Susan E. Scarrow’s research while affiliated with University of Houston and other places

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Publications (54)


Political Parties and the Rhetoric and Realities of Democratization
  • Chapter

December 2003

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102 Reads

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84 Citations

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Susan E. Scarrow

This chapter considers how political parties may be contributing to changes in the relationships between citizens and the democratic process in established industrial democracies. Parties may promote democratizing reforms through their rhetoric as well as through the culture they nurture within their own organizational domains. The changes in the values that parties have proclaimed in their election platforms are first examined. The changes they have made in their selection procedures, and in the inclusion of interest groups on parties' decision-making bodies are then assessed. The investigation finds that while few parties in these countries have given top priority to campaigning on democratic themes, many have nevertheless embraced an internal agenda of democratization, altering party rules to offer party members a greater say in party decisions.


New Forms of Democracy? Reform and Transformation of Democratic Institutions

December 2003

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246 Reads

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69 Citations

This chapter introduces this book's examination of changing political institutions and practices in established democracies that provide citizens with access and participation opportunities. After describing past waves of democratic reform, it argues that in recent years reformers have been calling for changes to improve elections and representative democracy, while at the same time pushing for new forms of direct democracy and an expansion of advocacy democracy. The analyses presented in this book focus on three key principles of democratic politics: access, transparency, and accountability. They consider changes in rules and behavior in each of these areas, and ask whether the observed changes add up to a transformed style of democracy.


Making Elections More Direct? Reducing the Role of Parties in Elections

December 2003

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31 Reads

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23 Citations

This chapter examines the role political parties play in elections in established representative democracies, and asks whether new institutions and procedures are reducing parties' traditional role as political mediators. It traces the growing adoption and use of devices of direct democracy, the low usage of non-partisan elections, and the trend towards direct election of municipal executives. Taken together, these changes are indicative of a trend towards expanding citizens' opportunities to have a direct say in policy decisions and in the selection of political leaders. However, the magnitude of the shift is small, and political parties still dominate most political decisions within these countries.


Germany: The Mixed‐Member System as a Political Compromise

February 2003

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208 Reads

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26 Citations

Describes how the German mixed-member electoral system arose, and shows how it developed both from interest-based bargaining and from more widely shared concerns about political stability. Some of the features that are most characteristic of the current German arrangements-including giving citizens two ballots and the legal threshold set at 5% of the national vote-were absent in West Germany's first electoral law. These points were incorporated into the German law as the result of partisan struggles, contests whose outcomes were shaped by the shifting contours of West Germany's evolving party system. In other words, although the circumstances of total regime collapse and temporary occupation created rare opportunities to develop a political consensus for principled experimentation with new institutional designs, the German 'model' was as much an ad hoc creation as it was the product of theoretically inspired engineering. The different sections of the chapter are: Electoral Systems in the Federal Republic of Germany; The Origins of Germany's Mixed-Member System; The 1949 Law-and the 1953 and 1956 laws; The German Electoral System Since 1956; and Conclusion: Accidentally Inventing a Model?


4 Party Decline in the Parties State? The Changing Environment of German Politics

September 2002

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37 Reads

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32 Citations

The 1949 (West) German Basic Law established a system of party-based democracy which has now endured for more than half a century. Yet today's political system is not identical to that of earlier years. Since the beginning of the 1980s new party alternatives have made coalition politics harder to manage, the established parties have lost votes and members, and waning public support for all the parties has drawn unfavourable attention to the parties' entrenched positions. These changes grew more pronounced in the 1990s, exacerbated, though not caused, by German unification. Developments reached a new stage in 1998, when one of the new parties of the 1980s, the Greens, became a party of government—an event made possible at least as much by the transformation of the Green Party itself as by a revolution in German politics. Nevertheless, despite the recent challenges to traditional political patterns, Germany remains very much a parties state. Parties still serve as the central mechanisms for political linkage and political decision-making, and the same big parties—Christian Democrats, Christian Socialists, or Social Democrats—are the principal players in state and federal coalition politics. German Parties and Political Institutions Germany's parties and party system have been shaped by the country's legal and institutional frameworks. To begin with, the breadth of the German party system was intentionally limited by constitutional provisions which allowed the prohibition of anti-democratic parties, and by the 1953 and 1956 electoral laws, which raised the nation-wide electoral threshold. 26 These laws helped reduce the number of Bundestag parties from eleven after the 1949 election to four after the 1961 election, and the party system retained this configuration for the next two decades. The German parties' internal politics and structures have also been marked by 26 Under Germany's mixed member electoral system, parties which win at least three direct seats receive a share of seats proportional to their list vote even if this is below 5 per cent.


