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How Parties Win
Shaping the Irish Political Arena
By Sean D. McGraw The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2015 Sean D. McGraw
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11950-9
CHAPTER 1
How Parties Win
A Telling Case Study
How do political parties achieve and then retain electoral predominance within a fully competitive party system? Major parties, defined as parties that persistently gain at least 15 percent of the total vote and remain a viable coalition partner in government, occur in just over half of the cases in a recent study of forty-seven democracies from around the world in the period from 1945 to 2006. The subject of How Parties Win is why and, perhaps even more important, how some major parties succeed electorally over time while others decline or disappear altogether.
It is often simply assumed that major parties will continue to experience electoral success — even over long periods — once they become major parties. As a result, the precise mechanisms by which parties actively reconstitute themselves and their linkages with the electorate are undertheorized. Previous explanations, especially those that focus on sociological, partisanship, and formal institutional explanations, ultimately fail to satisfy. These arguments view parties principally as dependent variables, reflections of larger, more fixed elements within society. Though they have proven useful in explaining the foundations of party systems, they insufficiently account for how major parties continue to survive. These arguments fail to explain fully how major parties endure long after the social realities that originally underpinned the cleavage structure disappear, after the collective identities of key social groups and political parties fragment and their shared interests dissipate, or after the organizations supporting these social divisions decay. Thus, such approaches fail to provide an adequate explanation of precisely how major parties maintain their electoral predominance, especially during periods of dramatic social, economic, and cultural change.
In this study, political parties are viewed principally as agents — as independent, rather than dependent, variables. Parties seek to shape how societal interests are translated into the political arena; they are not merely reflections of social realities or expressions of deep-seated social demands. Rather, parties constantly shape interests in a myriad of ways, employing multiple strategies within the ideological, institutional, and organizational arenas. Since no single strategy is sufficient in itself for understanding how major parties maintain their electoral success, my analysis improves on previous studies by using a diachronic multidimensional approach. In addition to integrating how parties proactively seek to shape electoral outcomes as a result of the choices they make on these multiple dimensions of competition, I offer a novel construct for understanding how party leaders select and sometimes purposefully sideline pressing political and social issues to preserve their electoral advantage. When major parties displace controversial and divisive issues to extraparliamentary institutions — such as referenda, national systems of wage bargaining, quangos, tribunals, and courts — they mitigate the effects of changing environments and dampen the ability of minor parties to alter the overall nature of electoral competition. This successful displacement of issues affects, in turn, the range of strategies on the ideological and organizational dimensions that parties can choose from to preserve their electoral predominance. Ultimately, because the long-term electoral success of major parties can create the impression of electoral immobility and quiescence, even the perception of "freezing" within the electoral market, we need to uncover political entrepreneurs' activity in shaping the political arena, which is often feverish but otherwise hidden from view.
The three established political parties of the Republic of Ireland — the parties and party leaders that comprise the principal empirical focus of this book — provide a crucial case for assessing how major parties achieve and retain electoral predominance. On average, these parties have managed to grab and maintain their hold of over 80 percent of the total vote, in the face of dramatic social, economic, cultural, and political change. The underlying cleavage structure in Ireland, the political value system, and the issues dimensions relevant for elections have experienced sharp change. Dramatic shifts have also occurred in the demographic composition of the electorate, as Ireland has transitioned from one of the poorest to one of the wealthiest European countries in less than a generation. Additionally, changes in Ireland's political institutions, such as membership in the European Union (hereinafter EU), North-South relations and institutions, and the national system of wage bargaining, have altered how politics in Ireland is conducted. Each of these potential sources of change has been visibly present in recent decades, yet the party system has outwardly experienced more stability than change in electoral outcomes, which previous theories cannot fully explain.
