Do populist parties lose support when participating in government?

Populist parties typically voice strong criticism of the establishment, but what happens when these parties join national governments? Drawing on a new study, Pedro Riera and Marco Pastor illustrate that populist parties are vulnerable to losing support when they become junior members of a governing coalition. These parties tend to lose more votes when they are ideologically radical, when the coalition they join is ideologically homogenous, and when the coalition holds a majority in parliament

Electoral systems and ideological voting

Electoral systems affect vote choice. While a vast literature studies this relationship by examining aggregate-level patterns and focussing on the interparty dimension of electoral rules, the convenience of analyzing this phenomenon by emphasizing the role played by the incentives to cultivate a personal vote generated by the system and matching voters with the party they vote for has been traditionally overlooked. In this article, we offer new evidence that documents the impact of the intraparty dimension of electoral systems on the levels of ideological voting registered in a democracy. Using spatial models of politics and employing data from the five waves of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that ideological voting in proportional representation systems is higher when lists are either closed or flexible. Moreover, the results suggest that this effect is slightly amplified in the case of high numbers of district-level candidates

Making the breakthrough into Parliament boosts the electoral success of smaller political parties

Establishing the impact of legislative representation on parties’ subsequent electoral outcomes is very difficult due to how different parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties look. To address this problem, Elias Dinas, Pedro Riera and Nasos Roussias used an element that is quite common in multiparty systems – that is, legal thresholds of representation at the national level- and compared parties that are slightly above and barely below it. Looking at all post-WWII democracies with a national threshold of representation, they show that presence in parliament increases parties’ vote shares in the next election

La abstención diferencial en la España de las autonomías. Pautas significativas y mecanismos explicativos

The implementation of the model of territorial organization established by the Spanish Constitution of 1978 involves the creation of non state-wide institutions with legislative powers, and the celebration of regional elections in order to decide the composition of the autonomous parliaments. The turnout registered in this type of contests is persistently and generally lower than in general elections. Those citizens that participate in the general but not in the regional elections are known as differential non-voters. Despite this pattern of non-voting is repeated election after election in all the communities, its magnitude and consequences differ in each case. In this paper, the causes of this variation are explored by using aggregated data of turnout in both types of elections across regions and over time. Results from the specified econometric models seem to point out the need to resort to several socio-demographic, political and institutional factors to explain differential abstention in the decentralized Spain.La implementación del modelo de organización territorial establecido por la Constitución española de 1978 supone la creación de entidades no estatales con capacidad legislativa y la celebración de elecciones regionales para decidir la composición de los parlamentos autonómicos. La participación registrada en este tipo de comicios es persistente y generalizadamente más baja que la que se da en las elecciones a Cortes Generales. Aquellos ciudadanos que votan en las elecciones generales pero no en las autonómicas son conocidos como abstencionistas diferenciales. A pesar de que este patrón abstencionista se repite elección tras elección en todas las comunidades, su magnitud y consecuencias difieren en cada caso. En este trabajo se exploran las causas de esta variación utilizando los datos agregados de participación en ambos tipos de elecciones en cada autonomía y momento del tiempo. Los resultados de los modelos econométricos especificados parecen apuntar la necesidad de acudir a diversos factores sociodemográficos, políticos e institucionales para explicar la abstención diferencial en la España autonómica

Why do some countries use PR while others don’t? How electoral system trends spread across European democracies

Why do countries pick one electoral system over another? As Damien Bol , Jean-Benoit Pilet and Pedro Riera write, there is often an assumption that the choice of an electoral system is closely related to the calculations of dominant political parties who select systems that are likely to benefit them in elections. However based on a study of European countries between 1945 and 2011, they illustrate that the choice of an electoral system can be shaped significantly by the choices of neighbouring/similar states

Changing the rules of the game : on the determinants and consequences of electoral reforms in contemporary democracies

