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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.

This thesis examines why party systems of some developing countries become deeper and more quickly stabilised than others. Drawing on the scholarship of party system institutionalisation in third wave democracies, the thesis argues that the field can be strengthened by looking to three factors that the current literature has taken for granted: the role of cleavages, the function of personalistic politics, and the requirement of legitimacy to assess party systems. This thesis addresses these issues and in so doing provides a novel view of how, when and why party systems in newer democracies from Latin America, Europe and Asia consolidate over time. The research considers three case studies from three regions of the world, following the most similar approach method of comparison. One country per world region has been chosen for study in detail: Chile (Latin America), Estonia (Central and Eastern Europe) and South Korea (East and Southeast Asia). They all have party systems which have become more stable over time, but they exhibit different trajectories and speeds of consolidation. The thesis uses a variety of methods. In order to infer the causes of different processes of institutionalisation from party systems’ own participants, more than 120 elite interviews were conducted in the three countries over 13 months. To evaluate the overall legitimacy of the stabilisation process, this works presents the results of almost 500 face-to-face interviews with randomly selected individuals from the population. Quantitative analyses based on secondary public opinion surveys are used to test implications and observations, and offer potential generalisations. The findings suggests: 1) Where the ideological cleavage (left-right) is a strong determinant of party support the party system is more stable, and the stronger the ideological cleavage becomes over time, the more consolidated the party system is. Here, an ideological trauma can be at the core of the limitations of the left-right scope development. 2) Party systems with personalistic leaders can consolidate, contrary to the received wisdom, if charismatic figures build their parties around programmatic lines. And 3) legitimacy should not be regarded as a dimension for the Theory of Party System Institutionalisation, because it does not contribute in any way, positive or negative, to the stability of party systems. The thesis concludes that theories of party system institutionalisation should be reconsidered with respect to cleavages, personalism and legitimacy. In so doing, the growing literature on party system institutionalisation can benefit from a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of party systems in new democracies from different regions of the world.

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.

This dissertation consists of four article-length chapters that revolve around the study of distributive politics and/or party systems. In the first chapter, I use the case of South Korea to present a theory of conditional core-swing targeting that explains how presidents use their strong budgetary powers to manipulate the distribution of government resources. Presidents whose parties already possess a legislative majority are expected to favor core municipalities to strengthen the foundations of their majority constituency, whereas those who seek majority control are predicted to prioritize swing municipalities in an effort to cross the majority threshold. Using a novel dataset of national subsidy allocations that spans three decades, I find evidence in support of my theory. This chapter demonstrates that the beneficiaries of distributive favoritism are not fixed, and that politicians can engage in complex and varied targeting strategies to achieve their objectives. In the second chapter, I turn my attention to the concept of party system institutionalization. While institutionalized party systems are regarded as key underpinnings of democracies, much of our understanding of this relationship remains disjoint and inconclusive due to unresolved conceptual, measurement, and data challenges. To address these limitations, I focus the concept on the establishment and entrenchment of the interparty rules, and construct a corresponding measure that covers 96 post-WWII democracies using a Bayesian latent variable measurement model. The resulting measure not only has unmatched coverage and demonstrated validity, but also better corroborates theoretical expectations than existing measures. This chapter should facilitate the advancement of systematic understandings about the causes and consequences of party system institutionalization across a global sample of democracies. In the third chapter, I examine how two key dimensions of party systems—their degree of institutionalization and nationalization—jointly impact policymaking and policy outcomes in democracies. Party system institutionalization enhances the capacity of parties to sustain intertemporal policy coordination, whereas party system nationalization incentivizes parties to target broader constituencies. As these mechanisms are distinct, I argue that variations across these two dimensions should have disparate implications for the provision of public goods and services. Using a representative sample of democracies, I demonstrate that while party system institutionalization and nationalization are both necessary for increasing the supply of national policies, the former is more important for generating higher-quality and more equitable public service outcomes. This chapter presents a more comprehensive framework for understanding the relationship between party systems, policymaking, and policy outcomes. In the fourth chapter, which is co-authored with Michael Bernhard and Allen Hicken, we examine party system institutionalization in the context of competitive authoritarian regimes. Party system institutionalization is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but its role in non-democratic systems has been understudied. To address this gap, we construct an original data set that disaggregates electoral volatility—the most common measure of party system institutionalization in democracies—into ruling party seat change and opposition party seat volatility, and further divide opposition party volatility into Type-A and Type-B volatility. We find robust results that democratization becomes more likely when decreases in the ruling party’s seat share are accompanied by opposition party Type-B volatility. This chapter indicates that party system dynamics can be linked to regime performance even in non-democratic contexts.

