Party Politics

As the legislative body of the European Union, the European Parliament groups 732 elected representatives from over 170 national political parties from 25 member states. At the EP level, these members are affiliated with seven major party groups representing distinct policy positions. In this paper we provide precise estimates of these policy positions based on expert surveys in addition to characterizing the dimensionality of policy competition in the EP. Our results suggest not only that party groups have identifiable and differentiated positions on multiple issues of policy, but also that these positions group broadly into two orthogonal dimensions: one consisting of classic left-right social and economic issues, and the other related to the powers and scope of EU institutions.

This paper revisits 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 why socioeconomic factors are not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup. Instead, we argue that the coup was the product of a polarizing political realignment that led to a legitimacy crisis. We evaluate this claim using estimates of Argentine legislators' latent preferences (ideal points) between 1916 and 1930. Our 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.

Grass-roots party contacts with voters have become an important feature of recent presidential campaigns. Using respondent reports of party contacts from the 1956-2008 time series of American National Election Studies survey, this paper describes the increase in contacting of the elections of the 2000s and explains it as a function of changes in party capabilities and strategies. In a bygone era, grassroots contacting efforts were the work of the local party organizations – the product of their various capabilities and needs and, consequently, less patterned across the country. With the demise of the local organizations, these grassroots efforts declined; by 1992, contacting had fallen to its lowest point (reaching only 18% of the electorate) in almost four decades. In recent elections, though, the national parties and presidential campaigns have filled this void through their personal contacts with voters that now reach over 40% of the electorate. The ANES evidence shows that this surge in party grassroots contacting is tied to the strategic priorities of the national parties and presidential campaigns. They concentrate their efforts in the most competitive, battleground, states; on the most likely voters as defined by age, income, campaign activities, and registration status; and, especially in 2008, on mobilizing their partisan base. In ramping up party contacted, who is contacted has changed – and become more readily predictable – and the American electoral process has been transformed.

In this paper, using our original data on party leadership succession in twenty-three parliamentary democracies, we investigate the determinants of a party leader’s survival rate: how long he/she remains in office. Unlike previous studies, which focus on institutional settings of leadership selection or on situational (political, economic, and international) conditions at the time of succession, we propose a perceptual theory of leadership survival, focusing on the expectations of party constituents (or indirectly, the voting public) who have the power to remove a leader. Specifically, we argue that they “benchmark” their expectation of a current party leader’s performance by comparing it against their memory of that leader’s immediate predecessor. Empirically, we show that party leaders who succeeded a (very) long-serving party leader and/or to a leader who had also been the head of government experience lower longevity than others, making these types of predecessors “hard acts to follow”.

Measures of party divisiveness have been widely used in scholarly literature for a variety of different purposes. However, conventional measures of party divisiveness, such as the percentage of party votes in a particular Congress, fail to consider important changes in the agenda from one Congress to the next. We introduce a measure that controls for such changes, drawing attention to the affect that agenda change has on observed party divisiveness and providing a more accurate account of party divisiveness across time. We analyze party voting in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1953 and 2004, and find that a sizable amount of the fluctuation in party divisiveness identified by conventional measures is mitigated using this method. While we examine party voting in the U.S. House, our theory and method is applicable to similar measures used in the study of other legislatures (e.g., Rice and Attina indices).

Existing research on party aggregation focuses on the national level, relating it to changes in the federal distribution of powers. I argue that party aggregation also affects sub-national party systems, and therefore that study of party aggregation needs to extend beyond the national level. A comparative analysis reveals that party aggregation at the Indian sub-national (state) level does not respond uniformly to changes in the federal distribution of powers. While federal centralization has positive and significant effects on the number of parties in Indian states, the effects of federal decentralization are relatively less important. Furthermore, Indian states that are highly dependent on the national government have fewer parties and a higher degree of party aggregation. I conclude that existing analysis of party aggregation is simplistic, and that we need to develop a more comprehensive set of explanatory factors by which to study this phenomenon and to extend research in this area to the sub-national level.

