Party system types 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.

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

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 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.

This is the third of three chapters on political party systems and structures of competition, and presents an overall review. In the first section, Approaches to the Classification of Party Systems: A Review it looks at the principal existing approaches to the classification of party systems, pointing to both their limits and possibilities when applied within comparative analysis. It then goes on in the second section, Party Systems and the Competition for Government, to underline the importance of understanding the structure of competition in any given party system, since in many ways the whole notion of a party system is centred on the assumption that there exists a stable structure of competition. Structures of competition can be seen to be either closed (and predictable) or open (and unpredictable), depending on the patterns of alternation in government, the degree of innovation or persistence in processes of government formation, and the range of parties gaining access to government. The emphasis in the third section, Party Systems and Electoral Outcomes, is on the need to distinguish between processes of electoral change on the one hand, and changes in party systems and the structures of competition on the other, a distinction which also allows the possibility of situations in which electoral change is the consequence rather than the cause of party system change.

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.

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.

It can hardly be denied that the process of forming party system is long-term, complex and multidimensional one. The features of the “systemness”, e.g. stability, durability and predictability, may be achieved only after several years of democratic development. Thus, the analysis of the changes which take place in short period may give limited effects because of rapid changes of most frequently used quantitative parameters of the party system. From the other side, the comparison of the results of two or more consecutive parliamentary elections allows us to describe and to interpret some trends in political development. The aim of this article is to show the changes in the structure of political competition and in the number and size of the main parties, affecting the level of fractionalization and concentration of Polish party system between 2005 and 2007. By using traditional measures of stabilization of party systems on electoral, parliamentary and governmental arenas, I have tried to answer the question whether are there the symptoms of stabilization of Polish party system after 2005, or not. Comparing effective number of parties, the level of fractionalization and concentration, and the modes of forming the cabinet I have come to conclusion that, contrary to 2005 parliamentary election, there are some signs of party system stabilization in its two dimensions: representativeness and effectiveness. The structure of political scene seems to be more stable: no relevant party has appeared on it since 2001, the number of parties represented in the Sejm has diminished, the level of support for the strongest parties has increased and the electoral volatility has been lower in 2007 than in 2005. What is new after 2005 is that the structure of competition has changed. Two strong, conservative right-wing groupings have been main contenders and the post-communist Left is, for the time being, practically excluded from the struggle for power. The further stabilization of party system depends on capability to maintain this pattern of political competition.

A new theoretical development for examining the institutionalization of party systems is proposed in this article. We build on electoral coordination theories to disaggregate volatility into the vote transfers that occur between or towards parties that are in equilibrium (which we call endogenous volatility) and those that are not (exogenous volatility). The former captures accountability, and the latter reflects the number of voters who are not acting in accordance with the existing equilibrium in the party system. Exogenous volatility measures the institutionalization of party systems. We also show that endogenous volatility depends on government performance, while exogenous volatility is a function of institutional openness. The empirical evidence comes from an original data set that includes 448 electoral cycles in lower-house elections in 66 countries between 1977 and 2011.

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.

Party Systems

Recent democratic regressions and crises suggest democracy is at risk across East and Southeast Asia. One of the factors that can determine democratic stability are citizens’ attitudes. While previous research has concentrated on support for democracy-in-principle, this contribution argues that it is political trust, i.e. support for democracy-in-practice, which is crucial for democratic stability. For democracies to be stable, political trust should be high as well as rooted in long-term factors like liberal democratic value orientations or social trust to protect it from short-term fluctuations following economic crises or political scandals. This contribution therefore examines not only the current levels and development of political trust but also whether it is influenced more by long-term factors (liberal democratic value orientations, social trust) or short-term factors (economic performance evaluations, incumbent support). The empirical analysis shows political trust in five East and Southeast Asian democracies (Indonesia, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan) to be mostly mediocre and primarily dependent on economic performance evaluations and incumbent support. Among the five democracies, citizens in Japan appear most resilient to democratic regressions; on the other hand, Taiwanese democracy seems least equipped to master future crises.

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.

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.