Segnalazione bibliografica. Autori: Richard S. Katz, Peter Mair Party Politics January 2012 vol. 18 no. 1 107-111 Abstract A recurring problem in comparative politics is determining the extent to which models derived in one setting can be transferred directly to other settings. The original cartel party thesis was meant to account for developments that were beginning to be observed in the established democracies of western Europe in the 1990s. Many of the contemporary conditions that appeared to be driving those developments are to be found in other places, but of course preceded by quite different historical trajectories. The articles on parties and interest...

Segnalazione bibliografica. Autori: Paolo Bellucci, Oliver Heath British Journal of Political Science January 2012 42 : pp 107-135 Abstract No consensus exists on the causal mechanisms underpinning declining voting based on social cleavages – religion and class – in Europe. Previous research has emphasized two main factors: social change within the electorate (bottom-up) and parties’ policy polarization (top-down). This article presents a third level of analysis that links parties and cleavage-related social organizations, producing a factor capable of reinforcing group identity and interest representation. This hypothesis was tested for Italy in 1968–2008, where changes in the party system provided a natural experiment to...

Empirical election studies conclude that party elites' images with respect to competence, integrity and party unity – attributes that we label character-based valence – affect their electoral support (Stone and Simas, 2010). We compile observations of media reports pertaining to governing party elites' character-based valence attributes, and we relate the content of these reports to mass support for the governing parties. We present pooled, time-series, analyses of party support and valence-related media reports in six European polities which suggest that these reports exert powerful electoral effects during election campaigns but little effect during off-election periods. This finding, which we label the Election Period Valence Effect, is consistent with previous work concluding that citizens are also more attentive to policy-based considerations and to national economic conditions around the time of elections. These findings have implications for political representation and for understanding election outcomes.

Segnalazione bibliografica. British Journal of Political Science (2011), 41: 229-257 Autori: Samuel Abrams, Torben Iversen, David Soskice Abstract Classical rational choice explanations of voting participation are widely thought to have failed. This article argues that the currently dominant Group Mobilization and Ethical Agency approaches have serious shortcomings in explaining individually rational turnout. It develops an informal social network (ISN) model in which people rationally vote if their informal networks of family and friends attach enough importance to voting, because voting leads to social approval and vice versa. Using results from the social psychology literature, research on social groups in sociology and their...

Segnalazione bibliografica. Autori: Thomas Brauninger, Martin Brunner, Thomas Daubler European Journal of Political Research, December 2011 Abstract It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra-party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote-seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party-in-a-district lists results from voters'...