It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra‐party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote‐seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party‐in‐a‐district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party‐in‐a‐district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra‐party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote‐seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote‐seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra‐party competition on personal vote‐seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system.
Does representatives' legislative activity have any effect on their electoral performance? A broad theoretical literature suggests so, but real‐world evidence is scarce as empirically, personal and party votes are hard to separate. In this article, we examine whether bill initiation actually helps MPs to attract preference votes under flexible list electoral systems. In these systems, voters can accept the party‐provided rank order or vote for specific candidates, which allows a clear distinction between personal and party votes. The empirical analysis uses data on bill initiation by Belgian MPs in the period 2003–2007 to explain their personal vote in the 2007 elections. We find that particularly single‐authored proposals initiated shortly before the upcoming elections are associated with a larger personal vote.
Election manifestos are important documents, but very little is known about the way parties create their manifestos and how they use them. This is unfortunate, because such knowledge can inform both the academic study of party politics and political practice. This article presents original results from interviews with actors who played a key role in creating the 2007 national election manifesto for the major Irish parties. It describes the sequence of actions in developing the manifesto, and how those involved in the preparation perceive its functions. The results suggest that preparation processes are similar to those found a decade ago, but a trend towards giving party activists a larger say seems to be emerging. This finding is at odds with the prediction of the cartel party model that party leaders seek to reduce the influence of activists. Another finding is that manifestos are not only used to address voters, but also are tools for intra-party coordination, for communication with interest groups, and are especially important in the government formation process. Students of party competition should take this multi-purpose nature of the documents and variation in preparation modes into account. Finally, if there is a lack of policy debate in Irish election campaigns, the reason does not lie in a lack of policy material on the side of the parties.
Despite the recent focus on scaling policy positions by treating political text as quantitative data, huge investments in political science continue to use expertcoded content analysis, namely the 30-year Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) of coded manifestos as well as the Comparative Policy Agendas Project (CAP). All text analysis methods require the identification of a fundamental unit of analysis. The fundamental unit of analysis in both CMP and CAP is the "quasi sentence", which is either a natural sentence, or a part of a sentence judged by the coder to have an independent component of meaning. The use of subjective judgment in identifying quasi-sentences, however, means that specification of the fundamental unit of data analysis is endogenous to the content of the text. In addition, it is known that the unitization of political texts into endogenous quasi sentences by expert coders generates unreliable specifications of the unit of analysis. The justification for using quasi-sentences is a supposed gain in associated validity of the codings. In this paper, we show that this justification is empirically questionable, since using quasi-sentences does not produce valuable additional information in characterizing substantive political content. Defining text units exogenously as natural language sub-units separated by one of a predefined list of punctuation marks, by contrast, generates perfectly reliable unitization, with no measurable cost in terms of the content validity of the resulting estimates. analysis schemes employ humans to read textual sub-units and assign these to pre-defined categories. Both methods require the identification of a textual unit of analysis -a highlyconsequential, yet often unquestioned decision of research design -before the methods can be applied.In this paper, we critically examine the dominant approach to unitizing political texts prior to human coding: the parsing of texts into quasi-sentences, defined as part or all of a natural sentence that express a distinct policy proposition. The use of the quasi-sentence rather than natural language units (such as sentences defined by punctuation) is motivated by the desire to capture all relevant political information, regardless of the stylistic decision to create long or short natural sentences. The correct identification of quasi-sentences by human coders, however, is highly unreliable. If we can demonstrate through comparing texts coded using both quasi-and natural sentences, that there is no appreciable difference in measured political content, then we would have a strong case for replacing human unitization schemes 3 with natural sentence text units that can be easily identified -and with perfect reliability -by computerized methods based on punctuation delimiters.Our paper proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the main issues motivating the use of quasi-sentences and what this entails for reliability. Next, we re-examine and recode, using natural sentences, previously unitized and coded texts in several languages, and ...
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