Party Competition (party + competition)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Party Competition and the Resilience of Corporatism

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 2 2009
Mette Anthonsen
This article argues that after the Golden Age of capitalism, corporatist methods of policy-making have come to depend on specific modes of party competition. In contrast to previous studies of corporatism, which have argued that corporatism depends on strong social democratic parties, this article suggests that the competition between well-defined left-wing and right-wing ,blocs' has become detrimental to corporatism. In countries with mixed governments or traditions of power-sharing, on the other hand, corporatism thrives. These conclusions are based on a comparison of four traditionally corporatist countries , Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland , from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. [source]


Partisan responses to Europe: Comparing Finnish and Swedish political parties

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2001
KARL MAGNUS JOHANSSON
This article analyzes party responses to European integration in Finland andSweden. We argue that such responses are shaped by seven explanatory factors: basic ideology, public opinion, factionalism, leadership influence, party competition, transnational links, and the development of integration. Each factor can lead to a positive or a negative evaluation of the European Union. In the empirical analysis, the sample includes all parties represented in the respective national parliaments, and the research material consists of party documents, parliamentary votes, statements by leading party figures, public opinion surveys, direct observation and interviews. Party competition and leadership influence are the strongest factors in the Finnish case, while public opinion and factionalism are the strongest factors in Sweden. Issue avoidance combined with the secondary importance of the EU in party politics explain why parties have been relatively successful in containing internal factionalism and discord, especially in Finland. [source]


Subnational political opportunity structures and the success of the radical right: Evidence from the March 2004 regional elections in France

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 6 2007
ELINA KESTILÄ
The concept of ,political opportunity structure' refers to the degree of openness of a particular political system and the external institutional or socio-economic constraints and opportunities that it sets for political parties. Comparative analysis across subnational units is conducted where the 94 departments of mainland France are the units of analysis. The significance of electoral institutions (district magnitude), party competition (effective number of parties), electoral behaviour (turnout) and socioeconomic conditions (immigration and unemployment) on the ability of the FN to gather votes across the departments is assessed by means of multiple regression. The empirical results show that the subnational political opportunity structures have been of great importance for the FN. Some four out of the five independent variables are statistically significant and explain a great deal of the variance in the two dependent variables (electoral support for FN list and index of electoral success). Turnout and district magnitude are negatively correlated with the electoral fortunes of the FN, while unemployment and the effective number of party lists are positively correlated with the success of the FN in the regional elections. The variable that indicates the share of non-European immigrants does not provide additional explanatory power in a statistically significant way. [source]


Partisan responses to Europe: Comparing Finnish and Swedish political parties

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2001
KARL MAGNUS JOHANSSON
This article analyzes party responses to European integration in Finland andSweden. We argue that such responses are shaped by seven explanatory factors: basic ideology, public opinion, factionalism, leadership influence, party competition, transnational links, and the development of integration. Each factor can lead to a positive or a negative evaluation of the European Union. In the empirical analysis, the sample includes all parties represented in the respective national parliaments, and the research material consists of party documents, parliamentary votes, statements by leading party figures, public opinion surveys, direct observation and interviews. Party competition and leadership influence are the strongest factors in the Finnish case, while public opinion and factionalism are the strongest factors in Sweden. Issue avoidance combined with the secondary importance of the EU in party politics explain why parties have been relatively successful in containing internal factionalism and discord, especially in Finland. [source]


Party Competition and the Resilience of Corporatism

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 2 2009
Mette Anthonsen
This article argues that after the Golden Age of capitalism, corporatist methods of policy-making have come to depend on specific modes of party competition. In contrast to previous studies of corporatism, which have argued that corporatism depends on strong social democratic parties, this article suggests that the competition between well-defined left-wing and right-wing ,blocs' has become detrimental to corporatism. In countries with mixed governments or traditions of power-sharing, on the other hand, corporatism thrives. These conclusions are based on a comparison of four traditionally corporatist countries , Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland , from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. [source]


The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2003
Michael Laver
Most existing theoretical work on party competition pays little attention to the evolution of party systems between elections as a result of defections between parties. In this article, we treat individual legislators as utility-maximizing agents tempted to defect to other parties if this would increase their expected payoffs. We model the evolution of party systems between elections in these terms and discuss this analytically, exploring unanswered questions using computational methods. Under office-seeking motivational assumptions, our results strikingly highlight the role of the largest party, especially when it is "dominant" in the technical sense, as a pole of attraction in interelectoral evolution. [source]