Political Parties and Party Systems (Cap VII)

7/31/2019 Political Parties and Party Systems (Cap VII)

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ST ABI L I TY AND CHANGE

IN P ARTY SYSTEMS

\ n obvious, though some times over look ed, point about par ty sys tems is how[urable they are. Of the twenty-t hree esta blished , independent liberal dem ocra-ies in the late 1950s, on ly f our had a radical ly diff erent part y system thirt y years1ter at the end of the 1980s: I

Belgium (where a two-and-a-half party sys tem had transformed into frag-mented multipartis m);

France (w here po larize d multipartism had been replaced by a mo re moder-ate m ult ipartis m);

India (where the previously p redominant Congress Party had lost that posi-tion);

Israel (where consolidati on of the right-wing parties in Likud t ransf ormedthe dynamics o f the multip arty sys tem).

lere were three other count ries where less radical changes in the party sys temre evident. In Norway a nd Denmark the declining vote of, respectively , the')our and Soc ial Democra tic par ties had altered the pos ition of the previously1stp ower ful party in the system . In addition, the Liberal Par ty in No rway a ndRadi cals in Denmark had experienced long-term decline. The third country

; Iceland wh ere the basic configur ation of the parties persisted, but wh ere a tvery end of the 1960s the party sys tem b ecame far more prone to electoral1tilit y and to the entry o f new parties. Howeve r, the overw helmin g impr es-1, at leas t when first glancin g at this list of count ries, is one of continuit y in;t p arty sys tems.


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1. Volatility and Realignment

STABILITY AND CHANGE IN PARTY SYSTEMS 215

Italy) were becoming less so. The most notable feature of his findings was the lack of an overall trend .

This conclusion suggests caution should also be exercised in considering theexperience of the early 1990s when once again a number of countries have seensignificant shifts in support for parties:

Sweden, where the 1991 general election produced a major de cline in theshare of the vote (5 .5 per cent of the total) for the governing Social

Democrats. Belgium, where greatly increased support in 1991 for the right-wing

Flemish Bloc, combined with continuing party fragmentation, indicated

that a form of polarized multipartism might be developing.

Italy, where the 1992 election saw significant gains made by the separatistNorthern League, and where subsequently the collapse of ChristianDemocracy and the Socialists prompted a major upheaval in the party sys-tem in 1994. (The 1994 election saw parties organized into three main elec-toral alliances, with the centre alliance that included the successor party tothe DC being squeezed between the left and right blocs of parties.)

France, where electoral support for the ruling Socialist Party collapsed in

the 1993 Assembly elections, prompting speculation of a fundamentalrea lignment in that country.

Japan, where the 1993 election ended the rule of the LDP and where theelectoral reforms of the new non-lDP government indicated that one-party

dominance might never be restored.

Canada, where the ruling Conservative Party retained only two parliamen -tary seats in the 1993 election when two new parties (the Bloc Quebecoisand Reform) became the second and third largest parties in the system.

Austria, where the right-wing Freedom Party took an unprecedented 22 percen t of the vote in the 1994 general election.

Again st this evidence of massive shifts in electoral support could be placed the

evid ence of elections in countries such as Denmark, Britain, Greece, and Norwaywhich very much suggested 'politics as usual', and even the post-reunificationelect ion in Germany did not suggest that an overturning of the party system inthe FRG was imminent . While electoral volatility in the 1990s may be affecting

even m ore countries than in the 1970s, there is no evidence of its being a univer-sal ph enomenon. Furthermore, one of the countries that seemed to be experi-enci ng party system change at the beginning of the 1990s, Sweden, reverted to anolde r pattern of voter support in 1994 when the Social Democrats recovered their'lost ' voters and were able to form a minority government after the general elec-tion.

214 PARTY SYSTEMS

When speaking of continuity, it must be emphasized just how much countries

vary in the propensity of parties to split (and re-fuse) and of new parties todevelop. Yet our concern is not with short- or medium-term 'adjustments' to a

party system, but with shifts in relations between parties that are so fundamen-

tal that the dynamics of the system become very different.Now the impression of continuity in most party systems might seem paradox-

ical-after all, from the mid-1970s onwards, many political commentators werearguing that mass electorates were becoming more volatile in their behaviour.

How do we square this with the idea of stability in most party systems?In fact, there are two different sets of questions that need to be distinguished.

(1) Is it actually the case that electorates have become more volatile? Is it morelikely now than it used to be that a person who voted for party x at the last

election will vote for a different party at this election?(2) To the extent that there is volatility, do voters turn mainly to new parties,

or do they switch their vote to parties that are fairly similar to the one they

are leaving, or do they switch to old parties that are very different to the

one they are leaving?

We examine these two issues in turn.

Electoral volatility

The argument that mass electorates were more volatile than they had been gainedconsiderable force in the mid-1970s from the coincidence of several events,

including:

the huge increase in support for the British Liberals in the 1974 elections;

the sudden rise of the Progress Party in Denmark in 1973; the decline of party identification in the United States after the mid-1960s,

and the outcome of the 1972 election that produced a Republican landslide

in the presidential election with safe Democratic majorities in the Congress.

Yet at the end of that seemingly turbulent decade Pedersen analysed Europeanelections since the Second World War and could find no overall pattern of party

system change. 2 Two countries (France and Germany) had experienced highvolatility between elections earlier on but had become much less volatile, whileDenmark and Norway had moved in the opposite direction. Among the otherstates there was less variation from one election to another, and of these coun-tries some (Switzerland, Britain, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands) werebecoming somewhat more volatile while others (Austria, Belgium, Ireland, and


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Political realignment?

While there appears to be no universal trend towards greater electoral volatility ,it is true that there have been elections in established liberal democracies thathave featured a large amount of vote switching. For example, 40 per cent of thosewho voted in the 1971 Danish election voted for another party in the 1973elec-tion. This kind of behaviour might indicate that a massive transformation in a

party system is possible when, for whatever reasons, voters become disillusionedwith the party they supported previously. However, the evidence suggeststhat theconnection between electoral volatility and long-term change in a party systemis not at all straightforward.

First, note that in the 1973 election only 3 out of the 40 per cent of electoral'switchers' changed to an 'old' party that was very different from the one theywere leaving-for example, social democrats switching to a non-socialist party.Nine per cent of voters moved to 'similar' parties while 27 per cent voted for new,minor parties. Then again Mair has noted that not only are 'old' parties contin-uing to receive a relatively large percentage of the vote of a now much larger elec-torate, but they are also polling substantially more votes than they used to. 3 This

suggests at least one imp 'ortant source of continuing stability in party systems.But what of the new parties? The behaviour of voters in Denmark in 1973

might suggest that, infrequent though they are, when electoral upheavals occur,they can transform a party system. The Danish case is an instructive one to exam-ine because there are relatively few barriers to the formation of a new party inDenmark, and party splits and subsequent re-fusing are quite common; in thisregard it differs from Britain, where the electoral system, amongst other factors,works against the establishment of new parties . In fact, in the long term theDanish party system seems to have changed remarkably little despite the 1973election. Consider the data in Table 7.1 which shows the share of the voteobtained by the parties in the 1971and 1990general elections (excluding partiesthat did not get more than 2 per cent of the vote in either election) .

The percentage of the vote obtained by four of the five largest parties is virtu-ally the same in 1990 as in 1971-between them in 1971 they received 78.7 percent of the total, in 1990 77 .5 per cent. The main difference between the two yearsliesin the dramatic decline in support for the Radical Liberal Party and the emer-gence of the Progress Party and the Centre Democrats who, between them, in1990obtained about the same proportion of the vote as the Radical Liberals hadlost. For all the turbulence associated with the 1973 election, its long-termimpact on the Danish party system cannot be said to have been that great. Therehas been change-it would surely be extraordinary if there had not been any-but it is rather modest change. If the Danish example suggests anything, it is thedurability of party systems even when circumstances generate high electoral

Table 7.1. The percentage of the popular voteobtained by each of the parties in the Danish generalelections of 1971 and 1990

Social DemocratsConservative People's Party

LiberalsSocialist People's PartyProgress PartyCentre DemocratsRadical Liberal PartyChristian People's Party

37.316.7

15.69.1

14 .4

1.9

37.416.0

15.88.36.45.13.52 . 3

volatility at a particular time. It confirms the conclusion that change in party sys-tems, at least major change, is not that common.

The rest ofthis chapter examines the sources of stability and of change in partysystems. It does so by looking at three factors:

(1) Political institutions: this is the shortest section, as a number of the argu-ments have been introduced already (in Chapter 6).

(2) The composition of the electorate.(3) Social cleavages, political values, and issues: this is the longest section and it

examines a number of different kinds of change in party systems.

