When Political Parties Die
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When Political Parties Die
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When Political Parties Die A Cross-National Analysis of Disalignment and Realignment Charles S. Mack
Copyright 2010 by Charles S. Mack All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mack, Charles S. When political parties die : a cross-national analysis of disalignment and realignment / Charles S. Mack. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-38546-9 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-38547-6 (ebook) 1. Political parties. 2. Two-party systems. 3. Democracy. 4. Comparative government. I. Title. JF2051.M22 2010 324.2'1—dc22 2010015941 ISBN: 978-0-313-38546-9 EISBN: 978-0-313-38547-6 14
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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America
To my grandchildren, Morgan and Jaxson McQuaid, with much love.
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Contents
List of Illustrations Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
xi xiii
Introduction
1
Party Disalignment and Realignment Characteristics of Disalignment Realignment Theory Working Definitions and Variables Objectives and Hypotheses Methodology Plan of the Book
4 6 7 8 9 10 10
Parties and Party Systems
13
Major vs. Minor Parties The Party Base Party Labels A Definition of Political Parties Party System Consolidation and Institutionalization Socioeconomic Cleavages and Party Preferences New Parties and New Cleavages Party Durability Party Systems Electoral Systems Party Types Perspectives on Leadership
14 14 18 19 20 21 22 25 28 29 34 37
viii
Contents
Chapter Three Realignment and Dealignment
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
43
The Origins of Realignment Theory Realignment Criticisms Realignment Resurrected? The Dealignment Perspective Political Change outside the United States
43 47 49 53 55
Disalignment and Realignment: A New Theoretical Approach
65
A Different Lens Calculation of Parties’ Bases and Medial Voters A Theory of Disalignment Disalignment and Electoral Systems A New Theory of Realignment A Typology of Elections Introduction to the Cases Hypotheses
66 68 71 73 75 79 81 85
The Case of the American Whig Party
87
Origins and Rise of the Whigs The 1824 Election The 1828 Election Party Development The Jackson Presidency The Birth of the Whig Party The 1836 Election The Frustrations of the 1840 Election The Tyler Disaster The 1844 Election The Mexican War and the 1848 Election Taylor, the West, and Patronage The Compromise of 1850 The 1850 Election and Its Aftermath The 1852 Election Temperance, Immigration, and Catholicism The Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the End of the Whigs
87 89 90 92 94 96 99 101 104 106 108 111 113 116 117 119 122
Contents
Chapter Six
ix
The Know Nothing Surge The Whig Rise and Fall Conclusions
124 127 133
The Case of the British Liberal Party
141
Origins and Rise of the Liberals Liberal Doctrines The Age of Gladstone Gladstone and Ireland The Prewar Years The House of Lords Battle Labor Discord Women’s Suff rage The Irish Crises Coalition and War Management The Expanded Electorate The 1918 “Coupon” Election The 1920s Local Elections Conclusions
142 144 145 147 148 152 157 158 160 163 167 168 172 178 179
Chapter Seven The Case of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party Quebec and Regionalism in Canada The Unassimilated Province Western Protest The Party System Regional and Provincial Competition Electoral Structure and Serial Party Systems Pan-Canadianism in the Third-Party System Mulroney and the Meech Lake Accord Preludes to Disaster The 1993 Earthquake The New Protest Parties Continuity of Change: 1997–2002 Renewal of Change: 2004–2008 Who Won the Merger?
187 188 190 194 196 198 199 200 203 205 208 211 213 214 221
x
Contents
Provincial vs. Federal Party Systems Conclusions
224 229
Chapter Eight The Case of the Italian Party System
237
The Rise of the Italian State Influences on the Party System The Quasi-Stable Party System The Postwar Party System to 1992 The Collapse of the First Republic Italy: Conclusions and Outlook
237 238 242 244 251 256
Chapter Nine Comparative Analysis of the Cases
Chapter Ten
259
Conditions Necessary for Disalignments Leadership Failure Intensity of National Identity Cleavage Issues and Positions Alienation of the Core Base Availability of a Successor Party or Parties The Electoral System Analysis of the Cases against the Hypotheses
259 260 264 269 272 272 275
Conclusions and Implications for American Politics in the 21st Century
279
Protecting the Base Base Integrity and Party Polarization The Obstruction of Governance The Intensity of Belief The Cartel Parties New Party Barriers The Reform Party Experience Clarity of Choice The Italian Analogy Could Disalignments Recur? Are Disalignments Cyclical?
279 281 284 287 290 292 293 294 295 296 299
Selected Bibliography
303
Index
315
List of Illustrations TABLES Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8
Hypothetical Effect of a PR Voting System in the 2005 British Election Hypothetical Effect of a PR Voting System in the 2006 Canadian Election Turnout Rates in US Elections, 1996–2008 Calculation of Party Bases and Medials (Canadian Elections: 1972–1988) Calculation of Party Bases and Medials (US Elections: 1836–1848) Calculation of Party Bases and Medials (British Elections: 1895–December 1910) Disalignment Drop-Offs from Party Bases Classification of Selected Elections (United States, Great Britain, and Canada) The 1836 Presidential Election Regional Party Competitiveness, 1840–1848 Summary of Presidential Popular Vote Percentages, 1836–1852 US Immigration and Its Major Sources, 1820–1850 The American Catholic Population, 1790–1850 Presidential Elections, 1856–1864 Party Composition of the US House, 1835–1863 Results of Gubernatorial Elections by Party, 1845–1863
31 32 59 69 70 70 71 82 100 112 121 124 125 128 129 131
xii
Table 5.9 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 6.6 Table 6.7 Table 6.8 Table 6.9 Table 6.10 Table 6.11 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 7.5 Table 7.6 Table 7.7 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 9.1 Table 9.2
List of Illustrations
Party Affiliations in State Legislatures, 1835–1865 1900 General Election Results 1906 General Election Results 1910 ( January) General Election Results 1910 (December) General Election Results 1918 General Election Results 1922 General Election Results 1923 General Election Results 1924 General Election Results 1929 General Election Results Summary of Liberal Party Performance, 1900–1987 Results of Elections to London Metropolitan Area Borough Councils, 1900–1931 1984 General Election Results 1988 General Election Results 1993 General Election Results 1993–2000 General Election Results Hypothetical Results of a PC-CA Merger, 1997–2000 2004–2008 General Election Results Changes in CPC Regional Representation, 2000–2008 Major-Party Percentages of the Italian Vote, 1953–1992 Percentage Point Drop-Off from Best Year to 1992 Disaffection of Party Bases Results of Selected Elections under FPP
132 149 150 153 156 170 174 175 176 176 177 178 204 207 210 214 216 219 221 251 251 270 274
FIGURE Figure 4.1 The Composition of an Electorate in a Two-Party System
67
Preface Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Few institutions seem as derided, yet as necessary and prevalent, as political parties. Parties are essential elements in linking society and the state, and they compete to provide an elected government. Yet, their modes of operation and competition often make them widespread objects of scorn. Nonetheless, we could not have democracy without them. Political parties reflect past circumstances and events, as much as contemporary ones. Like a river, politics is ever changing yet always there. Events of decades and even centuries gone by affect the shape of political institutions of both today and the future, even as they inhibit or prevent other developments from ever coming to pass. This concept is called “path dependence,” and T. S. Eliot’s poem captures its essence well: The British capture of France’s North American territories in the late 18th Century worked its way through the intervening years to find its contemporary reflection in the politics of Quebec and Canada. And Britain’s Glorious Revolution, almost a century earlier, led in one way to the rise of that country’s Liberal Party and in another to the birth of the American Whig Party—and indeed to the constitutional systems of both countries. Minor parties arise constantly to give voice to new points of view and to new or underrepresented interests. Most quickly disintegrate. A very few become major parties, but once they do they are likely to be very long-lived indeed. Among the democracies of West Europe and North America, most of the dominant political parties have been around for decades, and many date back to the 19th Century. How have they managed to survive so long?
xiv
Preface
Under rare and very specific circumstances, a major political party does die, perhaps suddenly or possibly over the course of several elections. The result is an upheaval that has sweeping consequences for the country’s political system. What are the conditions that bring about the party’s demise? And what does that teach us about the things we need to do to maintain political parties that are healthy and constructive participants in the development of beneficial public policies? In an earlier book,1 I expressed the view that America’s Republican and Democratic Parties were both at death’s door. My view today is that they are not dying, but that they survive in a condition that obstructs sound public policies. At the time, I overstated their situations because I did not fully understand the circumstances that can endanger a major party. Some subsequent years of study led to a better understanding of the problems that can produce the death of a major party, and thence to this book. Without prematurely giving away the plot and revealing the killer’s identity quite yet, I will say that an important set of clues was provided by an old favorite subject of political science, realignment theory. It turns out that if one analyzes the theory of party realignment through a new lens, one is led to the phenomenon that I call party disalignment (i.e., party collapse and disintegration). And if one then pursues a theory of disalignment, the trail leads back to a new theory of realignment that may contribute to a better understanding of certain historical political developments than the traditional theory provided. And so I wrote this book both as an analysis and as a narrative, in order to explain not only disalignment but also realignment once that hoary subject is held up to a different light. The case studies—narratives within the larger narrative, as it were—that examine what happens to political institutions under the pressures of history are an important part of that story. A personal note may be in order here. After retiring from a traditional career in politics, lobbying, and association management, I decided to pursue graduate studies in political science at the Catholic University of America. Ultimately, I specialized in comparative party politics, a focus that led over time to a doctoral dissertation on disalignment and then to this book. Undoubtedly, there are aspects of disalignment theory—and to the revised theory of realignment—that I did not explore fully or that might not even have occurred to me. I would be delighted if the ideas presented here lead to a further and deeper probe into these subjects by other analysts. My thanks to various mentors and friends whose advice and guidance at various stages of this analysis and manuscript preparation greatly strengthened the final product:
Preface
xv
• Professors John K. White, Kirk Buckman, and Matthew Green—all currently or formerly of the Catholic University Department of Politics— who lent friendship and good counsel to this project. • Several people who strongly encouraged and abetted my post-retirement career in graduate school: Dr. Kathryn Healey and the late Fr. David O’Connor—old and close friends, who took a deep personal and intellectual interest in my studies from the very beginning; Father O’Connor is deeply missed. Prof. Joan Barth Urban has provided me with wise advice and a helping hand from my earliest days as a graduate student. In addition, my daughter, Alice McQuaid, nagged me mercilessly to go to law school as she had and become a lawyer like her; I escaped her constant harassment only by fleeing to graduate studies in political science. • Eric Valentine, my agent and former publisher, who helped bring this book about. • Two respected scholars who were kind enough to grant me interviews on the changing shape of Canadian politics: Prof. R. Kenneth Carty of the University of British Columbia, and Prof. R. Kent Weaver of Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution. • A pair of unindicted coconspirators from the years of our political youth, who offered helpful comments on Chapter 10—Raymond L. Hoewing and Thomas Y. Canby. • And, most of all, my wife Alice, who brings beauty and happiness into my life every day—while remaining the world’s toughest editor.
NOTE 1. Charles S. Mack, Business Strategy for an Era of Political Change (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2001).
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Chapter 1
Introduction
The day after Canada’s general election on November 26, 1993, newspapers across Europe and North America carried the startling news that the country’s governing party, the Progressive Conservatives (PC), had not only been defeated the previous day, but had virtually been wiped out as a political party. Overnight, the Tories, one of Canada’s two founding parties and among the oldest political parties in the world, had been reduced from being the party of government to the smallest party in Parliament, replaced by two new regional parties. Major political parties in long-established democratic party systems like Canada’s tend to be robust, resilient, and highly durable entities. When defeated at the polls, as they often are, they typically remobilize their assets to return and fight another day. They remain contenders for future power. But what happened to the PC was no ordinary defeat. Deserted by the bulk of its traditionally loyal voters, the party was demolished and was never again a contender for national power in its original form. The PC lingered on as an insignificant force for some years until it finally was absorbed in a merger with one of the regional parties that had replaced it. The Tory catastrophe was a truly historic development—but not, in fact, unique. Twice before in modern political history, major democratic parties had been destroyed by their electorates: the American Whig Party in 1854, and the British Liberal Party in 1918–1924. Moreover, in the same year that Canada’s PC was disaligned, the entire party system of Italy disintegrated. Political science literature has voluminously discussed the decline of party systems, of parties as institutions, and of particular parties in advanced democracies. It seems odd, then, that there has been no analysis of the phenomenon of the decay of major political parties. The phenomenon has neither been identified nor named, and therefore of course it has not
2
When Political Parties Die
been analyzed. Yet, there are important questions that have not been answered because they have not been asked: Why are political parties sometimes so badly defeated in elections that they are unable to survive as major parties and contend for a future role as a party of government? Do these phenomena share common causes? What relationship do they have with the structure of electoral systems and party systems? Perhaps even more important, why should people care? After all, most democratic electorates habitually tend to view parties and politics with scorn and derision, often seeing them as obstacles to the enactment of nonpartisan, public-interest policies. But as political scientists have long recognized, political parties are the critical link that connects society with government. Parties are considered a vital signal of democracy even, ironically, when they are absent, as in the typical authoritarian state. Indeed, authoritarian regimes are prone to erect uncompetitive political parties as symbolic fig leaves to mollify domestic and international public opinion. But once national societies shun authoritarianism for true democracy, the rise of competitive political parties becomes one of the first developments. Voters perceive parties as instruments of democracy even while scoffing at their quotidian political behaviors. The collapse of a major political party is therefore a critical historical and political event. Questions about its nature and origins are important. If we understand why major political parties can die, then we are also well along the way to understanding what parties do to perpetuate themselves. Furthermore, grasping the electoral mechanisms that bring about party demise may help us to a new understanding of the processes that bring about electoral realignment, that is, a restructuring of the party system. Since naming a phenomenon is a first step toward understanding it, this book uses the coined term party disalignment to describe both party demise and the theory developed to explain it. We define disalignment briefly here as a severe loss of support for a major party among its core base voters, leading to its immediate or subsequent demise. (A fuller statement of the theory appears in Chapter 3.) It is important to distinguish between ordinary political party defeats and party disalignments. Just as every democratic election produces winners, so it invariably produces losers. The vanquished arise, lick their wounds, pay pro-forma tribute to the voters’ choice, and begin plotting revenge at the next election. They may lose over and over again, but so long as they retain a core base of voters they can go on indefinitely until, ultimately, they prevail. Disalignments are different. In each case, their common characteristic is that the party has been abandoned by the majority of its traditional core
Introduction
3
base of voters. The result is not mere defeat but destruction. Major parties cannot survive without the support of a core base. Later chapters in this book will examine in some detail the causal factors behind these ruptures. In brief, however, these catastrophes appear to have occurred because of leadership failures that produced schisms in values or ideology on issues of overriding national socioeconomic importance—in other words, party leadership was seriously out of step with social and attitudinal changes affecting the party base. In each case, there was a substantial adjustment in the party system as the disrupted party was replaced (or displaced) by a new or previously minor party. The victims of disalignment have never recovered. Even in political systems characterized by weak parties and candidatecentered politics, the essential quality of parties is that they are the vehicles that, uniquely, select candidates and offer them under a common label for election to public office. Moreover, because major parties tend to be highly durable, a disalignment is a rare event that has severe consequences for the party system. A theory of disalignment should enable both scholars and political practitioners in all democracies to predict situations in which certain kinds of issues can produce disalignments as well as those where they cannot. There are, of course, numerous instances in which a disagreement between a party’s leaders and its base does not result in disalignment. Sometimes, the disagreement is not intense enough to overcome the base’s desire to win. On other occasions, disaffected members of the base may choose to sit out the election but not vote for a different party. At still other times, a partial splintering of the base does occur, but one that is insufficient to threaten the party’s continued existence; examples include the loss of a part of the base of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the new Party of the Left in 2005, and the defection in 1981 of the British Labour Party’s right wing to a new Social Democratic Party. These situations did not result in a disalignment, perhaps because the issues were not considered that important, or underlying changes in social values were not sufficiently powerful. Disalignment is an electoral event that does not seem to take place unless the alienation of party base voters from the party leadership is sufficiently sweeping to reach some critical mass of intensity. Disalignment is therefore not a process that occurs easily or readily. The voters who constitute a party’s base are its most loyal and dedicated supporters, typically including its dues-paying members or financial contributors and its steadfast workers at the grassroots. They tend to support the party strongly in election after election for affective reasons or because of a commitment to some more-or-less ideological conception of party
4
When Political Parties Die
principles, even if they are not always enamored of particular candidates or the party’s stance on a particular issue. To such voters, the party is an idea or cause that demands and almost always receives their loyalty and that transcends any hesitations or concerns they may have in a given election. It takes exceptional circumstances for the voters who constitute a major party’s base to abandon it. Positive feedback is at work here: The durability of the party strengthens its ability to build a base, and the loyalty of the base enhances party durability. History is also at work. Political parties are not the result of virgin births. Parties arise because of socioeconomic divisions or political circumstances that may have originated or occurred long before. Canada’s Quebec problems, for instance, are the product of France’s defeat by the British 250 years ago, which set certain chains of events in motion while precluding others from occurring. The very shape of constitutional democracy may be traced back in the same way to Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. Political scientists call this process “path dependence,” and it has shaped and colored the establishment of parties and other political institutions the world over. PART Y DISALIGNMENT AND REALIGNMENT North American and West European major parties are generally mature institutions within their national constitutional orders. The typically long lives of these major parties are what make disalignment a rare event. Only three unambiguous instances have been identified, and these constitute the primary case studies in this analysis.1 The first such occasion occurred after the 1852 election in the United States when the voters in the Whig Party’s base deserted it, initially for the Know Nothings and then for the new Republican Party, because of disaffection with party leaders over nativist issues. The second disalignment took place in Great Britain over the course of four elections between 1918 and 1924, following failures of the Liberal government to cope with labor strife, class politics, the militant campaign for female suffrage, turbulent Irish politics, and the management of the war effort. Leadership feuding and electoral reform (including a substantial expansion of the electorate) were also significant contributing factors. Following the critical election of 1924, the Liberal Party was reduced to permanent minor-party status and later disappeared in a merger with another minor party. The third instance of disalignment occurred, as we have already noted, in the Canadian general election of 1993, when the governing Progressive Conservative Party lost all but two of its parliamentary
Introduction
5
seats as a result of its handling of the Quebec question, and its ineffective economic and political leadership. The PC lingered for a decade as a minor party and then also disappeared in a merger with another party. These cases are the subjects of in-depth analysis in Chapters 5–7. The collapse of the Italian party system (Chapter 8) receives a less comprehensive analysis because there is no similar party system failure with which to compare it. The argument advanced here is that each of these disalignments was the product of a rupture between the party base and the leadership. This rupture occurred because of mistaken actions or positions taken by leaders on cleavage issues—divisive social or economic questions affecting values or ideology of national concern. Most of the voters that comprised the base concluded that the party no longer represented their interests, and they abandoned it for a new or previously minor party. The displaced major party either disappeared immediately or was reduced to permanent minor-party status, followed in both situations by a multiyear realignment of the party system. Where the party-system structure so permitted, the new major party then began to entrench itself at national and subnational levels. (For reasons that are discussed more fully in Chapter 6, this kind of entrenchment has not occurred in Canada, because most provincial parties are largely independent of the national parties with which they are nominally affiliated.) Cleavage issues are ones that require voters to think about what kind of nation they want to be, with different social or economic interests holding different, polarized opinions. Frequently, those opinions are strongly held. In various countries and in various periods of time, political parties have been formed to represent a single interest on a single cleavage issue—Protestants vs. Catholics, for example, or clericals vs. anticlericals, on a religious cleavage. Other cleavages have included workers vs. middle and upper classes, regional interests, immigration questions, race and gender issues, and the like. More recently, parties have become advocates for sets of issues, leading to the formation of mass and catch-all parties (as discussed in Chapter 2). Increasingly, the latter represent aggregations of interests, so that there is usually a single major party that speaks broadly for left-of-center viewpoints, countered by another that is the advocate for the center-right. Equally often, however, there may be minor parties that advocate on specific issues away from the political center—for example, green or nationalist parties—generally coexisting with the major catch-all parties and frequently acting as protest parties. Within a national electorate, major interests may hold varying opinions about the ideal qualities that characterize their views of society, seeing deviations on these cleavage issues as real or potential threats. Political leaders are expected to express this consensus view of their core supporters.