Direct Democracy and Institutional ChangeA Comparative Investigation

August 2001

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86 Reads

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103 Citations

Comparative Political Studies

Is direct democracy on the rise around the world? Previous efforts to answer this question have investigated patterns of referendum usage and have found only small and isolated increases. In contrast, the current study focuses on patterns of institutional change and finds a broad movement to redesign institutions in ways that give citizens more opportunities to exercise direct control over political decision making.



Parties and the Expansion of Direct Democracy: Who Benefits?

July 1999

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49 Reads

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165 Citations

Party Politics

This article considers the extent to which political parties can use direct democratic reforms as an effective tool for reshaping political behavior. It investigates the interaction between behavioral and institutional changes associated with recent German extensions of direct democracy and intra-party democracy. The examination finds clear links between individual participation preferences and the evolution of the institutional framework: parties promoted reforms in hopes of making `conventional', electorally orientated political participation more appealing to citizens who were increasingly attracted by `unconventional' political outlets. The parties were less successful in using institutional design to achieve specific modifications in patterns of political participation.


Democracy within - And without - Parties: Introduction

July 1999

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18 Reads

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29 Citations

Party Politics

This article briefly reviews discussions about relations between unmediated decision-making procedures and political parties. Late-19th-century debates about institutional reform established the idea that direct democracy undermines parties' power. A century later, proponents of direct democracy and intra-party democracy still promote them in these terms. However, prior research indicates that neither direct democracy nor intra-party democracy automatically weaken the importance of parties, though both the availability and use of unmediated procedures often affect patterns of political competition.


Party Competition and Institutional Change: The Expansion of Direct Democracy in Germany

October 1997

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48 Reads

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56 Citations

Party Politics

A wave of plebiscitary reforms has swept the German states in the past decade. This study uses explanations for cartel party failure as a starting point for investigating why the biggest German parties defected from their long-held consensus against direct democracy. The article shows that, in an increasingly competitive electoral environment, parties were willing to sacrifice long-term benefits in hopes of making short-term electoral gains. More generally, it suggests that the course of institutional reform cannot be understood merely by looking at distributions of party interests and voter preferences. Instead, it is also necessary to examine why political actors come to see their interests in a different light.


Citations (45)


... In fact these two dimensions shaped the very birth of mass democracy, seen as a transition from closed hegemonies to polyarchies (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Dahl, 1971): the gradual legitimation of opposition marked a transition from an ideal of monism to full acceptance of pluralism; and increasing opportunities for participation realized the inclusion of ordinary citizens into goal definition (Dahl, 1971). With the advent of mass democracy and pluralist party government (Katz, 2020) these dimensions became less prominent: but still with a relevance of the vertical, elite-mass dimension, especially for conflicts among and within parties. ...

Reference:

Roads to Rome: how visions of elitism and pluralism shake up the goal repertoire of electoral competition
The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies
  • Citing Article
  • July 2020

Robert Rohrschneider

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Jacques Thomassen

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Jane Mansbridge

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[...]

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... We understand party institutionalisation as the complex process by which political parties consolidate stable organisational structures in the territory and enduring patterns of behaviour, establishing durable electoral support bases that facilitate political representation in the institutions(Mainwaring 2016;Scarrow, Wright & Gauja 2023).8 J. ROCH AND G. CORDERO ...

