Search

Chapter 4 (Tsukasa Iga) focuses on Najib in Malaysia, who became the prime minister in 2009, after the 2008 general election when the ruling National Front coalition suffered a major setback. Iga attributes Najib's authoritarian governance to the concentration of power in the prime minister and the fragmentation of opposition parties. Notably, the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, has attracted the greatest attention, but the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban can also be seen as such examples. [Extracted from the article]

Research on party responsiveness in established democracies suggests that parties follow shifts in the preferences of either the general electorate or party supporters. Drawing on theoretical models of party competition and research on party-voter congruence, we argue in this article that in the 21st century Western European mainstream parties respond to their partisan constituents. Parties adjust their policy positions to eliminate previous incongruence between themselves and their constituents and follow the shifts in supporters' positions. Analyses based on a series of datasets that use expert surveys and election surveys to measure parties' positions and several cross-national and national surveys to measure voters' preferences between 1999 and 2014 strongly support the argument that mainstream parties respond to existing incongruence. The findings in this article update many of the empirical results of prior studies on party responsiveness to public opinion shifts, with important ramifications for our understanding of party-based representation in contemporary European democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electoral successes of European far right parties in the 21st century coincided with increased immigration. While some argue these parallel trends suggest immigration sours opinion towards foreigners, a growing literature suggests it is the fluctuation in issue salience which matters. We investigate the overlooked case of Italy, which has long featured anti-immigration parties. Analysing multiple data sources, we find immigration preferences remained stable throughout 2006, 2013, and 2018 – but issue salience varied considerably, tracking the anti-immigration vote. Voters are more likely to opt for anti-immigration parties when immigration is a high salience issue, suggesting that salience, not changing preferences, is associated with far right political success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a special issue of India Review on the consequences of the 2019 Indian general election for politics and public policy. The special issue assesses how four key policy and political domains are impacted by a second Narendra Modi-led BJP government: the party system, minority rights, the economy, and federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 Indian national election delivered a convincing victory to the BJP and, along with it, prognostications of future BJP election wins. The BJP's victory was certainly impressive, but does it portend a prolonged period of BJP rule at the national level? As of 2019, any predictions of the BJP's long-term dominance are premature. The election revealed that the BJP possesses relatively few of the party-system advantages common to other dominant parties, including India's former dominant party, Congress, during its period of dominance. Whereas a party is ideally situated to become dominant when it is large, enjoys a deep and broad base of support, and faces an opposition that is both fragmented and stigmatized, the BJP's main advantage lies in its relatively deep support base in its political strongholds. On other dimensions, the BJP has far less in common with other dominant parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the voting behaviour of Crimean Tatars before and after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. The main question is: do they take part in voting, thus de facto legitimizing the new status quo, or do they largely boycott elections, thus indirectly refusing to accept the annexation? The article found that Crimean Tatars were already not particularly active as voters before 2014. After the annexation, a lot of them boycotted the elections held in 2014 and 2016. But by 2018 Moscow managed to attract more than a third of voters in Tatar-dominated areas. As a result, their voter turnout at the 2018 Presidential election almost reached the level of 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Malaysia's 14th general election (GE14) saw unprecedented numbers of women standing as candidates, they ended up only as a tiny 11% of elected representatives. The political space for women is restricted due to socio-cultural barriers and patriarchy within political institutions. However, the data in GE14 shows that women hold a higher winning percentage, effectively creating a reverse gender gap in terms of winning percentages. Additionally, women were also able to compete with men in mixed gender constituencies, and their winnability was comparable to the men. The low percentage of women as elected representatives stems from the fact that there were not enough female candidates to emerge as a viable force in the contestation for seats. The inadequate presence of female candidates resulted in the inability to fulfil the promise of minimum 30% women in the legislature and the executive, which, in turn, is arguably impeded by coalition politics in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2018, Malaysia's Barisan Nasional (BN) lost power for the first time since the country's