Authors: Peter. Mair
Second, parties are now increasingly subject to new state laws and regulations, which sometimes even determine the way in which their internal organization may function. Many of these regulations and party laws were first introduced or were substantially extended in the wake of the introduction of public funding for parties, with the offer of state subventions inevitably accompanied by the demand for a more strictly codified system
of party registration and control. Arrangements for party access to the public broadcasting media have also required a new system of regulation, which again acts to codify the status of parties and their range of activities. From having been largely ‘private’ and voluntary associations that had developed in the society and drew their legitimacy from that source, parties have therefore increasingly become subject to a regulatory framework whose effect is to accord them quasi-official status as part of the state. In other words, as the internal life and external activities of parties become regulated by public law, and as party rules become constitutional or administrative rules, the parties themselves become transformed into public service agencies, with a corresponding weakening of their own internal organizational autonomy (see Bartolini and Mair, 2001: 340).
The third and last aspect of this development is also perhaps the most obvious. Parties have also cemented their linkage to the state and to the public institutions by increasingly prioritizing their role as governing (rather than representative) agencies. In the terms adopted by the analysts of coalition formation, parties have become more office-seeking, with the winning of a place in government being now not only a standard expectation, but also an end in itself. Some forty years ago, a now-classic review of political developments in western democracies was organized around the theme of ‘oppositions’ (Dahl, 1966); nowadays, however, within the world of conventional party politics, there is less and less sense of enduring opposition, and more and more the idea of a temporary displacement from office. Opposition, when structurally constituted, now increasingly comes from outside conventional party politics, whether in the form of social movements, street politics, popular protests, boycotts and so on. Within politics, on the other hand, the parties are either governing or waiting to govern.
They are now all in office. And with this new status has come also a shift in their internal organizational structures, with the downgrading of the role of the ‘party on the ground’, and an evident enhancement of the role of the party in the institutions. In other words, within party organizations, there has been a shift in the party centre of gravity towards those elements and actors that serve the needs of the party in parliament and in government; as Maurizio Cotta (2000: 207) notes, ‘those who control the government appear to be better able than in the past to also control from that position the whole party’. This shift might also be seen as a final manifestation of the classic Downsian or Schumpeterian notion of parties as ‘competing teams of leaders’, in which the party organization outside the institutions of the polity, and the party on the ground in all its various manifestations, gradually wither away. What we see is ‘the ascendancy of the party in public office’ (Katz and Mair, 2002). What remains is a governing class.
All of this has had major implications for the functions that parties perform, and are seen to perform, within the wider polity. As most students of party politics know, much of the literature in the field has laid particular stress on understanding the crucial functions that parties can be expected to perform in democracies.
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Moreover, with some minor variation, there has been a remarkable degree of consensus about what precisely these functions are. Parties are seen to integrate and, if necessary, to mobilize the citizenry; to articulate and aggregate interests, and then to translate these into public policy;
to recruit and promote political leaders, and to organize the parliament, the government and the key institutions of the state. That is, just as parties aimed to combine government for the people with government by the people, so too they combined key representative functions with key procedural functions – all within the same agency. Without parties, it was commonly argued, and without this combination of crucial functions, both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of conventional systems of representative government could be undermined.
In the main, however, the picture that has been presented in this approach to the understanding of political parties has also proved to be very static, being fixated on an image of the mass party as something both normatively and practically desirable. However, as parties have changed, and as the mass party model has passed away, the functions that parties can – or do – perform in contemporary politics have also been rebalanced. Indeed, as I will suggest here, the evidence points to the development from a time in which parties did manage to combine both representative and procedural functions to one in which they emphasize procedural functions alone. This development goes hand in hand with the concurrent relocation of parties from civil society to the state, and is therefore also part of the process by which parties and their leaders exit from the arena of popular democracy. Let us look at it more closely.
One of the first functions usually associated with political parties is that of helping to integrate and mobilize the citizenry in the polity within which the parties compete. This is, or was, one of their classic representative functions, particularly vital at a time when distinctions based on property ceased to be necessary qualifications for the right to vote, and the mass of citizens were first admitted to full rights of participation in the political world. In these circumstances, it became very important
for parties not only ‘to organize public opinion and to communicate demands to the centre of governmental power’ but also to ‘articulate to its followers the concept and meaning of the broader community’(Lapalombara and Weiner, 1966: 3). Party-led integration involved giving voice to previously excluded communities while also emphasizing their part in the larger whole. Today, however, such a role is more or less redundant, in that neither integration nor mobilization may any longer be deemed necessary, especially within the more advanced democracies. As Alessandro Pizzorno (1981) first suggested, this function has proved historically contingent. The bulk of the citizenry is already fully integrated, and has already acquired whatever political identity is deemed important. Indeed, the basis for contemporary integration and identity formation is in any case now more individualistic and particularistic, and hence less and less amenable to the traditional encapsulating strategies of political parties. Even to the extent that processes of mass integration or mobilization might still be seen as conducive to democratic consolidation – and this argument might be considered applicable to newly emerging democracies, or to the European Union polity – they are unlikely to be accomplished by either parties or their equivalents.