Unless they have been content to remain defiantly on the oppositional fringe, or transform themselves into supporters of market economics, few of Europe's communist parties, west or east, have found it easy to adapt to the collapse of `actually existing socialism'. This is especially true of those that have not played down their past. This article looks at one exception, the Cypriot party, AKEL, which has managed to modernize policy, improve its electoral position, and play an important role in government at the same time as maintaining its communist subculture and symbols. It demonstrates, in keeping with Panebianco's `genetic' approach, how the party's origins and development, as well as leadership skill and the special circumstances of a small, divided island, have contributed to the organizational and ideological flexibility that help explain its relative success. It finishes by asking whether this success can continue in the long term

Despite widespread agreement that American politics in the 1980s and 1990s has become more ideological, with more deeply entrenched partisan divisions, studies of legislative decision-making within the American context have generally continued to downplay the role of ideology and partisan attitudes in explaining the behaviour of politicians. Why? We argue that this situation is explained by a combination of instrumentalist conceptions of behaviour that neglect attitudinal motivations, and methodological problems following from the scarcity of data which measure ideology and partisanship separately from the behaviour they putatively explain. To address these problems, we employ original data on a state legislature to allow us more direct insight into such matters. Independent measures of ideology and partisan attitudes are found, as expected, to have a strong empirical association, but nonetheless also to have identifiable and separate impacts on the voting decisions of legislators. Our findings underscore both the importance of ideology and partisan attitudes to an understanding of legislative decision-making and the value of developing independent measures of these concepts wherever possible.

A specter is haunting contemporary party politics: the specter of anti-political-establishment parties. In old as well as in new democracies, fears run high and the literature is booming. Specters are evasive, however. Political scientists have tried to get hold of this one under labels like protest, populist or extremist parties. Yet the `anti-political' ideology which is central for many of these outsider parties has not received the systematic attention it deserves. The present piece of discourse analysis pretends to fill this gap. It argues that anti-political-establishment parties construct two specific cleavages. They contrapose the political elite against citizens, on the one hand, and against themselves, on the other. In its main part, the article analyzes the symbolic strategies anti-political-establishment parties employ in constructing this double conflict. It proceeds to describe their dilemmatic position in between normal and anti-democratic opposition, sketches the possible career paths of anti-political-establishment parties, and concludes with some notes on available counter-strategies.

We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporating a novel theory of strategic changes in the issues covered in party manifestos. We argue that parties use junior ministerial appointments to oversee their coalition partners on portfolios that correspond to issues emphasized by the parties’ activists when the coalition partner’s preferences deviate from the party’s. The findings, based on a data set of more than 2800 party-portfolio dyads in 10 countries, show significant support for these expectations. We find that party leaders who successfully negotiate for junior ministers to particular portfolios are most concerned about checking ideologically contentious coalition partners in areas of concern to activists. The results also illustrate the usefulness of our dyadic approach for the study of junior minister allocation.

This article investigates the nature of party behaviour in the legislative arena in a developing democracy by undertaking a spatial analysis of voting in the Korean National Assembly. We discover the main dimensions of politics in the Korean parliament and look at how KNA members' ideological preferences, regional interests and the shift from divided to unified government shapes relations between parties in this chamber. We find that party behaviour in the KNA is primarily ideologically based around a 'progressive-conservative' dimension of South Korean politics. However, we find that the geopolitical element of the progressive-conservative divide in Korean politics is more salient in the KNA than the socio-economic (left-right) element. We also find more division between the parties in the 17th KNA than in the 16th KNA, but this had less to do with ideological splits than the fact that the main progressive party (Uri) held the presidency and a majority in the parliament for the first time.

In recent years, Western democracies have attempted to outlaw political parties alleged to be 'non-democratic'. Provisions in post-World War II constitutions were mainly enacted to exclude Nazi and Fascist parties from participating in the elections. Lately, the banning of political parties has spread to radical and religious parties. Recent debates in Spain, Germany, Turkey and Israel provide some examples of this. This article deals with the legal framework for the disqualification of political parties in Israel, focusing on the new anti-terrorist amendment, which allows for banning lists and individual candidates who support terrorist acts and the use of violence. The new grounds for banning parties are also discussed in a comparative perspective, vis-a-vis the new Spanish law of 2002. The article reveals the dilemmas of Israel, a 'defensive' democracy, in its attempt to deal with support for terrorism by outlawing political parties.