independence. Although the opposition finally succeeded in assuming the reins of government after three failed attempts since 1990, the aspired for 'two-coalition system' did not emerge. Like previous opposition coalitions that disintegrated after electoral defeat, BN is fast melting down and is now reduced to a rump of its Malay nationalist core, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). Officially born in 1974, BN was expanded from its centrist forerunner Alliance, which suffered an electoral setback in 1969 under centrifugal competition. As a permanent grand coalition designed to contain opposition, BN had resiliently survived on a crafty manipulation of communal anxieties of ethnic Malays and Chinese. As unintended consequences, BN had, however, radicalised opposition in first-past-the-post elections and become vulnerable to implosion after electoral landslides. Pakatan Harapan now seemingly emerges as the new dominant coalition, with centrifugal competition from ethno-religious and regional-nationalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of Malaysia's 14th general election, many were quick to posit that it was a Malay tsunami - an electoral revolt of ethnic Malay voters - for the opposition Pakatan Harapan coalition that tipped the scales. A closer analysis of sentiments on the ground, however, indicates that the Malay vote was one against former Prime Minister Najib Razak, and not necessarily one in support of the then-opposition. While soaring costs of living, the goods and services tax and corruption (to varying degrees) were the main bugbears that drove votes against the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, the Malay vote, whether rural or urban, is far from homogenous; sweeping characterisations of their voting preferences could be inaccurate. This article uses both primary data and secondary literature to explore the intricacies of the Malay vote with a view to deriving a preliminary typology of Malay voting tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do far-left political parties influence the level of Euroskepticism among mainstream political parties within that same party system? This study seeks to address this question by building on previous work that has examined the effect of both far-left and far-right Euroskeptic parties on mainstream party positions regarding the EU. We theorize that when far-left parties place an emphasis on state control over the economy, mainstream parties in the same party system are less supportive of the EU. To test our theoretical expectations, we use data from the Comparative Manifestos Project in 25 EU member states from 1958 through 2015. The analysis indicates support for the hypothesis that when far-left parties place greater emphasis on a need for state control of the economy, mainstream parties in that party system are more Euroskeptic. Our findings have important implications for understanding the nature of political party dynamics both generally, and more specifically in the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explain the nomination of ethnic minority candidates for lower house elections. We argue that these nominations are explained by the incentives that different parties face in different districts. Center-left parties reap greater electoral rewards when they offer descriptive representation, and that they also experience fewer difficulties in recruiting ethnic minority candidates. Therefore we argue that center-left parties have a greater incentive and ability to make their nominations more responsive to district demographics. More specifically, our hypothesis is that district-level ethnic diversity will increase the probability that any party will nominate an ethnic minority candidate, but this increase will be greatest for center-left parties. We look at multiple elections in Australia, the UK, and the US, and find consistent evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Even when center-left and center-right parties are nominating similar overall numbers of ethnic minority candidates, center-left parties’ descriptive representation patterns are more closely connected to district demographics. We argue that this helps explain how descriptive representation effects political competition more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is general agreement that economic voting matters, there is less agreement on how to measure it. This paper examines the most recent conceptualization of economic voting: the ownership of economic assets or “patrimonial” voting. Using the 2016 Australian Election Study survey, we show that property ownership and, especially, share ownership were significant influences on party choice. By contrast, ownership of an investment property or a personal superannuation fund had no significant effect on the vote. We explain this finding through the specific policies that the parties advanced in the 2016 campaign. While Labor parted ways from the Coalition by proposing radical changes to the tax treatment of investment properties but with no retrospectivity, the parties had similar positions on the tax treatment of superannuation. The findings emphasize how party policies can shape the electoral significance of asset ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all general elections can be considered as being equal: some are placed in continuity with the previous political phase and therefore do not change the most relevant features of the party and political system; others, however, tend to represent a watershed between distinct political phases. Without a doubt, the 4 March 2018 Italian general elections