Impact of electoral volatility and party replacement on voter turnout levels

Abstract

While elections are viewed as the lynchpin of modern democracies, few works have adequately assessed the role played by political parties in mobilizing voters. Much of the extant work has relied on the number of parties in a party system to estimate the impact on voter turnout; not surprisingly, the voluminous literature on voter turnout has arrived at a theoretical impasse regarding the relationship between party systems and voter turnout. We argue that in order to better understand the relationship between party systems and voter turnout, researchers should consider other relevant party system measures. In particular, several scholars have surmised that party system stability holds numerous implications for democracies, but there has yet to be an empirical analysis of this claim. In this study, we anticipate that lower volatility and replacement rates -both indicating more stable party systems -should have a positive impact on aggregate turnout. Even when including several control variables, the results of our cross-sectional time-series analyses confirm our hypotheses.

El peso de los nuevos partidos en el sistema de partidos colombiano. 1986-2010

“…Entre los más usados, se destacan la magnitud del distrito (Hug, 2001;Mainwaring et al, 2010;Tavits, 2006); el umbral electoral efectivo (Lago y Martínez, 2010;Selb y Pituctin, 2010); la fórmula de repartición de escaños -representación proporcional versus mayoritaria- (Hauss y Rayside, 1978); la forma de gobierno -presidencial o parlamentaria- (Hauss y Rayside, 1978;Mainwaring et al, 2010); el financiamiento público (Hug, 2001;Mainwaring et al, 2010;Sikk, 2007;Tavits, 2006); el grado de fragmenación del sistema de partidos (Mainwaring et al, 2010;Robberts y Wibbels, 1999;Robbins y Hunter, 2012;Tavits 2006), y el grado de centralización política (Hauss y Rayside, 1978;Lago y Martínez, 2010 premien a aquellos Nuevos Partidos que se presentan en contextos institucionales adversos, y por otra parte, que si se mantiene la suposición de un cálculo racional en la decisión de creación del NP, si las élites aun conociendo las reglas adversas, crean el partido y se presentan a la elección, es esperable que hayan previsto altas opciones de éxito electoral.…”

“…Estos conceptos son recogidos por el presente estudio y serán calculados para el caso colombiano durante el periodo de 1986-2010. 5 La "volatilidad electoral total" no mide la entrada de nuevos actores a la competencia electoral (Robbins y Hunter, 2012). En cambio, la diferenciación de los tipos de volatilidad, recién propuesta 6 , permite detectar con mayor claridad no solo, si se producen variaciones en los porcentajes de votación registrados por los partidos sino también ciertas características del sistema de partidos.…”

Transformation of West European Political Landscape and Institutionalization of Anti-System Politics

“…This outcome, in turn, if occurring consistently over time, can lead to party system de-institutionalization (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2015), a situation which -as we have learned from the Eastern European (Birch, 2003;Powell and Tucker, 2014;Sikk, 2005) and Latin American (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995) experience -may affect the democratic process, both in terms of its legitimacy and its effectiveness. Indeed, recent studies have pointed out that new party entry causes the reduction in voter turnout levels (Robbins and Hunter, 2011) and increases uncertainty both in the voting decision-making (Ezrow, Homola and Tavits, 2014;Marinova, 2016) and in the process of government formation (Grotz and Weber, 2015), thus weakening accountability. In the context of Western Europe, new parties have been studied so far mainly from the traditional party-level perspective, by focusing on their ideologies, political platforms, organisations (Hug, 2001;Kitschelt, 1988;1995;Lucardie, 2000;Willey, 1998).…”

A New Approach to Estimating Electoral Instability in Parties

“…Party system instability consists of changes in the patterns of interaction between parties and the electorate (Pedersen 1979, 4). Even so, the study of party system instability has by and large focused on change originating from shifts in voter preferences, as evinced by the prevalent use of the Pedersen index of electoral volatility (e.g., Mainwaring 1998; Korasteleva 2000; Mainwaring and Zoco 2007; Lane 2008; Robbins and Hunter 2012). This is to the neglect of electoral changes in parties, including their ideology, structure and strategies.…”