The works reviewed here both highlight the extent to which the strategic actions of political parties attenuate the ability of the electorate to hold parties in power accountable for their performance. The essays in the volume edited by José María Maravall and Ignatio Sánchez-Cuenca address this question directly, exploring political, ideological, and institutional limitations on retrospective voting. Bonnie Meguid's book takes a more detailed view of a narrower but related topic: How does cooperation or collusion among mainstream parties influence the electoral fortunes of single-issue fringe parties? She demonstrates that by manipulating the range of electoral options available to voters, mainstream parties can preserve their electoral dominance while reducing the ability of voters to affect the political agenda.

The Maravall and Sánchez-Cuenca volume takes a broad look at the question of democratic accountability. The editors rightly criticize the disconnect between much formal theory and empirical research. While analyzing this issue of accountability from a variety of perspectives, including voting behavior, party structure, and constitutional design, all the chapters share a laudable commitment to mesh theoretical argument with empirical evidence. The chapters are refreshingly eclectic in their theoretical approach, blending retrospective, spatial, and sociological theories of voting in thoughtful and productive ways.

The first empirical chapter, by Belén Barreiro, uses cross-national data to show that voters in democracies do hold incumbents accountable through retrospective voting. The next chapter, by Sánchez-Cuenca, asks how this could be the case if voters voted ideologically. He posits and demonstrates that ideological voting will decay in response to inconsistency and incompetence on the part of an incumbent party. This loosening of the ideological constraint permits sufficient retrospective voting to hold incumbents to account. Marta Fraile echoes this point with an analysis of the informational demands of ideological and retrospective voting. Ideological voting makes fewer cognitive demands than is often assumed, while retrospective voting can entail highly complex calculations of attribution of responsibility. Sonia Alonso and Paloma Aguillar follow up with chapters on ethnic and nationalist voting. Ethnic parties are held accountable for economic performance when they govern alone, but appear to escape responsibility when governing in coalitions. In the Spanish autonomous regions, nationalist parties are held accountable primarily for the performance of the regional government, while national parties are punished on the regional level both for poor performance at the regional level, and for poor performance at the national level. Taken together, these chapters paint a picture of incumbent accountability that may be attenuated by ideological and sociological considerations, but is always present.

Turning more explicitly to the role of political structure, the chapter by Maravall examines the role of internal party democracy, while Alberto Penadés explores the selection of electoral laws, and Alicia Asderà and Carles Boix look at the durability of constitutional structures. Maravall argues that internal party democracy is a two-edged sword, as activist party members help the electorate to monitor the performance of the incumbent, while also weakening the ability of that incumbent party to operate effectively. Demonstrating the continued relevance of Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy, internal transparency may aid accountability in the short run, but in the long term, it will undermine party effectiveness and ultimately undercut the responsible party model. Asderà and Boix examine the impact of constitutional structures on democratic stability, and find that income inequality and social polarization are far stronger determinants of stability than are constitutional structures. Institutions thus matter … but only sometimes. Penadés takes electoral law as the dependent variable, and examines the strategic considerations behind the choice of an electoral law. Here, we see the impact of partisan strategies on the choice set presented to voters, a theme that is also at the core of Meguid's Party Competition between Unequals.

Narrow in focus, Meguid's book examines the interplay between the strategic choices of established “mainstream” political parties and the electoral fortunes of single-issue “fringe” parties. The topic is both fascinating and familiar to anyone who has followed the fortunes of the French National Front, and the example of the National Front looms large over this work. Meguid does an excellent job constructing a theoretical account that applies both beyond France and to party families other than the Far Right/xenophobic family of the FNF. Using a model of party strategy based on manipulation of issue position, salience, and ownership (PSO), she demonstrates that the strategic choices of mainstream parties influence the electoral fortunes of single-issue parties from the regionalist, ecological, and far right party families.

