Political parties around the world are adopting primaries to select leaders and legislative candidates. While a large, though inconclusive, literature has emerged in the American context to explore the consequences of primaries, little attention has been devoted to other national contexts. Exploring patterns of financial donation, this study examines whether individuals who supported a losing leadership candidate are less likely to exhibit subsequent financial commitment to the party compared to those donors whose preferred candidate won the internal election. Drawing upon a novel dataset that includes tens of thousands of donors to recent leadership elections in Canada, we demonstrate that intra-party winners (i.e. those who supported the winning leadership candidate) are more likely to be financially committed to the party in the year after the election than those who supported losers. Results suggest that open and inclusive elections, while participatory in nature, may come at a cost for political parties as losers withdraw from the party in the wake of their loss.
{"title":"Sour Grapes? Party Donors and Canadian Leadership Primaries","authors":"Scott Pruysers","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.15","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Political parties around the world are adopting primaries to select leaders and legislative candidates. While a large, though inconclusive, literature has emerged in the American context to explore the consequences of primaries, little attention has been devoted to other national contexts. Exploring patterns of financial donation, this study examines whether individuals who supported a losing leadership candidate are less likely to exhibit subsequent financial commitment to the party compared to those donors whose preferred candidate won the internal election. Drawing upon a novel dataset that includes tens of thousands of donors to recent leadership elections in Canada, we demonstrate that intra-party winners (i.e. those who supported the winning leadership candidate) are more likely to be financially committed to the party in the year after the election than those who supported losers. Results suggest that open and inclusive elections, while participatory in nature, may come at a cost for political parties as losers withdraw from the party in the wake of their loss.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44109215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Right-wing populists often mobilize popular support by employing a people-versus-elite dichotomy in which they cast ‘the people’ as the underdog, or by ‘performing’ crisis to discredit the elite. Such ‘underdogism’, and the reliance on crisis more broadly, remains an effective strategy for as long as populists are in opposition. But what happens when populists gain power? One would expect that they would not be able to exploit their position as effectively and their appeal would weaken drastically. In certain cases, however, they still manage to sustain the underdog illusion. This article argues that memory politics are an important locus for populists to maintain their underdog rhetoric, and within that field the performance of victimhood is key. Building on theories about the performance of crisis and recent trends in research on memory politics in Central Europe, we propose a framework for understanding how governing right-wing populists justify vindictive policies and thus try to cement their power.
{"title":"Populist Memory Politics and the Performance of Victimhood: Analysing the Political Exploitation of Historical Injustice in Central Europe","authors":"Jens Meijen, Peter Vermeersch","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.10","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Right-wing populists often mobilize popular support by employing a people-versus-elite dichotomy in which they cast ‘the people’ as the underdog, or by ‘performing’ crisis to discredit the elite. Such ‘underdogism’, and the reliance on crisis more broadly, remains an effective strategy for as long as populists are in opposition. But what happens when populists gain power? One would expect that they would not be able to exploit their position as effectively and their appeal would weaken drastically. In certain cases, however, they still manage to sustain the underdog illusion. This article argues that memory politics are an important locus for populists to maintain their underdog rhetoric, and within that field the performance of victimhood is key. Building on theories about the performance of crisis and recent trends in research on memory politics in Central Europe, we propose a framework for understanding how governing right-wing populists justify vindictive policies and thus try to cement their power.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48600198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Factionalism is an important element in parties' internal life, affecting their policies, strategies, electoral performance and even survival. Yet little is known about how parties manage factionalism. This study examines how radical left parties (RLPs) manage factionalism, drawing on a comparative case study of four RLPs – the Spanish Podemos and United Left (IU), and the Portuguese Left Bloc (BE) and Communist Party (PCP) – from 2010 to 2019. Drawing on original data collection, we find that parties adopt both formal and informal mechanisms to address factionalism. However, their approaches differ significantly. We identify two main approaches towards factionalism: a permissive approach, which allows internal pluralism, in the BE and IU; and a prohibitionist approach, which actively fights factionalism, in Podemos and the PCP, with competitive prohibitionism in the former and pre-emptive prohibitionism in the latter. These approaches strongly correlate with parties' origins and political orientation, but neither fully prevents intra-party conflict or splintering.
