Search Results

This is the third of three chapters on the implications of electoral politics and the design of political institutions for welfare state adjustment. Kitschelt's main proposition is that the strategic configuration of party systems, net of public opinion on social policy reforms, is a critical force that shapes social policy reform programmes and their implementation. He lays out mechanisms that may induce politicians to pursue often unpopular reforms based on internal opportunities offered by the dynamic of competitive party democracy that have received only scant attention in the comparative political economy and social policy literature. The central guiding proposition of the chapter requires two important qualifications: first, that the dynamic of party competition is only one of several mechanisms that affect social policy retrenchment; and second, that a comparative study of social policy change in the 1980s and 1990s would ideally rely on equivalent measures across a wide range of countries, but cross‐nationally comparable measures are not available. These data limitations currently make it impossible to determine the explanatory power of internal political conditions relative to external demographic and economic changes in accounts of social policy retrenchment, so Kitschelt uses case studies from Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan to illustrate how mechanisms of party competition impinge on social policy change, and beyond that, attempts to generalize his argument based on a reading of much looser expert judgements about social policy retrenchment in a broader set of countries.

Focuses on the concept of electoral and party competition as the key mechanism leading party elites to respond to the preferences of voters. While competition is of central importance in both democratic theory and in empirical studies of party behaviour, the concept (as operationalized in many studies) is vague and ambiguous; in particular, it has very different meanings in the real world of electoral and parliamentary behaviour, on the one hand, and in the formal models of rational‐choice scholars, on the other. Discusses the unintended by‐product (social value) of competition, and gives an overview of the intellectual origins (from Simmel, Schumpeter, and Downs) of this approach. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to an original criticism of the problems inherent in applying this import from economic theory to the study of electoral competition, first focusing on key dimensions of this competition—contestability, availability, decidability, and vulnerability, and then arguing that these four crucial dimensions of competition interact with one another in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with the simplifying assumptions upon which the economic model depends. Each of the dimensions of electoral competition impinges on the others in an interactive, if not sometimes contradictory manner, and as a result of these multidimensional interaction effects, party competition cannot be conceived of as a linear process that unfolds between minimum and maximum points on a single continuum, but rather as a moving point shifting about in a four‐dimensional space within which no equilibrium point can be identified; accordingly, electoral preferences cannot be regarded as exogenous to party competition, but are decisively influenced by parties and party elites.

Some scholars have concluded that the existing literature on parties is sufficient, and that there is little more that can be learned through additional study in the aftermath of a century of scholarly research on the topic. Others maybe led to dismiss further empirical study of parties on the grounds that parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant, since they are failing to respond successfully to a series of challenges, and many of their functions are performed better by less formally organized social movements, by direct contact between politicians and citizens through the broadcast media or the internet, or by innovations in direct democracy; in the view of this group of scholars, parties maybe seen as in an inexorable process of ‘decline’. Finally, there maybe some who have concluded that scholarly research on parties has failed to advance the task of developing rigorous and persuasive theory, and that further efforts along these lines are doomed to fail. Begins by reviewing each of these assertions, and concludes that such negative views are unwarranted. It concludes with a brief overview of the contributions made by the authors in each of the three parts of the book, which examine the core concepts that have guided empirical research on parties (reconceptualizing parties and party competition), their organizational structures (party organization and party models), and the changing and sometimes problematic nature of their relations with citizens in democratic political systems (party linkages and attitudes to parties).

