Party Systems

Question 1

What is Sartori’s (1976) definition of a party system?

Answer 1

“A party system is a system of interaction resulting from inter-party competition. That is, the system in question bears on the relatedness of parties to each other, on how each party is a function of the other parties and reacts competitively or otherwise to the other parties”

Question 2

What is the effective number of electoral parties and effective number of legislative parties?

Answer 2

Effective number of electoral parties: how many parties win votes during an election

Effective number of legislative parties: how many parties win seats after an election

Question 3

What is a one-party system, two-party system and multi-party system?

Answer 3

One-party System: where only one party is legally allowed hold power (Cuba, North Korea) or where one party is simply dominant (PRI in Mexico until 2000)

Two-party system: only two parties have a realistic change of holding power (US, UK)

Multi-party system: more than two parties have a chance of holding power, either separately or as part of a coalition (Ireland, France, Netherlands)

Question 4

How do sociological factors affect party systems?

Answer 4

• The nature of party systems is conditional on demand and supply and there will be as many parties as there are social cleavages that need representation

Question 5

What is Lipset and Rokkan’s Freezing Hypothesis?

Answer 5

Says that once electorates become fully mobilised and there is universal suffrage then an equilibrium becomes established and the cleavages and therefore parties in the system become ‘frozen’. For example, in Europe since the 1920s.

Question 6

What is Mair’s (1997) argument relating to the freezing hypothesis?

Answer 6

• Freezing Hypothesis remains valid
• It is not the parties themselves which are static, but the party systems, possibly because the parties themselves change
• Once electorates had become fully mobilised and the institutional structures of mass democracy had become consolidated, a crude equilibrium became established.
• Once an equilibrium had been established the system could simply generate its own momentum: the structure of competition was more or less defined, but the parties within the system can and do change; parties are now less interested in closing off sections of the electorate within self-contained political communities and more interested in trying to appeal to the whole electorate

Question 7

What are some arguments that sociological factors are the main determinants of party systems?

Answer 7

• It generally explains the effective number of parties as more cleavages means more demand for representation and more demand for political parties.
• It explains the dimensions of competition and what parties will campaign on
• Certain cleavages are more salient than others (which explains why some cleavages become politicised and others don’t)

Question 8

How does Posner (2005) explain why certain cleavages are more salient than others?

Answer 8

• The reason why some cleavages are salient, and others are not, is likely due to strategic behaviour by political actors within practical and institutional constraints to exploit a hot-button issue as a rallying point
• Example: In Nigeria, there are significant ethnic, regional and religious divides: yet political rivalries largely converge around ethno-religious fault lines, rather than regional ones.

Question 9

What is Mair’s (1997) argument for how stable social relations are related to the survival of parties and thus the stabilisation of the party system?

Answer 9

• The impact of socio-economic changes on voting behaviour and the way in which these can then feed through into electoral realignment or dealignment, also serves to emphasise how the long-term survival of individual parties may be dependent upon stable social relations.
• The apparent linkage between party organizational change on the one hand and party vulnerability on the other helps to indicate that the stabilization of party alignments rests partly on how the parties themselves link into the wider community.

Question 10

What are some arguments by Cox (1997) that sociological factors are not the main determinants of party systems?

Answer 10

• Saying every socially defined group will want to/ be able to organise as an individual party ignores that forming coalitions between different cleavages may often be a better strategy (Cox, 1997)
• The number of social cleavages seems large relative to the number of parties in a society (Cox, 1997)
• How is anyone to tell which cleavages are big enough to be party defining and which are not. (Cox, 1997)
• A given set of social cleavages does not imply a unique set of politically activated cleavages, and hence does not imply a unique party system. (Cox, 1997)

Question 11

What is a case which goes against what the sociological theory would claim about party systems?

Answer 11

Two of the most stable party systems in Latin America, the Colombian and the Uruguayan, were based on cross‐class, catch‐all parties whose original (nineteenth‐century) urban—rural cleavages had long since faded and whose modern foundations clearly rested on state patronage (Collier and Collier, 1991)

Question 12

What is Duverger’s law?

Answer 12

Duverger’s law: single-member district plurality systems will give rise to two party systems and proportional representation electoral rules will encourage multi-party systems (Duverger, 1954)

Question 13

How does Cox (1997) explain the reasoning behind Duverger’s law?

Answer 13

Rational agents allocate their resources to candidates with a hope of winning the election. This includes voters who don’t want to waste their vote on a candidate with no serious hope of winning, as well as people like opinion leaders, contributors and party officials, who will allocate resources such as endorsements, money, and campaign appearances to serious candidates rather than hopeless ones. As long as voters can agree on which are the hopeless candidates, which will likely be influenced by how other agents choose to allocate their resources and endorse etc., then strategic voting will mean that votes concentrate on serious candidates, which will usually be just two in a single-member district plurality system, like the ones in the US and UK (Cox, 1997)

Question 14

How does Sartori (1968) make a slight adjustment to Duverger’s law?

