Party Strength Research Articles

No coalition is an island: how pre-electoral coalitions at the national-level shape local elections

ABSTRACT The rise of populist parties has affected the structure of electoral competition on the national level. To evaluate the depth of such changes, this paper examines whether pre-electoral coalitions (PEC) that contested the 2021 Czech general election aiming to replace the populist ANO in the government were replicated at the local level. Using the probit multilevel model estimated on the dyads, the results indicate that local pre-electoral coalitions were more likely to form if they were based on two (of three) pre-electoral coalitions that contested the 2021 general election. The strength of the populist party, however, does not increase the probability of anti-populist PECs. Instead, parties in local opposition are more likely to coalesce together, no matter which party governs. In addition, forming PEC in the Senate election is associated with a higher probability of forming the same PEC in local election.

Back to the future? An analysis of party influence on electricity grid remunicipalisation in Germany

ABSTRACT The literature on privatisation and nationalisation has presented conflicting results on partisan theory, echoed in studies on local public service ownership. Moreover, there is a notable quantitative research gap on Germany’s energy market, the sector most strongly affected by remunicipalisation. This study addresses this gap by investigating whether party strength impacts the remunicipalisation of local electricity grids in Germany. Using logistic regression on a novel dataset covering approximately 1,800 municipalities in the 2010s, the findings reveal that stronger left-wing or green party representation do not increase remunicipalisation likelihood. Instead, factors such as population size, the local political systems, and municipal finances play substantial roles. In doing so, it adds valuable insights on a hitherto understudied case and examines the role of partisan theory, whose application has yielded conflicting results. Electricity grids are critical infrastructure for the energy transition, with many contracts in Germany up for renewal in the early 2030s.

When is gender on party agendas? Manifestos and (De-)democratisation in Greece, Portugal, and Spain

ABSTRACT When do political parties give attention to gender-related political interests, and what determines their positions? We argue that progress in gender equality commitments is an essential component of democratisation, and backsliding in these indicates democratic decay. Using original data coded from party manifestos in Greece, Portugal, and Spain over recent decades, we investigate the role of party ideology and critical junctures in the political context. We find that left-wing parties give more attention to gender-related interests than other parties. Far-right parties also give significant attention to some interests and stand out for traditional positions. Further, the economic recession significantly decreased attention to gender-related interests. Our results suggest that economic crises and associated far-right party strength fuel gender backsliding and de-democratisation.

Emotions of fear and anger as a discursive tool of radical right leaders in Central Eastern Europe

The paper examines how the radical right parties´ leaders work with emotions while addressing their voters and sympathizers on Twitter/X social media. We focus on the “supply side” on the level of leaders´ discourses. The goal is to demonstrate how they work with emotions, especially those of fear and anger. The context represents Russian aggression against Ukraine, because, typically, circumstances of a crisis bolster the ability of radical right leaders to use emotional rhetoric devices. Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia represent three particularly relevant and distinctive cases among the CEE countries according to the relevance, relative strength, and stability of radical right parties. We examined social media, particularly Twitter, since it is one of the most prominent tools of political communication today, especially for populists. We collected the data of all Tweets between February 24, 2022 and February 24, 2023. We combined a systematic quantitative content analysis with a more in-depth qualitative analysis of the key characteristics of the discursive construction of the two most salient emotions: anger and fear. We did not confirm the assumption that they would utilise the war in Ukraine since most tweets addressed issues related to domestic politics. The research, however, confirmed that despite differences, anger and fear play a substantial role in the emotional repertoire and represent necessary rhetorical devices. Our findings concur with the literature on radical right populism and its employment of emotional discourse. We found that even a crisis in international politics has been reframed primarily as a domestic issue and integrated into classical discursive practices.

