The researchers want to undertake two related tasks, both of which are valuable for the advancement of the study of comparative public policy and of comparative political parties and elections. First, they wish to improve the understanding of why some countries do better than other countries in delivering public benefits related to the health and well-being of their residents. The researchers focus attention on whether countries have political parties in their national parliaments that represent narrow geographic constituencies versus having political parties that represent broad, national coalitions that unite many regions. Using data from 60 countries, including many developing countries, the researchers plan to test the theory that broad, national parties running governments tend to lead to more comprehensive public health policies and thus better health outcomes. Alternatively, coalitions of regional parties running governments tend to lead to fragmented, piecemeal policies that fail to cover all geographic areas. While the data concern immunization levels and infant mortality rates, the findings will have implications for other areas of policy, including education and infrastructure. The overall purpose of this portion of the project is to understand the links between the nature of political parties and party competition at the national level, on the one hand, and the delivery of public services by national governments, on the other.
Second, the researchers wish to coordinate and archive constituency-level election returns for many of the world's democracies, a task that is sorely needed by the community of researchers studying elections and political parties. They will be gathering and archiving constituency-level election data for use by the broader research community. In creating this archive of data (known as CLEA, the Constituency-Level Election Archive) the study will enable these and other researchers to expand and improve research on comparative politics, political parties, party systems and elections.
This project will have four kinds of broader impacts. First, findings from the study will help policy-makers learn the important causal connections between institutional design, party system characteristics, and policy-making. By linking formal institutions to political parties and then to policies and policy outcomes, they will have leverage in advising about institutional design, especially for new and developing democracies. Second, the researchers will make their data widely available through the CLEA archive. This will enable scholars, policy analysts, diplomats, and intelligence analysts to use the data to study the causes and consequences of party system characteristics, and to analyze election results for other purposes. Third, the data collection portion of this project will involve a great deal of collaboration with graduate and undergraduate students. Fourth, the researchers will participate in the University of Michigan's undergraduate research program that helps to attract and retain minorities and women as members of faculty research teams.
In this project a group of political scientists who are experts on elections collected and analyzed data on election returns from around the world. The project is innovative in collecting data from relatively small geographic units---such as congressional districts in the United States---and analyzing the data for patterns of success among political parties in local areas. Of particular interest to the researchers was the consistent success of minor, local parties, and how those local parties affected policies at the national level. Such minor, local parties no longer have sustained influence in American politics, but small parties with only local or regional followings are very important in many other countries, and they can dramatically influence the policies of national governments. A major part of the project was to collect these local election returns, to organize the results into useable datasets and make them available to anyone with an Internet connection. The research team has created an archive of election returns, neatly organized by locality, country, political party, and year of election, and accessed via a number of widely used computer programs. Many researchers with interests in elections, political parties, public policy, and legislatures have used the data already and future generations of social scientists, citizens, and government officials will have access to an archive of the world’s election returns at the district level. At the beginning of the project, the team had data sets with 543,463 election returns. Now, at the end of the project, the archive has nearly 750,000 election returns in the datasets. Moreover, the team has created additional archives of summary statistics on those elections, as well as maps on the precise geographic locations of the local election districts. Thus, the project has provided multiple kinds of valuable research infrastructure for the study of elections. The team of political scientists on this project also conducted their own research using the data. The research led to several important findings. They found that countries with many active local political parties tend to have government policies that are less successful in delivering important public health benefits---such as the measles vaccine---compared with countries without such local political parties. The researchers argue that this is because local political parties divert the national government’s attention away from comprehensive, national health outcomes. The researchers also found that countries with active local political parties tend to attract less private foreign direct investment compared to countries without such local parties. This is because, they argue, investors consider active local political parties to be more in favor of siphoning off higher taxes from these foreign investments compared with political parties having a national scope.
