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Several states have attempted to rein in or eliminate political parties through a series of reforms. This paper details several such efforts, ranging from campaign finance reform to nonpartisan elections, designed to reduce partisanship or constrain the power of political parties. Not only have these reforms ultimately failed, but they have imposed other costs on the political system that have generally worked against reformers' stated goals. This paper describes some of these costs and concludes with recommendations for addressing a political system dominated by powerful but unpopular parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New parties have been joining their established counterparts in parliament for decades now. While it has been ascertained why these parties have been able to cross legislative thresholds, few studies so far have scrutinized the determinants of the newcomers' survival in a systematic way. It is this paper's ambition to remedy that. The survival chances of new political parties in advanced democracies are determined, this paper argues, by four sets of variables: origin variables (circumstances of a party's formation, where do these parties come from), party family (does the new party represent an as yet unpoliticised issue or unrepresented ideology in the party system), institutional access (does the party participate in the executive), and systemic variables pertaining to the electoral gatekeepers (how proportional is the electoral system the party competes in). Not just the occurrence of events as such is important; this paper pays particular attention to the timing of these events. To this end, event history (or survival) analysis is the method applied to study the determinants of newly elected parties' survival chances in advanced democracies. A new dataset was created for this purpose containing 150 parties in 16 countries. The results partly confirm earlier research: having roots in civil society organisations and presenting an ideologically distinct profile are beneficial to new party survival, as is participation in the executive. The electoral system variables, however, did not appear to have an effect. Adding to the literature, type of formation is shown to have a significant impact on the outcome, pointing towards the need for more attention to parties-as-organisations. The more parliamentary cycles a party stays represented, the higher its chances for survival. However, the effects of the origin variables show that new legislative party survival is not just a matter of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the incentives of party activists to become involved in the party life. In the last decades, the research on party activism has developed several and relevant works that shed light to the topic. However, a strong division from the beginning between the American and European approaches has limited the scope of their results, eroding the potential of the comparative analysis between both partisan worlds. Our paper is an attempt to overcome this lack. Using data from party activists in two Spanish political parties, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the Popular Party (PP), and the California Democratic Party (CADEM), we propose two main hypothesis: a) the different types of party membership (more formal in Europe than in the US) affects the incentives of party activists to become involved; b) these incentives influences differently in US and Europe to the degree of internal activism. We considered two different typologies to measure incentives proposed by J.Q. Wilson and A. Panebianco. The empirical analysis employs data from people attending the recent party conventions and congresses in those parties. Our results are somewhat mixed overall. Although some significant differences in incentives and activism arises, the general comparison shows that party activists are not so different as the traditional American 'exceptionalism' and European 'regionalism' have assumed so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the partisanship of independent voters in Japan is presented which was prepared for presentation at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The paper discusses topics including the decision-making of independents, a comparison of the determinants of vote swings before and after electoral reform, and the electoral dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party during 1955-1993.

A conference paper about the fall of Labour governments in Great Britain is presented which was discussed at the American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting, in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2012. The paper discusses topics including the degeneration and fall of governments and the book "How Tory Governments Fall: The Tory Party in Power since 1783, " edited by Anthony Seldon.

A conference paper about constitutional views is presented which was prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, from August 30-September 2, 2012. The paper discusses topics including budget battles, impasses between the U.S. Congress and the White House, and the subject of divided government.

A conference paper about the 19th century rhetorical presidency in the U.S. is presented which was prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association's Annual Conference from August 30-September 2, 2012, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The paper discusses several topics including the mode, content, audience and frequency of popular presidential communication, political parties, and the change in presidential rhetoric in the nineteenth century.

