Transformational party events and legislative turnover in West European democracies, 1945–2015

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of party change on party-level legislative turnover. Analyzing a novel dataset tracking 251 parties in eight West European democracies between 1945 and 2015, we assess how transformational party events affect the renewal of parties’ parliamentary delegations. Transformational party events refer to party changes resulting from deliberate strategic decisions that redistribute power within parties, change their identity, and/or shift alliances within and between them. We focus in particular on changes in parties’ leadership and name, the formation of electoral cartels, mergers and divisions, applying empirical methods suitable for dealing with fractional outcomes and multi-level data to test their impact on turnover rates. Our estimates indicate that leadership change is a key determinant of MP renewal, leading to systematically higher rates of legislative turnover. Party relabeling and divisions affect turnover as well, although their influence is contingent on other characteristics of the parties and their environment.

A longitudinal analysis of party level candidate turnover drivers in the flexible-list PR system of Flanders (Belgium) (1987–2019)

“…We follow eleven parties from the moment when they managed to obtain at least one seat in any of the investigated assemblies. We recorded the party characteristics needed for testing our hypotheses: electoral swing, the number of party members and transformational party events (Hooghe and Dassonneville, 2014;Gouglas et al, 2020;Koskimaa et al, 2021;Matland and Studlar, 2004). Table A in the Supplemental Material gives an overview of the included election years and shows that for each of these elections several legislative assemblies were elected simultaneously i .…”

“…Third, we include the effects of transformational party events on candidate turnover (Gouglas et al, 2020). Such transformations stem from strategic choices that reallocate power within parties (Harmel and Janda, 1994), bring about identity changes (Mair, 1989), and/or modify party alliances (Panebianco, 1988).…”

“…Second, candidate turnover figures can signal party change or stability (Sikk and Köker, 2015; Barnea and Rahat, 2011). For example, a new party name may come along with new candidate lists that 'embody' this party transformation (Gouglas et al, 2020). Third, scholars have linked candidate turnover to intra-party competition (Hazan and Rahat, 2010).…”

The Impossible Stability? The Italian Lower House Parliamentary Elite After a “Decade of Crises”

“…For instance, the drastic decrease in MPs' pre-parliamentary institutional or party experience may occur due to two separate paths. Either a sudden and temporary "contagion effect" after the emergence of a party (the M5S) explicitly pushing for a total renewal of the political elite (Kakepaki et al, 2018) or a smoother effect of incremental processes like party organizational changes (Gouglas et al, 2021).…”