In general, the institutional structures facing political parties change only very

slowly.Major change is most likely to occur when a liberal democratic state hascollapsed. The breakdown of democracy may well lead to institutional 'engineer-ing' when democracy is restored-'engineering' designed to prevent the subse-quent collapse of the regime . The instability of democracy in South America hasproduced many attempts at this, though in Europe too there have been a num-ber of instances of regime rebuilding: Austria, the FRG, and Italy (after the col-lap se of dictatorship in the Second World War), France (in 1958), Greece (in1974 after the collapse of the military regimes established in 1967), Portugal (in1974 -6), and Spain (in 1977).4In the Austrian and German casesthe new polit-ica l structures were designed to give a central role to parties in governing; and inthe other countries too the institutions of the new regimes all had the effect of stre ngthening parties as links between government and mass electorates.


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In 1989 the PASOK government in Greece adopted PR in a successful effortto prevent its opponents from winning an overall parliamentary majority inthe two general elections that year .

In general, though, modifications to PR systems tend to follow changes in thenumber of parties, rather than being the cause of a rise or fall in the number of

parties. Research has shown that changes to more proportional electoral rulesoccur after the number of parties has already started to increase; similarly theadoption of rules that are less proportional tends to have taken place after thenumber of parties has started to decrease. s This suggests two conclusions about

the connection between electoral systems and party systems in long-establisheddemocracies. Radical changes of electoral rules are uncommon; and less radical

changes in electoral rules seem to be not the causes of changes in party systemsbut, at most, factors which extend changes that are happening already .

The New Zealand experience is wholly exceptional but is worth mentioning

because it exposes the role that chance can sometimes play in institutionalreform. The adoption of a German-style Additional Member form ofPR in 1993was the culmination of a process that had begun a few years earlier when the thenPrime Minister misread a cue card during a television broadcast! He promised a

referendum on the electoral system-a referendum that neither of the two largeparties wanted . Given the Labour and National parties' dominance in the legis-lature under plurality voting, they could have resisted parliamentary pressure to

adopt PR, under which smaller parties will secure much greater representationthereby preventing the re-emergence of single-party majority governments.

I n addition to the electoral system, there is a whole range of practices and ruleswhich could be modified in an effort to weaken opposition parties. For example,patronage positions in government might be abolished, or the powers of localgover nments might be reduced if these are strongholds of opposition power . Butsuch reforms may not produce the transformation of the party system that might

be expected: other strategies may be open to the parties adversely affected by

them, which modify or counteract the effects of the reforms. In Britain in the1980s the removal of many powers from local governments and the reform of

laws governing trade unions by the Conservative government all served toweaken sources of continuing power for the Labour Party. But the effect on theparty system was modified by the Labour Party's response in the form of revising

its policies and emphasizing moves towards a fully membership-based party;these were arguments that developed more quickly within the party than wouldhave been possible if Labour's organizational base had not been attacked sodirect ly by its opponents. One result of this response was to reduce the possibil-ity of a predominant party system emerging in Britain in the long term.

To summarize: the persistence of institutions, and the ability of parties tocoun teract institutional reform, limit party system change . This does not negate

The net effect of this institutional 'engineering' on the party systems has beento increase the power oflarge parties. With the exception ofItaly, all t hese coun-

tries avoided a high level of party fragmentation:

France established moderate pluralism (with four major party gro upings, at

least until the mid-1980s); with the exception of 1987, Portugal had only four significant parties at each

election; Austria and the FRG dev eloped two-and-a-half party systems;

Greece moved towards a two-party system, and Spain towards a multipartysystem with a single large party (the Socia lists).

Even in Italy, the opportunities for the parties to 'colonize' various state andquasi-state bureaucracies strengthened the position of the largest parties

(especially the DC, the Socialists, and the Communists), preventing a sti ll morefragmented party system from developing. In Austria the use of a proporz systemof appointment (appointing officials to state and quasi-state boards and so on,on the basis of balancing appointments between the parties) helped both tosustain the dominance of the two main parties and to prevent a return to the vir-

tual civil war between the sub-cultures that had been a feature of politics in the

1920s.Nevertheless, major institutional 'engineering' is uncommon, except when a

new regime is being established; frequent changes of the rules of the game wouldbe likely to undermine mass and elite commitment to the liberal democraticregime. The apparent losers from the new rules would be much more tempted toresort to unconstitutional means to restore their lost power, thereby threatening

the regime's stability. For similar reasons, even changing the electoral system inorder to reduce the possibility of electoral defeat is not common; political oppo-nents would be tempted to engage in yet more institutional manipulation oncethey were returned to office . However, there are some instances in recent decadesof this form of 'engineering'.

The government of the Canadian province of British Columbia introducedthe Alternative Vote system in the early 1950s in a successful attempt to keep

the social democratic party (the CCF) from winning provincial elections. In 1951 the French government modified the PR system to reduce the num-

ber of seats that the anti-regime Communists and Gaullists would win. The French Socialist government introduced legislation before the 1986

National Assembly elections to substitute a party list form ofPR for the two-ballot electoral system; this failed to prevent their opponents from winninga majority (though it did reduce the number of seats lost by the SocialistParty), and subsequently the centre-right government reintroduce d the oldelectora l system.


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3. The Composition of the Electorate

STABIL ITY AND CHANGE IN PARTY SYSTEMS 221

government . Howe ver, by comparison with other contemporary liberal d emo-cracies, Israel continued to be a country of high immigration-its population

rising from 716,000 in 1948 to 3.1 million by 1972. Increasingly, its immigrants

were Jews from North Africa and the Middle East who shared few of the experi-ences of European social democracy that had influenced many of the state' s

founders. These groups could be mobili zed by the right -wing parties (which coa-

lesced first to form the Gahal Alliance and th en as the Likud list).6 By the m id-

1970s Likud could obtain well over 30 per cent of the vot e, making it a party of equal size to the Labour Party. From that time until the election of 1992 when

Likud fared disastrously, Labour was either out of office entir ely or was involvedin a power-sharing arrangement with Likud . Undoubtedly, the highly propor-

tional electoral system in Isra el contributed to the speed of the impact of immi-

gration on the party system, but the sheer scale of the change in populationwould probably have brought about a new party system irrespective of the elec-toral rules used .

Secondly, immigration can facilitate conflict within societies, especially duringtimes of r elatively high unemployment . (This raises issues about the impact of social cleavage change which we examine in a later section, but it is useful to con-

sider the issue also in this context .) Immigrants may be perceived by longer-established residents as 'taking jobs away' from them. This becomes the source of

social division when newcomers are readily distinguishable from others becauseof their skin colour, religion, language, or customs: wh ite Australians in Earl'sCourt are much less lik ely to be targeted by a white English person as the cause

of his or her failure to find a job than are those of Afro-Caribbean or South Asian

origin. When existing parties do not respond to the backlash against immigrantsby embracing the racial politics of the longer-established groups, new parties canarise to develop this cleavage .

In the last two decades many European countries have experienced these kindsof social tensions-involving immigrants from North Africa (in SouthernEurope), from East and South-Eastern Europe (in Germany and elsewhere in

Northern Europe), and from ex-British colonies (Britain). Examples of the effecton party development are the rise of the National Front in France (in the mid-

1980s) and that of the far-right parties in Germany since unification in 1990. But

onl y in France, and to some extent in Italy, has the scale of voter support so farprompted a partial transformation of the party system itself. Much earlier, in the1970s, the British National Front had enjoyed increased electoral support, draw-ing on white opposition to racial minorities, but it never came close to winningany par liamentary seats.

America too had its 'nativist' movements, from about 1840 to the 1920s,in reaction to the mass immigration to the country by non-Protestants. Forexample, the revival of the Ku -Klux -Klan in the early twentieth century was not

220 PAR T Y SYSTEMS

the arguments developed in Chapter 6 about the role of institutions in shapingparty systems. Nor does it involve denying that party leaders can and do try to'develop' political cleavages . But it does suggest that once they have been formed,

party systems tend to be preserved by the institutional context in which they were

formed.

There are three main ways in which the electorate of a state can change from one

election to another:

migration to and from the state; territorial changes in the state, with new lands being added or existing lands

being ceded to other states or being granted independence;

the death of some voters and the coming of age of others.

All three of these ways in which the composition of an electorate may change

could possibly help to transform a party system. We examine in turn the likeli-

hood of each of them actually doing so.

Migration

One of the measures of the strength of political parties is their ability to accom-modate new citizens, and their particular interests, so that these people do not

look to forming new parties to protect those interests. For example, in the UnitedStates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Democratic and

Republican parties organized and mobilized vast numbers of immigrants(mostly non-English speakers from Central and Southern Europe). Similarly, in

both Australia and Canada in the years since 1945 the existing parties have beenable to bring into the political process new migrants without disruption (or, atleast, direct disruption) to the existing party system .

