Not Just between but Within: Evaluating the Effects of Inter- and Intraparty Reforms on Party System Change
Year: 2012
Type: preprint
Abstract: The literature on electoral reform has largely concentrated, until very recently, on reforms that focused on the interparty dimension of electoral systems. The general argument for such a focus revolved around the idea that the most important reforms a system could undertake were those that had a major impact on the resulting political party system and competition among parties within that system. More recently, the focus on only the interparty dimension has been called into question, through a range of diverse case studies of so-called ‘minor’ and intraparty dimension reforms and their impact on political competition. However, while case studies have demonstrated the importance of differentiating between the effects of both dimensions of reform, few have analyzed the impact of intraparty reform in an aggregate cross-national or cross-temporal comparison. Using an original dataset of electoral reform in 34 democracies from 1950 to 2010, this study represents the first systematic analysis of the impact of intraparty reform on party system change, as well as presents a comparison between the independent effects of interparty and intraparty reform on party system change. The findings suggest that candidate-centric intraparty reforms have a significant effect on party system change in subsequent elections while interparty reforms have a significant effect on change in electoral volatility, though that effect is dampened when also accounting for intraparty reforms.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Sarah Shair‐Rosenfield
Institution: Arizona State University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W44624185