Party System Size Research Articles

Exogenous Shocks and Party System Development: What is the Effect on New Party Entry?

ABSTRACT Since 2020, the world has been officially battling a COVID-19 pandemic. Even countries with established crisis management plans and years of experience in handling political and economic crises, have been shaken. In the midst of the pandemic’s rampant effects, how politicians handle the crisis is of crucial importance to the preservation, development, and protection of nations in the future. Who is in power determines not only the stability, but the political course of countries. Hence, what happens to the party system as a result of an exogenous shock is a question we need to answer. Importantly, we have little evidence on how the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic affected party competition. Building on the party systems literature, we examine the effect of the pandemic on electoral volatility, party system size, and the number of new party contestants. We hypothesise that, in countries where the incumbent government handles the crisis less effectively, electoral volatility tends to be higher, party system size tends to be larger, and more new parties tend to enter the electoral race. Drawing on evidence from national parliamentary elections held by electoral democracies from March 2020 to April 2022, the empirical results support our hypothesis.

What Makes Party Systems Different? A Principal Component Analysis of 17 Advanced Democracies 1970–2013

AbstractParty systems, that is, the number and the size of all the parties within a country, can vary greatly across countries. I conduct a principal component analysis on a party seat share dataset of 17 advanced democracies from 1970 to 2013 to reduce the dimensionality of the data. I find that the most important dimensions that differentiate party systems are: “the size of the biggest two parties” and the level of “competition between the two biggest parties.” I use the results to compare the changes in electoral and legislative party systems. I also juxtapose the results to previous party system typologies and party system size measures. I find that typologies sort countries into categories based on variation along both dimensions. On the other hand, most of the current political science literature use measures (e.g., the effective number of parties) that are correlated with the first dimension. I suggest that instead of these, indices that measure the opposition structure and competition could be used to explore problems pertaining to the competitiveness of the party systems.

Party systems and public goods: the dynamics of good governance in the Indian states

ABSTRACT We argue that two key party system characteristics – the effective number of parties and electoral volatility – have a curvilinear, inverted-U shaped, influence on public goods provision. Rejecting the linear pattern generally assumed in the literature, we contend that optimal governance outcomes will be observed at intermediate levels of party system size and stability. Only under these conditions will the benefits of competition be balanced against the risks of fragmentation. We find support for our arguments by employing new data and estimating panel models of public goods provision in 29 Indian states and territories. We hope that our findings will contribute to understanding how party systems function, particularly those at the subnational level, and will better inform how they can be leveraged for development and good governance. We also hope that they will provide some guidance about the future trajectory of public policy in the Indian states.

Socioeconomic heterogeneity and party system fragmentation

ABSTRACT Considerable evidence suggests that social diversity increases the number of political parties. While a vast literature examines this relationship by measuring social diversity as ethnic fragmentation, the convenience of capturing the level of social heterogeneity by using alternative indicators has been traditionally overlooked. In this article, I offer new evidence that documents the impact of social diversity on party system size by proxying the former as the number of social classes. Using both objective class positions and subjective class identifications and employing two different datasets that cover democratic legislative elections around the world between 1981 and 2015, I find that the effective number of social classes has a positive effect on party system fragmentation when the average district magnitude in a democracy is high. Given the difficulty to test these effects in a cross-country environment net of unobserved heterogeneity, I examine the robustness of the findings in Spain between 2000 and 2016, an ideal case due to large differences in district magnitude and a changing party system. Overall, the results suggest that high levels of social diversity are likely to increase party system fragmentation when the electoral system is permissive enough.

Party system fragmentation, social cleavages, and social media: New Zealand’s 2017 election campaign on Facebook

ABSTRACT Explorations of the predictive relationship between party system fragmentation and social cleavages beyond a single dimension remains an undeveloped area of research, one which rarely accounts for the changing technological landscape where parties now compete. This case study of New Zealand's 2017 election campaign on Facebook contributes to this area. It reveals an environment where parties compete within social cleavages for support, and users demonstrate a diverse preference for cleavage appeals. The findings also offer a compromise between the competing theories about New Zealand’ social cleavage structure. Finally, we revisit the predictive relationship between party system size and social cleavages in a postdictive fashion, demonstrating the continued explanatory power of cleavage structure, this time with data derived from social media.