Nevertheless, that in many cases migration has relatively little impact on theparty system overall should not lead us to conclude that party systems are always

immune from its effects. In particular, two outcomes deserve attention.First, despite the American experience, large-scale immigration (in relation to

the size of the existing population) can transform a party system especially whenthe culture of the newcomers is significantly different from that of older resi-dents. The clearest example of this in contemporary democracies is Israel . The

Israeli state was founded in the 1940s by Jewish emigres and refugees fromEurope, many of whom had been active in socialist parties in their countries of origin. For more than twenty years this facilitated Labour Party dominance of


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Territorial chang e

Only occas ionally do liberal democrat ic states ad d or shed territory, and rela-

tively small boundary adjustment s are lik ely to have littl e effect o n a party syste m.But large r shif ts of territory may do so, so that it is wor th while considering both

actual occurren ces an d potential ones.Of the twen ty-three long- standin g libera l democraci es me ntioned at the

beginning of thi s chapter, two (Br itain and Ger many) have e xper ienced ma jor

changes o f territo ry s ince 191 8:

Br ita in. The non-particip ation of United Ireland Party MPs in the

Wes tmin ster Par liament ' after 1918 and subsequent Irish indepen dence changedthe balance in th e British party sys tem. With over e ighty MPs t he Natio nalistssometimes held the balance of power betwee n Liberals and Conserva tives in theyears 1886-1918. Their removal from Westmin ster i n 1921 h elped to fac ilitatethe emergence o f two- partism in the British P arliament by the 1930s .

Ge rman y. As was no ted in Chapter 6, the boundar ies of the new G erm an state

in 1949 resulted in a polity in which Catholic s were a far m ore impo rtant minor-ity than they had been pre viously. In turn , this prov ided favo urable conditi onsfor the form ation of a 'Chr istian' party that embr aced b oth Catholic s andProtestants. The party system th at emerg ed was dif f erent from the one thatwould have dev eloped had the Wester n all ies and the Soviet Union reach ed thekind of deal ab out a neutral Germany that th ey we re to reach later ove r Austria.

With r eunificati on in 1990, the potential for some change in the FRG party sys-tem was open ed up because the new vo ters had rather diff erent values from th osein We stern Germany, and l ived in an economically back ward reg ion. This is an

issu e explored furth er in Secti on B.

The end of Communi st rule in Eas tern Eur ope has led to the crea tion of som estates supposedl y base d on relati vely small, ethni cally distinct populat ions-inthe Baltic stat es, for exampl e, and in the Cze ch Republic and Slovakia. (In fact,the situ ation is f ar mor e compl ex than this. M ost of the new sma ll states still con -tain quite large ethni c minoriti es.) However , the emergenc e of new, small statesmay al so act as a c atalyst for p articular territories in ethni cally divided societiesin the older libera l democraci es and increa se demands for ind ependence.

STABILITY AND CHAN G E IN PARTY SYSTEMS 223

At the mom ent, the st ate seemingl y mo st in danger of 'breaking up' is C anada,and thi s example illustrat es well ho w the loss of terr itory could ch ange a part ysystem r adically. Gener ally, the governin g part y in Canada has enjoyed strong

electoral and elite support in both of th e largest provinces, Ontari o and Qu ebec.In 1993, ho wever, the separatist-in clined Bloc Queb ecois secured a m a jority of f ederal parli amentary seat s in Quebec . Independenc e f or Quebec w ould com-pletely change party strategies for coaliti on building in th e remainder of Canada;

it is quite possible that a complex form o f multipartism , based partly on r egionalpar ties, could emerge in pl ace of the two -and- a-half p arty system o f the presentday. Cert ainly, the remo val of Quebe c would change the d ynamic s of the part ysystem, a ssumin g that th e rest of Canad a remained as one coun try-an assump-tion that itself might w ell be questioned.

222 PART Y SYSTEMS

prim arily in its earlier anti-Bla ck guise, but as an anti-immi gra nt, anti- Catholicbod y. The Klan en joyed elect oral success at t he state leve l-includin g at one

point winning th e governorsh ip of Co lorad o-but th e structure of Am erican

political instituti ons worked aga inst its bec omin g a national political party. Inrecent decades t oo there has b een a 'nativist' reaction again st i llega l immi grationby Latin os from var ious countr ies in Central and South Am erica, but th e direct

effe cts of this on the party system so far a re still rather small.

So far we ha ve been c onsid ering rathe r unusual change s in the voting populationof a s tate . But all states e xperience chang e between elections through the d eath of

some voter s and the coming to vot ing age o f younger people . Consid erably more

than half of the voters wh o can vote in an election today could not ha ve done sothirt y years ago-they would have been too young or they had not been born .Yet, as was ob served at the b eginning of the chapter , comp aratively f ew part y sys-tem s changed in the period between th e late 1950s and lat e 1980 s. Indeed, thepoint can be made more br oadly than th at -the par t y sys tems in m any demo-

crac ies are remarkably similar to those that developed in the 1920s following th eera of democrati zation. But very few of the voters from that decade were ali ve atthe en d of the 1980s . So wh y was it that old parties survived the los s of their orig-inal voters and did not lo se out to new p arties ?

One answer to this is th at in some countri es, starting up a new part y has beenextr emely difficult-simply b ecause the rule s of the elector al game hav e made ithard t o achiev e an electoral breakthrough. The threshold to gaining po wer is toohigh. Obviously, this argument has for ce in relation to the United States, or

Britain , bu t i t is less plau sible in countri es w hich have hi ghly proportion al elec-toral sys tems (such as the Netherland s). Yet even in the se countrie s large partiessurvi ve. More significant is the dual connection-betw een parti es and exi stingvoter s, and between the latter and their children. To und erstand this we shouldreturn t o the distinction between the three kinds of way s in which people can belinked to political partie s (introduced in Chapter 6 ).

In general, the era of democrati zation saw a weak ening of m aterial linksbetween superiors and infe riors within social h ierarchies . Instead , building upreliable support for a p arty depended on exploiting social solidarity or on devel-Oping emotional attachments to parties that were like the attachments that many


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STABI LITY AND CHANGE IN PARTY SYSTEMS 225

likely that they would not actua lly vote for 'their' par ty. Their identity with their

respective parties involved a much looser kind of relationship than their grand-parents had had with political par ties.

The activities of the parties themse lves served to weaken the link between voter

and party. In the ear ly twentieth cent ury their social and recreational activitiesbrought toget her voters and foste red a sense of community within the party. Asnoted in C hapter 2, increased aff luence, and the availability of entertainments

that could be enjoyed on an indiv idua l basis, red uced the attraction of parties ascentres of social life. They could no longer match the a lternative recreations

ava ilable elsewhere.The net resu lt o f all this was to weaken social solidarity as a link between voter

and party. In its p lace, image, personality, and issues increasingly became the

means by which a party cou ld attract voters to itse lf. To the extent that this sup-planted social so lidarity, it made support for a party 'performance re lated'-avot e wo uld be conditional on the image, personality, or issue correspon ding as

far as possible to what the voter wanted. Of course, to some extent what someonein one generation wants is learnt from previous generations through socializa-tion experie nces within the fami ly. But outside inf luences are more like ly to

interrupt the transmission of wa nts than they are the transmission of identities-whether they be identities with sports teams or parties. Thus, in general, it would

seem th at par ties now would have a more tenuous link to their supporte rs thanthey used to. But does this mean t hat party systems are now more likely tochange? A nd, if it does, how are we to explain the stabi lity seemingly evident in

most party systems from the late 1950s until (at least) the 1980s? These are ques-tions that can be addressed as we turn to examine soc ial cleavages, po litica l val-ues, and issues.

people had to a particular social group. In other words, it was the social solidar-ity link that provided the best means of tying voters to a party. In some cases-aswith most Soc ialist and Catho lic parties-the polit ical party grew o ut of a

broader socia l movement, orga nization, or set of attachments. You expressed sol-idarity with fel low members of the working class by joining the union, takingindustr ial action when necessary, and identifying with, and voting for, t he socia l-

ist party. In other cases itwas less specific attachments-to the nation, perhaps-which could stimulate loyalty to the party. You would demonstrate yo ur pride in

Britain, per haps, through your support for the Conservative Party. Sometimes just the need to identify with some institution in the society prompte d individ-uals to seek a connection with a party: this was evident in the United States as

much as anywhere, with identification with either of the parties being a means bywhich a person could express attachment to the American way of life and toAmerican institutions. It was the act of expressing an identity that was importan t

for such Americans; it could be identity with either the Democrats or theRepublicans, just as in baseball it could invo lve rooting for the New Yor k Yankeesor the Boston Red Sox, but in both spheres of life it was the fact that yo u had a'team' tha t signified you belonged in that society. In all these ways diffe rent par-

ties were able to create loyal electorates-voters who did not have to be convincedabout their party's policies or image, but who gave their support to t he partybecause it represented identities that they had of themselves.

