Position, selective emphasis and framing

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 article explores changes in party competition and coalition-building patterns in the Czech Republic that underpinned its twin transition to democracy and a market economy in the 1990s and early 2000s. It charts the domestic political landscape that underlined the Czech Republic's evolution from a communist state to a modernising political economy under relatively benign global and regional conditions. A key objective is to map the new internal political space that led to the deepening of the Czech Republic's integration into the global economy as well as to explain the ways in which internationalisation has transformed that political space over time. Internationalisation relates to the expansion of global markets, institutions and norms, a process that gradually reduces the purely domestic aspects of politics. Although progressively more aspects of domestic life become responsive to external processes, internationalisation does not necessarily imply global convergence (a term closer to 'globalisation'), at least in the short to medium terms, when domestic responses tend to vary across political sectors, institutions and time. We refer to Europeanisation as a process of domestication of European Union (EU) policy directives, recommendations and standards by states acceding to the EU. Our interest is to evaluate the particular response of the Czech Republic, and the sources of that response. In particular, we seek to: (1) identify changes in patterns of party competition; (2) outline the implications of coalitional patterns for policies and outcomes regarding internationalisation more generally, and Europeanisation in particular; and (3) assess the challenges that Czech leaders face in the changed global political and economic environment of the early twenty-first century.

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.

Politics With(Out) Coase

To what extent are the social bases of political divisions in former communist societies consistent with those observed in Western democracies? This review critically examines theoretical and empirical work on social cleavages in East European, post-communist societies. It considers the initial wave of hypotheses concerning the structuring of party support in the region and examines empirical evidence on the patterning of the social bases of political preferences that have accrued subsequently, as well as the somewhat sparser attempts at explaining the processes through which these patterns emerge and change. It points to the omissions and weaknesses of the analyses so far conducted and concludes that the post-communist era has seen the emergence of social bases to politics that are like those in the West and that help shape variations in patterns of party competition in these societies.

This article examines changes in patterns of party competition in Japan and Taiwan following the introduction of mixed parallel electoral systems. National and district level election results demonstrate the consolidation of a two-party system in both countries. Differences in the speed and extent of this development are analyzed.

This paper examines the role of political competition and emotional rhetoric on congressional discourse during the Brazilian military dictatorship era. Leveraging historical archives of Congressional records, we curated a comprehensive database of parliamentary speeches from 1975 to 1986. Specifically, our analysis explores an exogenous political reform that increased party competition within the opposition during the redemocratization phase under the military regime. By combining theoretical frameworks drawn from the party competition literature with newly developed Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, our findings unveil a significant increase in the primary opposition partys use of predominantly negative emotional rhetoric. These results highlight the impact of political competition on nonpolicy attributes in party strategies and demonstrate how NLP methods can be integrated with models of party competition to study political speech.

This article lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the effects of political uncertainty on party development and strategies of mobilization and competition. Defining uncertainty as the imprecision with which political actors are able to predict future interactions, the authors identify three types of political uncertainty: regime uncertainty, economic uncertainty, and institutional uncertainty. They argue that political uncertainty is particularly high among developing democracies, contributing to puzzling empirical patterns of party development and competition in these contexts. Taking into account the role of uncertainty in the strategic decision making of party elites will help scholars better understand the differences between parties in advanced and developing democracies. But it can also help scholars understand the less dramatic differences between parties even within advanced democracies. The authors’ theoretical framework can be applied broadly since uncertainty informs the strategic choices of a much wider range of political actors.

Expert advice to a voting body

Fiscal competition over taxes and public inputs

Elections with limited information: A multidimensional model

In this article, we argue that voters use party positions on an issue dimension as a heuristic device to locate parties on other dimensions on which they have less information about. We confirm our argument by fielding two survey experiments in a context with two distinct issue dimensions: the left-right and national dimensions in Catalonia. We find that the position of a hypothetical (but plausible) candidate on a national dimension exerts a great deal of influence on where respondents locate him on the left-right dimension, as well as on a more narrowly-defined socioeconomic dimension, but that the left-right position does not affect the perceived placement on the national divide. This asymmetry can be partly explained by the different nature of these issue domains, and specifically by the distinct ability of the national dimension to activate social group cues that give rise to projection biases. These findings have important implications for our understanding of issue misperceptions and of the strategic choices available to parties in multidimensional policy spaces. The nature of the issue dimension could facilitate why some issue dimensions tend to function as cue givers and others as cue receivers. We discuss the implications of our findings in constraining the strategies available to parties in multidimensional contexts.

The paper lays the foundation for building a dynamic theory of the impact of process innovation upon competitive strategies. An innovation is tracked over two and a half decades to observe changing patterns in competition resulting from ongoing innovation development, emerging complementary technologies, and expanding use. The study finds that the innovation created competitive opportunities and threats for both firms that adopted it and those that did not.

What should major parties out of power do to win elections? To answer that question, we need to understand what these parties do to recapture political ascendancy and whether their actual behaviour differs from their optimal behaviour. In this article, we propose a systematic, replicable method of identifying the competitive strategies that American parties out of power have adopted in their pursuit of the presidency. We present a taxonomy of party strategies, which we operationalize by comparison of utility functions for hypothetical voters. Using both directional and proximity models of issue voting, we compute these utility functions for each presidential election from 1852 to 1996, controlling for variables that systematically affect voting, including economic conditions and incumbency. These results suggest that, contrary to the views of many political scientists and party activists, there is no single optimal strategy through which parties out of power can regain it. Rather, several competitive strategies offer similar prospects for electoral success.

Owning the issue agenda: Party strategies and vote choices in British elections