The literatures on political parties and social movements have rarely intersected. This is curious, given the obvious links between some social movements and the political parties they produce (McAdam/Tarrow 2010). One key question that remains unanswered is why some parties that originate in social movements are better at generating support at the ballot box than others. This paper examines the electoral success of a prominent group of movement parties - West European Green Parties. In adding to previous work that explained Green Party success by focusing on the social structure of the electorate and the political opportunity structure (e.g. Kitschelt 1988; Dolezal 2010), this paper explicitly takes the behavior of the Green Parties themselves into account. I hypothesize that the electoral success of movement parties is due to the substantive (i.e. policy) gains as well as the procedural gains (i.e. government participation) that they are able to achieve (Kitschelt 2006). Between these two types of gains, delivering on the substantive dimension should be the key factor. Having their origin in social movements, these parties are likely to attract supporters that evaluate parties mainly on programmatic terms and their success in delivering policy change. However, the effect of substantive gains will interact with procedural gains, since government participation is the main opportunity to access the means for accomplishing programmatic goals. Parties that are able to deliver on both dimensions are expected to be most successful, while parties that fail in providing substantive gains but at the same time enjoy the payoffs of procedural gains should be the least successful. Based on a dataset of Green Party success for 18 parties in 14 countries spanning the 1973-2007 period and 93 elections for a total of 107 observations, I test these hypotheses with the help of a pooled cross-sectional time series dataset. The empirical analysis finds clear support for the hypotheses. The most successful Green Parties deliver substantive gains while being part of the government and parties that provide procedural without substantive gains are electorally heavily punished. That is, the results clearly identify Green Parties as programmatic parties and demonstrate that policy-seeking rather than office- or vote-seeking behavior, which many models in the Downsian tradition assume, is the key to electoral success for these parties. The analysis also reveals that governments without Green Party participation that deliver on the latter's policy demands are not successful in limiting the electoral appeal of Green Parties and that the programmatic dimension that is central to Green Party success is different from the traditional focus on material welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There can be no denying the profound changes in U.S. campaign financing since the U.S. Supreme Court's January 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Nevertheless, there has been confusion about the extent to which the decision should be seen as the primary explanation for what has occurred. This paper begin to disentangle the strands through an analysis of independent expenditures in elections at the state level in 2006 and 2010 from new data gathered and supplied by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. The paper's findings tend not to support some key claims being made on both sides of the contemporary political debate surrounding independent spending. First, contrary to statements made by some of the decision's critics, we find that Citizens' United itself did not have a noticeable direct effect on independent spending in 2010 - although this could, of course, change. Increases were more or less comparable in states that prohibited corporate spending before the decision and those that did not. However, the paper also addresses one of the claims normally associated with the opposite side of the political spectrum. It is often said that limiting contributions to the political parties (ending "soft money") has displaced party money, increasing independent spending by unaccountable non-party organizations. We find that party contribution limits have indeed displaced some party independent spending in the years and states we studied. However, the displacement has been not been toward ideological groups, umbrella organizations or vaguely defined party networks, but rather toward national organizations of state elected and party officials who are acting as party organizations in all but the most formal sense of that term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of the paper is to analyse party manifestos that are conducted for national parliamentary elections in Slovenia, a country that is recognised as one of the most firmly established democracies in the Central-Eastern European (CEE) post-socialist region. Based on the already gained project results, this paper provides answers about the following characteristics of the manifestos: a) "what" - the structure (e.g. size and types) and content (the contextual share of policy domains); b) "why" - the main purposes of their (non) production and (non) availability; and c) "how" - the methods and processes of producing the election programmes. We believe that the analysis provides answers about the significance of the content, structure and production of the election programmes in the case of the smaller and younger democracies in Europe. Various types of data are collected and analysed in this regard, including election results, comparative content analyses of the election programmes, semi-structured interviews with political parties' secretaries general and media editors, the analysis of the main television political parties' debates, public opinion polls, and evidence from the stakeholder meeting with the campaign grass-roots managers and organisers. Data and results concerns are covered mostly over the last decade (i.e. the 2004 and 2008 elections and the national parliamentary first-ever early elections in 2011), but including the early period of Slovene democracy (e.g. from 1990 to 2003) as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the scope of the "Governmental Politics Model" (GPM). Proponents of the GPM, which has been predominantly used in the context of the U.S. presidential system, claim that it is also applicable to parliamentary systems of government. However, this claim has seen hardly any rigorous testing. This paper argues that parliamentary systems feature certain characteristics that should be conducive to the emergence of "governmental politics" --understood as bargaining processes among governmental actors whose policy preferences are informed primarily by their position in government--and thus suggest the applicability of the GPM. Those factors are the formation of coalition governments and the comparatively weaker position of the head of government. The 2008 decision of the German grand coalition government to deploy armed forces to the European Union-led anti-piracy operation "Atalanta"--which saw extensive "pulling and hauling" among the foreign and the defense ministers, and which can be characterized as an unintended compromise solution- serves as an illustrative case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how the survival chances of a dominant-party regime are affcted by its economic performance. I test this relationship using two economic datasets and three different operationalizations of economic performance that aim