Suchergebnisse

This article analyses the reaction of mainstream political elites to acts of terrorism and assesses whether opposition parties will rally around the flag, much like they do during military or diplomatic crises. A statistical analysis, conducted on 181 terrorist events in five countries (France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States) over the period 1990 to 2006, indicates that rallies around the flag are the rule. Overall, the results show that the repetition of acts of terror is a strong factor affecting political parties' responses to terrorist acts, as repeated attacks are more likely to prompt criticism. The magnitude of the act (i.e. the number of fatalities) is also associated with a rallying effect, as larger attacks are more likely to result in a unified front across parties. Other variables, such as the identity of the perpetrators and the existence of a formal anti-terrorist pact between the parties, are significantly related to the likelihood of a rally. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

In this article, we use logit models to examine the role of the major characteristics of a political party's organization, (1) legitimation, (2) penetration/diffusion, (3) charisma, (4) ideology and (5) centralization/decentralization, in the institutionalization of parties in both pre-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian national parliamentary elections. The article begins by situating this research in the context of the theoretical and empirical literature on party origins, organizational development and institutionalization, in general, and party formation theories in post-communist countries, specifically. The impact of organizational features on electoral success or failure is analysed for 24 parties. The models correctly predicted both the successful and failed parties in the 2007 Russian Duma election and offer reasons for the apparent floating party system in Russia. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Party gender quotas are rules voluntarily adopted within political party structures that aim at securing a set percentage of women to appear on candidate lists in elections for political office. Although parliamentarian support is critical to the adoption and enforcement of party gender quotas, empirical studies of parliamentarian opinion on this matter are few, and none are concerned with countries of Eastern Europe. In the context of Poland, this study addresses two main questions: (a) why do some parliamentarians support party gender quotas? And (b) what are the most important reasons? Using survey data on Polish parliamentarians, I examine the role of three major determinants of variation in party gender quota support: parliamentarian's gender; economic and religious political party ideologies; and placement on the candidate list. Cross-tabulations reveal that women parliamentarians and parliamentarians from parties with economic statist and anti-clerical ideologies are more likely to support quotas than are those from economic liberal and Catholic traditionalist parties. In addition, parliamentarians placed low on the party's electoral list in the previous election are more likely to support quotas than those placed at the top. Logistic regression analyses including all these determinants show that the only statistically significant effects pertain to economic and religious party ideologies. Discussion of the theoretical implications of party ideology being the most important explanatory factor for parliamentarian support of party gender quotas concludes this article. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Electoral systems shape party systems by constraining voters' choices, but the choices voters make may also compel political parties to change the electoral system. Thus, an electoral system changes endogenously if the voters' choices it induces vary over time, and political parties are motivated by the voters' new choices to modify the electoral system. This article applies this logic to explain the change in the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system. When SNTV fosters the formation of a dominant-party system, the ruling party needs to maintain steady economic growth so that enough resources can be turned into private goods to satisfy the majority of voters. But economic growth necessarily increases the anonymity of the voters, and hence the difficulty for the dominant party to garner votes using this strategy. The demise of one-party dominance and the shift in government power then urge some parties to replace SNTV with other electoral systems. This hypothesis is confirmed by the electoral reforms in Japan and Taiwan. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]