Dr. Yaroslav Prytula is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Economic Analysis and Finance at Lviv Ivan Franko National University (LIFNU) and a Professor at the Lviv Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. Previously he served as an Academic Secretary of LIFNU and a Vice-Dean of the Faculty of International Relations at LIFNU. He is a member of the Supervisory Board of Lviv Ivan Franko National University. His scholarly interests are in macroeconomic modelling, quantitative methods in social science and higher education in transitional societies. His current research is related to socio-economic regional development in Ukraine. During 2001 he spent a semester in The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs under William and Helen Petrach scholarship and continued his research during 2003-04 in The George Washington University Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning under the U.S. Department of State funded Junior Faculty Development Program. During 2004-07 he was a fellow of the Open Society Institute Academic Fellowship Program. During 2007-09 Yaroslav was a fellow of the Global Policy Fellowship Program of the Institute for Higher Education Policy (Washington, DC). In 2011 Dr. Prytula was a visiting scholar at the George Mason University under the University Administration Support Program funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and administered by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Currently Dr. Prytula is a Fulbright Research Scholar at the George Washington University School of Business. Dr. Prytula was awarded his PhD in Mathematical Analysis from LIFNU in 2000. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of LIFNU.  Yaroslav Prytula has received numerous awards and scholarships.

Presented by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Abstract:

Why do some ruling parties last in power for decades despite facing regular, contested elections?  Well-known examples include the PRI in Mexico, the LDP in Japan, the PAP in Singapore, and the ANC in South Africa. The existence of these long-lived “dominant parties” raises normative concerns: can we really call these regimes democratic if there is never, or rarely, ruling party turnover? They also present a theoretical puzzle: if opposition parties are able to contest elections that decide who rules, why do they consistently fail to win? In this talk, I approach these questions by focusing on variation in ruling party duration.  Drawing on a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence, I show that “dominant” parties are typically the first to hold office in a new regime, and often have played a central role in founding it.  As a consequence, these ruling parties frequently start out with enormous electoral advantages over their competitors in the party system, including a strong party “brand,” a disciplined and well-resourced party organization, and the ability to shape and manipulate the rules of competition. These advantages allow them to endure in power by winning consecutive elections for a generation or more.  Only with the erosion of these advantages do elections become more competitive, and the risk of ruling party defeat increases. Once dominant parties are defeated, subsequent partisan competition becomes much more even, and regular rotation in power becomes the norm.  Thus, one-party dominance is best thought of as a kind of temporary “adolescence” on the way to fully consolidated democracy.  

Speaker Bio:

Kharis Templeman received a BA (2002) from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in political science (2012) from the University of Michigan. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.  As a graduate student, he worked in Taipei at the Election Study Center, National Cheng Chi University, and later was a dissertation research fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.  His dissertation examined the development of Taiwan’s competitive party system from a comparative perspective, including a large study of the origins and decline of dominant party systems around the world over the last 60 years.

Current research interests include democratization, party system development in newly-contested regimes, and political institutions, with a regional focus on the new and transitioning democracies of Pacific Asia.  He is currently a regional manager for the Varieties of Democracy project.  Other ongoing collaborations include research on constitutional design for divided societies, on the arms-allies tradeoff in client states, and on intra-tribal voting coordination in elections in Jordan.

On March 14-15, the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, held a workshop on electoral system alternatives in the United States. The workshop brought together a number of scholars of American electoral institutions, practitioners working to implement electoral reforms, and experts on electoral systems reforms in advanced democracies. The workshop examined how different electoral systems options have worked in other countries, and what the implications of similar reforms might be in the United States.

Among other things, the workshop asked:

• How might plurality elections in single-member districts in the United States skew democratic outcomes? Is there a relationship between the electoral system and the problems we see today, such as ideological and political polarization?
• What lessons might be drawn from reforms in other countries? Examples include the single-transferable vote (STV) in Ireland, the alternative vote (AV) in Australia, and mixed-member systems in Italy, Japan, and New Zealand;
• How might we go about reforming American electoral systems -- through local, state, or federal means, and through engagement with which types of political and civil service actors?
• How has ranked-choice voting (RCV) worked in local experiments in the United States, including in Minneapolis, MN; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; and Cambridge, MA?
• How might electoral systems reforms interact with other proposed political reforms in the United States, including the National Popular Vote for the Electoral College, top-four primaries, and the adoption of redistricting commissions? 

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