The short-term and long-term effects of institutional reforms on party system nationalization

Abstract

The impact of institutions on party system nationalization has traditionally been examined in a cross-national fashion. However, while in some cases institutional reforms may be expected to immediately affect party nationalization, in others, changes might take place over subsequent elections. In this paper, we argue that reforms affecting mainly elite coordination -such as decentralization-will take a longer time to have an impact on party system nationalization than reforms related to the mechanical effects of electoral laws, i.e. changes in the electoral system. In order to test this argument, we use error-correction models to test the impact of electoral reforms on party system nationalization in democratic elections held in 22 Western and Eastern European countries from 1945 to 2012. In accordance with our arguments, we show that both decentralization and the number of districts elected in the legislative power will have an impact on party system nationalization, but that the impact of the latter will manifest itself earlier.

The localization of electoral volatility: Evidence from Serbia and Croatia

“…2016). In accordance with the present results, previous studies have demonstrated that Croatia has more localized party system than Serbia (Bochsler, 2010c;Golosov, 2016;Schakel, 2017). However, our study introduced a new methodology based on electoral volatility indices and this result demonstrates that method is capable of estimating nationalization and localization metrics using different spatial units of analysis which wasn't explored in previous studies.…”

Meta-institutions as a Product of Institutional Dynamics and Institutional Reformation

“…Notably, policy and governance are the most contributed ones of all the literature on institutional reform. Simon and Guinjoan (2017) modelled impacts of electoral reforms on party system nationalization to conclude on institutional reforms" positive impacts all over the European countries in post-WWII era. Benz and Sonnicksen (2018) revise institutional reforms of German federalism from the point of view of its influence on the quality of decision-making procedure and find specific triggers that cause unexpected effects beyond the conventional procedures of decision-making.…”