Abstract: An idealized description of elections suggests they center around competing visions for the future of the state. Campaign platforms provide parties with the opportunity to present these competing visions and for voters to decide among them. In order to understand what issues are being discussed, researchers must analyze what policies are being prioritized and emphasized. While party policy shifts have been studied more frequently internationally, this type of platform-focused research is less popular in the Canadian context. This thesis aims to fill this gap by analyzing the continuity and shifts in Canadian provincial party platforms. I ask the following question: what policy priorities do provincial parties in Canada set out in their platforms, and why do these differ and change? By advancing a framework based on identifying and coding policy priorities articulated in platform section titles, I argue and substantiate that variables such as time, party family, and province/ region influence the priorities provincial parties set out in their platforms. Through a comprehensive analysis of over 20 provincial parties and 100 platforms, this study demonstrates how Liberal parties, New Democratic parties, and right-wing parties in Canada such as Progressive Conservative parties adopt different campaign strategies. Of the major party families, Liberal parties had the highest percentage of social issues as the first chapter topic, while New Democratic parties were the most likely of all three party brands to cover economic and business topics in their platforms’ first section. Parties in Western Canada were also more likely to prioritize economics and business topics first compared to parties in Eastern provinces. Further, when looking at consistency levels over time, many provincial parties were inconsistent in their policy priorities and emphasis; however, the NDP were the most likely to be classified as somewhat consistent. Findings also suggest that parties who experienced changes in leadership demonstrated only slightly lower levels of consistency, despite the significant influence of the leader over party decisions in Canadian politics. When comparing consistency levels under the same and different leaders, I found that the more activist-dominated New Democratic Party showed similar consistency levels under the same and different leader, results that are compatible with existing research. Finally, despite differences in policy prioritization levels, differences in average space dedicated to policy issues by party family is minimal. Ultimately, this study reinforces that in Canadian politics, political parties show their values and build their brand not necessarily through their policy positions, but through their priorities. A concluding discussion highlights the value and significance of this research and suggests areas of future exploration about Canadian political parties.

Why, despite experiencing similar systemic shocks, has Bolivia embarked on a successful process of (partial) party system reconstruction while Peru’s party system remains collapsed? This dissertation introduces a theory of networked cleavage articulation that explains this variation in party system reconstruction outcomes. This theory posits that the social network structures within which nascent parties emerge condition the articulation of social cleavages in the party system and define the extent to which cleavages become associated with party system consolidation or increased political instability. The dissertation employs original interviews, surveys, and electoral data to evaluate this theory through a mixed-methods approach. It offers three central findings. First, it demonstrates that social cleavages can consistently structure political behavior and nonetheless be associated with various party system outcomes, from consolidation to social conflict. I show that, ethnic cleavages in Bolivia and Peru have structured political behavior since their democratic transitions and throughout major party system transformations. Second, the dissertation demonstrates that the degree of cleavage articulation explains variation in party system reconstruction outcomes. In Bolivia, the MAS-IPSP produced a successful articulation of the indigenous bloc of the ethnic cleavage, enabling partial party system reconstruction. In contrast, political parties’ articulation offers for the non-indigenous in Bolivia and both the indigenous and non-indigenous in Peru have thus far failed. Consequently, these ethnic blocs remain associated with political instability. Finally, this dissertation shows that the likelihood of cleavage articulation is conditioned by nascent parties’ original network landscapes. I find that, in contrast to other indigenous and non-indigenous parties in Bolivia and Peru, which have emerged from networks with regional strength and limited paths to expansion, the MAS-IPSP emerged within a vast organizational landscape that provided it with diverse within-network paths to growth and enabled it to produce a successful indigenous bloc articulation. This dissertation challenges current understanding of the relationship between social cleavages and party systems. By bringing attention to the challenges of cleavage articulation, its likelihood of failure, and the role of social networks in this process, the dissertation introduces new and important insights to existing literature on social cleavages, political representation, and party politics.

