L. What are parties and party systems? Parties In contemporary states itis difficult to imagine there being politics without par- ties, Indeed, in only two kinds of states today are parties absent. First, there are a few small traditional societies, especially in the Persian Gulf, that are still ruled by the families who were dominant in the regions they control long before the outside world recognized them as independent states. Then there are those regimes in which parties and party activities have been banned: these regimes are run either by the military or by authoritarian rulers who have the support of the military. While these interludes of party-less politics can last for some years, ulti- imately the suppression of parties has proved to be feasible only as a temporary measure, As the military authorities relax their grip on power, ot as unpopular policies stir discontent, so parties start to re-emerge from ‘underground’ or from their headquarters abroad. The difficulty that regimes have in suppressing party politics is one indicator of just how central parties are to governing a modern state. If the conduct of both politics and government in modern states seems to require that there be political parties, this does not mean that parties are always i revered institutions. Far from it. In some countries there isa long-standing dis- trust of patties. This is especially true in the United States where anti-party sen- timents are evident from the very founding of the state in the late eighteenth century, At times this anti-partisin has manifested itself in moves to restrict the activities of parties. For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Progressive reformers in many of the American states introduced laws that pro- hibited parties from contesting local government elections. This did not prevent them from participating informally in these elections, but it did bring about a significant reduction of party activity at this level of politics. Moreover, even in ‘countries where extensive party involvement in public life appeared to have @ high degree of public acceptance, dissatisfaction with politics could rebound on ‘all the major parties. For example, in Germany in 1993 a protest movementSNIDER 2 INTRODUCTION calling itself Instead of Party’ won seats in the Hamburg provincial parliament, And organizations that are recognizably parties may deliberately not use the word ‘party’ in their name, because of the connotations that word has, This has been true ofthe Gauls in Prance and of the Northern League in Italy Given that parties are so important in the modern state, the next question to ask is—what precisely are they? In answering this we immediately come up against a problem. As many observers have noted, aitempting a definition of ‘party’ is rather like attempting to define an elephant—anyone who has seen one Knows what one looks like, but providing a definition for a person who happens never to have come across one is rather dificult. The problem is that of identfy- ing precisely the boundaries between parties and other kinds of social and polit- ical institutions, For virtually every definition of a party produced by political scientists its possible to find some institutions that are recognizably parties that do not conform with the definition in some significant way. Pthaps the best way of unravelling these problems is to consider some of the features of parties that at least some observers have thought were key features, Parties are institutions that bring together people fr the purpose of exercising power within the state Certainly for something to be recognizable as a party it has to involve more than fone person, although, of course, a party can be a vehicle setup by a single person 48 a way of enhancing his or het own power within the state. In most cases the long-term purpose of this interaction is for the party to take over control of the state, either on its own or in conjunction with other parties, but there are some exceptions that prevent us from thinking of this as a defining characteristic of a party * The goal of some parties is to bring about the ultimate dissolution of an existing state rather than to exercise power within it, For example, orthodox Marxists in the late nineteenth century saw the role ofthe Communist Party as helping to bring about the demise of the capitalist state; later, under Communism, there would be no role for the party, Again, Gandhi saw the Indian National Congress as a body that should dissolve once it had gained its objective of Indian independence from Britain. Today there are parties, such as the Bloc Quebecois, many of whose members have the ultimate objective of taking the province out of the Canadian federation, rather than exercising power within it, AS a tactic to achieve its ultimate objective of bringing down a regime, a Party may choose not to engage in one activity usually associated with “exercising power, namely helping to form a government, In the French Fourth Republic, for example, the Communist Party usually obtained about INTRODUCTION 3 a quarter of the vote. But, after 1947, even if other parties had been willing, to have it in the government, it would probably not have chosen to do so. It believed it could effect better leverage for bringing down the regime by act- ing explicitly as an anti-regime party. «There ate some pola groupings that call temseves pats, and which engage in some political activities associated with parties such as contesting clections, but whose purpose is either fo entertain or to ridicule politics as. an activity, Parties like the Rhinoceros Party in Canada or the Monster Raving Loony Party in Britain fall into this category. Parties seek to use legitimate means for pursuing their ends Sometimes political scientist distinguish parties from terorist groups or militia ‘groups through Linking the former with the pursuit of objectives through legiti- mate means. Once again, while this does place most partes inside the boundary and these other organizations outside it, there are still important exceptions to be noted. ‘* Parties that have started out as civil organizations can become engaged in open, armed conflict with a regime, either