Shaping provincial party competition How do different levels of party competition interact within federalized party systems?

JUAN MANUEL ABAL MEDINA; MARÍA CELESTE RATTO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; V Congreso Latinoamericano de Ciencia Política, ALACIP; 2010

Asociación Latinoamericana de Ciencia Política

In his seminal work Duverger (1954:113) states that electoral rules shape competition between political parties. One important assumption of his famous Laws, is that electoral systems’ influence goes no further than the district level boundaries. Duverger’s Laws were revised within the framework of the analysis of the effect that different elections have on federal systems. Authors as Chhibber and Kollman 1998, 2004; Gaines 1999; Ferrara and Herrón 2005; Lago 2006 emphasize the idea that the strategic environment created by electoral systems and concurrent elections for office at different government levels, influence the coordination among political parties. In recent years numerous studies have attempted to explain the logic of the Argentinean party system competition, as well. Several studies have shown the growing territorialization of party competition in Argentina (Calvo and Escolar 2006; Leiras 2007; Gibson and Suárez Cao 2010); in spite of that the consequences of the interaction between national and provincial parties have received little attention. This paper is a preliminary attempt to assess how national parties could affect the provincial party competition. The effective number of provincial parties was analyzed with a dataset of electoral results aggregate at the provincial level, from 1983 to 2005. A multivariate regression analysis was performed to measure the impact of several factors on the number of provincial parties. The factors studied were: institutional factors (the kind of electoral system; seats shared by district; electoral reforms), socio-demographic factors (literacy; proportion of urban population; population), federal factors (effective number of national parties; economic crisis of 1989 and 2001; democratic experience); interaction term (effective number of national parties * the kind of electoral system). In order to disentangle how different levels of party competition interact within the Argentinean party system, we suggest that the cross-level effect should be measured as an interaction term in a multiplicative model in place of the traditional additive regression models proposed by current literature.