Suchergebnisse

A neglected aspect of parliamentary democracies that do not conform to the British model is the relation between executive and legislative leadership. In multiparty systems with strong legislative committees, committee chairmen constitute a governing coalition comparable to the cabinet. Given the coalitional nature of each leadership group, their partisan composition may not be identical; nor need they be equally stable. These are matters of importance for the operation of government. This article examines the relations between the two coalitions in the primordial parliamentary democracy, the French Third Republic. Using correlation analysis, I found a weak partisan relation between the two coalitions during the five legislatures of the interwar years. Using two measures of stability, durability and the continuity of coalitions beyond formal tenure, I found the legislative coalition always more stable. Institutional rules and the multiparty system helped account for these differences. Nevertheless, there was enough variation from legislature to legislature to show that electoral rules and results had an impact. Variations resembled those in the American republic. Periods of greater similarity in partisan composition coincided with greater effectiveness or stability for the executive; periods of divided control coincided with lesser executive stability. This was of consequence for the making of policy.

In accord with the office-seeking theory of parties, we explore the impact of the structure of electoral competition on French parties. We speculated that the Fifth Republic's electoral structure—dual-ballot elections in single-member districts—would produce a multiparty system consisting of parties tailored to the two-ballot mode of winning. To test our proposition we devised two measures of winning for the members of the national assembly's partisan groups: the percentage of members who won the absolute majority that was needed to win on the first ballot and the average shift in the electoral margin of the groups' remaining members from the first to the second ballot. The two measures revealed four distinct ways of winning, each of which fostered a prototypical party.

Although the effect of electoral rules on the number of parties in democracies has been well explored, little attention had been paid to their effect on the parties themselves. The authors examine this problem within the context of French two-ballot rules, which illuminate partisan distinctions rather than blur them as single-ballot rules do. Earlier studies demonstrated that the dual-ballot rules used in French legislative elections allowed four ways of winning, in response to which four stable parties emerged. The French presidential election further illuminated these distinctions. Because there is only one winner, the contest becomes personalized, heightening partisan distinctions in electoral strategies, appeals, and organization. Examining this effect in the 1995 presidential election, the authors conclude that the French dual ballot provides a tool for understanding not only French parties but also parties in which single-ballot rules force all to use similar electoral strategies and appeals.

Examines effect of electoral rules on political parties and their strategies in democracies, in context of the two-ballot system; that allows parties to go beyond the Right-Left dimension of the single ballot used in most democracies, Some focus on the Rally for the Republic (RPR), the Union for French Democracy (UDF), the Socialist party, the Communist party, and the National Front (FN), and the Gaullist party.

The dramatic reversal of party fortunes in the French elections of 1993 prompted us to re-evaluate the scheme we had devised for analyzing French parties. The scheme, based on the assumption that electoral rules have a significant impact on party organization, set out four stable prototypical parties. We felt that parties would organize around the electoral strategies prescribed by the single-member-district, two-ballot rules used for all but one of the Fifth Republic's legislative elections. We analyzed the 1993 election results to see if the parties we had identified as our prototypical parties still conformed to type. Despite the Socialists' dramatic defeat and the overwhelming victory of the Gaullist-centrist coalition, the Gaullists remained the primary party, the Union for French Democracy the dual electoral party, the Socialists the secondary party and the Communists the marginal party.