Partisan Competition Research Articles

Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states

Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to voters in a way that will increase her electoral prospects, or she can “insulate” the bureaucracy, which prevents all future winners from using the bureaucracy for electoral advantage. Our main result is that politicization persists when incumbents expect to win, and insulation takes place when they expect to lose. We test this hypothesis using data from the adoption of civil service reforms across the U.S. states. The predictions of the model are consistent with the empirical patterns leading up to the implementation of the general civil service reforms. Using both state and city level data, we observe an increase in partisan competition prior to the reforms.

A Whole New Ballgame: The Rise of Canada's Fifth Party System

This article asserts that Canadian politics underwent a major transition beginning in late 2003 and represents the rise of a new era in Canadian politics: the fifth-party system. This era is drastically different from the previous “fourth party system.” The fifth party system is characterized by the introduction of a number of new variables, most notably new patterns of partisan competition, amendments to Canada's system of campaign finance, the growing importance of policies appealing to the family, and growing importance of Web 2.0.

Citizens, Legislators, and Executive Disclosure: The Political Determinants of Fiscal Transparency

Increased fiscal transparency is associated with improved budgetary outcomes, lower sovereign borrowing costs, decreased corruption, and less creative accounting by governments. Despite these benefits, hardly any effort has been invested in exploring the determinants of fiscal transparency. Using a new 85-country dataset, we focus on two important sources of domestic demand for open budgeting: citizens and legislators. Our results suggest that free and fair elections have a significant direct effect on budgetary disclosure, and that they dampen the adverse effect on fiscal transparency of dependence on natural resource revenues. We also find that partisan competition in democratically-elected legislatures is associated with higher levels of budgetary disclosure.

Structured Partisan Competition: A Vote Shares Model of Party Alignments and Realignments*

Objective. This study develops and tests an aggregate “vote shares” model of party alignments and realignments, building a theoretical framework around “structured political composition” (Rabinowitz, Gurian, and Macdonald, 1984, p. 6). The vote shares model conceptualizes party alignments as latent class constructs, or factors, and changes in these latent class constructs as party realignments. Methods. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model with bias corrected bootstrap estimates and standard errors is used where the cases are counties and the variables are aggregate election outcomes. The data come from Kansas from 1900 to 2010. Results. Comparing the findings of the vote‐shares approach to those of Nardulli (2005) and Sundquist (1983) suggests that the vote shares model provides a greater depth of understanding and a more accurate portrait of the timing of realignments and the partisan bias of new alignments in Kansas. The vote shares model also overcomes the major problem of false positives associated with landslide elections, a problem that plagued most previous aggregate voting models. Conclusion. The vote‐shares model of party alignments and realignments provides a viable alternative for analyzing historic and current election returns where the votes are aggregated by a geographically defined government jurisdiction (parish, county, city, or district).

“It's the Central Government's Fault”: Elected Regional Officials' Use of Blame‐Shifting Rhetoric

This article investigates regional officials' use of blame‐shifting rhetoric in times of heated public criticism of unpopular regional policy decisions. Based on a content coding of nearly 500 political accounts from elected regional officials it is shown that “it's the central government's fault” is the most frequently used excuse when regional officials publicly defend unpopular decisions to cut public health care. The article finds that this excuse is used more by regional leaders (mayors and chairmen of regional boards) than by other elected officials and that partisan competition affects how often this excuse is used.

The Voting Rights Act, Legislative Elections, and Southern Partisan Change: Conversion or Competition*

Objective Has the shift from a one-party Democratic South to an (increasingly) Republican South been marked by partisan conversion or partisan competition of legislative district seats? That is, as Democratic incumbents retired, did the districts switch from uncontested Democratic incumbents to uncontested Republican seats (conversion), or did the two parties contest the district after the period of Democratic retirement (competition)? Method We analyze all state legislative elections since 1967 to explain southern partisan change. We report rates of uncontested legislative elections, and we model candidate entry in southern and nonsouthern legislative elections. Results Our findings support the conversion hypothesis implying that southern legislative districts are increasingly polarized along partisan and racial lines. Conclusions Despite growing partisan parity within the southern electorate, southern state legislatures are increasingly composed of uncontested white Republicans and uncontested black Democrats. We discuss the implications of party-based, racial polarization for the ongoing constitutional debate regarding the Voting Rights Act's Section 5.

