Partisanship and the party system

The defining properties of party identification long established for the United States fail with some frequency to be replicated in electoral systems abroad. A number of plausible suggestions have been made to account for this system-level variability: Most of these have some face merit, but none taken alone is adequate to provide a full cross-system explanation. Variation in party system size or fractionalization has recently been discussed as another source of differential dynamics of party loyalties. Unfortunately, the conventional means of assessing party identification properties are subject to rather severe artifacts, typically ignored, when comparisons are made across systems of very different party size. The conceptual stakes underlying key methods options for such comparisons—most notably, between continuous and discrete statistical tools—are examined. The use of continuous statistics for systems of very multiple parties rests on an assumption that voters do in some degree regard these party systems as imbedded in a continuous space. A simple test for this assumption is mounted in four systems and unsurprisingly it shows very clear support. Analysis of residuals beyond this obvious result add several points of less obvious information about the distribution of party affect in such systems.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45485/1/11109_2004_Article_BF00991980.pd

Who were the voters behind the Schulz effect? An analysis of voter trajectories in the run-up to the 2017 German federal election

In early 2017, after the nomination of Martin Schulz as candidate for chancellor, the SPD experienced a rapid surge in public support as measured in public opinion polls. Yet, the upward trend proved short-lived and the SPD ended up with the worst election result since 1949. Using data from a multi-wave panel survey, this analysis examines the voting trajectories of eight thousand German citizens over the course of one year in order to investigate the processes underlying the so called ‘Schulz effect’. The voter trajectories show that the surge and decline of public support for the SPD was accompanied by some reshuffling in the composition of its electorate. Moreover, different explanations of the party’s swaying in the polls are tested, showing that the SPD achieved the activation of dormant party identifiers but attracted and then lost other voters with diverse characteristics and policy preferences

Congressional campaign effects on candidate recognition and evaluation

To date, most congressional scholars have relied upon a standard model of American electoral behavior developed in the presidential setting. This research extends our knowledge of Congressmen's incumbency advantages and their sources. Candidate preference is viewed as a function of the relative recognition and evaluation of incumbents and their challengers, as well as of Democrats and Republicans. In the recognition model, contact with voters and media effects are quite important, but there is no direct role for party identification. Evaluation is a function of personal contact and party identification, and media variables are insignificant. Relative recognition, relative evaluation, and party identification are three important predictors of candidate preference, and incumbency itself adds little beyond what is contained in incumbent recognition and evaluation advantages.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45489/1/11109_2004_Article_BF00989756.pd

Is democracy an option for the realist?

In Democracy for Realists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that the depressingly well-established fact that people are woefully ignorant on politically relevant matters renders democratic ideals mere “fairy tales.” However, this iconoclasm stands in deep tension with the prescriptions they themselves end up offer-ing towards the end of the book, which coincide to a surprising extent with those that have been offered by democrats for decades. This is a problem because, if we take seriously the type of data that Achen and Bartels rely on (and add to)—data that should make us realists in the sense of the book’s title—it is not clear that democracy in any recognizable sense remains an option for the realist