This work proposes an explanation for nationalist party success based on successful issue competition. Niche parties, it has been argued, gain votes by concentrating on their “owned” issues, such as environmentalism for green parties and mono-culturalism for nationalists. We argue that nationalist parties may increase their vote share by engaging in issue competition with mainstream parties and expanding the diversity of issues emphasized in their platforms. Because of their position and ideology, green parties are not able to engage in such an electoral strategy. Relatedly, no such reward exists for nationalist parties in well-documented majoritarian systems. In party systems with a size typical of proportional systems, we find that as nationalist parties broaden their issue agenda from highly specialized positions, they are able to increase their vote share. Our findings have significant implications for the study of party–voter issue linkages and party competition in fragmented political space.
The vote NO (a defeat for the proponents) of the 2016 Italian referendum has been broadly attributed to a wave of protest politics sweeping Western democracies. Given that the government of Matteo Renzi proposed and supported the referendum, the resulting vote against government interests raises a crucial theoretical question: to what extent does the referendum vote reflect the characteristics of a protest vote? To disentangle the meaning and impact of protest, we distinguish two dimensions: the ‘system discontent’ and the ‘elite discontent’, referring to both general and focalized images: general sentiments towards the representational aspects of political institutions as compared to focused sentiments towards government performances. The circumstances surrounding the referendum provide a crucial test for whether these two forms of protest can be at odds with one another. We expect and find that elite discontented voters tend to reject this referendum. Vice versa, system discontent increased support for the referendum, as it would reform political institutions to which voters had negative sentiments. Findings suggest that analyses of political psychology and behaviour identify the conceptual foundations for protest and ask whether forms of protest work in parallel or at odds. Protest attitudes and their effects should be thought of as multidimensional.
This chapter develops the electoral–constituency model of party personnel. Under this model, parties deploy their personnel according to their ability to draw votes within specific electoral districts or to specific competing candidates of the party. The chapter derives testable premises, grounded in a two-dimensional characterization of electoral systems: (1) the extent to which they shape a party’s seat maximization through dependence on the geographical location of votes; and (2) the extent of a party’s dependence on “personal votes” of individual candidates. Nationwide proportional representation (PR) versus systems with many electoral districts define the first dimension, while the second dimension is characterized by differences between systems with closed party lists and those employing a single nontransferable vote (SNTV). The chapter discusses how different single-tier and mixed-member systems generate different tradeoffs between parties’ use of the expertise and electoral–constituency models. In particular, the electoral–constituency model suggests that parties allocate members from safe districts differently from those elected in swing/marginal districts. The chapter presents data on the parties covered in the book according to variables such as the margin of electoral victory and population density of districts represented.
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