From City Limits to City Trenches: Local Politics and the Rise of Amateur Partisanship

Tip O’Neill, former Speaker of the House, once declared, “All politics is local.” Although a truism embraced by politicos of all stripes, political scientists have rejected this insight in both thought and deed. In fact, since Paul Peterson declared, “city politics is limited politics,” local political conflict has been relegated to the periphery of American political studies. This paper attempts to carve out a space for local politics by situating contemporary American political development within the history of de-urbanization. I argue that de-urbanization altered the terms on which national political disputes occurred: it increased, by fostering local racial conflict, national partisan competition and increased, by creating less autonomous local political systems, the influence of national interest groups in competitive local congressional races. Stuck in the vortex of this historical conjuncture, national political leaders formulate policies to appeal to their base and policies that may be opposed by segments of their political coalitions but may deter dramatic counter mobilization by their opponents. This paper concludes that by assessing the effects of these dynamics on contemporary policymaking.

Gonna Party Like It's 1899: Party Systems and the Origins of Varieties of Coordination

This article explores the origins of peak employers' associations to understand why countries produce highly centralized macrocorporatist groups, weaker national associations but stronger industry-level groups, or highly fragmented pluralist associations. The authors suggest that the structure of partisan competition played a vital causal role in the development and evolution of these peak associations. The leadership for peak employers' association development came from business-oriented party activists and bureaucrats, who sought both to advance industrial development policy and to solve specific problems of political control. Business-oriented party leaders and bureaucrats in both predemocratic and democratic regimes feared the rising tide of democracy and labor activism and viewed employer organization as a useful tool for political control, to secure parliamentary advantage, and to serve as a societal counterweight to working class activism. Because leadership for association building came from the state, the political rules of the game were crucial to outcomes. The structure of party competition and state centralization shaped incentives for strategic coordination for both political actors and employers. Dedicated business parties were more likely to develop in countries with multiparty systems and limited federal power sharing than in countries with two-party systems and federalism: in a multiparty context where no single party was likely to gain power, each party had an incentive to cooperate with other social groups. Moreover, business-oriented party leaders and bureaucrats in multiparty systems were motivated to delegate policy-making authority to coordinated societal channels for industrial relations, because they anticipated that employers would win more in these channels than in parliamentary settings where the center and left could form a coalition against the right. Again, centralized party systems were more likely than federal ones to develop a dedicated national business party that transcended regional cleavages and to retain a strong role for the state in the governance of industrial relations.

Coalitions and Camps in the German Party System after the 2009 Bundestag Election

The recent Bundestag election in Germany warrants consideration for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the results are indicative of several trends developing since unification and that will continue to play an important, if not ever increasing role in German politics. These developments include the intensifying fragmentation of the German party system and German voters' growing electoral volatility, both of which are hampering the parties' ability to form government coalitions. In the following article, we distill five fundamental aspects of the election. Building upon this analysis, we explore their meaning as well as potential impact on the German party system and partisan competition, as well as coalition patterns. At the same time, we address the overarching question of whether—and if so, to what extent—German politics is experiencing a trend toward bipolarity between a center-right and left camp and whether such an antagonistic model will be a passing phase or is indicative of a more established five-party system in Germany.

The Road to Somewhere: Why Health Reform Happened

Why did comprehensive health care reform pass in 2010? Why did it take the form it did—a form that, while undeniably ambitious, was also more limited than many advocates wanted, than health policy precedents set abroad, and than the scale of the problems it tackled? And why was this legislation, despite its limits, the subject of such vigorous and sometimes vicious attacks? These are the questions I tackle in this essay, drawing not just on recent scholarship on American politics but also on the somewhat-improbable experience that I had as an active participant in this fierce and polarized debate. My conclusions have implications not only for how political scientists should understand what happened in 2009–10, but also for how they should understand American politics. In particular, the central puzzles raised by the health reform debate suggest why students of American politics should give public policy—what government does to shape people's lives—a more central place within their investigations. Political scientists often characterize politics as a game among undifferentiated competitors, played out largely through campaigns and elections, with policy treated mostly as an afterthought—at best, as a means of testing theories of electoral influence and legislative politics. The health care debate makes transparent the weaknesses of this approach. On a range of key matters at the core of the discipline—the role and influence of interest groups; the nature of partisan policy competition; the sources of elite polarization; the relationship between voters, activists, and elected officials; and more—the substance of public policy makes a big difference. Focusing on what government actually does has normative benefits, serving as a useful corrective to the tendency of political science to veer into discussions of matters deemed trivial by most of the world outside the academy. But more important, it has majoranalyticalpayoffs—and not merely for our understanding of the great health care debate of 2009–10.