Mexico has experimented with mixed‐member electoral systems for many years, is probably the second oldest mixed‐member system after Germany, and has modified its mixed system more than any other country. The purpose behind the electoral reforms has always been the same: to open up the system enough to satisfy political demands, but not so much that the hegemonic party loses control. Although the latter could to a large extent be controlled by electoral fraud, the former objective still had to be addressed, and over the last 35 years Mexico has seen a gradual but consistent expansion of proportional representation, so that by 1997, the electoral laws, together with electoral preferences and the general democratization of the country, had led to the end of majority control by the official party in the Chamber of Deputies, and Mexico now has a strong two‐ or three‐party system. However, there have been seven fundamentally different electoral systems in Mexico this century, with a different electoral system for each of the last five elections, which makes it impossible to distinguish the effects of electoral rules from those of voter preference; furthermore, most of the reforms are highly endogenous with the party system. Discusses reforms from 1964 onwards, and is arranged as follows: it first describes the party (minority) deputy system that operated under single‐seat district plurality rules in the period 1964–1976, and then the minority representation system of 1979–1985 (mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) rules were introduced for the 1979 election); next it gives accounts of the 1988, 1991, 1994 and 1997 mixed‐member electoral laws, and details of the senate formulas for the period 1994–2000; it then discusses the consequences of the four mixed‐member electoral laws (effects on party competition and Duvergerian effects), the effects of the change to an MMM system on legislative behavior, and the prospects for future electoral reform.

First tests rival models of voting turnout using data drawn from the 2001 BES pre- and post-election surveys. Analyses reveal that the general incentives model performs best. Crucial individual-level influences on electoral turnout are calculations of efficacy-discounted benefits and costs of participation, sense of civic duty, and age. A model of the aggregate-level dynamics of turnout between 1945 and 2001 indicate a substantial portion of the sharp decline in turnout that occurred in the 1997 and 2001 general elections was caused by the one-sided nature of the contests, coupled with the perception that the two major parties did not offer a distinctive menu of policy choices. Analyses suggest that the strong relationship between age and civic duty has a sizeable generational component.

Ireland is among the few countries to employ proportional representation by the single transferable vote (STV), an electoral system that is highly rated by many researchers in the field. In the Irish context, STV is used in constituencies of small district magnitude, but it still delivers a high degree of proportionality. The party system has been characterised by moderate multipartism and, unusually for western Europe, by a significant number of independent MPs. Critics maintain that the provision for voter choice leads to intra-party competition with dysfunctional consequences, but the voters wield a veto over electoral system change and are unlikely to approve any new system that reduces their opportunity to participate in choosing their representatives.

General Charles de Gaulle, founder of the Fifth French Republic in 1958, was a bitter opponent of the unchecked power of political parties, for which he blamed the failure of earlier Republics, but his vision of the future was as naïve as his diagnosis of the past was tendentious, for the problem of the Third and Fourth Republics was rather the weakness of parties. The main surprise of the Fifth Republic was the emergence, from 1962, of the secure parliamentary majorities that France had hitherto lacked; in addition, since 1965, when de Gaulle himself found that he needed party support to campaign for re‐election, the presidency itself has been a key stake in party competition. These two developments transformed the role of parties, and the party system of the Fifth Republic may now be described as one of bipolar multipartism. This contains two distinct and opposed sets of dynamics (pressures): bipolarity, (which is encouraged in important ways by France's political institutions), and forces in the party system pointing towards fragmentation and multipartism; these pressures exist in every party system, but the French case is unusual because they are so evenly balanced. The introduction discusses this situation; the next three sections cover the same topics as those in the other country case studies in the book, and examine party legitimacy, party organizational strength (finance and staffing, and activism, and parties in civil society), and party functionality (in political recruitment, governance, interest articulation and aggregation, political participation, and political communication and education).