to capture short- and mid-term trends, as well as drastic variations with respect to the average growth of the previous years. In contrast to previous studies, the evidence used in this paper (it covers more than 65 dominant-party regimes during the period 1950-2009) strongly suggest that these type of autocracies have very good chances to stay in power even after experiencing sustained periods of bad economic results. For instance, even when a dominant-party regime experiences an average economic growth of -3% over a five-years period (a terrible economic situation registered in less than 6% of the observations), its chances of ending are only 2.6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the assumption that parties and candidates with access to material benefits will distribute goods to low-income voters in exchange for electoral support. I claim that a candidate's capacity to turn to clientelistic strategies of mobilization is a necessary, but insufficient condition to explain his or her decision to use clientelism. Besides having access to material resources and a network of party activist to distribute goods to potential voters, candidates have to prefer to use clientelism to mobilize voters. In studying candidates' capacities and preferences to use clientelism, this paper provides an account of the microfoundations of political clientelism in Argentina. By combining quantitative and qualitative data at the municipal level, I find that an almost equal number of pragmatist candidates, who are capable of using clientelism prefer to turn to these strategies, and idealist candidates who, although capable, prefer not to use clientelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do specific electoral systems and executive-legislative arrangements make it more likely that parties compete for votes by offering citizens the contingent provision of targeted, private and particularistic goods or the non-contingent production of large-scale club or collective goods? Based on an original dataset scoring parties' efforts to engage in clientelistic and/or programmatic linkage with citizens, the paper assesses a variety of institutional hypotheses. It finds that presidentialism and district magnitude moderately affect clientelistic partisan effort, as long as no regional geographical controls are deployed. The influence of institutions on parties' efforts to mobilize programmatic appeals is more elusive. Overall, the impact of democratic institutions cannot be discounted, but it is overwhelmed by socio-economic forces and the cumulative experience of citizens and politicians with democracy. A variety of research trajectories is identified to push the research agenda beyond this preliminary paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 2007 Democratic presidential race as a case study of a nomination contest where the party network's influence on the race was not clear-cut. This paper identifies donors to the Democratic presidential contenders in 2007 and groups them based on their prior (2006) donation patterns. It finds, in preliminary analysis, that Clinton benefitted from more contributions from large repeat donors than Obama did, but only by a narrow margin. The Democratic donor pool was quite split in 2007, and a plurality of donors to the Democratic party committees in 2006 actually gave to Obama rather than Clinton. This paints a picture of a divided Democratic party establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about dominant party regimes in Canada and Australia is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the claim that single-party dominance is less frequent in the Anglo-Saxon world and the rise and fall of dominant party regimes.

A conference paper about the 2003 general elections in Ontario is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, in Seattle, Washington, from September 1-4, 2011. The paper discusses topics including the role of political parties in Canada in supplying candidates with resources and intra-party transfers between Ontario provincial parliamentary candidates.

Access to food is essential to ensuring an adequate standard of living; it is one of the most basic of all economic rights. Yet around the world, millions of people continue to starve outright, or to suffer hunger-related disease and life challenges. Food insecurity is disproportionately associated with countries that are politically unstable or wracked by regional strife; indeed, famine is an intrinsically political phenomenon. That is why hunger in India -- the world's most populous democracy -- is paradoxical. This paper "maps" the prevalence of hunger in India, demonstrating variation not only in the depth of hunger by state but also showing variation in the level of social protest around food issues from 1990-2010. Drawing on two original datasets created for this project, I demonstrate: 1) variation in the use of public interest law (PIL) as an advocacy strategy; and 2) variation in the level and form of other types of protest (e.g., street protests and farmer suicides) during this period. I also point to the recent shift of hunger issues into party politics and argue that the evolution of advocacy strategies by the "Right to Food" movement in India -- a shift from the courts to the street to party politics -- challenges dominant interpretations of social mobilization around "interest-based" issues in that country (Katzenstein, Kothari and Mehta 2001). The paper aims to set the stage for a field-level study of local activism that could inform broader theorizing on the interplay between law, institutions, and grassroots networks in the process of realizing economic rights such as the right to food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the political parties in Western Balkan states is presented which is prepared for presentation at the 2011 Anuual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington. The paper focuses on topics including the case of Serbian political parties, a consensus on qualifying for European Union (EU) membership in Serbia, and domestic candidates in EU-eligible states.

This paper analyzes strategic voting in the 2010 UK General Election using survey data from the 2010 British Election Study (BES). The paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we use survey responses to generate respondent-level preference orderings among the three major parties. Using these preference orderings, we simulate the 2010 election as if it were a national election using four different electoral systems: pairwise comparisons (in search of a Condorcet winner), the Borda count, the alternative vote, and Coombs' method. We found that the Lib-Dems were the Condorcet winner and, as the compromise party, won under every tested method except the alternative vote (which they advocated). In the second part, we empirically test a rational-choice model of strategic voting. The model predicts that voters should take into accounted the expected utility of their vote and vote for their second-most preferred candidate if their first choice is clearly in third place in terms of likelihood of winning. The 2010 election offers a compelling case study because of the strong performance of the Lib- Dems, who traditionally finished a distant third. Our statistical analysis of the BES survey data provides support for our theoretical model of strategic voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do political parties engage in religious mobilization in some environments