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Macropartisanship in Multiparty Systems: A Comparative Study of Five Democracies

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Abstract

This study aims to propose a new macropartisanship indicator under a multiparty system. Previous macropartisanship studies have focused mainly on the US two-party system. To identify macropartisanship under a multiparty system, I propose an index that considers the effective number of parties in the electoral space and the proportion of non-partisan voters, using five countries as cases: the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Denmark. Further, a brief examination using fractional integration shows that the newly defined macropartisanship in two-party systems is more stable than in multiparty systems, where macropartisanship has more frequent updates.

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Notes

  1. Abundant knowledge has accumulated on American macropartisanship, scrutinizing it as both a cause and an outcome. Literature focuses on policy preference (mood) and macropartisanship (Stimson et al. 1995; Erikson et al. 2002), party realignment and macropartisanship (Meffert et al. 2001; Green et al. 2000), ideology and macropartisanship (Box-Steffensmeier and De Boef 2001), political elites and macropartisanship (Smidt 2018), and the application of the new time-series method (Box-Steffensmeier and Smith 1996; Brandt and Freeman 2009; Jackson and Kollman 2011; Grant and Lebo 2016; Smidt 2018).

  2. For ENPP, I used the Comparative Political Dataset Armingeon et al. (2019a, 2019b). Data and R codes for replications are available at Political Behavior’s Harvard Dataverse, at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8GWO7H.

  3. Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and France may also be candidates for the fourth category of European multiparty systems, but long-term data on party-support rates are not readily available for these countries. Denmark is selected as a case because Anderson (2009)’s data set covers the period of 1962–1960 and Fazekas and Larsen (2018)’s data set covers the period of 2010–2018.

  4. This study’s survey questions for calculating macropartisanship differ somewhat for each country. While US respondents were asked whether they self-identified as Democrat or Republican (or independent), Japanese respondents were asked which party they support. In the three European democracies, vote-intention questions were substituted for party-support questions in previous studies (Clarke et al. 2001; Sanders and Gavin 2004). In other words, whereas psychological attitudes have been the primary focus for extracting party support in the US and Japan, vote-intention questions in the UK, Germany, and Denmark have also included the behavioral component of voting choice. According to this line of understanding, while it is assumed that party-support questions and voting-intention questions contain different elements, the latter have substantially replaced the former in time-series macro-analyses of party support in European democracies, including the focal countries of this study. In particular, despite slight differences in wording and grammar, all the survey companies conducting the UK polls used in this study asked about party support based on vote intention. Regarding the substitutability of party-support questions and voting-intention questions discussed in previous studies, I base the analysis in this study on voting-intention questions for the three European democracies. For more details, please refer to the questions and survey mode in Appendix A.

  5. Each country’s data are obtained from the following sources. For the US, I use data from Gallup on party approval ratings. For the UK, data from Gallup (time points: 674), Harris (212), NOP (539), ICM (579), Lord Ashcroft (56), MORI (705), Opinium (445), Populus (313), Survation (96), and YouGov (1720) were used to calculate the series of the simple mean. In particular, methods such as imputation of missing values, filtering, and smoothing are not used in the calculation. In Japan, since June 1960, The Jiji Press has published monthly data on party approval ratings. In Germany, although long-term data on support for political parties are difficult to obtain, the Politbarometer’s monthly individual survey data on vote intention are used as an alternative measurement of party-support rates, and this study uses this variable (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim (2017): Politbarometer - Overall Cumulation. GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA5100 Data file Version 1.0.0). Finally, for Denmark, see Footnote 3.

  6. In this research, I follow the lead of existing literature and rely on the conventional measurement to set the major party’s series as the basement of macropartisanship. Importantly, however, it can be assumed that macropartisanship in the multiparty system is constituted by multiple dimensions. To address this issue, in Online Appendix C, I used the method of factor analysis. As poll data include missing data, the dyad ratio algorithm by Stimson (1999, 2018) is adopted to identify the common transition that underlies multiparty approval ratings. However, the results demonstrate that the dimension reflects each country’s context and that it is hard to generalize as a uniform concept. Further, while the dimension implies whether the electorate is partisan, that is, its partisan conviction, it does not illustrate the direction, which is the core foundation of the macropartisanship concept. In this analysis, I used a multi-dimension index instead of relying on a one-party approval rate.