Setting-up the Stage?!: Party Competition and Electoral Law in Central and East-Europe

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to study the effect of electoral regulation on party system development. Using a new database, this study shows existing variation in regulating electoral competition. It further illustrates that, perhaps contrary to electoral regulation design, increases in the amount of regulation about funding and monitoring have a stifling, rather than a stimulating, effect on party system size. More importantly, the paper provides evidence supporting the cartel thesis argument in that the changes allowed by incumbent parties help secure their collective survival, while keeping newcomers out.

Political finance regimes and party system size: evidence from new and established European democracies

AbstractStudies of party system size have looked at institutional and sociological factors in their attempt to explain what determines the number of parties. While some recent studies contend that party laws, beyond the district magnitude, have a significant impact on, among others, new party entry, we know very little about whether certain rules matter more in some societies than they do in others. In this paper, we study the extent to which various party finance rules affect party system size and differentiate the effect between new and established democracies. Specifically, we focus on direct and indirect public subsidization and limits on private donation and campaign expenditure. We hypothesize that compared to established countries, new democracies tend to have a larger party system size when the political finance rules create more equal conditions for electoral competition. Using data from 43 Europe democracies, the empirical analyses support our hypothesis.

Voting after the change: A natural experiment on the effect of electoral reform on party system fragmentation

This article analyses the causal effect of the 1993 electoral reform in New Zealand on party system fragmentation using the ‘synthetic’ control method. Previous studies using cross-national evidence suggest that electoral reforms change the number of parties. However, they do not take into account possible endogeneity problems and usually focus on their short-term effects. Since the electoral system in use in this country before the change was first past the post (FPTP), I can create a ‘synthetic’ control democracy that had the same institutional framework but did not modify the rules of the game. The results indicate that the electoral reform produced the expected effects on party system size at the electoral level, but that these effects tended to disappear in the long run. In contrast, electoral system effects at the legislative level were larger and stickier over time.

Elusive indeed – The mechanical versus psychological effects of electoral rules at the district level

While electoral research has become one of political science’s most fertile areas, to date no empirical contribution has addressed the three mechanisms of the electoral chain – strategic entry, strategic voting, and the electoral system’s mechanical effect – in a unified analytical framework. This paper addresses this shortcoming by analysing the effect of electoral systems on party system size, accounting for all three mechanisms. Our study yields three major findings drawing on constituency-level data covering 462 electoral districts in Finland and Portugal between 1962 and 2011. First, macro-sociological context, measured as cleavages, operate at the district level: An increase in the heterogeneity within a constituency significantly increases party system size. Second, in the two established democracies we examine, we observe that district-level bottom-up coordination takes places. Finally, while our analyses reveal that some strategic voting takes places, it is blurred by a comparatively large amount of non-strategic behaviour by voters. The variance we find surrounding psychological effects is too large to exert a targeted impact. In sum, the mechanical effect turns out to be the most decisive link of the electoral chain.

The effect of political sophistication and party identification on voter–party congruence. A comparative analysis of 30 countries

ABSTRACTPartisanship and cognitive mobilization are generally seen as independent and counter-balancing influences on vote choice. While the former is typically regarded as a shortcut, reducing the need for close ideological congruence with one’s preferred party, the latter is associated with increasing levels of political sophistication and the importance of ideological proximity in voter decision-making. This paper tests the strength of these arguments in comparative perspective using data from Wave 3 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Our results show that in general higher levels of political sophistication are associated with higher levels of voter–party ideological congruence and that a strong party identification reduces this proximity. For voters with both high levels of sophistication and strong partisanship, however, congruence remains high. In a second step we examine whether these relationships are affected by the complexity of the party environment. Our findings show that party system size has no effect on levels of ideological congruence at the individual level, and this holds for different levels of voter sophistication. We conclude that for the most part voter sophistication and party identification are best seen as counter-weights in determining vote choice.

