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Most studies of electoral system effects tend to ignore the characteristics of parties in the causal chain. Yet, this dissertation argues that different party structures, when interacting with electoral systems, lead to different levels of party system fragmentation. In a weak party structure, elite action is the key to explaining the different outcomes: a permissive electoral system tends to inflate the number of parties because the rule poses an obstacle to elites’ electoral coordination. But this major obstacle is removed under a restrictive rule, which results in lower fragmentation. By contrast, the role of voters becomes active in a strong party structure; therefore, the effects of permissive and restrictive electoral systems become similar as both tend to bring down the number of parties through voters’ strategic behavior. This dissertation tests the theory on Thailand since the country has gone through three waves of electoral reform in which the electoral system has been changed between a permissive and a restrictive electoral rule. At the same time, the party structure has changed following the victory of the Thai Rak Thai Party in the 2001 election. The changing interactions of party structures and electoral systems provide a quasiexperimental setting conducive to inspecting the effects of the key factors on party system fragmentation while other confounding variables (social heterogeneity and viii political institutions) are held constant. This research design allows me to compare periods of time in different configurations of party system fragmentation. This dissertation applied multi-methods, including case study analysis, single-country multilevel quantitative analysis, and a large N, cross-national quantitative analysis, to reach the conclusions. Theoretically, the findings suggest that electoral system effects are contingent on party structures. Successful institutional engineering requires deep understanding of both formal rules and the political context of a particular country. In other words, one size cannot fit all, even for the same country at different times. / text

D. Litt. et Phil.

This dissertation seeks to examine why democratic systems and electoral competition can sometimes fail to secure clean government in the interest of the electorate. The question of why voters support corrupt politicians, despite disapproving of corruption itself, is of critical importance if it is to be believed that corruption has a detrimental effect on development. The core argument of this dissertation is that party system features that improve accountability by shaping the efficacy of elections as tools to select and control politicians, play a vital and overlooked role in conditioning the scope for corruption. I conceive of governmental corruption as a classical principal-agent model, in which voters‘ relationships with their representatives are mediated by the extent to which party systems enable the electorate to select non-malfeasant politicians who seek to curb corruption and to hold accountable those who do not. This thesis purports that party systems which reduce agency problems confronting voters, by making available information regarding the quality of their incumbents and potential challengers and structurating effective, choices at the polls, decrease the latitude for governmental corruption. This thesis probes this argument through a controlled comparative analysis of corruption in 91 contemporary democracies and three nested-design case studies. The large-N analysis and the case studies of Panama, India, and Mexico offer broad support for these hypotheses.

In the past decade, party systems have collapsed in Venezuela and Peru. Scholars have suggested that Colombia may be following a similar fate. I argue it is not. Despite loosing national elections the Liberal Party still wins subnationally. Regional clientelistic networks, based on goods that do not depend upon the central state, help provide votes to those candidates who have been in politics the longest. The latter are likely to be liberal politicians, with privileged positions within the party. They get nominated, thus, they have no reason to defect. Because they distribute goods that are independent from the national state, they also have little incentive to promote national candidates. Consequently, the LP wins within the regions but is unable to attain control of national offices. As long as it keeps doing so this party is unlikely to disappear. / text

The objective of these article is to evaluate different kinds of methodological tools thatmeasure the levels of congruence of the competition within de multi-level party systems, unders- tanding this last one as the levels of similitude that are experimented by the different districts where political parties compete. It starts from the premise that every party system is multi- level because in that system exists competition in different institutional levels (and in different districts simultaneously). The relevance of multi-level appears when national elections and subnational elections dynamics are not necessarily equals, and it is required to overcome the methodological traditional nationalism that it has been experimented until the moment in the research agenda about parties and party systems. The review of the concept of «congruence» is not exhaustive, and it seeks to systematize the contemporary literature to observe de similarities and differences in national and subnational electoral dynamics, and the consequences of the use of each measurement tool for the identified dynamics. / El objetivo de este artículo es evaluar diferentes herramientas metodológicas para medir los niveles de congruencia de la competencia de los sistemas de partidos multinivel, entendida esta como los niveles de similitud que experimentan entre los diferentes distritos donde compiten los partidos. Se parte de la premisa de que todo sistema de partidos es multinivel, ya que existe competencia en distintos niveles institucionales (y en diferentes distritos de manera simultánea). La relevancia de la lógica multinivel se da en que la dinámicas en las elecciones nacionales y subnacionales no son necesariamente iguales y requieren superar el tradicional nacionalismo metodológico que ha experimentado hasta el momento la agenda de investigación sobre los partidos y los sistemas de partidos. La revisión del concepto de congruencia no es exhaustiva y busca sistematizar la literatura actual para observar las similitudes y diferencias en las dinámicas electorales nacionales y subnacionales, y las consecuencias del uso de cada instrumento de medición sobre las dinámicas que se identifican.