6
When Political Parties Die
A party rank-and-file that holds a fundamental commitment, for example, to a heterosexual definition of marriage will not look kindly on party leaders or candidates who see a place in society for gay couples. The threat of disalignment arises when the opinions expressed by party leaders deviate too greatly from those of numerous core base members with strong convictions on highly salient issues. Disalignment represents a failure of party elites to bring with them core party voters on great polarizing societal issues (for example, Canada’s PC on the Quebec issue)—or to stay abreast of the core when it moves ahead of its leadership (e.g., the British Liberal Party on issues of feminism or the conduct of the war effort). Disalignments are not predictable, because they represent failures of leadership to mesh policies and persuasion with what is acceptable to the party base. CHAR ACTERISTICS OF DISALIGNMENT There appears to be a connection between electoral systems and the potential for disalignment. The three primary cases in this study have each occurred in first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral systems with single-member districts. (France also utilizes single-member districts but with a run-off process rather than single-round plurality voting to decide winners.) They may therefore represent applications of Duverger’s Law, which holds that FPP systems tend to be dominated by two major parties because FPP usually works to weed out minor parties (see Chapter 2). Canada, however, has recently evolved into a multiparty system at the national level. An additional case is the collapse that occurred in Italy in 1993—this one not the destruction of a single party but the disintegration of an entire party system—as discussed further in Chapter 8. The Italian collapse is anomalous because it occurred prior to an election, and also because at the time Italy used a proportional representation variant as its electoral system. All the primary disalignments to date have taken place under FPP voting systems—that is, those in which a plurality of votes is sufficient to win—organized by single-member legislative districts. Still, the Italian implosion implies the possibility of a future disalignment under a proportional representation (PR) electoral system, where the percentage of legislative seats awarded a party approximates its share of the vote. The presence of an FPP system is therefore a probable but not absolute condition of disalignment. There are other preconditions to disalignment, all of which appear to be essential. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, these are: • Leadership failure • Intensity of national identity cleavage issues and positions
Introduction
7
• Alienation of the core base • Availability of a successor party or parties • Probability of an FPP electoral system
America’s Whigs and Canada’s Progressive Conservatives were victims of sudden disalignments; that is, their disalignments occurred at a single election. On the other hand, the disalignment of the British Liberal Party took place over several elections and is therefore considered a secular process. The implosion of the Italian parties was also sudden. Whether sudden or secular, a characteristic of disalignments is that they lead to secular realignments of the party system, changes that occur over a period of time. Such realignments are necessary to allow the party system to adjust to the loss of a major participant and its replacement by another. They are secular because those adjustments need time to take place, often over several succeeding election cycles. However, realignments also occur when disalignments have not. Disalignment is therefore a sufficient cause for realignment but not a necessary one. In addition to extensively studied realignments in the United States (see below and Chapter 3), certain elections in other countries, unconnected to disalignment, may well have been realigning elections (e.g., Canada in 1968, Germany in 1983, and Britain in 1983 and again in 1997). Are America’s two contemporary major parties threatened by disalignment? Despite substantial and chronic upheavals over a succession of ideological issues, it seems not. A major party cannot be disaligned unless another ideologically compatible one exists (or can arise) that offers a viable alternative to members of the disaffected party’s base; such an alternative has not developed in the United States. Moreover, the existing network of federal and state laws, regulations, and court decisions governing elections, party structure, and campaign finance have combined to discourage effective rivals to the Democratic and Republican Parties. As further discussed in Chapter 10, America’s two major parties are frozen in place and seem immune to disalignment. REALIGNMENT THEORY Because of the apparent strong connection of disalignment with realignment, a brief discussion of the latter phenomenon is appropriate at this point. Chapter 3 examines studies of realignment in more detail. Realignments have been described as sharp and long-lasting changes in voting patterns. Long-lasting they may be but not all realignments (or disalignments) are sharp. Some in fact extend over several elections.
8
When Political Parties Die
(Indeed, some scholars have argued that the United States has been undergoing a secular realignment of more than a half-century in duration.) Actually, realignments are a function of shifts in a completely different segment of the electorate than the driver of disalignments—a distinction on which we will elaborate in Chapter 4.2 Chapter 4 also develops a typology of elections based on a system originally developed by V. O. Key Jr.,3 but amplified by the concepts of disalignment and realignment proposed here. WORK ING DEFINITIONS AND VARIABLES It may be useful at this point to summarize the argument with some working definitions and indicators of variables. (Independent variables stand to the left of the arrows; those to the right function as dependent variables. Intervening variables are those between arrows.) Disalignment: A severe loss of support for a major political party among its core base voters. Cultural changes o a critical national-identity cleavage issue and leadership failure o a rupture between a major party and its core base o a severe and permanent loss of support among those core voters o displacement of the major party by a previously minor or new party. Realignment: A substantial, persistent, and pervasive transfer of support among medial voters from one major party to another. Cultural changes and a major social or economic upheaval, possibly on a cleavage issue o a shift in political and /or ideological attitudes o altered voting behavior among a critical mass of medial voters that then persists for a number of successive maintaining elections. Sudden Disalignment/Realignment: A change in voter behavior that occurs at a single critical election. Secular Disalignment/Realignment: A change in voter behavior that occurs over the course of several elections. Critical Election: The election at which a realignment/disalignment process climaxes. Core Base Voters: That segment of the electorate that habitually and normally votes for the candidates of a particular political party, usually with little regard to whom those candidates may be in any given election. Peripheral Base Voters: That segment of a party’s base that usually votes for the party’s candidates, but that can occasionally be wooed away by the candidates of a rival party if their personal or issues appeal is sufficiently enamoring.
Introduction
9
Medial Voters: Those voters who are susceptible to appeals from candidates of either/any major party in any given election, with no fi xed record of support for candidates of a single party. Entrenchment: The establishment of a dominant position at the subnational level by the party or parties displacing the disaligned party, usually subsequent to a national critical election.
OBJECTIVES AND HYPOTHESES This study has two objectives: first, to examine disalignments and their causes in order to explain the circumstances under which such disalignments may occur; and second, to consider if the concept of disalignment can contribute to possible modifications of realignment theory in light of challenges laid against its traditional formulation. This analysis: • Introduces the concept of disalignment. • Attempts to show that disalignments are changes affecting a party’s core base of voters—but that realignments are functions of medial-voter behavior. • Seeks to show that the mechanism of disalignment is a rupture between the party and its core base on major cleavage issues affecting concepts of national identity. • Shows that the mechanism of realignment is a rupture between the party and a preponderance of medial voters. • Documents that disalignments result in realignments, but that realignments do not require disalignments to occur. • Demonstrates that both disalignments and realignments may be either sudden or secular, and in either type may be climaxed by a critical election. • Asserts that disalignments result in a permanent displacement of a major party by a new or previously minor party, which then proceeds to entrench itself at subnational levels where the party-system structure permits. Hypotheses: The hypotheses to be tested against the case studies are these: 1. Leadership failures and/or significant alterations in party policies on major socioeconomic cleavage issues affecting concepts of national identity that differ from traditional, strongly held, and sufficiently intense attitudes of core party voters cause disalignment. 2. Parties in states that utilize single-member, first-past-the-post electoral systems are more vulnerable to disalignment those in multiparty systems using variants of proportional representation. 3. Disalignment produces a permanent and pervasive displacement of a major party by a new or previously minor party that then becomes
10
When Political Parties Die nationally and subnationally entrenched in subsequent elections where this is structurally possible. 4. Disalignments invariably result in realignments, but realignments may occur even in the absence of disalignments.
METHODOLOGY This study tests the hypotheses through a comparative analysis of the cases to determine the independent variable(s)—particularly the key hypothesis that inept leaders and /or important policy changes affecting national social and economic cleavage issues may alienate the party’s base of core voters and cause party collapse. Disalignment is seen as the dependent variable in this analysis (although it sometimes also acts as an intervening variable). The tests are operationalized by examining and analyzing the following bodies of data for each of the cases: • The professional literature on realignment, and on the affected political parties, their competitors, and relevant elections. • Historical and contemporary political analyses. • Analysis of electoral and party systems for each of the case studies. • Historical analysis of the critical election and its relevant predecessors and successors, including pertinent national and subnational elections. • Determination of (a) the party’s core base and (b) medial voters, by analysis of results of elections prior to the disalignment.
PLAN OF THE BOOK The concept of disalignment seems not to have been examined by political scientists heretofore. Realignments, in contrast, are widely studied phenomena, at least in the United States—less so in other democracies—but there is no longer a generally accepted theory to explain them. This dissertation seeks to provide insights into these two related concepts. Chapter 2 is a discussion of the characteristics of political parties and party systems. A review of the development of the concepts of realignment and dealignment is the focus of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents the proposed new theory of disalignment and amends traditional realignment theory. In addition, this chapter develops a typology of elections and introduces the four cases. Those cases comprise the next group of chapters—Chapter 5 on the American Whigs, Chapter 6 on the British Liberal Party, Chapter 7 on
Introduction
11
Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party, and Chapter 8 on the implosion of the entire Italian party system. Each of these cases follows a line of historical narrative, beginning with the party’s founding events and proceeding through its growth until the final events of its disalignment. Although the causes of disalignments are uniformly leadership failures, the roots of those failures grew out of each party’s founding causes. The subject of Chapter 9 is a comparative analysis and synthesis of the conditions necessary for disalignment to occur, along with an evaluation of the hypotheses in the light of the evidence presented by the case studies. Chapter 10 examines the politics of the United States, seeking to examine why disalignment is unlikely to occur here and to apply lessons from the preceding case studies. NOTES 1. The disappearance of the Federalist Party after the US election of 1800 is not considered a true disalignment, because mass popular electoral participation had not yet developed in the United States. 2. Dealignment, the alienation of voters from party politics and electoral participation, is a related but different concept. Possible connections between disalignment, realignment, and dealignment will be discussed in Chapter 3. 3. V. O. Key Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 5th ed. (New York: Crowell, 1964), 536.