Legislative policy-making authority, party system size, and party system nationalization

How does the internal organization of legislatures shape the legislative party system? We argue that the size and nationalization of the national legislative party system is related to the size of the legislative prize—namely, to how the legislature's internal rules and structures concentrate policy-making authority in the hands of the largest party. To test this argument, we draw on studies of legislative organization to develop a measure of the concentration of legislative policy-making authority. Using two time series cross sectional data sets of post-war elections, one of advanced industrial democracies with pure parliamentary systems and one of all advanced industrial democracies, we find support for our argument and note that the effect of internal legislative structures is larger than that of the electoral system. We also show that the incentives to aggregate and consolidate the legislative party system are generally stronger where there are few external constraints on the legislature.

Constituency Diversity, District Magnitude and Voter Co-ordination

Why are voters in some electoral constituencies able to successfully co-ordinate their balloting decisions on viable party offerings, while those in other constituencies are not? Prior work on voter co-ordination failures has focused on institutional and elite-level explanations. This article demonstrates that characteristics of the voting constituencies themselves – specifically their socio-demographic diversity – can play an important role in shaping voters’ collective ability to co-ordinate around viable party offerings. It synthesizes theories of collective decision making from the field of organizational psychology with theories of institutions as incentive structures to argue that diversity inhibits collective co-ordination in some contexts, but not others. In so doing, the article offers a new causal mechanism that links diversity and district magnitude to party system size. The argument is tested using a cross-national analysis of tens of thousands of voters across lower house elections in twelve countries.

The resilience of ethnic minority parties in the face of strategic voting incentives

Recent research has indicated that social heterogeneity impacts party system size, even in restrictive settings. This research as yet has not established whether it is minority or majority voters who are behaving outside Duvergerian expectations. This study argues that it is ethnic voters that seem to defect from their parties at lower rates, which explains why small parties proliferate and persist in heterogeneous states. This hypothesis is tested on party-in-district level election returns in the German lander Schleswig-Holstein. The results show that small ethnic parties suffer notably less defection than small non-ethnic parties. The study proposes a number of potential causal mechanisms that could be driving ethnic voters, as a group, to defect at lower rates than non-ethnic voters.

Party Systems and Public Goods: The Dynamics of Good Governance in the Indian States

The effort to understand when governments provide public goods to their citizens is among the most important in political science. One institution that seems to be highly influential in policy-making, particularly in parliamentary democracies, is the party system. In this paper, we consider two of the key elements of party systems – the effective number of parties and electoral volatility. We argue that the influence of both of these characteristics on the provision of public goods is curvilinear rather than linear, as has generally been supposed in past research. Our contention is that intermediate levels of party system size and stability are ideal for public goods provision; when these levels are too low, the system is not competitive enough to incentivize service provision, but when they are too high, the system is too fragmented and unstable to produce long-run beneficial outcomes. The best outcomes will be observed, we argue, when the benefits of competition are balanced against the risks of fragmentation and instability. We test our argument with a panel model of public goods provision in India’s twenty-nine state and territories, measured by education spending, road construction, and revenue accumulation. Our results provide support for our arguments and shed new light on the role of party systems in structuring good governance in India and in parliamentary democracies around the world.

Institutional, societal, and economic determinants of party system size: Evidence from Brazil

Institutionalist views emphasize that identical institutional rules should function in similar ways across nations, thus making electoral engineering possible. This article utilizes the case of Brazil (eight elections in 27 states) to show that there is considerable cross-sectional variation in party system size under indistinguishable institutional rules. Confirming previous works, we find that the interaction between institutions and societal complexity plays a key role in determining party system size. In addition, we show that the educational profile of voters and subnational economic conditions also contribute to the phenomenon. Overall, our results call for caution on electoral engineering projects at home or abroad.