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In sum, while parties may be important in other respects, this particular task no longer forms an essential – or even effective – part of their repertoire.
The second key representative function classically associated with parties is as articulator and aggregator of social and political interests present within the wider
society. That is, parties give voice to citizens, and also create packages of policies in which various conflicts or incongruities in popular interests can be reconciled within coherent and competing partisan programmes. The aggregation of diverse but related interests into broad political programmes was always one of the key tasks of the traditional mass party, of course, but the articulation of interests was never their exclusive preserve, since this was also effected by non-party interests such as unions, churches, professional associations and the like. Nevertheless, at least during the heyday of the mass party, even those alternative associations and non-party movements that did serve to articulate interests usually operated under the aegis of party, or within the broader party-centred networks of representation. Indeed, this was the basis of traditional cleavage or ‘pillarized’ politics. In contemporary democracies, in contrast, the party and non-party channels of representation have become increasingly distinct from one another, leading to a new division of labour that has become one of the defining features in the patterns of representation in post-industrial democracy. This is especially true when the interests being articulated are more particularized and the channels of representation become more specialized and narrow-cast. In these circumstances, the parties have often aimed for self-sufficiency, and hence have relied less on their formalized links to non-party associations. At the same time, the various non-party associations have often found it preferable to compete for influence in the marketplace, and to play contending parties or political representatives off against one another. On both sides, therefore, the idea of a party-centred network has been proving less and less attractive or meaningful.
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But if the articulation of interests has often been pursued beyond party control, what of the more broadly based aggregation process? One possible reading of the changes that are occurring here is that while aggregation can still be considered important, in that at some political level conflicting demands still have to be reconciled, this can now be usually effected through the formulation of public policy and regulations rather than by means of a partisan programme as such. Rather than occurring within the electoral process, in which it is the parties in particular that would seek ‘to organize the chaotic public will’ (Neumann, 1956: 396), aggregation now occurs after elections, in the formulation of public policy and in government itself. Indeed, this was the key motif in much of the propaganda that built up around the ‘Third Way’ in the late 1990s, with government policies being designed to offer ‘win-win’ solutions rather than ‘win-lose’ alternatives (e.g., Giddens, 1998): when politics becomes non-partisan, this sense of representation, and hence aggregation, evaporates.
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The contemporary equivalent of interest aggregation can also be achieved in yet another and even more depoliticized fashion through the delegation of decision-making to such non-majoritarian institutions as judges, regulatory agencies and the like.
In sum, party as such appears less and less necessary to processes of interest representation, aggregation or intermediation. The articulation of popular interests and demands now occurs more and more often outside the party world, with the preferred role of parties being that
of the receiver of signals that emanate from the media or the wider society. These are certainly the terms of reference that were adopted in 2000 by the then Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, when he rejected a trade-union proposal to restore the link between pensions and average earnings, a proposal that had just won the support of a large majority at the Labour party conference. ‘I’m not going to give in to the proposal that came from the union leaders today’, Brown declared. ‘It is for the country to judge, it is not for a few composite motions [at party conference] to decide the policy of this government and this country. It is for the whole community, and I’m listening to the whole community.’
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So conceived, the traditional representative role of the mass party eventually wastes away. Or perhaps it gets turned on its head, so that, as Rudy Andeweg suggests, ‘the party … becomes the government’s representative in the society rather than the society’s bridgehead in the state’ – the party as spin doctor, as it were.
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But the work of social representation is not all that these parties did, or were expected to do. They also have a key procedural role, and here too there are two crucial functions involved. The first of these procedural functions involves the recruitment of political leaders and the staffing of public offices. If by this is implied that parties will always ensure the initial enrolment and socialization of potential political leaders, as well as their subsequent career path within the party network, then even this party function may have become hollowed out with time, in that parties in both old and new democracies seem increasingly willing to look beyond their immediate organizational confines when searching for suitable candidates and nominees. Indeed, with the
decline in party membership levels, parties often have little choice but to look elsewhere, and, as the organizational strength and standing of parties diminishes, the candidates who are recruited are more often those who have achieved recognition in other fields. Parties in this sense have much less status or autonomy than before. Honoured in a minimalist way, however, in the sense that a party affiliation or party endorsement, however briefly or even opportunistically acquired, is seen as a necessary element in the election or nomination of candidates to public office, this function obviously continues to be crucial. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger felt the need for the Republican label in his successful campaign for the governorship of California.
Political patronage emerges as one of the key functions that parties still perform. Indeed, in certain political systems, where patronage appointments have grown in importance, or where, as a result of devolution in the United Kingdom, for example, the number of elected offices has increased, it might be argued that this particular function has become even more important. Parties have more positions at their disposal. However weakened party organization may have become, a party label remains a necessary acquisition on the pathway to political power, and within the institutional arenas of power themselves the actors are more and more likely to be professional – party – politicians, a strengthening trend not only for parliaments, but also for governments, with most European countries showing a steady decline from the 1950s through to the 1980s in the proportion of government ministers recruited through non-party channels (Krouwel, 1999: 210–15). Not only do parties still recruit, at this level, but they now seem to do so more extensively than ever.
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