belong to the latter category. This article analyses those same elections from three points of view: firstly, it reconstructs and explains electoral turnout, both following a long-term diachronic perspective, as well as comparing the various areas of the country from a territorial point of view. Secondly, similar diachronic and territorial comparisons are conducted with respect to electoral results, so as to clearly identify winners and losers of the 4 of March. Finally, it presents flows of votes in thirty-eight different territorial contexts (cities or electoral constituencies): in this way, it is possible to precisely reconstruct the reasons behind the ‘electoral earthquake’ of 4 March 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the prediction of an exceptional victory of populist forces was shared by analysts at the closing of the parliamentary term, and accordingly a harsh electoral competition was expected, albeit with the aura of uncertainty raised by the new electoral law (‘Rosatellum’), the actual campaign has not proved at all ‘exceptional’. The leaders, the issues and the media coverage were rather a follow-up of the 2013 campaign. That campaign was truly a departure from the campaigning patterns of previous Italian electoral contests, both those of the ‘majoritarian’ (‘Mattarellum’) years and of the ‘proportional’ (‘Porcellum’) ones. What has marked significantly the 2018 campaign has been instead the intensive use of the social media [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rosato law has established a new electoral system featuring single-member districts (S.M.Ds) along with a prevailing proportional tier. S.M.Ds are typically associated with individual incentives to cultivate a personal vote and with a more direct link between representatives and their local constituency. This article investigates patterns of personalized votes in the Italian elections of March 2018 by analysing voting data about candidates for the Chamber of Deputies who ran in the plurality tier. Results reveal that only a minor - although not negligible - portion of Italian voters cast their ballot for an individual candidate only, and that these votes had almost no impact on the outcomes of competition in S.M.Ds. Moreover, some interesting differences across geographical areas, parties and coalitions emerge in the use of personalized vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The March 2018 Italian general elections can be described as a historic turning point, another watershed moment in the turbulent history of contemporary Italian politics. After a stormy and complex legislative term, characterized by a variety of institutional and political phenomena, Italy has faced one of the most important electoral challenges since the return of democracy in the mid-1940s. After examining the major political events that led to the latest general elections, this introductory article presents and analyses the rules, the actors and the outcomes of the electoral contest that has seen the victory of two anti-establishment parties: the Five Star Movement and the League. In the concluding section, the article discusses the potential tensions that may emerge from the clash between the populist attitude of the new governing parties and the constitutional constraints of a liberal democratic regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional elections in Romania are more important politically than it would generally be the case in a highly centralized country. Despite the limited regional autonomy of the territorial units named județe (counties) which host those elections, regional elections have become more and more important because of their electoral forecasting potential. As explained in this elections report, county elections have grown up as barometer elections, turning, through their capacity to accurately indicate the outcome of the national elections into a ‘subspecies’ of second-order elections. The report will therefore emphasize their special relationship with national elections due to election timing, constituency design and electoral formula similarities. Finally, the report evaluates the 2016 elections outcomes, by strengthening the concept of barometer elections as a type of second-order elections in the framework of a highly nationalized party-system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Trump began his campaign for the US Presidency by emphasizing the supposed dangers of immigration, a theme that he then rode to victory in November 2016 won the 2016 US Presidential election. This paper asks whether the sociology of migration can illuminate the sources of Trump’s success and after quickly reviewing the key contributions concludes not. Insight, rather, is to be found by understanding the ways in which population movements across state boundaries are a source of both international integration and national dis-integration, producing conflicts over the number, characteristics, and rights of immigrants from which liberal societies can find no escape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political achievements, campaigns, and challenges faced by the Austrian Green political party. Topics explored include the failure of the Green Party to earn parliamentary representation in the October 2017 national elections, the election of Green Party Leader Alexander Van der Bellen as Austrian President in the 2016 presidential elections, the evolution and growth of the Green Party since its entry to the Austrian National Council in 1986, and factors which contributed to the decline in the electoral support maintained by the Green Party.