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Chapter 2
Parties and Party Systems
Disalignment affects major political parties. Realignment primarily affects party systems. Our discussion of these ways to look at politics begins in the next chapter. But first we need to consider a number of significant qualities of political parties and party systems. Let’s start with some definitions: A party system is more than the aggregate of the political parties it encompasses. Just as a family is more than the sum of the individuals who comprise it but also has qualities of behavior and interaction that differentiate it from other families, so a party system has qualities that are special and perhaps unique. Those will be discussed in greater detail throughout this chapter. So, then, what do we mean by political parties? Rather surprisingly, they are harder to define. Political scientists are not in agreement concerning the qualities and characteristics that comprise a definition of this important term. The voluminous literature is reminiscent of the blind men seeking to describe an elephant in terms of the single part each is groping. In the case of parties, some define the animal by norms or functions, some by composition or membership, and some by ideas. What is often overlooked is the most fundamental of qualities—purpose—which is to ask why parties exist in the first place. There is a difference between purpose and functions. The purpose of major political parties is to supply society and the state with a government. In democracies, they do so by competing to win elections to gain or retain political power. In the process of doing that, parties may fulfill a variety of important functions—mobilizing the electorate, expressing and aggregating interests, articulating ideologies, and so forth—but the quest for power and control of the government is their overriding raison d’être. Political parties, just like advocacy or interest groups, express views on public issues. It is one of their most important functions. But their defining
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When Political Parties Die
quality, one that distinguishes them from any other type of organization, is that only parties nominate candidates for public office. In addition to candidate nomination, there are certain other characteristics that distinguish parties from advocacy and interest groups, but these may be only implied or even wholly absent from some definitions found in the literature on parties. These include the processes of interparty competition, and the concept of party label or name, which is to say its “branded identity.” MAJOR VS. MINOR PARTIES Disalignment is a phenomenon affecting established major parties. It is therefore important to distinguish here between major parties and minor ones (sometimes described as “effective” and “ineffective,” respectively, in the context of their ability to lead a government or participate in governing coalitions). With a few notable exceptions, minor parties are frequently short-lived and tend to be led by small cadres of elites. Often, minor parties are niche organizations that represent small interest or ideological groups. Their role in these situations is to make voters aware of their point of view and perhaps get some of their adherents elected to office. In most cases, they are ephemeral organizations that seldom endure long enough to create a strong base of followers. Their highest aspiration is to gain enough electoral strength to be invited by a major party to join a governing coalition—or to deny such a party a governing majority if it does not embrace the issue positions the minor party advocates. Sometimes, the minor party simply disappears if its platform is adopted by a major party or, better yet, enacted into law. Occasionally, minor parties in a particular country will coalesce to form a new major party. One such example is the Democratic Party of Japan, which comprises previously fragmentary socialist and other elements, and which was victorious in the 2009 parliamentary elections in defeating the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party. Another instance was the formation of the Conservative Party of Canada by the merger of two minor parties in 2003. It may be that such instances are becoming more common. THE PART Y BASE In comparison, a major party is defined here as one that has a competitive chance to become the governing party (or to lead a governing coalition) because it has both a substantial and durable base and the ability to persuade
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a large share of independent voters to support it in any given election. The frequency with which the party wins elections matters less than the party’s image as a contender for power. Minor parties are perceived as lacking this competitive ability to win elections and lead a government. A distinction critical to the theories developed in this book is that between voters who have a strong affective affiliation to a major party—that is, the voters who constitute the party’s base—and those lacking such an affiliation. Major-party base voters regard politics differently than that segment of the electorate sometimes described as swing or independent voters; in this book, we characterize the latter as medial voters. Medials are citizens much more prone to shift support from one party to another from election to election or, where ticket-splitting is possible, even to different offices in the same election.1 It is important to note that medial voters have significance for realignments (as discussed in Chapter 3) but not for disalignments. It is the strong loyalty of the party’s base that enables it to survive even severe defeats and regroup for the next election. In the United States in 1932, for instance, despite a massive Democratic victory, the Republican base remained largely intact, enabling the party to survive even as its values began to change and moderate. To cite another example, the base of Britain’s Conservative Party suffered relatively little damage in the series of electoral losses that beset it from 1997 through the 2005 election; the base remained sufficiently unbroken for the Conservatives to survive as a major party and contest future elections. The structure of the party system and the persistent loyalty of the base, even in defeat, are assets that enhance the durability of major parties. Major-party durability is an important—indeed a defining—characteristic of any mature party system. Durability may be attributed to one or more of a large number of factors affecting voter behavior and particularly habituation. They include ideological commitment; the political inclination of the family environment in which the voter grew up, or sometimes a spouse’s party preference; levels of income and education; social class; a preference for policies of a particular party or aversion to those of a competitor; an affective attachment created by a particular candidate, perhaps even one no longer on the political scene; and many other factors cited in extensive scholarly literature on this subject. Once party image and identification become part of a voter’s consciousness, they become difficult to alter or remove. V. O. Key Jr. characterized the individual voter’s choice of party identification as a “standing decision.” John Aldrich, quoting Key, subsequently observed that “partisans vote for their preferred party’s candidates until and unless given good reasons not to.”2
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When Political Parties Die
The United States, unlike most other democracies, tends to have multioffice elections; in most states voters cast ballots for Congress, state, and often local offices all in the same election. The more visible the office, the more information the electorate is likely to have about the candidates. But the converse is also true. Little or nothing will be known about “down-ballot” offices and candidates. Party affiliation is critical for these candidates. The less voters know about these candidates, the more likely they are either to vote strictly by party affiliation or not to vote at all. Voters habituated to one party or another comprise the bases of those parties. In most party systems with two or more durable parties, the total of all party bases probably exceeds the number of medial voters—that is, those largely unhabituated voters whose electoral choices fluctuate from one party to another in different elections, or even in the same election where multioffice elections occur. In the next chapter, we will reexamine this model of the electorate. Aldrich likened party affiliation to a commercial brand name, cueing an established reputation that, even in an era of considerable ticket-splitting, leads a substantial share of American voters to vote straight party tickets.3 In this sense, a party’s brand name comprises associated characteristics, both objective and affective. Campaigning and other techniques by which parties and candidates distinguish themselves from their competition are analogous to the advertising utilized by the marketers of branded goods and services to maintain and enlarge market share. Each major brand competing in the political marketplace has a fairly stable “market share” of normally loyal “consumers” who make up the party’s voter base. Medial voters, on the other hand, may be likened to the segment of consumers whose brand loyalty is weak or nonexistent, and who make their marketplace decisions primarily on price, for example, or some other competitive factor. Another element that is important in the definition of parties is the concept of contest or competition. Each party’s drive to win elections is paired with its desire to oppose its competitors’ ideas and pursuit of power. E. E. Schattschneider dealt squarely with both elements, those of nomination and of contest, when he wrote that parties “characteristically undertake to get control of the government by nominating candidates and electing them to office; the object is to get power by winning elections.”4 Major parties are always engaged in this contest; minor parties usually are not. Most minor parties lack the ability, and perhaps even the desire, to seek control of the government. In many multiparty parliamentary systems, Giovanni Sartori observed, minor parties lack even coalition potential and exist primarily to “blackmail” governing parties into making policy concessions.5
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In a formal sense, it is difficult for minor parties to “blackmail” major ones in the United States. In Congress, the solidification of parties since the Civil War has prevented this from occurring. In the Electoral College, not since 1824 have third-party candidates blocked a majoritarian outcome. On the other hand, minor-party presidential candidates have had some success in leveraging outcomes in individual states to affect the result, as various abolitionists did in the 1840s and, more recently, as Ralph Nader did in Florida in the 2000 election. Informally, minor parties have had considerable success in affecting major-party policies, which are often borrowed (if indeed not stolen outright) from minor parties in order to coopt their constituencies. Many of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were adopted from proposals of socialists and progressives. Minor parties also exert policy influence on the larger parties in Britain and Canada. Major parties exist to compete for power. For the most part, minor parties exist primarily to express an ideology and to shape public policy. Many small parties are created primarily to advance a point of view; the election of their candidates is secondary, perhaps even incidental. That may be one of the reasons why a minor party only rarely displaces a major one—the consequence of a disalignment. All parties, both major and minor, that earnestly compete in the electoral market often find their ideological motivations in conflict with pragmatic politics. The critical question here is whether the goal of electoral success predominates. A writer on Canadian politics observed that the New Democratic Party, Canada’s perennial third party, “seems more interested in making a point and offering convictions with limited appeal than in electoral success. The NDP is less of a political party than it is a movement.”6 This is not to say that all minor parties lack electoral significance. A few are serious competitors, perhaps more so in Germany—and now Britain— than anywhere else. Germany’s Green Party became an active participant in electoral politics only after a long struggle between two factions—its Realos, who were willing to make political compromises and wanted the party to nominate candidates and contend for public office, and its Fundis, who wished to remain an ideological advocacy group unrestricted by the exigencies of political campaigns; the Realos prevailed but still contend now and again with pressures from the Fundi minority. The German Free Democrats are a center-right party that is usually available for alliance with the Christian Democrats (and, as a result of the 2009 federal election, is now part of the governing coalition). The Party of the Left is the product of a merger between Communists from the former East Germany and disgruntled defectors from the Social Democratic Party. Britain’s Liberal
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When Political Parties Die
Democratic Party ended a long period in the political wilderness as a partner in a Conservative-led coalition government after no party won an outright majority in the 2010 election. Most other minor parties, however, are interest or advocacy groups for which contesting offices is only one of several publicity techniques by which they seek to draw attention to their agendas. Minor parties in the United States rarely endure more than a few elections, although they may exert significant influence during their brief lives—as did, for instance, the Liberty Party in the 1840s, the Progressive Party in the early part of the 20th Century, the Reform Party in 1992, and the Green Party in 2000. The Libertarian Party is one of the very few minor parties in the United States that have lasted for more than a few elections. One reason that American minor parties tend to have short lives is that if their issues are popular—as those of the Progressives were in the early 20th Century and the Greens are today—their positions are often co-opted by the major parties (as noted above) and even adopted as public policy. Minor parties, in the United States and elsewhere, therefore tend not to survive where two strong major parties exist. Moreover, as small cadre parties, they typically lack a substantial base of voters and may not last long enough to form one. Nor do many medial voters support them for more than an election or two. Parties large and small fail when they cannot attract votes. PART Y LABELS The common label is another essential element of party definition and identification—what Aldrich characterized as the party’s “brand name.” The common label is a vital informational cue to voters that enables each party to differentiate itself from its competition. To the British voter, to consider a single example of many, vast amounts of information—ranging from issues to image, from historical cleavages to the personality of the incumbent prime minister—are communicated in the single words “Conservative” and “Labour.” Moreover, the common label fosters collective accountability to the electorate on the part of the party, its officeholders, and its candidates for their policies and actions. One of the very first things parties do when they form is adopt a name that thereby enables the new party to market itself (and its candidates) in a way that distinguishes it (and them) from competitors. A party’s name becomes so laden with distinctive connotations that to change it, or even modify it, is in a very real sense to alter the party’s identity. To protect party brand names, several European countries (including Germany, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain) provide them with legal safeguards;
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the German Party Law, for instance, “requires the names and acronyms of new parties to be clearly distinguishable from existing ones.”7 A DEFINITION OF POLITICAL PARTIES At this point, we can pull together the various concepts discussed up to now to offer a definition of political parties as we use the term in this book. We draw here on the ideas of a number of other political scientists while amalgamating them in a somewhat different, pragmatic way: A political party in a democracy is an autonomous, institutionalized coalition of citizens that operates under a common label to nominate candidates for public office, competing with other parties to elect them, for the purpose of gaining control and organization of the government. “Autonomous” means that the party is organizationally separate from other parties and from the government, although its operations may be regulated. “Institutionalized” means that the party operates under recognized rules and practices, both formal and informal, which enable political actors to build expectations of future behavior and facilitate accountability to the electorate. We can now build on this definition to construct another one—that of a major political party: A major party is one that has a competitive chance to become the governing party or to lead a governing coalition because it has both a substantial and durable base of voters and the ability to persuade a large number of independent voters to support it in any given election. The definition of a political party encompasses some significant minor parties that fail to meet our major-party criteria but that are, nonetheless, serious political participants. The key distinction is that they lack competitive opportunities to lead their country’s government, although in some parliamentary democracies they may participate in governing coalitions as allies of the governing party. Among these are Germany’s Greens and Free Democrats; the British Liberal Democrats; the New Democrats and Bloc Québecois of Canada; and some of the established smaller parties in other advanced democracies. Before leaving this topic, a brief comment is in order concerning the countries to whose political parties our definition applies and those where it does not. We include party systems that are institutionalized (an older term is “consolidated”); that is, there are shared, long-standing rules and institutions, written and unwritten, that guide participants’ behavior and on which all such participants depend. Such party systems are long-standing and stable, comprising parties that are well-connected and accountable to established interest and ideological groups, independent of the interests of any single leader, and widely perceived as essential to democracy. The
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When Political Parties Die
countries with well-established party systems are those in West Europe and North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and perhaps a few in Latin America. That does not mean that party systems elsewhere are in undemocratic states, but only that those party systems are not (yet) institutionalized. The parties and party systems of Central Europe, for example, are considered democratic but are new, fluid, and with limited indicators of institutionalization. Most of these parties have not yet built durable bases of support and must therefore necessarily lie outside the scope of this analysis. PART Y SYSTEM CONSOLIDATION AND INSTITUTIONALIZ ATION The concept of party systems relates to the strength, number, interrelationship, integration, and other qualities of the parties that comprise the system. The stronger these characteristics are, the more consolidated the system is. The United States, for instance, has a highly integrated and consolidated party system. It is recognizably strong, perhaps even rigid. What the concept of institutionalization adds is predictability of expectations and behavior. Political behaviors are generated and regulated by numerous rules, both written and unwritten. Various organizations, associations, traditions, and procedures are also all dimensions of institutionalization. There is an expectation in established democracies, for example, that the losing party in an election will allow the winner to form a government without resort to violence and in accord with a wide variety of established laws, procedures, and accepted practices. In turn, the losing party knows that the winner will permit another election to be held near the end of its term, and that it will abide by the results of that election. The dependability of these expectations into the foreseeable future is a measure of the country’s institutionalization. Party institutionalization is strong in France and Great Britain, for example. It is weak in, say, Ecuador and Venezuela, and wholly absent in Cuba and Syria. Party systems arose and consolidated, said Giovanni Sartori, with the rise of mass electorates and political participation, which facilitated party identity and political choice.8 In other words, consolidation occurred as a result of parties’ construction of their own mass bases of voter support. High degrees of institutionalization, said Scott Mainwaring, distinguish the party systems of the advanced democracies from those of the newer, less-advanced ones.9 Interest groups, ideological cleavages, and accepted political parties are all strongly connected and attached in highly institutionalized democracies. Party branding enhances the linkages among
Parties and Party Systems
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ideology and issues and bolsters the connections between voters and parties by lowering the electorate’s information costs and strengthening voting cues. Where these qualities are weak, on the other hand, political institutionalization is also attenuated. The countries of Central and East Europe are democratic today but some only feebly so and with weak political parties and other institutions. In unconsolidated systems, parties tend to be frail and fragile, often personalistic or at least the political vehicles of small elites, and lack a voter base of significant substance and size. Such parties frequently arise in one election only to disappear by the next, replaced by others whose shelf life is no longer. Still, they are demonstrably more democratic and accountable than China or Myanmar, where competitive political parties are not even allowed, or Somalia, where the entire spectrum of societal institutions is constantly on the brink of failure and ruin. The effects of both disalignment and realignment (especially the former) distort the operations of the party system. The players are different (in the first case) or have different relationships (in the second). These changes produce tectonic changes in party behavior and expectations. The ground shifts under the feet of party-system participants, and suddenly nothing is the same anymore. New rules, both written and unwritten, need to be developed to govern the processes of interaction among these participants, and the process of doing so may take years. In sum, political parties are strongest in consolidated or institutionalized party systems and weakest where these qualities are weak or nonexistent. Processes like realignment and disalignment can take place only where parties and other political institutions are strongly established. For that reason, we exclude from this analysis uninstitutionalized party systems, such as those in Russia, Central and East Europe, Africa, and most countries of Latin America and Asia. It is in the states of West Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand where we might expect to find instances of disalignment and realignment. SOCIOECONOMIC CLEAVAGES AND PART Y PREFERENCES Political parties have their roots in social and economic cleavages that largely antedate the formation of parties themselves. Peter Mair describes cleavages as “deep structural divides that persist through time and through generations.”10 Expressing polar positions along lines of national socioeconomic cleavages therefore became an important function of cadre and mass parties in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
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When Political Parties Die
The classic theory of cleavages is that of Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. Based on their studies of European countries, they concluded that these divisions were products of both national revolutions and the Industrial Revolution. Lipset and Rokkan delineated four principal cleavages: state vs. church; political /economic center vs. periphery; land and agriculture vs. industry; and owners vs. workers—all seemingly permanent controversies that they said had frozen many decades earlier and that still characterized the party divisions of the 1960s when they wrote.11 In that same decade, however, fresh lines of cleavage based on new sets of values were emerging in Europe and North America—even as some of the old cleavage lines, such as that focused on Church power, were starting to unfreeze in many countries.12 Ronald Inglehart was perhaps the first scholar to comment on the growth of the postindustrial cleavage that became evident during the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote that a new, younger class of affluent, better-educated voters was becoming socially and politically mobilized around quality-of-life, postmaterialist issues that arose as the experiences and memories of pre–World War II economic deprivation of an older generation abated. This postwar generation, Inglehart said, was less preoccupied with traditional “bread-and-butter” issues and more focused on social concerns such as environmentalism, feminism, rights of equality for minorities, the antinuclear and antiwar movements, and such moral questions as abortion. These problems became the issues of the “new left.”13 NEW PARTIES AND NEW CLEAVAGES New interest groups and “green” parties sprang up to advance these issue preferences and had notable success in persuading existing center-left parties to adopt at least a portion of their policy proposals. But precisely because the new groups’ positions have been largely co-opted by older parties, the consequence is that green parties in most countries have not become significant political competitors. The most notable exception is the German Green Party, which evolved from advocacy group and social movement to political party; it eventually gained enough electoral support to enter governing coalitions in several Länder (states) before becoming a coalition partner at the federal level with the Social Democratic Party from 1997 to 2005. In the United States, Ralph Nader, running as the Green Party’s candidate in the presidential election of 2000, gained enough votes in a pivotal state, Florida, to enable the election of George W. Bush; otherwise, American Greens have been far more effective as advocates than as a political party. Green parties have been minor participants in center-left
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coalition governments in such countries as France, Italy, Belgium, and Austria. In Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, green parties operate largely at the political fringes, although in the latter country an expanding agenda of new left concerns and issues is bringing them increasing support. Other observers of fringe politics subsequently observed a related complex of “new-right” concerns centered on issues of security, authority, and disdain for minorities (today, also including anti-immigrant positions).14 This division between “new left” and “new right” has been termed the libertarian-authoritarian cleavage. In addition to their European manifestations, new-right values were an influence in the rise of Canada’s Reform Party in the 1980s. To a substantial extent, the new values have largely been folded into the old left–right cleavage that continues to characterize politics in most democracies. The original root of ideological differentiation, the “class struggle” (to use Karl Marx’s term), is far less clear-cut than it once was, even while modern lines between left and right seem as sharp as ever: The new left often comprises the educated professional and middle classes, as Inglehart and others have noted, while new-right causes (such as opposition to immigrants) are embraced by many in the working class—almost complete reversals of historic class perspectives and divisions. The robustness of this altered left–right cleavage is not that it is “frozen” (as Lipset and Rokkan saw it) but, to the contrary, that it possesses the flexible capacity to absorb and express polar positions on postmaterialist issues. As Douglass North has noted, ideology is a prism through which parties and voters perceive public problems and evaluate alternative solutions to them.15 The ideological divide endures precisely because it is also aggregative, able to absorb the country’s other cleavages. Parties of both left and right have had little difficulty differentiating themselves on the relatively new postmaterialist issues while still retaining at least a measure of the old materialist biases, such as those favoring capital or labor, if not always distinctions of social class. In Canada and in several European countries, the new cleavages created by postmaterialist values have produced a variety of new parties in recent decades. Some of these are outgrowths of sociopolitical movements; these “movement parties” typically include left-libertarian groupings concerned with, for example, ecological, feminist, antinuclear, and antiwar issues. As noted, Germany’s Green Party has been the most successful of these European parties. New parties of the radical right have often initiated protests against immigrants, cultural minorities, European integration, redistributive taxes, corruption, and family and women’s issues, while advocating for nationalism.
