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Mapping the Temporal Universe of Party Governments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Peter H. Merkl
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Abstract

This is an attempt to map out the wide variety of party-dominated democratic systems in the light of concern about the seeming decline of party government in the face of contemporary challenges. The object is to determine the parameters of their institutional, mobilization, and policymaking patterns that may constitute a reasonable definition of party government. With the help of qualitative attribute tables, sixteen systems are compared, including some non-European and some marginal cases. The most important variables indicating a high degree of conformity to the model, not surprisingly, turn out to be an executive-dominated parliamentary system, a bipolar, Left-Right-based party system, a degree of centralization, and considerable problem-solving capacity, even if the parties play only a limited role in policymaking.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , October 1985 , pp. 483 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1985

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References

Notes

1 The weakening of established parties before the assault of a wide variety of protest movements signifies, among other things, the weakening of party governments themselves (see Lawson, K. and Merkl, P., eds., When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986]Google Scholar) at the same time as the stability of the party systems of advanced democratic countries is being challenged by increasing electoral dealignment (Dalton, R., Flanagan, S., and Beck, P. A., eds., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? [Princeton University Press, 1984]).Google Scholar

2 Pulzer, P., “Responsible Party Government in the German Political System” in Party Government and Political Culture in Western Germany, ed. Doring, H. and Smith, G. (London: Macmillan, 1982).Google Scholar

3 Rose, R., The Problem of Party Government (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 421CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the 1950 Report of the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association, “Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System,” a supplement of American Political Science Review 44 (09 1950)Google Scholar and other writings of Austin Ranney and Elmer E. Schattschneider. The latter chaired the committee and, as he pointed out elsewhere, the classical definition of democracy as “government by the people” is really predemocratic since the democratic management of policy conflicts by the people requires strong political parties that are arranged in such a way as to give the voters a choice. This arrangement is party government (See Schattschneider, , The Semi-Sovereign People [New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1960], p. 129Google Scholar) and we should remember that British party government also predated democracy by a century or more.

4 Rose, , Problem of Party Government, pp. 433–34.Google Scholar

5 The Wildenmann project on The Future of Party Government assembled conferences and papers in the early 1980's at the European University Institute in Florence. The papers are scheduled to appear in several volumes. The project did not include many non-European systems other than the United States.

6 Richard Rose's argument that the “presidential party” of American presidents is as good a vehicle of party government as the majority parties of other systems seems flawed in that the presidential party is more often the creature of the president than it is his master.

7 The strong, partisan Finnish president, for example, competes with a prime minister weakened by an unstable party coalition.

8 Under the 1917 constitution, and somewhat different from the legacy of José Battle y Ordoñez, the nine-member elective National Council of Administration was composed in unequal parts of the two major parties — 6 to 3 — and there was still an elected president to handle foreign affairs, defense, and internal order. After 1951 the country returned to this quasi-Proporz council, this time with the presidency rotating among its members, just as in Switzerland.

9 Mayer, L., “A Note on the Aggregation of Party Systems” in Western European Party Systems, ed. Merkl, P. H. (New York: Free Press, 1980), pp. 515–20.Google Scholar

10 The development under the French Fifth Republic came close to such a division in 1978 and might again in 1986 which would bring about a major constitutional conflict because of the extraconstitutional evolution of strong presidents and weak national assemblies.

11 In some countries, small communities customarily avoid partisan labels in their election. In the state of California, nonpartisanship in local elections, including metropolitan areas, is mandated by law.

12 Even in the West German Federal Council, whose member delegations are state-appointed and have to vote en bloc, the partisan division between delegations from CDU/CSU-governed and SPD-governed states is an important point of leverage for or against the party government in Bonn.

13 The recent victory of the Canadian Conservatives may herald the establishment of a second nationwide party.

14 The degree of party control at the center, of course, could be supplemented by state-level party government. But it could also be argued that there is no substitute or halfway house for central partisan control. Either a system has it or it does not, and lower levels do not matter, according to this line of argument.

15 But, far from being an intransigent partisan confrontation, the relationship between the PCI and the DC has developed in the direction of a trade-off involving the several levels of government: the national PCI is willing to give DC coalitions some support as long as the DC-run national government continues central funding for Communist regional and urban administrations. See Panebiaco, Angelo in Lawson, and Merkl, , When Parties Fail.Google Scholar

16 Money, W. J., “Some Causes and Consequences of the Failure of Scottish Conservatism” in Conservative Politics in Western Europe, ed. Layton-Henry, Z. (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 47–68.Google Scholar

17 The prejudice expressed in the Federalist Papers and, until about the 1920's, in many European commentaries of constitutional law amply document the older view that political parties were an illegitimate and perhaps even corrupt phenomenon on the political scene.

18 Many post-1919 constitutions still solemnly affirmed this freedom of the representative which is, of course, at variance with the practices of party discipline and party government in twentieth-century legislatures.

19 We should account here for some of the more radical doctrines of responsibility, including that of the Communists, who have often sought to abolish all such residual checks as a presidency or states' rights in a federation. But their championship of conventionalism and of indirectly elected hierarchies of councils, not to mention “democratic centralism,” can hardly claim to be any closer to a rational system of political responsibility than these seeming compromises in use.

