Weak party institutionalization and the dynamics of political dialogue.

摘要

Does weak party institutionalization shape political dialogue? Research on dialogue argues that parties' ability to gain advantage on issues drives the decision to talk to their opponents. Parties, it is argued, have niches of advantaged issues created through prior experiences, performance, posturing and positioning through platforms. In institutionalized party systems, party labels provide informative cues to voters and provide electoral benefits to party members. In weakly institutionalized party systems, however, party labels provide limited information about the party preferences, and carry little electoral value. In weak party systems, consequently, parties fail to disclose consistent programmatic messages that may be readily interpreted by voters, failing to gain electoral benefits on advantaged issues.;Failure by parties to imbue value to labels and gain advantage over issues dramatically changes how we understand political dialogue in weakly institutionalized party systems. We expect, as I will show, political dialogue to be more prevalent, as politicians engage each other in futile attempts to control issues and communicate to voters their policy preferences. As parties become institutionalized, they claim issues and reinterpret past performance. Issue control eventually generates incentives for politicians to talk past each other, effectively reducing dialogue.;This dissertation seeks to explain how weakly institutionalized parties shape political dialogue. I will provide a theoretical rational and empirical support showing that in weakly institutionalized party systems, political dialogue differs from dialogue observed in highly institutionalized settings. To this end, this dissertation uses novel techniques of content analyses to study over 14,000 op-ed articles by 230 Venezuelan politicians from 1996 to 2007. Statistical research is complemented with interviews conducted in Venezuela, providing new insight into political dialogue in the aftermath of the collapse of the Punto Fijo regime in the 1990's.;My research will show that in weakly institutionalized party systems, dialogue is prevalent and issue advantage is unlikely.