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Political parties in Western democracies with large immigrant populations have become increasingly interested in nominating immigrant-origin candidates. This paper investigates how contextual factors explain parties’ effort of immigrant representation. I argue that nominations of immigrant-origin candidates are shaped by parties’ strategic calculations weighing out potential vote gains among immigrant-origin voters compared to a potential native backlash. I contend that alien enfranchisement and liberal naturalization policies provide decisive incentives to nominate immigrant-origin candidates. In contrast, economic insecurity implies potential material threat perceptions generating a native backlash against immigrants, reducing the nomination of immigrant-origin candidates. Using a novel dataset on candidates in Switzerland, the analysis reveals that the political and economic contexts indeed determine the number of immigrant-origin candidates and their ballot position, particularly those of non-Western origin. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of strategic behaviors of political parties and the promotion of immigrant representation.

This special issue arose from a collaboration between researchers at the University of Manchester and Duke University that was funded by the Economic Social and Research Council [ES/J019453/1]. The project sought to examine the nature of voter contact in the digital age in comparative context. In particular we were interested to understand the extent to which parties and candidates were seeking to mobilise voters during national election campaigns in the US and UK using new communication channels such as email, sms/text messages, and social media. After benchmarking the use of these tactics in national campaigns we also wanted to address the 64 million dollar question of whether these methods actually worked. Does online contact actually increase the likelihood that someone will turn out to vote? And if so, how effective is it in comparison with other more conventional methods? Our interest in researching these questions was triggered by the general growth in use of these tools across both countries and particularly the high profile e-campaign of Barack Obama to reach the White House in 2008. In the course of conducting our research on the effects of new forms of voter contact we faced some immediate questions about the extent to which internet-based methods can be meaningfully compared with more traditional offline modes. Given the rapid proliferation in the types of online communication channels now available, how far can a simple binary division into online and offline channels really capture this new complexity? How do we take account of the increasingly complex and indirect web of connections through which parties’ online messages can be conveyed and also the extent to which parties themselves can control this? While email is perhaps the closest approximation to the more conventional ‘surgical’ methods that parties use such as direct mail and phone calls, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are more than simply conduits for content but are themselves immersive new social spaces. The idea of the internet and particularly social media serving as a new context for mobilisation prompted us to think more generally about how far the field had moved and broadened both substantively and methodologically since the seminal work of Rosenstone and Hansen in the early 1990s. What new forces now impinge on voter contacting and how far do the old channels remain potent? In particular, how have advances in technology affected parties’ strategies and improved their capacity to target voters? What are some of the ‘new’ contextual factors that we might need to consider, particularly beyond expressly political and institutional channels? And finally what new methods are available to best capture this wider complexity of affective forces? To explore these questions we invited leading scholars within the field to reflect on the current and past state of voter mobilisation research as well as to provide us with some fresh empirical evidence about the relevance of context in shaping parties’ GOTV efforts. The papers gathered here represent the fruits of that effort and provide a rich insight into and update on the impact of a variety of technological, social, economic and political influences on parties’ GOTV efforts.

The Sainte-Lague index has a strong claim to be the index ¨ that should be adopted as the standard measure of disproportionality in electoral studies. Its properties are therefore worthwhile understanding more clearly. This paper provides a counter-example (the 2010 UK general election) to previous claims that the Sainte-Lague index satisfies ¨ Dalton’s principle of transfers with respect to differences between seat shares and vote shares, but not ratios of seat and vote shares. Instead, we prove that the Sainte-Lague index satisfies the ratio but not the dif- ¨ ference version of the principle. This strengthens the argument for the Sainte-Lague index since the ratio version is the one that accords with ¨ notion of electoral disproportionality as inequality the in representation of voters