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When Political Parties Die
The most successful of these parties has been France’s National Front (FN), which had its greatest success in 2002 when the party’s presidential candidate received more votes in the first round of voting than the socialist candidate, preventing the latter from competing against the centerright candidate in the second, definitive, round. The FN also did well in the 2010 French regional elections. The Netherlands, long seen as one of Europe’s most liberal societies, has experienced substantial growth in parties of the radical right in recent years. In North America, the most successful has been Canada’s Reform Party. Although considerably more center-right than radical, Reform—later, the Canadian Alliance and still later, a prime constituent of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC)—was another manifestation of the postmaterialist wave of new parties. Most of Reform’s issues initially were in areas of governmental and political reform, but it was also hostile to special privileges for Quebec. Reform is the only new party, in its current CPC mode, to win a national election and lead a government. A question to be discussed in Chapter 9 is why such parties of any size or significance have not arisen in the United States or Great Britain. More recently, several scholars have concluded that the new ideological distinctions have begun to blur again—at least partly because the changing structure and interests of workers have weakened the left’s strength as labor’s unique advocate. This deterioration of labor support has had serious adverse impacts on parties of the left in France, Italy, Germany, and Great Britain. In consequence, notes one analyst, “the obvious question is whether there is a left left.”16 Traditional cleavages seem less and less relevant to electorates everywhere; the principal exception, the division that does seem to endure, is the ideological one between right and left, even as these poles fluctuate in meaning and significance from country to country. Still another student of parties, Peter Mair, believes that party systems in West and Central Europe and in Latin America are evolving toward the French model of bipolar competition rather than the more formal British and American two-party systems. Within each of these countries,“[t]he broad tendances will remain stable while the various parties reshuffle within them.”17 In the major states of West Europe, catch-all parties of the left have been losing elections to political families of the center-right, a trend that shows signs of continuing for some time. Voters everywhere vote persistently in their own self-interests as they perceive them. One source of influence, especially in Italy and Latin America, is clientelism, which induces voters to make ballot choices on the basis of personal material benefits offered by a patron, rather than issues or ideology. Another is personalistic preference for a widely admired personality
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or that political figure’s party; the lingering admiration among certain American voters for Franklin Roosevelt’s party 65 years after his death, the enduring fondness of Argentines for the memory (and party) of Juan Perón, and of the French for that of Charles de Gaulle, are all examples. Hugo Chavez, the increasingly authoritarian leader of Venezuela, wraps himself in the cloak (if not the policies) of Simón Bolívar, the liberator of most of the Andean states of Latin America. In sum, all these factors, both ideological and nonideological, are undoubtedly operative in varying degrees over time, from country to country, and within countries. The common thread may well be that the dominant influence on the ballot decisions of individual voters is whatever they consider closest to their personal interests (as each defines and prioritizes them). In the advanced democracies, parties continue to be key instruments for expression of those interests. New policy preferences give rise to new interest groups, but they also create demands by voters that political parties accommodate these preferences, whether by support or opposition. Consistency among voters is not required: Many US voters cast ballots for Barack Obama and the “change” he offered in 2008, but then balked later on when they perceived that the changes he was proposing in economic and health-care policy could affect them adversely. This is consistent with an important claim of disalignment theory: If an issue has sufficiently high salience, the electorate—and particularly the parties’ bases—will have high expectations that their party of preference (operationally meaning the party leadership) will advance their interests and expectations. If the issue preference is sufficiently intense, leaders who fail to meet those expectations run the risk that even highly loyal party voters will depart and seek another political vehicle to advance their preferences and interests. At its extreme, this is the process that produces disalignment. PART Y DUR ABILIT Y It is one of the great oddities of politics that political parties are seen by analysts as the crucial link between democratic societies and their governments—even as they have always been viewed by citizens of all democracies as pestiferous and dangerous. Parties arose, said Susan Scarrow, as legislatures assumed increasing shares of political power and with the wave of expanding electorates in the democracies. They were simultaneously unwanted at birth and yet inevitable.18 In no language or culture is the word politician considered a compliment.
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When Political Parties Die
James Madison’s warnings, in Federalist Papers No. Ten, of the dangers of “factions” prevented neither the arrival of parties nor his later personal partisan participation and leadership. American politics was contentious from its earliest years, precisely because those “who built the first political party system in the 1790’s mistook parties for factions, assuming that those with whom they differed were disloyal to the nation and its ideals. . . . Unconscious builders of political parties, Federalists and Republicans were prisoners of inherited political assumptions which distorted their understanding of the innovations stemming from the creation of a strong central government in a federal system.”19 These assumptions have colored views of politics from before the dawn of the American republic down to the present day. Nor are they confined to Americans. Some years before Madison penned his essay, Britain’s Lord Bolingbroke had anticipated Madison’s concerns—expressing fears that parties and factions would undermine the public good by seeking their own particularistic ends. An Englishman of a later era, James Bryce, wrote in 1919 that “The tendency to groups is a deadly bacillus in modern legislatures.”20 Robert Michels, whose study of the German Social Democratic Party led to his “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” saw parties as dominated inevitably by elites disconnected from the rank-and-file membership and therefore inherently undemocratic.21 The attitudes and concerns of these writers remain widely shared among the world’s democracies. Yet, in none of these countries has such antipathy prevented the organization and dominance of domestic politics by political parties. Notwithstanding his earlier trepidations, Madison himself plunged into party politics in the 1790s, feuding with his old ally (and coauthor of The Federalist Papers), Alexander Hamilton, leader of the Federalists. Parties, organizationally recognizable as such today, emerged for the most part in the 19th Century, although they initially appeared in the United States in the republic’s first decade. Lacking any substantial popular base, the Hamiltonian Federalists faded out as a national party after the election of 1800, surviving mainly in New England.22 (A Federalist remnant, last led by Daniel Webster, survived in Congress into the 1830s and became a component of the new Whig Party.) Both the Federalists and even their populist opponents, the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, were cadre parties, all leaders and no base. There was no mass popular participation at this stage of political development because there was little sense of organizational contest to generate it. After 1800, the DemocraticRepublican Party so dominated American politics that no competitive party system per se really existed until the arrival of mass parties in the
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Jacksonian era 30 years later. Absent organized partisan competition, it is not possible to speak of the existence of any party system from 1800 until about 1832. The formation of the Whig Party, created to oppose Jackson’s Democratic Party, produced the first enduring party system in the United States. After the Whig disalignment in the 1850s, most northern Whig leaders migrated to the new Republican Party, with a number detouring briefly along the way to join the Know Nothings. The American Democratic Party dates to the 1830s, with the Republican Party about 20 years younger. Both are probably the oldest political parties in existence, depending on when one dates the formation of Great Britain’s political parties. The British Whigs and Tories, ancestors of the 19th-Century Liberal and Conservative Parties, were originally factions of the aristocracy that divided in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 over the relative powers of the king and Parliament. By the early 1830s, they operated as parliamentary caucuses. Liberals and Conservatives did not become organized parties, competing for the votes of an expanding electorate, until the late 1860s, the era of Gladstone and Disraeli. Britain’s Labour Party was founded in 1900, although a few working-class leaders had run for Parliament in the previous decade. Canada’s Liberal and Conservative (later, Progressive Conservative) Parties date officially from the country’s independence in 1867 but had been active in various forms during the colonial period. On the European continent, socialist parties were among the earliest, dating from 1869 in Germany, 1892 in Italy, and 1905 in France (although small, fragmented French socialist parties were active earlier). All these parties, and their new and future competitors, assumed the role of ideological and issue advocates for the various polar interests of long-standing socioeconomic cleavages that divided their countries. Many of these oldest political parties are still in existence. The long tenure of so many European and North American parties illustrates the extent to which parties have become entrenched in, and inseparable from, democracy. Indeed, when authoritarian governments collapsed in France, Italy, and western Germany at the end of World War II in 1945, the very first steps in the organization of democratic institutions produced the rise (or resurrection) of competitive political parties. Much the same thing happened almost immediately in Eastern and Central Europe when the Soviet Union collapsed. Japan was probably the single instance of one-party domination in a democracy until the electoral defeat of that party by a competitor in 2009.
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When Political Parties Die
PART Y SYSTEMS Disalignment and realignment are processes that severely impact the party systems within which they occur. Disalignment is particularly disruptive because it creates a vacuum in the position previously occupied by a major party. This vacuum is then filled by a new or previously minor party or parties, but other, preexisting parties must also adjust to the altered configuration. This adjustment is a realignment that creates new lines of partisan cleavage and that may take some years to complete. Party systems are complex, and several of their dimensions influence, or are influenced by, this realignment process. The more severe the change in competitive structure, the greater the change in the party system. A party system is more than the aggregate of the political parties that it encompasses. Sartori defined the concept as “the system of interactions resulting from inter-party competition.”23 To Steven Wolinetz, another political scientist, the party system is a separate entity from the parties that comprise it, possessing a number of distinct features which arise from electoral competition and parties’ relation to each other. These include the number of parties contesting elections and winning legislative seats, their relative size and strength, the number of dimensions on which they compete, the distance which separates them on key issues, and their willingness to work with each other in government formation and the process of governing. Party systems can vary on any or all of these.24
While that characterization implies parliamentary systems of government, most of the elements Wolinetz includes would also apply to presidential systems. Political scientists often enumerate national party systems based on major changes within them as a way of categorizing political eras. Thus, in the case of the United States, we speak of the period that began with George Washington’s presidency as the First Party System; the era from Jackson to Lincoln as the Second Party System; from the Civil War to the 1890s as the Third Party System, and so forth. Similar delineations of party systems have been made for Canada, Germany, France, and other countries, although the terminology is sometimes different. Peter Mair, another student of parties, maintains that the strength of a party system revolves around a competitive core: “In Britain, the party system is about the conflict between Labour and Conservative; in France, it is about ‘left’ against ‘right,’ often without a particular party specification; in Sweden, it is about the Social Democrats against the more loosely determined bourgeois bloc, and so on.”25 One might add that, for the United
Parties and Party Systems
29
States, this model of competition resembles Mair’s description of Britain. Party competition in pre-1993 Canada also was similar to the two-party British pattern; then, from 1993 to 2004, the Canadian party system comprised a predominant Liberal Party vs. an ideologically varied and unallied quartet of opposition parties. More recently, Canada’s party system seems to be realigning into a structure of “two-and-two-halves” (i.e., two major and two minor parties), not unlike Germany’s except that coalition government, which is common in Germany, is unknown in Canada. The state of competition in contemporary Italy looks much like that of France. ELECTOR AL SYSTEMS The United States, Canada, and Great Britain all currently choose the popular house of their legislatures in single-member districts through plurality, first-past-the-post (FPP) elections.26 This system became uniform in the United States in the middle 1840s. (Most states also use FPP to choose presidential electors.) Canada has relied on FPP for parliamentary elections since its independence in 1867. Both multimember and singlemember districts were utilized in Britain until 1951; the practice since has been single-member districts utilizing FPP. The prevalence of a two-party system has usually produced majorities of votes for candidates in the United States. Such majorities have been less common in Britain and Canada. Significant British third parties (initially Irish Nationalists and Labour, then the Liberal Party, and most recently the Liberal Democrats) have often kept either major party from winning more than a plurality of popular votes. The presence of significant minor parties in Canada has usually limited majoritarian outcomes at the national level, although not in individual constituencies (called “ridings”). The distinguishing characteristic of FPP, however, is that a majority of votes is not necessary to win; in a single- or final-round election, a plurality is always sufficient. Measured by legislative seats, the FPP system in the United States has always enabled one major party or the other to gain majority control of each house of Congress and, since 1828, to elect a majority of the Electoral College. FPP usually has also produced majorities of seats for the largest party in the British and Canadian Parliaments (although not in Great Britain in its 2010 elections). The mechanics of FPP elections tend to foster electoral majorities but, as noted, do not guarantee them. In contrast, electoral systems in most European countries except Britain and France utilize variants of proportional representation (PR) to elect their national parliaments.27 France relies on a two-round electoral system
30
When Political Parties Die
to choose parliamentarians from single-member districts with plurality voting in the second round.28 Germany uses a mixed system in which about half of the Bundestag is elected by FPP in single-member districts, while the other half is chosen by PR from national party lists. Japan also relies on a mixed system: about three-fifths percent of the Diet is elected from single-member districts under FPP, with the rest selected by PR from regional party lists. Single-member districts do not exist where PR governs elections. Multimember districts may be as small as a region or as large as the entire country. There are numerous varieties of PR mechanisms, but typically each party will nominate a list of candidates from which winners (if any) will be drawn in ranked order. Generally, parties must achieve a specified minimum share of the popular vote to win parliamentary seats. Germany’s threshold, for example, is 5 percent, while Turkey’s is 10 percent. But under the Italian pre-1993 first republic, the threshold was zero (and even now is small). As a generalization, the lower the threshold, the greater is the number of parliamentary parties, and the more difficult it is for any one of them to reach a governing majority. To proponents of FPP, this is a key point. The purpose of the electoral system, they maintain, is to enable the voters to give one party or the other a governing majority, not to be nice to third parties and special interests. PR advocates turn this argument upside down. They believe introduction of this voting system would be fairer, better represent minorities, and assure that the composition of parliament closely reflects actual voter preferences. In Canada, for instance, reformers are more concerned with parliamentary representation for native Americans, feminists, and environmentalists than they are with allowing a broad-based political party to aggregate their interests, win a majority, and organize a government. Sartori stated the contrasting objectives of electoral systems more formally: “The ultimate end of PR is representative justice. The ultimate end of majoritarian elections is governing capacity. To be sure, these goals are amenable to trade-offs . . . [but one] of these two ends . . . must have clear priority and prevail over the other.”29 His point was echoed by Stefan Wagstyl of the Financial Times who wrote, in an analysis of governance problems in central European countries, “To some extent, these governments’ weakness is the inevitable result of the proportional representation electoral systems introduced after the fall of communism. Even in the more stable political world of western Europe, PR systems are often associated with weak, short-lived governments, as in Italy.”30 PR has never been seriously considered in the United States, largely because the two major parties so completely dominate federal and state
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31
political systems. The major parties in Canada (and Britain) have resisted the introduction of PR in national elections, probably as much for reasons of incumbents’ self-interest as ideology. These differences are not hypothetical. The electoral formulas under which elections are conducted can magnify or distort electoral results. Tables 2.1 and 2.2 show what the impact of PR systems on parliamentary party representation would have been in Britain and Canada in recent elections (assuming no minimum threshold to obtain seats). Under a PR system, Labour would have lost well over a third of the seats it actually won in the 2005 elections and would have been almost 100 seats short of a majority. In actuality, FPP tends to magnify the number of seats won by the plurality victor. The Conservatives would have gained a small number of seats. The big winner would have been the Liberal Democrats, who would have increased their share of seats by 130 percent and would have been in a position to negotiate at least parliamentary support with either major party or even participation in a governing coalition. Indeed, this is what happened in Britain’s 2010 elections. Although the Liberal Democrats lost some seats, they were still in a position to negotiate parliamentary support with the major parties, neither of whom had obtained an outright majority on its own. The Conservatives, with 36 percent of the vote, won 47 percent of the seats. For Labour, the comparable percentages are 29 percent and 40 percent. FPP provided each of the major parties with an 11 percentage-point “bonus” in seats, but imposed an even larger “penalty” on the Liberal Democrats. In consequence, the price of Liberal Democratic participation in David Cameron’s new Conservative government was a promise of changes in the electoral system that would give the Liberal Democrats a better chance in future elections—perhaps not “pure” PR, but no longer “pure” FPP either. Specifically, the Liberal TABLE 2.1 Hypothetical Effect of a PR Voting System in the 2005 British Election Percentage Hypothetical of Vote Seats
Actual Seats
Change
Labour
35.3
228
356
-128
Conservative
32.3
209
198
+11
Liberal Democrats
22.1
143
62
+81
Other
10.3
66
30
+36
Source: BBC News; available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/vote2005, and author’s calculations.