Party statutes and party institutionalization
  • Citing Article
  • March 2022

Party Politics

... There is an increasing appetite among citizens for direct and deliberative practices (Bedock & Pilet, 2021;Gherghina & Geissel, 2019) while several political parties now include such practices in their manifestos Scarrow et al., 2022;Wuttke et al., 2019). Recent studies showed that populist parties refer to direct and deliberative practices differently than do non-populist parties Gherghina & Pilet, 2021;. ...

Intra-party decision-making in contemporary Europe: improving representation or ruling with empty shells?
  • Citing Article
  • Full-text available
  • March 2022

Irish Political Studies

... In a political system dominated by such parties, there is less reason for voters to abandon parties and to consider newcomers (Gherghina 2015;Tavits 2013). The smaller magnitude of "homeless" and "wandering" voters is helpful for systemic-level stability: abrupt shifts in electoral balance from one election to another can easily undermine the consolidation of inter-party competition (Ponce and Scarrow 2022). ...

Party Institutionalization and Partisan Mobilization
  • Citing Article
  • February 2022

Government and Opposition

... In the US presidential election of 2016, for example, approximately five percent of voting-age Americans in Canada cast a ballot. Over the last several decades, the two major US political parties have sought to mobilize Americans living abroad, with the Democratic Party investing far more than the Republican Party in transnational outreach(Dark, 2003;Klekowski von Koppenfels, 2020;Kalu and Scarrow, 2020). One recent survey of Americans living in Canada found that approximately one in four were exposed to political ads from the US via social media, text messaging, or email (McCann and Rapoport, 2023). ...

US Parties Abroad: Partisan Mobilising in a Federal Context
  • Citing Article
  • October 2020

Parliamentary Affairs

... In other words, it's a form of member decision-making filtered through the hands of MPs. In sum, our findings suggest a different trajectory of digitalization for conservative mainstream parties like the Spanish People's Party, contrasting with newer parties that may genuinely view digital platforms as the most democratic means and effective solutions for conflict resolution (see Scarrow 2021). This reflects the "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" philosophy that has characterized the PP since its foundation (Astudillo & García-Guereta 2006). ...

Intra-Party Democracy and Party Unity: Varied Rules, Varied Consequences
  • Citing Article
  • June 2020

Representation

... Given that party members generally tend to be men (Bale et al., 2020;Heidar and Wauters 2019;Van Haute and Gauja 2015), we would expect that imbalance to be replicated in youth wings. While one might imagine that younger generations of party members may be more representative, since the number of women in elected office who can act as 'role models' (Ponce et al., 2020) is increasing, the scarce evidence we have about young women members is mixed. In Norway, Kolltveit (2022: 7) finds a situation of youth wing gender parity in his survey. ...

Quotas, women's leadership, and grassroots women activists: Bringing women into the party?

European Journal of Political Research

... Parties also function as democracy's transmission beltthat is, connecting voters to government by representing their interests in the policymaking process and holding policymakers accountable (Hicken 2020: 3). Effective party organizations influence voters' attitudes towards democracy (Webb et al. 2022). Intra-party workings also affect citizens' perceptions of democracy. ...

Party organization and satisfaction with democracy: inside the blackbox of linkage
  • Citing Article
  • December 2019

Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties

... Many political parties have experienced a decline in membership for decades. Consequently, party research primarily deals with the extent, reasons for and consequences of membership decline (Scarrow, 2019;Van Biezen et al., 2012). Only recently has awareness been growing that party membership trends are not uniform (Sierens et al., 2022). ...

Multi-Speed Parties and Representation: The Evolution of Party Affiliation in Germany
  • Citing Article
  • August 2018

German Politics

... If parties wish to continue this practice when recruiting women candidates, their candidate-recruiting process must start with recruiting women as party members and then enabling and encouraging them to be active at the local party-level, where they can develop and demonstrate their leadership qualities. Pressures to recruit women candidates could also have indirect participatory effects if the women who are elected due to these efforts then inspire and even actively encourage other women to increase their involvement with parties' grassroots activities (Caul, 1999;Atkeson, 2003;Liu and Banaszak, 2017;Hinojosa and Kittilson, 2020;Achury et al., 2020). ...

The consequences of membership incentives: Do greater political benefits attract different kinds of members?

Party Politics