Electoral and Party Competition: Analytical Dimensions and Empirical Problems

ABSTRACTThis research note presents EPAC 2017, a dataset resulting from the second round of an expert survey on ethnonationalism in party competition. EPAC provides cross-sectional data on the positions of (ethno-) national and mainstream parties on an ethnonational (also often referred to as ‘territorial’ or ‘centre-periphery’) dimension, as well as other important dimensions of political competition. The 2017 edition covers 222 political parties in 22 multinational European countries. The research note presents the main survey items and performs a series of validity and reliability tests on the data. Results show that EPAC 2017 provides valid and reliable measures of party positions on an ethnonational dimension. A short analysis of party system changes in Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the opportunities of combining the 2011 and 2017 editions. The combined dataset allows studying the mobilization of the centre-periphery cleavage in party competition across Eastern and Western Europe and over time.

CONTINUITY RATHER THAN CHANGE WAS CHARACTERISTIC OF THE Turkish party system during its formative years in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Now, however, party competition in Turkey appears to be approaching a new phase of development. While some political analysts have described the emerging trends in the 1970s with reference to a ‘critical realignment’ in mass electoral behaviour, others have characterized the party system as going through a period of ‘flux and transition’. Indeed, the recent course of electoral politics in Turkey displays some significant changes. First, with the termination of the Justice Party's UP) dominant position in party competition, there has been a transition from a predominant party system to one of moderate pluralism in which the likelihood of coalition government has significantly increased. Secondly, the trend toward greater fragmentation in the party system which partially accounted for the JP's loss of dominance in 1973, appears to have been reversed in the 1977 parliamentary election as the two major parties made substantial gains at the expense of the minor parties. Thirdly, these changes have been accompanied by the increase of ideological polarization in the party system and the intensification of ideological cleavages among the party elites.

Acknowledgments Introduction Democracy and Party Competition Part I. Theory, Party Systems and the Procedural Quality of Post-Communist Democracy: 1. Historical legacies and strategies of democratization: pathways toward post-communist polities 2. The quality of post-communist democracy: patterns of party competition, interest representation and governance Part II. Setting and Research Strategy: 3. From communist rule to democracy: four central and East European countries 4. Empirical research strategy Part III. The Structuring of Party Competition: 5. Programmatic citizen-elite linkage strategies across post-communist polities 6. Linkage strategies within party systems: diversity among parties Part IV. Political Alignments and Dimensions of Competition: 7. Political divides and alignments: the politicians 8. Electoral constituency alignments: emerging political cleavages? Part V. Political Representation and the Quality of Democratic Governance: 9. Political representation 10. The governability of post-communist democracies: collation politics between passions and policy interests Part VI. Conclusion: 11. The diversity of post-communist democratic governance Appendices Bibliography.

This chapter addresses the major technical challenges of long-term party competition analyses in plurality voting systems as well as the operationalisation of the concept. The most important technical challenge lies in the instability of constituency boundaries due to changing sizes of local electorates which limits direct comparability of constituency results to a few subsequent elections. Working around this problem requires the aggregation of multiple individual constituencies across larger territorial units, in this case the so-called regions of England. The operationalisation of the competition concept follows Bartolini’s three dimensions of contestability, availability and vulnerability while the role of his fourth dimension of decidability is only indirectly estimated through the mobilisation scenarios employed in Chap. 7.

This study explains the meaning of ta’awun siyasi (political cooperation) which is usually carried out by party elites ahead of executive elections. Party elites see ta’awun siyasi not just an election rule but part of a political strategy to boost party votes during elections. In fact, there is great hope from ta’awun siyasi, but the results sometimes don’t go as desired because the impact of the coalition’s tail coat is not worth the energy expended. On the other hand, there is a communication ethic that is sometimes overlooked in addition to neglected siyasi fiqh norms. The main problem of this research study is how to reconcile the essential meaning of ta’awun siyasi with the ethics of coalitionalism in the style of party elites while still upholding the principles of democracy and siyasi fiqh with the historical basis of the 2019 election coalition as a reference for the upcoming 2024 election. This study is a qualitative research that is descriptive in nature describing material objects with an analytical knife from the theory of democracy and fiqh siyasi. The main data sources are interviews, questionnaires and other documents. The results of the study found that the true meaning of ta’awun siyasi describes sincerity and sincerity, partiality for the good and benefit of the public even though sometimes political party elites are more entangled in purely pragmatic interests. The main principles of fiqh siyasi such as the concepts of siyasa ‘adilah, haibah siyasasiyah, istishlah al-’ammah, siyasat al- dunya wa hirasat al-din must become a frame in building group communication.

