Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T06:59:55.347Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Electoral competition after party splits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2019

Raimondas Ibenskas
Raimondas Ibenskas*
Affiliation:
Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While party splits are a relatively frequent phenomenon in many new and established democracies, the systematic empirical research on electoral competition after schisms is limited. The analysis of more than 200 splits across 25 European countries in the post-war period addresses this gap in the research. The study shows that the vote shares of rump and splinter parties in the first election after fission are related to their membership strength and the share of splinter legislators. This relationship is present in both Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe. Additionally, economic growth affects the support of rump parties that hold government office while party system fragmentation and party funding regulations correlate with the electoral performance of splinter parties.

Keywords

Political partieselectoral competitionparty splitsEurope
Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 45 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aimer, P and Vowles, J (1993) Voters' Vengeance: 1990 Election in New Zealand and the Fate of the Fourth Labour Government. Auckland: Auckland University Press.Google Scholar
Andersen, R (2008) Modern Methods for Robust Regression. Thousand Oaks: Sage.Google Scholar
Art, D (2011) Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bakke, E and Sitter, N (2013) Why do parties fail? Cleavages, government fatigue and electoral failure in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary 1992–2012. East European Politics 29, 208–225.Google Scholar
Barnea, S and Rahat, G (2011) Out with the old, in with the new: what constitutes a new party? Party Politics 17, 303–320.Google Scholar
Beyens, S, Lucardie, P and Deschouwer, K (2016) The life and death of new political parties in the low countries. West European Politics 39, 257–277.Google Scholar
Biezen, Iv (2013) Party law in modern Europe. Available at http://www.partylaw.leidenuniv.nl/.Google Scholar
Bolin, N (2010) How new parties shape their own fate: an actor-centered framework for analysis. Presented at the ECPR Graduate Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 30 August–1 September, 2010.Google Scholar
Bolleyer, N (2013) New Parties in Old Party Systems: Persistence and Decline in Seventeen Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bolleyer, N, Ibenskas, R and Keith, D (2016) The survival and termination of party mergers in Europe. European Journal of Political Research 55, 642–659.Google Scholar
Bugajski, J (2002) Political Parties of Eastern Europe: A Guide to Politics in the Post-Communist Era. New York: ME Sharpe Inc.Google Scholar
Carey, JM and Hix, S (2011) The electoral sweet spot: low-magnitude proportional electoral systems. American Journal of Political Science 55, 383–397.Google Scholar
Carter, E (2005) The Extreme Right in Western Europe: Success or Failure? Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Ceron, A (2015) The politics of fission: an analysis of faction breakaways among Italian parties (1946–2011). British Journal of Political Science 45, 121–139.Google Scholar
Crewe, I and King, A (1995) SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Döring, H and Manow, P (2015) Parliament and government composition database (ParlGov).Available at http://www.parlgov.org (Accessed 14 May 2015).Google Scholar
Gallagher, M (2016) Election indices dataset.Google Scholar
Golder, M (2003) Explaining variation in the success of extreme right parties in Western Europe. Comparative Political Studies 36, 432–466.Google Scholar
Golder, M (2016) Far right parties in Europe. Annual Review of Political Science 19, 477–497.Google Scholar
Golder, SN (2006) The Logic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
Greene, Z and Haber, M (2016) Leadership competition and disagreement at Party National Congresses. British Journal of Political Science 46, 611–632.Google Scholar
Greene, Z and Haber, M (2017) Maintaining partisan ties preference divergence and partisan collaboration in Western Europe. Party Politics 23, 30–42.Google Scholar
Hanley, S (2008) The New Right in the New Europe: Czech Transformation and Right-Wing Politics 1989–2006. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hino, A (2012) New Challenger Parties in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hug, S (2001) Altering Party Systems: Strategic Behavior and the Emergence of New Political Parties in Western Democracies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Ibenskas, R (2016 a) Marriages of love or convenience: party mergers in established and new European democracies. Journal of Politics 78, 343–356.Google Scholar
Ibenskas, R (2016 b) Understanding pre-electoral coalitions in Central and Eastern Europe. British Journal of Political Science 46, 743–761.Google Scholar
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (2012) Political finance database. Available at http://www.idea.int/political-finance/.Google Scholar
Katz, RS and Mair, P (1994) How Parties Organize: Change and Adaptation in Party Organizations in Western Democracies. London: Sage.Google Scholar
King, AS (2002) Conclusions and implications. In King, AS (ed.), Leaders' Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 210–226.Google Scholar
Laver, M and Benoit, K (2003) The evolution of party systems between elections. American Journal of Political Science 47, 215–233.Google Scholar
Lijphart, A (1994) Electoral Systems and Party Systems:: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lucardie, P (2000) Prophets, purifiers and prolocutors. Party Politics 6, 175–185.Google Scholar
Luther, KR (2008) Electoral strategies and performance of Austrian right-wing Populism, 1986–2006. In Bischoff, G and Plasser, F (eds), The Changing Austrian Voter: 16 (Contemporary Austrian Studies). New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Mainwaring, S, Gervasoni, C and España-Najera, A (2017) Extra-and within-system electoral volatility. Party Politics 23, 623–635.Google Scholar
Marinova, D (2016) Coping with Complexity: How Voters Adapt to Unstable Parties. Colchester: ECPR Press.Google Scholar
McAllister, I (2007) The Personalization of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 571–588.Google Scholar
Meguid, BM (2005) Competition between unequals: the role of mainstream party strategy in niche party success. American Political Science Review 99, 347–359.Google Scholar
Mudde, C (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
O'Brien, DZ and Shomer, Y (2013) A cross-national analysis of party switching. Journal of Legislative Studies 38, 111–141.Google Scholar
Potter, JD and Tavits, M (2015) The impact of campaign finance laws on party competition. British Journal of Political Science 45, 73–95.Google Scholar
Powell, GB and Whitten, GD (1993) A cross-national analysis of economic voting: taking account of the political context. American Journal of Political Science 37, 391–414.Google Scholar
Rahat, G and Sheafer, T (2007) The personalization (s) of politics: Israel, 1949–2003. Political Communication 24, 65–80.Google Scholar
Roberts, A (2010) The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Public Preferences and Policy Reforms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rousseeuw, P, Croux, C, Todorov, V, Ruckstuhl, A, Salibian-Barrera, M, Verbeke, T, Koller, M and Maechler, M (2016) Robustbase: Basic Robust Statistics. R package version 0.92-6. Available at http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=robustbase.Google Scholar
Rybár, M and Deegan-Krause, K (2008) Slovakia's communist successor parties in comparative perspective. Communist and Post-Communist Studies 41, 497–519.Google Scholar
Scarrow, S (2015) Beyond Party Members: Changing Approaches to Partisan Mobilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sikk, A (2006) Highways to power: new party success in three young democracies. Ph. D. thesis, Tartu University Press, Tartu.Google Scholar
Tavits, M (2008) Party systems in the making: the emergence and success of new parties in new democracies. British Journal of Political Science 38, 113–33.Google Scholar
Tavits, M (2013) Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Van Biezen, I, Mair, P and Poguntke, T (2012) Going, going,…gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe. European Journal of Political Research 51, 24–56.Google Scholar
Visser, J (2013) ICTWSS: Database on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts in 34 Countries between 1960 and 2007. Amsterdam: Institute for Advanced Labour Studies, AIAS, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Zons, G (2015) The influence of programmatic diversity on the formation of new political parties. Party Politics 21, 919–929.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Ibenskas supplementary material

Ibenskas supplementary material 1

Download Ibenskas supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 339.6 KB
Supplementary material: Link

Ibenskas Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SYCAOH
Link