because it has decided to resort to the use of force or because the regime has chosen to repress it forcibly. This was the situation of the Chinese Communist Party vis-a-vis the Nationalist government in the 1930s and in the mid-1940s, But the Communists did not cease to be a party in those years. © Organizations that have commenced their life with the overt intention of either maintaining or overturning a regime by force, if necessary, may have ‘political wings’ that are recognizable as parties. Even when, for public rla- tions purposes, they seek to separate the political and military wings (as with Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army in Ireland), in reality the two may be difficult to separate. The militias that engaged in the Lebanese civil war ofthe 1970s were the armed wings of parties that had participated in the lectoral politics ofthe pre-1975 era, When they can contest elections in the state, parties will seek to do so By focusing exclusively on the politics of liberal democratic regimes, some polit- ical scientists have sought to define a party in terms of its putting forward cand dates to contest elections for public office, However, even if we were prepared to accept one corollary, that parties in regimes which did not hold elections were ‘not parties, there would still bea further problem in emphasizing this feature of parties. © Some parties may consistently refuse to put up candidates either because that would help legitimize a regime they do not recognize, or because itis believed not to be useful for the party’s long-term goals. (The Communist4. INTRODUCTION Party in Ireland was re-formed in 1931 but did not contest any of the four national elections held before its dissolution in 1941.) ‘© Moreover, under some circumstances a party that is normally an electoral competitor may refuse to contest a particular election in order to protest against the policies of the government, This too is a tactic designed to ‘undermine the legitimacy that election would otherwise confer on the win- ning party or parties, An example of this occurred in 1983 when the People’s National Party in Jamaica, which had been the governing party until 1980, did not run any candidates. Nevertheless, most parties have seen elections as a device for displaying their political strength even when they have no intention of joining a post-election government. The publicity attached to electoral activities means that, unless a party’s hold over a particular community is especialy tight, it risks losing some of its potential supporters to parties that are prepared to put up candidates. In the case of liberal democracies only very small sect-like parties could afford to avoid electoral politics, and for this reason contesting elections seems to be the activity that lies at the very heart of what parties do in these regimes. ‘This has led some political scientists to distinguish between parties and pressure groups in relation to this activity—pressure groups are influence-seeking institutions that do not put forward candidates, But the boundary between the two kinds of institution is far from easy to draw—on occasions a group representing a single economic interest or a single cause may put up candidates for office asa device for putting pressure on party politicians, Parties are institutions that seek to represent more than a single, narrow interest in the society This feature too may seem to provide a way of drawing a firm boundary between parties and pressure groups, but once again the boundary is not that easy to iden- tify. Its true that many parties have tried to aggregate a range of interests in soci- ty. Indeed, there is a famous argument, which is discussed later in the book, that after 1945 parties in liberal democracies increasingly adopted ‘catch-all’ electoral strategies—trying to appeal to as wide a range of interests in a country as pos- sible, However, even if this argument is correct, itis not the case that every party has sought to appeal to broad interests in society. The Refugee Party is an ex- ample of this; it contested the German elections of 1953 and 1957 and sought political representation for a narrowly defined interest within Germany. Parties are groupings of people with similar belief attitudes, and values Some observers of parties have drawn on a feature of British parties noted by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century—that they were groupings of like- minded people or what might be called ‘organized opinion. INTRODUCTION 5 Box 0.1. Two Definitions of Party Edmund Burke's definition of party ‘Party is 3 body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national intorest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’ (Gemund Burke, Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), in [outs |. Bredvold and Ralph G. Ross (eds), The Philosophy of Edmund Burke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) 134) Definition of Party proposed in this book ‘A political party i an institution that (@) secks influence in a state, often by atompling to occupy positions in government, and (b) usualy. consists of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to ‘aggregate interests! Of course, there are two potential problems with this view of parties: (1) Except in the case of relatively small parties, we would expect that a party ‘would have to embrace a range of views, so on occasions, perhaps on many occa sions, serious disagreements could arise between those in the party. Nevertheless, the proponent of ‘parties-as-organized-opinion’ might counter by saying that there would always be areas of agreement that marked out one party from its rivals. In the case of many partes this is true, but it brings us to the second problem. (2) There are parties, especially ones formed around a charismatic leader, where the range of opinions represented in the party isso broad that itis difficult to see it as ‘organized opinion: ‘The Peronist Party in Argentina was an example of this; Juan Perén had put together a coalition that embraced seemingly incom. patible left- and right-wing elements. This brief discussion of some of the problems involved in defining ‘a political party’ has