Annika Werner

Wahlprogramme im Vergleich

Die im Zuge der ersten Europawahlen entwickelte Nebenwahlthese von Reif und Schmitt (vgl. Reif/Schmitt 1980: 13) postuliert fur die Nachfrageseite der Politik eine geringere Relevanz der Europawahlen im Vergleich zu Wahlen der nationalen Parlamente. Hieraus wurden sich eine Reihe von Konsequenzen fur das Wahlverhalten der Bevolkerung und damit fur die Wahlergebnisse ergeben: Erstens folge aus dem geringeren Interesse der Bevolkerung an Europawahlen eine niedrige Wahlbeteiligung. Zweitens seien Erfolge kleiner und neuer Parteien zu erwarten, denn da keine Regierungsbildung zu verantworten sei, waren Wahler bei Nebenwahlen experimentierfreudiger und wurden eher ihren wahren Parteipraferenzen folgen. Drittens seien Wahler bei diesen Wahlen eher bereit, ihrer Unzufriedenheit mit den Parteien und mit der Politikumsetzung der nationalen Regierungsparteien Ausdruck zu verleihen. Daraus konnten sich zum einen ein hoherer Anteil ungultiger Stimmen und zum anderen Wahlverluste insbesondere fur Regierungsparteien ergeben (vgl. Reif/Schmitt 1980: 9f.). Diese Argumentation beruht auf dem Grundgedanken, dass die dominante Ebene – also die nationalstaatliche – mit ihren Inhalten und Rationalitaten die Entscheidungsfindung der Wahler bei den Nebenwahlen stark beeinflusst.

Policies, institutions and time: how the European Commission managed the temporal challenge of eastern enlargement

This article examines the relation between policies, institutions and time by addressing the case of eastern enlargement policy and the European Commission. Our main question is how the special challenges and requirements of EU eastern enlargement policy impacted on the administrative level of the Commission, i.e. the level in charge of structuring, monitoring and steering the policys implementation. We provide empirical data on institutional change in the Commission from the mid-1990s until 2004 and examine temporal categories at both the policy level and the institutional level. This analysis shows that – especially the temporal – requirements of enlargement policy drove the Commission to adapt its internal organization and time management; internal structures and procedures changed; actors were bound in a temporal grid. This allowed the mobilization of the actors and the in-time synchronization of their input. On the whole, our results open a new perspective on institutional change and time in the context of European governance.

Respectable radicals: why some radical right parties in the European Parliament forsake policy congruence

ABSTRACT Policy congruence has been identified as the main driver of European Parliament (EP) alliances. Yet, radical right parties are divided between three EP groups: European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR); Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD); Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF). This article investigates why four radical right parties in the ECR and EFDD – the Danish People’s Party, the Finns Party, the Sweden Democrats and UKIP – neither joined the apparently more ideologically homogenous ENF nor allied all with one another in 2014. Using Chapel Hill data, we find no policy logic explaining their alliance behaviour. Rather, our interviews with those in the parties indicate that they privileged national ‘respectability’ calculations when deciding alliance strategies. We therefore propose an alternative theory of EP group formation that sees some radical parties play a two-level game in which the perceived domestic ‘office’ and ‘votes’ benefits of European alliances outweigh those of ‘policy’.

Divided We Fall? Polarization in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

The chapter emphasizes the “supply side polarization” of politics by comparing party policy positions. To develop their analysis, the authors use data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR). While in public perception there are huge differences between both parties (and even more, between the candidates), reviewed data do not separate Democrats and Republicans sharply. While the Republicans stayed relatively stable in their conservative ideological supply, Democrats moved back onto the liberal side for the first time after 2000. Hence, this election was indeed more polarized than the elections before. But, in a more long-term perspective, the 2012 election does not stand out as particularly polarized because the polarization of 2012 is smaller than the peak elections of 1964 and the 1980s. In general, cultural (morality, abortion) and social issues (welfare, healthcare) played a strong role in the 2012 election, revealing areas of distinction between the two parties. Additionally, the chapter discusses the influence of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement on the positions of Democrats and Republicans.