{"title":"Dealing with the Facts of Life: The Management of Intra-Party Factionalism in the Iberian Radical Left Parties","authors":"Pedro Lourenço, Tiago Conceição, Carlos Jalali","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.9","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Factionalism is an important element in parties' internal life, affecting their policies, strategies, electoral performance and even survival. Yet little is known about how parties manage factionalism. This study examines how radical left parties (RLPs) manage factionalism, drawing on a comparative case study of four RLPs – the Spanish Podemos and United Left (IU), and the Portuguese Left Bloc (BE) and Communist Party (PCP) – from 2010 to 2019. Drawing on original data collection, we find that parties adopt both formal and informal mechanisms to address factionalism. However, their approaches differ significantly. We identify two main approaches towards factionalism: a permissive approach, which allows internal pluralism, in the BE and IU; and a prohibitionist approach, which actively fights factionalism, in Podemos and the PCP, with competitive prohibitionism in the former and pre-emptive prohibitionism in the latter. These approaches strongly correlate with parties' origins and political orientation, but neither fully prevents intra-party conflict or splintering.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42859609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.
{"title":"Age Inequalities in Political Representation: A Review Article","authors":"Daniel Stockemer, Aksel Sundström","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43186891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nicolás Mimica, Patricio D. Navia, Ignacio Cárcamo
The issuance of parliamentary questions (PQ) in presidential democracies reflects an effort to connect with the electoral constituency to advance the legislator's career. We postulate six hypotheses on the association between party affiliation, career advancement and district-level incentives and the issuance of PQs in Chile's presidential multiparty democracy. We test them using a novel dataset containing 68,424 inquiries (oficios legislativos) issued by Chamber of Deputies legislators in three legislative terms (2006–2018). Though district-level variables play a role in the issuance of PQs, incentives of political ambition do not. As opposition coalition legislators make more use of PQs than ruling coalition legislators, there is preliminary evidence to associate PQs with a possible oversight role.
{"title":"Party Affiliation, District-Level Incentives and the Use of Parliamentary Questions in Chile's Presidential Democracy","authors":"Nicolás Mimica, Patricio D. Navia, Ignacio Cárcamo","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The issuance of parliamentary questions (PQ) in presidential democracies reflects an effort to connect with the electoral constituency to advance the legislator's career. We postulate six hypotheses on the association between party affiliation, career advancement and district-level incentives and the issuance of PQs in Chile's presidential multiparty democracy. We test them using a novel dataset containing 68,424 inquiries (oficios legislativos) issued by Chamber of Deputies legislators in three legislative terms (2006–2018). Though district-level variables play a role in the issuance of PQs, incentives of political ambition do not. As opposition coalition legislators make more use of PQs than ruling coalition legislators, there is preliminary evidence to associate PQs with a possible oversight role.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45231056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The number of grassroots members of populist radical right (PRR) parties is on the rise, in contrast to the trend of membership decline in mainstream parties. While scholars have explained this by studying PRR parties' organizational strategies, I focus on party members and ask: Why do people join PRR parties? To answer this, I look not only at motivations, which is the dominant framework in party membership studies, but also at triggers – factors activating those motivations. Drawing on collective action scholarship, I argue that grievances and efficacy can work as triggers for joining PRR parties. Using interviews with 82 members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the League in Italy and the Sweden Democrats, I uncover three elements in the path to PRR party membership: disaffection, affiliation and action. As well as questioning established narratives on why citizens join parties, my findings provide a novel theoretical framework to investigate this form of political participation.
{"title":"Disaffected but Efficacious: Why People Join Populist Radical Right Parties","authors":"S. Ammassari","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.8","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The number of grassroots members of populist radical right (PRR) parties is on the rise, in contrast to the trend of membership decline in mainstream parties. While scholars have explained this by studying PRR parties' organizational strategies, I focus on party members and ask: Why do people join PRR parties? To answer this, I look not only at motivations, which is the dominant framework in party membership studies, but also at triggers – factors activating those motivations. Drawing on collective action scholarship, I argue that grievances and efficacy can work as triggers for joining PRR parties. Using interviews with 82 members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the League in Italy and the Sweden Democrats, I uncover three elements in the path to PRR party membership: disaffection, affiliation and action. As well as questioning established narratives on why citizens join parties, my findings provide a novel theoretical framework to investigate this form of political participation.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47965663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The vast majority of sub-Saharan countries have adopted constitutional clauses establishing that elected presidents cannot serve more than two mandates. While an extensive literature has examined why African leaders comply with or else try to manipulate term limits, the policy implications of the latter remain unexplored. Existing studies of other world regions suggest that setting a maximum number of terms presidents can serve tends to make them ‘lame ducks’ during their final mandate. We reconsider this argument, and posit and demonstrate empirically that constitutional limits can actually induce positive effects on second-term presidents' actions compared to their first terms. More specifically, the absence of electoral pressures, the concern for their post-presidential future and legacy-building motivations may lead to improvements in the rule of law, especially regarding the functioning of the judiciary. This article represents the first empirical investigation of the performance of Africa's second-term lame-duck presidents.