The Violent Legacy of Fascism: Evidence From Italy

Can legacies of fascism threaten democracies with political violence? Democracies aim to peacefully manage incompatible interests in a society. Yet, few democracies avoid violence altogether. Legacies of fascism may re-emerge because local networks can transfer their ideational tenets - supremacist identities and anti-democratism ( know what), violent practices ( know how), and paramilitary networks ( know whom) - to the new generations. Thanks to an original subnational dataset, we study if the Italian fascist movement that emerged in the 1920s affected political violence in the 1970s–1980s. The local strength of the fascist party before the institutionalization of the fascist regime predicts neofascist political violence more than forty years later. New catalysing events facilitate the resurfacing of local fascist legacies: when a Minister of Interior is appointed, we observe higher levels of neofascist violence in provinces where the early presence of the fascist party was stronger.

Party Origins, Party Infrastructural Strength, and Governance Outcomes

Abstract Ruling party strength is often associated with positive outcomes in autocracies, but we know little about how the effects of party strength differ across party types or which feature of party organization contributes most to better outcomes. This article argues that party infrastructural strength – the ability of grassroots party organizations to penetrate society and mobilize the masses – improves governance outcomes but only for authoritarian parties that rose to power through social movements that overthrew the existing political system. Parties that relied on mass mobilization to gain power tend to continue utilizing party strength to provide public goods and gather support. I provide empirical support for my theory using data covering all autocratic ruling parties during the post-Second World War period. The findings have major implications for understanding the intellectual and political challenges posed by well-organized one-party regimes.

Punishment is purple: The political economy of prison building

The United States is unique among rich countries in the world in its level of contemporary mass incarceration, a massive social change that has reshaped the nature of inequality and social mobility. We have more than tripled the number of prison facilities since 1970. Despite employing nearly 450,000 corrections officers, occupying a land mass of roughly 600 square miles, and costing conservatively $30 billion to build, this massive public works project has transformed the American countryside virtually unnoticed, with nearly 70% of U.S. facilities being built in rural communities. We suggest that mass incarceration—more than 2 million locked up annually—was not possible without the transformation of the American countryside through the prison boom—the increase from roughly 500 to nearly 1700 carceral facilities. There is a longstanding belief that the rural town leaders and politicians responsible for the prison boom are almost exclusively white, male, Republicans. We explore the political, social, and economic influences of prison building across states, regions, and cities/towns. Using multilevel modeling, we find that racial and economic disadvantage predicts prison building in towns, and party affiliation of state legislatures predicts prison building across different periods of the prison boom. While others find a link between Republican Party strength in state legislatures and mass incarceration, our findings suggest that prison building, like other types of punishment, results from bipartisan political support for the state's ability to punish. We conclude by advancing an expanded theoretical approach to the prison boom.

Evolution of government and market under China’s reform era: through the perspective of state capacity

There are two main stream theories explaining China’s rapid economic development in the reform era: new institutionalism and developmental state theory. Realizing the weaknesses of two main stream theories and based on China’s unique experience as both a transitional economy and developing economy that experienced rapid industrialization and marketization, scholars also developed other theories with some revisions of the above two mainstream theories. While these theories have very different focuses, they agree on the importance of state capacity. The author argues that the Chinese Communist Party composes the institutional foundation of state capacities to promote economic growth and build market institutions, and discusses three important aspects of how party strength and state capacity helped the market transition, government restructuring and enterprise reform. The future challenges are discussed in the conclusion.

Economic recessions and decarbonisation: analysing green stimulus spending in Canada and the US

ABSTRACT Existing research has demonstrated that government policies often prioritise growth over climate during economic downturns. Yet government stimulus spending during economic downturns also offers an opportunity for decarbonisation through long-term investments in infrastructure, transportation electrification, building efficiency, and clean energy technologies able to reduce emissions and sustainably shift the economy away from fossil fuels. We study the size and distribution of green stimulus spending in response to two recent economic downturns – the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on Canada and the US – two major economies with strong incumbent fossil fuel interests – we explore the determinants of green stimulus spending. Counter to conventional wisdom, our findings provide little evidence to support the notion that institutional permeability to industry lobbying influenced the share of green stimulus spending. Instead, drawing on a novel dataset on green recovery spending and lobbying, we show that the strength of liberal parties in the legislatures shapes the distribution of stimulus funds. Our analysis suggests that liberal parties committed to decarbonisation can leverage economic crises to align economic and climate policy making, even in the face of strong lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel sector.

