0000000000437835
AUTHOR
Carmen Ortega
The impact of ideological positions and personal attributes of candidates in intraparty competition: A study under the Swiss open‐listPRSystem
Intraparty preference voting systems offer different incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal vote, but little is known about how the candidates' policy positions affect their elec-toral success in intraparty competition. This article analyses the effect of candidates' ideological positions and personal attributes on their preference vote share in the 2015 and 2019 Swiss Lower House elections. We used candidate survey data combined with official election statistics. Our findings demon-strate that the ideological distance between candidates' posi-tions and their party's median position is of minor importance for their electoral success when compared to their personal attributes. How…
Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. Explaining MPs’ specialisation in the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados
Nowadays legislatures are largely based on committee systems. This enables a division of work and specialisation, in the context of highly complex politics and policy development. It seems clear that MP specialisation in the field of the committee they serve on is an important political asset, both for MPs and their parliamentary party group. This paper presents the Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. This index measures the degree an MP is specialised in the jurisdiction of the committee they serve on. In the second part of the paper, the index is applied to the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados, an interesting case for testing this multi-faceted index, to find institutional, pol…
The Impact of Regional and National Leaders in Subnational Elections in Spain: Evidence from Andalusian Regional Elections
Abstract Democracies have experienced two trends in the last decades: the growing personalization of politics and the increasing relevance of regions in the political process. This article addresses these trends by posing two questions: Do political leaders influence the vote in regional elections? Do regional party leaders have a larger impact on voter preferences than their national counterparts in regional elections? To answer these questions, we analyzed five regional elections held in Andalusia between 2004 and 2018. The results show that both national and regional leaders matter in regional elections. However, the effect of national and regional leaders is “conditioned” by the charact…