Chapter Six - Parliaments and Political Parties

Summary

While the previous chapter investigated the impact of the electoral system and elections on the inclusiveness of parliaments, this and the next chapter take a closer look at the actor composition of legislatures. To this end we distinguish between collective and individual actors. By collective actors we mean political parties, while we treat legislators as individual actors, even though we concede that to a varying degree their parliamentary activities are determined by the party leadership. As collective actors, political parties, or to be more precise, their parliamentary groups, markedly shape the performance and the inclusiveness of parliaments. Their influence is usually greater in parliamentary systems with their fusion of government and parliamentary majority than in presidential systems. Parties recruit the political personnel of parliaments and, more importantly, articulate, aggregate, and accommodate societal interests which they refer either directly or indirectly — via the executive — to legislative decision-making. These activities certainly have a major impact on the inclusiveness of a legislature. The sections that follow therefore examine the extent to which the party system fosters the inclusiveness of legislatures. For this purpose, we first take a closer look at the relationship between the electoral and the party system before discussing the societal conflict lines shaping the party systems of the five countries studied here. In both cases we dissociate ourselves from standard arguments of the textbook literature. In a last section we examine the organizational structure of parties which also has repercussions on their parliamentary activities and inclusiveness.

Factors Shaping the Party System: Elections

Elections are certainly an important, though not the only, factor shaping the political party system. They determine to a considerable extent the number and strength of the parties represented in parliament and thus serve as indicators for the structure of the party system. From the latter the literature usually derives further conclusions concerning the stability of a political system and, by inference, of the long-term perspectives for democratic consolidation and — in the case of established democracies — the sustenance of a democracy.