Aldo F. Ponce

Which members? Using cross-national surveys to study party membership

Reports of party membership have documented steep declines in formal enrollment in many countries, but numbers alone tell us little about the systemic causes or likely implications of such drops. Existing cross-national surveys can help illuminate the extent and consequences of these changes. Unfortunately, they are difficult to use for this purpose because differences in question wording and institutional differences in the meaning of party membership produce unstable results. This paper proposes to overcome these obstacles by using behavioral measures of party membership in survey-based studies of party membership. We demonstrate that such measures produce results which are more consistent across surveys and therefore more meaningful. We then illustrate their utility by using a behaviorally-qualified measure to study how party membership decline has affected parties’ ability to mobilize grassroots partisan participation. Our analysis also shows that even though reported party membership declined from the 1990s to the 2000s, there was surprisingly little change in this decade in the number of politically active partisans.

Who Gives? Partisan Donations in Europe

Party finance reformers often call for European parties to increase their financial reliance on small donors, but researchers have made few efforts to establish the feasibility of such strategies. This study examines partisan giving in Europe, investigating the potential for parties and policymakers to increase this type of political participation. It also asks whether there are national-level factors that make such efforts more likely to succeed in some countries. The research uses data from the European Social Survey to examine patterns of contributions to political parties in 16 European countries. It finds that the strength of partisanship predicts political giving independent of party membership, which suggests that European political parties may have some scope to increase their number of individual donors. On the other hand, existing tax policies to encourage political giving do not seem to be effective in increasing this type of partisan political participation.

Meet the Narco: increased competition among criminal organisations and the explosion of violence in Mexico

ABSTRACT Several previous studies have found that interventions by security forces against criminal organisations result in increased violence related to organised crime. However, much less is known about how and why this effect occurs. Our study not only identifies the causal mechanisms that explain this outcome, but also evaluates the empirical validity of these mechanisms. Employing a novel data set, we find that following security-force intervention, the number of criminal organisations increases, and such greater fragmentation in turn raises the incidence of violence among criminal organisations as the relative power of the organisations changes. We employ a mediation model to verify the existence of these causal mechanisms. In addition, we find a decreasing rate of rise in levels of violence as the number of organisations increases.

From Freedom to Repression and Violence: The Evolution of Drug Policy in Peru

This chapter assesses the evolution of drug policy in Peru; It takes into account past and current initiatives to reform the repressive drug policy in the country. Also, it discusses how several key determinants—such as foreign pressures, the rise of subversive groups, and the type of economic model implemented—have influenced the evolution of drug policy in Peru. Its development is systematized into phases that consider the influence and effects of these different determinants. The chapter argues that drug policy has become increasingly repressive in Peru, and concludes that the Peruvian state has been unable to implement innovative and non-repressive initiatives on drug policy because of its institutional weakness, foreign pressures from the United States, and security concerns due to the growth of subversive groups.