There is a rich literature in comparative politics discussing what makes democracies fragile and more likely to break down. The question has stimulated a substantial amount of research focusing on the fate of specific countries as well as on large cross-national comparisons over long periods of time. In the last decade several important works in political economy have advanced our understanding of some of the forces that systematically influence regime stability across countries. However, closer examination of the processes at work at the country-level indicates that some this literature’s claims are at odds with the historical evidence. In this paper, we revisit one historical event that has been repeatedly discussed by the literature on democratic breakdown: the rise and fall of Argentine democracy between 1916 and 1930. First, we demonstrate that socioeconomic factors do not furnish a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup. Next, we present an alternative explanation: we argue that the coup was the product of a polarizing political realignment that led to a legitimacy crisis. We examine our argument using estimates of Argentine legislators' latent preferences (ideal points) between 1916 and 1930. The roll call data analysis suggests that disputes over socioeconomic issues did not precipitate the breakdown of the regime. What mattered was the allocation of political power. These findings support the view that stable democracy requires that all major groups in society have a sufficiently large chance of being in power.

The study of electoral stability or volatility in Latin America calls attention to profound differences between most Latin American party systems, which are quite volatile, and West European party systems, which remain comparatively stable notwithstanding a trend toward greater volatility in recent decades. The examination of Latin American party systems poses interesting questions about why they differ so markedly from West European systems along this important dimension and what the consequences are for democracy. This paper focuses on volatility in one country, Brazil, in order to examine these issues. I make four arguments: that the Brazilian party system was moderately volatile during Brazil's first democracy (1946-64); that the party system has been highly volatile since 1982; that Brazil's volatility is much higher than that in the advanced industrial democracies; and finally, that the high volatility of the post-1985 period was caused by a combination of structural and institutional factors inimical to strong ties between citizens, political elites and parties, and further boosted by the dismal economic results of 1987-94.

The national party system of India has undergone a major transformation since the 1989 elections. The predominant party system that had been in place since 1952 gave way to a pattern of genuine multi-party competition. While the party system has become extremely fragmented, the stable presence of three competing poles lends it an aura of orderliness. This paper analyzes the nature of the new Indian party system with reference to Sartori's theoretical framework. It seems that the Indian party system hinges somewhere on the borderline between polarized and moderate pluralism.

This paper examines the instability of party identification among eligible Japanese voters, using a seven-wave panel survey covering the period from 1993 to 1996. We found that only about a quarter of our sample consistently identified with the same parties, suggesting that party identification of eligible Japanese voters is very unstable. We also examined the individual characteristics influencing the stability of party identification and found that membership in religious organizations and favourable opinions toward major pre-existing political parties (the LDP, the CGP and the JSP/SDP) have a stabilizing effect on party identification. On the other hand, favourable opinions toward new parties and minor, pre-existing parties (the JCP and the DSP) have a destabilizing effect on party identification. Furthermore, political dissatisfaction, reformative ideology, and the absence of a belief in voting as a duty have a destabilizing effect on party identification.

Analyses of patronage and political parties often start from the assumption that patronage is a vote-winning and useful organizational strategy for a political party. This paper questions this assumption and suggests that, for the political party using it, patronage exacts a variety of costs. These undermine the party's existence as an organization with a collective purpose, and even its vote-winning capacities. Examples from a number of different countries and parties illustrate the argument.

Scholarly work on the party-policy link has produced fundamentally different interpretations. The main theoretical division within this field is drawn between the view centred on the role of a party as vote maximizer and the view based on the role of a party as representative of social interests. This paper provides a step towards relaxing the standard dichotomy between these two separate schools of thought, apparently unable to communicate with each other. By drawing upon recent theoretical developments in the literature on party goals, party competition and party organization, this article places limitations upon the role of partisan and electoral politics in the making of party policies. Advances in the theory of party politics suggest that conceiving of parties as miniature political systems provides an altogether richer and more suggestive account of the party-policy link.

This paper argues that the East Central European parties have already reached an early stage of maturation as a partial consolidation of a party system. In this respect the case of the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP) is characteristic, since this party has gone through two drastic changes, first after an electoral defeat in 1990 and second after a landslide victory in 1994. The change by defeat was easier than the change by success, but against all the difficulties of economic crisis management the HSP has consolidated its social position and institutions, yet still remains weak as a programme party.

