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The goal of this article is to contribute to a burgeoning comparative literature about nationalization of party competition (political parties and party systems), clarifying its terminology and evaluating three different indices of measurement of this phenomenon and used recently in Latin America. This paper argues that despite the confusion in the terminology, the term nationalization should be understood as homogeneity of electoral support across the territory and that a proper measure of nationalization should take into account four basic elements: party presence across the country, number of subnational units where it is measured, its magnitude and the size of the party. The revision of the literature dedicated to Latin American countries reveals that more case studies of long-term evolution of party systems and explanation of its changes and party-centred variables are necessary. Adapted from the source document.

This article assesses the degree of representativeness within the state delegations with a measure based on primary election and caucus results, and delegate counts at the 1984 Democratic national convention. The analysis indicates that most state delegations were quite representative of the candidates' relative support within the public. States with the most representative delegations had few uncommitted votes cast in the primary or caucus and used proportional representation systems. The proportion of superdelegates, either pledged or unpledged, did not detract greatly from the representativeness of the state delegations,

AbstractThis article investigates whether different political institutions such as executives, legislatures, parties, party systems, judiciaries, decentralization, constitutionalism, and referendums across 24 Western democracies are venues for debate across five individual morality policies. Using data since 1945, the article compares three theories of morality policy—(1) Policy Type leading to different institutional venues; (2) Two Worlds of religious/secular party systems; and (3) U.S./European exceptionalism. In order, the most frequently debated issues are abortion, same sex marriage, euthanasia, stem cells/assisted reproductive technology (ART), and capital punishment. There is considerable variation in the institutions and country groups that debate them although fewer differences in the Two Worlds model. Abortion, euthanasia, and same sex marriage are the most convergent issues across institutions, party systems, and country groupings while capital punishment and stem cells/ART show the most diverse patterns of deliberation. The general Policy Type model of morality policy is upheld, but varies institutionally by specific issues. The Two Worlds model is of some importance, but only on three issues. There also are regional differences between the United States, Europe, and non‐European democracies.

In this paper we analyze the Spanish 2004 general election outcomes from the point of view of the outgoing party systems & their dimensions. The main aim is to check to what extent an electoral change has occurred & whether we should consider the 2004 electoral process as one of continuity or as an exceptional one, as one could think given the context of the election. Taking a close look at empirical data, we will try to answer the following questions: Are we still in the third electoral period or has a new one (the fourth) aroused? Is the Spanish exceptionalism still present (with respect to the different & concurrent party systems)? What is the depth of the electoral change registered in the 2004 election: is it just a different distribution of the vote or did it affect to the political alignments of the voters? &, therefore, should we consider 2004 election as one of continuity or as an exceptional one? We present all the values of the dimensions of party systems in each Comunidad Autonoma from 1977 to 2004 elections. Tables, Graphs, References. Adapted from the source document.

It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra-party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems -- where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates -- create another type of variation in personal vote-seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party-in-a-district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party-in-a-district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra-party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote-seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote-seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra-party competition on personal vote-seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system. Adapted from the source document.

International audience ; With the democratization of mobile devices embedding different positioning capabilities, location information is used for a variety of applications. On mobile devices, the geolocation can be obtained via GPS or by leveraging surrounding network infrastructure such as Wi-Fi access points. Despite a lower accuracy, Wi-Fi based geolocation has several advantages over GPS such as reduced energy consumption and availability in indoor environments. To enable this network-based geolocation, mobile devices need to interact with a location positioning system that will resolve a list of visible Wi-Fi access points into a position. By doing so, mobile users are revealing their mobility to the location provider, potentially exposing sensitive information to an untrusted third-party. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to preserve users' privacy when requesting users' location from Wi-Fi while supporting high utility. The key idea behind our online approach is to combine a caching strategy (for limiting the exposure of the user's position for already visited locations) and a random sampling (for controlling the precision of revealed information). We extensively evaluate our solution with a real dataset of mobility traces. We show that the proposed approach drastically reduces the exposure of the user's location to positioning systems (up to 95%). Indeed, by leveraging a caching strategy, requests are only sent when users visit new areas. Consequently, the capacity of positioning systems to infer points of interest of users from received requests is highly limited (a decrease of 50% on average). In addition, our privacy protection provides a trade-off between privacy (i.e., avoid revealing its true location) and utility (i.e., still benefiting from services such as places recommendation) fully controllable by the users.