but not in others? This paper develops a cross-national comparison of patterns of religious mobilization in Sunni- and Catholic-majority countries, with an emphasis on the cases of Turkey and Mexico. In many Sunni-majority contexts, political parties maintain strong and explicit ties to religious communities, relying on their mobilization to compete in what are often hostile political environments. In Catholic environments, political parties generally avoid making claims about religious doctrine or forming entangling alliances with sectarian movements, with candidates seeking to court religious voters doing so primarily through generic appeals to religious values and identities. What explains these differences in religious mobilization in the political arena? I argue that the crucial factors that explain this historically contingent divergence are pattern of secular regulations, electoral laws, and religious communities. The paper uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods to explore and evaluate this argument. First, relying on an original dataset covering 198 elections in 65 countries from 1990-2002, I examine the current distribution of different forms of religious mobilization across Sunni-majority and Catholic-majority countries. Then, I compare the evolution of religious parties in two critical, most-similar cases: Turkey and Mexico. Despite their analogous patterns of religious mobilization early in the 20th century and their comparable socio-economic and geopolitical situations, crucial differences in the evolution of their religious communities and secularist institutions expanded sectarian mobilization in Turkey while depressing it in Mexico. By exploring the patterns of religious mobilization across two world religions and critical country-cases, this paper highlights the contingent quality of religions impact on politics in general and electoral competition in particular [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although an increasingly large body of literature has examined rising party polarization in Congress, most of the empirical work has focused on ideological polarization between members. Less work has explicitly examined the resulting levels of bipartisan cooperation or the relationship between individual preferences and party strategy. This paper takes on both of these tasks, examining the joint roles of preferences and party strategy in the declining levels of bipartisanship in Congress. By breaking apart congressional behavior into cosponsorship coalitions and roll call votes, this paper suggests that although partisan behavior has increased substantially in roll call votes, the same is not true for bill cosponsorship coalitions. These divergent patterns can be reconciled by taking into consideration congressional agenda control and providing a theoretical perspective on party goals as they relate to partisanship and bipartisanship. As congressional parties sorted, partisan legislation became increasingly likely to face a roll call vote whereas bipartisan legislation became less likely to face a roll call vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EU integration challenges the fundamental right of sovereignty traditionally claimed by European nation-states. This ongoing transformation continues to cause a variety of reactions within EU Member States. At the extremes these have included approval by cosmopolitans who see it as a step towards a more universal model of citizenship, but a rejection by diehard nationalists who perceive the shift as an onslaught on the national community's right to self-determination. Between these two poles a wide spectrum of other positions and dispositions endorse or reject the goals of EU integration to varying degrees. Conceptualised within a historical-institutionalist framework, the central research question addressed by the paper is a comparative one. It asks why political parties which share similar topographical locations within their respective national party systems, and share membership of the same, or closely neighbouring, political families in Von Beyme's sense, often show significantly different alignments on EU integration, depending on policy sector and point in time - although different internal currents within the parties may share more common ground with their foreign counterparts than with other currents in their own parties. The paper examines four conservative parties, two of which - the British Conservative Party, the French Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) - are located within Western European national political environments, while the two others - the Polish Platforma Obywatelska (PO), and Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS) - operate within the same Central European post-communist state. All of the parties have recently been, or are currently, parties of government. While it is self-evident that ideology and policy do not exist in a vacuum, but in constant interplay with other institutional and contextual factors, these other variables are largely bracketed out for present analytical purposes in order to concentrate on the evolving ideologypolicy interface in its own right. In this meso-level analysis the focus is on the relationship between core ideological values, ideologically coloured understandings of national and international environments, general posture towards EU integration, and positions on specific institutions, processes or policies, in particular those implying a shift in the understanding of rights of states and nations. The approach to ideology applied here uses a qualitative reading of a range of more theoretical texts (books, articles, transcribed speeches, interviews) as well as manifestos from the period since 2001. The choice of this period is productive, both in terms of EU developments (introduction of the Euro, constitutional debates, Lisbon Treaty) and of party development in the three countries (changes of party leadership and of government in Britain and France, founding of the parties in Poland and successive accession to power). The patterns of variation and similarity between the parties revealed even at this intermediate level of detail are a valuable complement to the necessarily reductive categorisations and generalisations drawn in macro-level comparative studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the cross-national comparability of expert judgments of party positions. So far, most work in this area has focused on the cross-validation of different data sources with which party positions can be measured. This paper takes a novel approach and brings to bear data from a survey experiment performed in the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) designed to assess the degree to which experts in different countries evaluate party positions using a common metric. The 2010 wave of CHES includes a section composed of a battery of experimental vignettes. This series of policy statements by hypothetical political parties was designed to tap variation on questions pertaining to economic left-right, European integration, and "new politics." Experts from all countries included in the survey place these same hypothetical parties on a series of eleven point scales, which allow analysts to explore the extent to which experts in different cultures and countries view the same hypothetical party through a similar conceptual framework. The vignette data can also help to uncover and correct for any expert or country-specific biases