Electoral Success Of Parties Research Articles

Pakistan's Coming Crisis

Abstract: Pakistan's 2024 elections delivered a shocking surprise. Imran Khan's PTI won the largest number of seats amid heavy state repression. With this result, well-worn political patterns—whereby military favor virtually guaranteed a party's electoral success—were upended. This essay argues that Pakistan's 2024 election is not a "black swan" event but instead signals a coming crisis of governability that grows out of three structural changes: the rise of an aspirational middle class, the erosion of traditional authority patterns, and an intensifying economic and climate crisis. Consequently, a historic loss of military legitimacy is unlikely to abate in years ahead.

The Group Appeal Strategy: Beyond the Policy Perspective on Party Electoral Success

Political parties use policy appeals to change their policy images and increase electoral support. Building on the idea that parties’ group images also matter to voters, this article shows that group appeals can benefit parties as well. Combining manifesto data on policy and group appeals covering 50 years, we revisit the shift from class to catch-all politics in Britain and present three findings. First, a vote share analysis shows that the Labour Party benefited from using not just policy but also group appeals to downplay its class image. Second, consistent with a catch-all strategy, survey evidence shows that this boost in Labour support was most prominent outside the traditional base. Third, while group appeals had independent effects, we show how group and policy appeals also interact and reinforce each other. This suggests that non-policy strategies matter to parties’ electoral success on their own but also in combination with policy strategies.

Stories from London's Docklands: Heritage Encounters, Deindustrialization, and the End of Empire

AbstractThis article analyzes the activism of Eastside Community Heritage in London's Docklands, circa 1997 to 2003, following its establishment by community activists concerned by the British National Party's electoral success in the postindustrial area. Eastside attributed local racism to deindustrialization and unaccountable, exclusionary redevelopment. Aiming to recenter solidarity against economic injustice—thereby countering racism—and to challenge redevelopers’ neglect, the group published booklets celebrating the area's working-class past. But the project's archived oral histories show that residents remembered an area forged by different ideals. Their nostalgia was for participation in empire through the docks as much as for an idealized working-class community. Residents rarely distinguished between the interconnected losses of imperial purpose and social cohesion. I frame these tensions as a heritage encounters, making three key arguments. First, memories of youth in the imperial metropole informed residents’ perceptions of the late twentieth-century nation, despite recent scholarly efforts to separate them temporally and conceptually. Second, contrary to their predominance within histories of postwar class identity, deindustrialization and urban change were popularly understood within a larger, postimperial narrative of local and national decline. Finally, a close reading of this project offers a vivid case study into the fragility of British multiculturalism in the 1990s and 2000s.

Scheduled castes in the Akali Dal: Mapping their electoral performance and perceptions

ABSTRACT The Shiromani Akali Dal has provided an important platform for the Scheduled Caste community which has been integral to the party's electoral success. This paper empirically shows that share of the SC community in electoral success of the Akali Dal has always remained one-fourth or more since 1962 except 2017 election alongwith better electoral success rate of the SC community leaders. Despite these contributions, the SC community perceives caste discrimination in the party while the Jats and rich families dominate the party. The paper suggests organic integration of the SC community and addressing their grievances in the party.