The ability of authoritarian regimes to maintain power hinges, in part, on how well they are able to manipulate the flow of information to the masses. While authoritarian states have had success controlling traditional media, the growth of social media over the last decade has created new challenges for such regimes. The Russian experience offers an example of how an authoritarian regime responds to this potential threat. Because of the massive demonstrations surrounding the 2011-2012 Duma elections, the ruling Russian government suspected that social media provided a significant impetus for the demonstrations. Social media, through its dissemination of opposition blogs, could have helped drive negative attitudes about the governing party. As such, the government responded by employing strategies to tighten their grip on the digital flow of information. We use survey data to demonstrate that exposure to blogs via social media at the time of the demonstrations led many to believe that the elections were fraudulent. Ultimately, we contend that Russian fears concerning the importance of social media for the fomenting of opposition movements is well grounded. Social media can drive support for opposition in an autocratic state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the influence of the party reforms of 2012 and the ‘counter-reforms’ of 2013-2014 on the Russian party system, and the structure of political and electoral cleavages in Russian regions. The emergence of new political parties in 2012-2013 led to a temporary increase in electoral competition, an augmentation of the political space, and a rise in the number of electoral cleavages, but these developments did not weaken the domination of United Russia. The trend towards an ever greater tightening up of entry requirements for contestation in the elections led to a lowering of the number of political and, consequently, electoral cleavages, in addition to a reconfiguration of the political space. The study shows that there was an unbalancing of the political cleavage structure in 2012-2015: the socioeconomic political cleavage, whose primary place is a key determinant of equilibrium, ceded the top position to the authoritarian-democratic cleavage in 2012-2013, and to the ‘Ukrainian’ (systemic) cleavage in 2014-2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candidates running for the Polish Sejm are increasingly drawn from a wider group of occupations (1991–2011). As the percents of intelligentsia and farmers decline in the candidate pool they are replaced by candidates from middle- and low-level nonmanual occupations and business owners and the self-employed. In spite of the increased occupational diversity among candidates, the occupational diversity of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) has declined significantly. Between the 1991 and 2011 elections, intelligentsia went from 78 percent of elected MPs to 83 percent and farmers declined from 9 percent to 1 percent. At the same time, there was an increase in elected MPs who are self-employed or business owners. Data from the 2011 election clearly show that list placements by parties explain the overrepresentation of intelligentsia. Even though the advantages for intelligentsia can be found in all parties, they are greatest in parties seeking to appeal to a broad base, for example, Civic Platform, while parties that appeal to a narrow constituency are more likely to place candidates with diverse occupational backgrounds in top positions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) represents the most significant occurrence in Italian party politics during the economic crisis that commenced in 2008. Founded in 2005, the party caused a major upset at the 2013 national elections, with a subsequent major impact on the Italian party system, which is analysed along four dimensions: amount of change; number of relevant competitors; alteration of the political space; and degree of nationalisation. The sudden electoral success, in turn, presented the party with a number of challenges that forced it to adapt its organisational nature. Moreover, the anti-establishment nature of the M5S is questioned by its activities in the legislative arena. As with other outsider parties, this poses the dilemma of being part of the establishment while criticising it. The M5S has thus been forced to redefine its main goals and style of communication in order to adapt to the new institutional environment without losing the palingenetic aspiration of its original message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although considerable research has concentrated on online campaigning, it is still unclear how politicians use different social media platforms in political communication. Focusing on the German federal election campaign 2013, this article investigates whether election candidates address the topics most important to the mass audience and to which extent their communication is shaped by the characteristics of Facebook and Twitter. Based on open-ended responses from a representative survey conducted during the election campaign, we train a human-interpretable Bayesian language model to identify political topics. Applying the model to social media messages of candidates and their direct audiences, we find that both prioritize different topics than the mass audience. The analysis also shows that politicians use Facebook and Twitter for different purposes. We relate the various findings to the mediation of political communication on social media induced by the particular characteristics of audiences and sociotechnical environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the extraordinary rise of Emmanuel Macron and the near complete collapse of the Parti Socialiste (PS), the past year has seen