Authors: Peter. Mair
In itself, this slide into declining partisanship is hardly surprising. Parties were always more likely to matter in the so-called Golden Age of embedded liberalism, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when they were relatively unconstrained in shaping the policy outcomes that might matter to their electorates. As Fritz Scharpf (2000: 24; see also Ruggie, 1982) has put it, national governments and the parties that formed them could then easily shelter behind ‘semi-permeable economic boundaries … [and] ignore the exit options of capital owners, tax payers and consumers.’ By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the domestic capacity to control the economic environment was already in decline, with the end of the Golden Age signalled by the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and the first major oil-price crisis. By then, as Scharpf (2000: 27–29) goes on to point out, governments were losing not only their ability to shape the economy but also their desire to do so, and it was this shift in orientation as much as circumstance that was later to create the widespread waves of deregulation, privatization, and liberalization. Ruggie (1997: 7) had come to similar conclusions, arguing in his reflections on the end of embedded liberalism that the expansion and integration of global capital markets in the 1990s had ‘eroded traditional instruments of economic policy while creating wholly new policy challenges that neither governments nor market players yet fully understand let alone can fully manage’.
But it is not just the
supply
of partisan policy-making that determines whether parties make a difference; it is also a matter of what is
demanded
at the electoral level. Manfred Schmidt (2002: 168) has usefully pointed out that the very logic of the ‘parties-matter’ thesis builds from two core propositions: first, that the ‘social constituencies of political parties in constitutional democracies have
distinctive preferences
and successfully feed the
process of policy formation with these preferences’; and second, that the ‘policy orientations of political parties broadly
mirror
the preferences of their
social constituencies’
(see also Keman, 2002). It follows that in the absence of such constituencies there is little by way of collective preferences that can be mirrored, even if the parties could or wished to mirror them, and hence the whole logic of the partyness of policy-making becomes difficult to sustain.
It is beyond dispute that the once-distinct electorates of the mainstream political parties in western Europe have become markedly less cohesive in the past two to three decades. To be sure, it can be shown that traditional cleavages remain relevant to voting behaviour. For all the changes that have been wrought in the economy and in the polity over the past decades, for example, workers are still more likely than the middle class to vote for left-of-centre parties, and active church attenders are still more likely than secular voters to support religious parties. This is undeniable (e.g., Elff, 2007). But what is also clear is that the relative weight of these voting determinants has declined. Church attenders might still vote along religious lines, but there are many fewer such citizens in European electorates than there were thirty years ago, and their capacity to shape electoral politics has diminished accordingly (Best, 2011). The shifts in class voting are even more marked. The core working-class constituencies have experienced pronounced demographic decline, while the homogeneity of political preferences within the remaining class cohorts has been lost. In the most comprehensive and nuanced comparative study to date, Oddbjørn Knutsen (2006) points to
a substantial decline, both absolute and relative, in class voting in western Europe since the mid-1970s, with the falls being most pronounced in precisely those polities where class had once been a very strong predictor of political preference (see also Knutsen, 2007).
It is also beyond dispute that, in responding to, and sometimes even provoking, the changes in their electoral alignments, parties have become electorally more catch-all, easing their grip on once-core social constituencies while extending their appeal ever more broadly across traditional class and religious lines. In part, of course, this is the inevitable result of social change. Since the core constituencies themselves have begun to decline or to fragment, there is less within the social structure for the parties to grip on to (see also Freire, 2006). Voters have become more ‘particularized’ (Franklin et al., 1992). But in coming to terms with this social change, the individual parties have also had to learn to be more attractive to those segments of the electorate once seen as beyond the pale: religious parties have had to learn to appeal to secular voters, socialist parties to middle-class voters, liberal parties to working-class voters, and farmers parties to urban voters. In other words, it is not only that the vote has become more free-floating and available: so also have the parties themselves, with the result that political competition has come to be characterized by the contestation of socially inclusive appeals in search of support from socially amorphous electorates.
The tendency towards the decline of collective identities within western electorates, resulting from more or less common socio-economic or socio-cultural processes, has therefore been further accentuated at the political level by the behaviour and strategies of the competing political parties, and one consequence of this has been to undermine the foundations of partisanship in policy-making and in government. Given the
absence of coherent and relatively enduring social constituencies, there is little remaining on which parties can build or identify stable alignments. To be sure, ad hoc constituencies of the kind inevitably constructed in the process of electoral campaigning may also be marked by distinct sets of preferences, and such sets of preferences may be more or less sharply in competition with one another; but these are hardly likely to match the enduring identities and interests that characterized the traditional core constituencies of cleavage politics, and are therefore unlikely to be understood – or assumed – with the same degree of conviction by political leaders. It is in this sense that catch-allism in politics, like the social conditions that foster it, drives out partisanship.
In fact, as was shown in the previous chapter, the decline of partisan identities is one of the most telling changes in European mass politics in the last thirty years. Russell Dalton (2004: 32), who has documented this in some detail and with unambiguous results, suggests that ‘if party attachments reflect citizen support for the system of party-based representative government, then the simultaneous decline in party attachments … offers a strong sign of the public’s affective disengagement from political authorities.’ Voters might still line up behind one or other of the competing parties at election time – as yet, there obviously remains no case of a single party winning 100 per cent of the vote in open competition, or of a total set of parties failing to register even 1 per cent of the poll – but who these voters are, or for how long they will remain aligned, becomes less and less predictable. There is greater uncertainty about whether any individual citizen will go to the polls, and, even if she votes, there is greater uncertainty about the preference she might reveal. In this sense, voting patterns have become less structured, more random, and hence also increasingly unpredictable and inconsistent.
