Are Politics Local? The Two Dimensions of Party Nationalization around the World

Are politics local? Why? Where? When? How do we measure local versus national politics? And what are the effects? This book provides answers to these questions, within an explicitly comparative framework, including both advanced and developing democracies. It does so by using a statistically-based and graphical account of party nationalization, providing methodology and data for legislative elections covering scores of parties across dozens of countries. The book divides party nationalization into two dimensions - static and dynamic - to capture different aspects of localism, both with important implications for representation. Static nationalization measures the consistency in a party's support across the country and thus shows whether parties are able to encompass local concerns into their platforms. Dynamic nationalization, in turn, measures the consistency among the districts in over-time change in electoral results, under the presumption that where districts differ in their electoral responses, local factors must drive politics. Each of the two dimensions, in sum, considers representation from the perspective of the mix of national versus local politics.

Part I. Describing, Measuring, and Comparing the Two Dimensions: 1. Dimensions of party nationalization: static and dynamic; 2. A typology of party nationalization; 3. Measuring static and dynamic nationalization; 4. Applying the model: patterns of static and dynamic nationalization; Part II. Explaining Party Nationalization; 5. Explaining static and dynamic nationalization; 6. Institutions, ethnic heterogeneity and party nationalization: a statistical analysis; Part III. Implications: Nationalization as an Explanatory Variable: 7. Regionalism, accountability, and party nationalization; 8. The role of party nationalization on party unity and retrospective voting; 9. The role of party nationalization on collective action and dissent among co-partisan legislators: roll call voting and bill co-sponsorship; Part IV. Conclusion: 10. Summary and Conclusions.

Scott Morgenstern is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Patterns of Legislative Politics: Roll Call Voting in the United States and Latin America's Southern Cone (Cambridge, 2004) and the co-editor of Legislative Politics in Latin America, (Cambridge, 2002), Pathways to Power (2008), and Reforming Communism: Cuba in Comparative Perspective (2017). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, and other journals.