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When Political Parties Die
TABLE 2.2 Hypothetical Effect of a PR Voting System in the 2006 Canadian Election Percentage of Vote
Hypothetical Seats
Actual Seats
Change
Conservatives
36.3
112
124
–12
Liberals
30.2
93
103
–10
New Democratic Party
17.5
54
29
+25
Bloc Québecois
10.5
32
51
–19
Greens
4.5
14
0
+14
Others
1.0
3
0
+3
Source: Table 7.6 and author’s calculations.
Democrats were promised a national referendum on introduction of an “alternative vote” system in which voters can indicate their first-choice candidates, then second-choice, and so on; votes for candidates who fail to win at the outset are redistributed to lower preference candidates until one has a majority. Other political reforms, including fixed five-year terms for Parliament and direct election of the House of Lords, are part of the “Con-Lib” coalition’s program. One effect of a PR system in Canada in 2006 would have been a substantial reduction in the number of Bloc Québecois members of Parliament (MPs), lessening that party’s ability to obstruct the parliamentary system.31 Both major parties would have lost some seats, and the currently governing Conservatives would have been even further from a majority than they actually now are. The New Democratic Party would have almost doubled its number of seats, and the Greens would have entered Parliament for the first time. As these hypothetical numbers show and as Wagstyl pointed out, PR makes it more difficult to create stable governing majorities, which is perhaps the strongest argument against it. Electoral fairness offsets this in the eyes of proponents. It is more important in their view that legislative composition equitably and proportionally reflects voters’ partisan preferences. The concept of consociationalism provides a philosophical framework for PR. Consociationalism stresses the value of giving all key political and demographical groups a voice and a seat at the table proportional to their numerical size in the electorate, even if this makes it more difficult to create working majorities and reach decisions.32 PR systems would almost certainly preclude disalignments like
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Canada’s in 1993: With 16 percent of the vote, the Progressive Conservatives would have won 47 seats instead of only two. “Duverger’s Law” maintains that FPP electoral systems in single-member districts tend to produce two-party systems, because third parties generally cannot obtain legislative seats in proportion to their shares of national votes. Large parties differentiated at the center-right and center-left have a propensity to absorb smaller parties, both at their extremes and in the center.33 The rarity of major-party displacements in FPP systems—the result of disalignments—illustrates the inherent strength of two-party structures. The United States and Great Britain are often presented as epitomes of Duverger’s law. Among FPP countries, Canada is the exception at the national level but not within individual ridings (see discussion of the Chhibber-Kollman study in Chapter 7). A two-party system has been dominant in the United States for almost all its history, largely because of the presidential election system. From the 1830s through 1852, the Democrats and the Whigs predominated, as have the Democrats and Republicans since 1860. During the Whig period, multiparty systems briefly existed but two-partyism quickly reasserted itself, much as Duverger’s Law predicts. On rare occasions (e.g., 1912 and 2000), significant third-party presidential candidates have affected the outcome but never won. Since the Civil War, one or the other major party has usually had a majority in Congress (although not always in both houses at the same time), thanks to FPP. The same process makes its effect felt in the Electoral College, but with occasional greater latitude for minor candidates—as demonstrated rather dramatically in the 2000 presidential election in the single state of Florida, where a small percentage of votes won by the Green Party candidate, arguably at the expense of the Democrats, enabled the Republican nominee to carry the state and win the White House. FPP has also usually assured that the British Parliament has been controlled by one major party or the other. Only in the 1920s and early 1930s, following the collapse of the Liberal Party, were coalition governments necessary (exclusive of the periods of the two World Wars, when decisions to form national governments were made for reasons other than party politics). The failure of either major party to gain a parliamentary majority in 2010 represents an unusual flaw in the ability of FPP to produce a functioning government. In Canada, however, FPP has often been unable to provide the largest party with a parliamentary majority, especially since the 1993 disalignment. However, even when this has been the case (for instance, the results
34
When Political Parties Die
of the 2004, 2006, and 2008 federal elections), there have been no coalition governments in the country’s history. The latter election illustrates the strength of the country’s minor parties, which kept any party from gaining a majority despite the merger of center-right parties that reduced the total number of parties represented in Parliament from five to four. So-called upper houses of these national legislatures have widely varying structures and powers. The US Senate, a powerful body whose members were long chosen by state legislatures, is now popularly elected statewide. Canada’s Senate, whose members are effectively appointed by the prime minister, is a weak body, long and unsuccessfully the target of reformers. The British House of Lords, which had relatively strong powers prior to 1911 when its membership was still wholly hereditary, is also a weak body today; Lords, currently a mixture of hereditary and appointed peers, has also long been the object of reform proposals. Universal male suffrage in the United States was largely completed before the Industrial Revolution. In Britain, expansion of voting rights to all men occurred in phases from the early 1830s to 1918. Most Canadian men were allowed to vote by 1920, but certain minorities were excluded, and there was no federal guarantee of the right to vote until 1982. In all three countries, most women were granted voting rights after World War I. PART Y T YPES As party systems have evolved, they have produced a variety of party organizational models. Generally speaking, the parties with the broadest representation and participation have been the most successful electorally. But they may also be those most vulnerable to disalignment. Elite or cadre parties are among the earliest and organizationally most primitive forms. Often originating in legislative caucuses and typically created by a small group of leaders to advance (or oppose) a particular political perspective, these parties largely comprised a relatively small, closed group at the top plus some followers. Early parties in the United States, Canada, Britain, and other European countries took this form before evolving into more complex organizational structures. This model is still found among a number of small parties in multiparty systems including, for example, several in France and Italy. A variation of the type, the personalistic party found in some Latin American countries (e.g., Cuba and Venezuela), is centered on a single political leader. Mass parties developed as parties became nationalized and, in European countries, to fight for expanded suffrage for the working class. Often highly ideological, these parties viewed their purpose as the pursuit of
Parties and Party Systems
35
electoral victory in order to alter public policy. Political organization thus preceded (and was the means to) the acquisition of power and changes in public policy. In this regard, they are the opposite of the elite model. Mass parties were characterized by the involvement of large numbers of the electorate, often as dues-paying members, mobilizing them ideologically and politically and also through well-integrated social and service networks. Mass parties were usually highly organized and professionally staffed. Frequently, they possessed close ties to allied socioeconomic groups, as exemplified by long-standing relationships between European labor unions and socialist parties and between business interests and certain rightist parties. Martin Van Buren is credited with the transformation of the Democrats into a mass party in the United States during the Jacksonian era, and perhaps therefore may be viewed as the “inventor” of mass parties worldwide.34 In Europe, the mass model was first adopted by parties of the left (e.g., Germany’s Socialist Party and the British Labour Party). Their rightist competitors then emulated this model—much as the American Whigs had sought to adopt the organizational structures of the Democrats (although with less success). Catch-all parties were the next phase in party development. Intent on building up the lot of the working class, mass parties of the left became the victims of their own success; the welfare states they constructed brought the interests of workers and the middle class increasingly into convergence. To strengthen and extend their voter appeal to both classes, mass parties blurred their ideologies and began to resemble each other, competing as much on competency in managing the government as on issues. The result was a new kind of party that reduced the role of ideology to little more than a means of winning elections. What has made catch-all parties different from mass and elite models is that elections and the quest for power are their overriding objective; ideology and issues are little more than the means to this end. They make alliances with a wide range of interest groups and among medial voters to broaden the search for electoral support. Catch-all parties seek votes wherever they can find them, while reducing their former emphasis on members’ activities and participation. They are professionally staffed, with skilled fund-raising and media communications staff playing vital roles. They rely on a mix of government subsidies and contributions from interest groups, as well as individual membership or public contributions. Most major parties in North America and Europe have become catch-all parties today. In Canada, from their very beginnings in 1867, both the Liberal and Conservative Parties sought to broker
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When Political Parties Die
a broad spectrum of interests in their political campaigns even as they remained dominated by elites; they were prototypical catch-all parties long before the form developed in Europe and the United States. Cartel parties are really a later stage of development of the catch-all form. They are major parties that collude through their control of government to monopolize their collective power and to reduce opportunities for small and new parties to challenge them. At the same time, they protect the existing political system, limiting the ability of new political forces to restrict or even destabilize the existing system. Cartel parties utilize a variety of techniques to enhance their power and restrict or even exclude competitive parties that may arise. Clientelism, epitomized in Italy and Latin America, is one such collusive mechanism. Another was the exclusion of communist parties from government-coalition participation in France and Italy for a time during the Cold War. A monopolistic and restrictive mechanism is the requirement in Germany and other countries that parties must obtain a minimum share of the vote before obtaining seats in Parliament. The reluctance of the US, British, and Canadian legislatures to consider replacing FPP systems with proportional representation may be seen as another symptom of cartelism. State subsidies of parties (and /or their candidates) generally work to favor established parties, as do requirements or practices that restrict ballot access. (In the United States, says Nicol Rae, it is virtually impossible for “a third party [to be] able to organize nationally and meet the ballot requirements and various regulations on parties in all 50 states, and thus the DemocratRepublican duopoly is preserved at the possible expense of more radical alternatives.”35) Arguably, major parties in all contemporary democracies are cartelized to one extent or another. A 2001 study of attempts to liberalize electoral systems in a dozen European countries reached an interesting conclusion. Legal changes had relaxed some of the barriers to entry for small and new parties but had also made it even easier for large, established parties. “This conclusion,” the authors wrote, “is suggestive of a cartel-type situation with a twist: nestfeathering and liberalizing of electoral laws to the benefit of all parties, but disproportionately more for the established parties than for the new and/ or small parties.”36 Business-firm parties are a fifth model. These are parties either based on an existing company or created by business leaders for a particular political purpose; in either case, an objective is to confront the established cartel parties with a privately funded party rather than one that is publicly financed. Business-firm parties have thin organizations with minimal staff, often contracting out party functions to experts and consultants.
Parties and Party Systems
37
The party leader is a political entrepreneur behind whom the entire party is mobilized. This resembles in some ways the personalistic party found in less institutionalized party systems. Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (under various names and guises) is a prototype.37 Ross Perot’s Reform Party, largely self-financed and organized to advance his 1992 and 1996 US presidential campaigns, is another example of this type of party, although one that arose inside an established party system. Parties in service are a model proposed by Aldrich.38 His thesis is that the rise of candidate-centered politics ended the organizational role of Republicans and Democrats as mass parties and transformed them into service organizations for their nominees. The parties’ structures raise funds and provide other resources to the political entrepreneurs who are their nominees. As such, these candidates have the option to accept the help voluntarily (or not) and not as a condition of nomination. This transformation, Aldrich believes, has strengthened the role of party bureaucracies and their allied consultants. This development diminished the role of the party in the electorate; indeed, to Aldrich, the voters stand outside the party structure. Aldrich’s book deals only with US politics, but other studies have analyzed the expansion of party professionalism and fund-raising in parallel with the prevalence of dealignment in European politics (see Chapter 3). On its surface, the Aldrich model may seem to explain why contemporary US parties seem invulnerable to disalignments. If the self-perception of party bureaucracies is that they exist mainly to service their candidates and only secondarily to woo an external electorate, they risk losing touch with the temper of their bases. In actuality, the base—particularly including the party’s financial contributors and its workers at the grass roots—is the foundation on which the modern political party is built. If this foundation is weak because party elites neglect its needs, then the party itself is weak, regardless of what services party functionaries provide their nominees. Party leaders and functionaries must balance services to candidates with communications and services to the grassroots and financial base. PERSPECTIVES ON LEADERSHIP Disalignment represents a rupture between leaders and the led. It is interesting to examine this relationship as three noted social scientists viewed it around the time of World War I. These three were Gaetano Mosca, who discussed “the ruling class”; Robert Michels, who wrote about “oligarchy”; and Vilfredo Pareto, who analyzed “governing elites.” James Burnham termed them “the Machiavellians”
38
When Political Parties Die
because, like their 16th-Century mentor, they studied struggles for power.39 (The concept of a ruling oligarchy is far older, going at least as far back as the guardians in Plato’s Republic.) Although conducting different studies, all three “Machiavellians” reached roughly similar judgments about leadership—arguing that all societies and organizations are perpetually and universally dominated by elites to whom the masses or members are subordinate. The question here is whether these theories of “dominant minorities” (to borrow Robert Dahl’s collective term) affect the nature of party leadership against which disaligning voters are rebelling.40 Michels, whose work was based on a study of the German Social Democratic Party, is approximately typical of the three. His “Iron Law of Oligarchy” stated that the ideal of democratic self-government is not possible because “society cannot exist without a ‘dominant’ or ‘political’ class” and that the state “cannot be anything other than the organization of a minority.” The great mass of citizens cannot or will not make the effort to study and decide on the multiple issues of public or private governance, Michels said, and must necessarily defer to a leadership that will; this is the origin of oligarchic rule everywhere. Even in theoretically egalitarian socialist states, he said, an oligarchic leadership would rule: The social revolution would not effect any real modification of the internal structure of the mass. The socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents’ triumph. [The exploited] majority is thus permanently incapable of self-government. . . . The majority of human beings, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy.41
Pareto and Mosca developed similar theories. Pareto said that elites dominate every sphere of human activity, and that only a portion of these comprise the “governing elite” who run society. Revolutions, Pareto believed, merely substitute a new governing elite for the old one. Mosca said that every society contains a “ruling class” and a class that is ruled, sometimes through law and sometimes through force. All three writers were opposed to Marxism, but in fact Karl Marx and his followers saw the phenomenon of the dominant minority in much the same way, although the Marxists reached an opposite prognosis. Throughout history, Marx said, the masses have been oppressed by the state acting as the agent of a capitalistic dominant minority. To Nicolai Lenin, the oppressive mechanism was coercion. To Antonio Gramsci, it was the hegemony of culture and ideas that have brainwashed the masses into accepting
Parties and Party Systems
39
their fate. To all three Marxists, the oppression of the masses was reversible only by a proletarian revolution that would eliminate all class distinctions. To Michels, Pareto, and Mosca, however, these class distinctions are irradicable; a proletarian revolution would only bring in a new dominant minority (which, of course, is exactly what happened in all subsequent communist revolutions). Dahl, an American social scientist, rejected the conclusions of the Machiavellians, in part because “they offer us no hope at all and counsel us, directly or by implication, to give up the ancient vision of a society in which the citizens . . . govern themselves as free and equal citizens.”42 Dahl’s despairing appraisal may not be warranted. The views of Michels, Mosca, and Pareto notwithstanding, in a democracy the people determine who their rulers will be, and they change these governors with some frequency. The people may not rule directly but, through their votes, they decide who will. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, such decisions can lead to the destruction of a governing elite. Nonetheless, party leaders are critical to the party’s success and survival. Leaders must have the vision to take their followers to a place they have never seen (in Henry Kissinger’s phrase), but they must also be sure their people will follow them there—that the parade will not continue down Broadway when the leader turns onto Main Street. Party leadership is a hazardous business, and mistakes can lead to electoral defeat or the choice of a new leader (or both). On rare occasions, they can produce the ruination of the party. NOTES 1. See Martin P. Wattenberg, The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1996 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and John A. Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 2. Aldrich, Why Parties? 49. 3. Ibid. 4. Quoted by David Adamany, “Introduction,” in E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (n.p.: Wadsworth, 1975), xviii. 5. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 6. Bob Plamondon, Full Circle: Death and Transfiguration in Canadian Conservative Politics (Toronto: Kay Porter Books, 2006), 30. 7. Wolfgang C. Müller and Ulrich Sieberer, “Party Law,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: Sage, 2006), 439.