The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy by Larry Eugene Jones

Reviewed by: The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy by Larry Eugene Jones Barry Jackisch The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy. By Larry Eugene Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 636. Cloth $140.00. ISBN 978-1108494076. Larry Eugene Jones's remarkable study of the German Right in the Weimar Republic constitutes an authoritative English-language history of this tremendously important and consequential subject. Based on a vast array of source material compiled over years of research from over thirty different public and private archives, as well as hundreds of other sources, it is hard to imagine another scholar matching the erudition that Jones offers his readers on this subject. [End Page 616] A basic question lies at the book's core: why did a conservative, non-Nazi political party fail to emerge in the Weimar Republic as a viable alternative to the eventual triumph of the Hitler movement? In answering this question, Jones focuses much of his attention on the German National People's Party (or DNVP), the largest and most successful of several conservative political groups in this era. Jones is hardly the first scholar to devote attention to this party. However, his particular contribution explains in detail the larger political universe in which the DNVP operated and shows convincingly why it ultimately failed to assume the mantle of political leadership on the German Right. In studying this broader context, Jones also provides detailed insights into other economic interest groups, radical nationalist and patriotic associations, and a wide range of social and cultural forces that shaped the party's development. Jones clearly stakes out his argument in the introduction: the disunity of the German Right was an essential political factor in the Weimar Republic's collapse and Hitler's ultimate success. He pursues this argument consistently throughout the book's eighteen main chapters and the epilogue. This thesis takes issue with earlier studies stressing stronger lines of continuity between Germany's established political Right and the upstart Nazi movement. As Jones makes very clear, substantial divisions existed both within the DNVP and among the wide array of groups that orbited within the bizarre galaxy of right-wing politics. This disunity made the formation of a stable and long-term conservative political party, one that might have blunted the popular appeal of Nazism later in the 1920s, very difficult indeed. This failure had much to do with the DNVP's inability to resolve a fundamental dilemma. Jones details how the party gained increasing popular support in the republic's first years by stridently opposing government policies that allegedly threatened Germany's national pride and honor. However, after the party's electoral success in the 1924 elections, its leaders faced growing pressure to join a national government. This forced a shift from the comfort of angry opposition to the distinctly more challenging task of shaping government policy and working with other political leaders to advance a broader agenda based on political compromise. The DNVP's participation in two national governments in 1925 and 1927 laid bare its basic inability to move successfully from the national opposition to an effective and popular ruling party. Jones recounts in remarkable detail how key conflicts within the party and between the party and its associated interest groups further undermined the DNVP's development as a unified, popular political force. One of Jones's real strengths is his ability to tease out the often obscure and complex connections between various groups and personalities on the right-wing scene and to explain how their individual actions and views affected the larger political destiny of the German Right. Jones demonstrates that the DNVP's leadership constantly faced various political, economic, cultural, and nationalist factions that sought to push and pull the party in multiple directions to pursue their own agenda. While this is certainly a feature of any modern political [End Page 617] party, the range of interests connected to the DNVP made reaching consensus nearly impossible. For example, could the party effectively represent the economic interests of small farmers, industrialists, shopkeepers...

Predicting Elections Over A Twitter: A Campaign Strategies Of Political Parties Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Twitter is a social networking web application built to find out what is happening around us and all over the world. For this study, we analysed one million tweets for applying sentiment analysis is helpful to analyse the information where opinions are either good or bad/negative, or neutral and highly structured, heterogeneous in some cases. In this article we used a few machine learning algorithms like naïve Bayes, support vector machine, decision tree and neural network for analysis of elections results. Twitter data is used to predict the outcome of election by collecting data and analysing sentiments about the candidates. The experiential results show that the winning party's electoral success is expressively associated with social media/Twitter. It is a main promotional tool for new and upcoming parties in the 2019 general elections. This article mainly focused on Karnataka state elections of 2018 month of May for examining the analytical power of Twitter.

Prospects for Third Party Electoral Success in a Polarized Era

The trend of increasing major party polarization in the United States has raised concerns about the quality of representation and governance. One potential corrective is third parties, as they can hold the major parties accountable and instigate positive change. We, however, highlight limits to their influence. Two factors dampened the electoral support for third party candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite favorable conditions. First, the cost of third party voting is higher in the current polarized era, since casting a vote for a third party can lead to their less-favored major party candidate winning. Voters today have especially negative feelings toward their less-favored major party. Second, Trump co-opted voters distrustful of the government, which is a group that tends to support third parties. Our analysis of American National Election Studies (ANES) data from 1992 and 2016 shows support for both factors.

Electoral Participation and Right Wing Authoritarian Success Evidence From the 2017 Federal Elections in Germany

The 2017 federal elections in propelled the far-right party Alternative fur Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – AfD) to become the third largest party in the federal parliament. I argue that this strong result of a party that is at odds with much of the post war German political consensus can be explained by a) the move of the Christian-Democratic CDU/CSU to the political center and the resulting increase in similarity between center-left and center-right political forces; b) a de-politicization of politics, especially in the aftermath of the world financial and economic crisis and during the reign of the grand coalition. Drawing on data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the Party Manifesto Project, I show that the AfD inhabits an otherwise unpopulated region of the policy space where it puts particular emphasis on anti-EU positions. In the next step, drawing on data from the Federal Returning Office, I show that the AfD was able to mobilize the electorate more successfully than other parties and that the party's electoral success was in large part due to this mobilization success with the change in turnout the second strongest predictor of AfD vote shares.

