Svante Ersson

Party System Instability in Europe: Persistent Differences in Volatility between West and East?

To fully understand the function of volatility in todays European democracies, it is necessary to employ the principal-agent model. Where democracy is exercised in the form of party government, then it is especially essential to enquire into how the electorate can monitor politicians. Electoral volatility may increase the responsiveness of the party system to the electorate and increase the accountability of politicians. Party system instability is persistently higher in the east European democracies than in western Europe. System transition in eastern Europe passes through the party system, as new parties enter the electoral arena. Political innovation in western Europe also passes through the party system, where new movements appear alongside the established parties. However, there are signs of decreasing volatility in the east, whereas volatility is on the rise in several west European democracies. There will be convergence between west and east European democracies: both will experience considerable volatility in the future. This is a positive gain for democratic vitality in Tingstens conception. The level of party system fractionalization is already the same over the regions of Europe. The principal-agent model would favour several agents as well as agent switches, which means a moderate level of party system instability.

The riddle of federalism: does federalism impact on democracy?

Does federalism matter for democratic longevity? Most scholars would reply first ‘yes’, and then most probably add ‘very positively’. We show in this article that one should not take for granted that federalism constitutes a positive for democratic stability. This surprising result, derived from a regression approach where the impact of federalism is tapped while controlling for other factors constituting embeddedness, explains why many federal states have authoritarian regimes or unstable governments. More research on federalism is needed without harbouring preconceptions about the outcomes of this kind of political decentralization. One must separate between formal and real federalism as well as between various forms of political decentralization. The findings of this article tend to support the sceptical appreciation of federalism in the literature on political institutions.

Ecology of Party Strength in Western Europe A Regional Analysis

Following the Lipset-Rokkan cleavage approach, we present an ecological analysis of the electoral outcomes at the regional level of the political parties in 16 European democracies. The search for relationships between voter alignments and the social structure is conducted in terms of a comparative ecology model. Ecological factors at the regional level within each country account for 75% of the variance in support for 93 parties over three elections during the 1970s. More than half of the “regional” variance could be explained by five “structural” properties of the regions: industry, agriculture, affluence, religion, and ethnicity. The impact of these structural properties varied across countries and across party types. Some of the more theoretically interesting variations are discussed for specific countries, individual parties, and party types.

Is Federalism Superior

Neo-institutionalism in the social sciences harbors pretentious claims about the consequences of institutions. ‘Institutions Matter’, it is stated. We ask: ‘For what?’ The basic distinction here is the one between institutions as systems of rules on the one hand and social, economic and political outcomes on the other. We need models to test whether a variation in institutions is accompanied by or occurs together with a variation in outcomes. A chief difficulty in institutionalist theory is that the model linking the institution with the outcome is often not stated explicitly.

The Probability of Democratic Success in South Africa

The Republic of South Africa has erected a constitutional democracy including many institutional devices for the protection of human rights following a long process of negotiations between groups in deep conflict. How can we judge the probability of successful democracy in South Africa, taking a long‐term perspective? The article employs the regression technique for estimating the impact of social and political conditions upon democratic viability there. Adding the positives and the negatives together, the article concludes that there is a structural and institutional deficit, especially if one accepts the very high democracy rankings of South Africa made recently. In the long‐run perspective this is a negative for democratic viability in South Africa.

South Africa: Explaining Democratic Stability

Abstract Democracy scores for South Africa are now quite high. How is this to be explained? Testing social, economic, cultural and institutional models of democracy, we suggest that South Africas current democratic stability is best explained by a combination of institutional and political culture factors. The ANC in South Africa is found to be an interesting example of a dominant party. In contrast to superficially similar cases in Mexico and Taiwan, the position of the ANC is based upon electoral mobilisation not state monopolisation. However, in the long run any dominant party poses a risk for democracy, especially if contextual conditions do not fully support democratic stability. Civil society is identified as an important factor that is conducive to democratic vitality in South Africa.

State or Market? Politics Does Matter

We argue that politics matters in relation to the fundamental choice of allocation between public resource allocation and the market. These two forms of collective choices can be substituted only to a certain extent. It is difficult to pin down that politics matters for de tailed variation on kinds of public expenditures, particularly in rich countries, but we pre dict that politics is crucial to the basic choice between state and market when different types of countries are included in the analysis: OECD nations, Communist systems and Third World nations. The empirical analysis of variation in a few major expenditure items in 78 countries supports the argument. Estimating a number of regression equations mod elling the place of political factors in the context of public policy making, we find that poli tics is the single best predictor of the overall civilian size of the public sector, as well as of the welfare state ambition in education and health.

Unpacking the political development concept

Abstract The concept of political development was fashionable in the attempts at a theoretical interpretation of the emerging political systems in the Third World. Although it was attacked as a value-loaded notion, there was never a clarification of its meaning or reference. The contested conception of political development may be unpacked by looking at the extent of ambiguity in theoretical definitions of the concept and by inquiring into the degree to which theoretically derived dimensions of political development actually are independent at the empirical level. The finding is that the basic notions covered by the political development concept are referentially different to such an extent that future research should concentrate on each of the separate dimensions.

The socio‐economic structure of European democracies

The article presents the findings of a factor analysis concerning socio‐economic structure and socio‐economic development in sixteen European democracies. The socio‐economic structure of these nations consists of three dimensions: level of affluence, level of industrialisation and degree of urbanisation. A prominent feature in the change of the contemporary social structure of Western Europe is the weakening of the relationship between affluence and industrialisation. Statements about the implications for political life of socio‐economic structure and socio‐economic development entering into theories about modernisation and social mobilisation may be clarified and tested only if socio‐economic concepts are made operational in terms of a set of indicators, the interaction between which can be stated by means of factor analysis and used in the construction of indices.