20 The practices of direct democracy in Switzerland, except for the local level, deserve similar skepticism. At their best, that is in the frequent denial of initiatives and referenda by the voters, they are rather irrelevant nondecisions. Plebiscitary democracy in France, born of de Gaulle's spite for the “old parties,” also served chiefly to intimidate the legislature and the party politicians in it. In the United States, frontier traditions and the revolt of the West against patterns of “internal colonialism” by Eastern financial interests contributed to the phenomenon.

21 The current controversies over major environmental impacts of recent planning decisions are as good an example as any to show the extraordinary increase of the responsibility of party politicians for matters they can hardly understand themselves.

22 While the requirements of bureaucratic and technical rationality and of citizen participation may often be in conflict, there are always areas where the gain in participation may well be worth some loss of rationality.

23 The “manifesto model” of partisan competition has to be seen not as straight adversary politics — that is, with the opposition contradicting everything the government says — however, but rather in the context of consensual politics. Only a few salient adversary issues, not the whole bundle of promises or of ideological doctrines, constitute the mandate.

24 Lawson, and Merkl, , When Parties Fail.Google Scholar

25 Rose, , Electoral Behavior.Google Scholar

26 See Lipset, Seymour and Rokkan, Stein, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in Lipset, and Rokkan, , eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Crossnational Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 50–55.Google Scholar

27 Dalton, , Flanagan, and Beck, , Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies.Google Scholar

28 Mackenzie, W. J. M., “Peripheries and Nation-Building: The Case of Scotland” in Mobilization, Center-Periphery Structures and Nation-Building, ed. Torsvik, P. (Oslo: Universitesforlaget, 1981), pp. 153–80.Google Scholar

29 Even substantial inroads of dealignment and of postmaterialist cleavages have not been able to dislodge old L-R alignments cemented by well-established, bipolar party systems in a range of advanced democratic countries (Dalton, , Flanagan, , and Beck, , Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial DemocraciesGoogle Scholar; and Castles, F. and Mair, P., “Left-Right Scales: Some ‘Expert’ Judgments,” IUE paper, 1982Google Scholar).

30 Valenzuela, A., “Chile” in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, ed. Linz, J. and Stepan, A. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 4:3–14, 25–39.Google Scholar

31 Pederson, M., “Changing Patterns of Electoral Volatility in European Party Systems, 1948–1977” in Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change, ed. Daalder, H. and Mair, P. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983), pp. 29–66.Google Scholar

32 Barnes, S. et al. , Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverly Hills: Sage 1979), chaps. 14–16.Google Scholar

33 Such time-specific elaboration sounds good in principle. But for our tables, it would have meant a further proliferation of examples since the salient periods are not the same. Furthermore, it would have involved breaking down the entries into even smaller time frames to make them comparable.

34 Hauss, C. and Rayside, D., “The Development of New Parties in Western Democracies Since 1945” in Political Parties: Development and Decay, ed. Maisel, L. and Cooper, J. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978), pp. 31–34.Google Scholar

35 Merkl, P. in Lawson, and Merkl, , When Parties Fail.Google Scholar

36 The literature on terror and political violence is already huge, but there is still a lack of treatments of their impact on a system. (See Merkl, P., Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986]).Google Scholar

37 There is a particular need to get inside the political subcultures of these protest movements and to understand their small-group dynamics as well as the motives of the individual.

38 Merkl, , Political Violence and Terror.Google Scholar

39 Italian constitutional life has never gone very far in the direction of party government but, for one reason or another, retained the de facto autonomy of such checks on the ruling party as the senate, the presidency, and in recent years, the regions. Partitocrazia is a caricature of party government.

40 For a survey of past attempts at measuring levels of internal conflict and new methods for gauging levels of protest action, see Barnes, , Political Action, chaps. 2–6Google Scholar. In chapter 3, the authors undertook to measure protest behavior with a “potential protest scale” that is based on questions of what kinds of action a respondent “might take” to protest a grievance. Such an attempt to mix attitudinal with behavioral measurements is extremely interesting but requires more testing.

41 Mair, P., “Adaptation and Control: Towards an Understanding of Party and Party System Change”Google Scholar in Daalder, and Mair, , Western European Party Systems, pp. 105–129.Google Scholar

42 Hans Keman and Ditmar Braun, in their paper presented at the Future of Party Government conferences, Florence, offered a table listing “patterns of political control of the economy” with regard to 18 countries including most of ours. The low, medium or high degrees of such control are shown for three periods, 1965/1966, 1971/1972, 1977/1978 to ascertain changes over time. If we had similar measurements for the extent of political control of other sectors, we could really compare countries with respect to the “reach” of party government.

43 See Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).Google Scholar

44 Beer, S., British Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1965).Google Scholar

45 Inglehart, in Dalton, , Flanagan, and Beck, , Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies.Google Scholar

46 Keman and Braun guard their ratings of political control of the economy “in relation to prescriptive economic theory” which, for example, accords “low” control ratings in 1978 to such countries as Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, and Great Britain, and “high” ones to Austria, Belgium, Norway, and Sweden. The United States receives a puzzling “low-high.”