Strong Governors, Fragmented Party Systems: Accounting for Multilevel Coattails

• In Event: Development and Change in Comparative Parties

Abstract

Previous research on the institutional determinants of party system formation has argued that concurrent presidential and lower chamber elections reduce the fragmentation of the legislative party system, in the presence of a sufficiently low number of presidential candidates. Despite the fact that these theoretical claims have been confirmed by numerous studies, the coattails literature has failed to account for the distinct incentives that shape party strategies and electoral coordination in presidential countries with directly elected subnational executives.

In this paper I argue that the impact of presidential coattails on the party system is conditional on the extent to which subnational party and electoral dynamics shape national legislative elections. Specifically, in the presence of significant gubernatorial coattail effects, parties may elect sizable delegations to national legislatures independent of their performance or participation in the presidential election. This is to say that strong gubernatorial coattails weaken candidates’ and parties’ incentives to coordinate around the frontrunners in the presidential race in each and every district, because parties have the option of focusing on gubernatorial elections when they lack a competitive presidential candidate. Besides, the combination of proximate presidential and legislative elections with potential electoral externalities associated with subnational races likely creates a tension between national and subnational party branches' interests, leading to poor electoral coordination both within and across districts. This implies that (H1) temporally proximate presidential and lower chamber races will increase party fragmentation in countries with politically autonomous and influential governors, including when fragmentation in the presidential race is low. By the same token, (H2) concurrent presidential and lower chamber races will only exert a compressing effect on the party system in countries lacking politically autonomous intermediate spheres of government or where governors have limited influence on national party dynamics.

The paper relies on a dataset of democratic elections and federal and electoral institutions in 45 presidential and semi-presidential countries to test these hypotheses. It develops an original measure to account for variation in gubernatorial influence on lower chamber races – the gubernatorial coattails score – that accounts for both temporal proximity between subnational executive races and national legislative elections, and for the incentives that there exist for party provincialization

Author

• André Borges, University of Brasília