Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology and Heterogeneity

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but lack the ability to provide insight into intraparty politics. In this paper, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data which enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll call voting and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to determine the sources of party heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules reduce party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, the presence of these electoral rules conditions the effect of district magnitude

Political Representation, Executives, and Political Parties Survey: Data from Expert Surveys in 18 Latin American Countries, 2018-2019. PREPPS Latam V2

Our 2018/2019 Latin American expert survey expanded and combined previous efforts of measuring policy positioning (Wiesehomeier and Benoit, 2009) and democratic linkage mechanisms (Kitschelt 2013). Questions on policy positions included the general left-right dimension, the economic left-right, social policies, redistribution, foreign policy, and environmental policy, among others. Furthermore the survey collected information on conditional exchange and party organization. The data therefore will allow for a comprehensive comparative assessment of policy dimensions for a large number of parties and presidents across 18 Latin American countries in conjunction with mechanisms of accountability and modes of competition

Combining deductive and inductive elements to measure party system responsiveness in challenging contexts: an approach with evidence from Latin America

Contexts outside the advanced developed democracies present a challenge to assessing how well party systems reflect voter preferences across over-arching policy dimensions because not all electorates readily interpret political conflict in dimensional terms. In this contribution, I advocate an approach suited for such contexts that combines deductive and inductive elements: It starts out with what observers consider the most important dividing lines in a party system, and then goes on to operationalize these dimensions in an inductive fashion by drawing on all theoretically relevant items that are available in mass and elite surveys. I devise a relative-fit measure of responsiveness that can be compared across space and time, even if positions at the elite and mass levels are measured on different scales. To illustrate the usefulness of the strategy, I show how it leads to novel contrasts in terms of programmatic responsiveness among four Latin American countries, namely, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia

Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V-Party) Dataset V1,Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project

Item does not contain fulltextVarieties of Party Identity and Organization (V-Party