Suchergebnisse

Drawing on theories of neo-institutionalism to show how institutions shape dissident behaviour, Boucek develops new ways of measuring factionalism and explains its effects on office tenure. In each of the four cases - from Britain, Canada, Italy and Japan - intra-party dynamics are analyzed through times series and rational choice tools.

It is time to think again about the conceptualization of factionalism in political science. Following a brief review of scholarly contributions in the field, I argue that the analytical approach based on typologies and categories of subparty groups is not very useful in explaining intra-party behaviour and the process of change because, by their nature, these are static tools. Building on previous contributions to the study of factions, notably Sartori, I suggest focusing on intra-party dynamics instead of on organizational forms of faction. Factionalism should be viewed in non-exclusive terms, i.e. as a dynamic process of subgroup partitioning. It is a multifaceted phenomenon that can transform itself over time in response to incentives. Based on conclusions from case study research of factionalized parties in established democracies, I identify three main faces of factionalism: cooperative, competitive and degenerative. I suggest that the process of change may occur in a cycle that contributes to party disintegration, as illustrated by the case of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy (DC), which imploded in the mid-1990s under the centrifugal pulls of its factions.

Forming an idea of the number of parties competing at elections or winning seats in legislatures is fundamental to disaggregated approaches to mapping party systems. We set out a method for systematically relating the behaviour of any `number of parties' index to the size of the largest party's vote and the numbers of parties in competition. This approach shows that the `effective number of parties' ( N2) can confuse real changes in party competition with mathematical quirks in the way that the index is calculated. We also demonstrate that N2 (and its main rival the Molinar index) behaves in hard to predict and anomalous ways under some configurations of party support. We conclude that the Molinar index should not be further used, and that the N2 score's behaviour can create problems in quantitative applications. Even in less formal historical or comparative analyses N2 always needs to be carefully interpreted. There is no `perfect' measure of the weighted number of parties, but averaging N2 scores with a simple measure of largest party predominance (1/ V1) produces a highly correlated measure ( Nb), but one with lower maximum scores, less quirky patterning and a readier interpretation. A more radical solution is to `spatialize' N2 (or Nb) scores, which allows analyses to take more account of variations in the party competition conditions lying behind any given index number.