عنوان

Beyond Outbidding: Social Cleavages, Electoral Rules and Intraethnic Party Competition

Number

TL50859

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

Beyond Outbidding: Social Cleavages, Electoral Rules and Intraethnic Party Competition

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Tarkhani, Soran

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Bloom, Stephen

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2019

Text of Note

262 p.

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Text preceding or following the note

2019

Text of Note

The outbidding model of intraethnic party competition has dominated the literature on ethnic party competition. The emphasis of this literature on radicalization as an inevitable consequence of intraethnic competition has recently faced fair criticism. Scholars have presented new empirical evidence for intraethnic party competition that runs counter to the predictions of outbidding. Nevertheless, the major assumptions of the outbidding model persist. Scholars generally focus on ethnic outgroups as a source of intraethnic party competition, disregarding other factors that affect competition between ethnic parties within the same ethnic group. My approach to study intraethnic party competition is different. Instead of merely focusing on ethnic politics as the main factor driving intraethnic competition, I investigate other factors that determine intraethnic competition beyond ethnic politics, including social cleavages, and the electoral system. I submit that intraethnic party competition cannot be boiled down simply to ethnic politics. Ethnic parties within the same ethnic group compete over various issues ranging from socioeconomic concerns, to foreign policy and regionalists. Theoretically, this dissertation tries to apply methods and theories, which have been used in the literature on party politics to study non-ethnic parties, to analyze intraethnic party competition. First, I borrow from the literature on electoral engineering (Duverger, 1963; Cox, 1997) to understand the effects of electoral rules on the intraethnic party system, and how they influence intraethnic party competition. Second, I look to an older literature on party cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) to explain how intraethnic differences are manifest in different ethnic parties. The results of this analysis show that: 1) intraethnic competition is not simply driven by ethnic politics, and 2) ethnic parties from the same ethnic group often have different goals, strategies, and policies, due to changes and differences in electoral rules and social cleavages. Empirically, this prospectus is built on a case study of Kurdish parties. It analyzes in detail competition between Kurdish political parties in Iraq from 1991 to 2015. Two main factors (electoral rules and cleavages) are investigated and are found to have facilitated the emergence of various Kurdish parties and shape the mode of political competition among them. The results of the empirical analysis provide strong evidence for my major hypotheses and confirm that outbidding falls short of explaining intraethnic party competition. Several important implications follow from conceiving intraethnic party competition beyond the outbidding model. I hope that keeping these in mind will help scholars of ethnic politics avoid: (1) overestimating the homogeneity of interests of ethnic groups, (2) downplaying the likelihood of cooperation between ethnic parties and other political parties, (3) overlooking the possibility that some parties will attract voters from various ethnic groups, and (4) overestimating the potential for ethnic conflict and the breakdown of democracy.

Subject Term

Comparative literature

Subject Term

Ethnic studies

Subject Term

Political science

Tarkhani, Soran

Bloom, Stephen

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y