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In my PhD thesis I disentangle the rhetorical reactions of political parties to public opinion and protest. Previous research on political responsiveness of parties pre-eminently views the relation between public opinion polls and party agendas as the key feature of responsiveness (Miller and Stokes 1963; Soroka and Wlezien 2010; Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995; Burstein 1998; Adams et al. 2006; Ezrow 2010). Yet, taking to the street has become an ever more important toolbox to articulate popular grievances. Social movements have emerged throughout Western advanced democracies and transformed the political landscape in Europe. Also new political parties emerged from these social movements – such as Green parties and the New Left (Kitschelt 1994; Kriesi et al. 1992). It is, therefore, surprising that the link between political parties and protest has largely remained a lacuna in social movement studies and the literature on party competition. My thesis is a first attempt to address this gap. I argue that besides public opinion polls, political protest will affect party position taking. I hypothesise that growing protest leads to polarisation of party systems. While all parties will increase their attention to the issue at stake during protest in an effort to secure votes and/or office, they respond differently to protest contingent on how their ideology relates to protesters’ demands. Furthermore, the success of protest depends on its support by the public at large. I test my theoretical framework using a new and unique data-set containing party positions on nuclear energy – revealed in interviews, press statements and press conferences – of 67 parties across 12 Western Democracies. I run time-series-cross-sectional models to test my theoretical arguments. Traditionally susceptible to responding to anti-nuclear protest, parties of the left understand increased protest as a window of opportunity to influence policy debate in their favour, while right-wing parties perceive protest as a threat to their ideological position on the usage of nuclear energy. Furthermore, I aim to understand in my last empirical chapter whether protest also affects parties’ issue emphasis in manifestos. To this end, I use the Comparative Manifesto Project data and protest data on 18 democracies across 15 years to estimate how parties adapted their issue emphasis to postmaterialist issues. While I again find a significant influence of protest on parties’ issue emphasis, the polarisation hypothesis does not find support in my last chapter. Finally, the instrumental variable models used in this last chapter suggest that the causal direction runs from protest to parties’ position.

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The main objective of this thesis is to produce an explanatory model of the changing membership of political parties, capable of reproducing past behaviour and of testing the same systems under alternative conditions. The thesis considers the appropriateness of the General Epidemic Model to political party growth, and considers other models in order to address the shortcomings of this. A System Dynamics model, the Limited Activist Model, is created using two word of mouth processes to illustrate member recruitment and the conversion of New Party Members into Activists. The model is successful in that it broadly explains party data using the word of mouth metaphor. However, the two nonlinear processes employed are found to be overly sensitive, and the model is not able to fully reproduce known data. This is shown to be due to an artificially low susceptible pool being used in the second word of mouth process. The model is revised in the Limited Activist Model by representing activity levels by two stocks of different types of party activist rather than by having flows for the differing activities. This illustrates members' changing roles but it does not relate membership change to the needs of the party. It is shown that although word of mouth is a good explanation of the growth and decline of political parties, it is insufficient to explain observed changes in known data. A new approach to modelling the growth and decline of political parties is created called the Supply & Demand Model which is based solely on the hypotheses of political science. Mechanisms include the Demand from the party for members, and the natural Supply of members to the party in response to an increase in political legitimacy. A generic 'limits to growth' archetype is created to handle soft variables such as Political Legitimacy and Media Portrayal. It is shown that the growth and decline hypotheses of political science are good explanations of the changes in political party size, but as in the Limited Activist Model the model is insufficient to explain all of the variations in the data. The Supply & Demand Model is able to explain the growth and decline in terms of what is exogenous and endogenous, but not how the party achieves their aims. For a Political Party to be successful they need to obtain a balance between the supply of members and the demand for members, while ensuring a healthy level of political legitimacy. The strengths of the Limited Activist Model are combined with the Supply & Demand Model in order to link what the party does and the context in which it is done, whilst exploring additional growth and decline mechanisms. A new approach to modelling political recruitment is outlined using a combination of the growth and decline hypotheses of political science and the epidemiological based approaches, the Hybrid Model. A disaggregated view of political party membership was used to take into consideration the different activity levels among activists in order to link recruitment to specific membership activity. Aspects such as party competition are also explored. The Hybrid Model was found to closely replicate known data, while linking what the party does and the context in which it is done. However, the large number of parameters made the initial state of the model difficult to estimate. As such, it is recommended that the Limited Activist Model and Supply & Demand model be used in unison instead of the Hybrid Model alone. The number and sensitivity of the factors within the Hybrid Model, and especially of the exogenous effects, suggest that no party can have a decisive corrective effect on its demise. To investigate this further, more research is proposed with regards to the type of members being recruited and how they joined, along with more research into the influence of the media. It is suggested that a more sophisticated model of leaving might also assist the party in determining how much of the change in membership is endogenous and in the party's control, and how much is exogenous and as such, partly out of their control. From the research carried out in this thesis it is suggested that political parties should be concerned about the recent decline in membership levels, and look for ways to enthuse existing supporters into recruiting members of the public in order to boost political legitimacy and ultimately win elections.