Immigration and election outcomes — Evidence from city districts in Hamburg

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on local election outcomes. Our analysis makes use of data on city districts in Hamburg, Germany, during a period of substantial inflows of immigrants and asylum seekers. We find significant and robust effects for changes in foreigner shares on the electoral success of parties that built up a distinctive reputation in immigration politics. In particular, our fixed-effects estimates indicate a positive effect for xenophobic, extreme right-wing parties and an adverse effect for the Green party that actively campaigned for liberal immigration policies and minority rights. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that non-economic determinants and welfare state considerations are important in shaping individual attitudes towards immigration.

Why did the electorate swing between parties during the Great Depression?

The Democratic Party's electoral success during the 1930s has long intrigued politicians and scholars. To gain new insight into that success, this paper examines the striking heterogeneity in county-level support for Roosevelt. Even though the Depression's effects and the New Deal's benefits were famously widespread, only some parts of the country responded with large and durable partisan shifts. One reason is that several factors, including pre-New Deal economic hardship, Dust Bowl conditions, and New Deal spending, appear to have had effects that were largely transitory (i.e., faded by 1940). A complementary reason is that swing electorates can, and did, swing both ways. By contrast, several other variables – notably economic and demographic factors discussed in the previous literature – are related to relatively durable shifts. Finally, heterogeneity in marginal responses may have mattered greatly to national-level Democratic success. By demonstrating which factors were transitory and which were more durable, this paper illuminates the New Deal Realignment and, more generally, the influence of economic conditions and distributive policy on voter behavior.

Patterns of Claims-Making on Civic Integration and Migration in Europe: Are Muslims Different?

Of the various immigrant and minority groups in Western Europe, Muslims are frequently singled out for their alleged cultural distance and lack of interest to participate in social and political life. Mutual distrust between Islamic organizations and political actors seems to be rising. This paper is interested in patterns of discursive interaction between Muslim groups on the one hand, and other political actors on the other hand. It examines seven European societies with varying proportions of Muslims among the population, distinct traditions of citizenship policies, and different levels of electoral success of parties voicing anti-Islam positions. Using a political claims analysis covering 1995 to 2009, we show that there are substantial differences between countries in the use of migrant-group categories. These differences do not fit the policy tradition typology suggested by Koopmans 2007, and we identify significant changes over time. Of the various groups, we find that Muslims are differentiated in the news media. The proportion of claims by Muslim organizations is nowhere in proportion to their size in the population, and indeed claims about Muslims are more common. This suggests that the construction of Muslim groups as a politically relevant category is largely done by non-Muslim political actors. The frames used in claims about Muslims differ significantly from those used for other immigrant groups. Whereas the most common frames for immigrants more generally are instrumental, for Muslims identity-based arguments are invoked more frequently. Moreover, we find that Muslims are talked about almost exclusively in connection with integration rather than immigration.

Travelling against the Tide: The Cypriot Communist Left in the Post-1990s Era

The article focuses on the Cypriot communist party, AKEL, in the post-1990s era. The analysis centres on two processes and their impact upon two types of results. The two processes scrutinised are: (a) the party's pattern of change and adaptation as this was guided by its strategic decision to redefine and, at the same time, maintain its pivotal role within the political and party systems of Cyprus and (b) its governing aspirations and participation. The interest lies in the effects of these processes on (a) the party's electoral success and (b) its radical character. Electorally, the process of change rendered AKEL probably the most successful party within the European communist party family. The party also succeeded in preserving its peculiar radical identity. Nevertheless, this identity is under constant threat, not least because the party decided to pursue a governing strategy within the EU framework. When analysing the process of party adaptation, the sui generis character of AKEL comes to the fore, reminding us that politics seems always to be largely context dependent.

If Winning Isn't Everything, Why Do They Keep Score? Consequences of Electoral Performance for Party Leaders

The premise that parties are fundamentally motivated by office-seeking is common, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to its empirical validity. We approach this issue by analysing how parties respond to their electoral performance. Casting party leaders as the embodiment of their parties, we then examine the degree to which the length of time party leaders retain their position hinges on their party's electoral success, defined with reference both to the party's share of legislative seats and to its presence or absence in government. Our analyses centre on six parliamentary democracies in which the government is always formed by one of the two major parties either alone or in coalition with a minor party (Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Ireland and New Zealand) in the years from 1945 through 2000. Results indicate that party leaders' risk of removal hinges substantially on their party's seat share and/or their party's presence in government. More specifically, we find that as the seat share of both major and minor parties increases, the chance that the party leader will be removed decreases. Likewise, if a major party loses its role in government, the chance that the party leader will be removed increases dramatically. Although presence in government has no significant impact on the tenure in office of party leaders of minor parties, the magnitude of the effect is indistinguishable from that for major parties. Beyond providing strong evidence that parties are at their core motivated by electoral performance, we also estimate the magnitude of the electoral imperative, at least as it pertains to party leaders.

