Valid and reliable estimates of the policy preferences of political parties' supporters are essential for the study of political representation. However, such estimates are not directly available... Show moreValid and reliable estimates of the policy preferences of political parties' supporters are essential for the study of political representation. However, such estimates are not directly available from standard surveys of public opinion, which are typically representative by design only at the national level and rarely ask questions about public support for specific policies. In this article, we explore the possibility to use data from voting advice applications (VAA) to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters. To do that, first, we identify 10 questions on preferences towards issues of public policy that were asked around the same time and with similar wording in traditional surveys of public opinion and in VAAs fielded in Germany and in the Netherlands. Then we compare the VAA data disaggregated by political affiliation of the respondents to the survey data adjusted via multilevel regression modeling with poststratification (MRP). We find strong positive correlations between the estimates derived from both methods, especially after weighting the VAA data. Yet, point estimates are not always very close, and the match is sensitive to the treatment of neutral and ‘don't know’ answers. Overall, our results bode well for the validity of using VAA data in empirical research on political representation. Show less
Veraart, W.; Moerel, L.; Rodrigues, P.R.; Wilde, M. de; Schutte, C. 2017
This dissertation consists of a study of party patronage in Argentina. It attempts to assess the degree to which parties appoint people to public positions, who is in effect responsible for... Show moreThis dissertation consists of a study of party patronage in Argentina. It attempts to assess the degree to which parties appoint people to public positions, who is in effect responsible for patronage within parties, what motivates parties to appoint in different sectors and at different levels of the state, and what criteria they follow to select the appointees. Its main argument is that patronage has become the primary resource employed in order to build contemporary party organizations in Argentina. In fact, the research shows that patronage is the indispensable resource to recruit and sustain the two types of networks which make up the only type of party organization that has proved successful in contemporary Argentina, the “patronage-based network party”. For those who do not have access to state resources, the development or the maintenance of an electorally competitive party organization has become improbable. That is the reason why, paraphrasing Schattschneider´s, this dissertation affirms that Argentine party organizations have become unthinkable save in terms of patronage. Show less
