Party Scholars Research Articles

Un dialogo possibile? Teoria delle organizzazioni e studio dei partiti

Literature devoted to party organizations rarely relies on Organization Theory. With the exception of the fundamental contribution by Panebianco, which dates back to 1982, limited efforts have been made towards a mutual contamination between the study of party organizational development and the vast body of theories, approaches and analytical frameworks that crowd Organization Theory. Moreover, while Organization Theory has recently paid attention to the study of political parties, party scholars are still committed to accumulating empirical knowledge or, at best, elaborating ideal-typical models. The aim of this contribution is to favour a cross-fertilization between these two literatures, by building on the premises of organizational institutionalism and on the organizations as multi-dimensional rational open systems perspective. Despite our effort is primarily conceptual, our arguments are conceived to be properly translated into empirical observations.

Corbyn’s labour party: managing the membership surge

All British parties, with the one exception of the Conservative Party, have experienced membership surges in recent years, thus contradicting the assertion of many party scholars that membership is in terminal decline. The ebbs and flows of Labour’s membership since the 1980s are examined here before considering both the benefits and costs to the party of the recent spectacular surge associated with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The conclusion is that parties are not prisoners of broad societal trends; they have the ability to influence the ebbs and flows. To better understand and explain the membership trends requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative studies; something which is difficult in contemporary academic scholarship.

Whatever Happened to Party Government?

Most scholars of political parties can provide a basic summary of the argument presented in the American Political Science Association’s 1950 report on political parties, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The committee, led by prominent political scientist E.E. Schattschneider, produced the lengthy report highlighting the lack of programmatic unity of American political parties of that era and outlining a series of proposals that would lead to a party system in which parties were more ideologically cohesive. While the report had little direct impact on party policy and actions at the time, its vision of highly unified, programmatically oriented parties has largely become a reality in the current political environment. Despite the familiarity of the work to many, and its particular relevance in the current politically polarized era, few know and understand the larger context surrounding the report and the deliberative process that led to its production. Mark Wickham-Jones’s book Whatever Happened to Party Government? attempts to remedy that by providing a detailed historical account of the formation and deliberations of the American Political Science Association (APSA) Committee on Political Parties, which produced the report as well as some of the larger professional and political context that sheds light on the product that the committee distributed.

EXPLAINING GERMANY’S ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY

Partisan attachments and voting behavior in Germany today are more volatile than in the past. This article tests the enduring influence of social cleavages on voting relative to two other factors that account for party performance: path dependent forces and spatial dependence. Drawing on original data from the eastern German states, we explain support for Germany’s main parties in the 2017 federal election. We find relatively weak evidence for continued influence of social divisions for the major parties, but that support for the radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD) did reflect underlying cleavage structures. Additionally, we identify reliable effects of the historical immigrant population on contemporary voting. We also see weak evidence of lock-in political effects associated with German reunification, limited only to the CDU. Most interestingly, we observe powerful and robust effects of spatial dependence for three of the four parties we examine. We conclude that the effects presented here should signal to scholars of parties and electoral politics the need to incorporate history and geography into their analytical frameworks alongside more traditional approaches, since eastern Germany may in fact be less spatialized than western Germany or other country cases because of the homogenizing efforts of the SED regime.

Explaining Germany's Electoral Geography

Partisan attachments and voting behavior in Germany today are more volatile than in the past. This article tests the enduring influence of social cleavages on voting relative to two other factors that account for party performance: path dependent forces and spatial dependence. Drawing on original data from the eastern German states, we explain support for Germany’s main parties in the 2017 federal election. We find relatively weak evidence for continued influence of social divisions for the major parties, but that support for the radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD) did reflect underlying cleavage structures. Additionally, we identify reliable effects of the historical immigrant population on contemporary voting. We also see weak evidence of lock-in political effects associated with German reunification, limited only to the CDU. Most interestingly, we observe powerful and robust effects of spatial dependence for three of the four parties we examine. We conclude that the effects presented here should signal to scholars of parties and electoral politics the need to incorporate history and geography into their analytical frameworks alongside more traditional approaches, since eastern Germany may in fact be less spatialized than western Germany or other country cases because of the homogenizing efforts of the SED regime.