ABSTRACTOur review and evaluation focus on the theoretical adequacy of spatial representations of voting and party competition based on survey data. Key assumptions underlying discussion are: (1) voting cannot be properly explained without regard to party competition and vice versa; (2) the type of input crucially determines the nature of the space produced; (3) there is a basic and far‐reaching distinction between pure policy‐spaces with untrammelled party movement, and other spaces used to represent voting and party competition; (4) explanation requires the use of variables conceptually and if possible temporally antecedent to voting choice. Judged by these criteria current dimensional analyses reveal severe technical limitations (Section 2) and formalizations of their associated hypotheses also reveal theoretical limitations (Section 3). Both prompt an examination and formalization of other approaches not yet common in dimensional analysis (Section 4), which enhance its explanatory potential and foster convergence with other research.

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small‐N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross‐cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert‐survey‐based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two‐level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models.

One of the prime incentives for this dissertation was the renewed interest in the role of party agency for the emergence and structuring of party systems that came up in the course of the discussions about the third wave of democracy and the concomitant challenges to the theoretical fundamentals of common party system theory. In addition, scholarly discourse on the third wave brought up again the question as to how the party system as an independent variable impacts on processes of democratic consolidation, national integration and socio-economic development.Trying to examine the role of party agency in this regard and to assess the role of the party system as the independent variable, the dissertation deals with two regional and temporal contexts and a political phenomenon pertinent to these contexts that most often have ranked as unique or paradoxical in scholarly assessments. Academic accounts of post-colonial India are interspersed with references to a deviant case of, or an empirical anomaly to, party system and democratic theory, and the conventional vocabulary used to describe post-apartheid South African political development frequently resorts to such terms as political miracle or societal exceptionalism. A similar confusion and vagueness prevails with regard to the specific configuration of a democratic and competitive party system characterised by the towering and prolonged dominance of one party. The study is an attempt to shed light on these contexts and their party systems by departing from the conventional �paths� of party system theory as well as from the relativist assessments of post-independent India (1947-67) and post-apartheid South Africa (1994-). This is done by means of a diachronic comparison of the two countries� party systems with a distinct focus on the role of party agency in the shaping and maintenance of one-party-dominance and on the role of the two party systems as independent variables. Chapter 1 deals with the conceptual, theoretical and methodological problems, incentives and questions inherent in the kind of cross-national and diachronic comparison attempted in this study. Chapter 2 gives a brief outline of the regional settings at the time democratic party competition was beginning to take shape, outlines the institutional boundaries within which the two party systems were/are located, looks at the main characteristics of the electorate in post-independent India and post-apartheid South Africa and �takes stock� of the two party systems in terms of a broad outline of the dominant party and the relevant opposition parties. The next three chapters present the bulk of the empirical analysis and deal with the emergence, working and functions/effects of one-party-dominance in India and South Africa respectively. Each chapter refers to the basic outline of the analytical framework depicted above and combines theoretical arguments with empirical, as well as historical, givens of the two party systems under examination. Whereas chapter 3 examines how the two party systems were �shaped from above�, i.e. how party agency helped to achieve the dominant position of the INC and ANC respectively, chapter 4 examines the mechanisms of control employed to maintain dominance and the mechanisms of party competition prevailing in the two regional contexts. Both chapters deal with the party agentive factors identified in the analytical framework as responsible for the achievement and maintenance of one-party-dominance in the form of short analytical narratives. The last of these three chapters (chapter 5) sums up and discusses the effects and (redefined) functions of party systems in changing societies and gives an account of how both countries� party systems have fared with regard to these effects and in terms of fulfilling these functions. Chapter 6 takes up the differences and similarities of the two regional contexts as they have emerged out of the preceding three chapters, relates the �lessons� of the Indian experience to the prospects of one-party-dominance in South Africa by means of a comparison and reassesses the two key theses of the study, namely that a) party agency and strategy were among the most decisive factors in the formation and development of the two regional contexts� systems of one-party-dominance and are, in general, crucial for party system formation and development (they are especially relevant in the shaping of one-party-dominance in changing societies); and that b) systems of one-party-dominance have a potentially (but not necessarily) benign effect on processes of democratisation, national integration and democratic development in the crucial period of changing societies� transition to democracy and democratic consolidation.

