Party Strength Research Articles

E-Health Policy and Deployment Activities in Europe

e-Health has become a major topic in the European Union (EU) Commission due to the assumption that it improves the quality and effectiveness of health services and, at the same time, promotes information and communications technologies in this emerging high-technology area. In 2004, the EU Commission adopted the first e-health Action Plan, which sets targets for member states in the adoption of telematics applications. This article aims at explaining the variance in the application of e-health tools across 24 EU member states. The study includes the implementation of 12 e-health policies as of early 2007. Each policy was coded on a binary scale distinguishing between implementation and nonimplementation. The summing up of all binary values created an additive index. We used several multiple linear regression models to estimate the impact of socio-economic, political and healthcare related variables on the scope of implementation. The scope of implementation mostly depends on political factors, whereas economic and health-related variables scarcely account for cross-country variance. Only the scope and importance of the domestic information and communication technology market have a significant effect on the scope of implementation. In contrast, political variables constitute most of the variance in the implementation scope. The strength of left parties in government has a significant effect: an increase of left parties in government increases the total amount of e-health measures implemented. Governments that included e-health applications in policy documents rather early have adopted more telematics applications.

Focusing events, policy dictators and the dynamics of reform

Following the seminal work of Baumgartner and Jones, the punctuated equilibrium approach has won wide popularity. A series of studies have documented how policy areas are characterised by long periods of stability, which are disrupted from time to time by dramatic attention shifts leading to policy changes. The approach has so far overwhelmingly been applied in a US setting, while studies of punctuations in parliamentary systems are lacking. The paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical test that integrates the punctuated equilibrium approach with the work on pivotal parties as policy dictators. A policy dictator can veto reforms even following a focusing event that dramatically alters the policy image in an area. If the policy dictator is averse to the new policy image, all reform initiatives will be blocked; if the policy dictator is non-averse, reform initiatives will be allowed. The framework can help explain why dramatic attention shifts do not always lead to policy changes, but are mediated by the strength and policy position of the pivotal party.

“God Doesn't Like the Revolution”: The Archbishop, the Market Women, and the Economy of Gender in Guatemala, 1944–1954

“God Doesn’t Like the Revolution”The Archbishop, the Market Women, and the Economy of Gender in Guatemala, 1944–1954 Patricia Harms (bio) Conciudadanos católicos: nuestra libertad de conciencia está en peligro y nuestra Iglesia y sus representantes están gravemente amenazados (Fellow Catholic citizens: our liberty of conscience is in danger and our church and its representatives are gravely threatened). Concha Estéves, “Energica protesta del pueblo catolico,” October 1953 Vayamos a la campaña contra el comunismo en nombre de Dios y con Dios, pero jamás, guíados por mesquinos intereses políticos. . . . Todo católico debe luchar contra el comunismo por su misma condición de católico (Let us take our campaign against communism in the name of God and with God, but never guided by petty political interests. . . . Every Catholic should struggle against communism as a Catholic). Mariano Rossell y Arellano, “Carta Pastoral sobre los avances del comunismo en Guatemala,” April 1954 In the year following the election of Jacobo Arbenz conservative opposition to the Guatemalan revolution reached a critical juncture. On the afternoon of July 11, 1951, a labor dispute between the director of a state-run orphanage and its employees erupted into violence. Hundreds of women from the central market in Guatemala City led the crowd of several thousand protesting the dismissal of the employees, some of whom were members of the Catholic order the Sisters of Charity. The two-day conflict around the orphanage, the Centro Educativo Asistencial, resulted in the deaths of at least four people and injuries to over seventy others, many of whom had been innocent bystanders. All constitutional guarantees were suspended for the next thirty days in order to restore social order in the capital city. As instigators of the event the market women were catapulted onto the national stage as the unlikely leaders of an [End Page 111] antirevolutionary movement that represented those anxious to preserve the economic monopoly of the elite landowners, a strong patriarchal society, and the strength of conservative political parties. Despite the tremendous popularity of the revolutionary era, spanning the presidencies of Juan José Arévalo, 1944–50, and Jacobo Arbenz, 1950–54, strident opposition to the revolution’s economic policies and social reforms quickly emerged from strategically significant groups. Members of the military launched more than thirty coup d’etat attempts against the government of Juan José Arévalo, despite its moderate nationalist tenor and modest economic reforms. As a highly respected military colonel Jacobo Arbenz received less opposition from the military. His economic reforms and working relationship with the Guatemalan communist party, however, drew frequent and increasingly violent demonstrations from the fervently anticommunist university students and the market women. Their antirevolutionary rhetoric only grew more caustic following his highly controversial and popular land reform implemented in 1952. Poor and predominantly illiterate, the women who worked in the central market surrounding the National Cathedral emerged as the most enduring image of this multifaceted antirevolutionary social movement. Sought out by university students and political parties for their emphatic anticommunism, the market women initiated and participated in countless street protests following the July incident at the orphanage. They became indelibly linked with the mounting political opposition against the Arbenz government and symbolically represented a larger antirevolutionary opposition composed of conservative political parties, university students, and the elite land-owning class. However, they were most closely linked with the Guatemalan Catholic Church and its archbishop, Mariano Rossell y Arellano. Under Rossell y Arellano’s leadership, the Catholic Church supported political and social opposition to Guatemala’s democratically elected revolutionary governments in several covert and overt directions. Scholarship has focused extensively on the church’s covert collusion with the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, which is credited with the June 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz. The overt associations the church successfully created with urban Guatemalan women, who have generally been credited as an influential force in the antirevolutionary campaign, however, has not been examined.1 The church sought out women to support its antirevolutionary campaign in two specific ways. Although reluctant to acknowledge female suffrage granted to literate women in 1945, the archbishop wrote frequent pastoral letters urging Guatemalan women...