These identities with particular parties were handed down from one genera-

tion to the next, even in families that were rather inactive in politics, except invoting. Children identified with their parents and took on their pare nts' identitywith a political party. To some extent, support for existing parties was se lf -sus-

taining; the parties themselves did not have to expend huge resources in makingcontact with new generations. Political socialization, particular ly throug h themedium of the family, did much of the job for the parties. That job was madeeasier to the extent that the party identity of the family was reinforced by the

same identity in the immediate neighbourhoods and in places of work .Often party identities survived changes in family lifestyles-upward ly mobile

working-class families, for example, might well transmit identification with asocialist party to their children. Obviously, though, socia l mobility was a key fac-tor tending to weaken these ties as children came into contact with other kinds

of identification in circums tances that their parents had not experienced.Furthermore, the breakdown of homogeneous communities-in w hich thedominant identity might be with , say, the working class or with a partic ular eth-nic group-did help to erode the strength of identity people had wit h the party'attached' to these identities. The working-class Briton of the 1960s m ight stillclaim to be a Labour identifier, and the Irish-Amer ican might st ill claim to be aDemocrat, bu t the dec lining importance of these i dentities made it i ncreas ingly

4. Social Cleavages, Po liti cal Values, and Issues

A usefu l starting-point for the analysis is an argument developed by Lipset andRokk an that we mentioned at the end of Chapter 6, Section A . Having provided

an explanation of how party systems deve loped, they then went on to suggest thatcleavag es, a nd hence voter alignments with parties, had become 'frozen'. The bal-~nce betwee n parties that had been established by about the 1920s persisted;Identi fication with a party was handed on from one generation to another . By the

mid -1960s-the time at which L ipset and Rokkan were writing-party systemsthus tended to ref lect social divis ions of fifty or so years earlier . There is much tobe said f or this analysis of the state of party systems. In the mid-1960s the majorpart y famili es-Comm unists, Socia lists, Christian Democrats, Liberals, and so


8/17


the old, frozen cleavages which underlay e xisting party systems might be weak-ened and transformations in party systems would be more possible.

One attraction of this type of account in the late 1960s was that it meshed wellwith the notion that in the post-war years ideology was declining in Western

political systems. Affluence, and change in socio-economic structures, whichmeant that manual workers were a declining element in Western societies, were

transforming the social world in which parties competed for power . Parties of the

left could no longer appeal to the working class to support them through theircommitment to socialist ideology; and any bourgeois parties which tried to woo

mass electorates on the basis of an ideological appeal to the free market would be

equally unsuccessful, since the experience of economic depression in the 1930shad undermined such a vision. If electorates were no longer as divided as they

had been, parties could try to appeal to as many different voters as possible bydiluting whatever ideological commitments they had. Moreover, as societiesbecame more secular, and as regional and ethnic divisions continued to decline,so this trend to 'catch-all' parties would become yet more evident. Power withinparties would pass to the leaderships who would use modern electronic techno-

logy to appeal directly to voters; party members would be largely irrelevant .

Parties would be teams of leaders seeking office for themselves; in doing so theywou ld develop whatever images and policy promises were necessary to maximizetheir chance of winning office.

This kind of 'loose' connection between voters and parties would provide forchange in party systems during the period of transformation from old -style to new-style parties. But, according to Epstein, if not Kirchheimer, European parties wouldbecome more like American parties, and in doing so the need for new parties wouldbe much reduced once the new system was in place. The reason for this is that these

new kinds of parties would be so adaptable that any failure to reach mass electorateswould result in the party changing its image and its policies; the enhanced ability of the parties to respond to what the electorate wanted would make it difficult for new

parties to gain a foothold. As in the United States, the very adaptability of the majorpart ies would mean that there was no opening for other parties.

This type of account of party system transformation rests on four assump-tion s:

on-were the families that had contested elections decades earlier. No new,

major types of party had developed in the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s. Clearly, thisprompted the question of what would happen to party systems in the future. It is

a question with which political scientists are still grappling and to which nosingle answer has commanded universal support .

Broadly speaking, three kinds of answer might be provided:

a gradual transformation of parties from representatives of conflicting

groups in society into teams of politicians who compete for power for them-selves and who must mobilize mass electorates to do so (parties as office-seekers). But these electorates will no longer be firmly divided intodistinctive social groups.

the development of new lines of division in society that will prompt anorganizational response in the form of new parties " or other structures, thatrepresent these interests (new cleavages and new parties).

existing cleavages will decline but not disappear completely, and new lines

of division may well emerge. Existing parties will survive and their leaderswill seek to 'develop' cleavages to obtain power (the persistence of parties).

The third answer differ ,s from the first in that it sees divisions of interest and iden-

tity persisting in societies, and forming the context in which parties must oper-ate. Unlike the second answer, however, the third one sees party leaders in

existing parties capable of adapting to mobilize new identities. We now examineeach of these answers in turn.

Parties as office-seekers

The idea that existing parties would have a different kind of relationship withmass electorates in the future than they had in the first half of the twentieth cen-tury was first mooted in two important interpretative works on political parties

written at about the same time as Lipset and Rokkan were concluding their study.One was an essay published in 1966 by Otto Kirchheimer, in which he introducedthe concept of the 'catch-all' party .? The other was Leon Epstein's book PoliticalParties in Western Democracies which was published the following year . 8 Quiteindependently, they reached broadly similar conclusions about the direction in

which parties were moving. Parties were no longer connected to loyal e lectorates

through appeals based on ideology made primarily through organizations associ-ated with the party . Instead, parties were now utilizing different methods of reach-

ing voters and were considerably widening their target. They were now looking toattract voters by whatever means they could and from whatever social groups theycould; this is the sense in which they were 'catch-all'. The change involved was anorganizational change, but its impact would be to make change in party systemspossible. If more parties were now 'casting their net' widely in the pursuit of votes,

the weakening of pre-existing cleavages in Western societies; the absence of new social cleavages around which parties could mobilize;

the reduced power of ideology in mobilizing mass electorates; the ability of parties to transform themselves organizationally, so that they

are able to implement 'catch-all' strategies.

In the li ght of experience since the mid-1960s all four assumptions are open tochall enge.


9/17


introduction to a reissued edition of Political Parties in Western Democracies, thathe might have overstated the likelytrends in Europe. 9 Correspondingly, there wasnot the major change in West European party systems that a full conversion to'catch -all' parties would have brought about.

Are existing social cleavages weakening? Certainly the decline of the class cleavageis evident in most countries as social structure has changed. Nevertheless, theweakening of classseems to have permitted even older cleavages(such as regionaland ethnic divisions) to re -emerge as foci of discontent about economic declineand so on. (Perhaps the most extreme instance of this was Belgium where lin-guistic divisions intensified as class receded in importance.) There has not been ageneral move towards homogeneous, non-divided societies. The particular expe-

rience of the years 1945-70 in which that social transformation did seem possi-ble can now be seen as an unusual one.

There is something to the argument of the 1960s that 'catch-all' parties were amodel for the future-but only 'something'. Bythe 1980sit was becoming clearthat these parties were nc.t the only model that could function in libera l demo-cracies. As was noted in Chapter 3, by 1980 Epstein himself recognized, in his

N ew cleavages and new parties

In the 1970s increasing attention was paid to the development of new kinds of values that were evident in advanced industrial societies. In a well-known studybased on survey data compiled at the beginning of the decade, Ronald Inglehartdrew a distinction between 'material' and 'post-material' values-the former pri-oritized economic and physical security, while the latter prioritized participationand freedom of speech. 1 0 This distinction captured important dimensions of political conflict in the 1960s-associated with opposition to the Vietnam war inthe United States (and elsewhere), with the student revolt in France in 1968, andso on-but it did not embrace all the sources of conflict that emerged in the1960sand 1970sand which seemed to fall outside traditional class, religious, lin-guis tic, and territorial cleavage patterns.

On the one hand, there was evidence of sources of division within Westernsocieti es that centred on 'material' values but which were not embraced by thetradit iona l classframework . In particular, conflict centred on the role of the statein providing for economic and social well-being. Societies, it was argued, werebecom ing divided between those wholly dependent on the private sector for theirlivelihoods and those who, directly or indirectly, depended on some form of stateinter vention for theirs. This cross-cut old-style class politics in that a significantminor ity of the middle class were either state employees, or relied on contractsawarded by the state, or were employed by firms that relied on grants or subsidiesfrom the state. Related to, though separable from, this source of division wasanoth er one-between those for whom there was no alternative to the welfarestate if their needs were to be met and those who would be able to meet some of their n eeds through private provision.

