Polarized Party System Research Articles

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.

“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

Is a Polarized Party System a Too Extreme Party System? Understanding Perceptions of Party Extremity in the United States

The Democratic and Republican parties have polarized since the 1960s. Does the American public believe that the parties have grown “too extreme?” I leverage data from 18 national surveys to explain perceptions of party extremity as well as text-analysis of open-ended survey responses from an additional national survey to examine what the public associates with the concept of extremity. Three key results emerged. First, a growing proportion of Americans believe that both parties are too extreme, but this belief remains in the decided minority. Second, ideology and partisanship interact to shape beliefs about extremity. Moderates are more likely to believe that both parties are too extreme, but this is conditional on the presence of partisan motivations to say that only one party is too extreme. Finally, the public has a multifaceted conceptualization of extremity that is frequently tied to perceived procedural failures with only the highly knowledgeable reliably connecting perceived extremity to programmatic considerations. These results suggest that elite partisans have little reason to moderate their views given that most Americans do not perceive them to be too extreme, partisan considerations gain them ideological leeway, and many fail to connect extremity with the parties’ ideological reputations.

How party polarization shapes the structuring of policy preferences in Europe

A significant body of literature has addressed the impact of party polarization on voting behavior. Yet little is known of the relationship between party polarization and belief systems. The present study argues that party polarization enhances the ideological consistency of belief systems and does so for the citizenry as a whole. We first demonstrate that the more party systems are polarized on economic and sociocultural issues, the more consistently belief systems are aligned with the progressive-conservative continuum. Second, we show that ideological consistency is greater in highly polarized party systems, not only among the most politically attuned Europeans but also among those with lower levels of political sophistication. Results have implications for our understanding of citizen competence and responsiveness to elite cues in polarized party systems.

The CDU/CSU’s Ambivalent 2017 Campaign

Four inter-related factors shaped the 2017 campaign of Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU: (1) ambivalence over her successful modernization of the CDU; (2) fallout from her 2015 refugee policy; (3) a party strategy that bred complacency while mobilizing skeptics; and (4) tactical miscalculations. Merkel’s CDU/CSU came in first, but suffered record losses, while the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany emerged as Germany’s third party. The campaign, its result and—with a fragmented and polarized party system— her need to build another grand coalition all seemed sure to fuel recrimi - nations within the CDU/CSU over identity, strategy, and personnel in a post Merkel era.

Why do Democracies Experience Antisystem Movements: Statistical Analysis from Interwar Europe (1919-1939)

Why do some democracies experience antisystem movements whereas others do not? Enlisting novel cross-national data from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project and empirically focusing on interwar Europe, this article statistically tests widely-accepted theoretical claims in the literature on political authoritarianism. Logistic regression models applied on 22 interwar European democracies reveal that economic crises are a major cause behind antisystem movement emergence whereas the evidence for attributing causal effect to party institutionalization is not strong enough. Furthermore, the results show that in polarized party systems, the support of center-left/right parties is a crucial factor that leads to antisystem movement emergence in democratic polities.

Political party–interest group linkages in Greece before and after the onset of the economic crisis

Greece’s traditional system of state corporatism and polarized party system were the bases of very tight linkages between interest groups and political parties in the post-authoritarian period. Owing to governing policy shifts which negatively affected the strongest interest groups, a weakening of such tight linkages occurred, culminating during the economic crisis, when interest groups challenged austerity policies. This confrontation helped bring the collapse of the old party system and the rise of Syriza to power. The disentanglement of interest groups from parties was more visible with regard to their policy-related ties than organizational or leadership ties. Thus, despite their weakening, ties between interest groups and parties have not been completely severed.

The Body Politic in Pain.

In his 2015 book Pain: A Political History, Keith Wailoo demonstrates how a medicalized condition became central to defining party politics in the United States from World War II down to the present. Drawing on sources ranging from postwar Congressional hearings concerning the veteran welfare state to debates surrounding Rush Limbaugh's OxyContin addiction, Wailoo offers a fresh analysis of both U.S. political history and medical history, showing how today's highly polarized party system emerged in part from debates surrounding the existence and worth of pain, as well as its management.

