Party Politics

WE WELCOME ALL PANEL AND PAPER PROPOSALS ON PARTY POLITICS. BELOW ARE SOME SPECIFIC IDEAS FROM THE SECTION CHAIRS. Parties are key players in modern democracies. They are supposed to mobilize citizens to participate in elections, and they choose and train candidates for public office. Moreover, parties should represent citizens’ preferences and translate these preferences into government action. Hence, it is expected that parties stick to the promises made in their manifestos. However, even if parties wanted to keep their promises, they might sometimes be unable to do so. In most Western European countries parties cannot govern alone, but need to form coalitions to reach a majority in parliament. Parties might therefore have to make compromises with their coalition partners with regard to certain policy or office benefits. This might have consequences for how well voter preferences are represented in government action. This section invites papers examining inter-party politics, parties’ behaviour at different stages in the political cycle, as well as studies analysing intra-party politics, like the internal workings of parties. This section offers a wide thematic range for participants to contribute papers related to different aspects of party politics and we welcome large-N as well as case studies. 1. Measuring party preferences – Analysing party preferences has many potential applications for empirical political research. It helps conceptualize competition amongst parties and allows for the analysis of election outcomes and coalition formation processes, among other things. Thus, the first panel addresses different methodological as well as theoretical challenges for the measurement of party preferences. We welcome contributions about different methodologies for the estimation of party positions like expert surveys, voters’ perceptions measured through public opinion surveys, or content analyses of political texts. In particular, this panel invites researchers to submit papers on advanced text analytical methods. 2. Political parties and political representation – How well do parties fulfil their role as representatives? According to the responsible party model, voters should be able to choose a party whose political program corresponds to their own preferences. Once congruence is established, it is important that parties’ preferences are translated into the parliamentary arena. The final translation of electoral programmes into policy output is also crucial to the idea of the responsible party model. The panel aims to scrutinize the linkage between governmental as well as oppositional parties and citizens, on different levels and seeks to explain differences in party-voter congruence. 3. Parties in elections – This panel examines party behaviour in elections. How do parties try to differentiate themselves from their competitors? What kind of electoral campaigns do they run? What role does the media play in elections? Does the mass media accurately reflect or distort a party’s programmatic profile? Additionally, this panel also invites papers about the formation of pre-electoral coalitions. Are there circumstances that foster the formation of pre-electoral coalitions and how do these coalitions compete in elections? 4. Parties in coalitions – How do parties deal with the fact that they have to compromise with other parties that have (at times strongly) diverging preferences? This panel invites papers about the challenges for parties in coalition governments. This might include papers on the formation of coalition governments, but also papers about governance within coalitions, e.g. the challenges of policy-making in coalition governments with or without a secured majority status in parliament or the use of control mechanisms in coalition governments. 5. Political parties and legislative output –This panel brings together comparative cross-national and longitudinal studies as well as case studies on parties and legislative outputs. How do parties affect the legislative output and what do they do to achieve their goals? Who controls the legislative agenda? How do parliamentary structures like the committee system affect parties’ legislative performance? Beyond this, the panel addresses methodological challenges that arise when measuring legislative output. 6. Party organization – Parties differ with regard to their organizational form. Some parties grant their members more rights to influence intra-party decisions than others. Why are some parties dominated by their leaders and others by their members/activists? Does this have any consequences for their behaviour in elections or their ability to govern? This panel invites papers that deal with different types of party organization and its consequences. It also addresses questions of party discipline in the legislature. 7. Populist and extremist parties – Especially since the beginning of the European debt crisis, populist and extremist parties have come to the fore. On the one hand, the number of extremist parties rose massively. On the other hand, these parties were also able to increase their number of votes, and sometimes they were even able to enter public office. This panel invites papers dealing with the rise of populist and extremist parties. Which goals are these parties pursuing? How did they influence the political sphere in their countries? **CVs** Svenja Krauss is a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Hamburg, working on the research project “Bringing policies back in: Explaining payoff allocation in coalition governments” funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) and lead by Heike Klüver and Hanna Bäck. She studied Political Science at the University of Mannheim (BA) and at the University of Bamberg (MA) and worked as a Teaching Assistant at the ECPR Winter School on Methods and Techniques, among other things. Her research interests include comparative politics, coalition governments and quantitative methods. In her dissertation she examines the influence of control mechanisms on cabinet duration in coalition governments. Since September 2015, Theres Matthieß is a researcher at the Manifesto Project funded by the German Science Foundation and located at the WZB. In 2012 she attained a BA in Political Studies from the Technical University of Dresden and earned an MA in Political Studies from the University of Potsdam in 2015. Her main research interests include parties and political representation, coalition governments and the linkage between policy input and output. Her dissertation focuses on the enactment of election promises by law with specific focus on the influence of the government’s majority status.