On th e other hand, there was evidence of new social movements mobilizingaround issues that were not traditional material ones, but which could not befitted n eat ly into Inglehart's 'post-material' category. Environmentalism did notdo so because it posited a notion of physical security (involving not wasting non-rene wable resources) that was entirely absent from older political debates. It waseven m ore difficult to fit movements based on gender into a post-material cate-gory, since many of the issues raised by feminists were precisely those of eco -nomic r ights and physical security.

Whil e there was variation from state to state as to the form these movementsand issu es took, as we ll as differences in their relative importance, there was little

Are there new social cleavages around which parties could mobilize? This issue willbe considered in greater detail shortly. For now it should simply be noted that inthe 1970s considerable attention was paid to the question of whether 'post-material' and 'lifestyle' issues-such as environmental concerns-were develop-ing among sections of the middle class in ways that constituted a cleavage inWestern societies, dividing these groups from those dependent on maximizingeconomic growth. The possibility that this might constitute a new line of cleav-age does cast doubt on the 'parties-as-office-seekers' model of party systemchange.

Is ideology less important in mobilizing mass electorates? The rise of 'New Right'ideas in the Anglo-American democracies in the 1980s (and especially Britain,New Zealand, and the United States) undermined the argument that parties gen-erally were abandoning ideological appeals to mass electorates. In place of theconsensual politics of the 1950s and 1960s these countries experienced partycampaigning that was geared around a particular ideology-that of the unfet-tered market in most areas of social life. The ideological battleground was some-what different than in the 1930s, but the general argument, that the post-waryears marked an end to ideology, cannot be sustained.

Have parties been able to transform themselves organizationally? Many party sys-

tems now do have some 'catch-all' parties-Belgium being perhaps one of thefew exceptions. These parties have been able to utilize organizational forms-ahigh degree of centralization, weak membership control, and so on-necessaryfor practising a 'catch-all' electoral strategy. But other kinds of parties survive-partly because the 'catch-all' model does not seem to be all-conquering, andpartly because traditions of membership involvement, or a history of factional-ism, may prevent the required organizational structures from being adopted.


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230 PARTY SYSTEMS

doubt of their growing significance in dividing sec tions of the public. What wasless clear was whether any of them represented an entirely new line of socia lcleavage akin to c lass, or whether they were less 'fundamental'-in two senses.First, in that they were not likely to persist for as long; for example, was economicdepen dence on the state something that could be margina lized by New Rightpolicies which eliminated many programmes and subsidies? Secondly, in thatthey did not divide such large segments of society as the older c leavages haddone-in brief, the question might be asked as to whether either environmental -ism or feminism, for examp le, was mer ely the politics of a relatively sma ll minor-

ity of the midd le class.Assessingjust how fundamental these new issues and divisions are is a difficult

task-partly because there is disagreement as to w hat would count as evidence of their persistence. But, certainly, the na'ive New R ight belief that reducing stateactivit ies would weaken support for state intervention has not been borne out .Cross-national survey data indicate that, with respect to many aspects of statewelfare provision and state intervention in the economy, 'public attitudes ...were (and are) out of sympathy with the prevai ling international mood of politi-cians a nd govern ments in favour of market-led provision' . 11 While support for

some kinds of interve ntion has declined in many countries, support for otherforms of intervention has been mai ntained or increased . Even, or perhaps espe-cia lly, in those countries like Britain and the United States which had the great-est exper ience of New Right policies, support for a positive sta te role has notdiminished, and remains a source of division between mass elec torates. The casethat such a c leavage was not a fundamental one has not been disproved, thoughneither has it been proved .

The resolution of the question was made more difficult by t he fact that theorganizational forms adopted by many activists in the new social movementsreflected antagonism to traditional k inds of political organization. Political par-ties resembling the ones that arose in response to class conflict were regardedwith suspicion-part ly because of doubts about w hat they might achieve andpart ly because of a commitment to forms of participation that were believed tobe impossible within the hierarchies characteristic of parties . Participationshou ld be direct and leaders should be instructed by followers . Politics was to becond ucted through social movements, and no t through parties. The WestGerman Greens started out as a movement, and its decisions to become more'party -like', such as r unning candi dates in elections, were highly controvers~alwithin the movement . Simi larly within feminist movements there was often dIS-agreement as to whet her traditional e lectora l politics should be e mbraced at all .

It remains, t herefore, a matter of some speculation as to how much an inroadinto existing party systems t hese movements wou ld have made, a nd might sti llmake, had their or ientation been more towards t he conventiona l mobilization o f

STAB ILIT Y A ND C H ANGE IN PARTY SYSTEMS 23 1

mass electorates. Except in West Germany, where the Greens did gain as much as8.3 per cent of the vote in 1987,Green parties hitherto have usually obtained lit-tle more than 5 per cent of the vote in elections to national parliaments. Inresp onse to the new social movements, existing parties have sought to capitalizeon the issues by adopting environmental and equal opportunity policies, pro-moting the candidacies of women, and so on- thereby preserving existing partysys tems. The central problem of movement politics-how to preserve activism

dur ing periods w hen an issue 'cools' in public attention-has meant that the neworga nizational forms these movements introduced have not supp lanted thekind s of organizations used by parties.

The answer to the question of how 'fundamental' are the lines of social divi-sion exposed by new social movements cannot be answered directly, therefore, bylooki ng at change in the party system. But there is little reason to believethat thekind s of issues t he movements have thrown up can be resolved in the way t hatman y n arrow ly drawn issues ca n be. Moreover, there is litt le evi dence to su pportthe claim that these movements are the politics of smal l mino rities. On the con-trary, changes in c lass structure a nd social practices are like ly to make at leastsome of the values espoused by the movements attractive to a growing propor-

tion of the pop ulation. But, for our purposes, the important point is that exist -ing part ies have disp layed consi derab le capacity to respond to new divisions, a ndthis suggests the plausibi lity of the third approach identified earl ier, and it is tothis th at we now turn.

The per sis tence of p arties

The thi rd approach to the fut ure of libera l democratic party systems sees bothsocial cleavages a nd the traditiona l style of political party persisting . It does not,though , see social conf lict and parties as locke d in some kind of 'time warp'. Itre~ogni zes that what divides people will change-but its arg ument is that soci-etieswill always be divided, and the diminishing of old c lass a lignments does nota.ltert .hat; all that alters is how they are divide d. Moreover, whi le many o ld par-tiesWillr etain their p osi tion, some will not; some new parties w ill arise and somepart ~ sys tems w ill thereby be t ransformed. B ut the key point to be emphasizedh~reISth at parties will not genera lly be superse ded by new forms of' looser', moredlrectl ..y partICipatory, organizat ions.th This ap proach star ts from the ki nd of ass umption about d ivisions in society. at Sch attschne ider made (w hich was discusse d in Chapter 6). Societies are sp litIn a numb f d'f " . .,o . er 0 I lerent ways; somet imes these c leavages do dIsappear, wh Iled~er~ ~n se, but the central task o f party leaders remains that of t rying to get t heir

finltlOn of what is the most importa nt div ision (or divisions) accepte d byVoters.That i s their route to political office a nd power. T he problem wi th the


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232 PARTY SYSTEMS

'catch-a ll' model of party is that it does not seek to divide people on lines that

correspond to social divisions; it may succeed in the short term in mobilizingvoters, but in the longer term large numbers of them may exit to parties that are

'exp loiting' c leavages. The more open a party system is to the formation of newparties or to the splintering of old parties, the greater the constrain ts on parties

taking on a pur ely 'catch-all ' form.This approach recognizes that long- standing divisions-such as ethnic,

regional , and linguistic ones-can inten sify, and have done so in countries likeBelgium and Canada. And it recognizes that ch anges in social str ucture also pro-

vide opportunities for parties to 'exploit '. For example, the emergence of conf lict-

ing interests within the middle class, between those 'dependent' on the state andthose whose livelihood is independent of it, would permit the re definition of

cleavages by parties and would provide an incentive for at least one of t hem to

attempt t hat redefinition.Moreover, this approach can take account of the fact that par ticular po licies

can help to 'fix' cleavages . A good example of this is the cold war, which had a

major impact on the party systems of the liberal democracies. The advent of th ecold war created sti ll more divisions within the European left: the potential for

co-operat ion between Socialists and Communists became even more restricted.Moreover, it provided opportunities for other kinds of parties to def ine the fun -

damental lines of politica l division to their own advantage . The c lassic exampl e

of this is the Italian Christian Democrats . Its electoral strength came from the factthat it was anti-Communist but also a party of the centre, rather than a conven -

tiona l right -of-centre party. Although its support was eroding t hrough the 19 70sand 1980s, and although it was a highly factionalized party, it retai ned its posi-

tion as the largest party, and one that had to be in any Italian government. Theending of the cold war removed much of its raison d' etre: there was no longer aninternational Communist threat, and the alread y much modified PCI was tr ying

to convert i tself into an orthodo x social democratic party (the PDS ). The

Communist/anti-Communist cleavage did not matter any more, even thoughsome of the issues that traditionally divided left and right remai ned salient . The

DC's electoral support declined-the party lost to the regiona lly based NorthernLeag ue i n the north, and to other right -of-centre parties elsew here. In the 1994

elect ions it even had a new name, the Popular Party, but the b loc of parties it le d

came a poor third behind the left and right blocs of parties.The Ita lian example is useful in showing how the third approach to future

par ty system development can take account of both the potential for change an dstabil ity in party systems. Some party systems may undergo ex tensive chan~e,because their cleavage structure , institutional structure, a nd policy 'underpll1 -ning' is itse lf transformed . But where this transformation is less pronounce~,existing parties-because they have the advantage of being pa rties already 1 11

S T ABI LIT Y AND CHANGE IN PARTY SYSTEMS 233

existence-are likely to adapt themse lves to new circumstances; they wi ll seek toredefine the lines of political division to keep thems elves in power, and this wi ll

restrict the opportunities for new parties, and for new rivals to parties (such associal movement organizations).

