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The foremost mental roadblocks in predictive model building are refusal to make outrageous simplifications and reluctance to play with means of extreme cases. “Ignorance-based” models focus on conceptual constraints: What do we already know about the situation, even before collecting any data? Eliminate the conceptually forbidden areas where data points could not possibly occur, and locate the conceptual anchor points where the value of x imposes a unique value of y. Once this is done, few options may remain for how y can depend on x–unless you tell yourself “It can't be that simple.” A low R ² may still confirm a predictive model, and a high one may work to reject it.

Assembles cross‐national data to demonstrate the behavioural consequences of partisan dealignment. Without the reinforcement of habitual party ties, more voters are waiting longer to decide for whom they will vote, and in the countries where ticket splitting is possible, more are dividing their party choices. Candidate‐centred politics appears to be on the rise, although this is much more pronounced in presidential than parliamentary systems, and signifying the different style of dealignment politics, participation in campaigns and volunteer work for political parties is decreasing. In short, partisan dealignment is transforming the relationship between some voters and political parties—a relationship that was once seen as an essential element in the process of representative government.

Spain has made a number of experiments with democracy, but only since the mid‐1970s has this been successful. At that time, strenuous efforts were made to ensure that political parties would come forward, and as a result the new democracy had two key aspects: the creation of synthetic parties (in the sense that they are supported more from above than below), and the building of a parties state. The introductory part of the chapter discusses these changes and also has a section looking at the institutional framework that had such a shaping effect on party politics; this discusses the electoral system, and the rules governing parliamentary group organization and party finance. The next three sections cover the same topics as those in the other country case studies in the book, and examine party legitimacy (party membership, electoral turnout and volatility, popular assessments, party–voter ties, and evaluating party legitimacy), party organizational strength (parliamentary party organization, mass party organization, party finance, ‘goods in kind’ received by parties, and evaluating party organizational strength), and the systemic functionality of parties (governance, political recruitment and patronage, interest articulation and aggregation, political participation, political communication and education, and evaluating the systemic functionality of parties). The concluding section assesses the viability of Spain's parties state and gives a comparative analysis of its experience of democracy.

For thirty years following the end of the Second World War, it was orthodox to regard Britain as having one of the most stable and party‐oriented political systems in the Western world—parties penetrated state and society so significantly that it was virtually impossible to conceive of political life in the country without thinking first and foremost of party political life. However, since the middle of the 1970s, old certainties have been challenged by a continuing and multi‐dimensional debate about the transformation of British party politics. This challenge is predicated on a number of interconnected developments, which include: the apparent growth of electoral volatility; the spread of partisan and class dealignment; the emergence of nationalist cleavages in Scotland and Wales, which have threatened to fragment the national political culture; the erosion of two‐party electoral domination; and the growing chorus of criticism levelled at the damaging iniquities of the electoral system and the adversarial ‘winner‐takes‐all’ political mentality that is closely associated with it. Despite this, the single‐member plurality (SMP) (first‐past‐the‐post) electoral system continues to ensure that single‐party majority governments remain the norm. This chapter looks at what such changes imply for the general status of parties in the country, and is arranged in the same three sections as the other country case studies in the book; these examine the popular legitimacy of British political parties, their organizational strength, and their systemic functionalities (in governance and political recruitment, interest articulation and aggregation, political communication, and political participation).

The aim of this fourth chapter is to understand the determinants of reforms of core democratic rules through a macro-analysis taking into account both long-term and short-term factors of change. Two dependent variables are examined: first, the total number of reforms adopted per country between 1990 and 2010; and second, the number of institutional reforms adopted by legislature. In the long term, polities with a lack of political support and majoritarian polities experience more reforms. Focusing on short-term determinants, the results show that rising electoral uncertainty, as measured by volatility, along with the changing preferences of actors in power as measured by the advent of new forces in government, lead to the adoption of greater numbers of institutional reforms in following legislatures.

This chapter reviews the political and economic context of the global financial crisis (GFC). We first examine the origins and immediate effects of the GFC and the ‘Great Recession’ that it spawned. Ranging beyond the European focus of the research so far, we examine the impact of the crisis across the member countries of the OECD and the ways in which that variation is shaping the contexts of individual-level behaviour. We then examine patterns of electoral volatility and the changing nature of party systems before turning to consider the reasons why some governments were defeated and why others survived. Across these outcomes, analyses show that the impact of economic factors on political outcomes varied depending on their timing: before, during, or after the GFC. The chapter concludes by introducing our main sources of data: cross-sectional individual-level survey data from twenty-five national elections in OECD democracies from 2011 to 2016 sourced from Module 4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES); macro-data for thirty-five OECD democracies from 1990 to 2016; and a pooled set of 113 post-election surveys from twenty-four OECD countries between 1996 and 2017.