Whither Parties? Hume on Partisanship and Political Legitimacy

Recent work by party scholars reveals a widening gap between the normative ideals we set out for political parties and the empirical evidence that reveals their deep and perhaps insurmountable shortcomings in realizing these ideals. This disjunction invites us to consider the perspective of David Hume, who offers a theory of the value and proper function of parties that is resilient to the pessimistic findings of recent empirical scholarship. I analyze Hume's writings to show that the psychological experience of party informs the opinions by which governments can be considered legitimate. Hume thus invites us to consider the essential role parties might play in securing legitimacy as that ideal is practiced or understood by citizens, independent of the ideal understandings of legitimacy currently being articulated by theorists. My analysis contributes to both recent party scholarship and to our understanding of the role of parties in Hume's theory of allegiance.

Representation in the EU: multi-level challenges and new perspectives from comparative federalism

ABSTRACTThis article identifies the limits and possibilities of the federal comparison for the European Union party system. Can the literatures on parties and party systems in multi-level systems deliver more insights to the analysis of the developing life of parties and party competition in the European Union? What are the most productive dialogs between scholars of federal and multilevel parties and scholars of European Union parties? It argues that the study of representation in the EU involves two key multi-level challenges: vote choice in a multi-level setting and party system development through upward aggregation. Drawing more closely from the comparative federalism literature can provide analytical leverage for both issues.

The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How They Weaken Democracy. By Seth Masket. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

<i>The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How They Weaken Democracy</i>. By Seth Masket. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Our results are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party's agenda‐setting regime.

Party nomination strategies in flexible-list systems

A paradox in the comparative literature on electoral systems is that one of the most common systems in Europe – flexible-list proportional representation systems – may be the least understood. Any study of flexible-list systems must start by acknowledging a puzzle: why candidates spend time and effort striving to win preference votes when typically these votes make no difference between election and defeat. Offering the first comprehensive multi-country test of this key puzzle, we provide evidence from Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia that parties will promote to better list ranks in the next election those candidates who are successful at winning preference votes, thereby improving their prospects of election in the longer term and incentivizing them to cultivate personal reputations. Our findings have important implications for party scholars and practitioners when designing, or reforming, political institutions.

Partisan Polarization and the Effect of Congressional Performance Evaluations on Party Brands and American Elections

Scholars of political parties and elections around the globe have devoted extensive study toward understanding how party polarization affects the criteria voters use to determine their party preferences in elections. In American politics, previous empirical research suggests that congressional job performance ratings do not affect public attitudes toward parties and therefore have no significant ramifications for the electoral fortunes of parties. Building on the existing literature from American and comparative traditions, I demonstrate that congressional performance evaluations can be important for American parties and elections, but this depends on the extent of party polarization in Congress. First, when congressional parties are more distinct, congressional performance evaluations have a greater effect on the relative favorability of the majority party brand: when citizens like how Congress is performing under the leadership of the majority party, this boosts the favorability of that party overall. Second, because partisan polarization increases the effect of congressional performance evaluations on party brand favorability, partisan polarization also increases the role played by congressional performance evaluations in a variety of elections outside of Congress. These results inform our understanding of public opinion, parties, and elections, both in the U.S. and from a comparative perspective.

The Ulama, Thought-styles, and the Islamic State Debate in Contemporary Malaysia

During the 1980s Islamic resurgence in Malaysia, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) championed the formation of an Islamic state, while the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) retained its Malay/nationalist and secular ideology. However, in the run up to the 2008 general elections, PAS revealed its manifesto as Negara Berkebajikan Malaysia, or ‘benevolent’ state, and retained it for the 2013 elections. Conversely, some quarters within UMNO called for the implementation of shariah law. Has PAS become more moderate than UMNO? This article discusses the common threads underlying both parties’ views of the Islamic state. By examining the personal writings, publications, and religious sermons of the dominant ulama (religious scholars) of both parties, this study seeks to illuminate their attitudes towards Islam in general, and towards the idea of Islamic state in particular.DOI: 10.15408/sdi.v21i1.878