Since democracy took hold throughout the region of Latin America, the social reform strategies that these countries have used to mitigate long-standing inequalities is significantly varied. Some countries have consistently implemented progressive and gradual reforms while others have rapidly pursued expansive or transformative social policy changes. Through the analysis of thirteen Latin American countries finds that – rather than prevailing explanations focused on mass demands and the organization of the working class and political left – social policy trajectories are caused by dynamics between party systems and elections. In countries where party systems are institutionalized and elections become highly competitive, parties increase their competiveness vis-à-vis other political opponents by seeking electoral rewards throughout the promotion of incremental and redistributive policies. In contrast, in countries where inchoate party systems and weakly contested elections are the norm, populism takes root and populist leaders will pursue expansive social reforms that rely on social spending in order to consolidate their fluid political coalitions once reaching office. Over time, countries with institutionalized party systems and competitive elections will implement gradual and progressive social policies while those with inchoate party systems and low electoral competition will enact dramatic reforms that can be progressive or regressive in nature.

Parties are the main vehicles of representation in modern, democratic societies. Party systems, that is the number and the size of all the parties within a country, can vary greatly across countries. There is an ongoing debate in the political science literature about the appropriate way to reduce the dimensionality of the cross-country party system data for comparative purposes. This thesis reviews that literature and offers a new solution: Principal Component Analysis to find the most important information in the data matrix. I use data from 17 advanced democracies from 1970-2013. I conduct analyses using various related methods (Principal Component Analysis, Principal Component Analysis on the Residuals, kernel Principal Component Analysis, Non-Linear Principal Component Analysis, Principal Component Analysis on log-ratio transformed variables and Principal component Analysis on non-centered variables). I find that the most important differences across countries are: “the size of the biggest two parties”, “competition between the two biggest parties”, “existence of a third party” and “balanced multipartism.” I argue that most of the current political science literature uses summary measures that are only correlated with the first of those four dimensions. I suggest a strategy for incorporating a measure of the second dimension that relies on indices of opposition structure.

This project engages with one of the most consequential topics in contemporary party politics: the emergence and persistence of the far right party family in Western Europe. Far right durability, particularly given the increased salience of economic and security issues during and after the Great Recession, serves to highlight the sociodemographic structure of far right electorates and suggests that far right parties participate in a socio-structurally rooted dimension of party competition defined by this sociodemographic base and collective identity around the ‘losers of modernization’, that is mobilized by far right parties. Using public opinion survey data from the European Election Study and Voter Advice Application data from the 2009 and 2014 European elections, this project suggests that far right parties realize greater success by deepening rather than broadening their bases of support across eight West European states. Far right voters display greater unity in positions on wealth redistribution by 2014, and far right parties have moved rightward on that dimension as well. Lastly, economic anxieties also seemingly compel far right support as Europe’s crises continued, which is consistent with literature on economic voting if center left and right parties are perceived as complicit in Europe’s economic problems.

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.

