Electoral coordination and party system institutionalization

The topic of electoral volatility was not at the center of academic work in Latin America until Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully’s seminal 1995 work Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium). Preceding analyses primarily focused on explaining the breakdown of democratic politics in the region during the 1960s and 1970s. Conventional wisdom that departed from the classic work of Sartori in Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), maintained that stable party systems are crucial for the durability of democracies, focusing his attention on aspects such as party system polarization and fragmentation. Mainwaring and Scully shift the discussion, arguing that previous literature on the region neglected and inadequately conceptualized an equally important property of party systems: their level of their institutionalization. According to Mainwaring and Scully, party system institutionalization (PSI) is formed by four different dimensions. The first is stability in the patterns of party competition. Thus, institutionalized party systems are those in which actors develop expectations, orientations, and behavior based on the premise that practices and organizations will prevail into the foreseeable future. Mainwaring’s 2018 work, Party Systems in Latin America (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium), argues that this is the only relevant dimension in PSI, while considering that the other three are just underpinnings that facilitate it. So according to this work, an institutionalized party system is the one in which a stable set of parties interacts regularly in stable ways. This stability of interparty competition is traditionally measured with the Pedersen volatility index, a comprehensive measure of the net systematic shift in levels of electoral support for parties across elections. As volatility is negatively correlated with this important dimension of party system institutionalization, conventional wisdom holds that political representation deteriorates when there is persistent high volatility. To this debate, the well-cited 2006 article by Mainwaring and Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization” (cited in Electoral Volatility as an Expression of Party System Equilibrium), adds the idea that this lack of stability in the patterns of competition in party systems, measured by electoral volatility, is a typical characteristic of new and developing democracies. According to that study, the most important defining characteristic of party systems in less developed countries is captured by their lack of institutionalization, in other words, the amount of electoral volatility in their party systems. Since the publication of these three contributions, the debate on party system dynamics in the region has focused on cross-national levels of electoral volatility, their relationship with other indicators of party system stability, and their consequences for democratic quality and performance, while also broadening the analysis to Europe.

This chapter examines presidents’ appointment strategy in handling the party system surrounding them. The main prediction is that, facing stronger demands from opposition parties in more institutionalized party systems, presidents are more likely to appoint copartisan ministers, in order to enhance intraparty support. However, with greater dominance over less institutionalized party systems, presidents have greater leeway to choose nonpartisan ministers. The results of statistical analysis are overall in line with this prediction. While presidents are more likely to appoint ministers from the ruling party in more institutionalized party systems, they tend to choose nonpartisan ministers in less institutionalized party systems. Furthermore, an additional analysis of presidents’ portfolio allocation patterns shows that presidents are more likely to allocate cabinet posts in key policy areas to copartisans as party systems are more institutionalized.

This article is an overview of the types and level of institutionalization of party systems in seven young democracies in East and Southeast Asia. By applying Alan Siaroff’s typology of party systems, the analysis demonstrates that the party systems in Asia do not converge on a single format. The party systems under consideration also differ in the level of institutionalization. Party systems in Thailand, the Philippines and especially South Korea are stuck in an inchoate state. Even though there is considerable variation among the cases, the party systems in Indonesia, Mongolia and Taiwan can be considered as well institutionalized relative to the rest of Asia and moderately institutionalized when compared to Latin America. Furthermore, weak institutionalization correlates with volatile structures of party competition and cooperation in Thailand, whereas in South Korea and the Philippines party systems seem to be paradoxically stabilizing in a situation of protracted under-institutionalization, as both cases combine more or less stable party system patterns with weak institutionalization.

This article explains variation in levels of party system institutionalization in Asia by testing available data against several major hypotheses in the literature. The authors make three contributions to the literature on party system institutionalization. First, this study finds that historical legacies are a crucial variable affecting current levels of party system institutionalization. In particular, the immediate postwar period was the crucible from which institutionalized party systems in Asia developed. Second, the authors claim that for a significant number of institutionalized party systems, historical legacies are rooted in some element of authoritarianism, either as former authoritarian parties or as semidemocratic regimes. Third, precisely because authoritarianism has played an important role in the origins of institutionalized party systems, the authors argue that the concept of institutionalization needs to be strictly separated from the concept of democracy.

Political Party and Party System Institutionalisation in Southeast Asia: A Comparison of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand

Introduction The literature on party systems is composed of two related strands. Studies of emerging democracies typically ask whether the party system is institutionalized : are parties the primary legislative and electoral actors, with deep social roots and routinized patterns of interaction? Those of established democracies, on the other hand, are more concerned with whether the party system is in equilibrium : given status quo socioeconomic and political institutions, are the number of parties and ideological cleavages stable? As this volume’s editors propose, these two approaches are based on distinct conceptions about the role of parties in democracy. In a celebrated quote, Schattschneider (1942: 1) writes, “Political parties created modern democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.” In new democracies, parties are seen as organizations whose existence – before, during, and after democratization – is crucial but fragile. Scholars of established democracies, by contrast, assume that parties are here to stay and focus instead on more granular distinctions in the character of the party system. My goal in this chapter is to integrate these two literatures through the lens of party system institutionalization in Japan. Japan has had the longest history of party politics in Asia, but its functions and salience have varied over time. Parties emerged during the autocratic Meiji period, and they played a valuable role in political liberalization. Despite being derailed by military governments during World War II, parties quickly became a focal point of legislative politics during and after the U.S. occupation. They took on many of the organizational characteristics of their prewar predecessors, and the primary partisan cleavage in Japan, interregional fiscal redistribution, retained its salience throughout. In this sense, the Japanese party system has been institutionalized for a long period of time: legislative politics – both in the autocratic and democratic periods – was the province of political parties that represented urban versus rural socioeconomic divisions in society.

