Authors: Peter. Mair
At the same time, however, there was never any automatic or ‘natural’ translation of relevant social divisions into political oppositions and party formation. In and of themselves, for example, class structures largely failed to sustain a major socialist party in either the United States or Ireland, even though this development was the standardizing political experience in all other western democracies almost a century ago. Other social contrasts, and most notably gender, also failed in and of themselves to generate major political oppositions. Thus while social divisions helped to sustain political identities, they were not in themselves a sufficient precondition for the development of mass parties.
A second impetus was therefore usually required, and this came through the mass organizations themselves, and through the conscious intervention of party. In other words, by actively mobilizing citizens into a set of collective political identities, the political parties themselves helped to construct their own independent networks of partisan loyalties. Organizational intervention was crucial here, for in supplanting the loose-knit parties of notables that had flourished in the period prior to mass suffrage, the new parties approached their supporters with claims that, as Sigmund Neumann (1956: 404) put it, were ‘incomparably greater’ than those made by those earlier parties, in that they began to demand ‘an increasing influence over all spheres of the individual’s daily life’. And it was to be the interaction
of both of these forces – social closure, on the one hand, and organizational intervention or encapsulation, on the other – that anchored the new mass parties and stabilized their support networks.
This, indeed, had always been the great strength of the classic west European mass parties in the early decades of the century, in that they managed to cement the loyalties of their voters by building strong organizational networks on the basis of shared social experiences. Organizational effort plus social closure spelt political identity and political endurance. In practice, of course, the strength of political identities varied both within and across countries, as did the relative balance between organizational effort and social closure. The British Labour party, for example, was built on the basis of a very powerful class identity, but always remained relatively weak in organizational terms, preferring to develop as a sort of federal party to which local organizations and trade unions could become affiliated. At the opposite extreme was the neighbouring Irish Fianna Fáil party, whose support patterns have always revealed few if any social correlates, but which built a strong and stable following on the basis of a strictly political appeal, on the one hand, and a powerful organizational network, on the other. The classic example of the combination of social closure and organizational effort was that of the Social Democrats in imperial Germany (Roth, 1963), who combined strong class support with a party network that genuinely attempted to forge ‘cradle-to-grave’ encapsulation. In France, by contrast, neither the social nor the organizational impetus proved particularly powerful, and the political parties that emerged, even on the left, tended to be more fissiparous and ephemeral.
Parties in this golden age were marked also by their mutual distinctiveness. Differences were conspicuous. As we have seen, each party had, or hoped to develop,
its own ‘natural’ constituency within the wider society. Each had a distinct programme designed to reflect the interests of that constituency. Each sought to mobilize its own organizational resources, whether through its members or adherents, or through its own affiliated organizations, or through associated sponsors. Each maintained its own separate lines of communication, whether through a private party press or through the unequivocal partisan support of a national daily newspaper. Ideally, each hoped to form its own single-party government, or, should that prove impossible because of excessive fragmentation, to share government only with one or two like-minded competitors. In other words, and precisely because these parties maintained such distinct clienteles, representational integrity was a priority. They constituted the political voice of their constituencies, and derived both their strength and their legitimacy from that relationship.
The result was that European democracy became synonymous with party democracy, and European government with party government.
4
Within one agency or one institution, party guaranteed the two key constitutive elements of democracy: representation, on the one hand, and hence government
by
the people; and procedural legitimacy, on the other hand, or government
for
the people. In other words, parties – or at least the classic mass party – gave voice to the people, while also ensuring that the institutions of government were accountable. The party was at once representative
and
governor, and hence constituted, as Rudolf Wildenmann (1986) once put it, ‘the crucial agency of institutional legitimation’.
* * *
The golden age of party has now passed, and one of the principal purposes of this book is to analyse some of the causes and implications of this great change of political condition. As for the passing itself, we can probably date the first major step in the process back to the middle 1960s, when Otto Kirchheimer (1966) drew attention to the rise of the new catch-all people’s party, a more competitive model that tried to undo the old emphasis on strong representational links, seeking to exchange ‘effectiveness in depth for a wider audience and more immediate electoral success.’ These new-style postwar parties were to adopt a more aggressive approach to elections, attempting to win often short-term and contingent support far beyond the limits of their once pre-defined constituencies. They were also to become primarily office-seeking parties, with the desire to occupy government winning priority over any sense of representational integrity. Office mattered, as did electoral success, and the elaboration of party programmes, policies and strategies was increasingly attuned to this overriding competitive goal.
The changes in the forms of party politics that followed from the emergence of the catch-all party and its later successors, as well as the transformation in the patterns of party competition with which these changes can now be associated, may be specified under two broad headings: the
political identity
of parties, which has already been discussed in the previous chapter, in the context of party government, and their
location
, which is the main concern of the present one, and by which I mean to mark a process of
re
-location. The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a gradual but also inexorable withdrawal of the parties from the realm of civil society towards the realm of government and the state, and together, these two processes have led to a situation in which each party tends to become more distant
from the voters that it purports to represent while at the same time tending to become more closely associated with the alternative protagonists against which it purports to compete. Party–voter distances have become more stretched, while party–party differences have shrunk, with both processes combining to reinforcing a growing popular indifference to parties and, potentially, to the world of politics in general. This also becomes one of the sources of the growing popular distrust of parties and of political institutions more generally.