In the face of these unprecedented changes in Irish society over the last several decades, Ireland's three historic parties have maintained their electoral predominance by employing mutually reinforcing strategies within the ideological, institutional, and organizational domains. An underlying narrative of this study describes how political parties compete in a dramatically modernizing social, economic, and political context. However, somewhat paradoxically, I show herein that the meta-trends of organizational centralization and professionalization, the institutional displacement of controversial issues, and the centripetal character of ideological competition are the very factors that have reinforced the longstanding character of Irish party politics. Rather than rationalizing patterns of party competition, these trends have deepened the clientelistic and personalistic approaches that contribute to politics as usual in Ireland. My multidimensional approach to understanding how Ireland's major parties behave holds important lessons for the behavior of major parties in other contexts. How major parties in Ireland shape the demands of the electorate, constrain the political arena, and circumscribe the degrees of freedom enjoyed by competing parties has great relevance for understanding party behavior in other cases.
In this chapter, I provide a broad analysis of the comparative data concerning the electoral predominance of major parties and a brief overview of competing explanations for this predominance over the long term. I also present my argument that parties and party leaders are best viewed as agents whose choices, made along multiple dimensions, continually and dynamically shape the political offerings available to voters. Through this study, we will see how Ireland represents a telling case for understanding the processes of party endurance and adaptation more broadly by employing a multidimensional and longitudinal perspective.
Major Party Survival in Comparative Perspective
Comparative research on how major parties survive and maintain their electoral supremacy over long periods has been less than robust, perhaps because of a perception that most major parties in competitive party systems survive over the longer term. However, a review of the data reveals that major parties do not, in fact, automatically preserve their electoral predominance over time. Electoral results from forty-seven countries that experienced at least four consecutive democratic elections by 2006 demonstrate greater variation in the electoral success of major parties than one might expect. It is far from inevitable that major parties, once established within a system, will sustain their electoral stronghold.
Consider the evidence presented in table 1.1. For the purposes of this analysis, a party is identified as "major" if it secured 15 percent or more of the vote in parliamentary elections and as "minor" if it gained more than 1 percent but less than 15 percent of the vote. Parties were included if they were "major" in 1945 or when a regime initiated democratic elections, if after 1945. I did not include parties that became major after 1980, because the goal was to observe the ability of major parties to survive over the longer term. To capture the variation in potential electoral trends, I offer four summary categories: the designation "always major" represents a party that secured 15 percent or more of the vote in every election; "major-minor (now major)" denotes a party that dipped below 15 percent of the vote in at least one election but recaptured enough votes to be a major party in the most recent election; "major-minor (now minor)" is a major party that has dipped below 15 percent of the vote and remained there; and "dissolved" indicates a major party that no longer exists. Roughly half of all major parties (56 percent) from across the regions successfully maintained their status as major parties in every election. Another 33 percent of major parties experienced mixed electoral success and were minor parties in at least one election. A considerable percentage of major parties in Europe (28 percent) and Latin America (25 percent) have experienced declining electoral fortunes and are no longer identified as major parties, based on their most recent electoral results. Finally, 9 percent of major parties in this set of countries have disappeared altogether.
As recent scholarship has demonstrated, some major parties experience serious decline or disappear, as is evidenced by the Conservatives in Canada or some of the early Japanese parties. Disillusionment, anger, weak partisan identities, and large-scale perception of incompetence led to rapid decline of major parties and the collapse of democratic regimes in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Colombia. Italy presents a paradigmatic case of the rupture of a party system in a long-established democracy. There, the Christian Democratic Party (DC) collapsed, and the Communist Party (PCI) dissolved, beginning a tortuous decade-long process of reconstitution into a vastly different leftist party. The failure of leaders within Italy's predominant parties, especially the DC, to adapt effectively to a dramatically changed global ideological environment (by either rearticulating their own programmatic appeals or reestablishing links to groups within civil society) contributed powerfully to their demise. This failure, combined with a large-scale reliance on state institutions and resources for the distribution of patronage to its supporters, led to eventual collapse of these major parties.
