Parties or Candidates - Who Wins the Race?

Political Parties are vote-seeking organizations and most important actors in democratic elections. However, they are increasingly weak organizations as well, and electoral success becomes uncertain (e.g. due to dealignment, increasing volatility and lack of trust in parties). In addition to this, personality becomes more important: Voters’ decisions are more and more based on personal aspects of candidates (e.g. sympathy, personality) and to a lesser extent on traditional party linkage. Consequently, personalisation of campaigns takes place and candidates might become main actors in campaigns instead of party organizations. In this case, parties would only function as a team of candidates but no longer as coherent campaign organizations. This change does not simply happen, it is much more a result of strategic decisions of parties and candidates: Parties and candidates expect electoral success by an increased candidate-centred campaign pattern. Therefore, in the paper we address the patterns of campaign organization and analyse which patterns lead to electoral success. By this, we can answer the question if this campaign change is a reasonable strategic decision (at least on the short run - on the long run this strategic decision might trigger party decline even more). Referring to the literature of campaign / party change and recent own, yet unpublished theoretical work, we differentiate three faces of constituency campaigns: organizational partyness, communicative personalization and vertical integration of constituency campaigns. ‘Organizational partyness’ addresses the degree of partyness of a campaign organization, i.e. we differentiate a more candidate-based and a more party-based organizational pattern. The same dualism characterises the second campaign face ‘communicative personalization’, but here the communicative aspect is emphasized (independent candidate communication vs. party candidate campaign). The third face, vertical integration, takes findings from party organization literature into account and addresses the intra-party coordination of the multiple party levels within national election campaigns. This aspect is important for analysing party coherence –are parties (still) able to run national campaigns or are there more and more stratarchic tendencies within campaigns? We expect differences in electoral outcomes due to different campaign types. This should be especially true in mixed-member, multilevel systems where voters do have more than one vote. Consequently, we will examine empirically if the different faces of constituency campaigns outlined above affect the electoral success of candidates and parties in the constituency in German federal elections 2005, 2009 and 2013 (using representative candidate survey & election data). From a theoretical point of view, we assume that a candidate-centred strategy should enhance the first vote (SMD tier), a more party-centred strategy the second vote (PR tier).