that may exist. This paper presents preliminary evidence of how much cross-national difference in expert context explains variation in differences between party placements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a new Unified Database of Soviet Public Opinion with more than 210,000 respondents to eighty-seven public opinion surveys undertaken in the Soviet Union between January 1989 and February 1992. Using these and other data, the paper considers the role of public opinion and political mobilization in the Soviet Union during the crucial transition period. We conclude that the Baltic Republics were different from every other Union Republic, even from the Republics in the Caucasus which shared some of the same trends in terms of demonstrations, but which diverged in important ways with respect to the goal of the demonstrations, trust in the Communist Party, and membership in the CPSU. Demonstrations in the Caucasus were more concerned with ethno-territorial issues than with secession, and respondents in the Caucasus were somewhat more trusting of the Communist Party. Perhaps most importantly, they did not leave the CPSU until much later than those in the Baltics. Although there was some political mobilization in Russia and Ukraine, it was much more modest than in the Baltics and the Caucasus (and Moldavia). The political outcomes in these places appear to have been much more affected by changes in public opinion than in the impacts of demonstrations and informal group activity. People in Russia and Ukraine became increasingly distrustful of the Communist Party from 1989 to 1991, but they lagged in this feeling compared to those in the Baltics and the Caucasus, and they did not start leaving the CPSU in appreciable numbers until 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do bad politicians thrive in electoral democracies? This paper explores the conditions under which political parties select candidates with serious criminal records to contest elections in India, the world's largest democracy. I argue that indicted politicians benefit parties when they can exploit social divisions to build a compelling case that their criminality gives them an edge in serving the interests of their fellow co-ethnics. In particular, I hypothesize that criminality is likely to be lower in constituencies constitutionally reserved for protected minorities and in indirectly elected bodies, where caste divisions are less salient. In reserved constituencies, however, the salience of caste is likely to vary with the size of the minority population. Using a unique dataset drawn from candidate affidavits, this paper finds support for these hypotheses. This paper serves as a reminder that the "criminalization" of politics is not a monolithic phenomenon, but is highly contextual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper will investigate the varying political opportunities in princely states and provinces under direct colonial rule for peasant movements to transition into electorally successful political parties in India. Contemporary states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh had comparable peasant movements during the colonial era. However the Left was elected into power only in Kerala and not in Andhra Pradesh. A historical examination of peasant movements and electoral outcomes reveals that states which had areas under British provinces and progressive rulers had successful Left parties elected into power, for example Kerala. But, states which were formed with parts of British provinces and patrimonial rulers offered fewer chances for the Left party to be elected into power despite a history of peasant movements. The mechanism through which political opportunity structure influences electoral success of Left parties is organizational strength of the peasant movements. The organizational bases of peasant movements serve as networks for campaigning, raising funds for campaigns, providing patronage at the local level and mobilizing voters. In this paper I present evidence that the organizational strength of peasant movement and chances for the peasant movement to transition into an electorally successful Left party depends on the nature of the colonial rule, direct or indirect - progressive or patrimonial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines possible party strategies in response to underlying changes in traditional cleavage structures. Specifically, the paper explores how parties originally tied to Rokkan-ian cleavage structures have adapted their programmatic supply in response to continually disappearing class-based constituencies and the rising salience of new issues linked to globalization. The paper proposes that parties can choose between two strategies: obscuring their programmatic supply in an attempt to reach constituencies that have more heterogeneous policy interests or to diversify their manifestos in order to take up new issues while retaining older ones. Using a new measure of programmatic clarity, the analysis includes two time series cross section models-one for each strategy. The data are from the Manifesto Project database and cover the period from 1960-2010. The findings are mixed but do make two important contributions to the literature: first, that traditional center parties on the left and right adopt different strategies with left parties choosing to obscure their manifesto positions while right parties choose higher clarity. Additionally, the findings suggest that, regardless of whether they are class based or not, parties facing a declining vote shares and decreasing levels of voter turnout, are more likely to obscure their manifesto positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a model of electoral targeting in multi-party systems. Seat-share maximizing parties can use policy transfers to win votes by 1) converting undecided voters, 2) mobilizing loyal supporters, or 3) lowering the turn-out of voters loyal to other parties. The model allows for the empirical estimation of a measure of voting power, which is the expected increase in seat-share for a dollar spend on a group. Using European Election Studies data for 15 European countries between 1989 and 2004, the voting power of different income, education, gender, age and religious groups are calculated with respect to parties, legislatures and governments. Amongst the findings are that high income groups tend to have more power over governments than middle or poor income groups and that availability for conversion is a more important source of group power than availability for mobilization. The paper offers the study of politics a new approach to analyzing political inequality and a new variable to explain change in government policy. For better or worse, the model also provides practioning politicians with a guide to optimizing their electoral strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given its recent development of becoming a fully fledged legislature in EU politics, the European Parliament is increasingly compared to the USA House of Representatives. At the same time, a lot of scholars that have analyzed the evolution of party cohesion within the European Parliament (see, for instance, Hix et al. 2007) do not refer to the American example. This is surprising since there is a long tradition on research looking at party cohesion - socalled party votes - within the House of Representatives (see, for instance, Roberts and Smith 2003). This paper wants to bridge this gap by comparing