Paul Pennings

Democratizing Candidate Selection : Causes and Consequences

This special issue offers an up-to-date overview of the democratization of candidate selection, while giving attention to causes and cases from both past and present. The focus is on the consequences of internal democratization for the overall functioning of political parties. The contributions show that there are many forms of democratizing candidate selection. These differences mainly concern the inclusiveness of the selectorate that controls the candidate selection process and the degree of centralization of the selection methods, of which the role and composition of the selectorate are the most vital and defining criteria. The types of consequences and their impact on the functioning of parties are not univocal because there are different degrees of democratization. The empirical evidence presented by the contributions shows that moderate forms of democratization can have beneficial effects on party organizations - such as higher levels of membership participation - but that this effect is not certain. Radical forms, on the other hand, are more likely to distort party cohesiveness, and consequently weaken the quality of representative democracy.

Towards a New Methodology of Estimating Party Policy Positions

In the last twenty years, an international group of political scientists has coded nearly 2000 party manifestos with the help of one single coding scheme based on 56 categories which covers all main topics of these documents. However, there is a growing awareness of the shortcomings of the underlying coding scheme, such as overlapping and missing categories, which cannot be repaired without coding all manifestos all over again. Some have presented an alternative for manifesto-research by means of expert opinions on party policy positions, but these are unable to provide reliable time series for subsequent election years. The unborn solution to some of the problems with the coding scheme would be the computerised content analysis on digitalised party manifestos. This would open up a new universe of infinite possibilities for recodings and reanalyses. The extended consequences from full computerisation of textual analysis are mind boggling. But at the present, these possibilities are merely potentials as the computerised techniques are still underdeveloped. This article explores the possibilities for computerised content analysis in such a way that all postwar manifestos in established democracies can be compared with each other with the help of flexible coding schemes.

The Dimensionality of the EU Policy Space The European Elections of 1999

In any full-grown democracy, parties must confront voters with real choices that matter. The European Union is often said to be devoid of these choices owing to minor policy differences between parties. The manifestos issued at European Parliament elections by party groups are often perceived as being bland and indistinguishable from each other. How correct is this perception? In this article, the diversity of policy positions within and between the main European party groups is analyzed by means of the European election manifestos of 1999. The content analysis of these manifestos shows that there are significant differences both within and between the party groups. These differences indicate that these groups are (potentially) able to present meaningful choices to voters.

An Empirical Analysis of the Europeanization of National Party Manifestos, 1960–2003

This article provides a comparative analysis of the degree of Europeanization of national party manifestos. The research is based on a newly established database, which comprises digitized party manifestos of relevant parties in the period 1960–2003 in most of the established member states. The unit of analysis is the frequency of ‘co-mentions’ of 20 policy areas and (aspects of) Europe and the European Union. The results show that the degree to which parties acknowledge the increasing impact of Europe on policy-making depends on factors such as the time period, the type of policy sector, the duration of EU membership, the general attitude of parties towards European integration and the degree of internal consensus on European issues. Hence, references to Europe do not (only) reflect the process of European integration itself, but are affected by both insti tutional and party strategic factors.

Fuzzy Sets and Social Research

This special issue of Sociological Methods & Research presents four in-depth methodological discussions of the use of fuzzy sets in social research. They have in common that they confront and compare fuzzy set methods with mainstream techniques. These contributions should not be read as introductions to fuzzy set analysis (see Smithson 1987; Ragin 2000) but as attempts to validate this new methodology and demonstrate some of its strengths by comparing it with established approaches. In brief, fuzzy sets extend Boolean or “crisp” sets by permitting membership scores in the interval between 0 and 1. With crisp sets, cases are perceived only as members or nonmembers of a set. The problem is that many core concepts in social research are best understood as graded sets. Examples include such dichotomies as coordinated versus uncoordinated economies, national versus international politics, the public versus the private sector, states versus markets, consensus versus majoritarian systems, democratic versus nondemocratic, federal versus nonfederal, employed versus unemployed, male versus female, high versus low, established versus nonestablished, rich versus poor, and so on (see Pennings 2003). At a theoretical level, most researchers are fully aware of the problematic aspects of using these concepts as simple dichotomies. But this awareness has not been translated into the application of methodologies that are fully equipped to study diversity and complexity in a set-theoretic manner. Fuzzy sets can help social scientists conceptualize social and political phenomena as sets with imprecise boundaries between

