Abstract This article examines the electoral impact of spillover effects in local campaigns in Britain. For the first time, this is applied to the long as well as the short campaign. Using spatial econometric modelling on constituency data from the 2010 general election, there is clear empirical evidence that, in both campaign periods, the more a party spends on campaigning in constituencies adjacent to constituency i, the more votes it gets in constituency i. Of the three major political parties, the Liberal Democrats obtained the greatest electoral payoff. Future empirical analyses of voting at the constituency scale must, therefore, explicitly take account of spatial heterogeneity in order to correctly gauge the magnitude and significance of factors that affect parties' parliamentary performance.

Wlezien, C. (2013). Russell J. Dalton and Christopher Anderson (eds), Citizens, context, and choice: How context shapes citizens’ electoral choices, reviewed by Christopher Wlezien. Party Politics, 19(4), 684–686. http://doi.org/10.1177/13540688134...

A large body of research has claimed that budget making by multiparty governments constitutes a “common pool resource” (CPR) problem that leads them to engage in higher levels of spending than single-party governments and, further, that this upwards fiscal pressure increases with the number of parties in the coalition. We offer a significant modification of the conventional wisdom. Drawing on recent developments in the literature on coalition governance, as well as research on fiscal institutions, we argue that budgetary rules can mitigate the CPR logic provided that they (1) reduce the influence of individual parties in the budget process and (2) generate endogenous incentives to resist spending demands by coalition partners. Our empirical evaluation, based on spending patterns in 15 European democracies over nearly 40 years, provides clear support for this contention. Restrictive budgetary procedures can eliminate the expansionary fiscal pressures associated with growing coalition size. Our conclusions suggest that there is room for addressing contemporary concerns over the size of the public sector in multiparty democracies through appropriate reforms to fiscal institutions, and they also have implications for debates about the merits of “proportional” and “majoritarian” models of democracy that are, at least in part, characterized by the difference between coalition and single-party governance.

What sustains stability in legislative party systems between elections? This question commands attention given the potential for change highlighted in recent work on legislative party switching. In addressing the question, this article echoes a prominent theme in research on legislatures, parties, and party systems: the importance of the party label. The novelty here is the treatment of the individual legislator’s need for manifest loyalty to the status quo party label as the chief constraint that deters incumbents from switching and underpins stability in legislative party systems. Our theory focuses on the value of stable party affiliations to voters and thus to incumbents as well. We extract testable implications and assess hypotheses against an original cross-national dataset of over 4,300 monthly observations of MP behavior in 116 legislative terms. We find that the temporal proximity to elections deters MPs’ moves. This electoral deterrent acquires particular force under candidate-centered electoral systems

Mughan, A. (2013). Kees Aarts, Andre Blais and Hermann Schmitt, Political leaders and democratic elections, reviewed by Anthony Mughan. Party Politics, 19(4), 683–684. http://doi.org/10.1177/1354068813485781 Vai al sito web