Political Partisan Linkages in Competitive Party Systems: DALP II 2022-24 Survey

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The panel will introduce the Democratic Accountability and Linkage Project II (DALP II) expert data collection in over 80 countries, to be completed in April 2024, as an avenue to bridge detailed micro-level research on political linkages and macro-level comparisons across countries. Relying on an average of about 15 expert scores for each country, the DALP II survey replicates the most important measures of DALP I 2008-9, thereby providing a second datapoint to assess change over time, but then goes beyond DALP I by adding a range of features to be highlighted in the panel:

Firstly, DALP II covers measures of a larger scope of possible linkage mechanisms engaged by political parties in the competition for votes and thereby allows for the construction of more complex “linkage” vectors practiced by parties and—at the aggregate level—entire party systems. One overview paper, therefore, introduces the patterns of relationships (“linkage profiles”) revealed by the data between different kinds of linkage practices parties employ in competitive party systems around the world: programmatic, clientelistic, personalistic, party or group identification anchored, and valence-competence based linkages.

Secondly, DALP II collects information on a number of the features of clientelistic transactions that have been the object of detailed micro-level studies over the past twenty years, such as the nature and role of brokers, the continuity of relations between voters, brokers and politicians, the role that monitoring of voters’ electoral choices plays in discretionary exchanges, the balance between different kinds of clientelistic activities (Provision of tangible benefits or signaling candidate prowess and persuading voters to pay attention to candidates?), and the choice between rewarding inducements strategies and more punitive inducements threatening the withdrawal of resources and capabilities from voters recalcitrant to accept clientelistic exchanges.

Four regional “reports” that follow a mostly uniform set-up to display DALP II data for geographical regions—parties in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eastern Europe and Asia—zoom in on these specific attributes of clientelistic linkage mechanisms that has generated a great deal of micro-level research in recent years, but here in a macro-comparative frame examining cross-nationally how mechanisms of clientelistic targeting and exchange processes play out in different institutional and political-economic settings.

[2,523 characters and spaces]

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Profiles of Citizen-Party Linkages in Global Comparison 2008-9 to 2022-4 - Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University; Kerem Yildirim, Bilkent University

• Varieties of Clientelism: Findings from Africa - Hangala Siachiwena, University of Cape Town; Sarah Jane Lockwood, University of Cambridge; Matthias Werner Krönke, University of Reading

• Clientelistic Linkage Mechanisms in Asia, 2009 – 2023: DALP II Evidence - Yi-ting Wang, National Cheng Kung University; Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, University of Arkansas

• Clientelistic Partisan Linkage in Latin America, 2009–23: Evidence from DALP II - Melina Altamirano, El Colegio de México; Juan Cruz Olmeda, El Colegio de México

• Clientelistic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, 2009 – 2023: DALP II Evidence - Jovan Bliznakovski, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje

Chair

• Lenka Bustikova University of Florida

Discussants

• Meredith L. Weiss SUNY, University at Albany

• Amy R. Poteete Concordia University