Imm ediate ly after the elections in 1981 it was plausib le to argue t hat the politicalinstitutions of the Fifth Republic had completed the transformation of the com-plex French party system. There was now, it might have been argued, a two-party

tendency in France, and with the Socialist victory in 1981 the system could besaid to be in ba lance. The left was t he equal of the right in terms of e lectoral com-

petitiveness. The complex patterns of party po litics of the Fourth Repub lic hadgiven w ay to something more 'order ly'-not unlike the German two-and-a-half

part y system, or the 'c lassic' Britis h two-party model of the 1935-64 era. Theprobl em with such an analysis is that within a matter of two or three years it was

no longer plausi ble! In particu lar, the rise of the National Front suggested t hat thedualist tendencies imposed by presidentia l competition were not nearly as strong

as the 1981 election suggested.

The far rig ht in France had been marginalized since the end of the AlgerianWarin 1 962. Its reappearance in the mid- 1980s provides further evidence againstargum ent s that social cleavages wou ld disappear with increased prosperity or

that th e 'catch -all' party would become the dominant party model . The Nationa lFront h ad the usual right-wing po licies on issues like law and order, trade unions,

and on social matters (such as abor tion). But it was its policies on immigration~nd on the ro le in French society of non -white minorities that provided theImpetu s for i ts surge in support f rom the early 1980s. Its first e lectoral successnation all . I' hY was 111e ect lOns to t e European Parliament in 1984 . As elsewhere(such as' B' . . .E 111 nt am m 1989 w ith the strong performance by the Greens) the

urop ean elections could provide a n important p latform for a minor party ' vot-ers ~re lik ely to treat these e lect ions as less 'serious' than elections to a nat'iona lparh~m ent) and m ay indulge the mselves by voting for parties that they wou ld notVote Into th . l'elr own par lament, at least a t that time. The 11 per cent of the vote


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234 PARTY SYSTEMS

the FN obtained in 1984 gave them a platform for contesting the 1986 NationalAssembly e lections, which were fought under a system of proportional represen-tation. That year the FN won 9.7 per cent of the vote. Then, in the first round of the presidential election of 1988, the party's leader, Jean -Marie Le Pen ', won 14.4per cent of the vote, run ning ahead of the Communist candidate and only justbehind the UDF candidate. The Front lost seats in the subsequent Assemblybecause of the reversion to a second-ballot electoral system, but by then it hadestablished itself as a medium-sized party.

Once PR had been replaced by the second-ballot system for Assembly e lec-tions, the FN posed major problems for the RPR and the UDF, and to a lesserextent for the PS also, in relation to electoral strategy. None of these other parti eswanted to be seen as co urting, or even relying on, the support ofFN voters in th esecond round of balloting for the presidency or the Assembly. The second-ba llotsystem provides a strong incentive for a party to build al liances with other par -ties that will persuade the latter's supporters to switch their vote when their first-choice party has been eliminated. However, the 'mainstream' parties did not wishto be seen as the beneficiaries of switching by FN voters, but neither did they wi shtheir opponents to benefit from this. Consequent ly, devisi ng electoral strategi es

became a far more complex matter.The rise of the FN pro mpts the question of just how different the French par ty

system is from t he party system of the Fo urth Republic . Allowing for the diff er-ent state institutional structures, the enormous c hanges in French society, theorganizational consolidation of the major parties, and so on, it is interesting tonote at least some resemblance between the party systems in the two eras. Forpurposes of comparison, the 1993 elections are not very useful because of thehuge voter backlash against the unpopular Socialist government; the 1988Assembly elections are a more fertile source for comparison. Compare the sh areof the vote obtained by parties in the last election in the Fourth Republic (1956 )with the 1988 Assembly result (Table 7 .2).

Obviously, it is no longer a party system 'driven' by the extremes, as it was inthe 1950s; it does not exhibit po larized multipartism, and that does represent asea cha nge in French politics. But for all the dualist pressures imposed by a semi-presidential system, this is not a party system that bears much resembl ance to

those in Britain or Germany. Looking simply at the distribution of votes betweenparties, and that can be very misleading, the French system perhaps looks morelike the complex mu ltipartism of Finland t han anything else . This suggests bot hthe limits and also t he potentia l of constitutional 'engineering' i n relation toparty systems: party systems are not simply the product of the interaction of dif-f erent socia l cleavages, b ut neither can a particular type of party system be 'manu-factured' merely by se lecting the appropriate set of politica l instit utions.

Besides the rise of the FN the other great subjec t of debate abo ut change in the

Table 7 .2. The percentage of the popu lar vote won by each of the parties i nFrance a t the genera l elections of 1956 and 1988

Commun istsSocialistsRadicals a nd Allies

MR PConservat ive Moderates and Indepe ndentsGaullistsRight -Wing Extremists

25.715.215.2 }11.114.44.4

13.3

11.334.7

UDF 18.52.9

19.2FN 9.7

French party system stems from the crushing defeat of the PS in 1993. One pop-ular argument was that it was a blow from which t he left could not recover andcertainly, the resulting intra-party conflict suggested the Socialists woul d hav~great difficulty in winning the presidential election of 1995. But it is a mistake tosee a landslide defeat as necessarily prompting a transformation in t he party sys-

tem , or even having strong effects in t he medi um term. Both the Brit is hCon servatives in 1945 and the American Democrats in the presidentia l electionof 1972 suf fered e lectoral defeats on a sca le that prompted commentators at thetime to speak of a new era in electoral history; but in both cases e lectoral victo-ries for these par ties a few years later prod uced very different interpretations of how the politica l universe had act ually changed.

Germ any

The stable two-and -a-half party estab lished fair ly quickly in t he early years of theFRG h as been threatened by two successive developments since the end of t he1970 s: the rise of the Greens and t he reunification of the country.

It would be plausible, though somewhat mis leading, to see the rise of theGreen s '" hi'. . as on gmat mg w 0 ly m the development of new lines of social divisionWIthm th FRG d' . . h . . .

. e , IVlSlOnst at the eXlstmg partIes cou ld not take account of. It ismIsleadin g because at least part of the impetus for the formation of the Greenscame from t ' . h' h

enslOns WIt m t e SPD. Thanks to the transfor mation of i ts po licyprogramm e at Bad Godesberg in 1959, t he SPD had become t he model of policy

lmoderatio n among West E uropean soc ialist parties. The po litical t urmoil of theate 1960s . I d' . .-me u mg 0ppos ltlOn among the young to the Vietnam war-made

party man ag d' f fi I ftement more I cu 1. A er 1969 t he SPD was t he major partner i n a


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236 PARTY SYSTEMS

coalition government and this e xacerbated the problem. The resignation of Wi llyBrandt as Chance llor in 1974, and his replacement by the more right-wingHelmut Schmidt, then added to the party 's problems as a credible party of the

left . But in a state where th ere was a legal ban on the Communist Party, and inwhich the 5 per cent 'threshold ' of the electoral system made forming new par-ties difficult, those on the left of the party had no a lternative party to which to'exit '.