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8. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems. 9. Scott Mainwaring and Mariano Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, chap. 18. 10. Peter Mair, “Cleavages,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, 373. 11. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments,” in The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), 91–138. 12. In Poland, however, the religious cleavage remains frozen, presenting an additional dimension to the classic ideological division. This has produced both clerical and anticlerical parties of the right and also of the left. 13. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 14. Scott C. Flanagan, “Changing Values in Advanced Industrial Societies,” Comparative Political Studies 14 (1982): 403–444; and Scott C. Flanagan and Russell J. Dalton, “Models of Change,” in Mair, ed., The West European Party System, chap. 16. 15. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.) 16. Peter M. Siavelis, “Party and Social Structure,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, 365. 17. Peter Mair, “Party System Change,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, 70. 18. Susan E. Scarrow, “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Modern Political Parties: The Unwanted Emergence of Party-Based Politics,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, chap. 2. 19. Paul Goodman, “The First American Party System,” in The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, ed. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 57. 20. Quoted in Vernon Bogdanor, ed., The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press and the British Academy, 2003), 3. 21. Robert Michels, Political Parties (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962). 22. The Federalists imploded but did not actually disalign. Disalignment refers to the era in which popular voting predominates, as it did not during the Federalist period. There was no split between party leadership and base because there was no such thing as a base at this early period. 23. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, 44. 24. Steven Wolinetz, “Party Systems and Party System Types,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, 52–53. 25. Peter Mair, “Party System Change,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, 69. 26. Sometimes also called “the winner-take-all” system. 27. PR is used exclusively by the states of the European Union to elect members of the European Parliament (EP). So-called “parties” in the EP are really only caucuses, because candidates for the parliament run under national party labels, not those of the EP. Legislative accountability is therefore limited.
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28. France did adopt PR on the single occasion of the 1986 parliamentary elections, reverting to the two-round model thereafter. 29. Giovanni Sartori, “The Party Effects of Electoral Systems,” in Political Parties and Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 100–101 (emphasis in original). 30. Stefan Wagstyl, “The Great Political Divide at the Centre of Europe,” Financial Times, October 18, 2007, 11. 31. “Because of their primary concentration in Quebec, Canadian francophones are one of the few ethnic minorities in the world that is better off under FPP than under PR.” Charles Boix, quoted by Richard Johnston, “Canadian Elections at the Millennium,” Choices: Strengthening Canadian Democracy 6, no. 6 (September 2000): 34, n. 37. 32. Arend Lijphart is perhaps the principal proponent of consociationalism in governing. See his Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 33. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1978), 216–228. 34. Van Buren, the creator of the American mass party, was preoccupied with winning elections and the resulting patronage opportunities that came with them, rather than with using power to affect public policy. Still, he viewed policy differences as the organizing principle for political parties. See his posthumously published book, Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967; originally published 1867). 35. Nicol C. Rae, “Exceptionalism in the United States,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, 201. 36. Shaun Bowler, Elizabeth Carter, and David M. Farrell, Studying Electoral Institutions and Their Consequences: Electoral Systems and Electoral Laws (University of California Irvine: Center for the Study of Democracy, 2001), 13, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc5b9dg. 37. Andre Krouwel, “Party Models,” in Katz and Crotty, eds., Handbook, 260. 38. Aldrich, Why Parties?, 269–274, 289–291. 39. Michels, Political Parties; Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939); Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, 4 vols., ed. Arthur Livingston, trans. Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935); James Burnham, The Machiavellians (New York: John Day, 1943). 40. Robert A. Dahl also devoted a chapter to Mosca, Pareto, and Michels in Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). Dahl’s summary is from the left, Burnham’s from the right. 41. Quoted in J. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 166–167. 42. Dahl, 279.
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Chapter 3
Realignment and Dealignment
The concept of disalignment has its origins in that of realignment. Realignment has been widely discussed in political science literature for over half a century. Disalignment, on the other hand, has remained unidentified until now. (Indeed, the word is coined here because there does not appear to be another name for the concept.) Dealignment, an additional topic in this genre, has also been analyzed in the literature on US and European politics. This chapter discusses these theories and their interrelationships. Chapter 4 proposes a new way to look at them. THE ORIGINS OF REALIGNMENT THEORY V. O. Key Jr. is widely credited with the origination of party-realignment theory in a pair of articles.1 In his seminal work, Key identified a category of elections in which there is a sharp break in patterns of voting from preexisting cleavages. Just as the former voting pattern had existed for a number of elections, so the new party alignment now persists for some years. These realigning elections, said Key, are characterized by intense voter involvement and readjustments in power relationships. A particular characteristic of critical elections is a readjustment of voting behavior among specific groups that moves gradually toward “partisan homogeneity.”2 Such sharp and sweeping changes are brought about only by “events with widespread and powerful impact or issues touching deep emotions.”3 In his second article, Key distinguished between those realignments that are triggered by critical elections, and a second type, the secular realignment. This latter type was not sharp and short but rather was protracted over a period of elections. Secular realignments could occur independently
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of the influences shaping voter behavior at any particular election, Key said. He was vague about how long a shift in voting patterns needed to last before it could be considered a realignment, but he thought 10 years was a reasonable minimum. Both types of realignment are dependent on shifts in demographic characteristics, he observed, noting that changes in these characteristics in a particular geographic area ultimately produce changes in voting. Key’s papers focused only on US politics. In a closing footnote to the second article, however, he raised the possibility that his analysis might also be applicable to the party systems of West European countries. As discussed later in this chapter, several authors subsequently have utilized the realignment concept in analyzing European party politics. Considering the significance of the subject, it is odd that Key did no further work on realignment. Instead, further development of his theory was taken up by a number of other scholars, particularly Walter Dean Burnham and James L. Sundquist. Both, like Key, looked mainly at American politics. Burnham’s ideas were part of a series of works on American politics published between the late 1960s and 2000. The distinguishing feature of Burnham’s studies was what he saw as the cyclical nature of US party realignments, which framed the series of party systems into which his view of American history was organized. In his 1970 book and various articles, Burnham extended Key’s ideas regarding critical elections. These, he said, were “characteristically associated with short-lived but very intense disruptions of traditional patterns of voting behavior.”4 For that reason, he specifically excluded the concept of secular realignment and never dealt with it thereafter. Burnham’s thesis in these various publications was that party realignments occur suddenly, cyclically, and regularly throughout American electoral history. The cycles, he said, began in 1828 and repeated about every 32 or 36 years,5 initiated in each case by a single critical election. In most of Burnham’s analyses, he devoted considerable attention to changes in voting behavior among various segments of the electorate. The concept of critical elections at which realignments occurred was particularly important to Burnham. He defined realignments as: (a) “short, sharp reorganizations of the mass coalitional bases of the major parties” occurring at critical elections; (b) periodic; (c) often preceded by thirdparty surges; (d) closely associated with abnormal socioeconomic stress; and (e) marked by highly intense involvement both within the electorate and among political elites, and by ideological polarization between
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the major parties.6 Realignments, he said, were also generally marked by unusually high levels of voter turnout. Critical realignments, Burnham said, are “the chief means through which an underdeveloped political system can be recurrently brought once again into some balanced relationship with the changing socioeconomic system.”7 They occur, he later wrote, because the political system is unable “to undergo more than marginal incremental change,” and he called them “America’s surrogate for revolution.” Critical realignments, he added, “are fundamentally manifestations of constitution-making and remaking, of applied political theory in general and of Lockian [sic] political theory in particular.”8 In his 1970 book, Burnham associated realignments with preceding “third-party revolts” and blamed a failure of the major parties to accommodate “emergent political demand.” He also identified a connection with “stress in the socioeconomic system” and exceptionally high levels of “ideological polarization.” He claimed a correlation between realignments and “the outer boundaries of policy in general, though not necessarily of policies in detail.”9 In connection with this latter contention, he noted a “synchronization” of realignments with Supreme Court decisions. Burnham’s claim that realignments occur more or less cyclically every 36 years or so implies a considerable degree of predictability. A post-1932 partisan realignment should therefore have occurred in 1968 but did not. In explanation, he pointed in his 1970 book to a “post-1900 trend toward decomposition of political parties as action instrumentalities”10 and devoted a chapter to a discussion of electoral disaggregation and party decomposition. Disaggregation carried to an extreme, he said, would make realignment impossible. Subsequently, Burnham delineated two realignment types, one (“Type A”) a “partisan-focused realignment,” and the other (“Type B”) a more gradual postpartisan realignment, of which declining voter turnout, divided government, and the “permanent political campaign” are important characteristics. Burnham’s Type B is the realignment he believes occurred in 1968–1972 when the predicted Type A did not.11 (Martin Wattenberg said that Burnham’s comments on electoral disaggregation and party decay essentially anticipated the concept of dealignment.12) Burnham used the term, “interregnum state,” to describe his postpartisan realignment. In 1991, Burnham adopted the concept of “punctuated equilibria,” a metaphor he and other political scientists (e.g., Aldrich) borrowed from paleobiology.13 As Burnham applied it to American political history, the term refers to two steady-state periods of modest change,
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“punctuated” by a sudden “rapid disruption” of the status quo.14 His theory of realignment fit neatly into this concept; he saw critical elections constituting an important form of punctuation between two eras of political equilibrium. As his 1991 bifurcation of realignment into different types illustrates, Burnham’s conception of critical elections was a theory in motion. In another example, he termed the 1994 off-year election a realignment after treating realignments for a quarter-century as occurring only in presidential years. In that later work, he also emphasized a new criterion of comprehensiveness, recognizing that realignments have depth below the presidential elections.15 An important characteristic of realignments in Burnham’s mind was their cyclicality and therefore their predictability. As he saw them, critical elections occurred regularly through American history, each launching a new political era. This clocklike view led Burnham to predict a new critical election in 1968 or perhaps 1972. Unfortunately, the cuckoo failed to emerge on schedule, which led Burnham to vacillate in his expectations of a new critical election. In his 1976 paper, Burnham had written that “[t]here are excellent reasons for supposing that critical-realignment processes as historically understood have ceased to exist,” and that the period after 1963 constituted a “critical realignment to end all critical realignments.”16 In 1999, however, he returned to the original theme, saying that “the political crisis of the late 1960s entailed a genuine realignment.”17 As for “the 1994 electoral earthquake and its ratification in 1996, 1998, and, in all probability, subsequent elections,” these “represented a real sea change in the contemporary history of American politics. . . . If not a genuine realignment, 1994 looks very much like one, enabling the post-1968 fragmentation of the political order.”18 Although only six years had passed since the 1994 “sea change,” by 2000 Burnham was again anticipating a recurrence of the realignment phenomenon: He wrote that there would be no realignment that year but that “a genuine political explosion [could occur] relatively soon—perhaps toward the end of this new decade, perhaps a bit sooner or later.”19 Burnham’s publications are replete with statistical analyses and delineations of voting among various demographic groups. In this regard, he echoes Key’s approach and point of view, including the latter’s emphasis on critical elections, though almost without attribution to Key, whose contribution to realignment theory Burnham largely ignores. In contrast to Burnham’s mechanistic view of realignment, James Sundquist’s scrutiny is more qualitative and sweeping. Realignments, he said, could happen in more than a single critical election. Sundquist’s analysis
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therefore focused on realignment eras, notably those of the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1930s, that each produced new party systems. (E. E. Schattschneider had also discussed the realignments of these latter two eras.20) Each of these, Sundquist said, was marked by sweeping changes in voter cleavages and shifts in party identification. Unlike Burnham, Sundquist saw nothing inevitably recurrent about realignments; they occur when, and if, the party system “is disturbed by a new issue (or cluster of related issues).”21 A new generation of voters might be ripe for change, he said, but without the disturbance of a new issue realignment would not occur and certainly was not inevitable. There are two factors that impact the party system in a realigning election, Sundquist said: “the conversion of established voters to new party allegiances, and the mobilization by the parties of citizens who previously had not voted.”22 Sundquist identified five “variables that determine when, in what form, and on what scale a realignment takes place.” These were “the breadth and depth of the underlying grievance,” by which he meant public fervor strong enough to give rise to a shattering issue, “the capacity of the proposed remedy to provoke resistance, the motivation and capacity of party leadership, the division of the polar forces between the parties, and the strength of the ties that bind voters to the existing parties.”23 He amplified at length on each of these variables, noting particularly their interrelationship with voter cleavages, with what he called “cross-cutting issues” that bisect existing partisan cleavages, and with the manner in which party elites dealt with them. In sum, Sundquist’s analysis of realignments was more focused on issues and cleavages; Burnham’s approach was more quantitative. REALIGNMENT CRITICISMS Realignment theory has been challenged by a number of scholars. The 1991 volume edited by Byron Shafer is essentially a debate between Burnham and several of his critics. The chapter by Joel Silbey is perhaps the most substantive. There could have been no realignment before 1838, Silbey maintained, because strong partisanship in the United States did not develop until that year.24 Silbey offered his own delineation of American political eras: “prealignment” (1789–1838); alignment /realignment (1838– 1893) including the realignment of the 1850s; realignment/dealignment (1893–1948/1952); and “postalignment” (1948 /1952–present). The first and the last have similarities, said Silbey, in that in both the voters often did not participate and lacked party commitments, “but have instead been up for grabs.”25
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Everett Carll Ladd’s chapter in the Shafer volume was particularly scornful of Burnham’s theory and especially its cyclical elements. Waiting for the next predicted realignment, he said, was like waiting for Godot, the central figure in Samuel Beckett’s play, who, despite repeated predictions of his imminent appearance, never shows up.26 A decade later, David Mayhew authored a comprehensive critique that examined and challenged every claim of realignment theorists, although without disputing the occurrence of realignments themselves.27 Mayhew’s book did not attempt to set forth a new theory of elections, but rather detailed the claims of the realignment theorists and then proceeded to refute them on the basis of Mayhew’s own interpretations of American electoral events. In what he describes as “the heart of the realignments case,” Mayhew said that realignment theorists implicitly assumed that voters express themselves powerfully on policy agendas in critical elections, but poorly or inadequately at other times.28 In other words, as Mayhew interprets Key, Burnham, and other realignment authors, only once every several decades does the electorate bestir itself to maximize the utility of its needs and interests, and vote strategically on a policy agenda; in other elections, the electorate is either engaged in tactical voting on short-term concerns, or is simply ineffective. To Mayhew, this reiterative, periodic “Rip van Winkle view of democracy”29 was implausible—as were various other claims of Key, Burnham, Sundquist, and other realignment theorists. “. . .[T]he realignments way of thinking adds little or no illumination, but it does exact opportunity costs. Other lines of investigation might be more promising,” although Mayhew did not say what they are.30 He did express a desire for a refocus of research on secular realignments, but in the end he concluded that “the realignments perspective . . . is too slippery, too binary, too apocalyptic, and it has come to be too much of a dead end.”31 Burnham did not seek to rebut Mayhew’s criticisms, at least not in print; however, Arthur Paulson did in the 2007 revision of his book on realignment. (See below for a discussion of Paulson’s own ideas on the subject.) Mayhew, Paulson said, “rejects the most fundamental assumptions concerning realignment and periodic change in the party system. . . . [He] attribute[s] to realignment theory observations that are not necessarily definitive of the concept of realignment, or essential to the theory,” and he renders that concept “ahistorical.”32 After discussing each element of Mayhew’s critique, Paulson argued that it “often examines a series of single characteristics without considering them in context,” which “predisposes him to decide against realignment, in each case and as a theory.” While conceding the validity of individual criticisms, Paulson maintained
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that realignment theory remains “a very useful tool of electoral analysis” that should not be dismissed.33 Key’s articles and Burnham’s contributions inspired a generation of political scientists (particularly Sundquist) to elaborate on their ideas in a large number of works, both to apply them and debate them. A 1991 bibliography lists well over 600 books and articles on various aspects of realignment,34 and there have been several hundred more since. Nonetheless, as a result of the critiques of Ladd, Mayhew, and others, the traditional theory of realignment largely fell into disfavor. Writing several years before Mayhew, John K. White declared, “As a workable concept in examining contemporary American politics, realignment is dead.”35 REALIGNMENT RESURRECTED? Nonetheless, realignment themes seem to experience occasional rebirth, if not always (unlike the fabled Phoenix) in the same form. Everett Carll Ladd, for all the vehemence of his criticism of Burnham’s theory, did not wholly reject the concept of realignment. In his analysis of the 1996 election, he gave it a new twist. Where Burnham had been looking at partisan realignment, Ladd identified a philosophical one that lacked dominance by either party and that perhaps facilitated divided government. This philosophical realignment “sees the electorate significantly more conservative than it was in the preceding era, especially in the sense of being far less inclined to accept claims that more government represents progress.”36 (Burnham himself had made this point when he said that the American public tends to be “ideologically conservative [against big government in general], but also operationally liberal” in that it wants the benefits of government programs.37) Ladd put philosophical realignment “in the context of the postindustrial party system.” Other factors he said included: weakened voter ties to political parties; television’s dominance as a campaign medium; the absence of a majority/minority party model; divided government (not inevitable “in a no-majority-party era, but . . . more readily obtained in one”); and composition and alignment of social groups different from those of the New Deal. Socioeconomically, the postindustrial party system is marked, he said, by “[d]ispersion and decentralization . . . of the technology and economy in this period.” Ladd added: “Our postindustrial era is distinguished by far greater skepticism about government, though for most not by hostility toward it.” Ladd pointed to issue surveys in which conservative positions predominate overwhelmingly.” Compared to the New Deal period, Ladd said, race and religiosity have become new voting factors, and voting alignments
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in the South and New England are now “virtually a mirror image” of the Roosevelt era.38 He observed that the philosophical realignment seemed clear-cut, even though the parties were then more or less at parity, as they had been for the preceding 15 years. “[But] today’s postindustrial sociopolitical environment makes it exceedingly difficult for any party to establish stable, long-term loyalties across much of the population.” As Ladd was expanding on this conception of philosophical realignment, a new theory of voting and elections had emerged that dealt with some of the same problems he and Burnham had discussed. Observing signs that voters were moving away from political participation and that party strength was weakening, Martin Wattenberg said that realignment had stopped as the party system became dealigned. Voter turnout was declining and the public seemed to perceive decreasing value in their lives from political parties. We will return to this subject of dealignment presently, but it is important at least to introduce it at this point before launching into the next discussion of works by Paulson and Stonecash. Realignment is a phenomenon of party-based voting; dealignment represents processes affecting the party system: disaffection from the political process, the attenuation of party strength and affiliation, lower voter turnout, and the increased importance large numbers of voters give to choices of individual candidates rather than party preference. While some political analysts had perceived in political developments the demise of realignment, others had seen it transformed through the instrument of dealignment. Two recent books have sought to revive realignment theory as it applies to American politics. In the first of these (in addition to his rebuttal of Burnham’s critics), Arthur Paulson put forth the proposition that the period of 1964 –1972 constituted a genuine realignment, with 1968 as the critical election. His argument was that internal changes in the Republican Party, beginning in 1964, and in the Democratic Party, following 1972, made each party ideologically cohesive and “responsible.”39 The consequence, Paulson said, has been to sharpen the polarization of the two parties by making the GOP more truly the conservative party and the Democrats the liberal one. This change was driven by the realignment of the formerly Democratic “Solid South,” as that region began to shift increasingly from 1964 on toward an electoral preference for conservative Republicans—initially at the presidential level and then in congressional elections. A similar ideological realignment favoring liberal Democrats began to occur in 1972 in the Northeast and, later, on the West Coast. This was the first time in American history, said Paulson, that the party system has become ideologically polarized, and that this polarization is now institutionalized.
