Suchergebnisse

Research on contemporary party organization emphasizes the growing power of the party in public office (PPO). The relationship between the external party organization and the PPO, however, is rarely analysed directly. We argue that the capacity of the extra-parliamentary party to regularly extract a fixed share from their MPs' salaries -- the collection of 'party taxes' or 'tithes' -- can give us insights into the level and the nature of control the external organization exercises over MPs within and across organizational levels. Beyond providing new insights into an under-researched, but generally widespread, source of party funding across 25 parties in five Westminster democracies, the study shows the following: while party family shapes a party's basic capacity to establish an intra-organizational rule that obliges MPs to regularly contribute parts of their salary, ideology drives the salary share a party can expect MPs to pay. The federal-unitary divide affects whether the national or the regional organizations are the main recipients of these contributions. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

In a region where democratization has led to a proliferation of opposition parties, pre-electoral coalitions represent an obvious means by which to reduce excessive party fragmentation in Africa. However, this article examines whether such coalitions facilitate democratic consolidation in terms of contributing to incumbent turnovers as well as creating competitive, institutionalized party systems. Election data for all opposition coalitions formed in Africa's electoral democracies since 2000 reveals that coalitions rarely result in incumbent defeat. In addition, I find that a sizeable share of a country's total electoral volatility is often due to fluctuations in voting for opposition parties that enter and exit coalitions, indicating the inability of coalition members to build loyal constituencies and become institutionalized over time. I argue that this is because many of these coalitions are primarily office-seeking and consist of parties that are distinguished predominantly by the personality of their leaders rather than a distinct political programme that is relevant to the concerns of African citizens. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

In this article we analyse the fulfilment of economic pledges contained in the electoral manifestoes of the two main Spanish parties, PP and PSOE during the four electoral cycles that took place between 1989 and 2004. Consistent with previous research on programme fulfilment, we find that most promises are fulfilled by the party in government. In addition we find much lower fulfilment rates for the parties in opposition. Surprisingly, we find no significant differences in fulfilment when the governing party enjoys absolute majority compared to minority governments. This is unexpected because coalition and minority governments constrain the capacity of the winning parties compared to absolute majority governments. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Empirical election studies conclude that party elites' images with respect to competence, integrity and party unity -- attributes that we label character-based valence -- affect their electoral support (Stone and Simas, 2010). We compile observations of media reports pertaining to governing party elites' character-based valence attributes, and we relate the content of these reports to mass support for the governing parties. We present pooled, time-series, analyses of party support and valence-related media reports in six European polities which suggest that these reports exert powerful electoral effects during election campaigns but little effect during off-election periods. This finding, which we label the Election Period Valence Effect, is consistent with previous work concluding that citizens are also more attentive to policy-based considerations and to national economic conditions around the time of elections. These findings have implications for political representation and for understanding election outcomes. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Vertical integration is an important concept for political parties. In multi-level or federal contexts, it is said to affect party strength, national integration and federal stability. Despite this, difficulties with the conceptualization and operationalization of vertical integration and a lack of cross-national data impede research. This article clarifies the concept of vertical integration, distinguishing it from related concepts of strength, centralization and autonomy and distinguishing the indicators of integration from the effects of integration. It introduces the measures of vertical integration and autonomy used in the Party Organization in Multi-Level Systems (POMLS) dataset comprising data from survey responses from 204 state-level parties in eight countries. The data confirm the theoretical distinctions among forms of vertical integration and between vertical integration and autonomy and show that not all forms of vertical integration are mutually reinforcing. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This article examines the moderation of the Mexico's National Action Party in the context of democratization. Founded in 1939 as a confessional party, by the 1990s the PAN had moved toward the political center – retaining its Christian-Democratic identity and ideals but also making institutional appeals to the broader voting public in Mexico. This article explains the segmented process through which the PAN moderated in response to inclusionary reforms promulgated by Mexico's authoritarian regime. In some cases, those reforms merely aggravated internal tensions in the party. But other reforms repositioned the PAN vis-à-vis its competitors, Mexican civil society, and the Mexican voting public, and triggered institutional changes that enabled the PAN to build political momentum in advance of the country's 2000 democratic transition. Employing an institutional process-tracing approach, this article examines how shocks in the PAN's competitive environment reverberated inside the organization: how they affected the relative power of factions in the party, how they were mediated by existing party institutions, and how they related to the party's ideological goals. Those crucial intra-party processes, I argue, influenced whether the PAN, as an organization, responded to those exogenous shocks in terms of its competitive behavior, and conditioned how the PAN responded when it did so. The case of the PAN demonstrates that parties may respond to inclusionary reforms or other exogenous shocks in relatively uncoordinated and unsystematic manners.

The internet offers opportunities for political mobilization that parties are under-exploiting. Drawing on the rational choice approach to party behaviour, this paper builds an argument for why this is the case. I argue that if parties are not using new media to mobilize support, it is because the benefits of using it are uncertain while there are very certain costs -- communicational and organizational -- involved in the decision. I also argue that party characteristics shape incentives to use the internet for political mobilization and hence help to account for observed differences in party behaviour online. Using evidence from parties in Spain and Catalonia, the study finds that parties that are large, in opposition, non-programmatic, and non-bureaucratic tend to have greater incentives to use the internet for political mobilization, both because they expect to get the largest benefits and to pay the minimum costs from online mobilization. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This study explores how candidates running for the European Parliament (EP) in 2009 used micro-blogging and online social networks -- in this case Twitter (www.twitter.com) in the early stage of its adoption -- to communicate and connect with citizens. Micro-blogging in general, and Twitter in particular, is one of the new and popular Web 2.0 applications, yet there has been little research focusing on the use of Twitter by politicians. After reviewing different types of campaigning strategies and introducing a new and distinct strategy, this descriptive and exploratory study focuses on political candidates' use of micro-blogging and online social networking (i.e. Twitter) from a longitudinal, social network, and ideological perspective. The results clearly show that most candidates in 2009 still used Twitter reluctantly. Those who used Twitter did so predominantly for electoral campaigning and only sparingly for continuous campaigning. Candidates from progressive parties are the most active users of Twitter as a campaigning tool, whereas conservatives are virtually absent online. Although candidates' first degree networks are still relatively small and unconnected, their second degree networks are quite extensive. Candidates from parties in opposition have more extensive first degree networks than those from ruling parties. Candidates from fringe parties show small online networks. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This paper develops a theoretical framework for analyzing the strategic interaction between Islamists -- pragmatic and dogmatic -- and the regime when Shari'a-based issues are negotiated. I advance the new notion that pragmatists might be responsive to the Islamist electorate. Within the framework I generate the hypothesis that, if the regime promotes substantive reforms and the Islamist electorate supports them, then the internal cohesiveness of Islamist parties is weakened. In the case of Family Code reforms in Morocco, empirical analysis confirms that Islamists' change of strategy in 2003 -- from opposing to not opposing the reforms -- was due to changed preferences within the electorate in favour of reform. This change in preferences was matched by deep divisions within the Islamists of the Parti de la Justice et du Developpement and had dramatic repercussions upon the internal cohesiveness of the party. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]