Bryan Dettrey
Annotated Articles for "Party Systems"
This articles compares party systems and distribution of public goods in 15 Indian states. These sub-national units in India have different party systems. Some states have a two-party system and other states have a multiparty system. This unique environment makes for interesting research on party systems and governing performance.
The distribution of public goods is very uneven in India. For example, in 1981 61% of Punjab had electricity but only 9% of Bihar had electricity. In the proceeding ten years, Maharashtra increased its electricity service by 30%, but Bihar had only a 3.5% increase. The theoretical connection between public goods and party systems is in two- party systems a majority is needed to win, thus parties reach out to many social groups and voters. The parties are also held accountable by many groups and voters once elected. In a multiparty system, only a plurality is needed to win. In this situation, the parties reach out and are held accountable to fewer groups and voters.
The hypothesis is public goods will be distributed more evenly in two-party systems than in multiparty systems. Chhibber and Nooruddin regress party systems with development expenditures and public goods distribution. States with multiparty systems spend less of their budget on development expenses and have less access to electricity and drinking water. States with two-party systems also were seen not to favor one caste and have less caste conflict.
This review article covers a wide range of material relating to the stability and instability in Latin American nations. Directly relating to our topic of classifying party systems, Foweraker classifies party systems according to effective number of parties and presidential party seats in the legislature. He finds a strong connection between effective parties numbering less than 2.5 and the president's party obtaining more than 45% of the legislative seats. Conversely, there is also a connection between more than 2.5 effective parties and the president's party obtaining less than 45% of the legislative seats. Foweraker uses this classification to argue multipartism decreases the ability of presidents to obtain a majority and this is a contributing cause of instability in Latin American politics.
This article classifies party systems according to levels of nationalization in the Americas. This is very similar to the "penetration" concept used by Ware (1996, p. 150). The level of nationalization of parties is measured using the GINI coefficient of the vote distribution. The nationalization of party systems is then calculated using the GINI coefficient multiplied for every party by its proportion of national vote. The results indicate Argentina, Canada, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador have low levels of party system nationalization. Mexico, El Salvador, and U.S. have moderate levels of party system nationalization. Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, and Uruguay have highly nationalized party systems.
Kuenzi and Lambright use regularity of party competition, degree of penetration a party has in society, and levels of institutionalization to classify party systems in Africa. Net changes in party seats in elections are used to measure party competition. Age of parties and age of parties getting at least 10% of the votes are used to determine the penetration of the party system in society. Survey data determining if any party boycotted the election, if the losers accepted the results, and if the election was free and fair formed the institutionalization measure (perhaps they should have labeled this legitimacy).
The results indicate party competition is extremely varied. Lesotho had a mean legislative volatility of 99 while Cape Verde had a mean legislative volatility of 1. This range of variation makes it difficult to develop a parsimonious classification of party systems. The societal roots measure indicates older parties are less successful than younger parties. For example, in 13 African nations, the older parties held none of the legislative seats. The successful parties are younger and do not have long lasting roots in these nations. Thus, most nations are classified as having young party systems. Finally, on the institutionalization measure, only 5 nations are classified as highly institutionalized (Botswana, Gambia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa). Most of the nations demonstrated low levels of institutionalization.
This chapter starts with a methodology of counting the number of effective parties under difficult circumstances and ends with using the measure of number of effective parties to correlate with number of salient issues.
When counting political parties it may be difficult to properly account for closely allied parties in a political system. An example of this is the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) in Germany. Lijphart's solution is to count them as two parties, then as one party, and average the scores. Likewise, it may be difficult to properly count a party that is very factionalized. The Democratic Party in the United States is an example. The solution here is similar as to the one above. First count the factionalized party as one, and then average that score with the score obtained when the party is counted as two parties.
Lijphart uses case studies of 36 democracies to analyze the relationship between party systems and salient issues. Socioeconomic, religious, cultural-ethnic, urban-rural, regime support, foreign policy, and post materialism are the issue dimensions used to score the 36 democracies. The effective number of parties measure is then correlated with the issue dimension measure. Lijphart finds that number of parties and number of salient issues are strongly correlated (.84). The conclusion is that party systems with more parties also have more salient political issues so there is a strong similarity when classifying political systems according to number of parties or number of salient issues.
The first chapter of this book provides the theoretical grounding for the connection between party systems and stability. Party systems that are more institutionalized help create stable government whereas less institutionalized party systems foster more volatile governments. Institutionalized party systems help in the formation of government coalitions, reducing information costs to voters, shaping agendas, and funneling public opinion to government leaders. Party systems lacking institutionalization have increased costs to voters, make it more difficult to form governing coalitions, and create a more erratic political environment where demagoguery can occur. Similar to other works, party system institutionalization is measured in 4 ways: regularity of party competition, extent of party roots in society, legitimacy of electoral process, and whether party organizations have structure and resources. The rest of the book measures party system institutionalization for 12 Latin American countries and analyzes these measures against levels of stability.