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The short-term and long-term effects of institutional reforms on party system nationalization

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Abstract

The impact of institutions on party system nationalization has traditionally been examined in a cross-national fashion. However, while in some cases institutional reforms may be expected to immediately affect party nationalization, in others, changes might take place over subsequent elections. In this paper, we argue that reforms affecting mainly elite coordination—such as decentralization—will take a longer time to have an impact on party system nationalization than reforms related to the mechanical effects of electoral laws, i.e. changes in the electoral system. In order to test this argument, we use error-correction models to test the impact of electoral reforms on party system nationalization in democratic elections held in 22 Western and Eastern European countries from 1945 to 2012. In accordance with our arguments, we show that both decentralization and the number of districts elected in the legislative power will have an impact on party system nationalization, but that the impact of the latter will manifest itself earlier.

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Notes

  1. Demand-side explanation of party system nationalization is based on the impact of territorial cleavages. The nationalization of party systems has been explained by the progressive erosion of the pre-industrial cleavages and the increasing importance of the socio-economic one that took place during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (Caramani 2004). However, the nationalization process has been weaker in societies with relevant territorial cleavages—mainly ethnic or linguistic—(Bochsler 2010a, b; Sikk and Bochsler 2008) for two different reasons. First, because local parties have incentives to compete on their own, representing their territorial electorates; second, because ethno-regional representation is incompatible with merging with parties from other districts, thus leading to a territorially disconnected party system (Clark and Golder 2006; Lago and Montero 2009).

  2. This rationale is the same as in the case of strategic behaviour under electoral rules. When voters and parties vote and coalesce around M + 1 (M being district magnitude), the system reaches a Duvergerian equilibrium in which there are no incentives for strategic voting and only viable parties are expected to compete.

  3. The effective number of parties is calculated as follows: \(ENP = \frac{1}{{\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {p_{i}^{2} } }}\), where p is the proportion of votes obtained by party i in the election (Laakso and Taagepera 1979).

  4. We exclude foundational elections. The first post-war elections were often held to elect members of constituent assemblies; these often contemplated changes in the electoral rules (most notably assembly size) in a context of extreme uncertainty.

  5. The reform of 1993 established a mixed-member majoritarian system where 75% of the seats were allocated in single-member districts, while the remaining 25% were allocated through proportional representation. The linkage between the two tiers was made via the scorporo. In the assignment of PR seats, “the ‘effective vote’ is calculated by subtracting, from the list’s total vote, a number one greater that the votes received by the second-placed candidates in all the SMDs where candidates affiliated with that list have won seats” (D’Alimonte 2005, p. 257). This effective vote determined the PR seats for each list according to the LR-Hare method only when the list received more than 4% of the vote at the national level.

  6. Many reforms take place out of an election year. The strategy followed has been to place the reform as linked to the first election where this decentralization reform is applied.

  7. ECMs are, by definition, based on the analysis of changing figures across time and, as a consequence, they do not allow estimations of time-invariant variables. In our case, ethnolinguistic heterogeneity has been shown to be a powerful predictor of party system nationalization (Bochsler 2010b; Caramani 2004; Simón 2013) but its time-invariant character is not suitable for our estimation procedure. Despite this, the country’s fixed effects allow the ECM to properly account for systematic differences in party system nationalization explained by the different levels of ethnolinguistic heterogeneity in each country.

  8. Grant and Lebo (2016) have recently criticized the usual way through which ECMs have been estimated—the general error-correction model (GECM) suggested by De Boef and Keele (2008). In a nutshell, the authors argue that GECMs tend to overestimate long-term effects. In order to test the robustness of our results, we have re-estimated our models with a time-series cross-sectional analysis using a panel-corrected standard error (PCSE). The empirical evidence suggests that results obtained through the GECM underestimate the effects of institutional changes as compared to a PCSE, the conventional method which most scholars have relied upon to date. Further details are presented in the “Results” section.

  9. In order to better understand the impact of institutional changes on the number of years, instead on the number of elections, we have estimated the same models in a new database where the units of analysis are years rather than elections. In non-election years, we have filled in the information from the previous election. The results are totally in accordance with the ones using the number of elections as a unit on analysis. Results will be provided by the authors upon request.

  10. As mentioned earlier, we have evaluated the robustness of our results using a PCSE model. PCSE models do not allow for a proper assessment of the short-term and the long-term effects of institutional changes. However, the analysis of the immediate effects of institutional changes provides even stronger evidence than through ECMs. Indeed, both the degree of decentralization and the (log of the) number of districts are statistically significant and in the same direction as the ECM. Additionally, evidence using PCSE also supports the idea—not backed in the ECM—that the (log of the) district magnitude has a positive and significant effect on party system nationalization. Finally, the evidence concerning the presence of an upper tier is mixed, but points to a positive relationship with party system nationalization. The results are consistent also when accounting for time-series dependencies (autocorrelation) through the use of the lagged dependent variable in the right-hand side of the equation, as suggested by Beck and Katz (1995). Results will be made available by the authors upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Social Sciences Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Calle de Madrid, 126, 28903, Getafe, Madrid, Spain

    Pablo Simón

  2. Departament of Political Sciences and Public Law, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Barcelona, Spain

    Marc Guinjoan

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Correspondence to Pablo Simón.

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Simón, P., Guinjoan, M. The short-term and long-term effects of institutional reforms on party system nationalization. Comp Eur Polit 16, 762–782 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-017-0100-3

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