Strategic Government Spending in South Korea and Taiwan: Lessons for Emergent Democracies*

Objectives. How is government spending used strategically in South Korea and Taiwan? As nations generally considered to have weathered democratization, government allocations in South Korea and Taiwan are instructive on how spending may be used strategically without undermining democratization. Methods. The similar sociocultural, historical, political, and economic experiences of the two nations underlie a most-similar-systems approach to study how their differences influence diversity in strategic spending and, correspondingly, political outcomes such as size of the government party in the legislature. This article evaluates defense and civilian expenditures for South Korea and Taiwan from 1975 to 2006. Results. Three results are interesting. First, different elections—legislative elections in South Korea, presidential elections in Taiwan—lead to increases in spending. Second, in both nations, defense spending increases in election years but not social spending; however, defense spending benefits the government-party in the legislature in South Korea but not in Taiwan. Third, when the strategic uses of spending are accounted for, democratization does not directly affect allocations. Conclusions. These results explicate that government spending is a viable resource for party building in new democracies; however, the results also underscore that governing parties in new democracies benefit from spending only insofar as it is used to build the nation's or party's strengths—not undermine the opposition—under competitive elections.

Encyclopedia of American history

seventh edition of the of American updates this indispensable and classic reference book to cover the history of the United States from pre-Columbian times through the first year of the Clinton Administration. Unequaled in the amount of information contained within a single volume, and designed to be read as a narrative, the Encyclopedia chronicles all the essential facts of American history, from government and politics to science, thought and culture. Encyclopedia is divided onto four parts: Part 1: THE BASIC CHRONOLOGY presents the main political and military events in the history of the United States, beginning with the era of discovery. It has been updated to reflect newly discovered facts and modern perspectives on domestic and foreign affairs. Part 2: THE TOPICAL CHRONOLOGY records the nonpolitical aspects of American life and has been extensively revised to include a newly titled section Land, Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment, as well as updated sections dealing with the American economy. A few of the topics covered in this section are the fine arts, religion, medicine, education, television and radio, immigration, population, United States expansion and Supreme Court decisions. Part 3: NOTABLE AMERICAN BIOGRAPHIES contains profiles of 450 influential Americans from all walks of life and their outstanding achievements. Part 4: THE STRUCTURE OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT includes tables of U.S Presidents and their cabinets, party strength in Congress from 1789, and Supreme Court justices, as well as the complete texts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. JeffreyB. Morris, is professor of law at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center of Touro College. Associate editor for the last two revised editions of the of American History, Morris is the author of over a dozen books, including Federal Justice in the Second Circuit and To Administer Justice on Behalf of All the People: United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, 1965-1990. He has been professor of political science at City College of the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania and visiting professor of law at the Brooklyn Law School. From 1976 to 1981 Morris served as the chief research associate to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in Burger's role as head of the federal court system. Richard B. Morris, (1904-1989) was Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University and past president of the American Historical Association. Morris wrote more than 40 books spanning legal, labor, diplomatic, political and social history, including The Peacemakers: Great Powers and American Independence, Forging of the Union 1781-1789, Witnesses at the Creation, Government and Labor in Early America and Studies in History of American Law. He lectured throughout the world, serving as Fulbright Research Professor at the Sorbonne and Distinguished Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin.