Trust across political conflicts: Evidence from a survey experiment in divided societies

The implications of intergroup political conflicts for social cooperation are still an understudied topic. We report on two online survey experiments in which we implement multiple trust games to assess the impact of different political conflicts on trust behaviour in two national samples in Spain and Portugal. The results suggest that citizens’ social trust is heavily affected by partisanship, favouring in-group party members over out-group party identifiers. This finding is robust in both countries, although the partisanship overall effect seems to be stronger in Spain, which has a more polarized party system. Moreover, the effect involves all parties despite their size and ideology. However, trust among different partisans mirrors interparty positioning. A second study for the Spanish case shows that the partisanship treatment is the one affecting trust the most, followed by the ideological and regional conflicts, which are usually considered long-standing divides with a greater impact in European democracies.

Sorting your way out: Perceived party positions, political knowledge, and polarization

Political knowledge is one of the most important constructs for political behavior research, although scholars often ignore how general knowledge translates into specific information that citizens use to evaluate the party supply. This task is even more complex in multi-party systems. We analyze the accuracy of voters’ party placements benchmarked to expert placements in 24 European multi-party systems focusing on the role of general political knowledge given party system characteristics. Our results indicate that while more knowledgeable voters view the party system more similarly to experts, this difference is substantially smaller in ideologically polarized party systems. Thus, the required general political knowledge for an accurate ordering of parties on the left–right scale is much lower in polarized party systems. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of how competition can fulfill its function of linking citizens and political elites at the moment of democratic elections.

Is there a relationship between party system polarization and voters’ proximity to the parties in the left–right dimension?

One of the key questions in studies of voting behaviour is how voters rank or form preferences between parties. In this article, we study how the set of alternatives provided by the party system affects voters’ preference formation. More specifically, we study whether the proximity of a political party in the conventional left–right dimension is a better predictor of a voter’s preference when parties offer distinct positions than when parties’ positions are close to each other. Using the data provided by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find convincing evidence that supports the argument that proximity is more salient in polarized party systems compared with party systems where polarization is low.

Issues in Presidential Election Forecasting: Election Margins, Incumbency, and Model Credibility

Three issues of presidential election forecasting research are raised. The first concerns the consequences for forecasting models of presidential elections becoming more narrowly decided. A realigned and polarized party system has led to smaller election margins in presidential contests since 1984. This development complicates model estimation and may also have blurred differences between strong and weak forecasting models. The second issue concerns the presidential incumbency advantage. Forecasting research has shed greater light on this important electoral factor. The advantage of presidential incumbency appears to be largely restricted to first party-term incumbents. This exposes what might be seen as a blind spot to electoral accountability. Finally, the issue of forecast model credibility is raised. Several criteria beyond forecast accuracy should be taken into account in assessing whether a forecast model and its prediction are credible.

The Incumbent Electoral Defeat in the 2011 Spanish National Elections: The Effect of the Economic Crisis in an Ideological Polarized Party System

This article examines the effect of the economic crisis on voting preferences in the 2011 Spanish national election. Specifically we demonstrate that Spanish voters' reactions to the economic crisis were not uniform and that their evaluations of the economic situation and final electoral decisions were conditioned by prior ideological preferences. Our findings have several important consequences for the economic voting model. First, in a more polarized party system how voters evaluate the economic performance of the incumbent is a better predictor of vote choice than evaluations of the economy as a whole. Second, this effect varies depending on where parties are located and competing ideologically. Finally, those effects are more conditional on voters' ideological predispositions than the effects of voters' evaluations of the situation of the economy.

Comparative determinants of horse-race coverage

We investigate the levels of horse-race coverage in 160 different European print and broadcast outlets in 27 different countries at three different points in time. We match information on outlets’ content to survey-based information on the average levels of interest in politics and education of outlets’ audiences. We formulate hypotheses concerning journalists’ and citizens’ preferences over the ideal level of horse-race coverage, as well as hypotheses concerning the information content of horse-race coverage in different party systems. After controlling for the composition of each outlet’s audience, we find that horse-race coverage is most frequent in polarized party systems with close electoral contests, and in large markets with professional journalists. These findings challenge the traditional view of horse-race journalism as a ‘low-quality’ form of news.

Democratization, State-building and War: The Cases of Serbia and Croatia

The author explores the connection that exists between democratization, state-building and war in the cases of Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. It is necessary to examine closely how these processes influence one another because state-building and democratization are not necessarily contradictory and even war might not be an obstacle for democracy. However, in Serbia and Croatia state-building and war influenced democratization negatively, but in different ways. In Serbia, the nationalist mobilization for a state-building programme prevented democratization, while in Croatia democratization was a precondition for state-building, which then impeded democratic consolidation. Further important differences are the lower level of institutionalization, incomplete state-building, and polarized party system in Serbia and a higher level of institutionalization, completed state-building, and moderate party pluralism in Croatia. The war also influenced Croatia directly, while Serbia was only indirectly affected by the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina before the NATO intervention in 1999.

