Steven T. Wuhs

State Delegate Selection Rules for Presidential Nominations, 1972–2000

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the consequences of delegate selection rules for presidential nominations, yet few have sought an explanation for the variance in these rules across the states and over time. In this article, we ask why state party elites would open their processes of delegate selection to a large and potentially ideologically diverse constituency by holding primary elections rather than caucuses. We develop an account of endogenous institutional choice that suggests elites ought to be increasingly likely to open their delegate selection rules as the ideological nature of the party and the states electorate converge. We test this claim using a new data set on Democratic Party selection rules between 1972 and 2000 and find that the degree of ideological convergence is a strong predictor of state party choices to open the process of delegate selection. These results provide additional support for general theoretical claims that characterize political institutions as fundamentally endogenous to the politics they regulate.

Inclusion and its moderating effects on ideas, interests and institutions Mexico’s Partido Acción Nacional

This article examines the moderation of the Mexicos National Action Party in the context of democratization. Founded in 1939 as a confessional party, by the 1990s the PAN had moved toward the political center – retaining its Christian-Democratic identity and ideals but also making institutional appeals to the broader voting public in Mexico. This article explains the segmented process through which the PAN moderated in response to inclusionary reforms promulgated by Mexicos authoritarian regime. In some cases, those reforms merely aggravated internal tensions in the party. But other reforms repositioned the PAN vis-à-vis its competitors, Mexican civil society, and the Mexican voting public, and triggered institutional changes that enabled the PAN to build political momentum in advance of the countrys 2000 democratic transition. Employing an institutional process-tracing approach, this article examines how shocks in the PANs competitive environment reverberated inside the organization: how they affected the relative power of factions in the party, how they were mediated by existing party institutions, and how they related to the partys ideological goals. Those crucial intra-party processes, I argue, influenced whether the PAN, as an organization, responded to those exogenous shocks in terms of its competitive behavior, and conditioned how the PAN responded when it did so. The case of the PAN demonstrates that parties may respond to inclusionary reforms or other exogenous shocks in relatively uncoordinated and unsystematic manners.

Book Review: Mexico’s Evolving Democracy: A Comparative Study of the 2012 ElectionsDomínguezJorge I. (eds), Mexico’s Evolving Democracy: A Comparative Study of the 2012 Elections, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015; xvi + 282 pp.: ISBN 978 1 4214 1554 3, US

try data and anecdotal evidence. Focusing mostly on parliamentary democracies, the volume rightfully acknowledges the pivotal role of political parties in the internal organization of legislatures. Building on that assumption, the authors offer a parsimonious, formal delegation model, including political parties and backbenchers as two rational actors aiming at maximizing utility derived from speeches in the plenary. The puzzle is both interesting and straightforward: who gains access to the floor to speak on behalf of the party leadership? The model assumes that, as the core organizing unit of work in legislatures, parties have the capacity to select the legislators who will benefit from floor time, an inherently scarce good. Their central argument is that parties need to maintain unity by sending credible signals to voters. Dissent hinders partisan reputation, particularly when a preference outlier legislator takes the stand and produces a speech that is completely at odds with the preferences of the party leadership on that subject. Consequently, parties select legislators who are closer to the ideal point of the leadership. Those who are farther away from the leadership in the policy issue will deliberately be prevented access to the floor by their own party. The authors emphasize that the electoral system and candidate selection mechanisms in political parties are the core explanatory variables to explain variation. In electoral systems in which legislators have incentives to cultivate a personal vote, political parties will have fewer incentives to keep tabs on their members. In this case, legislators will use speeches to signal their individual positions for electoral purposes. Their illustration of the British system highlights how legislators make strategic use of speeches. In this setting, legislators avoid electoral punishment in their constituency by showing public dissent from the party leadership in the plenary in controversial and electorally important matters. Conversely, Proksch and Slapin argue that electoral systems with closed-list proportional representation give different incentives to parties and legislators. The former need to prevent the latter from shirking the party line to maintain the value of the electoral label. The latter need to conform to the party line if they do not want to risk being reselected in the next elections. Their second argument relates to the internal mechanisms of candidate selection. The authors argue that the degree of centralization in candidate selection matters to determine the leeway that legislators have to toe the party line. Ultimately, the implications of these two arguments revolve around parties and legislators adopting rational behaviour in the face of institutional constraints. In institutional settings in which candidate nomination is more decentralized and the electoral system is more personalized, legislators use speeches for their own benefit, expressing their own positions more clearly. Overall, the party leadership has less to lose from potential cohesiveness problems. In those institutional constellations where parties have more internal control over candidate selection and have less personalized electoral systems, legislators need to work towards the maintenance of a credible party label, as this constitutes an important public good. Proksch and Slapin’s work is an outstanding contribution for the comparative study of legislatures, particularly for its travelling capacity and adaptability to different institutional constellations. Their conception of speeches as a game between the leadership and backbenchers is a relevant alternative to traditional measures of party unity, which have been thoroughly explored by political science. Recent developments in computer linguistics over the course of the past decade, as well as the availability of online data, will make the study of speeches increasingly interesting for legislative scholars. Hopefully, this seminal theoretical guide will foster scholarly exploration of the ever increasingly available data.

55.00 (hbk).

This article examines how political context affects the strategic choice of nomination rules, using data from federal and state-level legislative elections. Our analysis indicates that competition affects the selection rules parties adopt. Overall, parties are most likely to use open selection rules when they think they will win, largely due to the effects of activist competition over coveted nominations. However, state-level party leaders have not been consistently empowered by decentralization. Although state-level party leaders do have nonnegligible influence when it comes to the selection of local legislative nominees, they have more influence in those states that are the most dependent on the federal government for resources. Competitive context continues to be a stronger predictor of selection rule choice than decentralization.