Joshua D. Potter

Party-System Nationalization and the Scope of Public Policy: The Importance of Cross-District Constituency Similarity

Party-system nationalization is supposed to result in the provision of nationally focused policy, including spending priorities with widespread benefits. Conversely, democracies characterized by parties with geographically narrower patterns of support are suspected of parochial policies, including targetable spending. The authors show that party-system nationalization alone is not sufficient to generate national benefits. In addition, governing parties’ constituents must be similar across districts. Nationalization can occur because parties are making the same appeal to similar constituents across different electoral districts, but it can also occur because parties are skillfully tailoring different appeals to diverse constituencies across districts. In the latter case, the authors expect to see the targeted spending priorities typically associated with party systems that are not nationalized. The authors test for the conditional effect of party-system nationalization in 36 elections across 20 countries using a Bayesian multinomial model and find support for their reasoning regarding the importance of cross-district constituency similarity.

Demographic Diversity and District-Level Party Systems

Scholars of electoral politics have long argued that the size of a party system is jointly determined by social diversity and district magnitude. However, no clear consensus exists regarding the best operationalization of the diversity of a society. Furthermore, the relationship between diversity and electoral rules, on one hand, and the effective number of parties, on the other hand, has never been tested at the level of the electoral district in a cross-national comparative context. This article aims to fill both holes and introduces the concept of cross-district diversity. I argue that the extent of cross-district diversity in a country exerts a substantial qualifying impact on the relationship between district-level diversity and the effective number of parties. Support for this finding emerges from a multilevel regression analysis that includes thousands of electoral districts in a diverse set of 29 democracies.

Entry and Coordination in Mixed-Member Systems: A Controlled Comparison Testing the Contamination Hypothesis

Do the logics of entry and coordination that hold in pure single-member district plurality (SMDP) systems and in pure proportional representation (PR) systems hold in the SMDP tier and the PR tier of mixed-member systems? The fact that single-member districts are embedded in multimember districts means the logic of entry and coordination in either may be contaminated by the existence of the other. How can we establish the counterfactual of how many parties we should expect in one tier if the other tier did not exist? We leverage the design of districts in the United Kingdom to address this challenge, observing voting in the same (or very similar) districts but under multiple electoral systems. We find only limited support for the hypothesis that contamination occurs across tiers of mixed-member systems and conclude that there appears to be generally sophisticated decision making about both entry and coordination.1

The Impact of Campaign Finance Laws on Party Competition

The comparative literature on party systems has convincingly demonstrated that electoral rules, social cleavages and their interaction can explain much of the cross-national variation in the size of party systems. This literature, however, has thus far ignored campaign finance laws. This article argues that various campaign finance laws exert more or less restrictive pressures on party competition. It develops a new theoretical concept, fund parity . The study demonstrates the positive relationship between fund parity and party system size and employs additional tests to supplement the regression analysis in order to account for potential endogeneity issues. The findings underscore an intuitive – but heretofore untested – relationship: increasing parity makes party competition more permissive and increases the size of the party system.

Street-level charity: Beggars, donors, and welfare policies

Begging is a phenomenon that has largely been ignored by scholars of the welfare state. This is surprising because the presence of beggars in a society tends to be interpreted as the welfare states failure to adequately provide for its citizens. This paper examines the conditions under which we expect donors to actually give money to beggars at the street level. In particular, it offers a systematic theoretical framework for analyzing interactions between beggars and potential donors. We develop a game theoretic model where potential donors and beggars interact with one another in the context of a broader political environment. The contribution of our approach is twofold. First, it offers equilibria results on the strategic considerations that motivate begging practices. Second, it explains how social welfare policies at the macro-level can indirectly shape the parameters that structure these street-level equilibria.