Suchergebnisse

How do electoral systems and intraparty candidate selection procedures affect party unity? In this article, I distinguish theoretically and empirically between electoral systems and candidate selections and argue that the influence of selection processes on parties' behavior is conditional on electoral system (and vice versa). Measuring parties' unity using Rice and weighted Rice scores, and applying hierarchical models to a new data set of 249 parties in 24 countries, I find support for the claim that the influence of selection processes on behavior is greater under electoral systems that encourage personal vote‐seeking incentives than under electoral systems that encourage party centeredness.

Do electoral systems and intra-party candidate selection procedures influence the degree to which parties act in unison? Whereas the theoretical literature is quite clear about the hypothetical effect of these institutions, empirical evidence is mixed. In this article, I solve the puzzle and theorize about the interactive effects of elections and selections on parties' behavior. I argue that the effect of candidate selections depends on the electoral environment within which they operate. Specifically, in an electoral environment that creates incentives for candidate-centeredness, the less restrictive the selection method a party uses, the less unified its record; whereas in an electoral environment that emphasizes party-centeredness, the effect of selections on unity is more muted. Using the electoral reform and divergent selection mechanisms characterizing Israel during the last three decades and utilizing Rice Scores, I provide support for the conditional effect of electoral systems and selection procedures on party behavior.

Intra-party candidate selection processes are one of the prime mechanisms through which parties organize. This article seeks to examine empirically what factors account for variation in candidate selection processes. After identifying the key assertions developed in the literature, I use a unique cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 512 parties in 46 countries to examine whether a party's ideology, size, regime type, territorial organization and region affect the way parties select their legislative candidates. I pay special attention to the hypothesized relationships between electoral systems and selection processes, since the literature was indecisive and since research on the effects of institutions on legislators' behaviour often amalgamated elections and selections. Underlying this amalgamation is an assumption that electoral systems determine candidate selection processes. I use my data to shed light on these relationships and provide a cautionary tale about amalgamating elections and selections. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Intra-party candidate selection processes are one of the prime mechanisms through which parties organize. This article seeks to examine empirically what factors account for variation in candidate selection processes. After identifying the key assertions developed in the literature, I use a unique cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 512 parties in 46 countries to examine whether a party's ideology, size, regime type, territorial organization and region affect the way parties select their legislative candidates. I pay special attention to the hypothesized relationships between electoral systems and selection processes, since the literature was indecisive and since research on the effects of institutions on legislators' behaviour often amalgamated elections and selections. Underlying this amalgamation is an assumption that electoral systems determine candidate selection processes. I use my data to shed light on these relationships and provide a cautionary tale about amalgamating elections and selections.

It has been argued that inclusive and decentralized selection procedures create greater incentives for parliamentarians to enhance their personal reputations. However, while the observable implications of this theory are at the level of individual members, the empirical data often brought to bear on this question to date have been collected at an aggregate level—the partisan bloc or legislative term. Despite some previously positive aggregate results, the author finds no discernible support for the connection between candidate selection procedures and vote-seeking behavior in Israel at the individual parliamentarian level. The author suggests an alternative theory—based on the stage of the legislative career—that explains both individual-level behavior and the aggregate-level trend.

Tools dedicated to inferring the ideological leanings of legislators from observed votes—techniques such as NOMINATE (Poole and Rosenthal 1997) or the item‐response‐theory model of Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers (2004)—rest on the assumption that the political process that generates abstentions is ignorable, an assumption not always easy to justify. We extended the item‐response‐theory model to analyze abstention and voting processes simultaneously in situations where abstentions are suspected to be nonrandom. We applied this expanded model to two assemblies where the existing literature gives reason to expect nonrandom abstentions, and we demonstrate how our extensions yield nuanced analyses of legislative politics. We also acknowledge limits to our ability to decide on the adequacy of alternative assumptions about abstentions, since these assumptions are not readily verifiable.

Previous research finds limited evidence for a positive link between intra-party democracy and citizens' inclination to vote for democratizing parties or to become more involved in partisan activities. This article investigates the association between democratic candidate selection processes and citizens' political engagement levels, which can be considered a crucial predisposition for actual political participation. First, we test the selection processes' effect on the two forms of political participation that are likely to be affected by democratizing intra-party reforms: electoral and partisan participation. Second, we examine how inclusive candidate selection processes are linked to three forms of engagement: watching campaign ads, reading newspapers, and discussing politics with friends and family. The analysis is based on public opinion survey data during seven election cycles from the Israel National Election Survey and candidate selection data on Israeli parties. The results of the hierarchical models show that democratic candidate selection processes are associated with higher engagement levels, while simultaneously bearing no effect on electoral and partisan participation. This implies the existence of a structural disconnection between citizens' political engagement and participation levels in response to intra-party democracy.

Though instances of party switching have been widely documented, there is little cross‐national research on this phenomenon. The prevalence of switching is therefore unknown, and the factors influencing this behavior remain unclear. Using the most comprehensive dataset on party switching ever constructed, we illustrate both that interparty movement is more common than previously assumed and that there are substantial differences in its prevalence across parties. To explain this variation, we examine the relationship between legislators' motivations, institutional arrangements, and switching. We find that motivational explanations are correlated with interparty movement and that institutional arrangements exhibit only limited direct influence on switching.