News

On August 5th, Waseda University’s Center for Positive Political Economy as a Top Global University Project hosted an international workshop entitled “Cross-National Research on Party Systems and Party Finances.” Dr. Fernando Casal Bértoa from Nottingham University was invited to talk about his latest research. Casal Bértoa actively publishes articles and obtained his Ph.D from the European University Institute in Florence under the supervision of late Peter Mair, the famous comparativist.

1^st Session

Casal Bértoa discussed how political finance regulation could hamper political corruption. His research motivations derive from a gap in the literature on “Politics and Money.” Based on a new dataset which has coded electoral laws in a large number of countries, he and his colleagues found that none of the hypotheses put forward in the literature had any evidence to support them. For example, the correlation between a higher reliance on public funding and lower political corruption was not supported. Neither was the correlation between a higher regulation on private funding and lower political corruption. Casal Bértoa demonstrated that small parties are more likely to survive in countries with generous public subsidies towards political parties.

Dr. Jeyong Sohn from Rikkyo University made three major comments regarding the presentation. First, he suggested that by introducing changes in independent variables Casal Bertoa could test the hypothesis dynamically with temporal differences. He also suggested that Casal Bértoa could gain more robust results  by conducting supplementary analyses with different case studies. Third, Sohn suggested that Casal Bértoa include the years of democratic experiences to avoid a possible endogeneity problem.

2nd Session

In the second session, Casal Bértoa presented on electoral “volatility,” an index widely used in political science in the last three decades. “Volatility” refers to a net change of votes/seats between two consecutive elections. Yet, some have pointed out limitations such as index inflation when parties split and merge over two elections. To address this problem, Casal Bértoa  created a  joint project with colleagues to develop a new way to calculate and correct volatility results. He suggested one collect information on the number of party members, media, etc. to assess the ‘capital’ of political parties to better reflect the size of the political forces between the two elections.

Professor Airo Hino (Waseda University) congratulated Casal Bértoa for his innovative plan to correct the “volatility” index. He welcomed the approach by illustrating an inflated tendency of the index using the Japanese party system of the 1950s as an example. Professor Hino discussed that an alternative way  to correct electoral “volatility” is to look at changes of parliamentary members. He suggested there are advantages and disadvantages of each index in terms of validity, reliability, and speed when arriving at an index score.

Lively discussions followed both sessions and the workshop clocked in at four hours. Casal Bértoa was awarded an “Ohkuma Bear,” the university mascot, for visiting Waseda amidst the Tokyo heat wave and conducting a successful workshop.