Party Competition

This study asks whether perceived threats to group social status increase electoral support for conservative candidates, and whether that effect depends on candidate issue positions or voters’ party loyalty. Using a joint experimental design that combined vignette and conjoint elements, the authors expose respondents to status-threat messaging and then ask them to choose between hypothetical candidates differing on issue positions and party. The contribution is a causal test of status threat’s effect on candidate choice among White American respondents, assessed alongside strong influences from issue positions and partisanship.

This paper asks whether features of party organization help explain Italy’s mixed performance on multiple dimensions of democratic quality, and how Italy compares to other liberal democracies over time. Focusing on two party organizational features—personalization and institutionalization—the authors first map Italy’s ups and downs across democratic dimensions relative to other liberal democracies. They then use regression analysis to test how variation in party personalization and institutionalization relates to measures of democratic quality.

This study asks how political parties divide attention across the past, present and future in campaign communication and whether incumbency shapes emotive rhetoric across these temporal dimensions. Using supervised machine learning to label temporal focus, the author analyzes 621 party manifestos from nine countries spanning 1949–2017 and describes the share of manifesto text devoted to each temporal category. The contribution is a systematic, cross-national description of parties' temporal rhetorical emphasis and how statements about past and present relate to differences in sentiment between incumbents and opposition.

Political science long held that U.S. local governments, often one-party dominated, would lack stable coalitions and democratic accountability compared to national systems.

Party competition fundamentally shapes modern politics and influences policy outcomes across the board. Conventional wisdom suggests heightened party rivalry stimulates more liberal policymaking as competing parties attempt to attract supporters from marginalized groups.

Does heightened party competition translate into more political activism?

Spatial models of political competition assume parties adjust their ideological positions in response to rivals, and spatial econometric techniques are widely used to model these interdependencies. These approaches typically treat party positions as perfectly measured covariates, but party ideology is actually latent and accompanied by measurable uncertainty. The implausible assumption of error-free measurements can distort empirical tests of theoretical expectations.

Party systems in modern democracies appear robust due to a dynamic interplay between entropy and structure.

How does party competition affect polarization? This article explores that question by analyzing state legislative data.

This article examines how party control affects public service performance.