Learning the Game: Explaining Party System Convergence in European Democracies
| Author | Ekaterina R. Rashkova |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12077 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Learning the Game: Explaining Party System
Convergence in European Democracies
Ekaterina R. Rashkova
University of Innsbruck
While many works have empirically studied the number of parties, little has been done to investigate the difference
between theoretical predictions and empirical reality. Furthermore, the bulk of the analyses on party system devel-
opment are carried out with national data, as opposed to studying electoral competition at the level where it occurs
– the constituency.This article offers a comparative study of the determinants of party system convergence of twenty
European democracies, explaining why party systems in new democracies are much further away from the theoreti-
cally predicted equilibrium than those in more established states.The main argument is that lear ning the effect of
institutions is integral to understanding the number of competing parties and it takes time for political elites in new
democracies to learn. Using a hierarchical model, the study shows the effect of age of democracy on party system
convergence and illustrates that it is more pronounced in new democracies. The analysis demonstrates further that
pre-electoral constraints such as signature and deposit requirements have a significant positive effect on party system
convergence,while public funding, contrary to previous speculations, is found to be insignificant.
Keywords: party system size; political learning; district ethnic heterogeneity; new
democracies; Europe
In a democracy, political parties are the main channels for representation and policy
development, and few institutions have been emphasised as crucial for the development of
stable democracy as much as political parties (Bakke and Sitter, 2005; Bielasiak, 2005;
Kitschelt et al., 1999; Tavits, 2005).Therefore, party systems flooded with entrants not only
put regime stability in jeopardy (Innes, 2001; Lijphart, 1984) but force voters into erratic
behaviour,resulting in high levels of electoral volatility (Tavits, 2008),which puts additional
strain on the development of stable party support. An important question, then, is what
determines the number of parties? Empirical work on electoral and party systems has
shown that the number of parties is primarily a function of institutional and social factors
(Benoit, 2001; Cox, 1997; Lijphart, 1990; Ordeshook and Shvetsova, 1994). Most of these
findings, however, are derived from, and carry stronger predictive power for, developed
democracies. Thus, they offer little help in explaining the phenomenon of too many
political parties, which has been witnessed in Eastern Europe over the past twenty years.
Even when the focus is the district level – where electoral law theory is most valid – we
still see many more parties in developing democracies than party system theory predicts.
Furthermore, the number of parties in young democracies is much larger than in most old,
established ones. This difference prompts questions about the factors that predict the
number of parties and can possibly explain existing variance.Recent studies on par ty system
development (Clark and Golder, 2006;Moser, 1999; Tavits, 2005) have gone some way to
explain the determinants of party system size, yet as they are executed on the national level
they say little about the variation in the number of parties in electoral districts over time.
Moreover, a fair amount of the extant work on the number of parties is limited to either
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12077
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014 VOL 62, 804–823
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
new or developed democracies.Thus, the question of why the observed number of parties
differs from the theoretically predicted number of parties across both time and space
requires further exploration. The purpose of this study is to investigate this issue and to
disentangle the relationship between political parties and institutions.
To get a better understanding of the determinants of the number of political parties and
to explain cross-national and cross-district variation, the article argues that models of party
system development must go beyond district magnitude into examining other institutions,
as well as considering how politicians respond to existing rules over time. The main
argument is that, besides institutions,whether they are district- or national-level constraints,
there is a process of political learning – a time in which elite members assimilate the
potential effect of different rules – that affects the number of parties.This article is not the
first to claim that elite learning takes place in new democracies as they age (Bakke and
Sitter, 2005; Tavits, 2007; Vander Weyden and Meuleman, 2008), but it presents this
argument with a new conceptualisation of party system development, that is, party system
convergence, and tests the propositions on a uniquely gathered, district-level data set,
consisting of both West and East European democracies.The article thus goes beyond what
has been offered so far, contributing to the theoretical prediction of the number of parties
and to the empirical quest of explaining the difference between that which theory predicts
and what we observe in practice.
The primary finding of the study is that, at the district level, age of democracy has a
positive effect on party system convergence and this effect is more pronounced in new
democracies.This finding highlights the importance of democratic exper ience in the party
system consolidation process.Another important result found in the cur rent analysis is that
national electoral competition regulations seem to play a central role in determining the
number of political contestants and, when strong enough, may even trump the effect of
primary electoral institutions, such as district magnitude. Moreover, in line with the
growing debate on the link between parties and the state and the effect of public subsidies
on party systems, using more diverse data than previously employed, the study shows that
state funding has no significant effect on party system convergence.Lastly, the article shows
that the number of political contestants is also affected by the additional benefits of running
for office, such as those provided by involvement in EU politics.These contentions are
supported by empirical tests using hierarchical data on national legislative elections in
twenty European democracies.
Studying the Number of Parties: Theory and Practice
Current explanations for the number of political parties go so far as to produce a lower and
an upper bound of how many parties we can expect. Maur ice Duverger’s (1954) lower
bound of two or more political parties for proportional representation (PR) systems, and
Gary Cox and Emerson Niou’s (1994) and Cox’s (1997) ‘M+1’ rule, which states that in a
district of size M we should not see more than M+1 number of parties competing for seats,
are the two usual points of departure for students of party system development.As a result,
a considerable number of works use district magnitude as the main determinant of the
number of parties, and while scholars (Cox, 1997;Ordeshook and Shvetsova, 1994; Tavits,
2008) have acknowledged the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on party systems, ethnic
LEARNING THE GAME 805
© 2013The Author.Political Studies © 2013 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014, 62(4)
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