Programmatic Supply and the Autonomy of US State Parties in 2008 and 2010

This paper examines the extent to which US state parties are autonomous from national party influence, evaluates how much state party autonomy varies across the USA, and examines possible explanations for this variance. We use newly collected party platform data from US state parties between 2008 and 2010 to examine the policy autonomy of state vis-à-vis national parties. In general, we find that US state parties have more extreme policy positions than the national parties. We also find significant variance in the levels of autonomy across state parties and that Democratic state parties are more autonomous than Republican ones.

Decline or Change? Party Types and the Crisis of Representative Democracy

Much has been written about the decline and transformation of political parties and the more or less devastating effects of these developments for the functioning of representative democracies. It is common knowledge to party scholars, reflected in a long-standing debate concerning party-type classification, that political parties come in differing shapes. However, as there is no standard measurement strategy allowing for the objective classification of parties, core assumptions of the literature cannot be tested—including a crisis of democracy as the result of changes in the realm of political parties.

Voters’ preferences for party representation: Promise-keeping, responsiveness to public opinion or enacting the common good

The functioning of representative democracy is crucially dependent on the representative behaviour of political parties. Large parts of the party representation literature assume that voters expect parties to fulfil the promises of their election programs. What voters actually want from parties, however, remains largely unclear. Within the Australian context, this article investigates the preferences of voters regarding three ideal party representative styles: ‘promise keeping’; ‘focus on public opinion’; and ‘seeking the common good’. Using a novel survey tool, this study finds that voters value promise keeping highly when it is evaluated individually. However, they rate seeking the common good as most important when the three styles are directly compared. A multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that, in particular, voters who have been involved in party grassroots activities prefer promise keeping. These findings have wider implications for our understanding of how representative democracy can and should work.

Compulsory voting and ethnic diversity increase invalid voting while corruption does not: an analysis of 417 parliamentary elections in 73 countries

ABSTRACT Invalid voting, meaning blank and spoiled ballots, is a regular phenomenon in democracies around the world. When its share is larger than the margin of victory or greater than the vote share of some of the large parties in the country, invalid voting becomes a problem for democratic legitimacy. This article investigates its determinants in 417 democratic parliamentary elections in 73 countries on five continents from 1970 to 2011. The analysis shows that enforced compulsory voting and ethnic fragmentation are strong predictors for invalid voting while corruption has less impact. Our findings suggest that the societal structure is crucial in understanding invalid voting as a problem for democratic legitimacy because greater social diversity seems to lead to either a greater rate of mistakes or lesser attachments of social groups to the democratic process. Thus, rising levels of invalid voting are not only concerning in themselves but also for the divisive factors driving them.

Nebenwahleffekte auf der Angebotsseite

Zentrales Merkmal von Europawahlen ist ihr Nebenwahlcharakter, vorrangig bezogen auf das Verhalten der WahlerInnen, auf die Wahlkampagnen sowie die Medienberichterstattung. Mit Ruckbindung an Reif und Schmidt (1980) zur Nebenwahlhypothese werden in diesem Kapitel Nebenwahleffekte auf das programmatische Angebot von Parteien in den Mittelpunkt gestellt. Dafur wird ein systematischer Vergleich von Bundestags- und Europawahlprogrammen deutscher Parteien der Jahre 2013/2014 durchgefuhrt. Basierend auf den abgeleiteten Merkmalen „Ressourceneinsatz“, „Dominanz nationaler Themen“ und „ideologische Distanz“ kann gezeigt werden, dass das programmatische Angebot deutscher Parteien einen schwachen bis moderaten Nebenwahleffekt aufweist, welcher sich durch einen geringeren Ressourceneinsatz fur Europawahlprogramme sowie die grosere ideologische Distanzierung zwischen den Parteien ergibt.

Party responsiveness and voter confidence in Australia

ABSTRACT Numerous studies have shown that Australians have little confidence in their political parties. This article presents the results of a study investigating whether the responsiveness of Australian parties to what their voters want drives this lack of confidence. It analyses two aspects of party responsiveness: programmatic responsiveness in electoral manifestos and perceived responsiveness that centres on Australian voters’ assessment of how well their parties meet their demands. The analysis finds that programmatic responsiveness has no significant influence. Instead, how Australians perceive their parties to be responsive has a modest effect on their confidence in those parties. The study suggests that, however, it is incumbency which has the most powerful effect on voter confidence.