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Critical Parties: How Parties Evaluate the Performance of Democracies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2017

Robert Rohrschneider  and
Stephen Whitefield
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Abstract

While the ‘critical citizens’ literature shows that publics often evaluate democracies negatively, much less is known about ‘critical parties’, especially mainstream ones. This article develops a model to explain empirical variation in parties’ evaluations of democratic institutions, based on two mechanisms: first, that parties’ regime access affects their regime support, which, secondly, is moderated by over-time habituation to democracy. Using expert surveys of all electorally significant parties in twenty-four European countries in 2008 and 2013, the results show that parties evaluate institutions positively when they have regular access to a regime, regardless of their ideology and the regime’s duration. Moreover, regime duration affects stances indirectly by providing democracies with a buffer against an incumbent’s electoral defeat in the most recent election. The findings point to heightened possibilities for parties to negatively evaluate democracies given the increased volatility in party systems in Europe.

Keywords

critical partiescritical citizensdemocratic performanceEurope
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 355 - 379
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of Kansas (email: roro@ku.edu); Department of Politics and International Relations and Pembroke College, Oxford University (email: stephen.whitefield@politics.ox.ac.uk). We would like to thank Jacques Thomassen who stimulated several analyses presented in this article; Lesa Hofmann for her advice regarding multi-level panel analyses; Russell Dalton, Margit Tavits, Allan Sikk and Timothy Haughton for helpful comments on earlier segments of the manuscript. Data replication sets are available at http://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS and online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123416000545.

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HG4QYB
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