Pippa Norris provides a schematic account of the evolution of campaigning through premodern, modern and postmodern stages. In particular she points to an emerging postmodern phase of electioneering characterized by a renewed emphasis upon direct forms of engagement which resonate with an earlier period in which campaigns were locally fought and largely dependent upon the canvassing efforts of party workers and volunteers. Norris's analysis offers a useful prism with which to view recent developments in electioneering in Australia. In the past several elections the rival Labor and Liberal parties have attempted to achieve a synergy between their centrally conducted and constituency-level campaigns by ensuring that their national campaigns are locally relevant and address local concerns. Their efforts to 'localize the national' meld the use of sophisticated software with elements of a traditional 'meet and greet' politics and suggest that local campaigning may now have a new shape and importance.

Authoritarian dominant parties are said to ensure elite loyalty by providing elites with regularized opportunities for career advancement. This paper uses data on the distribution of leadership posts in Russia’s regional legislatures (1999-2010) to conduct the first systematic test of this proposition. Loyalty to the nascent hegemonic party, United Russia, is shown to be important in determining a legislator’s chances of being promoted to a leadership position. These findings generate insight into how authoritarian institutions help maintain regime stability and provide a clearer picture of how Russia’s ruling party works.

Primary elections and membership ballots are becoming more common as a means of selecting candidates in European parties. This article assesses the likely implications of these changes for party cohesion by examining the American experience of primaries and contrasting US candidate selection with the membership ballots and primaries recently adopted by parties in the UK and Spain. It is argued that, in the absence of state regulation of candidate selection in European parties, these changes are unlikely to undermine party organizations as primaries have in the US. Instead, the European experience suggests that party leaders have been able to retain ultimate control over candidate selection, and that the democratization of the process has been more formal than real.

How do political parties arrive at their policy positions? While the literature on political parties has devoted considerable attention to studying the impact of voter preferences on position choice, little is known about the effect of internal party politics on preference formation. We conceptualize position formation in federalist countries as a multilevel bargaining process. We discuss two theoretical models: the first one argues that that subnational parties which provide their national counterparts with a large number of seats in the national legislature should be particularly successful in determining policy position choice at the national level while parties from small states bringing only a handful of seats to the negotiation table should hardly have a say during the internal decision-making process. In contrast to this ‘bottom up’-hypothesis, our second expectation claims that rather a ‘top down’ mechanism in the formulation of party policy goals in multi-level systems exists: The stronger or the more successful a party on the state level is, the more leeway it has when it comes to the formulation of policy goals within state parties’ election manifestos. Our hypotheses are tested based on a large new dataset on policy positions of national and state level parties in Germany that has been constructed based on a quantitative text analysis of election manifestos. Drawing on this new dataset, we analyze position formation of all major German parties from 1990 until 2009. Our results have major implications for our understanding of decision-making within political parties and political representation more generally.

This article addresses the relationship between political decentralization and the organization of political parties in Great Britain and Spain, focusing on the Labour Party and the Socialist Party, respectively. It assesses two rival accounts of this relationship: Caramani’s ‘nationalization of politics’ thesis and Chhibber and Kollman’s rational choice institutionalist account in their book The Formation of National Party Systems. It argues that both accounts are seriously incomplete, and on occasion misleading, because of their unwillingness to consider the autonomous role of political parties as advocates of institutional change and as organizational entities. The article develops this argument by studying the role of the British Labour Party and the Spanish Socialists in proposing devolution reforms, and their organizational and strategic responses to them. It concludes that the reductive theories cited above fail to capture the real picture, because parties cannot only mitigate the effects of institutional change, they are also the architects of these changes and shape institutions to suit their strategic ends.

The article examines the impact of electoral results on party membership and activity. Previous studies have focused on the long-term effects of electoral success or failure, suggesting that they may produce a spiral of demobilization or mobilization. The article shows that the dramatic change of electoral fortunes experienced by British parties at the 1997 general election broke this spiral, with the outcome leading to significant changes in the health and activity of local parties. It is concluded that dramatic election results can have significant implications for party organization.