and explaining figures of party cohesion between the USA House of Representatives and the EU European Parliament. The analysis of party or roll-call votes is part of a broader research agenda that deals with the question whether the European Parliament is developing towards a legislature such as the House of Representatives or, in other words, whether the European Parliament can be better understood by comparing it to the USA House of Representatives. Some comparative research on these two legislatures has already been done. Kreppel (2006), for instance, compared the European Parliament with the House of Representatives by looking at three emblematic features of the House: its legislative power, the role of committees and bipartisan voting. Despite the notion of 'American exceptionalism' that is often referred to when analyzing national legislatures of EU member states, her analysis demonstrated that the European Parliament shares these characteristics to a large degree. This paper will examine whether this also applies to party cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes childcare policy as a prototypical example of new social risk policies and explores whether partisan differences have had an impact on the recent expansion of public childcare expenditures. It argues that political parties contend with each other over human capital investment and female labor force participation policy on the social-value dimension as well as the redistributive dimension, and that each political party has different policy preferences and strategies for women's employment and childcare policy according to its position on the two-dimensional party competition space. That is, a left-libertarian party prefers activation, a left-authoritarian party dualism, a right-libertarian party workfare, and a right-authoritarian party dualism or workfare. Out of these three strategies, only activation is favorable to the expansion of public childcare expenditures. Assuming that different party policies have distinct impact on public childcare policy, this paper hypothesizes that a government policy position-composed of the governing parties' policy position-and its policy distance among them on the two-dimensional policy space affect changes in public spending for childcare services. Through analysis of the pooled time-series-and-cross-section data of 18 OECD countries from 1980 until 2005 using multivariate regression methods, this paper reveals that a government left-right policy position interacts with its libertarian-authoritarian policy position, and that a left-libertarian government raises its budget for childcare services while a left-authoritarian government does not. In addition, this paper also demonstrates that heterogeneous policy preferences among veto players in the twodimensional policy space impede the expansion of public spending for childcare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the electoral effects of corruption allegation in parliamentary electoral campaigns in Europe 1983-2007. Firstly, the paper examines the individual parties' electoral performances and secondly the survival rate of the governments. The results show firstly that parties that accuse their opponents for being corrupt are much more successful than parties that focus on other issues, under control for the position of the party (incumbent or in opposition) and for the actual level of corruption and secondly that governments tend to fall much more frequently when facing corruption charges, again under control for the level of corruption. The analysis also reveals that corruption scandals that are not politicized, i.e. brought up by a political party during the electoral campaign, have a negligent effect on governmental survival rate. Only when the issue is politicized does it have an impact. It thus seems that the politicization of political corruption has an independent effect on the electoral outcome and to a higher extent than previous research suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is one of the first to systematically identify the relative influence of ethnic identity, campaign strategies of political parties' candidates , poverty, evaluations of public and private goods performance in making citizens turning new democracies into swing voters. It brings together three of the major research streams in comparative politics - the literatures on development, democracy, and political clientelism - to properly situate the swing voter as - potentially - the pivotal instrument of democracy and antidote to the public goods deficit in failed developmental states. The paper contributes to the study of voting behavior by providing a more adequate operationalization of the propensity to swing vote as multi-component outcome and by introducing a unique empirical design analyzing survey data conduced ahead of Ghana's critical 2008 elections with count regression models. . Our analyses confirm theoretical expectations that constituency competitiveness, poverty, education, and access to information all impact the likelihood of swing voting. More critically, the paper shows the importance of voter evaluations of public and collective goods provision by incumbent politicians on vote choice volatility and in doing so challenges the empirical consensus on the limited retrospection of the African voter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in theorizing and empirical research concerning democratic accountability mechanisms such as programmatic appeals and clientelism, but a relative lack of readily comparable cross-national data. This paper addresses this empirical gap by first developing party and system-level indices of programmatic structuration based on a new global expert survey encompassing 88 polities. These indices are based on the cohesion, polarization and salience of positions taken by parties on different issues in each country. Second, the programmatic measures developed are subjected to various tests of construct validity through comparing the relationship with alternative programmatic measures from the survey, as well as exploring their relationship with economic development. Finally, the paper compares politicians' efforts to project programmatic appeals with other appeals politicians may deploy to attract voters and establish relations of accountability, and suggests future avenues for the refinement of these measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the occurrence of oppositional pre-electoral coalitions in competitive authoritarian regimes. Using a unique database of 115 elections in 57 countries, during the period 1989-2004, the paper argues that oppositional parties' potential for policy- as well as office-gains affects the willingness to form coalitions. In this way coalition behaviour under authoritarianism is similar to the same process in consolidated democracy. However, the lack of a clear policy dimension in many electoral authoritarian regimes, and the fact that the electoral arena is tilted in favour of the incumbent regime, makes oppositional coalitions rare in this context. The article show the first statistical evidence that coalitions are more probable when an oppositional victory seems realistic. When incumbent economic performance is poor and when elections are preceded by political liberalization, coalitions are more likely to be formed. Similarly, by utilizing unique data on party policy preferences, the study shows that ideologically coherent oppositional parties with distinctive