arguably the most dramatic upheaval in the French party system since 1958. This article develops a political economy analysis of the Hollandequinquennatto better understand how we arrived here. It argues that Hollande’s programmatic failures must be situated within an institutional account of the constraints of the presidential logic of the Fifth Republic and tensions between competing factionalcourantswithin the Socialist Party. Here we shed fresh light on this moment of rupture by situating a political economy analysis of Hollande’s economic programme within a more intricate institutional analysis of the specificities of the PS and its position within the Fifth Republic. The article traces the most salient political developments of the 2017 elections and outlines the political landscape of the contemporary French left. These factors explain why, after numerous crises of French socialism, this time is different. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When examining media effects on voting intentions, scholars of political communication have either focused on visibility- or tonality-based effects. Our study compares these effect models, asking whether the explanations are complementary or competitive; it goes beyond previous studies by considering interactions between media cues and voters’ attitudes. We draw on panel survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) that is combined with content analysis data of the main evening news broadcast in Germany. Findings show that visibility- and tonality-based effects are similar in potency, but tone-based effects are more contingent on attitudes toward parties and candidates. Both types of cues can backfire: higher visibility and more positive tonality can have negative effects on some attitude groups, which is in part moderated by the expectations about government coalitions. We find that visibility and tonality are rather complementary cues that both influence voting behavior. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help users casting a vote by offering an explicit ranking of viable options. The wide amount of readily available information provided by VAAs to users has been shown to contribute to reducing the transactional costs involved in gathering relevant political information. Available evidence also supports the idea that VAA users are more likely to cast a ballot in elections as a result. The extent to which electoral participation iscausedby using a VAA, however, remains unclear. Against this background, we reassess the mobilizing effect of VAAs by means of a multi-method approach. Our cross-sectional analysis of 12 national election study data sets provides further support to the idea that VAA usage increases users’ chances of casting a ballot in elections as compared to non-users. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a randomized field experiment conducted in the context of the 2013 Italian parliamentary election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The parliamentary elections of 2016, the first following Cyprus’ exit from the bailout programme, took place in a context of indifference on the part of the citizens. Characterised by a decline in bipartisanship, a rise in abstention and a more fragmented party system, the elections paved the way for the historical entry into parliament of the far right party, ELAM. This article sets these outcomes against the broader backdrop of the Great Recession while also paying attention to the reinvigoration of the cultural dimension of political conflict, with potentially significant constraints for future negotiations on the Cyprus problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been much speculation about whether China will democratize and avoid conflict with India in the twenty-first century. Yet, few studies have investigated how contemporary Chinese view India and its democracy. Addressing this gap in the literature, the authors examined Chinese media coverage of India's two-month long April-May 2014 parliamentary election, the largest election in world history, through systematic analysis of over 500 articles from ten major mass media outlets and over 27,000 messages transmitted on Sina Weibo social media. As might be expected, Chinese mass media generally portrayed India and its elections in a condescending fashion while avoiding discussion of 'democracy'. However, the authors found a much broader array of viewpoints on Chinese social media including considerable praise for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and extensive discussion about the intrinsic and instrumental merits of democracy both in India and in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ireland’s inclusive political rights for migrants, together with a favourable naturalization process and accessible political parties, present favourable factors for political participation; however, migrant representation among elected representatives has remained very low. Examining the institutional context and group structures, this article explores the trajectory of migrant involvement in Irish political parties from the point of first engagement to becoming a representative in an effort to explain their under-representation in Irish political life. It is shown that neither political parties nor migrants have made a collective and sustained effort to increase migrant representation in local municipalities, which is a necessary pre-requisite for enhancing representation in the legislature. The article concludes that while opportunity structures provide some explanation towards migrant under-representation in Irish electoral politics, additional factors such as how political actors interact as a group with the institutional context are also important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research