Answer 14

Duverger’s original proposition was that strategic voting was present in single-member plurality systems and absent in proportional representation systems. However, Sartori argued that there was still strategic voting under PR systems, it just came into play to a lower degree, with a continuum of systems from strong, in which strategic voting and elite coalitional activity act forcefully to depress the number of parties to weak, in which strategic voting and incentives to form coalitions are largely absent and thus put little downward pressure on the number of competitors

Question 15

What are arguments in favour of institutional factors being the main determinants of different party systems?

Answer 15

The reduction of known parties to voted for parties is the domain of strategic voters. Even if known, a party still haves to be viable to attract votes. (Cox, 1997)

Any class of agents will tend to allocate whatever resources they control to serious rather than hopeless candidates (Cox, 1997)

Readjustments occur in party systems in the wake of institutional changes (Mair, 1997)

Question 16

How do institutional factors effect the effective number of electoral parties and the effective number of legislative parties?

Answer 16

• They affect ENEP as single-member district plurality systems cause people to strategically vote which depletes the number of parties who receive votes
• They affect ENLP as smaller parties who receive a lot of votes over a large geographic area will not receive many seats in a SMDP system but in a PR system they will receive more seats as they will get a proportional number of seats to their votes
  -Example: in the UK 2019 general election Lib Dems got 11.5% of votes and only 1.6% of seats. In Norway in 2021 the Progress Party received 11.6% of the vote and around 12% of the seats

Question 17

Why might party systems determine electoral systems rather than vice versa and what is Cox’s response to this?

Answer 17

If electoral laws do affect the ability of political parties to survive as Duverger’s propositions imply, then parties will presumably seek to manipulate the laws to their own advantages. So, if Duverger is right this leads to the conclusion that the party system may affect the electoral system, and if this is true, that leads naturally to conclusion that electoral system affects party system, otherwise parties would have no reason to want to change the electoral system (Cox, 1997)

Question 18

When do Kim and Ohn (1992) point out that Duverger’s law does not hold.

Answer 18

If the social cleavage structure is characterised by geographically concentrated minorities then they may form the basis of a successful, albeit localized, third party. One of the suppositions underlying Duverger’s Law - that small parties will be underrepresented under plurality rule in single-member districts - depends for its validity on the geographic distribution of voters. In particular, if a third party’s supporters are concentrated in a particular region of the country, then they may be able to compete successfully as one of the two main parties locally, even while remaining a third party nationally.
Example: SNP won 48 out of 59 seats in Scotland in 2019 general election

Question 19

What is an example outside of Europe of Duverger’s law not applying?

Answer 19

India as an exception to law; they have a single member plurality system, but many more than two parties, especially at the national state level. Much scholarship regards India as an exception to Duverger’s law at the national level but not the district level. Diwakar argues that his study shows that many Indian districts do not conform to the Duvergerian norm of two-party competition, and that there is no consistent movement towards the Duvergerian equilibrium. (Diwakar, 2007)

Question 20

Do people always vote rationally and strategically for parties they know have a chance to win the election.

Answer 20

No. For example: in most seats in UK elections, more than 15% of the vote goes to third, fourth or smaller parties (Dunleavy and Diwakar, 2011)

Question 21

What evidence do Ordeshook and Schvetsova find about the interaction between sociological factors and institutional factors on party systems?

Answer 21

Ordeshook and Shvetsova (1994) reanalyze Lijphart’s (1990) data with an eye to clarifying how social structure matters in determining the number of parties. They find that the number of parties in a country increases with the diversity of the social structure and with the proportionality of the electoral structure, but also that these effects interact. Increasing the proportionality of an electoral system in a homogeneous society does not proliferate parties, whereas it does in heterogeneous societies. Similarly, increasing the diversity of the social structure in a non-proportional electoral system does not proliferate parties, whereas it does in a proportional system.

Question 22

What, according to Cox (1997) are the three key stages to consider when accounting for the level of vote or seat concentration observable in any polity.

Answer 22

The first stage is the translation of social cleavages (here taken to be exogenous but obviously susceptible to political manipulation) into partisan preferences.

The second stage is the translation of partisan preferences into votes.

The third stage is the translation of votes into seats.

Question 23

How do Sartori and Leys think party systems work, according to Cox?

Answer 23

There is a benchmark number based on social cleavages that would flourish under a purely proportional system. The amount this benchmark number is reduced depends on electoral system. Both Sartori and Leys thus placed single-member simple plurality systems and the various real-world PR systems on a continuum as regards their tendency to reduce the number of viable political parties below the theoretical benchmark number.

Question 24

What are the party systems citations

Answer 24

Sartori, 1976 - Party system definition

Lipset and Rokkan, 1967 - Freezing hypothesis

Mair, 1997 - defense of freezing hypothesis

Posner, 2005 - Nigeria example for why some cleavages become more salient than others

Cox, 1997 - Explains and defends Duverger’s law

Collier and Collier, 1991 - Latin America counterexample to sociological explanation

Duverger, 1954 - Duverger’s law

Sartori, 1968 - Still strategic voting in PR but to a lesser extent

Kim and Ohn, 1992 - Duverger’s law doesn’t hold if vote for third party is geographically concentrated

Diwakar, 2007 - India as exception to Duverger’s law

Dunleavy and Diwakar, 2011 - people don’t always vote strategically

Ordeshook and Schvetsova, 1994 - both institutional and sociological factors relevant