National Profiles of Democratic Accountability: Tradeoffs and Complementarities between Democratic Accountability Linkages

Abstract:     
Political parties combine and use different linkage strategies in order to achieve electoral success. In this paper, we examine the endogenous and exogenous factors that influence which democratic linkage strategies parties will choose to emphasize. In so doing, we challenge an often implicit assumption that parties will use one mode of democratic accountability at the expense of other modes, and show that parties will often use a variety of different linkage mechanisms. With a new dataset on
democratic accountability developed by a research team based at Duke University, we use cluster analysis to show some of the combinations of accountability mechanisms typically used by parties, and highlight the systemic and party-level factors which result in the linkage patterns observed.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 60

working papers series