What is the impact of declining party membership size on party organizations? Since existing theory is constructed with the expansion of party membership in mind, one might infer that the relationships observed during periods of growth can simply be reversed in periods of decline; i.e. declining party membership size will lead to declining complexity and decentralization of power. However, there is no a priori reason for us to expect this relationship to be true. The paper present a dynamic theory that explains why complexity and centralization of power remain unchanged despite declining membership. Using time-series data from the Party Change Project and the Party Organizations Project, the author provides systematic tests of the impact of declining party membership size. The empirical findings suggest that the impacts of declining party membership size may affect complexity and centralization of power for some but not all parties.

This paper focuses upon a hybrid `performance hypothesis' positing that an established party will change its ideological identity in reaction to a successful new party only when the established party itself experiences poor election results which it can attribute to the new party. That hypothesis is addressed with original, longitudinal data on manifesto positions of the far-right Norwegian and Danish Progress parties, their Conservative neighbor-parties and (for control purposes) the Labour parties. Analyses support the authors' conclusion that both new parties have had a significant impact on their respective party systems according to the intentions and strategies of their founders.

This paper examines the role of the opposition in the fifth parliament in Bangladesh (1991-5). It identifies two distinct but interrelated aspects of the role of the opposition, referred to here as proactive and reactive. The evidence presented in the article shows that the opposition MPs fared better than their ruling party counterparts in both respects. The level of activism of the opposition MPs in the fifth parliament was much higher than it was in the earlier parliaments. The government, despite its suspicion of the opposition's motive, was nevertheless more tolerant of its role, at least compared with the past. The article argues that the potential of the parliament, however, could not be harnessed in full because of lack of preparedness of the opposition and the government to acknowledge each other's legitimacy and to abide by the `rules of the game'. Both these factors discouraged the growth of a stable pattern of parliamentary politics in Bangladesh.

The 1993 election brought to an end the 39-year rule of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The major issue in that election campaign was the `political reform' that the government had twice promised and twice failed to deliver. Using data aggregated at the candidate level, the paper examines the question of whether the electorate were attracted to those candidates who participated in the reform movement. Candidates running for political parties standing for reform and leaders of reform groups were handsomely rewarded. LDP candidates who voted for or abstained from voting against the no-confidence motion that forced the election also gained votes. Candidates tainted with scandal and LDP incumbents lost votes. Yet the rank and file of the reform movement were treated no differently than other candidates. Though Japanese voters could not make fine distinctions among candidates, they proved perfectly capable of rewarding those clearly identified with reform.

The `bosses' are an occupational category of Russian administrative and economic managers who, in addition to their already prominent positions in the country's power structure, engage themselves in public politics and enjoy a significant degree of electoral success without being affiliated to any political party. The data provided by analysing the results of the 1994 provincial elections in Western Siberia confirm the prominence of the `bosses' in the electoral arena of the Russian periphery. Viewing this phenomenon as an important functional equivalent to political parties, the paper explains its salience with reference to its origins in the nomenklatura system, and to the strategic choices made by the Russian leadership in late 1991. It is suggested that the recent attempts to create a regular political organization on the basis of the `bosses' have failed to facilitate the process of party system formation in Russia.

The paper reports the results of analysing the first two waves of the British Household Panel Survey, conducted in 1991 and 1992. The connections between respondents' party identifications and voting choices are examined and related to a range of exogenous factors, including social location, ideology, policy preferences and changing material conditions. It is argued that identifications may be indistinguishable from voting choices and that, as a result, models that include party identification as an explanatory variable may be mis-specified.

Controversy has surrounded the explanation of one of the most striking features of recent British General Elections: the rapidly changing regional geography of the vote. While some analysts have seen this as evidence of the impact of local electoral contexts on voting decisions, others have claimed that apparent regional effects are merely a consequence of poorly specified models. In this paper, new data from the 1992 British Election Study are employed to demonstrate the independent impact of regional economic context upon the vote-switching behaviour of individual British electors between the 1987 and 1992 General Elections.