The response of national, state-level political parties to the challenges of competing for power at the devolved, regional levels is a neglected research topic. This article seeks to remedy this neglect by analyzing how the British Labour Party has responded to these challenges at the subnational level following UK devolution. British Labour remains formally a unitary party despite governmental devolution. Nonetheless, the national party leadership has allowed the Scottish and Welsh Parties considerable freedom, in practice, to select candidates, conduct regional-level elections and implement some distinctive policies. Meanwhile, the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties have shifted significantly from being traditional, centralized parties with a single hierarchical organization towards more pluralist, less hierarchical organizations.

We investigate bill passage between party factions in Uruguay and show they earn policy influence by joining coalition cabinets. The policy advantage of coalition is therefore not collected by the president alone, partners acquire clout in lawmaking. A faction should push legislation alone only if in a majority cabinet or else trade votes, preferably among those with resources to secure passage. Analysis of all bills initiated between 1985 and 2005 reveals that the odds of passing a bill sponsored alone by a majority cabinet faction was between (.4, .6), up from (.1, .2) otherwise. And contingent upon the cabinet status of factions involved, the odds of co-sponsored bills conform well to patterns expected by a view that policy rewards are a fundamental part of the politics of coalition in presidentialism.

This study joins two existing logical models and tests the resulting predictions of mean cabinet duration (C). One of these models predicts C based on effective number of parties (N): C = k/N2, where k is found to be around 42 years. The other predicts N on the basis of number of seats in the assembly (S) and district magnitude (M). The new combined model leads to a prediction for the mean cabinet duration in terms of these two institutional factors: C = 42 years/(MS)1/3. Three-quarters of the actual mean durations agree with the prediction within a factor of 2. For the purposes of institutional engineering, the model predicts that doubling the district magnitude would reduce the mean cabinet duration by 21 percent ceteris paribus.

This paper aims to explain why candidate-centered electoral institutions that foster personalistic parties are sometimes chosen in new democracies. Personalistic parties, which are undisciplined and focused on delivering individual or local benefits, are believed to harm government accountability and performance, and hence to weaken citizen support for democracy in the long run. Many scholars argue that these parties thrive because of candidate-centered electoral rules, which encourage candidates to cultivate personal reputations with constituents (instead of party policy reputations). Yet it is seldom obvious why such rules were adopted in the first place. I hypothesize that political leaders in new democracies sometimes choose candidate-centered electoral institutions in order to increase their electoral chances in the upcoming first democratic election, even though such institutions may harm their long-term interests. Social contexts (voter demands) and institutional settings (pre-existing electoral rules) affect this institutional choice. I test these hypotheses with cross-national quantitative studies of all new democracies.

The Social Democratic parties of Germany and Sweden were part of ‘third way’ movements common to such political parties during the mid-1990s. By continuing to moderate their positions and move away from their traditional bases towards the centre, they seemed to embody – a generation later – a second embracing of Kirchheimer’s ‘catch-all’ party thesis. But unlike its 1960s’ incarnation, each of them in the mid-1990s disregarded their left flanks and saw considerable growth of both Green and Left (former communist) parties fill the policy space that social democracy had relinquished. Both parties no longer lead their governments. This article suggests that the decline of social democracy in Germany and Sweden can be understood by a nuanced interpretation of the Kirchheimer thesis. Ultimately, it is argued that the failure of both parties to maintain electoral dominance results, paradoxically, from their overemphasis on the political centre, which left a lucrative space for left-wing parties to occupy especially in a PR setting. Kirchheimer helps us understand this pattern, because the focus on the centre leaves an ideologically moribund electorate that created space for Left parties to institutionally renew or adapt themselves to address the needs of these forgotten voters. This central hypothesis, along with others that derive from the catch-all thesis, is tested empirically with historical analysis and electoral and opinion data.