The Floating Voter in a Multiparty Systems Democracy: Does the Number of Electoral Parties Actually Matter?

This paper deals with the relationship between institutional, electoral and party system dynamics on the one hand, and the evolution of total electoral volatility in Belgium, on the other. Based on aggregated election data from the 1876–2010 period the paper describes how and why party system size and electoral volatility in a fragmented parliamentary democracy interrelate and how they affect the equal parliamentary representation of parties. There are three important conclusions: first of all, the national party system has become more permeable to new parties over time and, concurrently, has become more competitive. This process has impacted negatively on the supremacy of the three traditional ideologies and the distinctive electoral market leadership of the Flemish Catholic party. But more importantly, it is not the absolute number but rather the relative change in electoral competition from one election to the next that has been a prime factor in explaining the linkage between party system fragmentation and electoral volatility. Lastly, the increasingly permeable Belgian national party system seems to have impacted adversely on the equal representation of smaller parties and – somewhat counterintuitively – even after the year 2000 has primarily rewarded larger parties, the very parties that represent the main pillar-based ideologies. Added to this is that one of the main factors precluding equal representation of (new) parties is total electoral volatility.

The Impact of Campaign Finance Laws on Party Competition

The comparative literature on party systems has convincingly demonstrated that electoral rules, social cleavages and their interaction can explain much of the cross-national variation in the size of party systems. This literature, however, has thus far ignored campaign finance laws. This article argues that various campaign finance laws exert more or less restrictive pressures on party competition. It develops a new theoretical concept, fund parity. The study demonstrates the positive relationship between fund parity and party system size and employs additional tests to supplement the regression analysis in order to account for potential endogeneity issues. The findings underscore an intuitive – but heretofore untested – relationship: increasing parity makes party competition more permissive and increases the size of the party system.

Ethnic heterogeneity and party system size: A district-level analysis

It has been theoretically and empirically shown that ideological diversity complements the effect of institutions on the development of party systems and the number of political parties that ensue. Thus, students of party and electoral systems now commonly employ ethnic fractionalization as an indicator of ideological differences; however, there is no unilaterally agreed upon data set that scholars use. In addition, extant data sets measure heterogeneity at the national level, rather than at the district level, where electoral competition takes place and where both institutional and social factors matter most. Using a multi-level empirical analysis, this article illustrates the interactive effect of the two main district characteristics – magnitude and heterogeneity – on the number of parties. It demonstrates the analytical benefit of using district-level characteristics in explaining party system size and aims to reduce the data gap by providing a district-level ethnic heterogeneity data set for 18 European states.

The long and the short of it: Electoral institutions and the dynamics of party system size, 1950–2005

AbstractWhile institutional theories of party system size are usually examined cross‐nationally, there is ample reason to expect that changes in electoral institutions will affect party system size within countries as well. Although some of this effect may occur immediately, most of the effects are likely to be realised over time and across subsequent elections. A series of error‐correction models examine the short‐ and long‐term effects of changes in electoral institutions on party system size. The results indicate that changes in electoral institutions do produce the expected effects on party system size, and that these effects occur mostly over the long term.

When do parties emphasise extreme positions? How strategic incentives for policy differentiation influence issue importance

AbstractParties have an incentive to take up extreme positions in order to achieve policy differentiation and issue ownership, and it would make sense for a party to stress these positions as well. These incentives are not the same for all issues and all parties but may be modified by other strategic conditions: party size, party system size, positional distinctiveness and systemic salience. Using manifesto‐based measures of salience and expert assessments of party positions, the findings in this article are that parties emphasise extreme positions if, first, they are relatively small in terms of vote share; second, the extreme position is distinctive from those of other parties; and third, other parties fail to emphasise the issue. These findings have consequences for our understanding of party strategies, party competition and the radicalisation of political debates.