A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems

5. An Intensive Test: Campaign and Nomination

An Intensive Test: Campaign and Nomination PRECEDING the balloting stage of an election, but primarily conditioned by expectations of voter behavior and the effects of the application of electoral laws, are the nomination and campaign stages of the electoral process. In considering campaigns and nominations, this chapter has two objectives. First, by bringing under consideration additional aspects of the environment in which candidates seek office, the argument from electoral system to parliamentary party structure will be advanced and sharpened; new predictions will be made, and general predictions made in previous chapters will be made more specific. Second, the strength of the arguments made to this point will be increased by the partial verification of several of the intermediate predictions relating to campaign behavior deduced from them, In keepingwith the practice of working backwards, the requirements and techniques of campaigning will be considered first This section will begin by considering the predictions concerning the nature of campaign appeals made in chapters 2 and 4? showing that reported practice conforms to the predictions. Based partially on this analysis, the techniques of campaigning and then more importantly the resources required for the effective employment of these techniques will be discussed Finally, from the conclusions of this part and consideration ofthe distribution andavailability of electorally relevant resources, predictions will be made concerning the behavior of deputies. The same basic strategy also will be followed in discussing nominations. Three questions will be addressed: first, what is relevant to the selection of candidates; second, how can candidates influence the selection process; third, what implications does this selection process have for candidates5 behavior once they are in office? Campaigning Journalistic accounts of politics and formal (particularly spatial) models of politics both attribute great importance to the role of issues in 84 5_ An Intensive Test: Campaign and Nomination 85 political campaigns. They suggest that the policy proposals of parties that gain votes over previous elections and especially the policy proposals of parties that win a majority of the votes have been endorsed by the public, while those of parties that lose votes have been rejected. As has been suggested, this is a dangerous assumption for a number of reasons, two of which may be singled out as beingofparticular relevance inthiscontext* In the first place, while all parties makepolicy appeals to voters, these appeals are not the only factors that influence the electorate. Even leaving aside the independent impact ofparty identification in determininga large proportion of the vote in some countries, and considering only fluctuations in voting strength, it is clear that the personalities and other characteristics of both national and local party leaders and candidates may have an impact independent of, and perhaps greater than, that of the policy differences between the parties, In the second place, even when policy appeals are important in influencing voters, it is far from self-evident that the same issues will be important in different areas. Yet, unless this is true, it is difficult indeed to interpret electoral results as referenda on any particular issues/ What, then, can be said of the impact of issues in campaigns in Italy, Ireland, and Great Britain? How important are issues? What types of issues, and what specific issues, are stressed by parliamentarycandidates? Do different candidates stress the same or different issues? Answers to these questions havebeen predicted inthe precedingchapters, based first on deductive analysis of the electoral laws of the countries involved, and second on a combinationof deduction and inductionfrom an analysis of the electoral experiences of the three countries since World War II The task now is to confrontthese predictions with data inorder to see whethertheline of reasoning that produced them can be confirmed Based in part on considerations of district magnitude and in part on the nature ofchoice allowed voters, it has been suggested thatissue appeals will be of greater importance in Italy and Britain than in Ireland. Respondents to the questionnaire (Appendix B) were asked to rate the importance of national and local issues and national and local leaders in determiningthe result of the immediatelypreceding general election in their constituencies. While these data must be interpreted with some caution because it became clear that there was no way to force the Irish and Italian respondents to distinguish between the result with respect to parties and the result with respect to individuals, it is still possible to assess the relative importance of issues in the three countries. Table 5,1 reports the percentages of the respondents from each country reporting the opinion...