The Influence of Party Systems on Citizens’ Perceptions of Corruption and Electoral Response in Latin America

This study examines how different party systems in Latin America affect the capability of opposition parties to use public concerns about political corruption for electoral mobilization. Opposition partisanship is more strongly linked to perceptions of corruption in the ideologically polarized party system of Chile than in the hegemonic party system then in decline in Mexico or in the centrist two-party system of Costa Rica. However, the capability of opposition parties in all three party systems to mobilize electoral support among voters dissatisfied with corruption is weakened by the tendency of these politically alienated citizens to withdrawfrom all types of political involvement. Implications of the findings for redressing problems of political corruption through the electoral process and for a deepening of democracy in Latin America are discussed.

Causes of Tax Reform in Latin America, 1977-95

Among the policy changes associated with neoliberalism in Latin America, has played a leading role as it has been crucial not only to price stabili- zation but also to managing economic liberalization. But it also has a larger sig- nificance, since it involved a reconstitution of core state powers, and these could prove useful to any future government that seeks to expand the state's economic role. This paper seeks to determine its causes more precisely by analyzing data from fifteen Latin American countries from 1977 to 1995. Findings show that the definition of tax reform has been remarkably similar across the region with less progressivity, fewer exemptions, a new leading role for the value-added (VAT), and the strengthening of administration. The data analysis then finds is predicted by (in roughly descending importance) past inflation, explicit IMF performance conditions, new administrations, more authoritarian-elected govern- ments, the dominance of the president's party in the legislature, established elec- toral systems, closed-list proportional representation, less polarized party systems, and more numerous parties. Little or no support exists for the causal importance of past changes in gross domestic product (GDP), the constitutional powers of the president, party institutionalization, or partisan balance. The analysis concludes by placing these results in historical context, referring to theories of state forma- tion and the building of institutions in exchange for resources. In the drama of Latin American policy changes during the late twen- tieth century, played a pivotal role. It was crucial to price stabilization, which depended on finding a substitute for the inflation tax; it supported trade liberalization, in that the most common re- form, the introduction or expansion of the VAT, made up for cuts in 1. The first stages of work on this project were funded by the National Science Foun- dation under SPS-9320878. I would like to thank the staff of the Archives of the Interna- tional Monetary Fund for their helpfulness, and Leonora Dodge and Martha Rodriguez for dedicated research assistance. Thanks to Ken Shadlen, Carlos Elizondo, Jonathan Conning, Kurt Weyland, Marcelo Bergman, and three anonymous reviewers for com- ments on previous versions or fragments of this study. Thanks also to Samuel Morley for sharing his index database with me. Details of the data analysis and spread- sheets of key variables are available at http://www.williams.edu/PoliSci/mahon.htm. My entire database is available to any interested researchers upon e-mail request to me at jmahon@williams.edu.

Causes of Tax Reform in Latin America, 1977–95

Among the policy changes associated with neoliberalism in Latin America, tax reform has played a leading role as it has been crucial not only to price stabilization but also to managing economic liberalization. But it also has a larger significance, since it involved a reconstitution of core state powers, and these could prove useful to any future government that seeks to expand the state's economic role. This paper seeks to determine its causes more precisely by analyzing data from fifteen Latin American countries from 1977 to 1995. Findings show that the definition of “tax reform” has been remarkably similar across the region with less progressivity, fewer exemptions, a new leading role for the value-added tax (VAT), and the strengthening of tax administration. The data analysis then finds reform is predicted by (in roughly descending importance) past inflation, explicit IMF performance conditions, new administrations, more authoritarian-elected governments, the dominance of the president's party in the legislature, established electoral systems, closed-list proportional representation, less polarized party systems, and more numerous parties. Little or no support exists for the causal importance of past changes in gross domestic product (GDP), the constitutional powers of the president, party institutionalization, or partisan balance. The analysis concludes by placing these results in historical context, referring to theories of state formation and the building of institutions in exchange for resources.

Louisiana: Two-Party Growth and Increasing Party Polarization

This paper examines party organizations in Louisiana from the perspective of those at the grassroots. An assessment of local organizations as well as the attitudes of the party activists them-selves shows that politics in this state are in a period of transition. Over the past decade, Republicans have continued to make significant electoral gains; however, the major changes have occurred within the Democratic Party. The demographic transformation of Democratic activists and their correspond-ing support for more liberal policy positions contributes to an increasingly polarized party system in the state.