exposed some of the limitations inherent in such an exercise. But this does not mean that political scientists should not attempt to construct an ade- quate definition, and I do not intend to ‘duck’ the issue, For the purposes ofthis book I propose to define a party as follows: A political party is an institution that (a) seeks influence in a state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government, and (b) usually consists of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to “aggregate interests; It would be foolish to claim that I have solved the problem of how to define ‘party’. [have not, and the boundary between parties and other institutions is a complex one that no simple definition can hope to capture. Nevertheless, this definition does have some advantages over others:6 INTRODUCTION * it focuses attention on the centrality ofthe state as the object of party activ itys * it recognizes that for many, but not all, parties being ‘in government’is an important means of exercising influences * itis applicable to parties operating in regimes other than liberal democra- cies; * it makes it possible to distinguish parties from pressure groups, while re- cognizing that in particular cases the distinction may not always be a clear ones it avoids the potentially misleading assertion that parties are necessarily tunited by shared principles or opinions. Party Systems This book provides an examination of political parties and of how political sci- entists have tried to understand the working of parties. But itis also about party systems, and the distinction between parties and party systems is one that new- comers to the subject sometimes have difficulty in ‘keeping straight’ in their minds. Before we turn to this distinction, however, itis first necessary to exam- ine what parties are in the light of the preceding discussion. 1 said that parties are institutions; an institution is something that includes not only formal organizations but also informal rules and procedures governing con- duct? But ifa party consists of more than its formal organization, there is still an important distinction to be drawn between the institution itself and areas of social and politcal life affected by that institution. This point is best understood by referring to an argument introduced by Anthony King. In an article published at the end of the 1960s, reviewing the role of political parties, King discussed an analytic framework that was, and stllis, used by many scholars of American pol- ities. These scholars argue that parties consist of three separate elements—the ‘party-in-the-electorate, the ‘party organization’, and ‘the party-in-government’ King argued: {tis common in the United States for writers on parties to refer to ‘the party in the electorate} sometimes as ift were on par with the party in Congress or the party organization. The notion of party-in-the-electorate seems a strange one con the face of it, It is rather as though one were to refer not to the buyers of Campbell's soup but to the Campbell-Soup-Company-in-the-Market {In this passage King draws attention to a category mistake at the heart of the American conceptualization. Campbells soup purchasers are not part of that ‘company; what the company does, by way of marketing, pricing policy, and soon has an impact on the behaviour of purchasers of food, particularly soups. But a UMN INTRODUCTION 7 dear distinction can be drawn between the institution (in this case the company) and the behaviour it influences in the market. Similarly, we should distinguish between the institution of party and the activ- ities and processes that parties influence. This has a major beating on what is, and what is not, included in this book, Because of the great length ofa book that dealt with all aspects of politics that were affected by parties, this book deals only with parties as institutions. This means that several topics are excluded from detailed consideration. One exclusion is the behaviour of mass electorates; voting behav- jour is a major topic within political science and one which parties bear on directly. But in this book we are concerned with the role of parties in attempting {o shape that behaviour, not with, to use the conception criticized by King, ‘the party in the electorate: Again, party affects the behaviour of individuals within governments; but in relation to governing this book deals only with those areas in which parties per se may be directly involved. That is, in the formation and dis solution of governments and in the use made of occupancy of government posi- tions to further party objectives or interests ike parties, party systems can also be analysed as institutions. But a party sys- tem can also be examined as patterns of competition and co-operation between the different parties in that system. Its usual when thinking about party systems in liberal democracies to think of the nature of the competition between them. But as important-as_competition is the co-operation—formal, informal, and implicit—that is part of any party system. What is filtered out of politics, because neither party chooses to represent that interest or opinion, is often as important as the issue that the parties are contesting fiercely over. Examining the party system in a country involves both more and less than a study of the individual parties in that country. It involves more in the sense that itis the interaction of the parties that is at issue; it involves less in the sense that many aspects of party activity itself may not be directly relevant in understand- ing the way the party system works. Thus, if their titles were a good reflection of their subjects, a book on British parties would have a rather different focus from a book on the British party system, 2. The Study of Parties and Party Systems Like any book that tries to provide an overview of what has been the subject of much discussion and analysis for decades, this book tries to explain how other writers have understood parties and party systems. It is a work of synthesis, an effort not merely to explain this author's view of the subject but to set this in the context ofthe views of those whose insights into the subject have influenced how