Partisan Competition Research Articles

Clients and Communities

India’s urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their levels of infrastructural development and access to public services. Why are some vulnerable communities able to demand and secure development from the state while others fail to? Based on ethnographic fieldwork and original household survey data, the author finds that party networks significantly influence the ability of poor urban communities to organize and demand development. In slums with dense party networks, competition among party workers generates a degree of accountability in local patron-client hierarchies that encourages development. Dense party networks also strengthen organizational capacity and provide settlements with vertical connectivity to politicians and officials. The presence of multiparty networks, however, may attenuate the positive influence of party network density. Interviews with political elites and the survey data suggest that politicians are less likely to provide services to slums with multiparty networks. From within settlements, partisan competition also creates perverse incentives for rival networks to undermine each other’s development efforts. This article contributes to scholarship on clientelism, which has overlooked variation in the density and partisan balance of patron-client networks across poor urban communities and the resulting divergences in democratic responsiveness and development that face those communities. It also contributes to research on distributive politics and the political economy of development.

Patterns of Transnational Partisan Contestation of European Foreign Policy

This article explores the historical and societal roots of transnational partisan foreign and security policy preferences in Europe and assesses whether and how foreign and security policy is structured by the European party system today. It points to the existence of transnational dimensions in the contestation of European foreign policy that are consistent with the dominant axes of partisan competition on a European level (ideology and integration). The ideological dimension is mitigated by the small policy stretch between major party families in the core of the European party system. Even if it is a sign of the maturity of the European party system that it is able to structure in its core a still intergovernmental policy area, the nature of foreign policy as a prerogative of Member States and the adoption of Euroscepticism by parties located in the extremes of national party systems conspire to make the integration axis a more relevant dimension of contestation of European Union (EU) foreign policy. This means that the relevant patterns of contestation of EU foreign and security policy increasingly escape the existing range of rival views established by mainstream political forces.

Is more information always better? Party cues and candidate quality in U.S. judicial elections

We investigate the influence of electoral rules on voting behavior and the quality of judges, using newly collected data on judicial elections and ratings from 39 U.S. states. We find that in partisan elections, where candidates' party affiliations are listed on the ballot, party drives voting behavior and candidate quality has little effect on outcomes. In nonpartisan elections, where party affiliation is not on the ballot, party has a much smaller influence on voting behavior and candidate quality has a substantial effect on outcomes. If the primary task of public officials is not to represent voters' ideology and their decisions have little variability across parties, then we need to seriously consider the potential cost of partisan competition. To the extent that partisan voting behavior crowds out the influence of candidate quality on voting outcomes, the desirability of the partisan election system should be carefully assessed.

How the strategic context affects women's emergence and success in local legislative elections

While much scholarly attention has focused on the determinants of women's presence in state and national political offices, relatively little is known about women's descriptive representation at the local level. This study seeks to address the continuing gap in inquiry by examining where women run for and win seats on local legislative bodies throughout Louisiana. We develop hypotheses about the effects of the local strategic context on women's representation and expand on existing research by examining both place and county offices over a period of nearly three decades. Modeling candidate emergence and success endogenously, we find that more women run in localities where the strategic context is favorable to them and confirm that more women win when they have the resources necessary to propel their campaigns. The results suggest that the gender gap in local political representation can be lessened by building more robust networks of female leaders, enhancing partisan competition, and stimulating women in the electorate to support women's candidacies.

Partisan Competition and the Efficiency of Lawmaking in American State Legislatures, 1991-2009

Does partisan competition explain why some legislatures are more efficient at processing legislation than others? This article argues that legislative parties’ strategic incentives and capabilities are a function of their size, their ideological homogeneity, and the governor’s party. It shows that the distribution of legislative seats between the parties influences legislative efficiency, depending on the level of polarization between the parties and the party of the governor. A small partisan seat margin reduces legislative efficiency when the parties are polarized and when the government is divided. It provides further evidence that polarization and divided government can either positively or negatively affect legislative efficiency, depending on the distribution of seats held between the two parties. This research contributes to the literature by demonstrating the conditional influence of political parties. Based in multilevel modeling techniques, this research also contributes to the literature with robust evidence including 48 state legislatures, through 19 years.

A Principle or a Strategy? Voter Identification Laws and Partisan Competition in the American States

We undertake a comprehensive examination of restrictive voter ID legislation in the American states from 2001 through 2012. With a dataset containing approximately one thousand introduced and nearly one hundred adopted voter ID laws, we evaluate the likelihood that a state legislature introduces a restrictive voter ID bill, as well as the likelihood that a state government adopts such a law. Voter ID laws have evolved from a valence issue into a partisan battle, where Republicans defend them as a safeguard against fraud while Democrats indict them as a mechanism of voter suppression. However, voter ID legislation is not uniform across the states; not all Republican-controlled legislatures have pushed for more restrictive voter ID laws. Instead, our findings show it is a combination of partisan control and the electoral context that drives enactment of such measures. While the prevalence of Republican lawmakers strongly and positively influences the adoption of voter ID laws in electorally competitive states, its effect is significantly weaker in electorally uncompetitive states. Republicans preside over an electoral coalition that is declining in size; where elections are competitive, the furtherance of restrictive voter ID laws is a means of maintaining Republican support while curtailing Democratic electoral gains.