Many scholarly and policy evaluations of governance in Uganda have blamed limited commitment to democracy in the country squarely on the shoulders of state leaders. This dissertation considers a broader range of explanations and raises questions about the limited understanding of democracy expressed in the prevailing literature. It does so by considering historical contexts, international and global structures, and the relationship between local political cultures and the contested concept of democracy. Claims about democracy and good governance, it suggests, are used to justify very narrow procedural prescriptions for the domestic state on the basis of a systematic neglect of Uganda’s specific political history and the structural contexts in which the Ugandan state can act. More specifically, this dissertation engages with one of the key controversies in the literature on the politics of development, that concerning the degree to which accounts of democracy favoured by the most powerful states should guide attempts to create democratic institutions elsewhere. It argues that at least some of the factors that are often used to explain the failure of democracy in Uganda can be better explained in terms of two dynamics that have been downplayed in the relevant literature: competition between different understandings of how democracy should be understood in principle; and the international conditions under which attempts to impose one specific account of democracy - multiparty representation – have marginalized other possibilities. These dynamics have undermined processes that arguably attempt to construct forms of democracy that respond to very specific socio-cultural conditions. Fundamental disputes about how democracy should be understood are already familiar from the history of democracy in Western societies, where struggles to impose some forms of democracy over others have defined much of the character of modern politics. The importance of the international or global dimension of democratic politics has received less attention, even in relation to Western societies, but is especially significant in relation to Africa’s political history and its position in the world. After reviewing the history of struggles over forms of governance in Uganda, this dissertation explores a series of unique open-ended interviews carried out in 2009 with important political actors in Uganda. On this basis, it argues for the ongoing centrality both of the always contested character of democracy and of attempts to impose particular accounts of democracy through internationalised and globalised structures. An appreciation of both dynamics, especially in the historical context that has been downplayed in much of the literature, offers a better scholarly ground on which to evaluate contemporary politics in Uganda than the choice between multiparty systems and dictatorship that remains influential in discussions of the Ugandan case. Such an appreciation is in keeping with important recent attempts to think about the possibilities of democracy in Uganda in postcolonial terms and to resist the forms of neocolonial politics that are examined here as a ‘politics of dispensation.’ / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / sabina@uvic.ca

Many scholarly and policy evaluations of governance in Uganda have blamed limited commitment to democracy in the country squarely on the shoulders of state leaders. This dissertation considers a broader range of explanations and raises questions about the limited understanding of democracy expressed in the prevailing literature. It does so by considering historical contexts, international and global structures, and the relationship between local political cultures and the contested concept of democracy. Claims about democracy and good governance, it suggests, are used to justify very narrow procedural prescriptions for the domestic state on the basis of a systematic neglect of Uganda’s specific political history and the structural contexts in which the Ugandan state can act. More specifically, this dissertation engages with one of the key controversies in the literature on the politics of development, that concerning the degree to which accounts of democracy favoured by the most powerful states should guide attempts to create democratic institutions elsewhere. It argues that at least some of the factors that are often used to explain the failure of democracy in Uganda can be better explained in terms of two dynamics that have been downplayed in the relevant literature: competition between different understandings of how democracy should be understood in principle; and the international conditions under which attempts to impose one specific account of democracy - multiparty representation – have marginalized other possibilities. These dynamics have undermined processes that arguably attempt to construct forms of democracy that respond to very specific socio-cultural conditions. Fundamental disputes about how democracy should be understood are already familiar from the history of democracy in Western societies, where struggles to impose some forms of democracy over others have defined much of the character of modern politics. The importance of the international or global dimension of democratic politics has received less attention, even in relation to Western societies, but is especially significant in relation to Africa’s political history and its position in the world. After reviewing the history of struggles over forms of governance in Uganda, this dissertation explores a series of unique open-ended interviews carried out in 2009 with important political actors in Uganda. On this basis, it argues for the ongoing centrality both of the always contested character of democracy and of attempts to impose particular accounts of democracy through internationalised and globalised structures. An appreciation of both dynamics, especially in the historical context that has been downplayed in much of the literature, offers a better scholarly ground on which to evaluate contemporary politics in Uganda than the choice between multiparty systems and dictatorship that remains influential in discussions of the Ugandan case. Such an appreciation is in keeping with important recent attempts to think about the possibilities of democracy in Uganda in postcolonial terms and to resist the forms of neocolonial politics that are examined here as a ‘politics of dispensation.’ / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / sabina@uvic.ca

