Party System Research Articles

Affective Polarization Between Opinion-Based Groups in a Context of Low Partisan Discord: Measuring Its Prevalence and Consequences

Abstract Affective polarization has been primarily studied as a phenomenon between partisans. Recently, Hobolt, Leeper, & Tilley (2021) showed in the context of Brexit that affective polarization can also materialize around opinion-based groups, that is, political identities that form around extraordinary issues and cut through partisan lines. We generalize their findings by documenting the emergence of affective polarization around a new political conflict in a national context of low partisan discord. Specifically, we study divisions around the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, a multiparty system where all established parties supported certain freedom restrictions to contain the pandemic. Drawing on numerous indicators and a survey experiment from a representative online panel study, we explored the (a) prevalence, (b) consequences, and (c) context of affective polarization between supporters and opponents of COVID-19 containment policies. We found that the majority of supporters and a minority of opponents showed indications of affective polarization. Affectively polarized citizens showed various group biases that make productive political and social interactions less likely. Affective polarization was stable over time and different from partisan and sociostructural conflicts. We raise questions for future research and discuss what it means for democracy when deep political rifts are not captured by main parties in a party system.

Review Essay: Donald Trump, Charismatic Leadership and the “Deep State”

Abstract There have been many accounts of Donald Trump's assault on America's constitutional norms and institutions. Journalists have detailed how a real estate mogul and reality television star with no experience in public office captured the Republican Party and disrupted the regular protocols of the executive branch. Legal scholars have lamented Trump's politicization of the Justice Department breaking through the fragile guard rails put in place in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Psychiatrists have sought to diagnose Trump's politics of resentment, which they attribute to the rage and narcissism of a sociopath. Amid this frenzy John Campbell's Institutions Under Siege: Donald Trump's Attack on the Deep State provides a comprehensive study on Trump's assault on American political and government institutions. He shows persuasively that Trump's presidency had a deep and dangerous imprint on elections, the Republican Party, the bureaucracy, and fiscal policy. Critically examining Campbell’s theory and evidence, this essay considers where Trump stands in the long train of democratic crises that have occurred throughout American history, how his presidency and its provocative aftermath were a symptom of long-standing changes in the relationship between the presidency and the party system, and why the presidency itself might be a polarizing institution.

Catalysts of change: Unveiling the nexus between protest movements and party politics in the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT The recent surges of protest have emerged as a striking global phenomenon. Several diverse countries, including Egypt, the United States, Spain, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom, have witnessed massive protest movements over the past decade. Numerous recent studies have underscored the pivotal role of the interaction between protest movements and party politics. However, our understanding of why certain movements profoundly impact the political landscape, sometimes triggering the collapse of existing party systems, while others barely alter conventional politics, remains limited. Drawing from case studies of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey, we conduct a systematic comparative analysis of the impact of protest movements during the 2010s. We aim to elucidate why and how some protests have proven more effective in reshaping party politics, while others have faltered. Our contention is that the dynamics of the party system play a pivotal role in determining the capacity of social movements to instigate transformative changes in party politics.

BLENDING DOMINANCE, REGIONALISM AND COALITIONS: A NEW READING OF INDIA’S FOURTH PARTY SYSTEM

Since 2014, India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won more elections at the national and state levels than it has lost, returning with an even larger majority in the 2019 General Election. However, the question of whether there has been any break from the past in the nature of the Indian party system remains open. What is the nature of the BJP’s dominance in this period? What is the status of the opposition and the vitality of regional players in this new era? Have coalitions really been relegated to the past? This article investigates the current trends of the party system and compares them with tendencies exhibited historically. It applies mixed methods, largely quantitative analysis of secondary data based on ECI and Lokniti – CSDS election surveys. It argues that what has been called India’s “Fourth Party System” is not completely separate from the trends of the three preceding epochs but rather blends them in unique ways. A re-examination of the election results would reveal how dominance, regionalism and coalitions coexist in an enigmatic symbiosis offering a new reading of the structure of India’s current party system. The 2024 General Elections which witnessed a humbling but historic third consecutive BJP victory albeit reliant on coalition partners only reinforce how the three dimensions of dominance, regionalism and coalitions constantly play out in shaping the character of India’s Party System where changes seem more of a degree rather than of kind.