The rise of the left across much of South America in the aftermath of market reforms catalyzed a major divergence in regional party systems. In some countries, polarizing party systems emerged, marked by conflictual patterns of contestation between major political parties and the politicization of class cleavages in party competition. In other countries, integrative party systems consolidated, characterized by largely consensual patterns of competition and class cleavages that remain unexpressed in party competition. This variation in party systems represents a critical macropolitical legacy to emerge from the tumultuous recent decades and offers fruitful ground for developing and testing theory regarding the causes of political and social polarization in the younger democracies of the highly unequal developing world.Examining the cases of Venezuela, Brazil, and Chile, this dissertation develops an argument that centers on the avoidance or occurrence of "legitimacy crises": anti-systemic episodes involving protracted failures of governance and steep erosions of public confidence in state institutions. The presence or absence of legitimacy crisis decisively shaped factional contestation within the partisan left in each country, leading to party system divergence along two dimensions. Whether radical or moderate left coalitions consolidated entailed the establishment of conflictual or consensual patterns of contestation within party systems. Once in office, the radical and moderate left also pursued different strategies of political mobilization - mass-organizational in Venezuela and catchall in Brazil and Chile - that subsequently drove variation in the translation of class cleavages into party competition.The study relies on a variety of qualitative and quantitative data sources, including those gathered during 11 months of fieldwork in Venezuela, and utilizes both process-tracing and statistical methods (primarily genetic matching) to draw causal inferences. A concluding chapter shows that the argument can also explain variation in party systems in two other countries where the left has taken power (Bolivia and Uruguay), suggesting that the framework in the study might provide a broader model of macropolitical divergence in the region during the last decades.

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.

Governments are responsible for administrative arrangements dealing with disasters. Effective policies play a vital role in mitigating the impact of disasters and reducing likely losses of life and property. Yet, it had been noted that such losses were increasing, raising questions about efficacy of government policies and the factors that made them effective. This study adopted a comparative method, responding to a long-standing demand of disaster research, for examining the record in India. There were noticeable differences among its states, with some having undertaken comprehensive reform in an all-hazards approach, while others continued with old policies. This research studied four states with the objective of identifying variables that were critical in undertaking policy reform for building capacities. The roles of economic resources, democratically decentralized institutions, political party systems and focusing events were examined. Findings revealed that these factors had varying impact on state capabilities. Economic resources were an inevitable part of disaster management, but did not necessarily translate into policy reform. Panchayati Raj Institutions, which were democratically decentralized bodies, displayed tremendous potential. However, their role was limited mostly to the response phase, with states severely circumscribing their involvement. The nature of political party systems was able to explain policy reform to an extent. Cohesive systems in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Orissa correlated with administrative capacities, unlike in fragmented Bihar. However, anti-incumbency sentiments and strong community mobilization impacted contestation more than electoral salience of public goods. The most nuanced and significant explanation was provided by experience of focusing events. States that suffered major disasters revealed unmistakable evidence of double-loop learning, leading to comprehensive policy reform and capacity building. This research provides empirical support to theory about the role of focusing events and organizational learning in policy reform. Methodologically, it underscores the importance of the comparative approach, and its successful application in a federal framework. The significance of this research is most for policy makers and practitioners, as it serves to alert them on the need for reform without waiting for the next big disaster to catch them unprepared.

Political parties are central actors in modern democracies. Whether, and how, parties and party systems change are important questions in understanding how democracies function. Assertions of earlier freezing in western European party systems are puzzling in light of recent models explaining party system transformation since at least some of the factors in the model should have been affected by regime changes and economic changes in western Europe earlier this century. Either party systems have changed more than has been recognized, or our understanding of transformation needs to be rethought. I examine the consequences of interruptions in democracy for party systems and present hypotheses regarding the conditions under which we should see change in the effective number of parties, social orientation, and bloc volatility. Data from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, and Spain are used to test the hypotheses. Because system level components may not capture all changes, at the individual party level I again look at the cause and process of change in general and consider how variables associated with redemocratization should affect a party's organizational structure, issue basis, and social structure. A case study of party level developments in Austria applies and tests this model. The results demonstrate that freezing is an exceptional outcome, but there is a legacy of the past at both the system and individual party level. One of the key findings of this dissertation is the decline in the effective number of parties. Another important finding is the variation in the breadth and depth of change at the system level. While some countries (e.g. Denmark) showed high persistence on all three components, others (e.g. Spain) showed high change on all three components. Most countries fell somewhere in between, with moderate to high change on one or two components and moderate to high persistence on the other component(s). The case study of Austria demonstrates that even in a country which did not exhibit many system level changes modifications by the two major parties go a long way toward explaining why the regime and the grand coalition in the Second Republic was both possible and successful.