Intra-Party Politics and Public Opinion: How Candidate Selection Processes Affect Citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Shomer, Yael; Put, Gert-Jan; Gedalya-Lavy, Einat

doi:10.1007/s11109-015-9324-6

Cited by 25 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Second, these legislatures include cases of all possible combinations of two key institutional variables: regime type (parliamentary or presidential) and form of government (single-party majority, multi-party majority, and minority). Of course, other institutional variables, such as the electoral system, also shape the number of parties and voting behavior inside parliaments (for example, Carey and Shugart 1995; Hix 2004; Shomer 2009). However, in this article we only focus on regime type and form of government, and postpone the relevance of other important factors to future research.…”

Section: Introduction: What Drives Voting In Legislatures?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Hix¹,

Noury²

2015

PSRM

101

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We use roll-call voting data from 16 legislatures to investigate how the institutional context of politics -such as whether a country is a parliamentary or presidential regime, or has a single-party, coalition or minority government -shapes coalition formation and voting behaviour in parliaments. We use a geometric scaling metric to estimate the 'revealed space' in each of these legislatures and a vote-by-vote statistical analysis to identify how much of this space can be explained by government-opposition dynamics as opposed to (leftright) policy positions of parties. We find that government-opposition interests rather than parties' policy positions are the main drivers of voting behaviour in most institutional contexts. In contrast, we find that issue-by-issue coalition-building along a single policy dimension only exists under restrictive institutional constraints; namely presidential regimes with coalition governments or parliamentary systems with minority governments. Put another way, voting in most legislatives is more like Westminster than Washington, DC.

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Section: Introduction: What Drives Voting In Legislatures?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Hix¹,

Noury²

2015

PSRM

101

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…It is equally well-established that the ideological congruence of voters with winning parties fosters SWD (Henderson 2008;Ezrow & Xezonakis 2011). Most pertinently to our focus in this article, Shomer et al (2016) uncovered some evidence to suggest supporters of parties that use more inclusive candidate-selection methods tend to be more satisfied with democracy than supporters of parties which do not.…”

Section: Sources Of Democratic Satisfactionmentioning

confidence: 73%

Party organization and satisfaction with democracy: inside the blackbox of linkage

Webb

Scarrow

Poguntke

2019

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

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This article investigates the way in which party organizational resources and processes may affect perceptions of democracy, looking at the impact of parties' top-down communication mechanisms and bottom-up internal processes. Our examination breaks new ground by pairing party organizational data from the Political Party Database (PPDB) with individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), and shows clear evidence of the link between parties' organizational resource capacity and their ability to inspire satisfaction with democracy (the 'top-down' path from party organization to democratic evaluations). However, it does not appear that the degree of intra-party democracy practised (the 'bottom-up' path) has a similar impact. Overall, these results provide substantial evidence for the importance of party organization and agency in fostering the popular legitimacy of democratic political systems. Party Organization and Satisfaction with Democracy: IntroductionPolitical parties (in aggregate) are often given some or even much of the blame for today's democratic malaise. Some researchers portray the policies and behavior of "established" parties as the source of their own unpopularity, either because their policy collusion deprives voters of electoral choices (cf. Ignazi 2017; Katz and Mair 1995), or because changes in their financing and internal organization make parties much less reliant on support from party members and other partisans (Scarrow, Webb & Poguntke 2017). These and other changes in party priorities are said to result in "linkage failure", with rising distrust of parties and declining satisfaction with democracy seen as evidence that parties are getting worse at providing the linkage that once was fundamental to their democratic contribution (Lawson and Merkl 2014). While such diagnoses are plausible, for the most part they remain at a fairly general level: specific parties and their activities are largely absent from both theoretical and empirical research on satisfaction with democracy. Even those who have questioned the "linkage failure" narrative have most often done so in terms of country-level factors rather than by disaggregating the impact of various party practices (cf. Dalton, Farrell & McAllister 2011); this is true even though contemporary parties

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“…My results speak to the consequences of intraparty democratization in parliamentary democracies. Although more democratic candidate selection procedures in parties are associated with greater satisfaction with democracy (Shomer, Put & Gedalya-Lavy 2016), open leadership contests can also stifle a governing party's electoral prospects. This is problematic for governing parties.…”

Section: Number Of Observations 82mentioning

confidence: 99%

Don't air your dirty laundry: Party leadership contests and parliamentary election outcomes

2020

European J Political Res

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Staging an open contest is a democratic method to choose a party leader, though its electoral consequences remain unclear. I argue that leadership contests are electorally detrimental to governing parties. Competitive contests signal intraparty policy and/or personality conflict to voters, which damages governing parties’ perceived unity as well as competence in the policy‐making process. Thus, leadership contests undermine governing parties’ performances in parliamentary elections. Moreover, since voters evaluate governing parties’ record in office more than their rhetoric, unlike opposition parties, they cannot repair the image of incompetence/disunity by reshaping their rhetoric and/or policy direction. This implies that leadership contests damage governing parties’ electoral prospects more than they do to opposition parties’ electoral performances. Results from statistical testing with original data from 14 countries support my argument. In addition, these results are not endogenous to the contests’ timing; degree of competitiveness; leadership selection rules; whether or not the incumbent retains office; norms of contests; or how predecessors left office. These findings underscore the need to investigate the relationship between intraparty dynamics and election outcomes.

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Intra-Party Politics and Public Opinion: How Candidate Selection Processes Affect Citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Cited by 25 publications

References 56 publications

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Party organization and satisfaction with democracy: inside the blackbox of linkage

Don't air your dirty laundry: Party leadership contests and parliamentary election outcomes

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