Going jingo: a classification of the wartime positions of Russia’s “systemic opposition” parties

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on party-system dynamics in Russia by analyzing the war-related communication of the five main “systemic opposition” parties, their leaders, and three Communist MPs who initially criticized the invasion. Examining their adoption of established pro-war regime propaganda (anti-Ukrainian, anti-Western, “Z-talk”) or anti-war rhetoric, we assess the extent of rhetorical convergence in the party system. Based on a dictionary analysis of over 60,000 posts between February 2021 and February 2023, we find the Communist Party to be the most proactive in its pro-war jingoism, Just Russia leader Sergey Mironov to be the clearest case of a regime mouthpiece for Z-talk, and only Yabloko to provide weak but consistent dissent, while New People and the three Communist MPs avoid both pro-war and anti-war rhetoric. Our findings indicate a functional reconfiguration of the party system, stopping short of full-fledged rhetorical harmonization toward “GDR-ization.”

Dialogues Across Time: Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Democratization

Abstract This review article leverages Isabela Mares’ Protecting the Ballot: How First-Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption as a jumping off point to consider how to construct a dialogue between scholars of contemporary electoral malfeasance and historical political economists. It makes two main points. First, because both scholars of history and of the contemporary world are usually engaged in mixed-method case study research, both grapple with issues of case generalizability and external validity. This produces a naturally shared research agenda, although one that has largely gone unrecognized. Generalizability would be improved if both groups mapped their cases onto larger distributions of the phenomenon of interest. Second, the very substantial differences between party systems of first-wave and recent democratizers suggest that political elites will support reforms aimed at improving election integrity differently across the two periods. Contemporary electoral competition is unlikely to naturally give rise to the emergence of programmatic politics, instead locking parties into clientelism and various types of election malfeasance. I discuss what might be required for politicians today to support reforms aimed at curbing election malfeasance, and when the shift to programmatic politics becomes in the political interests of elected officials.

The Great Global Divider? A Comparison of Urban-Rural Partisan Polarization in Western Democracies

This study is the first to measure urban-rural electoral divides in a way that facilitates comparisons beyond majoritarian democracies of the UK and North America. Based on national election results at the lowest available geographic level in fifteen countries covering roughly five decades, we present a measure for each election and political party, enabling comparisons over time and between countries with different electoral and party systems. We show that long-term increases in urban-rural divides have been most pronounced in the US, the UK, and Canada, but these divides have also emerged in several European multiparty systems in recent decades, largely because of growing smaller parties with predominantly urban or rural support. Overall urban-rural electoral divides remain lower in these systems due to continued presence of mainstream parties with geographically diverse support. Our contribution paves the way for a comparative research agenda on causes and consequences of urban-rural electoral polarization.

Transition from parliamentarism to presidentialism and the restructuring of the Turkish party system

ABSTRACT The role of institutional factors on party system change has received increasing scholarly attention. This article analyses the emergence of new trends in the structure of party competition in Turkey following the transition from parliamentarism to presidentialism in 2017. The newly-adopted presidential system endowed the president with extraordinary powers and reduced the role of the parliament. Presidential elections assumed central importance in electoral politics; competition was structured by pre-electoral coalitions and party alliances; more than two-thirds of the voters cast their ballots for one of the two main electoral alliances; and there was a trend towards the emergence of a bipolar party system. The analysis presented in this study emphasizes the role of institutional engineering, especially the introduction of presidentialism and changes in electoral laws, as major factors in the restructuring of the Turkish party system.