The fundamental process of politics is the aggregation of citizens' preferences into a collective—a social—choice. We develop, interpret, and explain non-technically in this expository essay the definitions, assumptions, and theorems of a mathematical model of one aggregative mechanism—the electoral process. This mechanism is conceptualized here as a multidimensional model of spatial competition in which competition consists of candidates affecting turnout and the electorate's perception of each candidate's positions, and in which the social choice is a policy package which the victorious candidate advocates.This approach, inaugurated by Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy, and falling under the general rubric “spatial models of party competition,” has been scrutinized, criticized, and reformulated. To clarify the accomplishments of this formulation we identify and discuss in section 2 the general democratic problem of ascertaining a social preference. We review critically in section 3 the definitions and assumptions of our model. We consider in sections 4 and 5 the logic of a competitive electoral equilibrium. We assume in section 4 that the electorate's preferences can be summarized and represented by a single function; the analysis in section 5 pertains to competition between two organizational structures or two opposed ideologies (i.e., when two functions are required to summarize and represent the electorate's preference). Finally, we suggest in section 6 a conceptualization of electoral processes which facilitates extending and empirically testing our model.

T _1H E FATE of the Republican or Democratic party is often said to depend on what the voters want, more than anything else. Even party transformations which are not reducible to electoral alignments are typically explained as reflections of shifting ties between the electorate and the party. Such developments as the rise in incumbency, the insensitivity of congressional elections to all but the most dramatic electoral landslides, the rise of technology-based campaigns, and weakened party leadership in modern legislatures have, at least in part, been attributed to a greater indifference by voters to parties. Over time there are reciprocal influences among these changing features of American politics. But to most observers the transformation begins with the rising popular disaffection toward parties. This widespread disaffection is also presumed to sustain many of the transformations. Such a focus is unavoidable, given the centrality of the electorate in any competitive parliamentary party system. But party systems are more than electoral coalitions more than voting patterns. Party systems also differ in terms of elite practices and organizational arrangements. These too may change. They may change because of electoral shifts. Any substantial reevaluation of the parties by the voters will have consequences for party elites and formal party structures. But changes in the way elites are recruited and in the machinery of party processes are not fully dependent on electoral support patterns. In any case party processes are analytically distinct from electoral patterns, and they are the concern of this paper. Two questions, one thematic and the other historical, provide the parameters of our inquiry. First, is there a relationship between how national convention delegates are chosen and the way those delegates think and act? Second, can recent differences in the character of convention delegates be explained by changes in the way they were chosen?1

The extent of differences in mass-elite political opinion and their theoretical implications have long been a source of interest to democratic theorists. Early classical democratic theorists saw education as the solution to mass-elite political differences, with an educated mass public displaying the same support for democratic institutions as their elite counterparts. By contrast, the later democratic elitists saw little that would reduce mass-elite differences. More recently, modern elite theorists have argued that elites are more polarized on political issues than mass publics, and that political conflict can be moderated by the ability of elites to downplay potentially divisive issues. Using Australia as a case study, these three approaches to mass-elite political differences are analyzed using a matched survey of voters and candidates conducted at the Australia 1987 federal election. The results show little support for education as a factor reducing mass-elite differences and point to the democratic elitists' argument that mass-elite political differences are fixed and enduring. In line with modern elite theories, the results also confirm the existence of more intense issue polarization among elites than among voters, and elites' ability to control the issues that reach the political agenda.