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This thesis consists of the three papers that present new formal models of functions and organisations of political parties. The models begin with a particular function or organisational feature of political parties and integrate it with the related issues that the formal literature in political science has either discussed separately or has not paid sufficient attention to. The first paper analyses the strategic interactions between parties and their candidates in elections. It answers the question of why parties provide greater campaign support toward open-seat races than reelection races; to what extent campaign support of parties influences and incentivises valence investment of individual candidates. It also identifies and distinguishes party and personal attributes to an incumbency advantage and discovers a ‘multiplying’ effect that the sequential nature of reelection race has on the advantage. The second paper discusses intraparty competition between factions. It identifies a trade-off between collective and individual benefits in faction members’ choice between intraparty factions and provides a theoretical explanation for factional splits and merges observed in politics. It differentiates itself from the small literature of factions, which is often found to be insufficient to analyse the dynamics of intraparty factions, by incorporating a hierarchical structure of party organisations. The third paper integrates different types of organisational hierarchies, in power, as the second paper does, and in decision procedures and connects them to the longevity of political power. It analyses endogenous allocation of power that gives rise to a specific pattern of power hierarchy that best serves the two objectives of political power, the absolute size and longevity of power. It also shows that the optimal power hierarchy differs across the types of decision hierarchies, indicating the decision-making procedures adopted by a parties. It offers a theoretical explanation to why some parties have undergone more frequent leadership turnover.

The US Democrats, Australian Labor Party and British Labour Party adopted the issue of childcare assistance for middle-income families as both a campaign and as a legislative issue decades apart from one and other, despite similar rates of female employment. The varied timing of parties’ policy adoption is also uncorrelated with labour shortages, union density and female trade union membership. However, it is correlated with two politically-charged factors: first, each party adopted childcare policy as their rate of ‘organised female labour mobilisation’ (union density interacted with female trade union membership) reached its country-level peak; second, each party adopted the issue within the broader context of post-industrial electoral change, when shifts in both class and gender-based party-voter linkages dictated that the centre-left could no longer win elections by focusing largely on a male, blue-collar base. Were these parties driven to promote childcare in response to the changing needs of their traditional affiliates (unions), or was policy adoption an outcome of autonomous party elites in search of a new electoral constituency? Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, this research analyses the correlates of policy adoption and the specific mechanisms through which party position change on the issue took place (e.g. legislator conversion versus legislator turnover). It finds that parties largely adopted the issue as a means to make strategic electoral appeals to higher-educated, post-materialist and in particular, female voters. However, the speed in which they were able to make these appeals (and hence, the time at which they adopted the issue) was contingent on the speed in which elites were able to reform their party’s internal organisation and specifically, wrest power away from both the unions and rank-and-file members in order to centralise decision making power on election campaigns, executive appointments and candidate selection processes into the hands of the leadership.

Powerful individuals often influence the delivery of government services for their own purposes. Officials may prefer inherently to direct assistance to their own relatives and social contacts (nepotistic preferences). Alternatively, they may use government services strategically in exchange for favors (patronage) or to gain voter support (clientelism). Most existing literature examines these three phenomena separately, or does not distinguish the motivations for politicians’ influence on distribution. Causal identification has also been a problem in the empirical literature. In the first chapter of this thesis, I develop a theoretical model of interaction between three levels of actors: politicians, local patrons, and households. The model allows for politicians and patrons to influence government services for nepotistic, clientelistic, and patronage purposes. In chapters 2-4, I test the predictions of the model using two novel household survey datasets I collected along with my collaborators in rural Punjab, Pakistan. Chapter 2 tests the theoretical predictions for the interaction of politicians, patrons and voters. Chapters 3 and 4 provide quasi-experimental evidence on the causal effect of links with politicians on assistance. I find evidence that politicians exert dramatic influence on the targeting of government assistance in this setting. Consistent with the theoretical model, the most assistance goes to a small “inner circle” of their closest contacts. Politicians assist this “inner circle” based on their inherent preferences, regardless of electoral pressure. When politicians face electoral pressure, they also deliver assistance to a wider group, in particular members of the same clan. In contrast, local patrons do not appear to have significant independent influence over the targeting of the government assistance programs I study, but they do provide other types of assistance to households. Their behavior is more consistent with the idea that they are motivated by inherent preferences for assisting their contacts. The results have implications for the interpretation of empirical literature on nepotism, clientelism, and patronage. They can also inform the policies of donor agencies and civil society organizations who aim to engage or pressure governments to reduce corruption and improve public spending.