The Making of India’s Resilient Opposition in the 1970s

This article seeks to focus on the changing nature of India’s parliamentary opposition in the 1970s. The article argues that, unlike the previous decades, the Opposition in India was resilient, even if not organised in the face of the authoritarian tendencies of Indira Gandhi pre- and during the Emergency. The analytical framework helps to understand the reasons for the growing opposition’s resilience. The manifestation of this resilience can be traced to the programmes and actions of the opposition parties undertaken in the 1970s inside and outside the parliament as the crisis of democratic governance deepened, as explained in this article. This article attempts to make sense of parliamentary opposition in the 1970s, unlike any other existing study that either focused on the Congress, party system, or emergency per se. This article brings the spotlight on the Opposition as a category that lacks constitutional safeguards, thereby missing the ‘equality of conditions’ in a democratic framework. An emphasis is given to analytically understanding the political processes that played a significant role in the government–opposition relationship. The study has been conducted with the help of primary archival materials, newspaper reportings, memoirs, commentaries and governmental records such as parliamentary debates, along with existing academic works (though scarcely) on the making and functioning of the Opposition in India. The analytical approach in studying this particular moment in the political history of India helps us to understand the primacy, effectiveness, limitations and failures of democratic governance from the Opposition’s standpoint.

THE PARTISAN PARTICIPATION IN THE JORDANIAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS

Purpose: The study explores parliamentary elections, election laws, and party attitudes, using content analysis to understand their impact on electoral outcomes. It suggests recommendations for enhancing trust and promoting democratic principles.
 
 Theoretical framework: The study's theoretical framework may incorporate political science and sociology concepts, focusing on electoral processes, political parties, and democratic governance. It may explore institutionalism, party systems theory, democratic theory, and content analysis methodology to understand the impact of election laws, party behavior, and democratic norms on political outcomes.
 
 Design/Methodology/Approach: The study's theoretical framework may incorporate political science and sociology concepts, focusing on electoral processes, political parties, and democratic governance. It may explore institutionalism, party systems theory, democratic theory, and content analysis methodology to understand the impact of election laws, party behavior, and democratic norms on political outcomes.
 
 Findings: The study may have revealed the dynamic nature of the electoral environment, the impact of election laws on party behavior, partisan positions on electoral processes, the effectiveness of political parties in elections, trust in political institutions, and recommendations for electoral reform. These findings could help strengthen democratic governance and electoral processes.
 
 Research, Practical & Social Implications: The study provides empirical insights into party behavior and election laws, highlighting the importance of qualitative research methods. It can inform policymakers, political parties, and civil society organizations in electoral reforms, enhancing fairness, transparency, and inclusivity. The findings can also promote trust, civic engagement, and protection of human rights, fostering a more inclusive democracy.
 
 Originality/Value: The study provides valuable insights into evolving electoral dynamics, partisan positions, and electoral outcomes. It offers recommendations for improving trust and promoting democratic principles. The content analysis method provides a rigorous framework for analyzing textual data, enhancing the robustness of the findings.

How Parties and Ambitious Politicians Undermined American Democracy—and the Reforms that Might Save It

Abstract Asserting that American checks and balances have broken down, Lawrence Jacobs asserts that parties must filter out dangerous candidates such as Donald Trump. To do so requires a number of reforms to undo several wrong turns in the evolution of the party system. Ambitious political elites including Jefferson, Jackson, LaFollette, and McGovern introduced changes in the name of greater equality that served their own interests but also had a number of harmful consequences. Reforms are needed to expand and reinvigorate citizen political participation along many dimensions and curb elite influence. In his book Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History, Lawrence Jacobs offers a robust vision of democracy and argues democracy is incompatible with entrenching minority control of electoral outcomes or political decision-making. Yet some of the failures and changes that gave rise to current threats to democracy, including authoritarian candidates, have affected other nations and have causes that go beyond remedies considered here. Some of the modest reforms proposed by Jacobs seem unlikely to achieve the purposes he envisions. However, reforms that do not require constitutional amendments and broader citizen political engagement that extends beyond election season are welcome proposals.

