Author Meets Critics: "Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Party system ruptures are spreading across the democratic world, with the support of once-dominant parties eroding and new parties challenging established patterns of competition. However, political newcomers come in a variety of forms - from the genuinely new to those with significant links to existing parties. Meanwhile, some continuing parties have undergone transformative changes. "Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution' (OUP, 2023) by Allan Sikk and Philipp Köker proposes a new approach to understanding complex developments in contemporary party systems. It challenges the neat dichotomy of "old" or "new" parties by accounting for degrees of party continuity/novelty. Inspired by ideas from evolutionary biology, it proposes a shift in the focus of party (system) research to "party people" (i.e. actors with agency) and a candidate-based view of party evolution where electoral candidates are conceptualized as "party genes". It applies these ideas to nine Central and Eastern European democracies using a dataset of over 200,000 candidates. Introducing a series of conceptual and methodological innovations, the book shows how candidate change is associated with changes in party organizations, programs, and leadership.

The roundtable will review the book's arguments and innovations and critically discuss their potential (and limitations) for the study of changing parties and party systems in Western Europe, Latin America, and North America, and how increasing levels and diverse forms of party instability challenge our understanding of the role of political parties in representative democracy. The panel will begin with a brief presentation of the authors’ key arguments, followed by interventions from four eminent scholars of party and electoral politics, each focusing on different aspects of the book's arguments. These will be: Richard Katz (Johns Hopkins University), Petia Kostadinova (University of Illinois at Chicago), Tom Mustillo (University of Notre Dame), and Jae-Jae Spoon (University of Pittsburgh). The discussion will be moderated by Susan E. Scarrow (University of Houston).

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Chair

• Susan Scarrow University of Houston

Presenters

• Richard S. Katz Johns Hopkins University

• Petia A. Kostadinova University of Illinois at Chicago

• Thomas Mustillo University of Notre Dame

• Jae-Jae Spoon University of Pittsburgh

• Philipp Koeker Leibniz University Hannover

• Allan Sikk University College London