Over the past decades, European democracies have experienced diminishing trust in their political representative institutions leading to a decline in party membership as well as both reduced electoral turnout and overall political participation (Van Biezen et al., 2012). In response, many European parties began reforming themselves allowing for the direct participation of party members or even non-members in various intra-party arenas, such as leadership selections through primaries. Parties claim that such reforms increase intra-party democracy (IPD) by making internal organisation more inclusive and by providing all party members or even non-members with decision-making power perilously reserved to the party elites (Hazan and Rahat, 2010). However, the positive effect of increased IPD on membership is highly contested and surprisingly few relevant empirical and comparative studies exist. The central research question of this thesis is what are the (different) consequences of adopting different types of primary rules for party members? Hence, my aim is to examine whether the introduction of primaries is in fact as negative for party members as outlined by Katz and Mair (1994), Lefebvre (2011) or Hopkin (2001) or, alternatively, whether it represents a chance to revitalize parties as membership organizations (Macpherson, 1977; Ware, 1979; Bille, 2001). Primaries are defined as selection process for party leaders and candidates in which the final vote rests with either party members in closed primaries, or loosely defined group of party supporters or the wider electorate, open primaries. Thus, introducing a primary leads to a change in the level of intra-party democracy, as it shifts power from a more exclusive selectorate to either of the two selectorates outlined above. While this project focuses on primaries that select top-executive candidates, the theory and conceptual framework developed can be applied to primaries more broadly. The general argument put forward is that to capture the differentiated effects of party primaries we have to study the interplay between the rules determining who can vote (selectorate) and who can run (candidacy requirements) in primaries. This thesis answers its central research question by developing a conceptual framework that combines these two dimensions for party primaries that select the party leader in public office. First, it outlines the underlying logic of the conceptual framework that links the two dimensions and then provides a theoretical discussion of its consequences for party members looking specifically at the interaction between the two. To assess the consequences of different primary reforms, the thesis focuses on four dimensions of party membership: the party membership level, the turnout in primaries, the quality of membership and the attitude towards the leadership. This perspective highlights that different combinations of selection rules and candidacy requirements in primaries result in four distinct types of intra-party democracy from the perception of party members. In turn, these types lead party members to respond in a distinct fashion. Using a mixed-method case study approach, the second part of the thesis tests the theoretical framework for various Western European parties. The analysis will mainly use primary and secondary document analysis as well as new and existing survey data complemented by qualitative in-depth membership surveys. The main conclusion is that only some combinations of primary rules can lead to a positive effect for members while others do not. For example, closed primaries with open candidacy requirements will lead to more active participation of members, while open primaries with open candidacy requirements will reduce membership participation considerably.

Cette thèse (Sciences Po Paris & Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles) étudie le dilemme généré par l’immigration et la diversité pour les élites politiques dans deux communautés sous-nationales culturellement et linguistiquement distinctes : la Flandre (Belgique) et le Québec (Canada). Pour ces communautés, l’intégration des immigrés représente à la fois des opportunités et des défis. L’immigration peut à la fois augmenter le poids démographique de la communauté sous-nationale mais aussi affaiblir sa cohésion culturelle et linguistique. En étudiant la période de 1999 à 2014 et en utilisant l’institutionnalisme discursif, cette recherche questionne la réponse des élites sous-nationales à ce dilemme : comment les élites politiques flamandes et québécoises envisagent-elles l’intégration des immigrés ? Confrontées au dilemme de l’intégration des immigrés, sur une échelle qui irait de la menace à l’opportunité, comment les élites politiques se positionnent-elles ? Sur base d’une analyse des débats parlementaires, cette thèse identifie le positionnement des élites politiques (élus et ministres) et leur rhétorique sur quatre dimensions de l’intégration des immigrés : institutionnelle, démographique, linguistique et culturelle. Contrairement à d’autres recherches qui se sont uniquement concentrées sur les élites sous-nationalistes et les positions des partis régionalistes, notre focus sur les discours politiques et l’ensemble des élites permet de montrer comment les idées circulent et évoluent à travers les législatures. Cette recherche montre que les arguments-clés sont partagés par les élites politiques quand il s’agit des dimensions linguistique, démographique et culturelle de l’intégration des immigrés. Néanmoins et indépendamment de ces conceptions, des divergences claires existent sur les arrangements institutionnels à privilégier entre l’autorité fédérale et la sous-nation pour l’intégration des immigrés. / My PhD dissertation (Sciences Po Paris & Université Saint-Louis) considers the dilemma generated by immigration and diversity for political elites in two culturally and linguistic distinct sub-national communities: Flanders (Belgium) and Quebec (Canada). For such communities, immigration represents both opportunities and challenges. Immigration might increase the relative demographic strength of the sub-national community yet, it might also weaken its cultural or linguistic cohesion. Focusing on the 1999-2014 timeframe and using discursive institutionalism, I ask how subnational elites respond to this dilemma. Using discourse analysis, I identify the position of members of regional parliaments and their rhetoric on four dimensions of immigrant integration (institutional, demographic, linguistic, and cultural). Contrary to other researches that have focused only on sub-nationalist and regionalist party positions, my focus on political discourse allows me to show how ideas circulate and evolve through legislatures. My results run contrary to some expectations from immigration studies and federalism theory. I show that key arguments are shared between political elites when it comes to the linguistic, demographic and cultural dimensions of immigrant integration. Nevertheless and independently from the conceptions of integration put forward, I show that clear divergences remain when it comes to federal-subnational institutional arrangements for immigrant integration.