Growing Up in a Polarized Party System: Ideological Divergence and Partisan Sorting Across Generations

American political elites have increasingly polarized over the past decades, which has inspired much research into mass polarization. We study whether there is a generational component to mass polarization by disentangling period, age, and cohort differences while distinguishing two forms of mass polarization: partisan sorting and ideological divergence. Drawing from General Social Survey and American National Election Studies data, we find that partisan sorting has increased across long-standing and emerging issues, while ideological divergence has not. Contrary to expectations, over-time increases in sorting are clearly driven by changes within generations rather than by generational replacement. On several issues, newer generations turn out to be less sorted than those they replace. This tentatively suggests that, partially as a consequence of demographic changes, generational replacement will gradually lead to less polarization in American public opinion as it converges toward more liberal positions.

THE BULGARIAN SOCIALIST PARTY ON THE PATH TO DE-EUROPEANIZATION

The article's main purpose is to shed light on the Euroscepticism of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and its shifting identity towards European issues, liberal democracy, and in terms of party organization during the last decade. More than twenty years ago, the successor of the former Bulgarian Communist Party managed to achieve a difficult (and, it turns out, superficial) Europeanisation and Social-democratization. BSP supported the country's accession to the EU and the integration in NATO. Now, the party is identifiable as a pro-Russian actor, opposed to the Istanbul convention, spreading conservatism, and hysteria against the so called "gender ideology," fighting against economic neo-liberalism but also liberal ideas. The Russian war against Ukraine significantly impacted domestic politics and the structure of party competition, revitalizing the historic divide between pro-Russian and pro-Western camps. Isolated, the BSP lost its position as a major party of government and embraced anti-establishment and protest-party profile. The main research questions address the essence of the BSP's ethnonationalist and conservative turn, and its hybrid interpretations of "national interest" and "patriotism" in its discourses and documents. Special attention is paid to the BSP's positions towards the war in Ukraine. Our main approach is grounded on the path dependency theory and on the supply and demand sides of the fragmented party system.

Party System Change and Challenges to Democracy in Slovenia

In the context of a post-socialist party system, stabilisation is believed to be linked to democracy. Based on that assumption, it could be inferred that party system instability is not compatible with the consolidation of democracy. However, research has found that the destabilisation of party systems does not endanger democracy in Western countries. The case study of Slovenia reveals that dynamic changes in the party system and consolidation of democracy may also be feasible in the post-socialist context. There are factors additional to party system instability that may together produce a shift away from democracy, as happened in Slovenia in the period between 2019 and 2022 under Janez Janša’s government. This exploratory study of Slovenia has revealed domestic and external factors, which together co-create the particular outcomes of a fluid democracy, including several not yet revealed in the literature as relevant. The findings encourage further comparative qualitative and quantitative research not only into factors of democratic decline, but also of democratic stability in the context of multiple external shocks.

Gender, Race, and Intersectionality in the Political Donations of America’s Corporate Elite

ABSTRACT Women and racial minorities have made significant inroads into senior managerial and, especially, board of director positions over the past half-century. Despite this, there is little research on gender and racial differences in the political behavior of corporate elites. In this study, we investigate whether and how gender, race, and their intersection shape the political donation strategies of elite actors. Relying on a novel longitudinal corporate elites’ political donation database, we provide the first systematic elite-level analysis of political donations to U.S. Congressional campaigns during the 1980-2014 election cycles. Overall, we find that, compared to men, women elites are less likely to donate, but are more Democrat-leaning and give to more ideologically extreme candidates. We also find evidence of intersectionality between gender and race in political donations among corporate elites. While elites of color favor the Democratic Party overall, our results suggest minority men concentrate their donations on more centrist candidates relative to women. Notably, white men are the only reliably Republican constituency within this elite group. Our results portend potentially far-reaching consequences for the party system as the composition of the American corporate elite grows more racially and gender diverse.

