A research agenda for the study of citizen–politician linkages and democratic accountability

Kitschelt, Herbert; Wilkinson, Steven I.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511585869.014

Cited by 93 publications

(118 citation statements)

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“…This is particularly the case in systems where national ruling parties withhold funds from individuals, organizations and regions that do not support them. Indeed, analyses of specific centralized systems--Chile (Valenzuela 1977), Italy (Hine 1993), Mexico (Diaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, andWeingast 2000), and Japan (Curtis 1971; 1 Analyses tend to focus on explaining the strategy to pursue one politician-voter linkage strategy--programmatic or nonprogrammatic--rather than another (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007), or are based on single-country studies with comparative work based on secondary sources (e.g., Greene 2007;Scheiner 2006). Scheiner 2005Scheiner , 2006)--suggest that subnational candidates and voters in centralized systems often align with a national government party to have a better chance of gaining central funding.…”

Section: Decentralized and Centralized Power In Pork-centric Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Desposato

Scheiner

2008

Am Polit Sci Rev

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W hat shapes politicians' strategies in political systems where pork, rather than programmatic platforms, wins elections? We argue that resource control provides much of the answer, as politics in pork-centric systems will in large part be organized around actors who control access to pork. We use new national and subnational data from Brazil and Japan to show how the degree of centralization of resources can affect party affiliation patterns. We find that in decentralized Brazil, both national and subnational politicians join parties that control their subnational government. In contrast, in our analysis of centralized Japan, politicians at both national and subnational levels base their party affiliation decisions on national-level partisan considerations. P ork-barrel politics is a defining feature of electoral competition in many established democracies and, even more frequently, new democracies. However, because most theories of political parties focus on spatial competition, political science has not yet fully developed a framework for understanding political strategies in systems that are dominated by pork.By definition, in pork-oriented systems it is important for politicians to deliver private and local public goods to their constituents. As a result, those who control access to these goods have substantial influence over political actors. In this way, the institutions that assign control over state resources are likely to shape power relations and the incentives that drive political behavior throughout the system, and different patterns of resource control ought to lead politicians to pursue different career strategies. Comparative Politics Workshop, and the editors and four reviewers at the APSR. We thank Caitlin Milazzo for her research assistance. We thank Jun Saito, Rob Weiner, Ryota Natori, and Yusaku Horiuchi for their (leading) role in creating the JERRY data set on prefectural assembly members in Japan, and Rob Weiner for sharing his data on prefectural governors in Japan, upon which the bulk of the Japan subnational data analysis was based. The information on party switching at the prefectural level in Japan was drawn from the kaiha/party listings for each prefectural legislator in Yomiuri Shinbun (various years). The information on district overlap between national and subnational politicians in Japan was drawn from Yomiuri Shinbun (various years) and Miyakawa (1994). may be widely evident in political systems, affecting career paths, roll-call votes, coalition formation, and, the focus of this paper, party affiliation.We provide suggestive evidence about the relationship between resource decentralization and party system organization, examining national and subnational legislatures in Brazil and Japan. These two cases share many similar features, including a strong pork-barrel orientation, but in Brazil, control over pork allocation is significantly decentralized, whereas in Japan it is highly centralized. The implication is that national and subnational legislators in Brazil should be orient...

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Section: Decentralized and Centralized Power In Pork-centric Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Desposato

Scheiner

2008

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…To be sure, we do not attempt to establish a direct link between material inducement and vote outcome in general, as direct correlations are hard to establish due largely to people's unwillingness to provide accurate information on whether or not they vote based on material influence (Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007). In recent times, some voters do consider other factors such as past records of politicians, even when attempts are made by the latter to 'buy' the former's choice at elections (Weghorst & Lindberg, 2011;Gadjanova, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Campus Politics and Intra-Party Vote Buying in Ghana: How Political Mentorship Could Destruct

Paalo

Gyampo

2019

JSAA

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Elections in fledgling democracies are punctuated by perceived and observed cases of vote buying otherwise also called electoral clientelism-regarded as a major threat to democratic consolidation. Notions of vote buying are variously captured in the burgeoning literature on democracy, but the ongoing scholarly discussions have failed to engage some growing contemporary trends that also contribute significantly to sustaining the culture of vote buying in intra-party, local and national elections. In our analysis of recent intra-party elections in Ghana, we argue that vote buying has become more complex and more pronounced-and the proliferation of the phenomenon is aided by student campus politics (particularly at the various tertiary institutions), which directly feed into national politics. Following this stance, the article concludes with a recommendation that further empirical research be conducted by scholars and policymakers to fully examine the reinforcing role of campus politics in electoral clientelism during intra-party elections and, by extension, national elections.

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“…For instance, Kitschelt and Wilkinson (2007) argue for the need for cross-nationally comparable measures of clientelism using expert surveys; the techniques developed here would work well to advance that agenda. Our technique does not diagnose the causes of DIF, as does the anchoring vignette software, but it does create an exportable variable that is free of DIF.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The European Common Space: Extending the Use of Anchoring Vignettes

Bakker¹,

Jolly

Polk

et al. 2014

The Journal of Politics

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In this article, we combine advances in both survey research and scaling techniques to estimate a common dimension for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Most previous scholarship has either ignored or assumed cross-national comparability of party placements across a variety of dimensions. The 2010 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes anchoring vignettes which we use as ''bridge votes'' to place parties from different countries on a common space. We estimate our dimensions using the ''blackbox'' technique. Our results demonstrate both the usefulness of anchoring vignettes and the broad applicability of the blackbox scaling routine. Further, the resulting scale offers a cross-nationally comparable interval-level measure of a party's left/right ideological position with a high degree of face validity. In short, we argue that the left/right economic dimension travels well across European countries.

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A research agenda for the study of citizen–politician linkages and democratic accountability

Cited by 93 publications

References 0 publications

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Campus Politics and Intra-Party Vote Buying in Ghana: How Political Mentorship Could Destruct

The European Common Space: Extending the Use of Anchoring Vignettes

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