Under what conditions can populist leaders achieve success in different democratic systems? What opportunities do other political players have against autocratic intrigues? Are the formal institutions of the United States strong enough to resist President Trump’s violation of norms? These are the main questions of this volume, which collects various approaches to examine the impact of populism on liberal democracy. Since November 2016, one camp of scholars has interpreted Trump’s political rise and doings as a series of attempts to destroy liberal democracy, while another other camp is relatively sanguine thanks to its solid faith in the political institutions of the United States. As an important example of the former, Levitsky and Ziblatt’s (2018) book How Democracies Die focuses on the ongoing erosion of democratic norms, like “mutual toleration” between political competitors and “forbearance”, as a minimum level of cooperation. They argue that if unwritten rules are violated, the system of democracy will be undermined. The authors of this volume also express their concerns about political processes, but most of them belong to the latter, more optimistic group. According to Kurt Weyland and Raúl Madrid, President Trump can do serious damage in some policy areas (such as environmental and foreign policy). But he cannot achieve major institutional transformations and undermine American democracy. Despite the great virtue of the moderate and systematic approach of the book, there is a feeling that scientists in the two camps are still speaking past each other. Weyland and Madrid’s analysis propounds a cross-national framework for studying populists in government, which emphasizes the role of the political institutions and the parties but slightly underestimates the softer aspects of politics, such as democratic norms. As experts of democratic processes and populism in various regions, the authors aim to offer comparative lessons from Europe and Latin America, where populism was able to achieve significant political success. Unlike these regions, the United States’ political and social context does not favor populist actors. In the introduction, Weyland and Madrid determine four types of obstacles that prevent further expansion of populism. First, the separation of powers is linked to the federal and presidential system of government. Sovereign institutions and almost equal power relations between the two parties in Congress make it difficult to concentrate power. The next impediment to autocratic maneuvers is the stable and cohesive two-party system, which means for Trump not only a strong opposition but a decentralized Republican party, on which he has no direct influence. The massive polarization of American politics has helped the president seize power, but at the same time, it precludes him from further strengthening. Third, prevailing political and social cleavages, the percentage of ethnic groups and classes of the electorate are not favorable to a populist shift because there is no way for Trump to build a broad coalition. Finally, the absence of a crisis does not allow Trump to appear as a savior of the nation. Based on these barriers, Weyland and Madrid predict a democratic backlash “in which the leaders of both parties agree to enact reforms designed to prevent future violations of democratic norms” (p. 33). However, not all authors share this optimistic view, some of them more explicitly warn the dangers of the American populist phenomenon. Including the introduction and conclusion, the book consists of seven chapters. The individual studies highlight different aspects of the analytical framework presented above (e.g. party systems and strategies, social cleavages). The first three chapters provide comprehensive insights on populist cases from Latin America, East-Central and Western Europe and draw illuminating assumptions concerning Trump’s presidency. In the following, the focus is on the United States and the likely impacts on the public sphere of Trump's politics. We begin the examination of the book with the political context in which populist leaders gain power. The story of a populist ascension usually starts within a state of emergency: countries of Latin America and East-Central Europe were suffering a prolonged crisis when a political leader emerged and took power. As Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser examines, after the takeover, a personalistic “strongman” implemented economic reforms and at the same time promoted broad institutional transformations, and even introduced new constitutions (Chapter 1). As the cases of Fujimori and Chávez show, effective crisis management or increasing welfare expenditures can legitimize the efforts of populist presidents to govern without constraint. Among the countries studied the Netherlands and the United States are notable exceptions. Populists got power in developed democracies in the absence of a social crisis by bringing deeply divisive issues to the forefront such as immigration, Islam, and national identity. It is important to note that their impact on the political systems is more limited than the impact of populist counterparts in weaker democracies. How could populist leaders concentrate so much power in their hands? Kevin Deegan-Krause presents East-Central European ethno-nationalistic versions of populism where the concentration of power in parliamentary systems allowed for populist leaders to hijack democratic institutions (Chapter 2). Filling public institutions with functionaries, making uneven political conditions by legislation, state capture, eliminating independent media, intimidation of critics and opponents—are only a few devices from the toolbox to dismantle democratic pluralism. Weak institutions of Latin American and East-Central European democracies were unable to resist these radical transformations. The political structure of the United States is different because the system of checks and balances disperses power among political actors. This arrangement of horizontal accountability normally precludes that the President circumvents either the legislature or the jurisdiction. Trump has serious power of appointment, and he can violate democratic norms. But his position is weaker than the position of populist leaders in European parliamentary systems. Nevertheless, as Deegan-Krause and Bonikowski argue in their chapters, Trump’s transgressive style and the unpredictable consequences of his actions can erode formal institutions. Institutional weakness cannot be understood without the assessment of political power relations. As Orbán’s supermajority illustrates, a hegemonic populist actor can shape institutions in his image, thereby making them dysfunctional. Bertjan Verbeek and Andrej Zaslove show a different constellation, where the governing party is not in the dominant position (Chapter 3). The “parliamentary system of government forces the chief executive to forge a majority support coalition, which is not easy to do in Italy’s multi-party system” (p. 97) or in the Netherlands. Most European and Latin American populist leaders have risen in a fragmented party system with low legitimacy. Many can rely on a loyal, highly personalized party (e.g. Berlusconi, Mečiar, Orbán) which works as an effective machinery for obtaining political resources. In contrast, Trump came to power in a well-established two-party system with limited influence on the Republican Party. Moreover, there is an apparent cleavage inside the GOP between the old party elite, who lost its gatekeeping role, and the movement-based membership (Tea Party), who puts controversial cultural issues at the forefront. According to Kenneth Roberts, the high level of ideological and party polarization not only demoralizes, but it tends to politicize public institutions, and ultimately, it will erode the legitimacy of the system (Chapter 5). Escalating polarization and “movementization” led to radical changes in the electoral arena, because “they sorted voters into rival and increasingly hostile partisan camps, strengthening partisan identities” (p. 137). The social and ethnic structure of the United States prevents the formation of a broad social coalition for Trump. As Bart Bonikowski presents, the American president’s rhetorical style combines an exclusionary view of nationalism with anti-elite and authoritarian components which undoubtedly distorts political discourse and increases polarization (Chapter 4). This type of populism can be attractive for less-educated voters who make up a smaller part of the electorate, while in turn, the educated electorate and ethnic minorities stigmatized by Trump may also be mobilized to support Democrats. In this sharply divided political field, moralistic political views and antagonistic partisan identities reinforce social and political cleavages. According to Verbeek and Zaslove, one of the most important positive effects of populism on liberal democracy is to integrate those voices of those felt excluded. New issues and movements could reach out to disenchanted political orphans to rise above an outsider-leader who looks like “one of us”, but on the negative side, moralistic and militant rhetoric deepen further existing divisions and produce new ones. Polarization is one of the main motifs of the book that turns up chapter by chapter. As Madrid and Weyland state in the conclusion, “the high levels of political polarization in the United States pose a significant obstacle to efforts by Trump to obtain the electoral dominance that other populists have used to consolidate power and transform their countries’ political institutions” (p. 169). This antagonism in the US suitably explains why we should not be afraid of a rapid autocratic turn, but it is not reassuring when we think of the destruction of democratic norms. Formal institutions can function as fortresses (for a while), but as Roberts finds, the extent of democratic deterioration largely depends on the strategy of Republicans. Most likely the party leadership will stand by Trump, not only supporting him in legislation and appointments but also defending his anti-democratic behavior. So, is the glass of water half-full or half-empty? The answer depends on whether the emphasis is on the institutions or the action. The great value of this volume is that it presents different views and aspects of populism that the readers can compare with each other. It is highly recommended to scholars interested in the theories of populism and democracy.