Excessive Pricing: The Flaws of 'Tea Party' Competition Policy

Since the adoption of the Guidance Communication in 2009, the Commission has kept exploitative abuses— and in particular excessive pricing cases—in a state of artificial hibernation, and focused on exclusionary cases as a matter of enforcement priority. The Commission’s small antitrust policy against exploitative abuses is predicated on ‘Tea Party’ competition economics: in the long term, high prices are presumed to deliver efficient outcomes, and competition enforcers risk doing more harm than good in trying to improve market outcomes. Tea Party competition gurus are, however, wrong on three counts. First, they are wrong on the theory. Contrary to the ominous suspicion that competition agencies fiddle with excessive pricing laws to tax dominant firms’ profits and achieve distributional transfers, there is a sound conceptual basis to justify the control of dominant firms’ excessive prices. Take a monopolist charging excessive prices in market A. With this, the monopolist dries up demand in neighbouring markets (B, C, D, etc.). But the monopolist also dries up a range of unrelated markets (W, X, Y, Z) which include all the markets where customers purchase goods/ services. For instance, a customer faced with surging oil prices will purchase lower quantities of milk, cereals, fruits, etc. (assuming finite resources). As a consequence, the monopolist’s pricing policy on market A thus forecloses—possibly unwillingly—sales opportunities for other producers on a range of markets. In turn, this may force out a number of firms from those markets, increase concentration, decrease entry opportunities and eventually harm consumer welfare. Competition authorities should thus pay attention to the foreclosure effects that arise on ir-relevant markets. Second, Tea Party competition enthusiasts are wrong on the practice. In particular, the assertion that excessive prices cannot be objectively determined is not persuasive. Most of us have, for instance, noticed that the price of competition law conferences, books, or subscriptions has reached insanely high levels. And beyond such personal experiences, policy makers at all levels routinely consider that some prices are excessive, and craft policy decisions on this basis. This occurs, for instance, in all markets where States facilitate the purchase of high price products with subsidies (for instance, pharmaceutical products) or discourage the purchase of low priced products with taxation (for instance, cigarettes). Last but not least, firms themselves often recognize that their prices are excessive. This is aptly illustrated in markets where firms engage in price discrimination (and thus slash some of their prices), in order to serve additional categories of customers with low reservation prices. Of course, the remaining issue is of a methodological nature. It boils down to devising a standard of price excessiveness that ensures economic efficiency. But as in other legal disciplines (e.g. risk regulation), the absence of a ‘silver bullet’ evidentiary method—or the existence of several methods with intrinsic limitations—should not hinder the enforcement of the law. Rather, the sole admissible limitation is that in such areas where legal standards are blurred, competition agencies should not inflict sanctions on non-compliant firms. This issue is at the heart of the Microsoft case currently pending before the EU courts. Third, Tea Party scholars and practitioners are wrong from an institutional perspective. Often, opponents of Article 102 (a) TFEU resort to scaremongering, suggesting that the application of excessive pricing doctrines would open the floodgates to litigation, with angry customers clogging up courts and competition agencies with requests to change the price

Political Parties and Electoral Strategy: The Development of Party Organization in East Asia

Political Parties and Electoral Strategy presents a new theoretical perspective on political party organization through the analytical framework of historical institutionalism. Within this framework, the book argues that to understand different types of political parties we need to acknowledge politicians' ability to develop different strategic responses to the electoral market in which they compete for votes. Different electoral strategies, in turn, require different organizational structures for their implementation. The idea of party organizations as instruments of electoral strategy is used to study the development of political parties in the new democracies of East Asia – South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia. Offering a wealth of new empirical information, this book will not only be of great interest to all scholars of political parties but also to those working on East Asian politics.