policy differences compared to the incumbent government are more likely to coordinate their campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2000s, Britain's political communication environment has undergone rapid change. During the 2010 election campaign, television continued its dominance as the most important medium through which the British public acquires its political information, as Britain's first ever live televised party leaders' debates received saturation coverage for almost the entire campaign. But over the previous half-decade the growing mainstream popularity of the internet has started to undermine some broadcast-era assumptions regarding strategic news management, both in government, and on the campaign trail. This new, hybrid, environment, one characterised by a complex intermingling of the "old", the "new", and the "renewed" creates particular uncertainty for "old" news media, established politicians, and political parties. The old media environment, dominated by media and political elites working in traditional television, radio, and newspapers, remains significant for British politics, but politics is increasingly mediated online. The internet is creating a more open, fluid political opportunity structure - one that increasingly enables the British public to exert its influence and hold politicians and media to account. The origins of this current hybridity can be traced back over the last couple of decades, but since the mid-2000s, the pace of change has quickened, and the stage on which the drama of British politics unfolds is in the process of being redesigned, partly by political and media elites, and partly by ordinary citizens. This paper provides an overview of this changing political communication environment and its consequences for British politics. The first part draws on the latest data to illustrate key developments in new media usage in Britain. Part two explores the way in which news, so central to an informed citizenry, is changing. Part three examines the parties' news management strategies and how they have sought to use a blend of old and new media to boost their popularity. The paper then moves on to explore the role of media during the momentous 2010 general election campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes research recently completed for a forthcoming book, Party Systems and Country Governance. The paper's presentation parallels chapters in the forthcoming book. It provides thumbnail sketches of the first five chapters and summaries of later ones. It is also the sequel to a paper delivered at the 2010 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. This paper summarizes research methodology reported at greater length in the Midwest paper and uses two additional variables. Its extended findings show that party system traits have significant and relatively consistent effects on country governance in 212 countries, as measured by the Worldwide Governance Indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political Representation at the European level is organized around two principles: the territorial one and the partisan. Earlier studies have shown that the MEPs decide very much along partisan lines as long as bread-and-butter issues are concerned. When it comes to European issues, the national dimension plays an important role. The paper elaborates the distribution of styles and foci of representation, tests some explanation for the choice of style and focus, and finally investigates the impact of style of representation on the choice of foci and the character of campaign strategies. The paper shows that in a potential choice situation of colliding interests, the style orientations have a strong constraining effect on focus, and that it matters for political practice if candidates and MEPs regard themselves as trustees, party's or voters' delegate. The paper will use unique data from the PIREDEU project, namely the survey among the candidates (and elected) to the European Parliament 2009 in 27 countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Finnish National Election Study of 2003 revealed that in Finland most voters do not identify with parties and are selfdescribed as independents. In this article it is asserted that partisan attachments affect Finnish parties' optimal positions despite the large amount of independents. To show this, the paper is divided in two parts. In the first part voters' decisions are assumed to be deterministic. To show the effect of party identification under deterministic voting two different types of simulations are conducted; the partisan type, where the partisans' voting behaviour depends on their distance from the party and on a degree of partisan attachment, and the apartisan type where voting behaviour solely depends on issuepolicy distance. Results show that partisan attachments drive parties to adopt in general different optimal positions than they would if party competition was solely based on issuepolicy distance. In the second part of the paper, it is assumed that voters' decisions are probabilistic. Upon showing that party identification makes a voting model only based on distance significantly more fit, the predicted probabilities of party choice are computed. Results indicate that the probability that a voter will vote for a party is higher when the party is located at his optimal position according to the partisan than the apartisan type of simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 2008 it became clear that Barack Obama would be the first African-American to receive the nomination of a major political party. For the first time ever, an African-American holding the nation's highest office became a real possibility. How did the media deal with this historic candidacy? What role, if any, did racial themes play in media coverage of the 2008 presidential election? In order to answer this question, this paper presents the results of a systematic content analysis of New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today campaign coverage during the fall campaign. We examined substantive campaign coverage, coding for a number of potential racial references or frames. We find, not surprisingly, that racial references were present in the general election coverage. Most often, we found references to Obama's own race or the race of groups within the electorate. References to racism or the potential for racial animosity to continue to play a role in the campaign were also present, though less common. Although we cannot test the effects of this coverage, we suggest that references to race which occur throughout the fall campaign have the potential to prime racial considerations. This paper represents the first part of a larger project in which we also examine print coverage in four battleground states as well as broadcast coverage on nightly network news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dynamic patterns of vote choice induced by individual assessments of the employment situation. More specifically, this paper examines the patterns of vote switching and the factors that drive changes in vote choice. Furthermore, the paper takes government partisanship into account, exploring how the partisan persuasion of the government affects voters' responses to increasing employment concerns. I argue that increasing concerns about the employment situation induce voter transition to support a left party with the expectations of public policies of employment growth. But employment concerns