Communicating supranational governance? The salience of EU affairs in the German Bundestag, 1991–2013

Against democratic deficits of European Union (EU) governance, recent literature emphasizes the communicative function of national parliaments. Yet, arguments from the broader EU politicization literature have been only rarely applied to public parliamentary debates. This article integrates arguments about supranational authority and partisan competition as key drivers of debates on the EU and tests respective implications by an automated text analysis that retrieves EU references in all 1,393 plenary debates of the German Bundestag during 1991–2013. A panel analysis identifies authority transfers as the strongest predictor for EU salience in the plenary. EU references furthermore increase with supranational policy output, public EU visibility, and a differentiating public opinion. With regard to partisan emphasis, mainstream and particularly governing parties push European issues in the German Bundestag.

Representation without Parties: Reconsidering the One-Party South, 1930062

Political scientists have long viewed the one-party South as exemplifying the impossibility of democracy in the absence of partisan competition. I argue that this view conflates the effects of disfranchisement and one-partyism. Despite the lack of partisan competition, Democratic primaries induced a qualified but real electoral connection between Southern members of Congress and the (white) eligible electorate. I show that Southern representatives exhibited strong responsiveness to the economic policy preferences of their median voter. I also demonstrate that Southern MCs’ collective shift from New Deal liberals to pivotal centrists in the 1930s and 1940s mirrored shifts in white public opinion in the South. These findings suggest important qualifications to the view of the one-party South as an “authoritarian” regime and to the conventional wisdom that that representation requires partisan competition.

Welfare through Work: Conservative Ideas, Partisan Dynamics and Social Protection in Japan

What were the key elements of the ‘Japanese welfare state model’ of the 1980s and 1990s? How can we understand the high economic growth and relatively equitable distribution in Japan despite comparatively low investments in social welfare by the Japanese state? What changes in partisan competition, political ideas and welfare state protections have contributed to policy shifts away from that model towards the increasingly precarious economic realities of contemporary times? In a society that largely assumed a middle-class reality for most families, how can we make sense of the shocking emergence of the Haken village? These are some of the pressing ideational, institutional and political questions that Mari Miura’s book answers with both theoretically and empirically supported analysis and insight. Making a significant contribution to the literature on comparative welfare state regimes, Japanese politics and political parties, as well as to broader analyses of the intersections of the gendered division of labour and political economy, Miura’s Welfare through Work is recommended reading for both undergraduate students and more advanced scholars of Japan and welfare states.

The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model

In real-life elections, voters do not have full information over the policy platforms proposed by political parties. Instead, they form (imprecise) beliefs. I propose a new model of partisan competition to represent the interaction of these beliefs with platform selection. Both parties gain more from appealing to the voters with more precise beliefs over their platform. Minority candidates viewed with less precision overall gain relatively more from outliers. Therefore, the Median Voter Theorem is recovered if and only if voters’ policy preferences are uncorrelated with the precision of their beliefs about each candidate, and preferences are distributed symmetrically. Otherwise, even election-motivated parties diverge away from each other. As the population becomes polarized in how they form beliefs about politics, they will become polarized on political grounds as well, providing a new explanation for recent political polarization in the United States which, under reasonable assumptions, is more in line with the stylized facts than models with perfect observability.

Presidential Party Fundraising in Hopes of Not Having to Govern by Himself

AbstractThe extent to which presidents embrace the role of electoral leader of their party is important but relatively understudied. Each of the past three presidents devoted substantial time to the role of chief party fundraiser during his first 2 years in office, hoping to avoid having to govern by himself in the final 2 years of his first term. Key institutional and contextual factors drive these dynamics. Presidents are incentivized to spend time fundraising for their co-partisans because of the interaction of the high costs of campaigns and the contribution limits mandated by campaign finance laws in an era of intense partisan competition. While even unpopular presidents are in demand as fundraisers, popularity does relate to fundraising dynamics. An unpopular Bill Clinton aggressively embraced fundraising efforts behind closed doors in his first 2 years in office, supporting his fellow Democrats with a kind of hidden-hand leadership, while over 90% of George W. Bush’s fundraisers were open to the media in 2001 and 2002, as his popularity surged following 9/11. Popularity makes a difference in terms of where presidents raise money for their fellow party members as well. While Clinton and Barack Obama largely confined their efforts to states in which they had found electoral support, the more popular Bush headlined fundraisers for fellow Republicans in states across the political spectrum. Presidents’ efforts can win them more political allies in elected office, but also expose them to criticism and may make it more difficult for presidents to work across the aisle on questions of public policy.

