This study investigates expenditure of European parties in referendum campaigns. Previous work exploring why parties initiate referendums hints at the importance of subsequent campaigns to parties, but theoretical insights regarding party behavior in campaigning contexts are fragmented and limited. We argue that party expenditure indicates the extent of their engagement, and identifying explanatory factors can offer insights into underlying strategic goals driving parties in their behavior. Drawing on referendum instrumentalization literature and existing empirical studies, we propose a framework with three strategic factors and corresponding hypotheses. These are tested using official expenditure data for 47 parties campaigning in 24 referendums in eight European countries through bivariate and multivariate analysis. Our findings mainly suggest that parties see referendum campaigns as avenues for image-building, spending more on average when they initiate them and when referendums are publicly salient. Additionally, parties seemingly prioritize elections, while spending limits are ineffective in curbing expenditure.

Gendered inequalities in campaign finance are generally considered an important impediment to the equal representation of women in parliament. A multivariate analysis of 11,897 Flemish candidates in the Belgian elections from 1999 to 2019 provides strong new evidence of the gender gap in campaign spending, showing that women candidates are significantly outspent by men. But this gender gap is only present after the introduction of strict quota and is limited to non-incumbents. It takes 16 years and five elections after the introduction of strict quotas before this gender gap narrows. In terms of the funding of their campaigns, women draw significantly less money from their personal wealth and receive less money from their parties when strict quotas are in place.

This article examines whether political parties reward the parliamentary activity of members of parliament (MPs) through candidate selection processes. Previous research on this question provides mixed evidence. Moreover, studies often disregard potentially unequal effects among different kinds of MPs. Using new data on all members of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives between 1995 and 2019 (N = 1108), this contribution shows that several types of parliamentary activity indeed matter both for MPs’ general renomination as well as for their claim to realistic list positions. Furthermore, our study provides evidence that parliamentary activity matters more for the reselection of newcomers than for experienced MPs.

This article looks at the equalization/normalization problem through the lens of campaign spending and investigates the effect of expenses for digital tools on the electoral result of individual candidates in an open list proportional representation system. A multilevel analysis of the campaign expenses of 1253 serious contenders in the Belgian 2019 concurrent federal, regional, and European elections shows that the investment in both owned Web 1.0 media and paid Web 2.0 media does not have an effect on electoral performance. Investing in traditional tools, by contrast, does have a significant positive effect. While most candidates use digital tools, they invest only a small part of their budget in these, which may explain the absence of a digital expense effect. These findings put the use of digital campaigning in perspective, showing that the effect of paid online tools should not be overestimated, and that the role of traditional campaigning is still dominant.

The article investigates incumbent exit rates of women and men parliamentarians in the national chambers and European Parliament delegations of eight West European countries after elections. Relying on original data, the article uses a multi-level model to analyse the fixed effects of gender, type of delegation, and the politico-institutional context on incumbent exit rates, while also assessing random effects produced at the country level. The study finds that incumbent exit rate of men is significantly higher than women's. However, this result is significant in the European Parliament, not national legislature delegations. Additionally, we find that men are pushed towards the exit by gender quotas and proportional electoral systems. Finally, our findings show different dynamics with respect to countries and types of delegation, thus expanding our understanding of the gendered implications of political careers and institutional frameworks across different parliamentary contexts in Western Europe.

This article investigates the differences between candidate turnover at national legislative and European Parliament elections. Multilevel analysis is applied on original data containing 2754 electoral lists, clustered within 79 political parties, within 48 national and European elections. These comparative data allow (1) to test hypotheses on second-order EU elections within the context of electoral recruitment and (2) to measure the effect of systemic turnover drivers, which in turn may differ for EP elections. As such, this paper builds further on the emerging literature on candidate renewal by offering a comparative perspective and understanding the particular dynamic for EP elections. Results suggest that candidate turnover is lower at EP elections. Moreover, the effects of turnover drivers differ at EP elections: candidate turnover is lower on lists of fringe parties at the European level and elections with higher electoral volatility are characterised by higher candidate turnover, particularly at European elections.

Previous work on candidate campaign finance in list proportional representation systems has focused on differential electoral returns of spending for incumbent and challenger candidates. This article asks whether incumbents and challengers in these systems fund election campaigns from different sources. We hypothesize that incumbents receive more: (a) contributions from individual and corporate donors; and (b) financial support from party organizations, as party elites strategically deploy resources to constrain intra-party competition. The analysis is based on a dataset on campaign funding sources of candidates for two legislative elections in Colombia (2014 and 2018). The results confirm that party organizations transfer more financial resources to incumbents than to challengers. Contrary to expectations, parties do not specifically support the electorally most vulnerable incumbents. We also find that challengers receive higher levels of non-corporate private donations than incumbents. These findings provide insights into individual campaigns and demonstrate how parties coordinate intra-party competition through campaign funding.