highlighted the underrepresentation of immigrants in receiving societies’ political system. Furthermore in countries with authoritarian legacies a tendency for civic apathy and weak parties was identified. Under such circumstances, what are the chances for immigrants’ political claims within the political opportunity structure (POS)? What role do individuals and groups play – their agency – in propelling immigrants’ political claims? Taking Portugal as a case study, this article analyses how immigrants’ political inclusion is influenced by access to political rights, the party system, and the citizenship regime, envisaging a comprehensive view upon the macro-structure that creates the conditions for such inclusion. The POS’ analytical role is discussed to understand immigrants’ political mobilization and involvement with political parties. Additionally, acknowledging that political contexts can be appropriated differently by actors, we consider the weight of perceptions (and its mismatches with the objective POS), by analysing the discursive environment in which political strategies occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of the democratic participation of immigrants has been the object of an extensive, theoretical and empirical literature. Nevertheless, we still lack detailed information on those internal dynamics of political parties which shape patterns of participation and representation of immigrants and their descendants, especially in Spain. We focus on how immigrants incorporate political parties in Spain and how this mode of incorporation influences the opportunities for immigrants to access elite positions and candidacies. On the one hand we examine individual trajectories in accessing and evolving in parties and, on the other hand, party strategies to reach out and include immigrants. We acknowledge a persisting gap between the access and participation in political parties, which has been facilitated over recent years, and the many obstacles in accessing elite and candidate positions in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2014 presidential election in Indonesia two diametrically opposed candidates appeared to abide by an informal set of rules whereby neither challenged the other’s integrity in public. Privately, however, campaign advisors devised ways to attack their opponents, primarily by using media contacts to spread rumors and allegations. As a result, the 2014 presidential race in the world’s third largest democracy was the most negative and polarizing since the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998. TheObor Rakyatmedia scandal, a major political event in 2014 that remains understudied, represented a new manifestation of rumor politics and smear campaigning aimed at President Jokowi, widely hailed as a novel reformist politician because of his relatively clean record and lack of direct association with the Indonesian political establishment. In particular, theObor Rakyatreports made three serious allegations against Jokowi: that he is a bad Muslim, that he is a puppet president, and that he is in the pocket of Chinese financiers known ascukong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most accounts of coalition voting are based on instrumental reasoning. However, coalition voting might also be the result of expressive motivations. Using the case of the FDP, this article studies the impact of a varying degree of coalition voting in the German federal elections of 2009 and 2013. According to theories of instrumental coalition voting, there should have been more ‘threshold insurance voting’ at the 2013 election, as the FDP was actually in danger of not crossing the threshold. Yet it is found that there was considerably less coalition voting in 2013 than in the 2009 election. The analysis suggests that a more comprehensive account of coalition voting is needed that considers not only instrumental reasoning but also expressive coalition voting. Taking into account expressive motivations for coalition voting helps to explain the tremendous decline of the FDP vote share in the 2013 German federal election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Introducing the special issue, section (1) provides an overview of the election campaign, (2) discusses major aspects of the election's outcome and (3) highlights the broader theoretical implications of the contributions to the special issue to the research literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies campaign effects at the 2013 German Federal Election. It analyses whether and how the 2013 campaign contributed to electors' ability to cast votes in line with their political preferences – ‘correct’ votes in the terminology of Lau and Redlawsk. The article takes a novel perspective at correct voting by analysing its dynamic development during the course of an election campaign, using observational data collected by means of a rolling cross-section survey. It finds that voters’ likelihood to choose correctly significantly increased during the election campaign. Two campaign-induced processes in particular contributed to explaining this development: voters' growing involvement with electoral politics and their decreasing indifference with regard to the parties competing for their votes. These findings suggest that by stimulating citizens to engage more intensively with electoral politics campaigns can strengthen the linkage between voters’ preferences and their actual voting behaviour. Despite much criticism of how they are conducted, election campaigns can exert normatively desirable effects, thereby improving the quality of representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the personal vote to be cast in a meaningful way it is a minimal condition that voters