The SAGE handbook of comparative politics

Introduction - Todd Landman and Neil Robinson PART ONE: METHODS AND FIELDS OF COMPARATIVE POLITICS The Distinctiveness of Comparative Research - Charles C Ragin and Claude Rubinson Global Comparative Methods - Paul Pennings, Hans Keman and Jan Kleinnijenhuis Case Studies - Darren Hawkins Is there a Quantitative-Qualitative Divide in Comparative Politics? The Case of Process Tracing - James A Caporaso Establishing Equivalence - Jan W van Deth Comparative Political Sociology - Willfried Spohn Comparative Institutional Analysis - Vivien A Schmidt Comparative Political Economy - Thomas Pl mper The Contribution of Area Studies - Stephen E Hanson Comparative Politics and International Relations - John M Hobson PART TWO: CLASSIC ISSUES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS Postindustrial Democracies: Political economy and democratic partisan competition - Herbert Kitschelt Government Formation - Wolfgang C M ller Institutional Design - Josep M Colomer Comparative Political Behaviour: What is being compared? - Shaun Bowler Changes in the Causes of Democratization through Time - Barbara Geddes Political Culture - Christian Welzel Revolution - Jack A Goldstone Social Movements - Vincent Boudreau and David S Meyer Corruption - Paul Heywood PART THREE: NEW AND EMERGING ISSUES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS Electoral Authoritarianism - Andreas Schedler Electoral Corruption - Sarah Birch Comparative Federalism - David McKay Human Rights - Todd Landman Governance - Philip Keefer Terrorism - Jennifer S Holmes Comparative Regional Integration and Regionalism - Fredrik Soderbaum Transitional Justice - Paola Cesarini The globalization of comparative public opinion research - Pippa Norris

Enfranchisement from a political perspective

This paper presents an alternative theoretical perspective on democratization. Various models of democratization have been proposed in the literature, like enfranchisement in response to threats of revolution, threats of war, and split of interests among elites. However, there seems to be instances of democratization that do not follow any of these patterns. For one, these theories rely on redistributive aspects of franchise extension. My model captures democratization arising out of an evenly-balanced partisan competition between political parties, large rents from office and a part of the enfranchised benefiting from extension of franchise. Hence I can explain instances of suffrage extension with little or no redistributive repercussions like women’s suffrage. My model also fits the democratization experiences of several countries like Sweden, Chile, and Italy.

Disappointments and New Directions: Women, Partisanship, and the Regime in Yemen

AbstractYoung women activists in Yemen today often express a profound disappointment over the process of partisan competition, even as they continue to show a commitment to public service and civic engagement. This undoubtedly stems from nearly two decades of slowly receding rights, as the logic of multiparty competition has led political parties across the political spectrum to articulate an increasingly narrow set of views regarding the public roles of women and to allocate fewer resources to support their female members. This essay details the trajectory of these disappointments and shows how the interrelated processes of encroaching authoritarianism and cross-ideological opposition have come to position women as the objects of partisan debate, while simultaneously limiting their opportunities to directly shape Yemeni politics through partisan institutions. In response to a system that has valued their votes more than their voices, women have increasingly invested their energies in the associational sector, a choice that runs the risk of exacerbating some of the limits that they encounter under prevailing political conditions.

Governments, Partisanship, and Foreign Policy: The Case of Dispute Duration

Do variations in partisanship and political outcomes among democratic states affect the duration of militarized interstate disputes? To answer this question, the author develops a model of partisan competition derived from the government failure literature. The author argues factors associated with government failure determine the ability of governments to contend with the domestic political costs of militarized disputes, specifically the duration of those disputes. The author tests his expectations using hazard analysis on a dataset of 20 democratic governments and militarized disputes between 1945 and 1992. The results suggest the outcome of party competition in the form of a government’s sensitivity to the potential political costs of conflict is an important part of the conflict process. The author concludes that differences in domestic political outcomes influence the duration of militarized interstate disputes. Governments that are politically more secure in their tenure engage in longer disputes. Alternatively, governments that are more vulnerable have significantly shorter disputes. In addition, because government partisanship contributes to vulnerability, it also affects dispute duration, with governments of the left engaging in shorter disputes, while governments of the right fight longer disputes.

Seconds Out for the Second Round: The Landtagswahl in Hessen, January 2009

The ‘second round’ of the Hessen Landtagswahl was held in mid-January 2009 and was necessitated by the deadlocked outcome of the ‘first round’ held less than a year earlier. The failure of two attempts by the SPD to displace the CDU ‘caretaker’ administration ensured that new elections were the only remaining credible option. The outcome of the 2009 elections overcame this previous deadlock. We need however to be cautious about extrapolating from this particular result to the forthcoming federal election in late September. The nature of partisan competition within the Hessen party system is unique to the Land, and carries little substantive importance outside it.