Exploring the Causes of Technocratic Minister Appointments in Europe

In the last decade, the appointment of technocratic ministers has become more common than ever before in Europe. Yet, scholarly attention has mostly focused on the economic determinants that lead to the appointment of such political outsiders in governments. In contrast, political determinants have not been fully examined. This article aims to investigate the role of economic determinants, as well as institutional factors (e.g. electoral system), party-system characteristics (e.g. volatility, polarization) and cabinet-related factors (e.g. intra-cabinet heterogeneity, the strength of populist parties within the government). Using a novel data set comprising data for more than 7000 ministers, including around 900 technocrats, our analysis shows that the share of populist parties within the cabinets has the strongest effect on the likelihood of appointing technocrats in national government. However, institutional-level variables appear to have no effect on the levels of technocratic appointments.

Extending contestation: opposition party strength and dissenting civil society engagement with autocratic elections

ABSTRACT How does the strength of political-party opposition affect government-critical civil society organisations (CSOs)’ engagement with autocratic elections? The question is particularly pertinent in the current context of deepening autocratization and repression of civic dissent. In this article, I explore the argument that strong opposition parties or coalitions facilitate CSOs’ acts of dissent by offering robust dual electoral contestation: they credibly compete for power and forcefully politicise electoral regulation. Strong opposition parties thereby change the incentives for dissent and make civic activism more possible and meaningful. The article investigates this through a qualitative comparison of two cases of autocratisation: Kenya with a strong opposition, and Uganda with a weak one. The analysis largely supports the argument. However, the comparison also demonstrates that even with a strong opposition, autocratisation makes CSO dissent a dangerous activity that requires a careful balancing between rewards and risks.

The Anatomy of Cohort Analysis: Decomposing Comparative Cohort Careers

In a widely influential essay, Ryder argued that to understand social change, researchers should compare cohort careers, contrasting how different cohorts change over the life cycle with respect to some outcome. Ryder, however, provided few technical details on how to actually conduct a cohort analysis. In this article, the authors develop a framework for analyzing temporally structured data grounded in the construction, comparison, and decomposition of cohort careers. The authors begin by illustrating how one can analyze age-period-cohort (APC) data by constructing graphs of cohort careers. Although a useful starting point, the major problem with this approach is that the graphs are typically of sufficient complexity that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to discern the underlying trends and patterns in the data. To provide a more useful foundation for cohort analysis, the authors therefore introduce three distinct improvements over the purely graphical approach. First, they provide a mathematical definition of a cohort career, demonstrating how the underlying parameters of interest can be estimated using a reparameterized version of the conventional APC model. The authors call this the life cycle and social change (LC-SC) model. Second, they contrast the proposed model with two alternative three-factor APC models and all logically possible two-factor models, showing that none of these other models are adequate for fully representing Ryder’s ideas. Third, the authors present the article’s major accomplishment: using the LC-SC model, they show how a collection of cohort careers can be decomposed into just four basic components: a curve representing an overall intracohort trend (or life cycle change); a curve representing an overall intercohort trend (or social change); a set of common cross-period temporal fluctuations that permit variability across cohort careers; and, finally, a set of terms representing cell-specific heterogeneity (or, equivalently, interactions among age, period, and/or cohort). As the authors demonstrate, these parts can be reassembled into simpler versions of cohort careers, revealing underlying trends and patterns that may not be evident otherwise. The authors illustrate this approach by analyzing trends in political party strength in the General Social Survey.