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The theories of dealignment and realignment are not mutually exclusive, as many scholars have maintained, Paulson wrote. What Wattenberg and other analysts saw as dealignment was actually realignment by other means, Paulson said, adding his belief that realignment remains an important concept in analyzing elections. He said that scholars failed to see the realignment of 1964 –1972 because they were looking for something like the 1932 realignment: “Those who were ‘waiting for Godot’ expected realignment to embody a checklist that included a mobilized electorate, new electoral coalitions, and new majority party, resulting in unified government, a new governing coalition, and a new policy agenda.” They were misled, said Paulson, by the structural change occurring in the party system, noting that there were great differences even among previous realignments.40 As a defender of the critical realignments thesis, Paulson necessarily argued for the periodicity of electoral change while still stipulating, like Sundquist, that “there is no inevitability to election outcomes.”41 If, however, there was indeed a critical election in 1968 (the midpoint in the 1964 –1972 period of internal party change) as he claimed, then there should have been a reiteration in 2000 or 2004. Both those elections did indeed produce unified government as traditional realignment theory would predict—leading some Republicans to believe that a genuine GOP realignment was underway. There certainly was no landslide victory, however; the 2004 presidential election was relatively close, and that of 2000 spectacularly so. In any event, whatever prospects of long-term Republican dominance existed were ended by Democratic victories in the elections of 2006 and 2008. The question of realignment periodicity had earlier been addressed in a 1999 paper by John Aldrich, in which he argued that the 1990s may have been a new critical era, following one three decades earlier. Like Paulson, Aldrich believed that a critical era in the 1960s was overlooked because it was not a partisan realignment, but that it still brought “a new voting majority to power,” in which “the change in public opinion, leadership, institutional structure, and policy agenda and coalition were pervasive.”42 If that was the case, Aldrich said, another critical era would be expected in the 1990s. His evidence for that hinged on three changes, all of which he found occurring: The first is the clear and substantial change in the leadership of both parties. The second is the changes so far detected in public beliefs and values, the most clear-cut indicator being the change in party identification, typically back toward the levels found before the completion of the transition to a candidate-centered system. The third is changing patterns in voting, especially the decline in split-ticket voting and declining value of incumbency per se.43
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Aldrich’s conception of a 1990s realignment actually seems more closely related to the dealignment thesis, but in any event it did not occur in the form he envisioned it, preempted by the Republican surge that began in 1994. Still, he anticipated elements that both Paulson and Jeffrey Stonecash incorporated into their own analyses of realignment. Stonecash was able to elide the problem of cyclicality and periodicity. He, too, interpreted recent American politics in terms of realignment, but in his case it was Key’s abandoned stepchild, secular realignment. “Secular realignment . . . involves interpreting political changes over a longer period of time [than critical realignment] and creating a narrative that explains the sources of the gradual shifts,” Stonecash said.44 Paulson had seen secular realignment occurring only at the bottom (i.e., elections for the House and state offices). Stonecash’s view, in contrast, was that it has characterized the totality of political developments over the past half-century. The changes in voter attitudes and behavior that Wattenberg and others interpreted as dealignment, Stonecash saw as the evolutionary symptoms of a protracted realignment: . . .[T]he trends in partisanship of the last fifty years reflect the consequences of a long-term secular realignment. The parties have undergone a gradual and steady re-sorting of electoral bases. As the electorate reacted to these changes, it created the appearance of a movement away from parties—but these changes were really a reflection of the transitions associated with realignment.45
Central to Stonecash’s thesis, as to Paulson’s, are changes in partisanship since the 1980s resulting from ideological party polarization. On the one hand, Stonecash maintained, independents who had previously perceived little difference between the parties found themselves identifying with the party that now approached their own views. On the other, he said, partisans (primarily southerners) who did not share the dominant ideology of their old party began to migrate to its competitor, with which they were more in sympathy. However, “[p]arty identifications are strong attachments, and we should expect only some voters to change parties and for changes to be incremental.”46 Split-ticket voting, an important element of dealignment as its theorists saw it, is not so much a rejection of parties as such, Stonecash argued, as of a particular party because of a particular issue. Split-ticket voting in the South was actually a phase in the Republican secular realignment in that region, just as it was in the Democratic secular realignment dominance in the northeastern states.
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Split-ticket voting, Stonecash said, “is not a rejection of parties, per se, but of a specific party due to the conflict the party identifier has about an issue position of the party. That conflict leads to a short-term resolution that involves reduced support for the party’s candidates. In the long-term, we expect that voters are likely to change the party they support.”47 Paulson and Stonecash would agree that the data that have been interpreted as evidence of dealignment are actually signals of a new political alignment that emerged in recent decades. Whether that new configuration is the product of a critical realignment that occurred around 1970 (Paulson), or the consequence of a decades-long secular realignment (Stonecash), seems to be mainly a matter of the lens through which each author is viewing essentially similar evidence. THE DEALIGNMENT PERSPECTIVE Dealignment is a more recently identified phenomenon than realignment. Like the latter, dealignment was initially associated particularly with American politics but has also received attention from students of European politics. As noted above, realignment is a phenomenon of party-based voting; dealignment represents processes affecting the party system: disaffection from the political process, the attenuation of party strength and affiliation, and the increased importance large numbers of voters give to choices of individual candidates rather than party preference. Wattenberg maintained that dealignment has become the predominant characteristic of US elections since the 1950s, supplanting the role previously played by realignment. Indeed, he cited Burnham’s own belief “that a new alignment will find it very difficult to put down roots in the current dealigned era.” Wattenberg added, “Any realignment that does occur will be hollow as long as political parties continue to have a weak hold on the electorate.”48 Wattenberg distinguished between the character of realignment and that of dealignment in the United States: “Whereas realignment involves people changing from one party to another, dealignment concerns people gradually moving away from both.”49 Voters have been less negative toward the parties, he said, than neutral toward them. Instead, the movement away from party voting has been in the direction of what Wattenberg, Aldrich, and others have called “candidate-centered politics.” The origins of candidate-centricity lay in the reforms that began early in the 20th Century, in America’s Progressive era. These reforms gradually weakened the power of party organizations—most notably through
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the development of primary elections (including presidential primaries), but also because of the loss of party patronage, the rise of mass media (and now also the Internet) as substitute sources of political information, and, to a lesser extent, the impacts of direct democracy (initiatives and referenda) and state financing of elections. Primaries have largely replaced caucuses and conventions as the means of nominating candidates at state and local levels, substantially expanding the base of decision-makers. Because elite party groups no longer control their nominating processes, party organizations have lost power to candidate organizations (as first exemplified at the presidential level by John F. Kennedy’s success in capturing his party’s nomination in 1960), Wattenberg said. He added, “Because the parties no longer exercise control over the selection of presidential nominees, their command over the voters’ attention has lessened considerably.”50 He cited data indicating that substantial percentages of the public see little continued value in political parties. As the electorate has increasingly, since the 1950s, chosen to “vote for the man rather than the party,” there has been a decline in straight-ticket voting and a rise in extensive ticket-splitting.51 Wattenberg’s data indicate that between a quarter and a third of the electorate voted a split ticket for president and the House between the 1968 and 1988 elections.52 Choosing between individual candidates regardless of their party affiliation is a more complex decision-making process than simply voting a straightparty ticket, he noted. Voters need to evaluate opposing candidates and their issues or rely on ideological identification and /or performance ratings, not simply on party slates. The media’s shift in focus to individual candidates, Wattenberg said, has made parties “less institutionally relevant to the mass public,”53 and has helped weaken “a long-standing psychological predisposition that [had served] as an anchoring point for an individual’s political attitudes.”54 The consequence of ticket-splitting for the United States has been divided government—an element of Burnham’s interregnum state. In 1991, Shafer wrote that the United States has a propensity to elect Republican presidents, a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, and a Senate that could be controlled by either party.55 The elections of 1992 and 1994 demolished this thesis for a time and in its place installed its mirror age: For six years, the country was governed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Shafer’s pattern was not reinstituted until the 2006 elections. In between, the executive and legislative branches were both largely controlled by Republicans.56 Between 1953 and 2009, the same party will have controlled both the White House and Congress only about one-third of the time; otherwise, divided government has
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been the pattern. The same pattern has also been widely observed at the state level. Another consequence of candidate-centered politics is the entrepreneurial nature of candidates and office-holders, as both Wattenberg and Aldrich observed. Candidates raise their own political funds to win nominations and elections, aided only partially by Aldrich’s “party in service.”57 Television campaigning and other forms of advertising are paid for by the money the candidates raise themselves and generally benefit only them individually, not the party slate. More recently, the Internet has become an increasingly important fund-raising and communications instrument for candidates. To only a slightly lesser extent, volunteer campaign organizations have the same candidate orientation. Another characteristic of American politics in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries has been the growth of extensive financial involvement by interest groups and other nonparty organizations. A recent decision of the US Supreme Court has overturned limits on the amounts corporations and labor unions may spend on behalf of political candidates, issues, and causes on the ground that such restrictions violate the Constitution’s freespeech protections (see also Chapter 10). An effect will be to increase the number of voices supporting causes and candidates, some allied with one or the other major party, but some not.58 POLITICAL CHANGE OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES Most of the publications on realignment have dealt with American politics, but a few offer perspectives on other polities. In literature on European political systems, realignment theory has tended to focus mainly on social and economic cleavage structures and their effects on party systems and voter dealignment, rather than on particular parties, electoral events, or the mechanisms of realignment. In 1984, Russell Dalton and collaborators published an edited collection of essays on electoral change in the advanced democracies. Several of these articles discussed realigning patterns in several countries. Others explored patterns of dealignment. Dalton and his colleagues predicated these writers’ analyses on changes in public concerns and issues that had arisen since the late 1960s, particularly the rise of the new left and new right. It was not only the issues they found remarkable but also the coalitions of support: the middle-class base of the new left and the blue-collar and fundamentalist support for new-right causes. As discussed in Chapter 2, these alignments are almost mirror images of the bases of the parties of the
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When Political Parties Die
old left and right. The failure of the old parties to respond initially to the new social movements led first to “the destabilization of democratic party systems” and then to the “decomposition of electoral alignments in many Western nations.”59 Dalton and his colleagues classified the party systems they examined into three groups: Stable alignments were marked by minimal change in party coalitions and overall partisan equilibrium. Realignments were “defined as a significant shift in the group bases of party coalitions, and usually in the distribution of popular support among the parties as a result.” Dealignment was described as “a period during which the party-affiliated portion of the electorate shrinks as the traditional party coalitions dissolve . . . and initially was considered to be a preliminary step in a realignment process.” Later, however, it came to be seen “as a distinct electoral period.”60 (To Stonecash, however, dealignment in the United States is really just a phase in a secular realignment.) Admittedly, the authors said, such a classification is less difficult in a two-party system than in the multiparty systems that typify most advanced democracies, and they were careful to limit the typology to “enduring partisan loyalties,” rather vaguely defined as either links to particular parties or to social groups.61 The various authors represented in the 1984 Dalton volume found realignments predominant in Germany, Italy, and Japan, while dealignment dominated in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Britain, and Spain. Canada and France were seen to exhibit patterns of stability at the time. Explanations of the sources of change that may produce one or another of these three types of political alignment, they said, are rooted in a combination of processes. Eroding cleavages and political alignments may open social groups to appeals based on new issues or ideologies, a new cleavage model. If parties can make such appeals successfully, the result may be realignment. If not, there may be a surge in independent voters, especially within groups among whom postmaterialist values are most prominently identified—the young, the new middle class, and the highly educated—and which “provide them with new goals for citizen action.” This, they said, represents a pattern of dealignment that is partly enabled by the new left–right cleavages but also by the new cognitive mobilization of the mass electorate.62 In the same volume, Paul Allen Beck offered a somewhat different view, at least for US parties. He suggested that they are susceptible to “aging,” as elements of a party’s coalitional support base become alienated over time if its program fails to satisfy group expectations, especially among newer voters. Generational replacement may thus produce a cyclical pattern of electoral change, he believed.63 Nearly two decades later, two collections of essays found the dealignment pattern dominant among the advanced industrial democracies in
Realignment and Dealignment
57
the early years of the 21st Century; realignment was barely mentioned. The first volume, edited by Dalton and Wattenberg, examined functionally the three classic roles of political parties in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries: parties in the electorate, party organizations, and parties in government.64 The second work, edited by Paul Webb and colleagues, comprised country or area case studies covering much the same subject matter as the Dalton and Wattenberg book.65 In both volumes, essay authors found the influence of parties on individual voters to be severely eroded in advanced democracies. In sum, they reported that partisan identification was weaker, thereby increasing electoral volatility and leading voters away from attention to party labels and toward voting decisions based on individual issues and candidates. Voter turnout had declined almost everywhere, and ticket-splitting had increased in the five countries in which it was measured.66 In both collections, authors of various articles also concluded that party organizations among these countries have suffered continuing membership declines, while internal democratization (on leadership, candidates, and programs) has increased. Parties were found to be employing modern technologies, streamlining their internal organizations, and expanding staff and use of consultants. Within legislatures, in candidate choice and cabinet selection, and on policies and programs, the influence of parties is high. The incidence of popular referenda, however, has increased. These companion volumes differ somewhat in their overall conclusions: Dalton and Wattenberg see an inadequate response to the challenges of dealignment by political parties, “further increasing the gap between the governors and the governed.”67 In comparison, Webb and colleagues believe that “parties continue to perform vital tasks with a relatively high degree of effectiveness and are central mechanisms of popular choice and control.”68 These differences in conclusions are important to our discussion of realignment and dealignment but represent perhaps the same clash of views and values found among students of American party systems. In 1998, Wattenberg wrote that “long-term factors involving changes in the character of American politics,” rather than rising educational attainment or generational replacement among voters, are what produced the decline in partisanship.69 Later, he apparently changed his mind, at least regarding dealignment outside the United States. He (and Dalton) wrote, “Increasing educational levels have presumably improved the political and cognitive resources of contemporary electorates. With more political information available to a more educated electorate, more citizens now possess the political skills and resources necessary to become self-sufficient in politics.”70
58
When Political Parties Die
Inglehart, Dalton, and other political scientists have observed that the same factors that produced postmaterialist values—most notably, increasing education and affluence—also led, according to Peter M. Siavelis, to “a trend toward the decomposition of electoral alignments and the fragmentation of the ‘socio-psychological bonds between voters and parties.’ . . . These processes played out in the decomposition of electoral alignments in western countries, which Dalton et al. argue is evinced in the fractionalization and volatility of party systems in the 1960s and 1970s.”71 Dalton and other analysts characterized the decomposition of alignments as a pattern of dealignment, and found it to be widespread among the advanced democracies.72 In both West Europe and North America, dealignment has been marked by declining rates of party identification and lower voter turnout at elections, they observed. A “quite pervasive decline in the reach of traditional cleavage politics,”73 and “the general erosion of group-based politics” have led to a rise in “issue-based voting” and declines in voter participation.74 Volatility in elections has been high, constituency groups can no longer be counted on to support their traditional parties of choice to the same extent, party memberships and voter bases have shrunk, and parties “are seen to fail to perform the [linkage] functions considered essential . . . in a democratic polity.”75 In some countries (e.g., Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands), new parties have arisen seeking to capture the votes of the disaffected. Often, however, barriers to entry have made formation of new parties difficult, leading alienated voters to conclude that abstaining from the electoral process is their only rational option—and producing the rise of single-issue advocacy groups and new social movements.76 In response to all this, political parties have adopted a variety of new strategies, frequently adapted from commercial marketing, to cope with this political climate and appeal to new potential constituencies, as detailed in various country studies.77 Among these strategies, as Aldrich has discussed, is the transformation of party organizations into ever more aggressive providers of fund-raising and candidate-oriented services.78 There may be indications, however, that dealignment is no longer on the increase. Divided government is no longer as prevalent as it was (although it briefly resumed in the United States in 2006), and levels of voter turnout appear to be rising. In the United States, split-ticket voting in presidential elections seems to have waned somewhat, at least in the elections of the 21st Century to date. In the US 2004 election, for example, only 59 of the nation’s 435 congressional districts were carried by a presidential candidate of the opposite party from the representative they elected, down from 89 in 2000. In the 1984 election, 200 districts had voted for such a split
Realignment and Dealignment
59
ticket, as had 190 in 1972.79 Turnout has increased in the seven most recent American national elections, especially in presidential years, as shown in Table 3.1. More broadly, Mark Franklin’s study of turnout in 22 countries in elections since 1945 may throw into question the relationship of turnout to dealignment (although he himself does not make that connection). Franklin found that decisions to vote (or not vote) are habituated “during the first three elections that people are exposed to as voting-age adults,” and that there are significant differences in turnout by age cohorts.80 Franklin asserted that cohorts that developed the habit of voting at high levels during their earliest elections will continue to show high levels of turnout throughout their lifetimes; similarly, cohorts that did not will tend to be lifelong nonvoters. “Turnout change is constrained by the fact that, between any pair of elections, most people are set in their ways and will not respond to changes in the character of those elections. Only over a period long enough for generational replacement to occur can turnout vary substantially.”81 He added, “In some countries (notably the United States) the lowering of the voting age is almost the only thing that caused turnout decline since the 1960s.”82 If turnout declines (or rises) are a function of age habituation, then it is difficult to see how they are related to disaffection
TABLE 3.1 Turnout Rates in US Elections, 1996–2008
Year
Presidential Elections
Off-Year Elections
2008
62.3
–
2006
–
41.3
2004
60.3
–
2002
–
39.5
2000
55.3
–
1998
–
39.4
1996
51.7
–
Source: http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm (Web site of Dr. Michael P. McDonald, George Mason University). Note: Table is based on voter eligible population turnout rate (total ballots cast), not simply the voting-age population.
