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This article measures, compares, and analyzes the degree to which local factors, be they candidate qualities or district characteristics, affect electoral politics. It applies Morgenstern and Potthoff's components-of-variance model to 56 parties or coalitions to measure the "local vote" and shows that only in some cases do local factors manifest themselves in voting patterns. To explain this finding, the authors argue that the type of executive system, ideological cohesion, and a country's ethnic heterogeneity combined with federalism are all strongly tied to the local vote patterns. Statistical tests also show that in spite of the large literature on the incentives that electoral systems can offer to candidates to pursue a personal vote, the electoral system does not have a clear impact on the local vote.

The quality & stability of democracy are often considered products of particular traits of parties or party systems. Studies of the 'personal vote' or 'district effects', the 'nationalization of elections', & 'electoral volatility', however, have generally conflated the different concepts at both the theoretical & empirical levels, thus raising questions about the independent relationship of each trait to democratic functioning. In response, we decompose district-level electoral data for parties in 20 countries from Europe & the Americas to clarify the conceptual dimensions along which parties & party systems may be compared. We show that what we term the 'district-time effect', 'district heterogeneity', & 'electoral volatility' are theoretically & empirically distinct properties of political parties with separable impacts on democracy, & we draw on this analysis to offer a new classification of political parties. 4 Tables, 1 Appendix, 27 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier Ltd.]

THIS PAPER USES DISTRICT-LEVEL ELECTORAL RETURNS TO ESTIMATE THE SIZE OF THE INCUMBENCY ADVANTAGE IN 24 U.S. STATES OVER THE PERIOD FROM 1970 TO 1986. THE AUTHORS MAJOR FINDINGS ARE TWO: FIRST, THE INCUMBENCY ADVANTAGE IN THE MEDIAN STATE ROUGHLY DOUBLED OVER THE TIME PERIOD INVESTIGATED; SECOND, THIS INCREASE CAN BE EXPLAINED IN TERMS OF THE GROWTH OF LEGISLATIVE OPERATING BUDGETS AND, BY INTERFERENCE, IN CASEWORK AND OTHER PARTICULARISTIC SERVICES PROVIDED BY STATE LEGISLATORS TO THEIR CONSTITUENTS.

Are legislators ideologically close to their co-partisans? And, when not, what policies drive the lack of party unity? To address these questions, we propose two measures of intra-party ideological cohesion: dissonance and frustration. Based on a survey of legislators across 18 Latin American countries, we show that half of the region's representatives self-identify as substantially far from the mean of their parties (dissonance) and almost 40% perceive large differences (frustration). Relying on a series of statistical tests, we find that these patterns are distinct for left-wing and right-wing legislators. The right is more dissonant than frustrated, and they are also more dissonant than the left. In terms of policy, we show that moral issues drive dissonance and frustration on both sides of the ideological spectrum, but disagreements on economic topics are more correlated with ideological distance for the left than the right. In presenting new measurements of intra-party disagreements, our paper proposes new pathways for the study of party cohesion.