|
|
 |
|
Carlos Costa, "The political economy of party building: Theory and evidence from Peru's infrastructure development programme" Party Politics, 21 (March 2015), 169-182. [Available at http://ppq.sagepub.com/content/vol21/issue2/ ]
This article aims to understand how a nascent party can expand its support base, specifically focusing on identifying groups from whom nascent parties can secure new votes. Targeting groups of potential supporters with goods is a common strategy for parties hoping to expand. We set out to understand which groups should nascent parties target. Classic models of resource allocation are anchored in two main groups of voters: core and swing. While these models are well developed, nascent parties often don’t have core supporters. Nascent parties are still carving electoral niches and their support bases have yet to become the archetypal core group. According to classic models, nascent parties without a well-defined pool of core supporters should focus on swing groups.
Table 1: Frequency descriptive statistics Table 2: Variable operationalization summary Table 3: Proxy validity tests Table 4: Table of results Table 5: State level coefficients Figure 1: Strongest, weakest and most robust predicted expenditures Figure 2: La Libertad Predicted values for ICQ combinations A question that remains unanswered here is
how to convert newly acquired volatile support into steady, long-term
support? Core support is better because it comes at low cost and
political parties should strive to convert any higher cost support into
this lower cost version. Future research that theorizes about
strategies of support maintenance will greatly advance our
understanding of party-building strategies. We believe that to be a
natural direction of this research agenda. |