Mobilizing the Base and Embarrassing the Opposition: Defense of Marriage Referenda and Cross-Cutting Electoral Cleavages

Using the recent spate of so-called Defense of Marriage (DOMA) referenda as a point of analysis, the author argues that direct democracy presents the potential for intensifying the nature of interparty competition at the state level. Given a particular configuration of circumstances—namely where a salient electoral issue cross-cuts already existing party cleavages—ballot referenda can become tools by which political parties “poach” members of an opposing coalition. Using data at the county level, the author finds evidence that DOMA ballot referenda do not simply mobilize conservative Protestant voters; they also (potentially) reorient the partisan loyalties of two core Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics. However, as the electoral system is dynamic, the effectiveness of referenda as mechanisms of partisan competition changes with succeeding election cycles and may even lead to unintended effects. Notably, late-cycle DOMA elections (those occurring in 2005 and 2006) provide evidence both for increasingly effective mobilization within the gay and lesbian community and, more surprisingly, to increasing opposition to antigay marriage measures on the part of Mainline Protestant and Catholic voters. The author discusses the implications of these findings for our understanding of the gay marriage debate specifically and for the dynamics of the American party system more generally.

Christian democracy and the origins of European union

Major study of the role of European Christian democratic parties in the making of the European Union. It radically re-conceptualises European integration in long-term historical perspective as the outcome of partisan competition of political ideologies and parties and their guiding ideas for the future of Europe. Wolfram Kaiser takes a comparative approach to political Catholicism in the nineteenth century, Catholic parties in interwar Europe and Christian democratic parties in postwar Europe and studies these parties' cross-border contacts and co-ordination of policy-making. He shows how well networked party elites ensured that the origins of European Union were predominately Christian democratic, with considerable repercussions for the present-day EU. The elites succeeded by intensifying their cross-border communication and coordinating their political tactics and policy making in government. This is a major contribution to the new transnational history of Europe and the history of European integration.

If Everyone Had Voted, Would Bubba and Dubya Have Won?

Adapting and refining the approach used in earlier work on Senate elections, we simulate the impact of universal turnout on each presidential election from 1992 to 2004 and find little evidence that increased turnout would systematically transform partisan competition or policy outcomes. A state-level analysis of exit polls and the Current Population Survey reveals considerable variability in the gap separating voters and nonvoters. In most cases, nonvoters are just slightly more Democratic than voters. However, a handful of states, such as Texas, consistently feature a large “partisan differential,” in which nonvoters come disproportionately from demographic groups that are more Democratic than voters. We find that universal turnout may well have tipped an extremely close election—such as that of 2000 or even 2004—into the Democratic column. But the partisan differential is generally small enough that universal turnout would only change the outcome of an already close contest rather than leading to a wholesale transformation of competitive dynamics.

Race and Democratic Contestation

As the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) passes its fortieth anniversary and soon faces constitutional challenges to its recent renewal, a growing number of liberals and conservatives once united in their unqualified support now share deep reservations about it. In this Article, I argue that the growing skepticism about the VRA and majority-minority districting is misguided by a simplistic and impoverished sensibility about the value of electoral competition in American politics. Electoral competition should be judged with reference to ultimate end states it is intended to produce - more democratic debate, greater civic engagement and participation, and richer political discourse - all of which are generated by a deeper first-order competition among political leaders that I describe as 'democratic contestation.' In the Article, I offer democratic contestation, in place of electoral competition, as a basic value to be pursued in the law of democracy and as foundation for new theory that helps reconcile approaches to race, representation, and political competition. A theory of democratic contestation shifts the normative focus from the pluralist absorption about which groups get what from politics, to a new focus on the tenor and quality of democratic contestation among leaders. When viewed through a theory of democratic contestation, the VRA is crucially pro-competitive in the broader sense of democratic contestation. By carving out safe majority-minority districts, the VRA breaks the discursive stasis of racial polarization in which politics by definition revolve around the single axis of race. A theory of democratic contestation reveals how majority-minority districts energize the process of democratic contestation and enable an internal discourse of ideas that moves beyond the racially polarized divide, otherwise impossible in the face of racial polarized opposition. A theory of democratic contestation thus demands a thorough re-evaluation of the Supreme Court's recent decision in LULAC v. Perry and provides a new understanding of the renewed VRA going forward in the modern political world of national partisan competition.

The Impact of the Charter: Untangling the Effects of Institutional Change

This article provides an overview of the main debates on the impact of the Charter's entrenchment in Canadian politics. In doing so, it casts a wide net, providing a selective exploration of the impact of the Charter in three main areas: 1) public policy; 2) political institutions and 3) political mobilization. The paper argues that we should move away from thinking about the Charter as a constitutional document that sets out rights that are protected by courts and move towards a view of the Charter as a structuring influence on Canadian political debate. In policy terms, the paper examines the instrumental impact of the Charter on criminal law and on lesbian and gay rights. While the Charter has strengthened the hand of the judiciary relative to other political institutions, the discursive and instrumental effects of the Charter are also felt in other political institutions such as the executive and Parliament as well as the operation of federalism. Perhaps most importantly, the Charter has become an important factor in structuring political mobilization and debate, encouraging civil society organizations to stake their political claims in terms of Charter rights (for better or ill) and contributing to the partisan competition between political parties in federal politics.