Ethnic Outbidding and Party Modernization: Understanding the Democratic Unionist Party's Electoral Success in the Post-Agreement Environment

This article considers the phenomena of intra-group ethnic outbidding and party political modernization during peacemaking processes in civil war situations. At first glance, ethnic outbidding may seem unconnected with ‘modern’ political parties that function—as their modernity suggests—without recourse to ethnic exclusivity. This article makes the case that the two processes can operate in tandem. It begins by presenting an original conceptualization of outbidding processes by examining both the strategies employed by out-bidders and the potential impacts of outbidding on peacemaking processes. It then turns to consider political party modernization theory, which suggests that parties must abandon the appeals to confessionalism and ethnic particularism (usually displayed among intra-group outbidders) as part of the modernization process. As the example of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in post Agreement Northern Ireland illustrates however, the ability of political parties in peacemaking processes to mix traditional appeals with decidedly modern discourse and campaigning tools undermines this presumed incompatibility between particularlism and modernization within political parties. Instead we find that party modernization and ethnic outbidding can co-exist in the context of a peacemaking process. Moreover, we find that the nuances of outbidding mean that hard-line positions can be maintained on identity and constitutional issues but moderation can occur on other issues.

Third Parties, Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress

What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related to Populist issues. The results are consistent with two claims. First, co‐optation of the Populist Party's issues occurred even before the formation of the party. Second, the co‐optation of Populist policies does not appear to be correlated with the electoral success of the Populist candidates.

Popular Conservatism In Britain, 1832-1914

Popular Conservatism in Britain, 1832-1914 Matthew Roberts The Conservative party used to be absent at the rich historiographical feasts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British popular politics. This was ironic given that the tories were in office, either on their own or as part of a coalition, for nearly 58 years of the nineteenth century, and they were also the dominant electoral force of the twentieth century. To historians of popular politics the electoral success of the Conservative Party was unremarkable, largely attributable to the enduring power of the propertied classes. What 'popular', or more specifically, working-class, Conservatism existed was usually dismissed as a form of political deviancy.1 To many of the left-leaning historians of popular politics writing in the 1960s through to the early 1980s the issues of real historical substance clustered around radicalism, Liberalism and the rise of Labour. When historians did pay attention to Conservatism it was usually in the small 'c' sense of the term - defined as a traditional, defensive, introverted and fatalistic mindset - and how this largely depoliticized outlook inhibited the development of a genuinely class-conscious, socialist working class.2 This conservative outlook could, under circumstances such as extreme poverty and ethnic tensions, translate into popular Conservatism.3 Yet this was not deemed worthy of serious historical attention. Thus, as late as 1985 Martin Pugh could still comment that: 'Popular Conservatism remains a somewhat elusive and under-studied phenomenon.'4 By the early 1990s a combination of factors had forced popular Conservatism on to the historical agenda. The continuing electoral success of Thatcher's Conservative Party, which clearly rested in part on widespread working-class support, the collapse of communism and the related challenge to the credibility of Marxist historiography, the intellectual challenges of postmodernism via the 'linguistic turn' and the critique of electoral sociology, had the combined effect of establishing popular Conservatism as a topic of serious historical inquiry.5 Consequently, over the last 15 years historians of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular politics have devoted an unprecedented amount of attention to the Conservative Party, focusing in particular on the party's electoral support, and more broadly on the relationship between the party and British society. The purpose of this article is to take stock of this new scholarship, and to illustrate how it challenges conventional interpretations of Victorian and Edwardian popular politics, in which the Conservative Party was presented as the passive beneficiary of a whole range of factors that enabled it to survive, usually accidentally, the advent of mass politics. The first section of the article shows how narratives of the 'transformation of late-Victorian Conservatism', which dominated conventional interpretations, not only obscured the party's electoral success in the early and mid-Victorian years, but also underestimated the limits to, and fragility of, the late-Victorian Conservative Party's electoral dominance. In doing so the article also calls into question the stark historiographical juxtaposition between the late-Victorian tory hegemony and the so-called Edwardian 'crisis of Conservatism': the latter, it is argued, has been much exaggerated. The second part of the article emphasizes just how active, creative and integrative the Conservative Party was in the face of democratization, and not just in the late-Victorian period. The third section argues that popular Conservatism was from being the irrational, unthinking ideological void that it has traditionally been presented as by labour historians: ideas and issues were often to the fore in popular Conservatism. The article concludes with some possible suggestions for future research. 1 Narratives of transformation have dominated interpretations of the late-Victorian Conservative Party.6 This is hardly surprising as the party dominated government for some 20 years after 1886, except for a brief period when the Liberals returned to power between 1892 and 1895. The Conservative electoral ascendancy reached its apogee with the general election of 1900, when the party won its second victory in succession and became the first government since 1865 to win a second term. Thus, the Conservatives had won three of the four general elections held since 1886. This transformation appears all the more dramatic when set against the relatively [End Page 388] poor electoral performance of mid...

