Suchergebnisse

In this dissertation, I investigate a key distinction in the electoral origins of governing coalitions: whether bargaining among parties to form the government is primarily pre-electoral or post-electoral. Post-electoral bargaining refers to competing parties negotiating to form a governing coalition after an election. Pre-electoral bargaining involves parties committing before an election to govern together as a unit. In the first part of the dissertation, I argue that parties form pre-electoral pacts with an eye to gain portfolios, conditional on electoral costs. These costs vary in predictable ways tied to variations in the structure of the world's electoral systems. In the second part, I present two main findings on the consequences of the electoral origins of governing coalitions. First, pre-electoral coalitions are more proportional in their internal allocation of offices. I argue that this distribution of spoils is designed to encourage contributions to winning elections rather than purely legislative contributions to majorities. Second, I argue that the more pre-electoral a coalition, the more it is likely to take a majoritarian 'bonus' in the distribution of offices in the legislature. Cross-national empirical analyses are conducted on samples of coalitions from developing and advanced democracies since the 1990s

Research has suggested that fragmented political systems, incohesive parties, and weak programmatic links between voters and legislators can undermine the effectiveness of ideological legislative representation. Using Brazil's national and state assemblies, we examine the potential for voter-elite congruence in a legislative environment considered weak in programmatic representation and highly fragmented by a decentralized political structure. Focusing on 2005–2014, we use mass and elite survey data from the National Congress and 12 state assemblies to estimate deputies' and respondents' ideal points on a common left-right scale. Despite many potential barriers to ideological representation, we find an aggregate pattern of congruence between voters' and politicians' ideological positions during this period, with stronger voter-deputy correspondence for state deputies on average. These patterns are confirmed by a dyadic analysis of deputy and voter characteristics. However, we also find weaknesses in party-level ideological congruence for the major parties—for voters on the left and party supporters on the right. The findings suggest that, while the party system did not prevent overall ideological representation, it may have hindered important aspects of party representation.

This paper examines the nature of dimensional complexity in voter perceptions of party left-right locations. Most theoretical and empirical research on electoral politics treats these locations as based on a one-dimensional ideological spectrum. We measure variation in the complexity of voters' perceptions of left-right party locations and demonstrate that this quantity varies widely. First, we generate a measurement of the complexity of perceived left-right party placements positions applied to the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). This complexity measure, based on the fits of scaled dimensions of party placements, allows us to compare this concept across countries and regions. We then examine several possible correlates to the cross-national variation. We conclude with a comparison of this concept to issue dimensionality using data from the European Election Study (EES)

Conventional wisdom suggests that parties in candidate-centered electoral systems should be associated with less cohesive policy preferences among legislators. We model the incentives of party leaders to achieve voting unity accounting for the costs of discipline, showing that candidate-centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting party agreement on policies and preference cohesion. These implications for cohesion derive from the degree of control over list rank held by leaders under open lists (open-list proportional representation, OLPR) and closed lists (closed-list proportional representation, CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR, owing to leaders' lack of control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that promote agreement between members and leadership. Under CLPR, however, leaders can more easily achieve voting unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote internal agreement. We then extend the model to allow the party leader to replace members, showing that preference cohesion itself is greater under OLPR. Further, our baseline results hold when allowing legislative behavior to affect vote share and when accounting for candidates' valence qualities. We interpret our results to suggest that candidate-centered systems result in stronger incentives for developing programmatic parties, compared with party-centered systems.

When do candidate-centred electoral systems produce undisciplined parties? In this article, we examine party discipline under open-list proportional representation, a system associated with MPs cultivating personal constituencies. We present a model explaining how legislators' preferences and support among voters mediate political leaders' ability to enforce discipline. We show that disloyalty in candidate-centred systems depends on parties' costs for enforcing discipline, but only conditional on MP preferences. MPs who share the policy preferences of their leaders will be loyal even when the leaders cannot discipline them. To test the model's implications, we use data on legislative voting in Poland's parliament. Our empirical findings confirm that disloyalty is conditioned on party leaders' enforcement capacity and MP preferences. We find that legislators who contribute more to the party electorally in terms of votes are more disloyal, but only if their preferences diverge from the leadership. Our results suggest that the relationship between open lists and party disloyalty is conditional on the context of the party system.

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but generally lack the ability to provide an insight into the intraparty politics of party elites. In this article, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data that enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has some advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll-call voting, and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several mostly European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to examine sources of party elite heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules are associated with less party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, such contexts appear to condition the effect of district magnitude.