recognise candidates. However, from earlier studies we know that there is huge variation in the number of candidates recognised. Little to nothing is known about candidate recognition and its determinants. This study explores the sources of candidate recognition from three different angles: candidates; citizens; and context. Furthermore, it enables the distinction of campaign-related from other factors. A unique multi-level within-subject design was set up for the analyses of the 2013 German Federal Election to ensure a meaningful validation of our theoretical framework. Our results suggest that, indeed, many factors lead to recognition but as well that earlier studies overestimated the effects of political interest or incumbency status. Moreover, we show that a good campaign makes a difference for recognition – as does the context in which it takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2015 general election marked the end of the two-party system that had existed in Spain since the restoration of democracy. Two new parties, ‘Podemos’ and ‘Ciudadanos’, entered the national arena for the first time and together obtained 34.6 per cent of the vote. This paper describes this election’s context and electoral results by analysing the individual determinants behind the change to the Spanish party system. The results indicate that economic factors predominantly explain the votes for the traditional parties, the PP and PSOE. On the other hand, political factors help distinguish why some voters remained ‘loyal’ to the traditional parties and others switched to the new formations. While Podemos switchers were mainly politically disaffected left-wing voters, electoral support for Ciudadanos came from younger and ideologically moderate voters who had lower levels of political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ciudadanos, a party founded in Catalonia in 2006, has recently acquired a major role in the Spanish political system. This article examines why it was formed almost ten years ago and how it has evolved since; its ideological principles and policy menu; the party organisation and leadership; the main determinants of its vote, and the structure of opportunities faced by the party in the 2015 general election. It considers Ciudadanos in two different contexts ‒ Catalonia and all Spain ‒ and in two different ‘time zones’: before 2014, when the party was mainly a regional force, and after that date. In each context, the party seems to have responded to the unsatisfied demands resulting from the double electoral market failure of the last decade in Spain and Catalonia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the general elections of 2015 in Great Britain that returned a majority Conservative government to power. Topics discussed include a decline in the support for the Liberal Democrats political party, the referendum on European Union membership for Britain and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government that ruled in the five years leading up to the 2015 elections.

The article talks about the parliamentary elections in Greece that were held in January and September 2015. Topics discussed include the two consecutive victories of the Coalition of Radical Left (SYRIZA) political party in Greece, the June 2012 parliamentary election in the country which brought together Greek political parties including New Democracy, Panhellenic Socialist Movement and the Democratic Left, and the economic downturn faced by the country.

In Uganda’s 2016 elections, international and national commentators questioned the role that the government’s crime preventers – or community police – would play. Many claimed that they would be used “as tools” to rig the elections, intimidate voters, and voteen massefor the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime. In contrast, this paper shows that the government never intended the crime preventers to play an explicitly coercive role. Instead, the NRM leadership intentionally structured the crime preventer program as indefinite and fluid, allowing political authorities and citizens to understand the purpose of crime preventers alternately as dangerous tools of the regime, family men in search of work, or patriotic citizens of Uganda. Used interchangeably, these logics – which are described in this paper as ideal-typical categories of political, economic, and social – prevented Ugandans from accurately assessing the program. The resultant uncertainty fragmented organization of crime preventers, civil society, and members of the opposition; limited the government’s responsibility for crime preventers; and helped ensure that crime preventers would bolster the strength of the NRM regime in the 2016 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following Uganda’s 2005 multiparty transition, observers expected the country’s legislature – an unusually assertive body by regional standards – to lose its bite, muzzled due to newly re-instated party disciplinary measures. This article explains why – contrary to these expectations – executive-legislative tensions persist and, more fundamentally, what this tells us about the nature of one-party and executive dominance in Uganda. Inspired by a comparative politics literature on parties as well as an older generation of Africanist scholarship, the analysis centres on the nexus linking political finance, party-building and legislative independence. The article argues that the legacy of Uganda’s ‘no-party’ Movement system endures, perpetuated through the highly personalized and contentious nature of electoral mobilization. By failing to recentralize control of campaign finance, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) leadership has left parliamentary candidates largely to their own devices while undermining