International audience ; With the democratization of mobile devices embedding different positioning capabilities, location information is used for a variety of applications. On mobile devices, the geolocation can be obtained via GPS or by leveraging surrounding network infrastructure such as Wi-Fi access points. Despite a lower accuracy, Wi-Fi based geolocation has several advantages over GPS such as reduced energy consumption and availability in indoor environments. To enable this network-based geolocation, mobile devices need to interact with a location positioning system that will resolve a list of visible Wi-Fi access points into a position. By doing so, mobile users are revealing their mobility to the location provider, potentially exposing sensitive information to an untrusted third-party. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to preserve users' privacy when requesting users' location from Wi-Fi while supporting high utility. The key idea behind our online approach is to combine a caching strategy (for limiting the exposure of the user's position for already visited locations) and a random sampling (for controlling the precision of revealed information). We extensively evaluate our solution with a real dataset of mobility traces. We show that the proposed approach drastically reduces the exposure of the user's location to positioning systems (up to 95%). Indeed, by leveraging a caching strategy, requests are only sent when users visit new areas. Consequently, the capacity of positioning systems to infer points of interest of users from received requests is highly limited (a decrease of 50% on average). In addition, our privacy protection provides a trade-off between privacy (i.e., avoid revealing its true location) and utility (i.e., still benefiting from services such as places recommendation) fully controllable by the users.

International audience ; With the democratization of mobile devices embedding different positioning capabilities, location information is used for a variety of applications. On mobile devices, the geolocation can be obtained via GPS or by leveraging surrounding network infrastructure such as Wi-Fi access points. Despite a lower accuracy, Wi-Fi based geolocation has several advantages over GPS such as reduced energy consumption and availability in indoor environments. To enable this network-based geolocation, mobile devices need to interact with a location positioning system that will resolve a list of visible Wi-Fi access points into a position. By doing so, mobile users are revealing their mobility to the location provider, potentially exposing sensitive information to an untrusted third-party. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to preserve users' privacy when requesting users' location from Wi-Fi while supporting high utility. The key idea behind our online approach is to combine a caching strategy (for limiting the exposure of the user's position for already visited locations) and a random sampling (for controlling the precision of revealed information). We extensively evaluate our solution with a real dataset of mobility traces. We show that the proposed approach drastically reduces the exposure of the user's location to positioning systems (up to 95%). Indeed, by leveraging a caching strategy, requests are only sent when users visit new areas. Consequently, the capacity of positioning systems to infer points of interest of users from received requests is highly limited (a decrease of 50% on average). In addition, our privacy protection provides a trade-off between privacy (i.e., avoid revealing its true location) and utility (i.e., still benefiting from services such as places recommendation) fully controllable by the users.

Why do some countries spend more on and make more use of distributive measures than others? Which institutions systematically shape spending on and frequency of use of these measures? Cross-country longitudinal tests of theories that emphasize the institutional determinants of distributive policies are rare. We test a battery of competing hypotheses on spending and frequency using data on state aid expenditure by EU member states between 1992 and 2009 and on applications logged by such states between 1999 and 2009. We find that higher district magnitude lowers spending on and use of distributive measures if party leaders control access to the ballot rank. More measures are adopted if an increase in magnitude is associated with lack of ballot control. In case of single party majority or cohesive coalition governments, greater reliance on delegation rather than contract fiscal institutions lowers spending.

