Representative democracy is party democracy. Parties vote together in the legislative arena; party labels act as information shortcuts in the electoral arena, tying together co-partisan legislators’ re-election prospects. But the utility of party labels is weakened by waning party identifications in the electorate. Partisan dealignment therefore risks undercutting party loyalty on the part of backbenchers. Combining district-level data on electoral volatility and new data from the PARTIREP survey of legislators in 15 advanced industrial democracies, it is demonstrated that party loyalty is lowest where partisan dealignment is strongest – even after accounting for backbenchers’ policy preferences, whether they represent the ruling party or the opposition, and their campaign strategies. Our results have important implications for the sustainability of current models of representative democracy.
Numerous new parties have emerged since voters became less loyal to established political parties. A number of these survived and have been analysed intensely, especially green and radical right parties; many other new parties disappeared and have been neglected by party research. This article analyses the fate of all 30 political parties that entered parliament in the Netherlands or Belgium between 1950 and 2003. Qualitative comparative analysis is used to identify characteristics of both surviving and disappeared new parties. Conditions related to party origin (roots in civil society, organisational newness, initial programmatic profile) are scrutinised, as are conditions pertaining to the party's developmental process (party organisational strength and the occurrence of defections or party splits). Surviving parties are characterised by strong, rooted organisations that have not suffered defections. Most disappeared parties lacked a strong organisation and roots and have experienced shocks that they could not absorb. Organisational newness makes new parties vulnerable.
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Ideological congruence between voters and governments is desirable, the wisdom goes, because it implies enactment of policies close to those preferred by voters. Party polarization plays a paradoxical role here: more polarization reduces voter-government congruence if parties making up a government move away from the center-ground where most individual voters are located; yet increasing polarization permits those governments’ policies to become more distinct in the eyes of voters. This paper investigates how political system clarity helps to resolve this paradox. We examine the interplay of several sources of clarity and, in particular, of the joint role of party and voter polarization. We argue and find that, if polarization of survey respondents increases in step with party polarization, this provides clarity that can override party polarization’s negative effect on voter-government congruence. But other types of clarity also play important roles in accounting for the range of values that congruence takes on.
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