Who gets what in coalition governments? Predictors of portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies

Ministerial portfolios are the most obvious payoffs for parties entering a governing coalition in parliamentary democracies. This renders the bargaining over portfolios an important phase of the government formation process. The question of ‘who gets what, and why?’ in terms of ministerial remits has not yet received much attention by coalition or party scholars. This article focuses on this qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation and uses a new comparative dataset to evaluate a number of hypotheses that can be drawn from the literature. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their election manifestos, emphasise themes corresponding to the policy remit of specific cabinet portfolios are more likely to obtain control over these portfolios. The results show that policy saliency is indeed an important predictor of portfolio allocation in postwar Western European parliamentary democracies. (Less)

Party politics and democratization in Indonesia: Golkar in the post-Suharto era

Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia: Golkar in the post-Suharto era provides the first in-depth analysis of contemporary Indonesian party politics and the first systematic explanation why Golkar is still the strongest party in Indonesia. Applying a multidimensional conceptual framework of party institutionalization theory, the book examines Golkar’s organizational infrastructure, its decisional autonomy and programmatic platform as well as the party’s relations to the mass media. Strengths and weaknesses in the individual dimensions of institutionalization are then contrasted with the corresponding levels of institutionalization reached by Indonesia’s other major parties. Tomsa argues that Golkar remains Indonesia’s strongest party because it is better institutionalized than its electoral competitors. However, while highlighting the former regime party’s strengths in key aspects of party institutionalization, he also shows that Golkar also has some considerable institutional weaknesses which in 2004 prevented the party from achieving an even better result in the general election. Published less than a year before Indonesia's next parliamentary election in April 2009, this timely study will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian politics, political parties and elections, and comparative democratization theory.

Interpreting Environments: Interest Group Response to Population Ecology Pressures

Important articles in this Journal by Nownes in 2004 and Nownes and Lipinksi in 2005 demonstrate that ‘population ecology’ approaches are now central to interest group studies. Partly at least this move to study at population level is a consequence of the numbers of such organizations. Party scholars typically deal with far fewer cases and sui generis discussion is more defensible. Ecology seems to offer a ‘handle’ on the thousands of cases that exist in the interest group field. Nownes and Lipinski stressed the importance of environmental factors in determining group populations, and challenged group scholars to address the dynamics among interest group populations. This article argues that animal-based population ecology may be an imperfect analogy to use in making sense of group circumstances. It considers the way groups respond to opportunities and constraints.

Television, Democracy and Elections in Russia by Sarah Oates (review)

