Description du projet
Dévoiler comment les politiciens sans parti affectent le gouvernement
Traditionnellement, les politiciens poursuivaient une carrière en politique en s’affiliant à un parti politique. Toutefois, ces dernières années, davantage de politiciens européens sont parvenus à entrer dans ce monde sans être affiliés à un parti ou en y étant peu impliqués. S’agissant souvent de technocrates ou des personnes extérieures à la politique, on ignore la manière dont l’arrivée de ces politiciens affecte la démocratie représentative. Le projet DEPART, financé par l’UE, cherche à dévoiler comment ce processus influence la politique en étudiant de manière approfondie la carrière des politiciens européens durant l’histoire moderne de l’Europe. Il fournira également des réponses à la manière dont les politiciens sans parti influencent l’élaboration de politiques, la responsabilité politique et la représentation des électeurs, dévoilant ainsi comment ce phénomène affecte le gouvernement et les développements européens.
Objectif
How do people reach the highest echelons of politics? Traditionally, the answer has been through political parties. Yet recently, more and more politicians in Europe take office with little or no party socialization. Technocrats and political outsiders have assumed power across Europe. Even established parties appoint ever more nonpartisans as ministers. Yet we still know nothing about how this ‘de-party-politicization’ of our political elites affects – or even damages – representative democracy.
To address this gap, DEPART’s theoretical innovation is to re-conceptualize the idea of ‘party control of government’. Existing work views party control as established once parties appoint individuals to office. DEPART abandons this formalistic perspective and conceives of party control as a function of the socialization of political elites into parties. The weaker this socialization, the weaker the linkage that parties provide between voters and governments.
Empirically, DEPART breaks new ground by developing the first biography-based measures of party control, using the most comprehensive and most granular analysis of political careers in Europe to date (~10,000 ministers, 30 countries, 1945–2020). It also employs survey experiments to study voter responses to de-party-politicization.
With these unique data, DEPART addresses two hitherto overlooked questions. First, does de-party-politicization diminish the influence of the party composition of governments on policy outcomes? This would undermine the ability of voters to affect policy through their electoral choice. Second, do weak (or absent) partisan ties among political elites reduce the ability of voters to correctly assign blame for bad government performance? This would increase the chance that parties pay no electoral price for corruption, scandals and mismanagement.
Champ scientifique
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Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
1010 Wien
Autriche