This explains part of the attraction of n ew social movements as foci of a tten-tion for the disaffected left in the FRG. The Greens began life as a movement,then ran candidates as 'A lternative Lists' in 1977, before taking on the form of aparty-a lbeit a party with a different kind of internal structure-in 1980. Theycontested the federa l election that year and first won representation in the

Bundestag after the 1983 e lections. Critical to their growth in the early-to-mid1980s was the intensification of the cold war, and the conseque nt fear of a nu clearwar in which Germany wou ld be the first battleground. For those with pacifistviews in the SPD the Greens provided an attractive alternative. Of course, the

Greens cannot be understood simply as a splintering from the SPD. They wereable to draw support from those who had not bee n SPD voters t hrough their

appea l on environmenta l as well as peace issues. T hey were able to 'tap' supporton new issues, primari ly of concern to the midd le class. Neverthe less, there canbe little doubt that muc h of the support for the Greens was at t he expense of theSPD. In four elections between 1969 a nd 1980 the SPD received between 42.6 and45.8 per cent of the tota l vote; in the 1983, 1987, and 1990 elections it obtained

38.2,37 .0, and 33.5 per cent.The rise of the Greens contributed to a reversal of t he general trend in the FRG,

from 1949 to the mid-1970s, towards greater two- party dominance in the e lec-torate . This becomes apparent when looking at the share of the vo te received b y

the CDU / CSU and SPD since 1949 (Table 7.3). Together with evidence of voterattitudes towards parties, it constitutes part of a case for suggesting t here is som evoter dea lignment in German y. For examp le, in 1972 55 per cen t of Germansclaimed to identify either 'strong ly' or 'very strong ly ' with a po litica l party. B y1991 only 35 per cent of the popula tion in the former West Germany made thisclaim. 12 However, the extent of dea lignment should not be exaggerated-mo st

Germans still identify with a party, and this is a regime which has linked partiesvery closely to the ope rations of the state so that they have considerab le resource swith w hich to comba t the effects of dec lining partisan identification .

One approach to the reunified Germany is to argue that the absorption of EastGermany wil l result in t he older par ties making similar alliances wit h voters asthey did in West Germany . The resu lt would be, after a short trans itional period,a party system nationa lly like that in Western Germany. There are several objec-t ions to t his argume nt, however . One is that the e normous gap in economic

Ta b le 7 .3. The perce ntage of th e po pu la r vote won by the CDU / C S U an d the SDP in ge ner a l electi ons in Ger many s ince 1 949

1949 60.219 53 7 4.01957 82. 01961 8 1.51965 86 .9

196 9 88 .81972 90.7

19 76198019 8319871990

1994

91.287 .487.081.377.3 (80.0 in the former West Germany)

79.0

development be tween the two regions may produce strai ns within votingalliances in the West as we ll as producing support for new par ties in the East. O ne

manif estation of this in the ear ly 1990s was growing suppor t for parties o n theextreme right, especial ly in the East . Moreover, t he initial alignments of vo terswith parties in the East prod uced a reversal of the traditiona l class a lignme nt. 1 3

A ma jority of t he working c lass supported the CDU, w hile white-co llar state

empl oyees gave disproportiona te support to the SPD. To t he exte nt that the par-ties try to build on their initia l electora l coali tions in the Eas t, they may e nd upby con structing rather differe nt k inds o f pa rt ies t here. S uch a deve lopmentwoul d provi de the potentia l for f ragmentation in the party sys tem later on.

Bro adly speaking, Brita in remai ns a two-party system. T hat having been sa id, thedynami cs of the system have cha nged over t he last fifty years, partic ularly the roleplayed by third part ies in that period. Consider f irst the share of the vote obtai nedby the Conserva tive and Labour parties (as a proportio n of the total vote) in gen-eral elections since t he Seco nd Wor ld War (Tab le 7.4).

The most striking feature abo ut this data is the difference in the performa nceof the two parties before and after 1974. Before t hat date t he lowest s hare of thevote they rece ived between the m is 87.5 per ce nt (in 1964); from 1974 onwardstheir h ighest combined share is only 80.9 per ce nt (in 1979). T his suggests t hat amajo r shift in voter s upport for the two parties occurred during the early 1970s.Whil e this view is s ubsta ntially correct, the si tuation is rat her more comp licatedthan th at and it is possible to identify five distinct phases in the post-war partysystem: 1 945-58, 1958-71/2, 1971/2-9, 1979-87, and 1987 o nwards.

Phase 1-1945- 1958. This is the 'classic' two -party phase. T he share of the votereceiv ed by third p arties, es pecially the Liberals , col lapse d. The Labour and


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called -during th e turmoi l of the miners ' strike-m eant that an election washeld in circum stance s more like those of by- election s, and the vote for the two

large pa rties collap sed. (Labour recei ved 5 .8 per cent less of the vot e than in 1970,the Conservatives 8.5 per cent less. )

Table 7 .4. The percentage of th e popular vo te wonby th e Conservative and Labour par ties in genera le le ctions i n B ritain since 1945

1945 88.1 1970 89.41950 89.6 1974 ( F) 75.11951 96.8 1974(0) 75.11955 96 .1 1979 80.91959 93 .2 1983 70 .0

1964 87 .5 1987 73 .01966 89 .8 1992 76.3

Phase 4- 19 7 9-198 7. At the time, the 1979 electi on might h ave been thought of as markin g the end to this period of volatilit y, but it did n ot because of what wa shappening internall y within the two main part ies . The Cons ervati ves underMar garet Thatcher embarked on a radical 'New Ri ght ' policy agend a, cautiou sly

at f irst, which cou ld command the support of only 40 to 45 per cent of the vot-ers. The part y won four elections in succes sion , but at each election it s share of the vote fell slightly-from 43.9 per cent in 1 979 to 41.9 per cent in 1992 . Whi lethe Conservativ es moved to the right after 1979, L abour w as engaged in fierce

intr a-part y conflicts, with the lef t gaining increa sed pow er in the years up to the

1983 election. In 1981 some right-wing L abour MP s and supporters spl it withthe party to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP ) which cont ested the 1983

and 19 87 elections in allianc e with the Liberals. Inter- election vot er volatility per-sisted, but the anti- Conservative vote at general election s was divid ed between

Labou r and the Alliance, thereb y presenting the Conservativ es with huge parlia-

mentar y ma joriti es.

Conservative government s came to accept many of the same po licy objectivesand po licies. In general, the Conservativ es acted as a 'catch-all ' party, b ut Labourretained a forma l commitment to cert ain policies, i ncluding nationa lization,which i ndica ted that it did not full y accept the 'catch-a ll' approach. Voter attach-

ment to t he two main partie s was high, and the vote w as evenly divided betweenthem. Evidence of low electo ral volati lity is found in the behaviour of voters at

by-elections: defeat for the party which alre ady held the seat was comparativel y

rare. However, the extent of two-parti sm in thi s era can be exaggerated; one of the reasons for t he depressed Liber al shar e of the vote was their s trategy in the1950s of contesting on ly a relativ ely small number of parliamentary sea ts. This

makes the two-party dominance seem rather more secure than it rea lly was . Thesymbolic end of this period is the Torrington by-election of 1958 when theLibera l Party captured a se at previously held by t he Conservatives.

Phase 2-1958-19 7 1 / 2 . During thi s second ph ase there were periodic surges b ythird parties (the Liber als and the W elsh and Scottish Nationalists ) in by-

elections. Anti-government voting beh av iour in b y-elections became far mor e

common; during Conservati ve governm ents these protests frequen tly invol vedhigh leve ls of voting for the Lib erals who captured parliamentary seats from tim eto time. While the Liberal s' share of the vote incre ase d from its very low levels of

the mid -1950s, it was unable to sustain its inter-election performances . Easil y itsbest res ult was in 1964 when it obtained over 11 per c ent of the total vote, but it svote s hare then fell at each of the ne xt two elections.

Phase 5 -1 9 8 7 onwar ds. Between 1983 and 198 7 the Labour Par ty had started torever se its lef t-wing im age, and this proc ess accelerated aft er the 198 7 election .

Although the party 's share of the vote increas ed in both 1983 and 1987, it failed

to remov e the third party threat (from the now merged Social and Lib eralDemocrat s) in by-election campaigns. The Liber al Democr ats remained a

signific ant party of protest against the go vernm ent. More impo rtantl y, in the1992 g eneral election th e Labour Party with a mod erate programm e could sti llnot erode th e third p arty vote sufficient ly to win o f fice; it rece ived 2.6 per cent of the vote le ss than it had obtained in its 19 79 defeat.

