Ruling the Void (10 page)

The decisiveness of the electoral process and a strong foundation of electoral accountability are also central in a later version of the party government model elaborated by Jacques Thomassen (1994). In this case the emphasis is less on party government as such, and more on the role of elections as a mechanism of linkage and
representation. Nevertheless, though differently oriented, the core conditions of Thomassen’s party government model and, as he emphasizes, of the ‘responsible parties model’, are quite similar to those of Rose and Katz (see Box 3) and are manifest when the will of the majority of the electorate is reflected in government policy.

These three sets of stipulations share much common ground, although the emphasis varies from policy-making in the case of Rose, to recruitment in the case of Katz, and the electoral connection in the case of Thomassen. If we try to synthesize them, bringing all three emphases together, then a single set of core stipulations can be suggested. Party government in democratic polities will prevail when a party or party bloc wins control of the executive as a result of competitive elections, when the political leaders in the polity are recruited by and through parties, when the (main) parties or alternatives in competition offer voters clear policy alternatives, when public policy is determined by the party or parties
holding executive office and when that executive is held accountable through parties. These stipulations are summarized in Box 4. Equally, party government will not prevail, or will certainly be severely weakened, should one or more of these conditions be absent.

My contention is that, as a result of long-term shifts in the character of elections, parties and party competition, it is precisely this set of conditions that is being undermined.
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It is impossible here to offer a full account of the changing conditions of party government.
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What can be done, however, is to identify a series of key changes that bear on some of the conditions listed above, and together point towards a major shift in modes of government in contemporary Europe.

I will begin with the condition that remains secure, and which, if anything, has become even more salient: that by which a party or parties win control of the executive as a result of competitive elections. This has always been the case in two-party systems, in which elections are decisive and the winning party at the polls goes on to form the government. These are also responsive systems, with wholesale alternation in government being both a normal expectation and a relatively frequent occurrence. There are other systems, however, where the condition might seem less likely to obtain, and these include in particular the more traditional ‘continental’ European systems, in which fragmented party groupings compete against one another in shifting multi-party coalitions, and a clear boundary between government and opposition has often proved difficult to identify. Wholesale alternation in these latter systems has also been a relatively rare occurrence, at least traditionally, since coalitions would usually overlap with one another, blurring the lines of overall responsibility and accountability as a result.

Over time, the balance of the European polities has appeared to shift in favour of the bipolar mode. This substantial change in the functioning of European party systems has come about in two ways (Bale, 2003; Mair, 2008). In the first place, bipolarity has become the norm in the new democracies in southern Europe, with what are effectively two-party systems emerging and consolidating in Greece, Portugal and Spain, as well as Malta. Second, bipolar competition is now also increasingly characteristic of many of the older multi-party systems. That is, even in those systems that are marked by quite pronounced party fragmentation, political competition is now more likely to mimic the two-party pattern through the creation of rival pre-electoral coalitions tending to divide voters into two contingent political
camps. During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the majority of European polities changed governments by means of shifting and overlapping centrist coalitions and rarely if ever offered voters a choice of alternative governments. During the 1990s, by contrast, almost two-thirds of these older polities experienced at least some two-party or two-bloc competition, usually involving wholesale alternation in government. To these two sets of changes may also be added a third, this time in a context of largely unstructured party systems, in that a number of the post-communist polities have also drifted towards more bipolar competition. In sum, if party government depends on electoral contests that can produce a clear distinction between winners and losers, then this condition was being met more frequently at the close of the twentieth century than was ever the case in the early postwar decades.

The other conditions listed in Box 4 have proved much less robust, however. Although political leaders continue to be recruited by party, for example, they are less likely to be recruited
through
parties, in that the choice of leader is now less often determined by the strength of a candidate’s support within the party and more often by the candidate’s capacity to appeal to the media and thence to the wider electorate. The choice of Blair rather than Brown in the leadership contest in the British Labour party offered a clear example of this shift, as did the preference for Schröder over Lafontaine in the near-contemporaneous debate over who was to be the SPD’s candidate for the chancellorship of Germany.
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Such passages, combined with the clear evidence of the ‘presidentialization’ of political leadership in parliamentary democracies (Poguntke and Webb, 2005), suggest the formation of a more direct kind of linkage between political leaders and the electorate, one less strongly mediated by political parties as organizations.