Previous research claims that there is a significant relationship between party systems and democracy. Although party system institutionalization is seen as a necessity for democratic consolidation, the effects of different party system characteristics on democracy are sharply contested. This study contributes to this debate through a systematic analysis of the relationship between two party system characteristics (party fractionalization and party polarization) and level of democracy. It is found that party polarization is positively related to the level of democracy in a country, i.e. the higher level of party polarization can produce the higher level of democracy. It is found, however, that there is no significant relationship between party fractionalization and level of democracy in a country.

Today, all of Latin America's presidential republics are at least nominal democracies, with the region's past experience with frequent military coups an increasingly distant memory. As a result, over the past two decades, many scholars concerned with the health of Latin America's presidential democracies have shifted their focus from those factors which contribute to the consolidation or breakdown of presidential democracies to those which influence the manner in which these democracies operate. In particular, scholars have endeavored to better understand the manner in which constitutional and partisan institutions strengthen or weaken the functioning of a country's democratic system. As the linchpin of a democratic system, political parties have a profound impact on the quality of democracy in a nation. This article highlights the case of Guatemala, where a very weakly institutionalized political party system has had a negative impact on the functioning of the country's presidential democracy. After underscoring Guatemala's status as one of Latin America's least institutionalized party systems via a cross-national analysis of the region's presidential democracies, the article analyzes in detail the limited institutionalization of the Guatemalan party system from a variety of vantage points ranging from the level of temporal volatility in voting patterns within the electorate to the amount of party switching among legislators.

Managed Competition and Voting Stability: Evidence from Russian Legislative Elections (2003-2011)

Organizational membership is one of the strongest, yet overlooked, predictors of vote buying across Latin America. We argue that this relationship is driven by the fact that politicians outsource some of their vote-buying efforts to interest associations. In contrast to the existing literature that focuses on party brokers, who are loyal to a single political machine, we introduce the concepts of organizational brokers, who represent interest associations and renegotiate ties to political parties between election cycles, and hybrid brokers, who split their loyalties between an interest association and a single political party. We illustrate the operation of these alternative broker types through case studies of street-vending organizations in an uninstitutionalized party system, Colombia, and peasant organizations in an institutionalized party system, Mexico. Attention to the role of brokers and the organizations that they represent has implications for political accountability, collective action, and the persistence of clientelism.

A simple model involving five concepts-social mobilization, party system institutionalization, turmoil, internal war, and elite conflict-is specified and its structural parameters are estimated for 28 black African nations. The model is fully reciprocal, involving each concept as a function of each of the others, and the concepts are measured for two time periods, 1960-1964 and 1965-1969. Two-stage least-squares regression is utilized to generate parameter estimates. The resulting model structure is evaluated according to (1) its correspondence with extant scholarly theorizing, (2) its ability to account for variance in the concepts, (3) the systematic character of the residual, or error, terms, and (4) its predictions for the future. The major conclusions are that: forms of conflict interrelate in complex ways and are not simply different aspects of a single phenomenon; conflict affects the mobilization of society and the development of political institutions; social mobilization has little, if any, effect on conflict; and, the institutionalization of party systems as linkages between publics and governments has a real impact on the mobilization of society and on the level of conflict in society.

This article traces the development of political polarization in Bangladesh since its 1971 war of independence. I show how polarization is elite-driven, hinging mostly on competing views of the foundation myth of the nation. One major political bloc has emerged that ties national identity tightly to religion (Islam), where the other bloc prefers a national identity tied to ethnicity and use of the Bengali language. I show how an underdeveloped party system has contributed to the resulting political and societal polarization that stems from this ideological divide, which was created by elites as they attempted to consolidate party power. Further, I make a case that the activities of the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)—established in 2010 to prosecute those who aided the Pakistani army in committing war crimes during the 1971 war—actually increased polarization and made it pernicious. Instead of healing the nation, the ICT exacerbated old political cleavages and instigated violence and social tension, making Bangladesh’s young democracy more unstable and careening.

This book provides a comprehensive empirical and theoretical analysis of the development of parties and party systems in Asia. The studies included advance a unique perspective in the literature by focusing on the concept of institutionalization and by analyzing parties in democratic settings as well as in authoritarian settings. The countries covered in the book range from East Asia to Southeast Asia to South Asia.

In this article, I explore the nature of party systems that have emerged in Africa in the wake of the adoption of democratic political systems after 1990. Although political parties help shape core democratic processes and institutions, parties and party systems have received relatively scant attention in the scholarly literature on democratization in Africa. I argue that party systems in most African countries are built on quite a different foundation from the one that undergirds both advanced industrial democracies and the theories about party systems generated by their experiences. I assess the strengths and limitations of the comparative literature on party system development in the light of African experiences, and argue for a more critical examination of concepts from that literature that have been widely used to assess the prospects and progress of party system institutionalization, including pluralism, system fragmentation and volatility.

Genetic and economic relationships between somatic cell count and clinical mastitis and their use in selection for mastitis resistance in dairy cattle