Suchergebnisse

In multi-level systems, state-wide parties are faced with particular challenges. Competing in elections on multiple levels of the polity, such parties juggle the desire for national recognizability and the need to be responsive to regional particularities. In this paper, I reflect on the delegation model of multi-level party politics, which is a theoretical perspective of great importance in the literature, arguing that the accuracy of the model depends on two critical assumptions. Based on these theoretical considerations, I develop the model further and apply it to the case of the two main Spanish state-wide parties, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) and the Partido Popular (PP). More specifically, the programmatic positions of their regional branches are analyzed, and it is shown that the framework manifestos issued by the national party organizations shape these to a large extent. While this case is used to illustrate the illuminating potential of the extended delegation model, the paper is similarly attentive to the limitations of the model and also hints at the implications for our conception of democracy in multi-level systems.

AbstractPolitical parties commonly experience internal disagreements. Recently, evidence is accumulating that outright internal discord makes a party much less attractive to voters. However, we do not understand well when citizens perceive a party to be internally conflicted in the first place. We here explain citizens' perceptions from a democratic life cycle perspective: Factors related to the periodic conduct of elections induce higher levels of intra-party conflict and make it more visible to citizens. To test this argument, we combine survey data on citizens' perceptions of political parties in Germany spanning 16 years with indicators moderating (the visibility of) intra-party conflict. The analysis shows that citizens perceive more internal conflict when parties are heterogenous, when they are governing, when election day is distant, and when electoral losses accumulate. This demonstrates the recurring patterns in citizens' perceptions of political parties and suggests self-reinforcing dynamics between citizen assessments and election outcomes.