Essays on Distributive Politics and Party Systems

Abstract

This dissertation consists of four article-length chapters that revolve around the study of distributive politics and/or party systems. In the first chapter, I use the case of South Korea to present a theory of conditional core-swing targeting that explains how presidents use their strong budgetary powers to manipulate the distribution of government resources. Presidents whose parties already possess a legislative majority are expected to favor core municipalities to strengthen the foundations of their majority constituency, whereas those who seek majority control are predicted to prioritize swing municipalities in an effort to cross the majority threshold. Using a novel dataset of national subsidy allocations that spans three decades, I find evidence in support of my theory. This chapter demonstrates that the beneficiaries of distributive favoritism are not fixed, and that politicians can engage in complex and varied targeting strategies to achieve their objectives. In the second chapter, I turn my attention to the concept of party system institutionalization. While institutionalized party systems are regarded as key underpinnings of democracies, much of our understanding of this relationship remains disjoint and inconclusive due to unresolved conceptual, measurement, and data challenges. To address these limitations, I focus the concept on the establishment and entrenchment of the interparty rules, and construct a corresponding measure that covers 96 post-WWII democracies using a Bayesian latent variable measurement model. The resulting measure not only has unmatched coverage and demonstrated validity, but also better corroborates theoretical expectations than existing measures. This chapter should facilitate the advancement of systematic understandings about the causes and consequences of party system institutionalization across a global sample of democracies. In the third chapter, I examine how two key dimensions of party systems—their degree of institutionalization and nationalization—jointly impact policymaking and policy outcomes in democracies. Party system institutionalization enhances the capacity of parties to sustain intertemporal policy coordination, whereas party system nationalization incentivizes parties to target broader constituencies. As these mechanisms are distinct, I argue that variations across these two dimensions should have disparate implications for the provision of public goods and services. Using a representative sample of democracies, I demonstrate that while party system institutionalization and nationalization are both necessary for increasing the supply of national policies, the former is more important for generating higher-quality and more equitable public service outcomes. This chapter presents a more comprehensive framework for understanding the relationship between party systems, policymaking, and policy outcomes. In the fourth chapter, which is co-authored with Michael Bernhard and Allen Hicken, we examine party system institutionalization in the context of competitive authoritarian regimes. Party system institutionalization is regarded as a critical underpinning of democracies, but its role in non-democratic systems has been understudied. To address this gap, we construct an original data set that disaggregates electoral volatility—the most common measure of party system institutionalization in democracies—into ruling party seat change and opposition party seat volatility, and further divide opposition party volatility into Type-A and Type-B volatility. We find robust results that democratization becomes more likely when decreases in the ruling party’s seat share are accompanied by opposition party Type-B volatility. This chapter indicates that party system dynamics can be linked to regime performance even in non-democratic contexts.