American Politicians Confront the Court: Opposition Politics and Changing Responses to Judicial Power. By Stephen M. Engel. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011. 408 pp. $32.99 paper.

American Politicians Confront the Court: Opposition Politics and Changing Responses to Judicial Power. By Stephen M. Engel. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011. 408 pp. $32.99 paper.In his engrossing study of the interactions of elected officials and the Supreme Court, Stephen Engel finds scholarly literature inadequate to explain a history in which hostilities recur while judicial authority appears to have become more secure over time. Scholars who simply trace anti-Court sentiment to the justices' unelected status cannot account for the leavening over time of politicians' responses. By contrast, studies that focus on the development of a norm of judicial supremacy cannot explain the continued efforts of politicians to draftbills that undercut judicial authority. Engel has a greater appreciation for scholars who maintain that judicial power serves to entrench partisan policy aims. Yet these studies fail to consider how politicians' preferences for judicial power have changed over the past 200 plus years and mistakenly treat elected branch hostility toward the judiciary as an aberration.Engel's central claim is that anti-judicial animus reflects politicians' changing ideas about the threat posed by formed, stable, and permanent (8). He grounds his perspective on the relationship between politicians and the Court in the shiftin American political culture from the idiom of civic republicanism, which emphasized a uniform notion of the common good and equated stable opposition with civic instability, to the idiom of liberal pluralism, which regards partisan competition as a sign of a healthy body politic. This developmental theory posits that political efforts to control judicial power will not so much decline as change over time.From the Founding era through the midnineteenth century, when Americans embraced the idiom of civic republicanism, politicians accepted the notion of a fixed Constitution, the meaning of which was discoverable through textual analysis. Politicians thus viewed political parties and stable opposition as threats to a regime unified around a proper understanding of that foundational document. Carrying this idea into the realm of judicial behavior, if judges offered a vision that challenged the commitments underlying the presidential administration and/or the ruling party in Congress, they would be seen to represent not simply an alternative vision of the good but a fundamental threat to civic stability (58). Under these circumstances, action took the form of blunt instruments that sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Court.The Civil War marked a turning point in constitutional development. …

Party Systems and Democratic Divergence in Contemporary Latin America

The study of democracy in Latin America’s third wave is necessarily a study in contrasts, given the forking paths of democratic development in the region. Explanations of these forking paths are naturally drawn to an analysis of the diverse ways in which political parties and social movements have constructed alternative democratic orders. Party systems that were programmatically aligned from left to right by democratic transitions and market liberalization have been more stable than those that were de-aligned by the dual transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. They also moderated social mobilization by channeling dissent from market orthodoxy into institutionalized outlets of partisan representation and electoral competition. In the process, programmatically-aligned partisan competition contributed to the construction of democracy as a form of institutionalized pluralism, rather than a plebiscitary expression of popular sovereignty. The latter was more likely to emerge where de-aligned party systems failed to provide institutional outlets for societal opposition to the neoliberal model, thus channeling dissent toward anti-systemic forms of social and electoral protest. Where this occured, new popular majorities could be mobilized that not only swept away traditional party systems, but also transformed or refounded democratic institutions by plebiscitary means.

Post-Communist Politics: On the Divergence (and/or Convergence) of East and West

Adopting Ionescu's qualitative approach to political science, and building on Sartori's definition of party system, this article examines the degree to which European (both East and West) party systems have developed since the collapse of communism in 1990 in all three major areas of partisan competition: parliamentary, governmental and electoral. In this context, this article constitutes, paraphrasing Sartori (1969), an attempt to go ‘from political sociology to the sociology of politics and back’. The main conclusion is that, although two decades have passed, East European party politics continues to be generally characterized by instability and unpredictability at all levels.

Beyond Christian Democracy? Welfare State Politics and Policy in a Changing CDU

Germany's CDU encapsulates the core dilemma facing all of continental European Christian Democracy. The religiously based brand of welfare capitalism that traditionally set these parties apart is being undermined by broad socio-economic and political trends. Yet resulting pressures to shift towards neoliberalism have run up against public ambivalence, partisan competition, and – above all – a consensual dynamic within Christian Democratic factionalism. In the CDU's case, cross-cutting external pressures on its social market model have undercut a long dominant internal factional coalition, which has made way for shifting, ad hoc internal alliances under a leadership only vaguely committed to the classic Christian Democratic welfare state, yet leery of fully abandoning it. Since 2000 the CDU has thus lurched towards neoliberalism, pulled back, and even embraced some social democratic recipes. This article examines this programmatic and policy experimentation in order to help assess whether Christian Democracy in Germany (and beyond) remains a distinct force, or is instead degenerating into mere opportunistic centrism.

