Party Nationalization and Institutions

Abstract

Party nationalization has two distinct components: the first is based on the degree of homogeneity in the geographic distribution of a party’s vote, and the other is defined by the degree to which national events are reflected in the change in a party’s electoral support in all regions of the country. In spite of literature tying the static/distributional and the dynamic components together, we show theoretically and empirically that there is a non-necessary link between them. We then use a seemingly unrelated regression analysis on 60 parties across 28 countries to support our hypothesis that while the executive system (presidentialism vs. parliamentarism) drives the level of dynamic nationalization, the electoral system is more influential in explaining the static/distributional aspect of the phenomenon.

Keywords: parties, nationalization