The Green Party and Germany’s Environment: Integration, Influence, and Comparisons

The German Greens are helping Germany continue its legacy of being eco-friendly. This paper covers the history of the German Green Party. It will evaluate the success of the party and the reasons for its success. In addition, it will compare the German Greens to the United States Green Party in terms of their vote wins in elections and impact on their respective countries’ environments. The German Greens are known to be highly successful, forming coalitions with several big-name German parties. The party won 20.5% of votes in the 2019 European Election. In comparison, the US Green Party is not as well known. It was found that the German Green Party won a steadily increasing number of votes in every election, while the US Green Party had an overall decrease in the number of votes won every election. In addition, Germany has decreased its carbon dioxide emissions since 1971, while the US yearly carbon emission totals have increased. Because the Green Parties from the two countries have very similar policies, the reasons for their gap in success will be explored. In doing this, the conditions and actions required to form a highly dynamic political party will be indicated. Given the imminent problem of environmental degradation, this research endeavor would help countries and political parties understand how to properly care for the planet. It will also examine the direct impact of the strength of a political party on its country’s culture.

Learning from Polls During Electoral Campaigns

Voters’ beliefs about the strength of political parties are a central part of many foundational political science theories. In this article, we present a dynamic Bayesian learning model that allows us to study how voters form these beliefs by learning from pre-election polls over the course of an election campaign. In the model, belief adaptation to new polls can vary due to the perceived precision of the poll or the reliance on prior beliefs. We evaluate the implications of our model using two experiments. We find that respondents update their beliefs assuming that the polls are relatively imprecise but still weigh them more strongly than their priors. Studying implications for motivational learning by partisans, we find that varying adaptation works through varying reliance on priors and not necessarily by discrediting a poll’s precision. The findings inform our understanding of the consequences of learning from polls during political campaigns and motivational learning in general.

Divided by Europe: affective polarisation in the context of European elections

As European integration has become politicised over the last several decades, scholars have paid keen attention to the role of identity in shaping political conflicts and contestation in Europe. This article investigates the microfoundation of the political divide over European integration by building on and extending theories of social identity and recent studies on affective polarisation. Large-scale survey experiment data from 25 European Union member states are analysed to explore the extent of divides over European integration. This analysis shows a statistically significant and substantively large magnitude of the divide based on European identity. Moreover, results show that this divide over European integration deserves particular attention as it is largely driven by out-group animosity, rather than in-group favouritism. Lastly, results show that electoral context, such as electoral salience, involvement in elections, elite polarisation, and the strength of Eurosceptic parties, influences the intensity of the European divide.

The psychology of asymmetric zero-sum beliefs.

Zero-sum beliefs reflect the perception that one party's gains are necessarily offset by another party's losses. Although zero-sum relationships are, from a strictly theoretical perspective, symmetrical, we find evidence for asymmetrical zero-sum beliefs: The belief that others gain at one's own expense, but not vice versa. Across various contexts (international relations, interpersonal negotiations, political partisanship, organizational hierarchies) and research designs (within- and between-participant), we find that people are more prone to believe that others' success comes at their own expense than they are to believe that their own success comes at others' expense. Moreover, we find that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs only when thinking about how their own party relates to other parties but not when thinking about how other parties relate to each other. Finally, we find that this effect is moderated by how threatened people feel by others' success and that reassuring people about their party's strengths eliminates asymmetric zero-sum beliefs. We discuss the theoretical contributions of our findings to research on interpersonal and intergroup zero-sum beliefs and their implications for understanding when and why people view life as zero-sum. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Backlash to fossil fuel phase-outs: the case of coal mining in US presidential elections

Phasing out coal is a crucial lever in reaching international climate targets. However, the resulting jobs losses might trigger voter backlash, making phase-outs politically costly. Here, we present an analysis of the electoral response to coal mining job losses in US presidential elections using matched and bordering difference-in-difference estimators. Our findings confirm that fossil fuel phase-outs can result in voter backlash. In our main specification, we find a four percentage-point (pp) increase in the Republican vote share in 2012 (range across specs. = 3.6 pp–4.5 pp), declining to 3.2 pp in 2016 (range across specs. = 3.2 pp–4.2 pp), in counties suffering from coal mining job loss. The estimated electoral response is around three times as large as the number of jobs lost. We observe this response only in places where there was significant job loss, where these jobs accounted for a large share of locally available jobs and where income levels were low. Relative party strengths do not influence the results.

