Political parties play a crucial role in representative democracy. In the electoral arena, parties recruit their political candidates and coordinate political campaigns, while constituents vote for party candidates who are expected to represent their interests. In the legislative arena, parties work as floor-voting coalitions, while they help legislators engage in constituency services in order to achieve their career and policy goals. Even under competitive authoritarianism, elites cannot fully ignore citizens, and the linkage between parties and their supporters is critical in the political process.
Recent trends of people’s dissatisfaction with representative democracy and/or political institutions lead us to observe voters’ “mixed” attitudes toward political parties. On the one hand, voters are less likely to be a member of traditional parties, and there are constituencies in which parties cannot hold electoral campaigns due to a decline in the number of party members. In some countries, inexperienced “outsiders” who do not affiliated with traditional political parties won presidential elections. On the other hand, partisanship is still an important independent variable in explaining voting behavior in many countries. Many studies showed that party cues are influential in determining voters’ opinions, and that not only positive partisanship but also negative partisanship has a strong impact on electoral results.
What are the impacts of the weakening linkage of representation due to voters’ dissatisfaction with politics? The aim of this panel is reexamining the functions of political parties in the era of representation crisis from instiutitonalist perspectives. We welcome cross-national or single country empirical studies that focus on parties and representation including, but not limited to, the birth of new parties, the regulations on parties that try to improve the quality of representation, the relationship between parties and social movements, the role of parties in representation under competitive authoritarianism, and the role of parties in elections and constituency services. We try to accommodate varieties in regional scope of the panel.