The Nationalisation of Post-Communist Party Systems

Party nationalisation, defined as the homogeneity of party strength across a country, has recently become a major issue in research. Even though territory is a salient political question in the post-communist countries in Europe, party nationalisation in these countries has been neglected by the literature so far. This article presents data on party nationalisation for 20 countries over the period 1990–2007. It shows that the nationalisation of party systems in post-communist democracies is closely related to the territorial structure of social divisions, except for cases where the electoral systems provide for a high degree of nationalisation, or where super-presidentialism inhibits the creation of strong nationalised parties.

The 2009 Elections in Schleswig-Holstein: Polarised Electoral Campaign, Exceptional Election Results, and an Unspectacular Process of Government Formation

The elections for the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag were held on 27 September 2009. After conflicts between the governing parties the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), Prime Minister Carstensen had ended the ‘grand coalition’ and called for early elections, one year earlier than scheduled. The electoral campaign centred on the divide between the Christian Democrats who favoured a coalition with the Liberals, and the Social Democrats who competed for a majority together with the Greens. The elections resulted in large shifts in party strength. Christian and Social Democrats together lost about 22 percentage points of votes, while most of the smaller parliamentary parties attained their best election results in Schleswig-Holstein state elections ever. CDU and FDP gained a majority of seats and formed a coalition that re-elected Carstensen into office on 27 October. Using concepts from coalition theory, our analysis shows that a Christian–Liberal coalition was indeed the most likely outcome of the government formation process.

State of the Union Addresses and the President's Legislative Success

The State of the Union speech is generally considered a roadmap of the president's legislative program each year, yet little attention has been given to whether it functions as a determinant of the president's legislative success. The primary purpose of this article is to empirically examine the policy content of the message and the link to the president's policy success. In addition, I explore how this relationship is conditioned by the strength of the opposition party and the level of partisanship in Congress. Based on analysis of annual data from 1954–2000, the results indicate the speech has a positive and significant influence on the president's success in domestic policy. While this influence remains significant at low and average levels of partisanship and opposition party strength, it disappears when each factor is at high levels. I conclude with a discussion of how this study relates to previous research on the link between presidential speeches and legislative success.

The Impact of the Far Right on Citizenship Policy in Europe: Explaining Continuity and Change

Over the past decade, the empirical study of national citizenship policies has emerged as a fast-growing area of research. This article contributes to that literature by focusing on the question of continuity and change in the 11 ‘historically restrictive’ countries within the 15 ‘older’ member-states of the European Union. It explains why six of the countries have liberalised their citizenship policies since the 1980s, whereas five have not. The article develops an explanation that focuses on the politics of citizenship. The main finding is that, while citizenship liberalisation is more likely to occur with a leftist government, the most important factor is the relative strength of far-right parties, which can serve to mobilise latent anti-immigrant public opinion, and thereby ‘trump’ the pressures for liberalisation.