Much of the literature on parties centres on decline and failure, but recently the decline hypothesis has come under attack on both empirical and theoretical grounds, and this has exposed major shortcomings in dominant views (models) of party development, which mostly have offered an externalist view of party development and cast political parties as passive takers of their environment. This view of parties is markedly at odds with the considerable leeway attributed to other political actors and organizations, and whatever the solution to this impasse maybe, it clearly requires looking at party development not only from ‘without’, but also from ‘within’, in ways that capture the two‐ways link between intra‐party politics and resources and inter‐party competition; this perspective brings back not only intra‐party politics as a crucial political arena but also parties as central political actors. Explores this possibility by applying the emerging ‘new’ organizational approach to the trajectory of the French Socialist Party (SFIO, the Section Française de l’lnternationale Ouvrière, until 1971, PS afterwards), which, in the 1970s, staged a spectacular renaissance, and within a decade brought it from near extinction to power—although since then, policy and moral failures have dissipated much of this popular enthusiasm. However, the left's victory at the 1997 elections, the popularity of the current Socialist‐led government, and the weak challenge posed by new politics formations, suggest that much of the capital the PS accumulated in the previous decade remains in place. Provides an internalist account of the PSs jagged trajectory in four parts: the first summarizes externalist approaches to party development; the second analyses the trajectory of the PS over the last three decades in terms of the match and mismatch between party organization and the environment; the third looks at regional variations within this national pattern; and the fourth discusses the resilience of factionalism and draws the implications of this case for the study of political parties.

In this chapter, we take a closer look at democratic accountability outcomes. The evidence strongly and broadly suggests that cohesive and competitive political parties and governments help reduce the risks of democratic delegation. Specifically, executive cohesion strongly and significantly reduces the risks of corruption and fiscal indiscipline. Party competition, on the other hand, reduces rent extraction and promotes general satisfaction with democracy. The rest of the chapter reviews the broader lessons of this study, with respect to parliamentary democracy, parliamentary governance, political institutions, and the gap between citizens and their political representatives.

This chapter, on the causes of electoral reform in Japan, reviews the movement from an extreme electoral (hyper‐personalistic) system in which candidates of the same party competed against one another in three‐ to five‐seat districts (in a single non‐transferable vote system, SNTV) to a mixed‐member majoritarian (MMM) system that eliminated intraparty competition. It is argued that short‐term act‐contingent motivations played a necessary role in passing political reform, and that by January 1994, when the reform bills finally passed into law, no politician could publicly oppose political reform, even though some felt freer to grumble about it. The main sections of the chapter are: The Pathologies of SNTV: Who Hated What?; A Brief History of Failed Electoral Reform Efforts—1956 to 1991; The Fall and Rise of the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party): Electoral Reform in 1993–4; Analysis: The Causes of Electoral Reform.

This chapter briefly discusses the convergence of party funding regimes and introduces the proposed link between party competition and the outcome of party funding reforms. This link results from the assumed relationship between the parties' ability to reach a consensus and the introduction of state funding. The argument is that state funding to political parties represents such an important intervention into the rules of party competition that its introduction requires the consent of all relevant parties. The proposed nexus between party funding and party competition is of particular importance since it allows for a genuinely comparative, multi-causal explanation of the evolution of party funding regimes.

This chapter adapts the dynamic model of multiparty competition to take into account the possibility that party leaders take their own preferences into account when they set party policy. If they do this, they must make trade-offs between satisfying their private policy preferences and some other objective, whether this is maximizing party vote share or pleasing current party supporters. Models that specify such trade-offs have often been found intractable using traditional analytical techniques. However, they are straightforward to specify and analyze using computational agent-based modeling, though this does require a rethinking of the types of decision rules that party leaders might use. The chapter finds an analogue of the earlier finding that insatiable party leaders may win fewer votes than satiable leaders. Leaders who care only about their party's vote share may win fewer votes over the long haul than leaders who also care about their own policy preferences.

Having specified theoretical models of multiparty competition in the first ten chapters of the book, this chapter analyzes recent party competition in postwar democracies in order to verify whether the empirical implications of the party competition model can indeed be systematically observed in real party competition. This is easy to say but hard to do in a rigorous way. Fundamental difficulties arise from two distinct sources. The first concerns calibration of key parameters of the model to the real political environments it is used to analyze. The second concerns data, specifically the need for reliable empirical observations of the real world that can be compared with theoretical implications of our model. The chapter discusses these two methodological problems before moving on to compare empirical implications generated by the model, calibrated to real party systems, with empirical observations of these same party systems.