In this article, we attempt to explain varying patterns of centre—right success between 1990 and 2006 in three post-communist states — Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Success is understood as the ability to construct broad and durable parties. Both macro-institutional explanations, focusing on executive structures and electoral systems, and historical—structural explanations, stressing communist regime legacies, have limited power to explain the observed variance. The introduction of a more sophisticated framework of path dependence, stressing the role of choices and political crafting at critical junctures, adds some insight, but the lack of strong `lock-in' mechanisms required by such approaches makes such a model unconvincing when applied to Central and Eastern European centre—right party development. Other explanations that stress the importance of elite characteristics and capacity are needed to supplement the shortcomings of these approaches, in particular: (a) the presence of cohesive elites able to act as the nucleus of new centre—right formations; and (b) the ability of such elites to craft broad integrative ideological narratives that can transcend diverse ideological positions and unite broad swathes of centre—right activists and voters.

Europeanization is seen as a two-way interaction between developments at European Union (EU) and national levels. Applied to the European People's Party (EPP), it is discussed with reference to ideological/programmatic and organizational changes. Ideologically, EPP has kept its perennial federalism, but oil the left/right axis, has shifted towards liberal economics at the expense of traditional Christian Democrat values. Organizationally, this shift has been complemented by moves to incorporate liberal-conservative parties, especially in areas where Christian democracy has been historically weak, including EU candidate states. This flexible approach has nevertheless encountered limits and also created tension between purists and realists concerned with number rather than quality. Europeanization appears as a dynamic, unruly and sometimes contradictory process.

According to theories on coalition formation, parties with a key position in the coalition game receive higher office and policy payoffs than their coalition partners. In this article, I use two models of government-formation - the portfolio allocation model and the political heart model - to identify key players in the coalition game. Both models are modified to incorporate institutional and political constraints on coalition-formation, and the predictions of key parties from the four models are compared with the governments that actually formed in five European countries: Austria (1983 - 2002), Belgium (1985 - 2003), Germany (1980 2005), Ireland (1982 - 2002) and The Netherlands (1977 - 2003). I argue that the modified models are preferred to the original ones on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Using the key parties identified by the modified models, I find that if a coalition member is a key party, then it is able to assert its policy views more effectively than its coalition partners can, but, contrary to expectations in the literature, that it is unable to capture a surpassing share of cabinet offices.

The article provides a theoretical overview of how parties in modern democracies are using the Internet to perform a range of key functions, such as opinion formation, interest mediation and party organization. Drawing on the party goals’ literature and classic party typologies, the central argument of the article is that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are utilized in different ways by different types of political parties. While some parties stress the downward dissemination of information via new ICTs, others emphasize their interactive and targeting possibilities. The findings of the articles included in this Special Issue are profiled and assessed for the extent to which they provide empirical support for the strategies outlined.

Political parties were not generally major actors in the early stages of democratization in eastern Europe, and their role has been a highly central but limited one in the politics of the region overall. How different has east European democratization been from earlier cases in this respect and how far has the contribution made by parties to the process changed? Their role is first examined in the framework of the 'three waves of democracy' that developed in different historical and international contexts. Contemporary east European democratization is indeed closer to the patterns of the 'second wave' than to the 'first wave' democratizations of western Europe, to which the classic models of party development are closely related. Recent developments in eastern Europe and the role played by parties are then analysed in terms of the major political challenges identifed by proponents of the political development school, whose work concerned large areas covered by the 'second wave'. In comparison with earlier phases, the role of parties in east European democratization is relatively limited and dependent on the prior management of major conflict tendencies. Rather than participation and integration, parties are more critically concerned with the establishment of legitimacy in the more rapidly consolidating democracies.

The purpose of this article is to further our understanding of the directional nature of left–right scores. I suggest that a party's ability to modify its perceived position is conditional on whether parties adopt their manifestos to alter their perceived position and on whether voters are persuaded by parties' attempts to relocate in political space. As voters' knowledge of political parties is a major determinant of where parties are perceived to be located, new parties or parties with weak identities are more likely than old parties to modify their perceived positions, and for two reasons: they are neither willing nor able to adopt an identity-based platform and their freedom to move in political space is not constrained by what voters know about them. The results of statistical analyses show that while Italian voters modified their perception of party positions in the light of party manifestos, this was not the case in the other countries under study, where parties had longer histories than their Italian counterparts. Yes Yes

In 2007, the German party Die Linke emerged as the result of the PDS ( Party of Democratic Socialism; the successor of the Communist Party) merging with the WASG (Wahlalternative Arbeit und Soziale Gerechtigkeit; a break away left wing of the Social Democrats). This article compares the policy position of Die Linke with the positions of the two merging partners. Using a recently developed computerized method, Wordscores, we investigate the differences between the merging partners and compare their policy positions with the position of Die Linke. We provide a systematic analysis of the parties' positions with respect to the economic policy issue based on the manifestos of the three parties. The word scores estimates reveal significant differences between the two merging partners and show that Die Linke is positioned closer to the PDS with respect to the economic issue.

