Party Systems Notes

COMPARATIVE GOVERNMENT

Parties: Literature Summaries, Class Analysis & Tutorial Notes

**Roberts Clark, W., Golder, M., and Golder, S., (2009) Principles of Comparative Politics.

Key’s three party functions

• party in the electorate

• party as an organisation

• party in government

Deemed to be crucial. Eg Schumpeter emphasizes role of parties, if not explicit, in his definition of democracy as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the peoples’ votes.’

Number of parties: Duverger’s theory

Social cleavages

• Duverger: found that the primary engine behind formation of pol parties can be found in social divisions.

• Key aspect: the total number of cross-cutting cleavages.

Electoral institutions

• Nonproportional electoral systems, eg. the single-member district plurality system, act as a ‘brake’:

  • Mechanical effect of electoral laws: plurality systems punish small parties

  • Strategic effect – on voting and entry

• Duverger’s theory (1954): the size determined by interplay of social and institutional forces.

Evidence for Duverger’s theory

Duverger’s Law: single-member district plurality systems encourage two-party systems.

Duverger’s Hypothesis: PR electoral rules favor multiparty systems.

Countries will only have large multiparty systems if they are characterized by high levels of social heterogeneity and permissive electoral systems

*Kitschelt, H. (2008) ‘Party Systems’ The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (Oxford: OUP)

Parties:

• overcome collective action problems

• reduce problems of social choice (cycling etc)

• Papua New Guinea: democracy exists without parties!

• Sartori – ‘structured’ party system

• Mair – systemness

Party system:

• number of competitors

• ‘currency’ of competition for voter support

Numerical properties: fractionalization, effective number and volatility

• Party systems divided into two-party and multiparty systems – Duverger (1954)

• Sartori (1976): distinction between moderate and polarized multiparty systems dependent on the existence of ‘anti-system’ parties

• Since 1970s: variable-based typologies

• Rae (1967): measure of party system fractionalization

• Laakso and Taagepera (1979): effective number of parites (ENPP)

• Volatility index: summarises percentage differences of electoral support obtained by the same parties in two subsequent elections

Comparative statics:

Simple spatial theory: the elusiveness of equilibria:

• Downs (1957): median voter theorem. Parties choose policy positions proximate to the position of the median voter. Assumptions:

  • Office-motivated politicians

  • Perfect knowledge

  • Barriers to entry

  • Support of political activists

  • Unidimensional competition

  • Explicit preference schedules

• Problems:

  • Parties may be policy seeking

  • Coalition problems – voters may be strategic and support more radical parties than is warranted by own policy ideals in expectation of bargain compromises

  • Voters may not act on simple spatial rationale in which they gauge Euclidean distance, weighted by salience

Have parties converged on the centre ground?

Argument based on rise of career politicians and reduction of social cleavages, as well as spatial modeling.

Controversial to assume we can compare. Left right spectrum not applicable. Laver and Hunt’s comparison.

Link with catch all party.

Not necessarily true – eg.Labour Party; eg. Republican party

Agent-based modeling of party competition

• As a backlash against formal theory, but voicing unease with purely historical narratives of party competition: agent-based modeling of political behaviour (eg Page et al. 1992)

• Assumptions: voters and politicians have limited knowledge-processing capacity; act on simple rules rather than on a survey of everyone’s preferences and strategic options

• Parties slowly move in policy space without wrecking reputation. Eg. Laver (2005): parties act on rules of thumb, such as that of the ‘hunter’ who repeats appeals that have increased electoral support, or the ‘predator’ who moves towards the electorally strongest party. => may yield gravitation of partisan actors towards center region of the space.

• Ie importance of behavioural actions. But, model needs enriching by adaption of voters.

Party entry

• Game theoretic models rather than formal spatial theories

• Entry and exit previously seen as result of interplay between demand and supply

• Barriers of entry

Historical dynamics of party systems

• Lipset and Rokkan (1967)

• Dealignment?

• Realignment?

• Mass media and party finance = unaccountable ‘cartel parties’

  • KITSCHELT (2000) claims competition and voter exit contradict the thesis. Eg. Middle Eastern parties – low turnout in Algeria etc. Circumventing political mechanisms.

Party systems in new democracies

• Will ‘institutionalised’ party systems emerge in the first place?

• Post-communist parties: high volatility

• KITSCHELT (1999): In countries where party systems have developed staying power, not programmatic politics based on indirect exchange but clientelistic PA relations that dominate the literature

• Structured programmatic political cleavages and rather stable partisan divides – insertion of former communist ruling parties into democratic partisan politics

• Controversies surround descriptive characterization as well as explanation for more/less programmatic structuring. Legacies/institutional/reform based explanations of divides between interests?

Party Formation and Party-Voter Linkages

Dalton, R.J., (2002) ‘Political Cleavages, Issues, and Electoral Change’

• Inglehart (1977): citizens expanded interests to include non-economic, quality-of-life issues – environmentalism, women’s movement etc.

• L & R 1967: power of social cleavages

  • Class conflict: different ideologies on nature of politics and economics

  • Economic conservatives

  • Socialists and social democrats

• Empirically confirmed: eg. Rose (1969)

• But, increasing fluidity and volatility over time

  • De Graaf (1999): size of class...

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