Among the major parties that have preserved their electoral predominance, there are no clear-cut patterns in terms of which types of parties tend to succeed. For example, historical legacies, ideological background, organizational structures, and institutional frameworks fail to explain fully the variation in electoral outcomes for major parties in these cases. Patterns of longer-term electoral survival of major parties from different ideological backgrounds are mostly mixed. In Europe alone, left-leaning Social Democratic parties have fared the best, with twelve of sixteen of these founding parties always maintaining their major party status, compared to only seven of sixteen center-right parties. Centrist parties have experienced the most erratic results. Of the eleven major center parties that existed since their country's first election, only three have managed to never drop below the 15 percent threshold. Although left-leaning parties have been able to rely on greater numbers of core supporters to maintain their major party status, there was an overall shift to the right in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, a trend that has benefited center-right and right-leaning parties in the last two decades. Nevertheless, we must be cautious of overstating the importance of ideology in determining these results. Parties not only reflect social realities but also shape them, which means we must be careful not to place too much weight on overall trends on the demand side of politics. In addition, party strategies on other dimensions can influence the ability of parties to adapt their programmatic positions to attract votes. That a party's choices on one dimension affect their available options on another dimension reinforces the imperative to study the multidimensional strategies of party entrepreneurs from a longitudinal perspective.
The utility of employing an approach that takes account of party strategies on multiple dimensions over the longer term exists even in the United Kingdom and its former colonies, where major parties exhibit slightly higher rates of persistent electoral success than the average across all countries in the sample. For example, there are fourteen "always major" parties among the eight countries with British roots (including the United Kingdom), which equates to an average of 1.75 "always major" parties per country. This compares to only 1.27 "always major" parties per country if we consider all the countries in the sample and to only 1.09 if we remove the British legacy countries. Six out of eight of these "always major" parties have succeeded in majoritarian electoral systems, which generally produce two parties with a higher percentage of votes and could contribute to the greater numbers of major parties that have predominated over the long term. However, care must be exercised so that we do not attribute too much weight to electoral systems in explaining the electoral predominance of major parties. Not only have major parties in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom undergone dramatic shifts, even morphing and merging to become virtually new parties, but we also observe persistent major party domination in proportional representation systems.
These British-influenced countries have also likely benefited from a longer historical experience of democracy and therefore have deeper partisan identities and organizational advantages than major parties that emerged more recently. Nevertheless, again, we must be cautious not to overstate these advantages. Mainwaring and Zoco's analysis of electoral results in forty-seven countries leads them to conclude that competitive regimes inaugurated in earlier periods have much lower electoral volatility than regimes inaugurated more recently, even controlling for other factors. They argue that the political parties in regimes formed prior to 1945 and even pre-1978 effectively incorporated citizens into the political system and established strong attachments and long-lasting identities between parties and voters that later-forming regimes lacked. In many of the post-1978 regimes, weaker attachments between parties and voters have led to disillusionment of large segments of society with parties and politics as a whole. As previously mentioned, this had serious negative consequences for democratic survival in less-established democracies such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Colombia. Such developments reaffirm the vital role that parties perform in incorporating citizens into the political system and developing the deep partisan identities essential for stable democracies.
Critically for our purposes, all-encompassing parties that engender long-lasting identities among their supporters — the very factor that distinguishes stable from volatile regimes — no longer appear to be present even within stable democratic regimes. Extensive evidence suggests that even in consolidated party systems, major parties are no longer all-encompassing, are less effective in incorporating citizens into the political system, and engender much weaker attachments and partisan identities among the electorate. Even so, in many of these regimes, established major parties remain electorally dominant, and there is broad electoral stability, which suggests that parties are surviving for very different reasons than they did when they established their electoral supremacy. Therefore, we must turn our attention to identifying the precise ways in which successful major parties have survived in radically altered environments.
The fundamental argument of this book is that successful major parties shape how societal interests are translated into politics; they do not merely respond to changes on the demand side of politics. To overcome limitations of previous explanations of how and why major parties have been able to survive electorally over long periods despite dramatic social changes, I argue that political parties are best studied as actors that proactively seek to frame social change, rather than merely being shaped by it. Our understanding of political parties is limited if we view them as principally reflections of underlying sociological realities, as subject to a given set of electoral arrangements, or as a reflex of enduring political cultures and norms. The choices of party leaders and the strategies they adopt matter decisively for explaining why and how parties survive. By focusing on the strategic choices of party leaders to shape the political arena, I will underscore the specific ways in which major parties and party leaders select critical political and social issues, sometimes purposefully sidelining issues, to preserve their electoral predominance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How Parties Win by Sean D. McGraw. Copyright © 2015 Sean D. McGraw. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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