Parties tend to be wary of candidate-centred electoral systems, which explains the use of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) being limited to a few cases. One source of this wariness is that STV is thought to favour non-party candidates, or independents, a claim based primarily on the experience of Ireland. The relative absence of independents in Australia and Malta, the other two countries using STV for national elections, challenges the merits of this reasoning. This study re-examines the nature of this causal link using constituency-level data from the Irish and Australian cases. The results indicate that there is not a great deal of evidence to support the hypothesis that STV favours independents, in particular because electoral system detail can affect a system’s ability to realize expected consequences. While constituency size, ballot access and ballot design affect support for independents, it is not always in the expected manner. This suggests that the non-party phenomenon is more than just a by-product of electoral system effects.

In a recent re-evaluation of developments in European party systems, Paul Pennings has criticized Sartori for inaccurately predicting trends in party competition in his original typology, particularly as evidenced by indicators such as ideological polarization, electoral volatility and systemic stability. In this article I argue that many of these criticisms are unfounded as, firstly, they misinterpret Sartori's assumptions and predictions; and secondly, they employ invalid indicators to measure such party system traits. Furthermore, whilst the polarized pluralist type in particular needs clarification in many respects, focusing on voter preference distributions reveals that the fundamental arguments about the direction of competition are correct. I conclude that if a better understanding of contemporary party systems is to be reached, greater attention needs to be given to electoral demand and its interaction with party supply whilst retaining the principal features of Sartori's model.

Duverger's law postulates that single-member plurality electoral systems lead to two-party systems. Existing scholarship regards India as an exception to this law at national level, but not at district level. This study tests the latter hypothesis through analysis of a comprehensive dataset covering Indian parliamentary elections in the period 1952-2004. The results show that a large number of Indian districts do not conform to the Duvergerian norm of two-party competition, and that there is no consistent movement towards the Duvergerian equilibrium. Furthermore, inter-region and inter-state variations in the size of district-level party systems make it difficult to generalize about the application of Duverger's law to the Indian case. The study concludes that a narrow focus on electoral rules is inadequate, and that a more comprehensive set of explanatory variables is needed to explain the size of the Indian party system even at the district level.

The stabilization of party systems in new democracies is commonly assumed to be a lengthy process. Applying Peter Mairs government-formation-based model of party system development to the three young East Central European democracies of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, the article finds that party systems can stabilize much more quickly than expected. In an analysis of emerging party system patterns, the Hungarian and Czech party systems are found to be far more stable than the Polish, and already nearly as stable as more mature party systems. Examining differences in the three cases, the article makes two primary conclusions about the process of stabilization in new party systems. First, it suggests that stabilization is the product of both electoral system design and consequent patterns of elite behavior. Second, it argues that stabilization not only occurs in spite of ongoing volatility in party-voter alignments, but actually serves to reduce it.

This article explores empirically the competitive strategies of political parties aimed at maximizing electoral support in the early years of democratic elections. By spreading through geographical space in search of votes, candidates and parties challenged adversaries in their strongholds - a process that led to a reduction in the number of safe seats and uncontested constituencies. Evidence covers eight European countries from the early nineteenth century until World War I and is based on constituency-level data. The increasing competition among parties is described, and the impact of the 'massification of politics' evaluated: (1) the extension of voting rights; (2) the challenge to conservatives and liberals by mass parties (mainly social democrats after the Industrial Revolution) and the supremacy of the left-right cleavage over cultural resistances; and (3) the change from a majoritarian to PR formula as an incentive for parties to spread across constituencies. The analogy between competition in the geographical and ideological space is illustrated.

