Suchergebnisse

Should party leadership candidates communicate their policy positions to the party's electorate? And should they do so when their own ideal position is outside their party's mainstream? This article presents evidence from a field experiment into the communication of controversial policy positions through direct mail. Working with a front-running campaign during the race for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, we randomly assigned a subset of convention delegates to receive a direct mail treatment featuring policy messages outside the mainstream of the party. Using a survey instrument, we measured the effects of this treatment on delegates' ratings and preference ordering of leadership candidates. The effects of the direct mail were principally negative; receiving the mail reduced the probability of the candidate being supported. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

A number of recent studies have documented weakening ties between social democratic parties and trade unions. This article is concerned with the effects of weakening party-- union ties on policymaking. In many classic studies of corporatism it has been argued that this mode of policymaking depends on strong ties between social democratic parties and trade unions. In this article, we argue, in contrast, that strong party--union ties are potentially detrimental to corporatism, because in a polarized political environment unions may be tempted to exert political influence via political allies instead of bargaining with their counterparts. In order to evaluate this argument empirically, we present a detailed analysis of two countries with strong corporatist traditions (Denmark and Sweden) from the 1970s to the 1990s. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Do political parties respond to shifts in the preferences of their supporters, which we label the partisan constituency model, or to shifts in the mean voter position (the general electorate model)? Cross-national analyses -- based on observations from Eurobarometer surveys and parties' policy programmes in 15 countries from 1973 to 2002 -- suggest that the general electorate model characterizes the policy shifts of mainstream parties. Alternatively, when we analyse the policy shifts of Communist, Green and extreme Nationalist parties (i.e. 'niche' parties), we find that these parties respond to shifts in the mean position of their supporters. The findings have implications for spatial theories and political representation. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Using internal party documents and semi-structured interviews with over 200 activists of the Freedom Party of Austria, this article examines (anticipatory) adaptation in the intra-party and governmental arenas when this right-wing populist party switched its primary goal from populist vote maximization to office. It suggests such parties' success will owe much to their leaderships' capacity to identify and implement strategies and behaviours consonant with their new primary goal and to deal effectively with the inescapable tensions caused by the transition to incumbency. The article demonstrates how the FPÖ's failures in these respects resulted in an own goal. Yet right-wing populists' experience of incumbency is not necessarily doomed to failure. Agency remains an important determinant of success. Indeed, it appears supply-side factors may well be far better at explaining rapid shifts in the fortunes of such parties than the still predominantly demand-side approaches.

Over the past few years, attention to the role of state-wide political parties in multi-level polities has increased in recognition of their linkage function between levels of government, as these parties compete in both state-wide and regional elections across their countries. This article presents a coding scheme designed to describe the relationship between central and regional levels of state-wide parties. It evaluates the involvement of the regional branches in central decision-making and their degree of autonomy in the management of regional party affairs. This coding scheme is applied to state-wide parties in Spain (the socialist PSOE and the conservative Partido Popular) and in the UK (Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats). It is an additional tool with which to analyse party organization and it facilitates the comparison of parties across regions and in different countries. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

This article shows that even if we stipulate a single definition of both an ethnic group and an ethnic party, there are many reasonable indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, which may generate different counts of ethnic parties. It then maps the range of indicators that can be used to classify parties as ethnic, shows how previous questions raised in the study of ethnic parties can be better answered by some indicators than others, and identifies new questions that can be raised by each classification in relation to the alternatives.

The variables explaining party system fragmentation have been investigated extensively, but little is known about changes in the number of parties over time within countries. This article is an attempt to fill the gap by explaining the entry of new viable competitors in party systems after the founding election. Using empirical evidence from Spain, we show that when there is an electoral market failure and a high number of perfectly elastic voters, there is a high probability of new viable entrants. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Despite the recent spread of multi-scale approaches to party system classification, the most widely accepted criterion has always been the number of parties, often defined in terms of their relative sizes. Building on the existing body of qualitative classifications and quantitative techniques, this article proposes a method that can be used for defining party system types in operational terms, and distinguishing among them by a parsimonious criterion. The proposed method is based on representing information about seat distributions by party in graphical form, segmenting the resulting bounded diagram into regions, and identifying these regions as representations of different party system types. This makes the graphical representation, dubbed the relative-size triangle, instrumental both for building categorical classifications of the empirically observed party systems and for visualizing differences among them. For illustration, the proposed method is applied to a comprehensive set of post-World War II party systems. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The decline of party activism and membership in European democracies has been well documented, but not effectively explained. This article examines the state of party membership and activism across a wide spectrum of democratic countries and shows that membership is in decline in most of them. It tests two rival explanations of the decline using a cross-sectional multi-level analysis of data from the ISSP Citizenship survey of 2004. One hypothesis is that the decline is due to 'state capture', or excessive state regulation brought about by an ever-closer relationship between parties and the state which has the effect of stifling voluntary activity at the grassroots level. A second suggests that parties are being undermined by the growth of relatively new forms of participation, notably cheque book participation, and consumer and Internet participation. These provide alternative outlets for political action outside traditional forms of participation such as party involvement. There is evidence to support the first of these hypotheses, but not the second. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]