Moreover, as suggested above, the parties are also less able – and perhaps less willing – to offer clear policy alternatives to voters. Whether circumscribed by global and European constraints, or whether limited by the inability to identify any clear constituency within the electorate that is sufficiently large and cohesive to offer a mandate for action, parties increasingly tend to echo one another and to blur what might otherwise be clear policy choices. To be sure, there is a choice between the competing teams of leaders, and given the growing evidence of bipolarity, that particular choice is becoming more sharply defined. But there is less and less choice in policy terms, suggesting that political competition is drifting towards an opposition of form rather than of content. Competition in these circumstances can be intense and hard-fought, but it is often akin to the competition on show in football matches or horse races: sharp, exciting and even pleasing to the spectators, but ultimately lacking in substantive meaning. It was precisely this that Kirchheimer (1957) long ago associated with the ‘elimination’ of opposition – the situation that prevails when polities experience government by cartel, and when no meaningful differences divide protagonists, however vigorously they may at times compete with one another.

Likewise, public policy is no longer so often decided by the party, or even under its direct control. Instead, with the rise of the regulatory state, decisions are increasingly (2000: 52).
passed to non-partisan bodies that operate at arms length from party leaders – the ‘non-majoritarian’ or ‘guardian’ institutions (Majone, 1994). Faced with increasing environmental constraints, as well as with the growing complexity of legislation and policy-making in a transnational context, there is inevitably a greater resort to delegation and depoliticization (Thatcher and Stone Sweet, 2003). Moreover, the officials who work within these delegated bodies are less often recruited directly through the party organization,
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and are increasingly held accountable by means of judicial and regulatory controls. And since this broad network of agencies forms an ever larger part of a dispersed and pluriform executive, operating both nationally and supranationally, the very notion of accountability being exercised through parties, or of the executive being held answerable to
voters
(as distinct from citizens or stakeholders) becomes problematic. Party, in this sense, loses much of its representative and purposive identity, and in this way citizens forfeit much of their capacity to control policy-makers through conventional electoral channels.

Above all, it is here that we see the conditions for the maintenance of party government being undermined, and where the alternative forms of government identified by Rose (1969) begin to acquire greater historical weight, notably both government by inertia and ‘administrative government’. This is the sort of shift identified also by Johannes Lindvall and Bo Rothstein (2006: 61) in their analysis of the decline of the ‘strong state’ model in Sweden: ‘the state … is no longer an instrument for the political parties that dominate the Riksdag to steer and change society. Instead, the administrative state is turning into another ideological battlefield, where
sectoral interests seek power and influence … [and in which] the role of political parties as the main producers of policy-oriented ideology and ideas is challenged.’

There is one other respect in which the conditions for the maintenance of party government are severely undermined, but in this case one that has received relatively scant attention. In Thomassen’s account, summarized above in Box 3, a key condition for party government and for the responsible parties model is that both the policy programmes of the parties and the policy preferences of the voters be inscribed in, and constrained by, a single ideological dimension. The reasoning behind this argument is straightforward. Should two or more dimensions be invoked as the plane of contestation, it would be impossible for either the voters or the parties to establish a relationship based on representation and accountability, since it would never be clear precisely which positions on which dimension had favoured support for one particular alternative over another. In other words, the requirement of popular control that is included in the various sets of conditions given by the other authors (1, 5 and 6 in Rose’s set; 1 and 3b in Katz’s; 1, 3 and 5 in the summary set) calls for a shared recognition by voters and parties of the policy choices that are on offer and of the commitment to implement these policies, and also, it follows, for the sort of clarity that is intrinsically unavailable in a multi-dimensional space (Thomassen 1994: 252–57 and fn. 3). Moreover, as Thomassen goes on to suggest, and as is clear from the work of Sani and Sartori (1983) among others, the only possible single dimension that can meet this requirement is that of left-right opposition, which alone is sufficiently elastic and pervasive to accommodate the various domains of voter identification, and at the same time sufficiently enduring to provide a stable reference point over time. It is difficult to imagine any other
dimension that might offer the same degree of coherence and clarity to the electorate and the parties taken as a whole. In the absence of a left-right plane of competition, in other words, the entire foundation of the party government/responsible parties model is undermined.

It is here that the challenge to party government may be most sharply defined. Briefly put, and building on a variety of different arguments, it may be argued that the left-right divide, even in its simplest form, is now finally losing coherence (Mair, 2007). Voters in contemporary Europe may still be willing to locate themselves in left-right terms, and may even be willing to locate the parties in the same dimension, but the meanings associated with these distinctions are becoming increasingly diverse and confused. In part, this is due to the policy convergence between parties; in part also, to the often contradictory signals emerging from post-communist Europe, whereby the traditional left position is often seen as the most conservative. In another respect, it has to do with the new challenge of liberalism, and the increasingly heterogeneous coalition that has begun to define leftness in anti-imperial or anti-American terms, bringing together former communists, religious fundamentalists and critical social movements within what may appear to be a unified ideological camp. In this context, meanings are no longer shared and the implications of political stances on the left or on the right become almost unreadable.