ABSTRACT Earlier empirical research on party list proportional representation systems shows that women spend less on campaigns than men, particularly when quotas are applied. An analysis of the candidate campaign expenses for the 2014 and 2018 Colombian Lower Chamber elections provides a novel test of this gender gap and its underlying causes. The research design leverages Colombia’s unique context of electoral institutions, with interdistrict variation in terms of quota rules, and the availability of detailed information on campaign spending and funding. The regression models show that the gender gap in campaign spending is limited to districts with quota rules and disappears among incumbents and candidates listed first on the ballot. As for funding, women candidates are most disadvantaged with regard to personal funds and corporate donations but attract as many individual donations as men do.

This article identifies the party dynamics that drive candidate turnover, yielding crucial insights in the recruitment behaviour and nomination strategies of political parties. Inspired by the seminal demand and supply model of political recruitment, we contend that several dynamics trigger or discourage parties to renew their lists and increase or decrease the availability of candidates. A ‘selectoral opportunity structure’ consisting of these dynamics could imply discontinuity in the candidate selection process. Multilevel survival analysis is applied to estimate the odds of selectoral career termination for 11,678 candidates running for parliamentary election in Flanders (Belgium) between 1987 and 2019. The results suggest substantial career termination differences between political parties, driven by multiple aspects of the selectoral opportunity structure: electoral swings, party members and transformational party events. Our results attest to the importance of including party level characteristics and further exploring system level effects when studying candidate turnover in future research.

The literature on the political finance of referendum campaigns has focussed primarily on how these are regulated in individual countries, but scholarly work is yet to empirically explore how these regulations and other factors translate into concrete spending practices of political parties. This article attempts to do this for the United Kingdom (UK), which has one of the oldest and most extensive referendum political finance regimes, with the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act (PPERA). After formulating several hypotheses grounded in party behaviour and political finance literature, we offer a close examination of the PPERA's regulations on referendum campaign finance and compare the expenditure patterns of UK political parties in five post-PPERA referendums. The findings suggest that the competitiveness of a referendum, as well as a party's financial resources and the salience of the referendum topic for the party are possible explanations for their financial engagement in the referendum campaign. More surprisingly, our results show that expenditure limits imposed by the PPERA barely have an effect on party expenditure. Parties rarely come close to the limits imposed, but when they do bump up against the limit, they are able to circumvent this via donations, which do not count towards their spending cap.

Purpose Paid digital campaigning tools play an increasingly pivotal role in individual election campaigns worldwide. Extant literature often juxtaposes the equalization theory, which argues that these tools create a level playing field, and the normalization theory, which contends that strong and resource-rich politicians benefit most from digital tools. This article aims to inform this debate by looking at it from a campaign expenditure perspective beyond the Anglo-American bias of most research on the subject. Design/methodology/approach The authors use an original dataset on campaign expenditures and resources of 1,798 candidates running for 13 Belgian parties in the 2019 federal parliamentary election. Relying on multilevel statistical models, the authors link the candidates' digital campaign expenses to their incumbency status, which is expected to affect digital campaigning. Findings While earlier work on majoritarian cases often showed contradicting results, this study on the Belgian flexible-list proportional representation (PR) case provides strong support for the equalization theory by demonstrating that incumbents are not only less inclined to spend on digital tools than challengers, but also spend a smaller part of their budget on these tools. Originality/value This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the equalization versus normalization debate from a campaign expenditure perspective using a made to purpose dataset in a non-Anglo-American context. Peer review The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-12-2021-0679

This article investigates determinants of candidate turnover in 10 European established democracies with list-PR electoral systems. We identify party and election variables that affect the supply and demand of new candidates on the parties’ lists. In addition, we apply a weighted candidate turnover measure to investigate the dynamic of renewal on high-ranked list positions. We built an original dataset that contains 3344 electoral lists of represented political parties. Hypotheses are tested by means of a multilevel analysis of political party list renewal rates. At the party level, leadership change and larger party size in terms of members are found to coincide with higher general turnover. At the system level, general turnover is higher in elections with closed lists and high electoral volatility. At higher positions on the list, candidate turnover appears not to be affected by the party- and system-level variables identified in the broader literature.

A higher candidate turnover among women may be one of the reasons why quota rules seldom succeed in attaining full legislative parity. This proposition is tested on the basis of a longitudinal analysis of 11,678 candidates for legislative elections during the period 1987–2019 in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is shown that male candidates have shorter careers than women, contrary to expectations. The duration of the career as a candidate depends on the electoral performance, but only for men. In the long run, the introduction of a strict quota rule prolongs the candidate careers of both men and women, but the effect for women is much stronger. This finding contradicts the allegation that quota lead to an influx of unmotivated women candidates with a high turnover.