This paper investigates the conditions under which significant changes can occur in the structure and composition of a party system in a contemporary mature democracy. The empirical focus is Canada. Although one of the oldline Canadian parties, the Liberals, won a parliamentary majority in the most recent (1993) national election, two others, the governing Progressive Conservatives (PC) and the social democratic opposition New Democratic Party (NDP), suffered disastrous defeats. Two new parties with regionally concentrated bases of support, Reform and the Bloc Québécois, enjoyed marked success. Analyses of national survey data reveal that although economic issues generated by a serious, protracted recession were the principal proximate forces eroding PC and NDP support, dissatisfaction with all oldline parties was widespread. This disaffection, the virtual devastation of two of these parties, and the continuing strength of the two new parties in their regional bases, suggest that 1993 was a type of `critical election' that significantly altered Canada's national party system.

The fin de siècle political parties are claimed to have moved far from civil society, especially in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Through the example of the Hungarian Christian Democratic People's Party the paper analyses a different pattern of development: a party that is deeply embedded in the subcultural network of organizations. Tracing the roots of the Catholic organizational bloc back to the end of the last century, the article establishes the factors that have effected the bloc's coherence and autonomy. Mapping the links between the Catholic-Christian organizations and analysing the party's inner life, the role of the party elite in rebuilding the subculture is assessed. The `subcultural party' is presented as one of the possible party types that might emerge in Eastern Europe.

Most studies of coalition behavior have treated political parties as unitary actors. Building on extant literature, this paper relaxes the unitary actor assumption in order to develop a theory about the impact of party factionalism on cabinet duration. Specifically, cabinets composed of factionalized parties are expected to exhibit less stability. Cross-national data corroborate the hypothesis, demonstrating the importance of intra-party characteristics in determining coalition behavior.

A main aim of public party funding was to present parties with opportunities to participate on equal terms in public debate and to finance their ability to represent the general public. However, its impact on party communication and on party-voter contacts is a neglected aspect of research in the field. This paper suggests a disparity between intentions and consequences, mirroring that observed in the effects of public party funding on party expenditure, inter-party competition and party structure. This is illustrated by a case study of campaign finances and party communication in Israel since the inception of public party funding, with special attention to the 1992 elections, in which it spurred a shift to a `top-bottom' model of campaigning and to a concentration on the system management and ritualistic dimensions of electoral communications. It came at the expense of messages geared to enlist support for alternative prospective policies. The ensuing party-voter rifts and the effort to bridge them by reforming public party funding may throw light on the problematics of public party funding in western democracies and on the progress towards what have recently been termed cartel parties.

This article tests two propositions derived from European transitions to democracy on three countries in East Central Europe: Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. On balance, the paper finds that new party systems seem to be developing differently in postcommunist regimes than they did in Southern and Western Europe. First, the political cleavages of the pre-authoritarian period that might have re-emerged after an interruption in democratic rule did not simply `unfreeze' after the demise of communism. Second, the type of transition - whether by reform or ruptura - does not predict how ex-regime parties fared initially in East Central Europe. These findings suggest that, at least initially, the pre-authoritarian period and transition mode are likely to be less influential in shaping party systems than is the legacy of the communist authoritarian period. They also highlight the particularly destructive nature of communist rule in East Central Europe, in that it may have altered the bases of social and political life to a greater extent than did other types of authoritarian regimes.

Research on post-communist party systems must deal with (1) the extent to which party systems crystallize around programmatic cleavages or are based on clientelistic or charismatic parties and (2) if programmatic competition is high, the content of the major divisions that are represented by the parties. The extent to which programmatic structuring takes place in post-communism depends on countries' democratic experience and the nature of their democratic institutions fostering more personalized or more depersonalized power relations. These institutions, in turn, are influenced by the pathways of transition from communism to democracy, the type of communist rule and earlier traditions of democratization and industrialization in the inter-war era. With regard to the content of cleavage divisions, the paper identifies several configurations of party systems. Determinants are derived from voters' economic interests, the varying salience of socio-cultural conflicts in post-communist countries and the relations among ethnic groups.

