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Socialist Threat? Radical Party Entry, Electoral Alliances, and the Introduction of Proportional Representation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2020

ANDRÉ WALTER Open the ORCID record for ANDRÉ WALTER [Opens in a new window]
ANDRÉ WALTER*
Affiliation:
University of St. Gallen
*
André Walter, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Political Science, University of St. Gallen, andre.walter@unisg.ch.
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Abstract

A substantial body of research shows that the entry of socialist parties to the electoral arena is linked to major political and economic reforms at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, how socialist parties have affected electoral competition and coordination has never been investigated in detail. Drawing on the debate of the adoption of proportional representation, I employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the casual effect of socialist entry to the electoral arena on the formation of electoral alliances and the support of established parties. To do so, I use newly collected data for Imperial Germany 1890–1912. I show that established parties facing strong socialist competitors received more endorsement by other non-socialist parties and, as a result, a higher voter share. The findings suggest that established parties were able to mitigate coordination problems within the institutional setting of majoritarian electoral systems.

Type
Letter
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 701 - 708
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

I thank Patrick Emmenegger and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the meeting of the Political Economy Research Group at the University of St. Gallen, the Department Seminar of the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen, the ECPR General Conference in Hamburg, and the German Political Science Association General Conference in Frankfurt. I thank all participants for the feedback. All remaining errors are my responsibility. Replication materials are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/383K6K.

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