Political partisanship, race, and union strength from 1970 to 2000: A pooled time-series analysis

This paper reports findings that assess the relationship between the resurgence in conservative political strength and union density in the United States. The conservative Republican return to political power after 1968 is likely to have produced added declines in union membership. Yet despite close political regulation of labor–management disputes, sociologists have paid little attention to the influential political determinants of success in these contests. Using fixed-effects estimation, this analysis assesses the relationship between the political strength of the political party most hostile to labor and union density. With multiple factors held constant, the results suggest that increased Republican presence in the state legislatures along with Republican control of the presidency and the governor’s office after 1989 helped to reduce union memberships. The results also indicate that increases in the percentage of African Americans produces greater union strength but not in the ex-Confederate states. Added findings suggest two policies controlled by the states have influential effects on this outcome.

Party Strength, the Personal Vote, and Government Spending

“Strong” political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are strong, then legislators will demand less distributive spending because of a decreased incentive to secure a “personal vote” via local projects. We estimate that spending in states with strong party organizations is at least 4% smaller than in states where parties are weak. We also find evidence that strong party states receive less federal aid than states with weak organizations, and we theorize that this is because members of Congress from strong party states feel less compelled to secure aid than members from weak party states.

Partisanship, Political Polarization, and State Budget Outcomes: The Case of Higher Education

We explore the impact of partisanship in state governments on policy expenditures and priorities in a public policy area where the distribution of policy preferences does not fall clearly on the standard left-right political spectrum. We begin with the assumptions that (1) partisanship affects policy issues differently, due to variability in their substance and dimensionality; (2) party coalitions are heterogeneous, change over time, and are influenced by a variety of policy-demanding groups; and (3) policy preferences and policy priorities differ depending on a variety of factors (i.e., issue salience, economic cycles, and political polarization). We argue that, under these assumptions, parties matter, but the relevance and size of the effects are conditional on political polarization and economic conditions. We focus our analysis on higher education due to its complex policy space by providing both collective and particularized benefits and by presenting a growing mismatch between constituency preferences and policy outcomes. We find evidence that Democratic Party strength has a positive impact on state funding for higher education, but this positive effect diminishes as political polarization or unemployment rates increase.

The Dynamics of Critical Realignments: An Analysis Across Time and Space

Much of the scholarly interest in critical realignments results from the pivotal role that ordinary citizens play during these periods. By altering their voting behavior, citizens hold political elites accountable and forge non-incremental change in policy outputs. A central question regarding realignments is thus how are citizens changing their behavior to hold elites accountable? Are citizens producing realignments by converting from one party to the opposition? Are previous non-voters becoming mobilized in response to emerging issues or crises? Or are one party’s supporters disproportionately abstaining from voting and altering the partisan balance in the process? This article makes four central contributions to our understanding of these realignment processes, or dynamics. We present a theoretical framework for the analysis of realignment dynamics, based upon the Michigan model of voting and its conception of the normal vote. Where previous dynamics studies have collectively only examined two realignments, we examine the dynamics of all presidential realignments in American electoral history. Where previous studies have often focused on national, sectional, or state levels of analysis, we focus on city- and county-level realignments, a critical advancement for an inherently local-level phenomenon such as critical realignments. Finally, unlike previous studies, we identify the factors that promote particular realignment dynamics. We find that the conversion of active partisans has produced most of the enduring change in voting behavior in the United States, with the relative contribution of different dynamics varying both across time and space. Political factors such as the strength of state and local parties and demographic factors such as changes in the size of local immigrant populations have each favored particular realignment dynamics in American electoral history.

Party Rules, OK: Voting in the House of Commons on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which passed through the Westminster Parliament in 2007–08, demonstrated the dominance of party, even when the whips are removed and MPs are given a free vote. The party composition of the Commons determined the passage of the Bill and there is evidence that on abortion the dominance of party is becoming stronger still. There was also a gendered dimension to the voting, but even on abortion—the archetypical womens issue—the gender dimension came a poor second to the strength of party in determining the outcome of the vote.

Campaign Finance Reform Leads to Fragmented Campaigns, Not Party Strength

La Raja, R.J. (2008). Small Change: Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 304 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-472-07028-2. $70. Raymond La Raja doesn't ...

