Robert Harmel

Formation and Success of New Parties A Cross-National Analysis

After describing the universe of 233 new parties formed in 19 West European and Anglo-American democracies from 1960 through 1980, the authors use data on those parties to address several hypotheses concerning system-level causes and conditions for new party formation and electoral success. It is found that although the propensi ty for forming new parties is not associated with structural variables, new party suc cess is related to the type of electoral system.

Performance, leadership, factions and party change: An empirical analysis

This article reports the first empirical findings based on data from a major study of party change. Hypotheses are developed linking party change to both internal and external factors. The data provide support for the conclusion that electoral performance alone is not sufficient as an explanation for parties’ decisions to change, and that new leaders and/or dominant factions may indeed make a difference. This leads the authors to suggest that ‘the burgeoning field of theoretical and empirical work on party change should focus even more attention on internal decision‐making processes’.

Changes in Party Identity : Evidence from Party Manifestos

Political folklore holds that political parties often try to change their images following a disastrous election defeat. This paper inquires into the truth of this common assumption through a systematic analysis of manifestos promulgated by eight parties in Britain, Germany and the USA prior to national elections in the 1950s through 1980s. Each election was classified as triumphal, gratifying, tolerable, disappointing or calamitous from the standpoint of each party. The change in party images for adjacent elections was assessed by correlating the percentages of sentences devoted to standard political themes in the pair of manifestos. We tested the hypothesis that parties were most likely to change their policy images following disappointing or calamitous elections. Our findings suggest that poor electoral performance was not a sufficient condition to produce a major overhaul of party images, but poor performance in the prior election was virtually necessary to produce major change in policy packaging at the next election.

Party actors and party change: Does factional dominance matter?

. Other works have asked whether parties matter; this article asks whether parties’ dominant factions matter. Special focus is placed on whether change in dominant faction or coalition within the party tends to produce other significant party change, and under what circumstances. Three specific hypotheses are developed and tested, one involving motivation for change and the other two involving ‘resources’ which are necessary to make dramatic change possible. Empirical analysis rests upon original data covering seven changes in dominant faction and several dimensions of party change within five parties in the United Kingdom and Germany for the period 1950 to 1990. The authors conclude that not all of the hypothesized factors have equal impact on degree of party change, with ability of the newly dominant faction to control its coalition being primary.

Party leadership and party institutionalisation: Three phases of development

Related to the general thesis that different situations call for different leadership skills and orientations, this article focuses upon the changing leadership needs of one type of political party ‐ the ‘entrepreneurial issue party’ ‐ as it matures from birth to institutionalisation. Drawing upon relevant literature on leadership of revolutions, leadership of social movements, leadership of organisations, and leadership generally, the authors present empirical evidence for the argument that different leadership needs exist at three stages of party development: the periods of identification, organisation, and stabilisation. Related propositions are addressed from the experiences of entrepreneurial parties in Denmark and Norway.

On the Study of New Parties

The large number of new parties appearing in western democracies and their actual and potential impacts offer important avenues of research on parties in general. This paper reviews work on the definition and enumeration of new parties, their variability, classification and distinctiveness, and the development and testing of theory concern ing new parties. It suggests areas of research that, in the authors view, will provide evidence of the need to integrate an understanding of new-party phenomena in the broader spectrum of political studies.

Environment and Party Decentralization A Cross-National Analysis

Based on data from the International Comparative Political Parties Project, this article reports an assessment of the importance of environmental factors in explaining the vertical decentralization of power within national political parties. The findings from exploratory regression analyses and, especially, from analysis-of-variance, suggest that much of the cross-national variance in party decentralization may indeed be explained by environmental factors. Special attention is paid to the system-level factors of country size, type of polity (democratic or autocratic), vertical and horizontal distributions of power within the polity, sectionalism, and social heterogeneity.

Minority Partisanship in One-Party Predominant Legislatures: A Five-State Study

Based on a 1984 mail survey of Republican legislators in five southern legislatures, this study concludes that it is no longer adequate to simply dismiss a role for minority partisanship in one-party predominant legislatures. Variance exists among the legislatures and includes both partisan and nonpartisan models. Which model is followed may be affected by the number of minority party members, their treatment by the chambers leadership, and the party of the governor, though none of these factors appears sufficient by itself to produce minority partisanship or organization.

The how’s and why’s of party manifestos: Some guidance for a cross-national research agenda

It is the purpose of this article to highlight some of the variants that can serve as important avenues for future exploration into the “how’s” (production methods) and “why’s” (purposes) of party manifestos (aka platforms). Beyond discussing conceptual and theoretical issues pertaining directly to the how’s and why’s, the piece also includes a section on alternative dimensions of the “what” of manifesto content (i.e. alternatives to the much more studied “salience” and “position” dimensions). While it draws heavily from literature on established, western democracies, attention is also paid to special needs for extending manifesto research to include newer, less institutionalized democracies.

Manifestos and the “two faces” of parties: Addressing both members and voters with one document

It is commonplace to see references to parties’ manifestos as their written issue “profiles,” and changes in such documents as constituting changes in the parties’ “images” or “identities,” with the latter terms often used interchangeably to capture the role of platforms. This article argues, however, that projection of a party’s “image” and its “identity” are two different functions for a manifesto, not just one, and that it is important for the building and testing of theory that this distinction be maintained. Parties are, after all, addressing two audiences simultaneously with one document, and the two dimensions provide two alternative objects of change which can be used strategically to please both audiences at once. The article employs existing manifesto-based measures of parties’ relative issue emphases and their positions on a range of issues as indicators of image and identity, respectively, and finds that the two are indeed empirically distinct. Then, an earlier test of the electoral performance hypothesis as applied to emphasis change is replicated with data designed to capture change in issue positions. The test provides evidence for the prudence of maintaining the distinction between emphasis and position as two different dimensions of party profile change.