The reasons pushing parties to politicize noneconomic dimensions of competition, and the consequences of this for the representation of public opinion, are badly understood in the party competition literature. This is a pressing research gap, especially given the recent and significant reactivation of territorial or center-periphery conflicts in Western Europe. In this article, we first argue that bad macroeconomic performance increases the incentives of incumbent parties to deviate the attention toward territorial conflicts in order to avoid electoral punishment. Second, we also argue that the opposite is true for public opinion: it is precisely during periods of bad economic performance and high economic concern, when the electorate moves away from territorial interests. The dynamic emerging from our findings is thus far from an ideal bottom-up representation: elites divert the attention toward territorial conflicts to mask periods of poor economic performance, which is precisely when public opinion is less interested in center-periphery issues. We validate our claims using text analysis of party attention in Spain and time series models covering four electoral cycles (1996–2011).

In this paper, a systematic procedure for controller design is proposed for a class of nonlinear underactuated systems (UAS), which are non-feedback linearizable but exhibit a controllable (flat) tangent linearization around an equilibrium point. Linear extended state observer (LESO)-based active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is shown to allow for trajectory tracking tasks involving significantly far excursions from the equilibrium point. This is due to local approximate estimation and compensation of the nonlinearities neglected by the linearization process. The approach is typically robust with respect to other endogenous and exogenous uncertainties and disturbances. The flatness of the tangent model provides a unique structural property that results in an advantageous low-order cascade decomposition of the LESO design, vastly improving the attenuation of noisy and peaking components found in the traditional full order, high gain, observer design. The popular ball and beam system (BBS) is taken as an application example. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in stabilization, as well as in perturbed trajectory tracking tasks.

Recent publications suggest that exclusively ethno-regional parties are as rare in sub-Saharan Africa as elsewhere. At the same time, the idea that ethnicity is a very special feature of African party politics persists. This article acknowledges the general relevance of ethnicity in party competition but emphasises the level at which it becomes important. It develops a micro-behavioural approach that pays particular attention to the strategic choices of party elites in order to supplement the dominant structuralist thinking in party research on Africa. An in-depth evaluation of detailed election data from Burkina Faso shows strategies that rely on personal proximity between the voter and the candidates influence the parties' success to a great extent. Parties maximise their chances of winning seats if they concentrate their limited resources on the home localities of leading party members. Hence, African party politics are less dependent on ethnic demography than is often implied but more open to change through elite behaviour.