As the “Short Twentieth Century” came to an end, more and more democracies seriously considered the possibility –often for the first time in their history- of changing their national electoral system. Since then, the total number of electoral reforms enacted in countries that select their rulers through free and fair elections has sharply increased: in the last two decades over 33% of the world’s democratic states modified the formula employed for choosing the members of their national legislatures, and a similar percentage adjusted other elements of the rules of the game such as the district magnitude, the legal threshold, the assembly size or the ballot structure. Unfortunately, the academic examination of the causes and consequences of these episodes of institutional change has lagged well behind these empirical developments with single case studies and small n studies still the norm. In light of this gap, research on the determinants and the outcomes of electoral reform processes is increasingly needed. The aim of this study is to transcend the analysis of a small number of cases, and instead to comparatively examine the universe of electoral system changes that have occurred in 60 contemporary democracies between 1945 and 2010. The thesis has three main findings. First, the levels of party system fragmentation and citizens’ satisfaction with democracy have strong potential to explain electoral system changes in contemporary democracies. Contrary to what is usually implied by the literature on electoral reform, parties are seen to have strong tendencies to pass restrictive rather than permissive electoral system changes in circumstances where the electoral system might be considered to be already overly-permissive resulting in excessive numbers of parties. Moreover, candidate-centred electoral reforms usually take place when large numbers of voters are currently dissatisfied with the way democracy works in their country. The second main finding is that electoral reforms can reshape the morphology of established party systems through two distinct mechanisms of electoral engineering. The first mechanism takes place at the interparty level, with permissive reforms reducing the difference between the percentage of votes received and the percentage of seats obtained by a party, and restrictive reforms enlarging this gap. The second mechanism operates at the intraparty level, where candidate-centred reforms decrease the level of party system nationalization while party-centred reforms leave party system nationalization unchanged. Finally, the third main finding of the thesis is that parties’ positions regarding the possible modification of the rules of the game have an electoral effect. Parties that advocate a permissive reform in countries with low party system fragmentation are more likely to electorally benefit. By contrast, support for such reforms when the number of parties is large is more likely to result in electoral loses.Published version of EUI PhD thesis, 201

The take-up of mechanisms designed to temper proportional representation shows that countries don’t choose their electoral systems and rules in a vacuum

Some countries attempt to ‘temper’ the political party system unpredictability by introducing measures to halt fragmentation, such as representation thresholds. Here, Damien Bol, Jean-Benoit Pilet, and Pedro Riera argue that national legislators are more likely to adopt one of these electoral mechanisms when a large number of other countries have made similar choices in recent years

Referenda y estrategias de los políticos. 35 años de democracia directa en Europa

En los últimos años, el número de referenda convocados ha aumentado considerablemente. A pesar de ello, el estudio de la democracia directa no se ha desarrollado a la misma velocidad. En este trabajo, se describen las razones que empujan a un político a convocar un referéndum, y se analiza la celebración en España del referéndum sobre la Constitución europea en 2005, constatando la insuficiencia de las teorías hasta ahora desarrolladas para explicarla; de ahí la necesidad de sugerir otros argumentos. En este sentido, el trabajo concluye que el presidente español Rodríguez Zapatero trató con el más que previsible y abultado sí español de incentivar el voto afirmativo en otros países donde el resultado del referéndum era más incierto

Non bis in idem: voto escindido en sistemas electorales mixtos. Los casos de Nueva Zelanda en 1999 y 2002

El artículo de Campbell y Miller en 1957 es el precursor de una serie de trabajos en ciencia política quetienen por objeto de estudio el voto escindido. La implantación extensiva de sistemas electorales demiembros-mixtos a partir de los años noventa ofrece la oportunidad de comprobar la validez de las teoríascomúnmente utilizadas para dar cuenta de este fenómeno en un nuevo contexto institucional. Esta investigaciónanaliza las elecciones al Parlamento neozelandés de 1999 y 2002 y aporta evidencia empíricaacerca de la importancia de los mecanismos prospectivos y retrospectivos de control de los políticos paraexplicar la escisión del voto. En resumen, el trabajo concluye que el voto escindido en países con este tipode marcos institucionales es la respuesta de aquel electorado que tiene juicios negativos sobre las cualidadeso la gestión de los candidatos a nivel nacional o local del partido con el que se identifica