Meguid first examines the limitations of institutional and sociological accounts of fringe party success, and faults these approaches for their failure to examine the strategic choices of mainstream parties. She proposes her PSO model of party interaction as an explanation for the interaction of mainstream and fringe parties. In Meguid's model, parties compete by manipulating not only their positions on issues, but the salience of the issues and issue ownership as well. The PSO model presents a set of tactical choices that correspond to one of three strategic responses to fringe parties. Mainstream parties may accommodate the fringe party, and in so doing, attempt to steal ownership of the new issue, or they may dismiss the concerns of that party, and lower the salience of the issue. Both of these approaches tend to reduce the vote share of the fringe party. A third option, staking out an adversarial position vis-à-vis the new party, serves to increase the salience of the issue, while reinforcing the fringe party's ownership of the issue. The result is an increase in fringe party vote share. Crucially, the impact of these strategies depends on the combination of strategies employed by the two major parties. For example, if both parties employ a dismissive strategy, the fringe party is expected to fare poorly. However, if one mainstream party employs a dismissive strategy, while the other employs an adversarial strategy, the fringe party will gain votes.

Complementing her model of fringe party support, which identifies both mainstream parties as relevant actors, is a model, presented in chapter 4, which explains the strategic choices of mainstream parties. She argues that these parties do not seek to maximize absolute vote share per se. Instead, they seek to maximize their electoral margin over their primary competitor, subject to the constraints of organizational and reputational costs.

A variety of evidence is presented supporting the PSO theory. A cross-national analysis of some thirty niche parties over 120 national elections demonstrates the relative importance of mainstream party strategy. Compared to standard institutional and sociological models, the strategic mixes derived from PSO predict fairly well. Detailed case studies of mainstream party response to the UK Green Party, the French National Front, and the Scottish National Party help illustrate the author's argument.

Notwithstanding the overall quality of this book, there are a few theoretical and empirical gaps that must be mentioned. Meguid's theoretical model makes frequent reference to the shortcomings of conventional models of party strategy based on the proximity of voting behavior. It is less clear how her argument differs from other spatial theories of voting behavior, in particular from directional theory. (Directional theory does not even appear in the index.) While citing some of the foundational work on directional theory, the author does not explain how manipulation of issue salience under the PSO theory differs from a change in the intensity of a party's position under directional theory, or how her conception of issue ownership differs from extreme intensity of preference under the directional model. Likewise, an accommodative strategy under the PSO model could be recast as a shift outward of the “region of acceptability” with the same result—fringe party vote gain. By failing to contrast the PSO theory with a model of party behavior derived from directional theory, the author leaves open the question of the novelty of the proposed PSO approach.

PSO also seems to be a theory with a very restrictive domain. It is presented as a theory that explains only the effects of mainstream party responses to single-issue fringe parties. While the theory does seem to work well in this application, it is not clear what other political phenomena PSO could elucidate. There is also the assumption that political systems are dominated by competition between a large center left party and a large center right party. This works well for the UK and France, but perhaps less so in more extreme multiparty systems. The book is also silent on the strategic choices of fringe parties. These parties appear only as the objects of major party strategizing, and not as actors in their own right.

While the book is strengthened by its broad coverage of green, far right, and ethno-linguistic parties, these party families may face very different strategic environments. For example, the potential for mainstream parties to portray a fringe party as a morally unacceptable political partner varies greatly across party families. Far right parties are more subject to demonization (or outright proscription), which is a less useful tactic with respect to green parties. It is no accident that in chapter 3, the author finds that pure adversarial tactics are never applied to green parties.

These caveats aside, Party Competition between Unequals provides a very important corrective by forcing readers to consider the electoral fortunes of political parties within the strategic context of national party systems. The student of politics must never lose sight of the fundamental reality that politics is a strategic game of multiple players. These strategic choices affect the ability of voters to hold their leaders accountable by altering the balance of ideological and retrospective considerations, by restricting the choice set, and even by dictating the structure of electoral systems themselves.