Weak party institutionalization and the dynamics of political dialogue.

Informative party labels tend to provide information to citizens about the policies a party will pursue if elected. The clarity of these labels is impacted by the level of the party's institutionalization. The e ect that party institutionalization has on the dynamics of political dialogue, however, has largely been ignored. How parties and politicians decide the issues to be raised is an essential part of the democratic process. This paper addresses this gap by studying how, in weakly institutionalized party systems, the failure of parties to disclose consistent programmatic messages a ects their ability to gain advantage over issues and dramatically changes how we understand political dialogue. By using novel techniques of content analyses, I studied over 14,000 op-ed articles by 230 Venezuelan politicians from 1996 to 2007. The results indicate that in weakly institutionalized party systems, dialogue is prevalent, issue advantage is unlikely, issue salience is irrelevant, and dialogue is news-driven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]