In France in 2007, for example, in the space of a brief eight-week period, there occurred a presidential election that registered a record high turnout of 84 per cent, and a legislative election that registered a record low turnout of 60 per cent (Sauger, 2007).
Let me try to draw these strands together. In many different respects – including their patterns of incumbency, their policy commitments, and their electoral profiles – parties within the mainstream have become less easily distinguished from one another than they were in the polities of the late 1970s. Despite the growing evidence of bipolar competition (see below), the parties now share government with one another more easily and more readily, with any lingering differences in policy-seeking goals appearing to matter less than the shared cross-party ambition for office. Policy discretion has become increasingly constrained by the imperatives of globalization, and, within the much-expanded European Union and and European Free Trade Association area, by the disciplines imposed by the Growth and Stability Pact and the European Central Bank. Even when parties are in government, in other words, the freedom for partisan manoeuvre is severely limited, and this too makes the task of differentiating between parties or between governments more difficult. Finally, a combination of increasing social homogenization – the blurring of traditional identity boundaries – and increasing individualization has cut across differences in partisan electoral profiles, leaving most of the mainstream protagonists chasing more or less the same bodies of voters with more or less the same suasive techniques. Through the sharing of office, programmes and voters, even as competing coalitions, the parties have become markedly less distinct from one another, while partisan purpose is itself seen as less meaningful or even desirable.
This also serves to undermine the notion of party government. Party government is a rather elusive concept that did not begin to receive attention in European political science until the late 1960s. By then, however, it was already a prominent theme in discussions of US politics, with the American Political Science Association’s 1950 report,
Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System
, at the centre of debates over political and institutional reform. This much-cited and later much-criticized report had been heavily influenced by the work of E.E. Schattschneider, who emphasized the need for effective choice and accountability in federal elections. As he argued in 1945: ‘The major party in a two-party system is typically and essentially a mobilizer of majorities for the purpose of taking control of the government; it is the most potent form of democratic political organization available for our use. The major party is the only political organization in American public life which is in a position to make a claim, upon any reasonable grounds whatsoever, that it can measure up to the requirements of modern public policy … It alone submits its claims to the nation in a general election in which the stakes are a mandate from the people to govern the country’ (Schattschneider, 1945: 1151). In US practice, however, these arguments fall rather flat, with many of the early responses to the APSA report suggesting that it was oriented towards a British-style of cabinet government and majoritarian democracy, a system that was anathema to many American observers (see Kirkpatrick, 1971). Nor did the arguments receive much support in Europe. In this case, it was again a British or perhaps Anglo-American two-party model that seemed to be favoured, with the result that the arguments themselves appeared largely irrelevant (see Daalder, 1987).
The first substantial attempt to address the issue of party government in the European context was developed by Richard Rose (1969) and was also heavily biased towards the Anglo-American experience, although the analysis itself concluded with an attempt to draw more wide-ranging cross-national conclusions and to elaborate a series of hypotheses that could be tested in a wide variety of systems.
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For Rose, party government is about the capacity of parties to ‘translate possession of the highest formal offices of a regime into operational control of government’ (1969: 413). And since this capacity varied from system to system, and also over time, his analysis sought to identify the more specific conditions that must be met for parties to influence government. These are listed in Box 1, overleaf, and may be summarized as requiring a winning party to have identifiable policies and the organizational and institutional capacity to carry them out through the people it appoints for that purpose. It is this that constitutes ‘operational control of government’ and hence what may be defined in these circumstances as the practice of ‘party government’. In the absence of these conditions, alternative forms of government may be identified, among which Rose lists government by charismatic leadership, traditional government, military government, government ‘by inertia’, and in particular ‘administrative government’, whereby ‘civil servants not only maintain routine services of government, but also try to formulate new policies’ (1969: 418).
A similar but more parsimonious list of conditions for party government was later elaborated by Richard Katz (1986: 43–44) in a more abstract analysis that was intended for application to a wide variety of parliamentary and presidential systems. For Katz, party government required three conditions. First, all major governmental decisions were to be taken by people chosen in electoral contests conducted along party lines, or at least by individuals appointed by and responsible to such people. Second, policy was to be decided within the governing party or by negotiations among parties in the case of coalition governments. In this sense policy was to be made on party lines ‘so that each party may be collectively accountable for “its” position’ (1986: 43). Third, the highest officials (ministers, prime ministers) were to be selected within parties and to be held responsible for their actions and policies through parties. Most important, this third condition implied that ‘positions in government must flow from support within the party rather than party positions flowing from electoral success’ (1986: 43). In a later study, Katz (1987: 7)
adapted these conditions into the five interrelated stipulations shown in Box 2. That is, party government is manifest when winning parties both decide and enact policies through officials who are recruited and held accountable by parties. Katz also follows Rose (1969) in identifying a series of alternatives to party government, derived in this case from the concrete analyses developing from his model: corporatist or neo-corporatist government, in which policies are set through negotiations between interests that are directly affected by the policies; pluralist democracy, in which each individual candidate and elected official is responsible to his or her own constituency, and in which party as such does not figure; and direct democracy, in which policies are determined by referendum and elections are not decisive for securing mandates or accountability (Katz, 1987: 18–20).
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