Scully, R. (2001) Voters, Parties and Europe. Party Politics, 7, 4, pp.515-523

This article presents some theoretical contours for the study of party finance and its consequences. Two broad issues are explored. First, the article develops an account of changes in patterns of party finance, and in particular the move away from the ‘mass party’ model of funding towards ‘elite party’ and ‘cartel party’ models. Party finance is conceptualized as a collective action problem, and four ‘post-mass party’ financial strategies are identified. Second, the article addresses normative issues, assessing how these four financial models perform in terms of ‘liberal’ and ‘populist’ theories of democracy. It is concluded that the mass party model remains closest to the ‘democratic’ ideal, whilst the state-financed (‘cartel’) model is a reasonable pragmatic response to the decline in party membership.

Previous studies on new political parties have assumed that they either represent new or ignored cleavages or issues, or emerge in order to cleanse an ideology deficiently represented by an existing party. Four highly successful parties analysed in this article manifestly fail to comply with these assumptions. The article proposes a parsimonious two-dimensional typology of new parties refining the one suggested by Lucardie (2000), incorporating a new type of parties based on the project of newness. We show that the four parties analysed fall into the latter category as they fought on the ideological territory of existing parties yet did not attempt to purify an ideology. It is argued that newness has been an appealing project for new and rejuvenating parties everywhere and the experiences from new democracies should be taken seriously also by those working on established democracies.

Patronage is an enduring feature of contemporary politics and may well develop in modern, mass organized and ideological political parties. This article approaches patronage in an analytical way, and seeks to explore its micro-foundations and logic of development. As the case of Greece's socialist party suggests, patronage is the deliberate outcome of choices made by political actors at the sub-party level in their pursuit of power. Three particular actors are identified and their relations analysed: the party leader, the party organization and the party officeseekers, who are further distinguished into `patrons' and `partisans'. Patronage is likely to develop when a party leader is able to exercise control of both the party organization and the appointments for public office; in this case, even ideologically motivated partisans are expected to turn into self-interested patrons. Finally, some interesting implications for further research are pointed out.

Existing analysis of the Turkish party system suggests that it is unique in several respects. Upper class voters tend to support the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the center-left social democratic party, while poorer voters support the right. Unlike party systems in western democracies, expert surveys find that a religious-secular divide, and not a socio-economic divide, best explains the general left-right dimension. Qualitative literature stresses Turkey’s uniqueness due to the long history of the CHP, its close ties to the bureaucracy and military, and the role of the military in politics. Lastly, existing quantitative measures of policy positions disagree about the placement of major parties. We estimate the principle dimension of Turkish party competition using electoral manifestos as data by applying the Wordfish scaling algorithm. We find that ideology in Turkish politics is reversed, with the nominally center-left CHP employing more populist rhetoric typically associated with right wing parties in the West, and vice versa.

Using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project, we compare the policy positions of left and right parties with regard to immigration across 18 West European countries between 1975 and 2005. We test two main hypotheses: First, we expect that mainstream parties will exploit anti-immigrant sentiments in the electorate regardless of extreme right competition. This would indicate that the extreme Right is not the only driving force behind the recent 'anti-immigrant turn' of electoral politics in Western Europe. Second, we expect the mainstream Left to become increasingly critical towards immigration as its mainstream and/or extreme right competitors intensify their populist rhetoric. Being 'tough' on immigration is thus not a prerogative of the Right. We conclude that the impact of the extreme Right on the electoral behaviour of mainstream right parties has been overstated in previous studies.

Previous research on the initiative process tends to underestimate the involvement of political parties in ballot measure contests as well as the impact of partisanship on initiative voting. Focusing on recent ballot contests in California, we find that the two major party organizations in California are actively using ballot initiatives to bolster voter turnout for their candidates, divide the opposition with `wedge' issues and promote their own party's platform and ideology. This party involvement in initiative contests seems to be paying off, as partisanship is the strongest predictor of votes on ballot measures in California at both the aggregate and individual levels. More generally, our research - which runs counter to the expectations of Populist and Progressive reformers - shines new light on how political parties are shaping not only the process, but also the politics of direct democracy.