What do change and flux in political party organizations imply for democratic elections and democratic performance? This project assesses the extent to which voters can discern electoral information and make reasoned decisions in elections characterized by instability in party organizations. The significance of the project's central question is illustrated by the 2002 parliamentary election in Latvia. Several new parties and party coalitions appeared on the ballot that year: the socially conservative Latvia's First Party, which formed shortly before the election campaign began; the Union of Greens and Farmers, which merged two existing parties with only partially consistent policy programs; and a three-party merger of the prominent National Harmony Party and two markedly more conservative pro-Russian parties. In addition to these new party formations, two existing parties competed for reelection, each headed by a new party chairman. An informed voter in this election would have needed to learn the policy positions of the brand new party, reconcile the ideological inconsistencies within each of the two party mergers, and make sense of what the leadership changes meant for the policy goals and competences of the two preexisting parties.
This project constructs and analyzes an original dataset on instability in party organizations in order to examine the consequences of such instability for political representation and accountability in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the established democracies of Western Europe.
The intellectual merit of the research lies in its contribution to enhancing our understanding of electoral information processing and of democratic governance more generally. Building on extant research in political psychology, the project develops theoretical expectations about the conditions under which party cues are useful to voters. It also contributes to understanding of the processes of democratic representation and electoral accountability, both of which are indispensable for the functioning of any election that adheres to the tenets of representative democracy. Moreover, the project will yield a dataset on party instability in a diverse set of political systems. The dataset will enable other scholars to investigate the causes and consequences of party instability.
The study will also make several broader contributions. It will shed light on the importance of party stability for the practice of democracy. If indeed party instability poses a threat to the functioning of democratic elections, then policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, and citizen coalitions would be well advised to turn their attention and resources to the stabilization of party organizations. The findings of this research are relevant not only for new democracies, where political parties are not well-established, but also, and increasingly so, for the long-standing democracies where parties have destabilized over the past four decades. Furthermore, the dataset on party instability produced in this project will be relevant to government agencies and nongovernmental organizations interested in the impact of party instability on corruption, economic performance, and good governance.
The aims of this project were (1) to produce a data set on party instability in a diverse set of political systems , (2) to assess the extent to which voters can discern electoral information and make reasoned decisions in elections characterized by instability in party organizations and (3) to disseminate the data set and empirical findings. First, the grant enabled the collection of detailed, comparative data on instability in party organizations (the emergence of new parties, the disbanding of existing parties, party mergers, splinter parties and party entry into and exit from joint lists) in ten developing and seventeen mature European democracies, from 1987 to 2011. The measure of party instability stands apart from existing indicators of electoral volatility; it estimates party system instability independently of election results and mass preferences, thus limiting the conflation of independent sources of instability and reducing measurement bias. The data set will empower future research to disentangle empirically the dynamics of voter behavior and party elite maneuvering and to investigate the types of party changes in specific time periods and countries. The comparative data set will be useful in future empirical research on party and electoral systems, democratic governance and mass and elite behavior. Second, the empirical findings illustrate that instability in party organizations has adverse consequences for democratic representation and political accountability. Stable political parties enable voters to gather information about party positions and to elect parties that represent their political interests. In contrast, party instability places greater cognitive demands on voters, as evidenced by their lower levels of knowledge about party positions in erratic elections. As a result, when political parties are unstable, citizens are less likely to vote for the parties that would best represent their policy positions and are also less likely to sanction incumbents for poor economic performance. Hence instability in party organizations obstructs voter decision-making, with negative consequences for democratic representation and political accountability. Finally, the grant enabled the dissemination of these findings at two conferences: the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, Illinois and the 2011 European Conference on Comparative Electoral Research in Sofia, Bulgaria. One of these conference papers is currently under review while another one is in preparation for submission. The data set on party instability will be made available upon publication through the Harvard University IQSS Dataverse Network.