do not hurt the left government because voters perceive that the left government `owns' the issue, expecting better management of the employment situation. Analysis of a Markov chain model of voter transition, using the British Election Panel Study, 92-97 and 97-01, finds evidence to support my argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended to frame and describe a novel method of political party positioning within the European Union and beyond. Ever since the groundbreaking work by Downs in the 1950s, political scientists have derived a variety of methods to empirically determine the position of parties on scales varying between policy positions or between ideologies. Today, two sets of techniques dominate this research domain: expert surveys and manifesto/programme coding. What is common to both techniques is that the positioning is done by professionals outside the parties, i.e. by qualified researchers in expert surveys and in manifesto coding. Up to now, the parties have never been asked to position themselves. Through the EU Profiler project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and pan- European research endeavour, some 300 political parties within the European Union (and in a number of neighbouring countries) have been offered the possibility to place themselves on 30 political issues related to party competition in the 2009 European elections. The resulting data will offer unique opportunities for comparing the accuracy and efficiency among party positioning techniques, exploring for the first time and in a systematic way the auto-positioning of political parties throughout Europe. This paper will offer insights into the conceptual design and practical application of this new method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the sources of legislators' role orientations? The debate on this topic entertains two contradictory visions. Early role theorists perceive roles from a structural-functionalist perspective and highlight particular socio-structural variables as explanations for particular representational roles. More recent contributions to the debate picture representational roles as strategic behavior based on given interests and institutional constraints. This paper contributes to this debate in a twofold way. It firstly contributes to our theoretical understanding of representational roles by emphasizing party organizational careers as crucial mechanisms in explaining representational roles. The paper secondly contributes to our empirical understanding of representational roles by testing both role theories for the German case. The data for the paper are drawn from the German Candidate Study 2005 (GCS 2005) which includes 220 successful candidates elected to the 16th German Bundestag. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of political parties on women's representation, testing a theory which ties together party institutions and the political actors working within them. I consider the effects of party structure, activity, recruitment practices, and gatekeeping on the proportion of female county candidates, and test how these institutional factors interact with the differing ideologies of Democratic and Republican party actors, with the gender of party leaders, and with party leader beliefs about women as political candidates. I find support for my central hypothesis that party strength can enhance women's representation, conditional on the beliefs and characteristics of political actors. I also find substantial differences between Republicans and Democrats with regard to the effects of party activities and of party interactions with other political actors on women's representation. This paper demonstrates that local parties and their leaders fundamentally affect who runs for and holds political office at the local level and beyond. If parties increase their structure, activity, and recruitment, and decrease their gatekeeping activities, the proportion of women running for office could increase a great deal. The strength of these effects depends on the gender of party leaders and whether these leaders update their perceptions of women's electability. More broadly, the results in this paper indicate that it is critical to consider the interaction of political institutions and political behavior in order to explain political outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that intellectuals played a crucial role in shaping the discourse and forming political movements and parties against the (post-)totalitarian rule twenty years ago. However, the roles played by politically engaged intellectuals were not uniform, they played different roles in certain stages of transition just as they played several roles parallel during the regime change. There was a dynamic interplay between the dynamics of political change and the ways how different actors reacted to them. In the paper, I identify three classic models of relationships between intellectuals and politics: 1. full separation between intellectuals and the society, proposed by Julien Benda; 2. political involvement as "organic intellectuals" being attached to a particular social class, as proposed by Antonio Gramsci; and 3. socially unattached, "free-floating" intellectuals who are able to absorb different impulses of the society, and therefore able to represent universalistic human concerns, as proposed by Karl Mannheim. The paper investigates the first part of the "decade of intellectuals" (1983-93) by focusing the period before the transition. It is testing the approaches of Benda, Gramsci, and Mannheim, and concluding that none of these models cover fully the roles of 1. the radical reformer, 2. the negotiator, and 3. the movement-intellectual. It was more like a combination of Mannheimian universalism with the powerful cultivation of the "culture of critical discours" elaborated by Alvin Gouldner. The matrix, elaborated in the study, offers a better understanding of the set of political roles that intellectuals played in the non-violent revolutions of 1989. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about political party corruption and voting behavior in Poland is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including partisan competition, electoral volatility, and data from the Polish Panel survey, POLPAN, 1988-2008.

A conference paper about legislative politics and the minority government in Spain is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the first government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, minority government performance in Spain, and non-state-wide parties (NSWPs).

A conference paper about economic reform and political radicalism in France and Germany is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the emergence of Die Linke party on the national political stage in Germany, and the failure of France and Germany to reform their economies.

A conference paper about the political economy of social transfers and targeted subsidies (ST&TS) in Chile is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including high degrees of state capacity and state autonomy, and low levels of corruption in Chile, and the specific characteristics of the Chilean party system.

A conference paper about political parties and democracy is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the political mobilization of business interests, how business associations influence electoral politics, and the links between business associations and political parties.