Parties as Disciplinarians: Centrist Parties and Personalist Politics

• In Event: Consequences of Personalism for Representation

Abstract

Electoral strategies are often depicted along a continuum ranging from programmatic policy promises on one pole to personalistic exchanges between politicians and voters on the other. Since individual politicians tend to reap the benefits from personalistic exchanges, while programmatic campaigns generate greater externalities for all members of a given party, candidates for office have a tendency to prefer the former over the latter. Political parties may counteract this tendency by manipulating the career concerns of politicians. However, to do so, parties must commit to rewarding politicians based on their past campaign behavior, which may involve advancing less electorally appealing candidates toeing the programmatic line ahead of appealing candidates who have relied on personalisitic strategies in the past. We examine the ability of parties to commit to such a disciplined promotion strategy using an infinite horizon overlapping generations model. We then test one of the empirical implications of this model: Centrist parties should be unable to exercise this type of discipline in settings where party system volatility is high, and politicians from such parties should pursue personalistic or clientelistic campaigns as a result. However, centrist parties should be able to exert discipline when party system volatility is low, and their candidates will run programmatic campaigns. Candidates from ideologically extreme parties, by contrast, run programmatic campaigns regardless of volatility, but ideologically extreme parties should nonetheless tend to promote candidates with greater personal appeals.

Authors

• Marko Klasnja, Georgetown University

• Rocio Titiunik, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• James R. Hollyer, University of Minnesota