Phase 3- 1 971 / 2-1979. In the ea rly 1970s electoral volatilit y at by -election sincreased even more, and with a Cons ervative government in office the Liberal sbecame a n important conduit for protest . The economic and industria l prob lemsof these years made the governing parti es highly unpopular. Moreover, t he effectsof the numer ical decline of the workin g class were beginning to e rode Labo ur'score support. T he particular condition s in wh ich the Febr uary 1974 e lection wa s

Overall, th e years between 1945 and the early 1990s witn esse d three ma jorchanges within th e f ramework of a two-pa rty system. First, a transform ation in

the British social structure weakened the competiti veness of the Labour P arty.Unl ike th e Swedish Social Democrats, Labou r had never been ver y successful in

mobilizing m ass electorates outside its base in the organi zed workin g class, thef amil ies of trad e union members. As the working class declined in numb ers, the

Lab our Party cou ld no longer compete on equal terms with the Conservative s. Itsmo ve leftwards in the early 1980s made worse its probl em in voter mobili zation.Secondly, from the late 1950s voter volati lity increased-fir st in by-e lection s andthen, by the ear ly 1970s, in genera l elections as w ell. Thirdly, t he role of the thirdpart ies changed. In t he period immediate ly after 1945 they were comp lete ly


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240 PARTY SYSTEMS

marginal , but lat er they became vehi cles of voter protest . Undoubtedly, but for

the plurality voting system, this would have resulted in 'hung ' parliaments after

mo st election s. As it was, third partie s held the balance of parliamentary poweronl y once-between 1977 and 1979.


Tog ether with the third feature, the local and personal nature of the cont ests,this made it difficult for an y dissatisfaction with the governing party to be trans-lated into change in the balance of power between parties. (Or r ather, it wa s moredifficult than in most other types of elector al system. ) Even wh en there wa s great

popular dissatisfaction with the LDP, most LDP candidates, especially incum-bents, could organi ze sufficient electoral support through thei r own campaignorganizations (koenkai) to win. That at least some of the support for a candidatewas 'personal ' (and not support for a part y) helped to protect the party from th econsequences of unpopularity . In this respect the Japanese Diet was not unlikethe US Congress where opinion polls over the la st two decades have revealedgreat dissatisfaction with its work . At the same time more than 95 per cent of

congressional incumbents have usually won re- election, so that popular dissatis-faction does not produce much change in the legislature's composition. (Theabilit y of the incumbent to win re-election stem s from being able to blameothers for the failure of the institution, and from generating a 'personal' vote for

himself or her self.)The 1990 election was the last one fought under the old order, even though the

subsequent election, in 1993, was contested under the same electoral rules.

Continuing corruption scandals in the LDP finally produced strains within theparty that proved too great even for it. An anti-corruption party, the Japan NewParty, was formed in 1992, and before the 1993 election two further parties,formed by former LDP politicians (the Japan Renewal Party and the New PartyHarbinger ), added to an increasingly complex party system. Between them thesethree parties obtained 21 per cent of the vote in 1993. All three entered the seven-party coalition government after the election-joining the SDJP, the Democratic

Socialists, Komeito, and the small Shaminen party.Given the role of institutions in bol stering the LDP before 1993, it is not sur-

prising that the coalition government formed after the election gave high prior-ity to institutional reform. Alongside, for example, proposals to weaken the

power of bureaucrats, whose links with the LDP and industrialists had been thebasis of the old order in post-war Japan, was reform of the electoral system.Legislation was introduced, replacing the semi-proportional system with a com-bined system of plurality voting in single -member constituencies for 300 seatswith the remaining 200 seats allocated using PR. Not only would this make itmore difficult for the LDP to win parliamentary majorities should it return to thelevel of electoral support it had in the 1970s and 1980s, but it would mak e it farmore difficult for the heavily factionali zed LDP to practise the level of party dis-cipline that it had in that era. New electoral boundaries and single -member con-stituencies would likely weaken the glue that held the factions to each other.

For the new parties in government, reducing the base ofLDP power in this waywas essential for the preservation of their influence in the longer term. Even after

Of all the party systems in the liberal democratic world Japan's was perh aps the

one that displayed the least change-at least until 1993. While there was a splin-tering from the LDP in 19 76 with the formation of th e New Lib eral Club, and theparty's share of the vote declined over the period as a whole, the Japanese p arty

system of the late 1980s looked remarkably similar to the system at the end of the1950s . Although there was multipartism during the American occupation after1945, a predominant party (the LDP ) emerged with the fusion of two large par-ties, the Democrats and the Liberals, in 1955. We have already noted some of thesocial factors which might explain this pattern-the weakness of identity with the

working class and the relativel y homogen eous nature ofJapanese society. But it isto the institutions surrounding the Japanese party system that attention must begiven when explaining the rigidity of the system until its transformation in 1993.

Three features of the electoral system are worth mentioning in this regard. Thefirst was the 'passive' gerrymandering of electoral districts. In any electoral sys-tem that uses territorially d efined constituencies ( 'places'), how the boundariesare drawn will affect the chances a party has of winning a seat. When the gov-erning party can control the process of drawing the boundaries, it may be able toperpetuate its hold over power by drawing boundaries most favourable to it . Thisis known as gerrymandering. It was practised in many American states before the

1960s, and in the 1980s it was a device which kept in office the right-winggovernment in the Australian state of Queensland . In Japan it was not the overtform of gerrymandering that was evident, but rather a failure to redraw electoralboundaries to reflect shifts in the distribution of populations. Japan was one of the countries that suffered most from this kind of 'passive ' gerrymandering.Electoral boundaries were left as they were, and fairl y quickl y this led to an over-representation of rural and semi-rural areas and an underrepresentation of urban areas . Through its subsidization of agriculture, the LDP acquired a loyalrural electorate which helped it to stay in office.

The second feature of the electoral system was that candidates were oftenelected with only 15 or 20 per cent of the vote. Since voters had only one vote eachin multi-member districts, candidates required little more than strong minoritysupport to win election.


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242 PARTY SYSTEMS

the 1993e lection the LDP remained much the largest party in the Diet . The coali-tion government was always in danger of breaking up, partly because of the num-ber of parties it embraced and partly because of the range of party ideologie srepresented in it-from the Socialists to parties that had broken away from theLDP.Without institutional reform, the LDP would have opportunities on the fallof the government to make deals with particular party groupings and to restorethe status quo ante . It was to prev ent this that th e government gave such a high

priority to changing the rules of the 'political game' .

S T ABI LIT Y AND CHANGE IN PARTY SYST E MS 243

identif iers or not-were likely to alter the support they gave. There were twof orm s this took:

switching from voting, say, for a Democrat at one presidential election tovoting for a Republican at the next one;

'ti ck et splitting', in which at the same election a voter would vote for theRepublican candidate for one office (say, the presidency ) and for aDemocrat for another office (say,the US Senate) .

The p eriod from the mid-1960s to the present provides considerable evidence of the ef f ects of this behaviour. For example, there have been far more electoral'land slides' in presidential elections (1964, 1972, 1984)t han in earlier eras. Oftheeight presidentia l elections after 1960, five ( 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988)saw th e concur rent election of a Repub lican president and a House of Repr esentatives wi th a solid Democratic majority.

This b ehavio ur gave rise to the argument that the United Sta tes was experi-encing electora l dealignment . Voters were no longer very m uch attached to par-ties per se and would vo te on the basis of their attraction to a particularcandidate-this produced the higher levels of both vo te switching between e lec-tion s and 'ticket splitting' at the same e lection. It marks a major change in theAm erican party sys tem. Previously the United States had displayed a remarkablycon sistent pattern of par ty stability which lasted for a bout thirty years at a time;there would then fol low a relative ly short period of e lectoral turbulence duringwh ich the party system wou ld rea lign. These realignments had occurred in

the late 1820s and t he ear ly 1830s, when the one -party dominance of theDemocra tic-Repub licans was rep laced by a two -party system pitting theDemocrats against a new party, the Whigs .

the mid -1850s, when the Whigs collapsed and a new party, the Repub licans,arose, mobilized initially around the issue of slavery . After the Civi l War(1861-5) there was a n era of intense e lectoral competition .

the mid-1890s, when the Republican Party became the domina nt partynatio nally, and most of the states became uncompetitive -the Democratsdom inating the So uth, the Rep ublicans the rest of the country.

the ear ly 1930s,when t he Democrats became the dominan t party nationa llyand when party competition started to increase aga in in all areas except theSouth.

Given th is pat tern, it would have been predicted that a realignment would takeplace at the end of the 1960s. I nstead, t he weakening of the link between partiesand leaders produced a different pattern: the Republicans becoming the dominantparty in preside ntia l elections w ith the Democrats remaining the majority party atother levels of electoral compe tition , including e lect ions for the Congress.

How ever, there remai ns the question of why the ear lier kind of patte rn sho uld

The parties in the United States provided the model for the future of Europeanparties in Epstein's Political Parties in Western Democracies. American partiesalready had the organizational structures necessary for them to appeal to widesections of the public. The politics of the neighbourhood, in which precinct cap-tains who were tied into the patronage of party machines cajoled their friends

and neighbours into voting for their party, had given way to a different kind of relationship between party leaders and voters. It was a relationship that relied onmaking direct appeals to voters thro ugh the media (espec ially television) and onlearning about voter preferences through such devices as opinion pol ling. But atthe time Epstein waswriting this book most Americans still identified with a par -ticular party, and that identification was the most importa

Political Parties and Party Systems (Cap VII)

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