Although there is some dispute among observers about how the recent transformation of parties may best be understood, and particularly the further develoment from the catch-all party to the cartel party (Katz and Mair, 1995), there is consensus about the two broadly defined underlying processes at work here.
5
First, party organizations, however defined, are now less well rooted within the wider society; and second, they are
also now more strongly oriented towards government and the state. Thus, if we conceive of parties as standing somewhere between society and the state – the most obvious approach to understanding their role and location within a democratic polity – then we can suggest that they have shifted along the continuum from one to the other, moving from a position in which they were primarily defined as social actors – as in the classic mass party model – to one where they might now be reasonably defined as state actors.
Evidence of the erosion of the parties’ social roots is relatively easily adduced, and incorporates most of the trends already discussed. Electoral identification with political parties is now almost universally in decline, and the sense of attachment to party has been substantially eroded. Levels of party membership are now markedly lower than was the case even twenty years ago, and other evidence suggests that those members who remain within the parties tend to be less active and engaged. At the same time, the former privileges of membership have also tended to disappear, in that considerations of electoral success are now encouraging party leaders to look beyond their shrinking memberships to take their cues – and sometimes even their candidates – from the electorate at large. The voice of the ordinary voter is seen to be at least as relevant to the party organization as that of the active party member, and the views of focus groups often count more than those of conference delegates.
A tendency to dissipation and fragmentation also marks the broader organizational environment within which the classic mass parties used to nest. As workers’ parties, or as religious parties, the mass organizations in Europe rarely stood on their own, but constituted just the core element within a wider and more complex organizational network of trade unions, churches and so on. Beyond the socialist and religious parties, additional
networks of farming groups, business associations and even social clubs combined with political organizations to create a generalized pattern of social and political segmentation that helped to root the parties in the society and to stabilize and distinguish their electorates. Over at least the past thirty years, however, these broader networks have been breaking up. In part, this is because of a weakening of the sister organizations themselves, with churches, trade unions and other traditional forms of association losing both members and strength of engagement. With the increasingly individualization of society, traditional collective identities and organizational affiliations count for less, including those that once formed part of party-centred networks.
But this is not the whole story, for party networks have also weakened as the result of a sharpening division of labour, with the parties themselves often seeking to loosen their ties to associated groups, and to downgrade the privileged access formerly accorded to affiliated organizations.
6
In other words, the landscape has also been changed by the increasing tendency of parties to think of themselves as self-sufficient and specialized political organizations, ready to heed cues from any of the range of social actors, but preferring to remain unrestricted by close formalized links with them. Parties have therefore distanced themselves from civil society and its social institutions, and at the same time become ever more inextricably caught up in the world of government and the state. This process of party change has been fully analysed elsewhere (Katz and Mair, 1995, 2002, 2009), and need not be detailed again here. Suffice it to summarize a number of key developments that have marked most western democracies in the last decades of
the twentieth century and since, and which look likely to be reinforced in future generations.
First of all, as is now widely recognized, parties in most democracies have moved from a position in which they were principally dependent for their organizational survival on the resources provided by members, donors and affiliated organizations, to one in which they now increasingly rely on public funds and state support, such that in most countries today, and in particular in almost all newly established democracies, the preferred source of party funding has become the public purse. This operates in a variety of ways.
7
One is indirect: the state may classify private contributions to parties as tax-deductible, so giving a major boost to a party’s fund-raising activities; or may provide benefits in kind, such as free access to public broadcasting networks, or free mailings or poster sites. In most cases, however, and even in those few remaining systems where the principle of public funding is still viewed with some suspicion, state support takes the form of direct subventions for the work of parties in the parliamentary arena. These include funds for research and information-gathering, and for the salaries of researchers, assistants and secretaries who work for the parliamentary party as a whole or for individual representatives. Though often not regarded as constituting political funding as such, these particular state aids often provide significant help, either directly or in kind, for party organizations. And to the extent that more and more of a party’s activities are centred within parliament, these funds play an ever more important role in specifying the party identity and defining its role within the wider political system.
To an increasing extent, direct public funding is also provided for party central offices in order to help staff and maintain organizational work between elections. This sort of funding is sometimes couched in terms designed to depoliticize its intent, so that it may be provided ostensibly to promote membership affiliation among minority groups or younger voters, or for educational work that might facilitate citizen engagement, and so on in this vein. In practice, however, this has become a key means by which public resources are provided for partisan organizational and campaigning work outside parliament, and in this case also it has often become an essential source of income for the parties concerned.
State money is also sometimes made available specifically for election campaigning, and for party work at local or regional level. In this case, the justifications refer to the importance of parties in the democratic process, as well as to the need for voters to receive as much information as possible before polling day. Whatever the proffered rationale, however, the end result is that more and more parties in the democratic world have become increasingly dependent on state subventions for their organizational survival. Without this public support, it is likely that many parties would have difficulty performing their parliamentary roles, or even maintaining their extra-parliamentary presence. It is in this sense that parties have become dependent on the state, and appear as agents of the state.