It has long been argued that underlying values should hold a central role in political analysis. This would seem particularly relevant in an era of de-alignment and catch-all parties in which political actors often make direct values orientated appeals to the electorate. With the expansion in appropriate data and measures available to empirical researchers, the last two decades have seen a substantial increase in the number of studies directly addressing the values-voting relationship. Values based explanations of vote choice have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the processes underlying voter preferences and the structure of public opinion within democratic electorates. This existing empirical literature has generally focused on analysing the role of values on voting in single electoral contexts. While this approach has generated many useful findings that establish the role of values in differentiating political choice, it has only partially explored the contextual mechanisms through which values influence vote choice. This is necessary in order to understand under what political conditions values are likely to become more relevant to vote choice decisions. This thesis is an attempt to address three aspects of this gap in the cross-national research literature on values and voting using analyses of data from the 1990 and 2008 waves of the European Values Survey. Firstly it provides a cross-national analysis of core political values that enables a comparison of the role of values in structuring electoral competition across 15 West European countries. Secondly, it estimates the role that left-right political identity has in mediating the influence of values on vote choice using a structural path model. This provides a cross-national test of this mechanism and therefore assesses variation in the values-voting relationship across different national contexts. Thirdly, the thesis provides a systematic empirical analysis of the influence of political context on the values-voting relationship by testing the effect that macro level system factors, such as polarisation and the number of parties, have on the influence of values. The headline findings of the thesis are that political values are dynamic constructs that can demonstrate subtle variations in the preferences of voters across different electoral contexts. Political values have a multi-dimensional influence on electoral choice; with variation in voter preferences being highlighted by both value differentiation (having opposite preferences for the same value dimension) and emphasis (having a preference for different values). Left-right identity can act as both a mediator and a confounder of political values influence on vote choice. Political context is primarily relevant to the influence of values on voting through the content of supply side party competition as opposed to the structure of that competition. Overall, the study argues the findings show that supply side political context plays a crucial role in defining the parameters and strength of the values-voting relationship in each specific electoral arena.

According to a conventional wisdom, politics is nowadays more personalized than before. The proposition of the personalization of politics is relevant for three specific areas: institutions, media and voting behavior. This dissertation deals with the latter, since it focuses on the influence of party leaders on vote choice. So far the empirical scholarship tested whether “leader effects” have increased overtime (longitudinal studies) or investigated which conditions can enhance or discourage the electoral influence of party leaders (conditionality literature). We argue that both approaches have their limits, the former being based on the customary assumption of linearity, the latter investigating the role of (micro, meso and macro) “characteristics” rather than overarching and dynamic condition(s). This dissertation puts the cursor on a specific overarching condition: the (in)stability of parties and party systems (supply-side complexity). Actually, we argue that the magnitude of leader effects on the vote is conditional to the quality of the electoral environment. We therefore attribute to the “leader variable” a heuristic value: the leader appeal is conceived as an electoral shortcut more likely to be activated in complex electoral environment than in clear and stable contexts. There are two ways of testing the link between (variations in) and supply-side complexity and (variations in) leader effect on the vote. The first requires the adoption of a synchronic perspective, which implies a cross-national and cross-partisan empirical posture. This perspective considers space (i.e. “horizontal”) variations of stability, by assuming that certain parties and party systems are stable, while others are less or not stable. Are leader effects on the vote greater in the latter than in the former? The second one focuses on time (i.e. “longitudinal”) variations of stability. Indeed, electoral contexts vary across time – and not only across spaces - thus modifying the perceptions that voters may have of their electoral environment. When parties and party systems get convulsed, voters lose their frame of references. As such, they become cue-takers and rely more easily on leader appeals. On the contrary, when the political environment becomes clarified, voters will be less encouraged to rely on leader heuristic.This dissertation gives voice to both dimensions (space variation vs time variation). In a first place, we dig into the synchronic perspective. The relationship between supply-side complexity and leader effect on the vote is tested on a sample composed by 20 countries and 125 parties, included within the Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems. In a second place, we chart the magnitude of the leader variable according to longitudinal variations of supply-side complexity. Actually, our analytical effort will henceforth be centered on two distinguished case studies: Poland (1997-2011) and Italy (1996-2013), which have both experienced important variations in the stability of their electoral environment.We demonstrated that de facto differences (i.e. cross national and cross-partisan variations) in terms of stability do not automatically determine the magnitude of leader effects. On the contrary, we detect a link between the leader variable and longitudinal variations of the electoral environment. However, the quality of this link proves to be different in Poland and Italy. In the young democracy of Poland, leader effects and stability seem to be convergent rather than antagonist forces, while the Italian case properly fits our expectations: the convolution of the electoral environment makes voters more sensitive to the leader heuristic. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished