A Nation of States: Mapping the Impact of National Political Forces Through State Electoral Institutions, 1840-1940

<p>The proposed project will focus on the study of political party systems, with an emphasis on the number of parties in a system, and on the sustainability of regional parties. The Investigator plans to build on previous theoretical and empirical results to understand party systems in a variety of countries. Currently he has data on Canada and Great Britain, and will get access to data on Russia, Germany, South Korea, Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, and possibly more countries. The fundamental question motivating the study is how and why some parties become national in scope and sustain a nationwide presence, and how and why some parties have only regional appeal. Results from this research should be widely applicable to party systems in many other democracies. At the core of the project is the theoretical argument, first proposed in Chhibber and Kollman (1998A, 1998B), that the degree of government centralization is an important factor in explaining both the number of parties in a system and the survival of regional or local parties. The literature on party systems is vast and diverse. Yet most theories of party systems are static. Explanations of the number of parties based on electoral institutions, national culture, the heterogeneity of national populations, or presidentialism have been quite successful at capturing cross-national differences. However, these explanations cannot help us to understand the dynamics of party systems. As the number of parties in many systems fluctuates, explaining the patterns requires attention on variables that change over time. One such variable that has been strongly correlated with party politics in the United States and India is the centralization of national government authority. The project will entail both empirical and theoretical components. On the empirical side, the data sets gathered will contain constituency-level election results for a variety of countries. Currently, the Investigator has data from Canada and Great Britain, two countries with single member, simple plurality electoral systems to their lower houses, similar to those in India and the United States. Other single member simple plurality countries, South Korea, Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe have available data, and the Investigator will gather these data as well. The Investigator will also gather data from countries that have mixed electoral systems (elements of proportional representation and plurality), beginning with Germany and Russia. The formal component contains a rigorous theoretical models that can offer insights into the process of party formation and party aggregation across electoral districts. As a base, the Investigator will extend rational choice models of Duverger's Law to incorporate national politics. Then using these insights, the Investigator will explore multidimensional political competition in a similar environment, but including multiple levels of government as in a federation, and legislative parties. </p>