Beyond dichotomous explanations: Explaining constitutional control of the executive with fuzzy‐sets

What are the main variations in the constitutional control of the executive in 45 parliamentary democracies and how can these differences be accounted for? Four com- peting hypotheses, based on dichotomies, explain the degree of this control by means of contrasting institutional settings: consensus democracy versus majoritarian democracy, presidentialism versus parliamentarism, thick versus thin constitutionalism and established versus new democracies. These hypotheses are tested with the help of fuzzy-sets that allow for varying degrees of membership that go beyond the presence/absence suggested by these dichotomies. The necessary and sufficient conditions for constitutional control are specified with the help of this new methodology. The fuzzy-set analysis shows that the degree of constitutional control can be explained solely by a specific combination of institutional conditions stemming from the four dichotomies, and not by one single dimension. This con- stellation remains hidden for the traditional correlational techniques like regression. Hence, the fuzzy-set logic presents a promising new tool for comparativists that can be used to reveal causalities.

Measuring national delegate positions at the convention on the future of Europe using computerized word-scoring

The Convention on the Future of Europe that led to the eventual drafting of an EU Constitution involved numerous political actors from many countries. Their negotiations over the constitution generated a huge volume of texts containing substantive information about their preferences for EU institutional and political outcomes. In this paper, we attempt to measure these preferences at the national party level by analysing the Convention texts using the computerized ‘word-scoring’ method for text analysis (Laver et al., 2003). For each national party whose delegates’ texts were recorded at the Convention, we estimate their positions on four political dimensions. We then test the validity of these estimates by comparing them with measures of national party positions on EU policy dimensions obtained through an extensive expert survey undertaken in 27 countries (the EU 25 plus Turkey and Romania). Our results show strong evidence that the word-scoring method is broadly successful in reconstructing the map of national party preferences for and against a more centralized and more powerful Europe as expressed through the Convention texts.

Managing Political and Societal Conflict in Democracies: Do Consensus and Corporatism Matter?

In their Note ‘Corporatism and Consensus Democracy in Eighteen Countries’ (this Journal , 21 (1991), 235–46) Arend Lijphart and Markus Crepaz sought to analyse the conceptual and theoretical linkages between corporatism and consensus democracy. Their aim was not only to investigate whether the concepts were linked to each other, but also to examine to what extent they overlapped . The authors claim that corporatism is part and parcel of consensual types of democracy (p. 235). If corporatism could be included as a dimension of consensual democracy the contrasts between Westminster and consensual types of democracy would be empirically enhanced and would be more comprehensive. Although this is an interesting line of thought, we think that there are a number of conceptual and methodological flaws in the elaboration of this idea that should be discussed in more detail, because they may very well cast some doubt on the degree to which corporatism is indeed ‘part and parcel’ of consensual politics. In this Comment we shall elaborate this argument and also suggest some ways in which the thrust of Lijphart and Crepazs theoretical arguments can be upheld and their empirical analysis improved.

Democratizing Candidate Selection

This special issue offers an up-to-date overview of the democratization of candidate selection, while giving attention to causes and cases from both past and present. The focus is on the consequences of internal democratization for the overall functioning of political parties. The contributions show that there are many forms of democratizing candidate selection. These differences mainly concern the inclusiveness of the selectorate that controls the candidate selection process and the degree of centralization of the selection methods, of which the role and composition of the selectorate are the most vital and defining criteria. The types of consequences and their impact on the functioning of parties are not univocal because there are different degrees of democratization. The empirical evidence presented by the contributions shows that moderate forms of democratization can have beneficial effects on party organizations - such as higher levels of membership participation - but that this effect is not certain. Radical forms, on the other hand, are more likely to distort party cohesiveness, and consequently weaken the quality of representative democracy.

Party Responsiveness and Socio-Economic Problem-Solving in Western Democracies

What factors influence party responsiveness to socio-economic problems in OECD countries? Four alternative regression equations are tested that model the influence of objective conditions, public preferences and party ideology. It appears that the way political parties respond to socio-economic problems is mainly determined by their left-right ideology. The influence of alternative factors is much weaker. Furthermore, party responsiveness is not only bounded by left-right ideology, but also by the institutional environment in which parties operate, i.e the welfare state regime.