Thailand´ s Paradoxical Recovery

In Thailand's February 2005 parliamentary elections Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) Party achieved a sweeping victory. It had already formed the first elected government in Thai history to serve a full four-year term and was now the first individual party to be elected to a full parliamentary majority, and that a massive one.1 The party's electoral success owes much to the Prime Minister's own political skills and much also to the economic recovery achieved under his government. In 2004, for the first time since the Asian crisis of 1997-98, real output per person exceeded its pre-crisis level of 1996 and in this respect Thailand had finally emerged from the economic after-effects of the crisis. In many dimensions, the economy was booming. Despite setbacks from rural drought, panic-producing outbreaks of avian influenza and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), combined with continued political violence in the Muslim southern provinces, estimated growth of real GDP reached a respectable 6.4 per cent in 2004, only marginally below the 2003 growth rate of 6.8 per cent. Growth for 2005 is expected to be slower, at a little over 5 per cent, reflecting a slowdown in export growth, diminished inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the economic consequences of the tsunami of 26 December 2004. The terrible human costs of the tsunami dominate its economic effects, but the latter are nevertheless significant. Thailand was less severely affected than some other countries with coastlines facing the Indian Ocean, especially Indonesia, Sri Lanka and possibly Myanmar (Burma), but many thousands lost their lives (perhaps between 8,000 and 9,000 out of a regional total approaching 300,000) and entire communities were destroyed.2 Tourism was sharply affected in the short term and some long-term effect seems certain, but the long-term size of these effects remains

The Political Economy of Turkey's Justice and Development Party

The paper embodies three broad objectives. The first objective is to uncover the economic foundations of the JDP's dramatic electoral success in November 2002. The following elements deserve emphasis in this context. (a) The party constitutes a cross-class alliance incorporating into its orbit both winners and losers from the neo-liberalization process. Business support, notably from small and medium-sized business units falling under the umbrella of the nation-wide business association, MUSIAD, constitutes a crucial element of the JDP's electoral support. Yet, business support constitutes only one element of the party's electoral success. (b) The superior performance of JDP'S predecessors, the Welfare and the Virtue Parties, at the level of municipal governments is another element of key importance. (c) The failures of conventional parties of either the center-right or the center-left in achieving sustained and equitable economic growth, avoiding costly financial crises and tackling the problem of pervasive corruption have also paved the way for the party's unprecedented electoral success in the recent era. The second broad objective is to provide a critical assessment of the JDP government's performance on the economic front, with the qualification that a proper assessment would require a longer time frame. Focusing on the party's relations with the IMF, an attempt will made to evaluate the achievements and limitations of the JDP government to date with respect to the implementation of the economic program in the realm of fiscal adjustment and longer-term economic reforms. Looking towards the future, the paper will also consider some of the problems that the JDP government faces in establishing a sustained, equitable and crisis-free trajectory of economic growth in Turkey in the next few years. The third broad objective is to examine the repercussions of the foreign policy stance of the JDP notably with respect to Turkey-EU and Turkey-US relations in the economic sphere, attempting the highlight the critical linkages between the between the political and the economic spheres in the process.

The demise of ‘countrymindedness’: New players or changing values in Australian rural politics?

Abstract Aitkin's (1985) analysis of the National party (and its antecedents) depicts it as an ideologically based party, born of a past political culture that pitted the country against the city. Furthermore, Aitkin asserted that the party's electoral fortunes were likely to decline as a result of the impact that demographic, and hence social change, was having on the countrymindedness ethos that has underpinned the party's electoral success since the 1920s. This paper examines Aitkin's thesis by analysing the National party's performance in six northern New South Wales electorates in recent Federal elections, and considers the impact that demographic and social change has had on the party's electoral fortunes.