Vote oscillation across election levels reveals a party’s cadre deficiencies.

Evidence

When the total vote for a particular party oscillates between apparently strange and arbitrary maximums and minimums in successive elections, whether at the same level or at different levels (for instance, in pre-Hitler Germany, elections for the President of the Republic, for the Reichstag, for the diets of the Lander, for the communal councils, and so on right down to the factory committees), it may be deduced that that party’s cadres are inadequate both in quantity and quality, or else in quantity though not in quality (relatively), or else in quality though not in quantity. A party which wins a lot of votes in local elections, but fewer in those of greater political importance, is certainly qualitatively deficient in its central leadership: it possesses numerous, or at any rate sufficient, junior cadres, but not a General Staff adequate for that country and its position in the world, etc. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 786

Categorization

• QUESTION: This diagnostic method — reading vote fluctuation across levels as a symptom of cadre quality — is a testable analytical tool worth carrying into other political analyses.
• XREF: connects to: Party centralization backfires unless elites have skill responding to voters — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 414