766 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 Despite these, and other, shortcomings, Runaway State-Building is a signifi cant and substantive monograph which develops a valuable link between state building and party competition, and presents important findings. It is a recommended read for those interested in state-building and patronage innew democracies, as well as party scholars more generally. Department ofPolitical Science& International Studies Ingrid van Biezen Universityof Birmingham Oates, Sarah. Television,Democracy andElections inRussia. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 27. Roudedge, London and New York, 2006. xv + 222 pp. Figures. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?65.00. Television is the primary means of top-down political communication in Russia today. Slick, careful, pro-government reporting and analysis present reality as the Kremlin sees it, and Russians, by and large, accept this state-of affairs with resignation. Sarah Oates's study shows us how this came about, using an impressive array of interviews with media professionals, focus-group findings and survey data. An enormous amount of work, supported by several major research grants, has gone into this book. Oates analyses three elements in the process of political communication: media environment, content and audience. In tackling the first of these, she finds that although media law seems to provide for freedom of speech, in reality journalists face multiple constraints on their independence and professional freedom. Both state officials and owners of commercial or semi commercial media oudets use themedia to promote political and corporate interests.For journalists who engage indaring or confrontational investigative reporting, there is a high risk of being fired, and the persistent offender runs the risk of being physically attacked or even murdered. Oates's focus is on TV election coverage and political advertising. She analyses approximately one month of evening news programmes on the lead ing state-owned channel, ORT, and the leading commercial channel, NTV, during each of three Duma and three presidential election campaigns from 1995 through 2004. Concurrently, she examines a selection of the paid political advertising and free-time spots provided toparties under election law. In the 1995-96 election season the state or state interests did not have a controlling stake in NTV. Although NTV had taken a critical stance on thewar inChechnya in 1995, both channels rallied toEl'tsin's support in the crucial 1996 presidential election, eschewing any pretence at objectivity. The loyalist trend continued during the 1999 and 2000 election season, and moves during Putin's first term against oligarchs with television interests eliminated the few remaining pockets of editorial independence. By 2003, Kremlin dominance of all national TV channels appeared to have been consolidated. Oates uses focus-groups to tap into viewers' responses. These included a series of twenty-four focus groups before and after the 2000 presidential elec tions, as well as ten focus groups after the 2004 election. Participants were REVIEWS 767 asked about the role of themedia, their own viewing habits, and specifically about whether or not themedia influenced theirvote.Most showed awareness of bias on television and of deliberate attempts tomanipulate public opinion. An oil worker said of the 2000 campaign 'There was the impression that only one man was really running, i.e. Putin [...] It didn't beat you over the head, itwas very competent [eto ne v lob delaetsya, a ochen' gramotno]' (p. 145). Some participants admitted being influenced by what they watched even though theyknew the informationwas one-sided. Others appeared to accept bias as natural: theirprincipal criticismswere not about a lack of objectivity but about the negativity of themedia. Focus-group findings such as these can enhance our sensitivity to the Russian audience, but do not prove that TV carries the vote. On this point, Oates turns to survey data. She organized an opinion survey dedicated tomedia issues in 2001, updated by an additional survey in the winter of 2003/04. Her 2001 data snowed that themedian Russian adult watched two to three hours of television on a weekday, and four tofive hours on days off.The 2003/04 survey showed thatmore than four-fifths of respon dents heard about politics on television either daily or several times a week. She presents regressions showing that, controlling for demographic...

Democratic Theorists and Party Scholars: Why They Don't Talk to Each Other, and Why They Should

Despite their importance to one another, the current literatures on political parties and normative democratic theory continue to develop largely in mutual isolation. Empirical studies of contemporary political parties and party systems tend to have little to say about the meanings and possibilities of democracy, and therefore also about the varied potential roles of political parties within it. Meanwhile, contemporary democratic theorists quietly sidestep the issue of whether political parties perform a legitimate function in democracies. This lack of mutual engagement is regrettable, in particular given the pervasive erosion of popular support and legitimacy of political parties as representative institutions. In this article we explore the key reasons for democratic theorists and scholars of political parties so rarely taking on each others' core concerns, and we outline the key ways in which this mutual disengagement is mutually impoverishing. We will also suggest ways forward, by pinpointing and illustrating potentially productive areas of engagement which might serve to deepen our understanding of democracy's present and its possible futures.Ingrid van Biezen is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK (i.c.vanbiezen@bham.ac.uk). Michael Saward is Professor of Politics at the Open University, UK (m.j.saward@open.ac.uk). The authors are grateful to Richard S. Katz and Jeremy Jennings and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. In developing our arguments, we also benefited from conversations with Robert Dahl, Russell Dalton, Ian Shapiro, workshop participants at the ECPR Joint Sessions, and graduate students at Yale University. Part of this research was supported by the British Academy (research grant SG 38612).

Be Careful What You Wish For: The Rise of Responsible Parties in American National Politics

▪ Abstract Among advanced democracies, the United States has traditionally been unique owing to the absence of ideological mass political parties. American parties’ scholars have nevertheless traditionally viewed stronger and more ideologically distinct national parties as essential to improve the quality of the American democratic process, a view reflected in the 1950 APSA report, Toward a More Responsible Party System. In the following decades the American parties appeared to weaken still further in all aspects, but this apparent party decline in fact signified a transition to a contemporary American party system with more polarized parties similar to those envisaged by the 1950 report. It remains doubtful, however, that American democracy has been enhanced by these developments. Ironically, the advent of more ideologically coherent parties has also made party scholars more aware of the potentially unhealthy side effects that may attend such a development in a separated governing system.