While it has long been observed in Western Europe that deputies from the same party caucus generally take identical positions when legislative votes are taken, the explanation for this commonly occurring party voting agreement is controversial. The sociological approach argues that MPs hold together for normative reasons while the institutionalist tradition argues that discipline emerges as rational actors discover self-interested reasons to vote en bloc. The creation of democratic state legislatures in post-communist eastern Germany provides an opportunity to investigate the origins of party voting agreement. There, institutions conducive to high party voting agreement were extended to a region where political elites did not share norms conducive to party cohesion. This article examines the development of legislative voting in eastern Germany between 1990 & 2000. The examination shows that, while antiparty sentiment may have initially complicated the task of developing cohesive parliamentary parties, over the past decade institutional incentives have created high levels of party voting akin to those in western Germany. 1 Table. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractParty system institutionalization (PSI) is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but its role in non‐democratic systems has been understudied. In this paper, we evaluate whether the concept has meaningful and perhaps unique implications for the durability of competitive authoritarian regimes. We argue that a modified version of electoral volatility – the most common measure of PSI in democracies – conveys useful information about PSI in competitive authoritarian contexts by signalling the ability of the ruling party to manage the opposition. To this end, we construct an original data set that disaggregates electoral volatility into ruling party seat change and opposition party seat volatility and further divides opposition party volatility into Type‐A and Type‐B volatility. We find robust results that democratization becomes more likely when decreases in the ruling party's seat share coincide with an increase in opposition party Type‐B volatility. This paper demonstrates that the concept of PSI has utility for understanding regime dynamics in competitive authoritarian contexts.

Front Matter -- Copyright page /Robert J. Pekkanen -- Personnel Management and the Policy-Making Process /Robert J. Pekkanen -- Making a Cabinet /Nathaniel B. Thayer -- The Liberal Democratic Party /John Creighton Campbell -- The Specter of Crisis /Kent E. Calder -- The Liberal Democratic Party: The Organization of Political Power /Gerald L. Curtis -- From Pork to Policy: The Rise of Programmatic Campaigning in Japanese Elections /Amy Catalinac -- The Prime Minister and Party Politics: The LDP and the Opposition /Kenji Hayao -- Nukaga Fukushiro: Climbing the Ladder to Influence /Masahiro Yamada -- Electoral Reform and the LDP /Robert J. Pekkanen -- The End of One-Party Dominance /Gerald L. Curtis -- Regime Shift: Japanese Politics in a Changing World Economy /T. J. Pempel -- Forces for Political Reform: The Liberal Democratic Party's Young Reformers and Ozawa Ichirō /Otake Hideo -- Electoral Incentives in Mixed-Member Systems: Party, Posts, and Zombie Politicians in Japan /Robert Pekkanen , Benjamin Nyblade and Ellis S. Krauss -- Party and Voter Dealignment: The LDP System Disintegrates /Ikuo Kabashima and Gill Steel -- Electoral Incentives and Policy Preferences: Mixed Motives Behind Party Defections in Japan /Steven R. Reed and Ethan Scheiner.

Previous research has found mixed evidence regarding the change of parliamentary voting behaviour following electoral reforms. But scholars have not analysed whether the mechanisms by which voting loyalty is elicited matter differently in such cases. Our article fills this gap by investigating the individual variation in voting loyalty across two legislative terms, using a sample of 26 high-stakes roll-call votes. Romania constitutes an ideal setting for such a study due to its recent shift from closed-list proportional representation to single-member districts. Multivariate ordinary least squares models (including all Members of Parliament and including only incumbents) test for the effect of parliamentary experience, party membership duration, parliamentary office, party hopping and district magnitude, while also accounting for demotion and a number of socio-demographic controls. Results indicate that socialisation is less important for Members of Parliament's voting behaviour after reform, whereas signalling through voting dissent prior to party switching becomes more relevant. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright, the International Political Science Association.]