Stuart Bramwell, DPhil
Stuart Bramwell, DPhil
Works In Progress
If you would like to see the most up-to-date manuscript for any of these works, please email me at s.bramwell@lse.ac.uk.
Beyond dichotomy? Unpacking the cost of governing in democracies globally
It is well-established that governing parties, on average, lose votes. Yet variation in this "cost of governing" is not fully understood. We introduce detailed information about parties' control over government portfolios to explain these variations. Leveraging an original party-election year and post-election government data set covering 40 industrialised democracies from 1966 to 2021, we demonstrate that voters employ a variety of heuristics when punishing governing parties. The cost of governing increases with a party's share of cabinet appointments, and party size moderates this relationship: larger parties face amplified punishment as their governmental roles expand. Additionally, economic performance moderates governing costs differently for senior and junior coalition partners. These fine-grained measures add predictive power, which allows the further unpacking of the cost of governing across levels of government participation and economic performance.
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Co-Authors: Joost van Spanje and Wouter van der Brug
Status: Revise and resubmit at British Journal of Political Science
Social Democratic Parties and Working Class Inclusion in the Cabinets of Parliamentary Democracies
Social democratic parties historically championed working-class interests, yet their contemporary approach to cabinet appointments reveals a pattern of selective inclusion. Using cabinet-year data across parliamentary democracies from 1966 to 2021, this article demonstrates that SDPs increasingly favour ministers from working-class backgrounds who achieved upward mobility while systematically marginalising blue-collar workers. The econometric analysis shows that SDPs appoint ministers with working-class origins at significantly higher rates than other parties, yet their relative advantage in promoting blue-collar workers has disappeared since 1990. Three mechanisms help explain this pattern: ideological socialisation creates lasting SDP attachments among the upwardly mobile working class, catch-all electoral strategies prioritise signalling to middle-class voters from working-class families, and structural changes—party professionalisation and trade union decline—have closed traditional pathways for blue-collar workers. These findings illuminate how the evolving elite recruitment strategies of SDPs have resulted in the descriptive marginalisation of this party family's original class support base in government.
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Co-Author: None
Status: Revise and resubmit to British Journal of Political Science
Agents of change or continuity? Modes of elite defection and authoritarian (in)stability
Scholarship posits elite defections as pivotal for regime liberalization and/or democratization. However, not all defections achieve this end. While some contribute to democratization, their impact has been negligible or even detrimental in others, leading to autocratization instead. We argue that modes of defection help determine these divergent outcomes. To contribute to democratization, dissatisfied elites need to defect as a cluster, which requires alignment around shared goals, engagement with opposition leaders and voter mobilization. In contrast, isolated defections function as self-purges, bolstering the cohesion of the authoritarian cohort. Our analysis is based on original data on defections including novel data on ministerial elites in Venezuela, Turkey, and Kenya, along with 87 interviews and field research conducted in Venezuela between 2021 and 2023. By juxtaposing the failures of liberalization in Venezuela and Turkey with the successes in Kenya, we propose a causal mechanism that links elite defections to regime outcomes.
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Co-Authors: Maryhen Jiménez and Berk Esen
Status: Revise and resubmit to Democratization
Introducing the New Parties dataset: 1945 to the present
The creation of parties is a vital part of public life in democracies. Despite this, almost all publicly available datasets on elections overlook new or small parties by lumping them into the "other" category. As a result, political party researchers often find themselves looking at the tip of the iceberg, when most new party creation occurs under the surface. To address this, we have created the New Parties dataset, which collects electoral information on new parties over the course of three (potential) elections across 22 countries, from 1945 to the present day. In doing so, our dataset aims to provide a more complete picture of new party creation, success, and survival. This paper introduces the data by looking at participation rates and electoral success for new parties in different countries. It then demonstrates that socioeconomic conditions are a key driver of new party involvement in national elections along with the barriers to entry as proposed in rational choice models. Specifically, we find that poor economic performance is a key driver of new party participation but not success.
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Co-Author: Joost van Spanje
Status: Submitted to Party Politics