its own nascent efforts to ensure greater party institutionalization. The consequence of this failure to institutionalize the ruling party plays out in a more assertive legislature, where NRM MPs – who form the overwhelming majority – frequently rebel against the party line. Unable to enforce partisan discipline, Museveni is compelled to buy back legislators’ support through executive patronage. While he generally succeeds in subduing Parliament, especially towards the end of a legislative term, this success is by no means automatic. As such, the Ugandan legislature is best understood as an arena for intra-elite bargaining, its independence contingent on the push-and-pull between President Museveni and unruly NRM MPs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contrary to the experience of many African countries, opposition coalitions are a frequent feature of elections in Uganda. A product of previous alliance efforts and a concerted effort by sections of civil society to facilitate coordination between parties, the 2016 Democratic Alliance was the most cogent collective to date. The broad alliance fragmented just three months before the election as the Forum for Democratic Change pulled out over the selection of the joint presidential candidate. This paper will look at the logic that underlies coalition formation in Ugandan elections, as well as the key reasons for their collapse. This article contends that, when studying coalition formation and collapse, more attention should be given to intra- and inter-party dynamics and competition over shared electoral constituencies, as well as the role of trust, uncertainty and strategic decision-making in successful coalition formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Religion has influenced Ugandan politics ever since colonial times. While the interrelations of religion and politics have altered since the coming to power of president Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), religion continues to influence Ugandan public culture and formal politics in important ways. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Kampala and Acholi, as well as analysis of media reporting and discussions in social media, this article focuses on the role of religious leaders during Uganda’s 2016 parliamentary and presidential elections. We argue that the striking differences between Ugandan clerics’ teaching on politics relate in part to genuine differences in religious beliefs, but also to patronage, intimidation, and ethnicity, and to the strategic calculations religious leaders make about how best to affect change in a constricted political environment. In discussion with previous research on religion and politics in Africa, and utilising analytical concepts from the study of publics, the article proposes a model of religious (de)politicisation, whereby both the politicising and depoliticising effects of religion are acknowledged. To do so, the analysis distinguishes between NGO-ised and enchanted planes of religion, and shows that on both planes, religion contributed simultaneously to enhancing and diminishing the space for public debate in election-time Uganda. While many religious leaders actively or silently supported the incumbent regime, religious leaders also took vocal public stands, fostered political action, and catered for vernacular imaginaries of political critique, by so doing expanding the space of public debate. However, by performing public debate that remained vague on crucial issues, and by promoting a religious narrative of peace, religious leaders participated in the enactment of a façade of political debate, in so doing legitimising the autocratic facets of Museveni’s hybrid regime. Acknowledging religion as an important constituent of public culture contributes to more nuanced understandings of election dynamics in Eastern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The appointment of the President of the European Commission in 2014 occurred in the context of a novel environment: in constitutional terms, the Lisbon Treaty had introduced a small but significant change, namely the requirement for the candidate proposed by the European Council to be elected by the European Parliament. Politically, the 2014 European elections took place against the background of the eurozone crisis which had polarised opinions about the direction of European integration across the member states. This article develops a framework to assess the impact of this changed environment along two crucial dimensions of EU politics – interinstitutional relations and party politics. Based on this analysis, the article argues that while there has been gradual change in certain respects, the impact of theSpitzenkandidatensystem did not lead to a transformation of the EU’s political system. Indeed, rather than creating new opportunities for party political competition, the cooperation between centre-right and centre-left in the election of the Commission President and subsequent decision-making further strengthened the long-standing ‘grand coalition’ in the European Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 Turkey has undergone double regime transitions. First, tutelary democracy ended; second, a competitive authoritarian regime has risen in its stead. We substantiate this assertion with specific and detailed evidence from 2015 election cycles, as well as from broader trends in Turkish politics. This evidence indeed confirms that elections are no longer fair; civil liberties are being systematically violated; and the playing field is highly skewed in favour of the ruling AKP. The June 2015 election results and their aftermath further confirm that Turkey has evolved into a competitive authoritarian regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]