The Ideology of Two Dominant Party Systems in 21st-Century African Neoliberal Democracies: A Paired Comparison of Nigeria and Ghana

In Nigeria and Ghana, scholars and statesmen suggest that the party system has missed the mark, having bred two major political parties that look alike ideologically. The argument is that the major parties in a two-dominant party system must articulate clearly alternative visions and strategies in an ideologically driven manifesto. To show the difference, such parties must have opposing values and ideologies, one revising the neoliberal growth model. Some analysts argue that when the ruling party manifests capitalist tendencies, the opposition should tend to the left-of-the-centre or socialist to express the opposite. What are the parties doing differently? While it seems on paper that National Democratic Congress and New Patriotic Party (NDC/NPP) in Ghana and All Progressives Congress and Peoples Democratic Party (APC/PDP) in Nigeria have manifestoes that seem to differ, there appears to be a minimal difference in their policies when in power to match the ideological leanings. The paper argues that political parties are essential to liberal democracy, but in the current hegemony of the market economy, they do not have to be diametrically ideologically different to fulfil their roles. The major political parties can be differentiated based on their stand on issues, giving rise to issue-based parties rather than ideological ones. The electorates may also rely on the office’s effectiveness to guide candidates’ and parties’ choices. The parties ought to articulate pressing national issues and solve them.

Back from the Cold? Progressive Politics and Social Policy Paradigms in Southern Europe after the Great Recession

This article examines the programmatic evolution of social democratic parties in Italy, Portugal, and Spain, three countries in which the center-left has governed in the last decade. To do so, the article develops an analytical framework for mapping social and labor market policy reforms and assessing their liberalizing, regularizing, or recalibrating character. In explanatory terms, the article studies the coalitional politics behind social democratic reforms as being conditional upon the relationships between organized interests, electoral social blocs, and party system dynamics. The comparative analysis shows both commonalities and differences: the cases range from postindustrial recalibration (Italy) to inclusive egalitarianism (Spain), with Portugal taking a middling path, closer to that of Spain. Overall, in these countries a move away from both traditional “social protectionism” and crisis-era internal devaluation has taken place, but it has taken different forms depending on country-specific coalitional dynamics within the left and trade union camps.

The Colors of the Populist Radical Right: The Strategic Use of Hue and Saturation in Party Logos

Populist radical right (PRR) parties tend to stress their differences from other parties. Yet at the same time, PRR parties have increasingly sought to integrate into party systems across the globe. In seeking to understand the way that PRR parties negotiate this paradoxical situation, the literature tends to focus on their policy offerings or discourse. We, on the contrary, investigate an underestimated aspect of their political communication: their visuals. Namely, we focus on the question of if and how PRR parties communicate their similarities or differences from other parties via the color profiles of their logos, given that color is a key way that political parties can signal (a) their ideological commitments (via hue) and (b) their approach to “valence” considerations (via saturation). We expect PRR parties’ attempts to signal their integration into party systems to be mainly sought via saturation, as a proxy for valence perceptions related to parties’ seriousness and competence, while we expect them to signal their difference from other parties via hue, given the incentive for PRR parties to communicate their ideological distance from non-populist parties as a marker of distinctiveness in the political market. We test our research questions by analyzing parties’ logos across 35 democracies in recent elections. Results largely confirm our expectations, demonstrating the utility of focusing on the visual aspects of PRR parties’ political communication. Interestingly, the results do not replicate if we focus on populist parties beyond the PRR party family.

НАМ, НАМЫН СИСТЕМИЙН ТӨЛӨВШИЛД СОНГУУЛИЙН ТОГТОЛЦООНЫ ЭРХ ЗҮЙН ОРЧИН НӨЛӨӨЛӨХ НЬ

In the academic article "Influence of the legal framework of the electoral system on the formation of parties and party systems", apart from the scientific study of what the electoral system is, the legal framework of the electoral system, and how the electoral system is classified, the party is the most important part of the political system. As an important institution, it has been emphasized how it has developed and matured due to changes in the electoral system. The 8 parliamentary elections held in Mongolia in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 are characterized by the unique features of the times, economic conditions, political party and state policy decisions, and social times depending on the situation and legal changes in the electoral system, it had its own characteristics and effectiveness. Elections in Mongolia have been conducted by multi-mandate enlarged constituencies and single-mandate majoritarian system, which has created the opportunity for two political forces to hold the power in turn. The fact that the majority or two major parties alternately rule the government is related to the electoral system.

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”: fractionalized and polarized party systems in Western democracies

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”: fractionalized and polarized party systems in Western democracies