Who Owns Education? Cleavage Structures in the Partisan Competition over Educational Expansion

The literature on the partisan foundations of education policies leads to ambiguous expectations with regard to the predominant cleavage structures in party competition on this topic. There is disagreement as to whether leftist or rightist parties are responsible for increasing spending on education, while others claim that educational expansion has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over the topic of educational expansion, relying on data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. It identifies political parties as ‘issue-owners’ and ‘issue-ignorers’, respectively, and finds considerable variation with regard to cleavage structures of party competition between countries and across time. One tentative conclusion from the analysis is that policy legacies play an important role in shaping cleavage structures.

Geopolitical transformation in rural Mexico: toward new social and territorial boundaries in an indigenous municipality of central Mexico.

After decades of being one of the most loyal and reliable sources of PRI electoral votes, rural Mexico has become the arena of partisan political competition. The increasing political party rivalry in rural areas is not only related to a legal or formal institutional transformation at the national or sub-national level but to the ejido endogenous reconfiguration. Today local interest groups and supporters of opposition political parties are challenging the once hegemonic ejido authority, associated with the PRI regime, which since 1930 has ruled most Mexican rural villages. The ejido as a political institution is yielding many of its political functions to the empowered municipal government. As I will show in this paper, a major transition in rural Mexico is well under way, moving from agrarian toward municipal governance. The new political order challenges the ethnic and territory boundaries associated with the ejido rule forged in rural Mexico during the post-revolutionary era.

Unlocking V. O. Key Jr.: Southern Politics for the Twenty-First Century

V. O. Key Jr.'s two central insights in Southern Politics (1949) were that beneath an outwardly solid South, defined by forced unity that was maintained to keep African Americans subordinate, white politics was largely fragmented and disorganized; and that in such a fragmented polity, unstructured by ongoing competition between organized political parties, the white and black have-nots usually lost. The ten essays in this volume, drawn from a 2009 conference at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute of the University of Arkansas, do not directly explain exactly how partisan competition came to the South after 1950, and they entirely ignore the processes and outputs of governance—an omission that reflects the largest failure of post-Key scholarship on southern politics. Disparate in topics and uneven in quality, the papers are inappropriate for assignment to undergraduate or graduate classes in political science, sociology, or history.

The Formation, Institutionalization and Consolidation of the LTTE: Religious Practices, Intra-Tamil Divisions and a Violent Nationalist Ideology

Utilizing the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, I make a three-part explanation for the critical role the religious organization, ideological fitness, and state capacity played in the formation, institutionalization and consolidation of the LTTE in the Tamil ethnic mobilization process. Firstly, I show how the Tamil religious re-awakening during the British colonial period led to religious practices which consolidated the social dominance of the Vellalar caste and blocked the upward economic, social and political mobility of the other Tamil castes, thus enabling the emergence of lower-caste groups such as the LTTE in the 1970s. Secondly, I demonstrate that the LTTE's ideology privileged its nationalist goals over Marxist doctrinal purity because of the LTTE's commitment to improved intra-Tamil caste equality; an ideological approach which only increased the LTTE's legitimacy within the Tamil community and solidified its institutionalization as a viable Tamil group. Finally, I demonstrate how the intense intra-Sinhalese elite-level bidding wars, driven by the partisan competition for power among the dominant Sinhalese parties of the early 1980s, reduced the autonomy and capacity of the Sri Lankan state and enabled the consolidation of the LTTE as the leader of the Tamil ethnic mobilization drive.

Market Reform, Programmatic (De)alignment, and Party System Stability in Latin America

Although democratic regimes in Latin America since the early 1980s have been surprisingly durable, party systems in much of the region continue to experience very high levels of electoral instability. A critical juncture approach to institutional change suggests that variation in party system stability is related to the impact of market liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s on the programmatic alignment—or dealignment—of partisan competition. Market reforms that were adopted by conservative leaders and opposed by a major leftist rival aligned party systems programmatically, allowing societal opposition to be channeled into institutionalized forms of competition that were highly stable in the postadjustment era. By contrast, bait-and-switch reforms adopted by populist or leftist leaders were programmatically dealigning for party systems, leaving them vulnerable to highly destabilizing reactive sequences in the aftermath to the reform process—including mass social protests, the demise of historic conservative parties, and the outflanking of traditional populist or leftist parties by more radical, anti-neoliberal outsiders. The political dynamics of market-based economic adjustment thus heavily conditioned the ways in which party systems would process the postadjustment revival of populist and leftist alternatives in the region.