This chapter describes and examines the German electorate in terms of long-term as well as short-term individual volatility. The results suggest that voters change their minds less frequently during an election campaign than between three subsequent federal elections. The stability and strength of party identification serve—not surprisingly—as massive stabilizing factors of the vote decision, while changed attitudes towards candidates and issues do contribute to the explanation of individual volatility. Furthermore, the findings clarify that most swing voters do not oscillate wildly between all possible parties, indecision, or abstention, but rather have a limited choice set of usually two parties.

This chapter provides a comprehensive explanatory model of party system closure. The model includes the variables analysed in the previous chapters (i.e. age and birth period of democracy, party institutionalization, parliamentary fragmentation, and polarization), with the addition of the degree of economic development, the type of electoral system (i.e. majoritarian or proportional), and the nature of the constitutional regime (i.e. presidential, semi-presidential or parliamentary). Then we ask the question: what would be the explanatory model of party system institutionalization had we operationalized it in terms of volatility rather than closure? We show that the determinants of closure are not identical with those of volatility. The latter is more a function of the behaviour of the citizens, the former is more a product of elite decisions. At the end of the chapter we place the factors responsible for closure into a causal chain.

This book deals with the different aspects of electoral politics in Indian states during the period 2008-2012 and the nature of the relationship between between electoral politics in the states and at the all-India level. It reviews the changes in the system of party competition after the rise of a more stable bi-polar contest in Indian elections. While the first phase of the post-Congress polity during the 1990s saw the defeat of the incumbent parties in election after election, the next phase which this chapter examines is marked by a fair chance for the incumbent party to retain political power. The chapter shows that the dramatic features of the post-Congress polity, namely the participatory upsurge, political uncertainly and the emergence of new parties primarily on the basis of social identities, have been either subdued or have acquired a routine existence. Such a condition is described in this chapter as normalization of electoral competition.

The second chapter introduces the dataset of the book, defines its units of measurement, and operationalizes its key concepts. We discuss the method of creating our principal tool of analysis, the composite closure index. We reflect in detail on the question of how experiences accumulated through time can be taken into account when measuring stability. Finally, in a validation exercise, we also investigate whether our closure index could have been used to predict which democracies collapsed around the world between the two World Wars. With this exercise we also show that closure is a better proxy for party system institutionalization than the more traditionally used indicator, the electoral volatility index.

This chapter examines parties and party system change across the MENA countries since December 2010. The discussion begins with a brief overview of party systems in the region on the eve of the Arab Spring, thereby providing a quick introduction to the selected cases as well as a benchmark against which to measure change. Party system change is determined via indicators such as the effective number of parties, party system fragmentation, electoral volatility and the entry of new parties into the system. The analysis of the indicators of party system change is coupled with a discussion of empirical data on the political environment during and in the immediate aftermath of the elections, including issues such as regime classification, rotation of power, coalition structures, prohibited parties, and societal cleavages. The author explains how - despite the fact that some old regimes fell and elections were held - the traditionally dominant or hegemonic political parties stayed preeminent in a number of MENA countries. Finally, this chapter shows what party system change tells us about the prospects for democracy some five years after the outbreak of the Arab Spring.

Representative democracy relies on elections and party government. Parties play a key role to the extent that they aggregate citizens’ preferences and that they organize political competition. This in turn implies that parties, once in power, implement the programme they were elected for. There is a growing literature arguing that it is increasingly difficult for governments to implement their electoral programmes for a variety of reasons. Growing international constraints have limited government autonomy in general. As the electorate has become more dispersed and party membership has shrunk, it has, moreover, become more difficult for parties to respond to voters. Greater electoral volatility has further complicated things. As a consequence of these trends, the distinctiveness of government parties is said to have decreased. And this, in turn, could explain the decline in turnout and the rise of populist parties. This conclusion, however, is based on limited data and analyses. This chapter calls for renewed study of competition between parties and election-to-policy linkages. It suggests revisiting the thesis of mandate decline using new empirical data, adopting an agenda-setting perspective.

This chapter analyses the factors that contributed to the limited electoral success of the Congress party in the 2009 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Three factors seem to stand out as important ones: (1) favourable voter evaluations of the performance of the central government as well as the State government, both run by the Congress party; (2) failure of any one opposition party or alliance of parties to present a credible alternative to the Congress party; and (3) the ability of the Congress party to retain its traditional support base. Over the past few years the state of Andhra Pradesh saw a quick evaporation of the apparent stability that marked the government and politics of the state during the years 2004-2008, partly due to agitations for and against the division of the State and the tragic death of its powerful Chief Minister that resulted in a condition of high voltage politics, radical political shifts, and increased electoral volatility.