(Page 2 of 23) - Questions of Party Nationalization authored by Morgenstern, Scott. and Swindle, Stephen.

Questions of Party Nationalization

In The Semisovereign People: A Realists View of Democracy in America (1960), E.E.
Schattschneider provides the first systematic investigation of political nationalization and its
implications. This seminal work spawned an impressive list of additional investigations into the
question of nationalization as researchers attempted to define the concept more precisely and
understand its implications more completely (Stokes 1967, Rose and Urwin 1975; Claggett et al.
1984, Kawato, 1987, Caramani 1996). More recently, the work of Caramani (2000, 2004), Jones
and Mainwaring (2003), and Chhibber and Kollman (2004) have launched renewed interest in
the territorial structuring of electoral politics.

In spite of this impressive list of scholarship, the literature on nationalization continues to

be inhibited in at least three important ways. First, for most nationalization scholars, the
nationalization of politics implies the elimination of territorial variation in electoral support for
political parties. The measurements of nationalization, therefore, focus predominantly on the
extent to which partisan electoral support is uniform or variant across geographic regions.
Authors may vary in the specific ways in which they measure “variation,” but the underlying
assumptions of the measures are the same. For example, Caramani takes the standard deviation
of party returns across districts and then divides this number by the party’s average level of
support. For Jones and Mainwaring, the GINI is argued to be a better estimate of the concept.
Our problem with these measures is that they fail to control for other electoral forces that may be
occurring simultaneously, and therefore, they will misrepresent the extent of nationalization
actually taking place. We argue that the Morgenstern and Potthoff (2005) measure of district
heterogeneity, which controls for electoral volatility and local voting forces, is a more defensible
and accurate measure of nationalization.

The second issue is the disagreement over whether nationalization should be considered a

static or a dynamic concept. The static approach (Schattschneider (1960); Sundquist (1973);
Leithner (1997); Caramani (1999)), examines the distribution of votes a party gets across
different subnational units of a country at a single point in time. Whereas the dynamic approach
(Stokes, 1965; Stokes, 1967; Jones and Mainwaring, 2003) focuses on a single subnational unit
and examines the difference between levels of party support across different elections, looking
for the subnational unit’s deviation from the overall national pattern of cross-election difference
in party support. Advocates of the static approach believe that the dynamic approach is invalid
because it measures the nationalization of electoral trends rather than the nationalization of
electoral support. Advocates of the dynamic approach, on the other hand, argue that single
snapshots of voter support are far too sensitive to all sorts of political, sociological, and electoral
forces, which makes any conclusion about the causes of such a distribution tenuous at best.

Regardless of which of these perspectives is correct, what we do know is that measures in

each of the two camps appear to be tapping very distinctive electoral forces. Kawato (1987) and
Claggett, et al. (1984), use both types of measures in their work and both conclude that these two
ways of tapping nationalization do not correlate strongly. Consequently, the nationalization
literature has been hamstrung in its evolution because of an inability to effectively communicate
across this divide. Again, we argue that the Morgenstern and Potthoff technique of electoral

We have some sympathy with this criticism, but do not believe that the dynamic approach is completely immune

from its own criticism of the static approach. As this is the crux of our third concern with the general literature, we
elaborate further below.