Political folklore holds that political parties often try to change their images following a disastrous election defeat. This paper inquires into the truth of this common assumption through a systematic analysis of manifestos promulgated by eight parties in Britain, Germany and the USA prior to national elections in the 1950s through 1980s. Each election was classified as triumphal, gratifying, tolerable, disappointing or calamitous from the standpoint of each party. The change in party images for adjacent elections was assessed by correlating the percentages of sentences devoted to standard political themes in the pair of manifestos. We tested the hypothesis that parties were most likely to change their policy images following disappointing or calamitous elections. Our findings suggest that poor electoral performance was not a sufficient condition to produce a major overhaul of party images, but poor performance in the prior election was virtually necessary to produce major change in policy packaging at the next election.

Since the emergence of New Politics issues, there has been considerable debate about their potential for creating party system realignment. However, this debate has largely ignored the role of political elites in responding to changes in mass electorates. In this paper, we develop a model of realignment based on values and ideology which takes party elites into account. The model is tested using data that are based on national voter and parliamentary candidate surveys collected in Australia during the 1990 federal election. A realignment hypothesis predicts that the contemporary Australian party system is being replaced by a system reflecting New Politics/Old Politics conflict. An adaptation hypothesis predicts that the existing parties are adapting to New Politics concerns. The results show more support for the adaptation hypothesis and although a potential for realignment exists, postmaterial values and environmental ideologies have as yet insufficiently penetrated both elites and masses to bring this about. The results have major implications for the development of party alignments in other advanced societies.

The paper uses a survey conducted in late 1992 to examine popular support for and attitudes towards Russia's postcommunist political parties. The findings confirm that support for democratic reform is at best conditional, and negative mentions of political parties vastly outnumber positive ones. Although popular knowledge about currently active political parties is limited, five main parties attract majority support. A factor analysis of opinions of the main parties indicates three underlying dimensions: a centre/reformist dimension (subdivided into those who are partially aligned with the communists and those who oppose them); a right/nationalist dimension; and a left/communist dimension. The democratic reformist dimension attracts the largest popular support, followed by the communist dimension; the nationalist dimension attracts a negligible following. None of the three dimensions has any secure socio-economic basis within the electorate, however, and the differences that exist are mainly ideological. It is argued that the reformist and communist dimensions, perhaps under different labels, will form the basis for the more stable party system that is likely to emerge in the future.

The terms `left' and `right' are widely used to organize party competition and to shape connections between citizens and political parties. Recent and dramatic changes in the world, however, raise important questions about the meaning and importance of left-right ideology. Most notably, the collapse of communism has led to the development of a host of new democracies. And in advanced industrial societies, conflict has emerged over issues like the environment and immigration. This paper draws on a survey of political experts in 42 societies to address three questions raised by these changes. First, is the language of left and right still widely used, even in recently democratized countries? Second, do there exist secondary dimensions of political conflict that are orthogonal to the left-right dimension? Third, and most importantly, what substantive issues define the meaning of left-right ideology? In addition to addressing these questions, we present data on the left-right locations of political parties in each of the 42 countries.

Explaining ideological conflict has always been a classic theme of studies of party organizations. The aim of this paper is to re-examine May's law, based on rational choice theory, which suggests that due to differential incentives sub-leaders are likely to prove the most extreme stratum in party organizations, while non-leaders are the most moderate, and top leaders are located equidistant between these groups. The study, based on large-scale surveys of politicians, local constituency officers, party members and voters in the 1992 British general election, throws considerable doubt on this proposition.

Using an agent-based simulation of electoral participation, this paper examines the second order or cascade effects of an exogenous increase in turnout. Unlike most previous applications of agent-based modelling in political science, we adopt a descriptively complex rather than a simple model of behaviour. Experimenting with different levels of mobilisation allows estimation of the extent to which mobilisation spreads beyond the primary mobilisation target across the population as well as whether or not it survives over time. We argue that in a complex world cascade effects are smaller than previously thought. However, mobilisation effects can create secondary effects through habitual voting and increases in political interest and party affiliation, which reverberate over time, creating long-term spillover effects.