Bounded Democratization: How Military-Party Relations Shape Military-Led Democratization

A key dilemma facing a military which considers democratization is whether it is confident that civilians will protect its interests. A military’s confidence is a function of three factors: preference alignment with parties (trust), an expectation that allied parties will survive the transition (party institutionalization), and an expectation that allied parties can win power to protect it (party strength). When parties which the military trusts are institutionalized and strong, the military is confident that democratization will not endanger its interests. When these factors are absent, the military seeks to generate credible commitments through bounded democratization—a strategy of setting parameters on open contestation and popular sovereignty to constrain civilians. I test this argument using an original dataset on 525 regime transitions and a novel measure of bounded democratization. I find that when the institutionalization and strength of trusted parties decrease, the military proactively sets constraints on the developing political system.

Konstelasi kekuatan partai politik dalam pemilu serentak tahun 2019 di Kabupaten Pemalang

The general election is a contestation involving political parties and individuals in a democracy, where various processes and details follow. The result of the election is a number of vote which are then converted into seats in the legislature or the electability of the elite. These two results the become materials that are constantly being studied and analyzed, of course with various basid research objectives. The number of good votes obtained by political parties, legislative candidates, regional elite candidates to the president is rich in meaning and shows a variety of studies. Figures obtained by political parties both of the national level, especially at the regional level, have variouse aspect, such as strength of the party the power of the political machine or the level of competition in the region. These meanings are quite reasonable because the number of party votes, especially in the regoins, shows the dynamics closest to the vasiouse phenomena of the competition between political parties themselves. The study of the vote acquisition of political parties in regions, especially the districts, is a micro study developed by the electoral district (Daerah Pemilihan/Dapil). This constituency is the main point for cq’s vote. Seats in the regional legislature as well as evidence of the strength of political parties in the electoral district. Many variations appear when reading the vote count, of course, because each electoral district has has certain characteristics that tend to be relatively different. This study focuse on the vote acquisition of political parties in the electoral district in Pemalang Regency, Central Java. Pemalang Regency is located in the North West part of Central Java, and is crossed by national arterial road known as The Pantura (Pantai Utara Jawa). The large base political parties is PDI P, PKB, Gerindra, P Golkar, PPP and PKS, a political party strength which is also manifesd in the national political map. The vote gain of political parties are the looked at per eletoral district and then compared between parties, and the result is a vairety of variations as a result of the local poltical prosesses of each different electoral district.

Inevitable Results and Political Myths? Ilford North's 1978 By‐Election*

AbstractReductive and teleological ‘path to power’ myths continue to underpin explanations of Margaret Thatcher's first general election success. The by‐elections that eroded the Callaghan government's majority in the late 1970s, such as that at Ilford North in 1978, continue to be discussed as stepping stones to an inevitable victory, rather than acknowledged as examples of the fraught and uncertain realities of electoral politics. This article argues that they should be considered as part of a complicated historical process and reflected concurrent socio‐economic, cultural and political change. Such contests deserve to be understood on their own terms, with awareness of their unique peculiarities. In full media glare and an often carnival atmosphere, small, often ignored, constituencies momentarily captured the political zeitgeist and determined the national debate. Consequently, earlier interpretations of the contest that advocated the importance of media‐induced concerns over immigration and the National Front have distracted from the effectiveness of Conservative strategy that delivered a successful homecoming, rather than an overwhelming shock victory. By moving beyond contemporary political myths, it reconsiders the strength of Britain's political parties within a more historical context, which pointed to the depth of local Conservative support in Ilford North. Clear political strategy including well‐articulated appeals to specific voter groups and a well‐managed media maelstrom, allowed Margaret Thatcher's party to re‐establish its support among Ilford North's voters.