  7. A detailed comparative analysis among the indices using other patterns of the ENPP indicator is conducted in Online Appendix C. I compare this index with the one that demonstrates the conventional Laakso and Taagepera (1979) ENPP. As for ENPP, other types of measurement, such as those by Dunleavy and Boucek (2003) and Golosov (2010), can be alternatives. However, other types of indexing are considered to “mask one-party dominance” (Blau 2008). To remedy this, Molinar’s indexing, which is thought to be based more on voters’ cognition to depreciate small and mid-sized parties, has been applied to the weighting process in many fields (Scartascini and Crain 2011); therefore, I use Molinar (1991)’s index instead.

  8. Although the proportion of independent voters has increased since the 1980s because of changes in the style of interviews conducted by the Gallup poll (from interviews to random digit dialing), the percentage of independents in the US is not necessarily high. One study carefully recalculates the modified macropartisanship index (e.g., Smidt 2018) through a comparison with the American National Election Studies data. However, as this is a comparative study, I use the original series of Gallup poll data.

  9. The detailed calculation process is explained in Online Appendix B.

  10. What requires further consideration is whether the validity of the indicator could change if another political party was adopted as the series of the major party approval. If MacKuen et al. (1989)’s early work on the US had chosen the Republican Party as its major series rather than the Democratic Party, macropartisanship in the US would have been defined as an indicator of the conservative ideological package of the Republican Party. Thus, the initial selection of major series is important in the earlier study, but in a multiparty system, the choice can be more complex. Additionally, if the selection of a different political party results in a different indicator’s validity, the proposal of this measurement has a vulnerability. Therefore, Online Appendix C comparatively examines the cross-referenced validity of indexing when another party is selected. In this analysis, the Republican Party was selected for the US, the Labour Party for the UK, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) for Germany, and the Konservative Folkeparti (KONS) for Denmark. In Japan, the one-party-dominant system has been consistently in place, and the existence of alternative political parties is not evident; therefore, an analysis of different political parties is not conducted in Online Appendix C. This analysis demonstrates the same measurement with adjustments by the ENPP with Molinar’s index, and the simple partisan/independent ratio is validated, even in cases of other major party approval.

  11. Examining causality concerning macropartisanship is beyond the scope of this paper, as detailed in the Conclusion. This paper’s purpose is to compare the property of the new index per se, such as the fluctuations and trends, through a descriptive analysis alone. If the indicator’s effectiveness is confirmed in future research, it might be possible to examine the causality around macropartisanship comparatively based on this new indicator.

  12. Future analyses should pay close attention to this as a critical determinant; however, regarding new indexing, validation of estimation models including ENPP might raise endogeneity problems as the correlation is assumed between the right-side variable (ENPP) and the left-side variable (new indicator). Against this endogeneity problem, a possible rationale is that the new index uses ENPP with Molinar (1991)’s complex adjustment and does not rely on the simple adjustment by Laakso and Taagepera (1979).

  13. As the other extensive issue, political sophistication should be taken into consideration. Responding to the literature utilizing the FI method to analyze the dynamics of political sophistication (Box-Steffensmeier and De Boef 2001; Box-Steffensmeier and Tomlinson 2000), the relationship among macropartisanship, the party system (ENPP), and political sophistication has to be comparatively analyzed. In such a future study, it is hypothesized that the electorate’s political sophistication will be more advanced under a multiparty system that suppresses the continued support for a particular party and reduces the intensity of macropartisanship (Gordon and Segura 1997; Berggren 2001; Boonen et al. 2017).  However, under a two-party system, the electorate’s political sophistication is more limited than under a multiparty system, making it easier for the electorate to continue to support a particular party, and the intensity of macropartisanship is relatively high.

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Acknowledgements

The author is thankful for comments from Naofumi Fujimura, Hiroshi Hirano, Takeshi Iida, Satoshi Machidori, Tetsuya Matsubayashi, Kenneth McElwain, and Kazuo Shigemasu, and funding through a “Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists” from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Data and R codes for replications are available at Political Behavior’s Harvard Dataverse, at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8GWO7H.

Funding

This study was funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (19K13615).

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  1. School of Policy Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University, 2-1, Gakuen, Sanda-shi, Hyougo-ken, 6691337, Japan

    Hanako Ohmura

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Ohmura, H. Macropartisanship in Multiparty Systems: A Comparative Study of Five Democracies. Polit Behav 45, 285–304 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09699-6

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