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Intrinsic Motivation in Party Politics : Explaining the full range of political behavior

The proliferation of new parties since the 1960’s poses a challenge to established models of party behavior: too often, too many parties lose in elections. This seemingly nonstrategic behavior contributes to lively democratic societies, but is poorly understood by existing theories on political parties. This dissertation argues that insights from Self-Determination Theory can augment existing rational choice models of political behavior, and makes three specific contributions to better understanding the full range of political behavior. The first contribution shows that the empirical literature on the strategic entry of new parties is based on biased data, and that many findings from the strategic entry literature are likely driven by voter behavior rather than party behavior. The contribution argues that by excluding small and unsuccessful parties, the existing literature is based on data that systematically excludes observations that would contradict the strategic entry hypothesis. Once appropriate statistical models are applied to unbiased data, no support for strategic party entry is found. The second contribution uses an email experiment to observe whether successful and unsuccessful direct candidates have different sensitivities to extrinsic incentives. The experiment finds that unsuccessful candidates reply less often, but that – in contrast to successful candidates – they do not discriminate between responses that promise extrinsic benefits and those that do not. These findings are explained with the framework of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from Self-Determination Theory. According to this framework, intrinsic motivation is lost in more competitive environments. Thus, the discriminating behavior of successful candidates is explained by lower levels of intrinsic motivation. The third contribution examines whether the framework of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can help to understand party survival. Here, it is argued that party formation is a product of intrinsic motivation, but that once a party receives enough votes to win extrinsic benefit, intrinsic motivation is crowded out. Hence, such parties will only survive if extrinsic motivation can compensate for this loss. The analysis shows that the lifespan of parties that won enough votes to receive public party financing heavily depends on electoral success, while the survival of parties that have never received public financing depends much less on electoral success. The presented research suggests that, similar to the paradox of voting, there is a paradox of candidacy. It is argued that the intrinsic–extrinsic motivation framework can help to resolve this paradox and that the crowding-out effect represents a particularly interesting addition to existing theories.