En ese artículo, se analiza la personalización electoral medida por el porcentaje de votantes que emiten un voto preferente en vez de un voto solo por la lista. Un análisis de regresión multinivel de las elecciones de la Cámara en 2006, 2010, 2014 y 2018 en Colombia, con 971 listas con voto preferente al nivel del distrito como unidades de análisis, muestra que la personalización electoral se ha mantenido estable, a pesar de los cambios del sistema partidista. Sin embargo, aprovechando la característica única del sistema colombiano que los partidos pueden optar por una fórmula de lista cerrada o con voto preferente, encontramos que la personalización en listas con voto preferente disminuye con el número de listas cerradas, pero solo en distritos pequeños. En el nivel de la lista, la personalización aumenta con el número de candidatos. Al controlar este efecto, encontramos evidencia de un efecto de proximidad en el sentido que un mayor número de votantes en el distrito coincide con menos personalización.

In this article, electoral personalization is measured on the basis of the percentage of voters casting a preference vote instead of a list vote. A multilevel regression analysis of the 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018 Lower Chamber elections in Colombia, with 971 open lists at the constituency level as units of analysis, shows that the electoral personalization has remained remarkably stable, in spite of the party system changes during the investigatedperiod. Even so, leveraging the unique feature of the Colombian system that parties can opt for either a closed or an open ballot format, we find that the personalization of the open lists decreases with the number of closed lists, but only in the small constituencies. At the list level, personalization increases with the number of candidates on the list. When this effect is controlled for, we find evidence of a proximity effect in the sense that a larger number of voters in the district coincides with a lower level of personalization.

This paper examines the influence of party change on party-level legislative turnover. Analyzing a novel dataset tracking 251 parties in eight West European democracies between 1945 and 2015, we assess how transformational party events affect the renewal of parties’ parliamentary delegations. Transformational party events refers to party changes resulting from deliberate strategic decisions that redistribute power within parties, change their identity, and/or shift alliances within and between them. We focus in particular on changes in parties’ leadership and name, the formation of electoral cartels, mergers and divisions, applying empirical methods suitable for dealing with fractional outcomes and multi-level data to test their impact on turnover rates. Our estimates indicate that leadership change is a key determinant of MP renewal, leading to systematically higher rates of legislative turnover. Party relabeling and divisions affect turnover as well, although their influence is contingent on other characteristics of the parties and their environment.

This paper analyses the investment in digital tools and the allocation of communication expenses in a Global South country with an uneven digital penetration rate. Data were collected for 2,563 candidates in the 2018 legislative election in Colombia, based on the official campaign finance disclosure documents. A multivariate analysis shows that particularly challengers invest in social media tools, which is a strong indication in favor of the equalization model. That such an effect is not found for radio and television expenses confirms this interpretation. Candidates on open lists are more inclined to spend on both digital and radio and television tools than candidates on closed lists. At the district level, the odds of spending on digital media increase with the digital media use, but so does the odds of spending on radio and television ads.

Previous studies on flexible-list systems demonstrate that party selectorates promote candidates with a high number of preference votes to better list positions in the next election. This research note asks whether these rank promotions are limited to candidates in unrealistic list positions at the lower end of the ballot or also include candidates moving into realistic list positions (i.e. electorally safer highest ranks). Using a longitudinal data set of candidates for 18 parliamentary elections in Flanders (Belgium), we first successfully replicate the earlier established preference vote-effect on future list positions, but subsequently show that promotions from unrealistic to realistic positions are relatively rare. Moreover, preference votes do not seem to affect the ability to move upwards on the list or to receive a realistic position at the next election when controlling for incumbency and list position at the previous election. Robustness tests using different operationalizations for realistic position lead to similar empirical results. Preference votes do not seem to matter for realistic list positions.

This article investigates how candidate experience in previous elections, measured by the number of prior candidacies, affects ballot placement in list PR systems. The central argument is that selectorates find experienced candidates attractive because of proven loyalty and higher voter recognition. Moreover, prior candidacies strengthen candidates' familiarity with intra-party selection processes. Returning candidates, however, also risk becoming victims of a seniority trap: after not succeeding to access realistic positions after a number of elections, additional candidacies become harmful as selectorates lose interest. Using data on 18,393 candidacies by 9,905 candidates of parties in Flanders (Belgium) (1987-2019), a set of logit and Cox models test the hypothesised curvilinear effect of prior candidacies on access to realistic positions. Both approaches lead to similar outcomes, confirming that experience positively affects ballot placement but with decreasing marginal utility. These findings have important implications for career strategies and contribute to knowledge on nomination processes and candidate turnover.