Perspectives on Research Among Kansas County Health Department Administrators

Collaborations between academic researchers and local practitioners build on the strengths of both parties; however, several barriers often prevent the development of such partnerships. The purpose of this focus group study was to gain a better understanding of perceived barriers and benefits of developing academic partnerships from the perspective of local health department (LHD) administrators throughout the state of Kansas. Six focus groups (n = 49) were conducted with LHD administrators from 50 percent of the state's counties. Verbatim transcripts were coded by three independent investigators, and the research team reached consensus on the major themes. Five saturated themes emerged: (1) perceptions about research varied but were initially negative, (2) barriers to engaging in research included limited capacity and poor perceived relevance, (3) perceived benefits of research were largely related to professional growth and practice improvement, (4) uncertainty existed about how research fits into their professional role, and (5) university researchers were perceived as out of touch with community needs. Participants' negative perceptions of research were influenced by a lack of resources, time, and skills, and a lack of connection between research activities and primary clinical responsibilities. However, despite many negative perceptions, research was rated as highly important. Findings have implications for strategies to engage LHDs in academic collaborations such as targeting research projects to fill an existing need identified by LHD staff.

Debating the Color Revolutions: Necessary Distinctions

Abstract: Lucan Way’s elucidating account of postcommunist authoritarianism and democratization includes compelling critiques of diffusion-based arguments, particularly with regard to timing and electoral cycles. Yet his interpretation glosses over a distinction that ought to be the foundation of any discussion about post-Soviet governments—the distinction among regimes, rulers, and political teams. Further, Way underestimates the importance of the strength of autocratic parties or armed forces. Autocrats need strong parties and armed forces because they need either to resist or to control something. To understand the power of whatever that “something” is, political scientists need to pay greater attention to the weak legitimacy of autocracy. Western pressure can be decisive, but it is not always easy to forecast when and how it will be applied.

Partisan Strength and Nonpartisanship Among Asian Americans

Relatively little is known about partisan identification among immigrant-dominated ethnic groups in the United States. In this article we build on the work of Lien, Conway, and Wong (2004) to explore patterns of partisan strength and nonpartisanship among Asian Americans. We note that more than one third of Asian Americans do not identify themselves on the standard seven-point partisan identification scale, indicating that they either have no party attachment (denoted no-party nonpartisans) or are not sure of their partisanship (denoted unsure nonpartisans). Using data from the 2000-2001 Pilot National Asian American Political Survey, we estimate separate models of (a) partisan acquisition (i.e., partisan vs. nonpartisan), (b) strength of partisanship, and (c) type of nonpartisanship. As expected, we find significant differences in this Asian American sample between partisans and nonpartisans and among strong partisans, weak or independent-leaning partisans, and pure independents. In our nonpartisanship model, we also find discernible differences among pure independents, no-party nonpartisans, and unsure nonpartisans. Our findings address questions about how one should test models of party strength in Asian American samples, particularly given the relatively large percentage of nonpartisans among Asian Americans in comparison to samples drawn from the general population.

Islamism and Family Law Reform in Morocco and Jordan

This article questions why Islamists approved family law reform in Morocco and not in Jordan. The answer entails three inter-related factors: the different relationships Islamists had with their respective monarchs; the strength of leftist parties and their ties to civil society; and how the respective reforms were presented by the two monarchs. This article contributes to a body of literature that argues, while not discounting ideology, that an understanding of Islamist parties requires an examination of the larger political context and Islamist responses to it.

Effects of political institutions on air quality

We empirically test existing theories on the provision of public goods, in particular air quality, using data on sulfur dioxide (SO 2) concentrations from the Global Environment Monitoring Projects for 107 cities in 42 countries from 1971 to 1996. The results are as follows: First, we provide additional support for the claim that the degree of democracy has an independent positive effect on air quality. Second, we find that among democracies, presidential systems are more conducive to air quality than parliamentary ones. Third, in testing competing claims about the effect of interest groups on public goods provision in democracies we establish that labor union strength contributes to lower environmental quality, whereas the strength of green parties has the opposite effect.