We elaborate on each of our case selection criteria in turn. First, the explanation for our chosen time period is straightforward. We saw no reason to not broaden our coverage both forwards and backwards in time relative to the literature, provided the appropriate data were available. This ensured that our presidential regime-only models would have a somewhat more adequate number of cases. Because data became difficult to obtain around the turn of the twentieth century, we somewhat arbitrarily chose to draw the lower bound at 1900; data also became difficult to obtain for very recent elections, which led us to the 2005 upper bound. 1 As noted in the main paper and as demonstrated below, confining the analysis to the post-World War II period does not alter our conclusions. Second, as is conventional, we employ the minimalist, procedural definition and operationalization of democracy developed by Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi and Przeworski (1996, 1999). This means that we study only those legislative elections in countries where the chief executive is elected; the legislature is elected; more than one party competes; and incumbents have actually lost elections. As noted in the main paper and as demonstrated below, neither controlling for pre-1990 OECD membership; eliminating elections in African countries; nor eliminating single country-elections, all relatively unconsolidated democracies, alters our conclusions. Third, also straightforward is our decision to confine the analysis to countries with a population of at least one million. Comparing elections in tiny Nauru (population approximately thirteen thousand) to elections in the United States (population approximately three hundred million) seems akin to comparing apples and oranges-especially when one is concerned, as we are, about the challenges of cooperating across districts. The literature implicitly takes a similar approach: the effective number of ethnic groups, one of its control variables, is only available for larger countries (see, for example, Fearon 2003), which means that small countries would otherwise need to be list-wise deleted from the analysis. 2 Hence, it makes sense from a theoretical standpoint; for reasons of data availability; and in the interests of comparability to restrict our analysis to elections in larger countries. Fourth and finally, we exclude elections conducted under electoral systems with two relatively unusual features: fused elections and single, nation wide electoral districts. In fused elections such as post-1980s Bolivia, voters cast a single ballot for the presidency and the legislature, but distinct 1 Less arbitrarily, severe restrictions on franchise existed in many countries prior to the turn of the last century. We could not help but be concerned that participation in pre-1900 democracies was too different from that in post-1900 democracies for valid comparison. In other words, we to some extent break with Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi and Przeworski (1996, 1999) by working participation into our definition of democracy (s...
Presidential elections with few candidates held in temporal proximity to legislative elections are believed to promote the nationalization and consolidation of the legislative party system. However, contrary to the existing literature, the authors argue here that the shadow presidential elections cast over legislative elections is contingent on the relative powers of the president vis-à-vis the legislature. Specifically, the authors find that proximate presidential elections with few presidential candidates promote the nationalization and consolidation of the legislative party system only when the president is neither very weak nor very powerful. They also find that proximate presidential elections with many presidential candidates promote the denationalization and fragmentation of the legislative party system only when the president is at least reasonably powerful.
This article explores how the party-defined dimensionality of political competition relates to the number of parties competing in legislative elections. It demonstrates that a mathematical relationship between the number of electoral parties and the literature’s concept of dimensionality follows from the variables’ definitions; conversely, it argues that exploring the relationship between the number of electoral parties and a different concept of dimensionality conveys new information. Hence, it first argues that how we conceptualize dimensionality matters. Redirecting attention to the latter relationship, it then hypothesizes that party system fragmentation will go hand-in-hand with the appearance of new conflicts on the political agenda when the electoral system is permissive. Using a time-series cross-sectional dataset that includes at its core a new measure of dimensionality, it finds reasonable support for the hypotheses; however, at the elite level, new parties are found to play less of a role in politicizing new conflicts than expected.
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