{"title":"Africa's Lame Ducks: Second-Term Presidents and the Rule of Law","authors":"G. Carbone, A. Cassani","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.2","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The vast majority of sub-Saharan countries have adopted constitutional clauses establishing that elected presidents cannot serve more than two mandates. While an extensive literature has examined why African leaders comply with or else try to manipulate term limits, the policy implications of the latter remain unexplored. Existing studies of other world regions suggest that setting a maximum number of terms presidents can serve tends to make them ‘lame ducks’ during their final mandate. We reconsider this argument, and posit and demonstrate empirically that constitutional limits can actually induce positive effects on second-term presidents' actions compared to their first terms. More specifically, the absence of electoral pressures, the concern for their post-presidential future and legacy-building motivations may lead to improvements in the rule of law, especially regarding the functioning of the judiciary. This article represents the first empirical investigation of the performance of Africa's second-term lame-duck presidents.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47156200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While far-right parties tend to receive a small minority of votes in national elections, their presence in ruling coalitions is becoming much more common. In this article, I ask under what conditions mainstream parties are willing and interested in forming a coalition with a far-right party, given the potentially high costs associated with having such a partner in government. I characterize such moves as the co-optation of a growing political rival in an effort to minimize electoral threat. That is, as far-right parties become more threatening to the electoral success of a mainstream party, they will invite the party into their government, in an effort to stave off said threat. This characterization borrows from the literature of authoritarian co-optation to build on our current understanding of parliamentary coalition-building. Quantitative analysis utilizing cross-national, survey and spatial data is employed to support this theory.
{"title":"Come Together: Far-Right Parties and Mainstream Coalitions","authors":"Nicolas Bichay","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.5","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While far-right parties tend to receive a small minority of votes in national elections, their presence in ruling coalitions is becoming much more common. In this article, I ask under what conditions mainstream parties are willing and interested in forming a coalition with a far-right party, given the potentially high costs associated with having such a partner in government. I characterize such moves as the co-optation of a growing political rival in an effort to minimize electoral threat. That is, as far-right parties become more threatening to the electoral success of a mainstream party, they will invite the party into their government, in an effort to stave off said threat. This characterization borrows from the literature of authoritarian co-optation to build on our current understanding of parliamentary coalition-building. Quantitative analysis utilizing cross-national, survey and spatial data is employed to support this theory.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43426432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Multiparty governments are based on delegation and compromises but, at the same time, coalition parties have at their disposal several legislative instruments to keep tabs on their partners. Whereas previous studies focused on policy divisiveness and issue salience as main factors able to explain parliamentary scrutiny, in this article we suggest uncertainty as a complementary factor. In particular, we theorize that the use of parliamentary questions (PQs) is a function not only of policy characteristics but also of actors involved in coalition governance. When ministers increase intra-coalition uncertainty, cabinet parties use PQs to extract information from ministers and to reduce uncertainty in policy implementation. Statistical analyses of all written and oral parliamentary questions in the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 2006 and 2018 support our main hypothesis that when intra-coalition uncertainty increases, coalition parties ask more questions of ‘hostile’ ministers.
{"title":"Controlling Uncertainty in Coalition Governments","authors":"Fabio Sozzi","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Multiparty governments are based on delegation and compromises but, at the same time, coalition parties have at their disposal several legislative instruments to keep tabs on their partners. Whereas previous studies focused on policy divisiveness and issue salience as main factors able to explain parliamentary scrutiny, in this article we suggest uncertainty as a complementary factor. In particular, we theorize that the use of parliamentary questions (PQs) is a function not only of policy characteristics but also of actors involved in coalition governance. When ministers increase intra-coalition uncertainty, cabinet parties use PQs to extract information from ministers and to reduce uncertainty in policy implementation. Statistical analyses of all written and oral parliamentary questions in the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 2006 and 2018 support our main hypothesis that when intra-coalition uncertainty increases, coalition parties ask more questions of ‘hostile’ ministers.","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42947063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"GOV volume 58 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/gov.2023.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2023.3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47758,"journal":{"name":"Government and Opposition","volume":"58 1","pages":"f1 - f2"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42466899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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