60
When Political Parties Die
from the party system by the electorate as a whole. Franklin’s findings therefore challenge a major assumption upon which the WattenbergDalton dealignment thesis rests. There are also circumstances in which Ladd’s concept of philosophical realignment may tend to reduce dealignment. In North America, at least, party ideological differences are not blurring. Ideologically conservative voters, for instance, may initially vote for particular conservative candidates regardless of party, but ideological polarization of the parties sooner or later may lead those voters to conclude that they are finding more and more attractive candidates in the Republican Party (in the United States) or the CPC in Canada. Progressives may have the same experience with America’s Democrats or Canada’s Liberals or New Democrats. As Jeffrey Stonecash has observed, such ideological voters might drift back to greater party loyalty, with fewer independent voters and, in the United States, more straight-party voting.83 Stonecash did not discuss party systems outside the United States, but it should be noted that where political parties and coalitions are polarizing ideologically—as they have in the United States, France, and Italy, and may have begun to in Canada—their voter bases may stabilize and strengthen, implying the possibility of future disalignments and consequent realignments.84 It should also be noted that there are circumstances in which realignment and dealignment can coexist—a pattern identified in 1984 by Dalton and colleagues—especially in federal systems.85 Realignment can occur at one level of office, or region, even as candidate-centered voting takes place at another level or region. Examples have occurred in Germany, Canada, and the United States, particularly where states or provinces are experiencing population growth or other demographic changes that can affect voting patterns. The key point here is that dealignment is no longer the driver of voting behavior in the United States and probably not in other democracies— if indeed it ever was. The next question, then, is realignment such a driver, and the answer may be: Perhaps in a different form than we have regarded it traditionally. This background enables us now to move on to consideration of new theoretical perspectives on disalignment and realignment. NOTES 1. V. O. Key Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics 17 (February 1955); Key, “Secular Realignment and the Party System,” Journal of Politics 21 (May 1959). 2. Key, “Secular Realignment,” 204.
Realignment and Dealignment
61
3. Key, “Secular Realignment,” 198. 4. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970), 6. 5. Specifically, the elections of 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932. 6. Burnham, Critical Elections, 10. 7. Ibid., 181. 8. Burnham, “Revitalization and Decay: Looking toward the Third Century of American Electoral Politics,” Journal of Politics 38, no. 3 (August 1976), 149. 9. Burnham, Critical Elections, 10. 10. Ibid, 175. 11. Walter Dean Burnham, “Critical Realignment: Dead or Alive?” in The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 117, 125–127. 12. Martin P. Wattenberg, The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 31. 13. The fondness of social scientists for biological metaphors dates at least as far back as the 19th Century, when Karl Marx borrowed the concept of evolution from Charles Darwin and sociologists developed the theory of social Darwinism. 14. Burnham, “Critical Realignment: Dead or Alive?,” 109. 15. Walter Dean Burnham, “Realignment Lives: The 1994 Earthquake and Its Implications,” in The Clinton Presidency: First Appraisals, ed. Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman (New York: Chatham House Publications, 1996). 16. Burnham, “Revitalization and Decay,” 149. 17. Walter Dean Burnham, “Constitutional Moments and Punctuated Equilibria: A Political Scientist Confronts Bruce Ackerman’s We the People,” Yale Law Journal 108, no. 8 ( June 1999), 2258. 18. Ibid., 2273. 19. Walter Dean Burnham, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” The Nation, April 17, 2000, 4. 20. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960), chap. 5. 21. James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1983), 35. 22. Ibid., 37. 23. Ibid., 41. 24. Joel H. Silbey, “Beyond Realignment and Realignment Theory: American Political Eras, 1789–1989,” in The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Silbey’s proposition is questionable, considering the intense challenges that followed the election of 1824 and the hard-fought campaigns of 1828–1836. 25. Ibid., 18. 26. Everett Carll Ladd, “Like Waiting for Godot: The Uselessness of Realignment
62
27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34.
35. 36. 37. 38. 39.
40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.
46.
47.
When Political Parties Die for Understanding Change in Contemporary American Politics,” in Shafer, ed., The End of Realignment?, chap. 2. David R. Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Ibid., 29. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 165. Ibid. Arthur Paulson, Electoral Realignment and the Outlook for American Democracy (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England and Northeastern University Press, 2007), 11. Ibid., 19. Harold F. Bass Jr., “Background to Debate: A Reader’s Guide and Bibliography,” in The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). John Kenneth White, Still Seeing Red: How the Cold War Shapes the New American Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 325. Everett Carll Ladd, “1996 Vote: The ‘No Majority’ Realignment Continues,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 2; emphasis in original. Burnham, “Realignment Lives,” 387. Ladd, “1996 Vote,” 17–21. In the sense that the 1950 report of the American Political Science Association’s Committee on Political Parties used the term to advocate, inter alia, increased public accountability. See Chapter 10 for a more detailed discussion of this report. Paulson, Electoral Realignment and the Outlook for American Democracy, 147. Ibid., 159. John A. Aldrich, “Political Parties in a Critical Era,” American Politics Quarterly 27, no. 1 ( January 1999), 9. Ibid., 28. Jeff rey M. Stonecash, Political Parties Matter: Realignment and the Return of Partisan Voting (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006), 150, n. 4. Ibid., x. Stonecash’s interpretation appears to antedate Paulson’s. In actuality, Paulson’s similar ideas first appeared in the 2000 edition of his book under a different title. His 2007 volume is an updated edition. The rebuttal of Mayhew was added in the later work. Ibid., 130. This interpretation of the etiology of secular realignment contrasts with that of Dalton and his collaborators, who believed that the “. . . pace of realignment (secular/critical) apparently depends on the nature of the realigning issue conflicts and the response of political elites.” Russell J. Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan, and Paul Allen Beck, eds., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 13. Stonecash, Political Parties Matter, 108.
Realignment and Dealignment 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.
56. 57. 58.
59. 60. 61. 62. 63.
64.
65. 66.
63
Wattenberg, Candidate-Centered Politics, 32. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 158; 36–39. Ibid., 38. Martin P. Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1996 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 111. Ibid., 49. Byron E. Shafer, “The Notion of an Electoral Order,” in The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), chap. 3. Except for a period in 2001–2002, when the Senate had a narrow Democratic majority. Presidential candidates through 2004 also accepted public funding. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, slip opinion, January 21, 2010. The Court hedged the decision somewhat. For example, spending must be publicly disclosed and donors may not coordinate their contributions with the candidates who benefit. Nonetheless, the decision has incensed leading Democrats who fear that business groups will outspend labor unions and other left-leaning interest groups. Dalton, Flanagan, and Beck, eds., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies, 8; emphasis in original. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 21–22, 454 –455. Paul Allen Beck, “The Dealignment Era in America,” in Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment?, ed. Russell J. Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan, and Paul Allen Beck (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 8. Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds., Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002). The member states of the OECD are the advanced economies. Paul Webb, David Farrell, and Ian Holliday, eds., Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002). Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans, 47. The five countries were Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. The measures may be questioned, at least in the cases of Canada and Germany. Canadian data assessed “split federal /provincial partisanship,” but it is difficult to see how data can be compared when federal and provincial elections do not occur at the same times and the party systems are different. Data for Germany compared “1st and 2nd vote.” However, while the major German parties encourage their partisans to support their respective individual Bundestag candidates in the first vote, they frequently urge second-vote support for minor-party allies
64
67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.
78. 79. 80.
81. 82. 83. 84.
85.
When Political Parties Die to assure that these smaller parties meet the five-percent threshold for parliamentary seats. Ibid., 284. Webb, Farrell, and Holliday, Political Parties, 458. Wattenberg, Decline of American Political Parties, 123–124. Dalton and Wattenberg, eds., Parties without Partisans, 11. Peter M. Siavelis, “Party and Social Structure,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: Sage, 2006), 363. Dalton and Wattenberg, eds., Parties without Partisans, chap. 2. Peter Mair, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Fritz Plasser, eds. Political Parties and Electoral Change: Party Responses to Electoral Markets (London: Sage, 2004), 265. Dalton and Wattenberg, eds., Parties without Partisans, 11. Mair, Müller, and Plasser, Political Parties and Electoral Change, 8. Kay Lawson, and Peter Merkl, eds., When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). See for instance Kurt Richard Luther and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, eds., Political Parties in the New Europe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mair, Müller, and Plasser, Political Parties and Electoral Change; Webb, Farrell, and Holliday, Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies. John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Political Parties in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Sources for 1972, 1984, and 2000: Stonecash, Political Parties Matter, Table 5.1, 70. For 2004: Wall Street Journal, Dec. 17–18, 2005, A9. Mark N. Franklin, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies since 1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 204. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 214, n. 7. Stonecash, Political Parties Matter, 131. This is hardly a universal trend, however, particularly as elections approach. Center-right parties in Britain and Germany, for example, moderated their stands on issues and ideology to blur differences with the principal centerleft party. In some German state elections, the center-left SPD sought to blur differences with a far-left splinter party. Catch-all parties will always consider the search for votes to be more important than ideological purity. Dalton, Flanagan, and Beck, eds., Electoral Change, 474 –475.
Chapter 4
Disalignment and Realignment: A New Theoretical Approach The richness of the body of literature on realignment (and dealignment) does not explain why certain political parties are occasionally displaced from major-party status, the realigning consequences of such displacements, or the overall consequences for both the stricken party and the party system. Neither do political science analyses explain why disalignments occur, or that they are the direct causes of a category of realignments. (A second category, unrelated to disalignments, appears to be the product of an ideological shift among a significant and instrumental segment of the electorate.) Political scientists use the word “institution” to mean more than a concrete organization. It also means patterns, customs, rules (written and unwritten), traditions, and other socially accepted forms of conduct on which participants rely. “Path dependence” is one of the tools students of politics have developed to analyze the impact of institutional change over time. In the words of James Mahoney, “The concept of path dependence is built around the idea that crucial choice points may establish certain directions of change and foreclose others in a way that shapes development over long periods of time.”1 Disalignment is one such critical choice point or juncture, closing off old institutional pathways and developing new ones. This is an important difference between disalignments and realignments. Disalignment particularly removes the possibility that the former major party can any longer be a competitor to form a government and establishes a new historical path toward possible future power down which the displacing party can proceed.
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When Political Parties Die
Realignments, too, produce major power shifts within a party system, but they are relatively brief historically—10 years is typical, 20 rather long. Although realignments also create new pathways, they are conclusive only in the short and medium term; sooner or later, the defeated party can still look forward to an eventual return to power. This is because of the important distinction between the voters who constitute a party’s base and the medial voters who frequently decide which party will prevail in a given election. Theories of disalignment and realignment advanced here hinge closely on this distinction between party base voters and medial voters. Disalignment primarily represents an adverse electoral decision by the party’s base, particularly its core. Realignment primarily represents an electoral decision by medial voters. This chapter explains these terms and concepts in more detail. It also proposes new theories of disalignment and realignment and then suggests a possible typology of elections based on those theories. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the case studies and the hypotheses to be tested against them. A DIFFERENT LENS It is possible that a new perspective may illuminate the question of durable shifts in voting behavior, at least in polities with plurality electoral systems. The theory of disalignment proposed here may also provide a bridge to a new theory of realignment applicable in countries with FPP electoral systems. Let’s therefore proceed with a discussion of disalignment before returning to a possible new way of regarding realignment. This analysis is predicated on a different perspective of electorates than has generally been held in the literature of realignment. Key, Burnham, Sundquist, and most other writers whose approaches to realignment are summarized in the preceding chapters view national electorates as an aggregate composite of a large number of socioeconomic interests. This perspective is perfectly valid for numerous electoral analyses, but it fails as an explanation for realignment. Its defenders are forced to come up with new explanations of why the theory no longer predicts future realignments or is unable in other respects to function as they believe it should. Its critics grow weary of “waiting for Godot” and have stopped believing he will ever reappear. If we look at the political characteristics of electorates through a somewhat different set of lenses, we can gain a new perspective of realignment, and also one that helps view disalignment. We need not reject the socioeconomic micro complex of voter characteristics per se, but simply adopt
Disalignment and Realignment
67
FIGURE 4.1 The Composition of an Electorate in a Two-Party System Party X Core Base
Peripheral Base
Party Y Medial Voters
Peripheral Base
Core Base
a different, macro point of view. In other words, the focus here is not on the peculiar and particular characteristics of voters, but on the way they actually vote. In this new perspective, we see the electorate as a spectrum in which the voters with the most intense party loyalties form the polar positions, with the less attached and relatively unattached citizens closer to the midpoints. Figure 4.1 illustrates the placement of these voter groups in a two-party system. (The model would also work for a multiparty system, but an additional dimension would be required to show each added party.) The core base of each party is shown at the far left and far right (the terms are used here spatially, not ideologically) at any point in time. “Strong partisans” is an approximate synonym often used in political science literature. The core bases comprise voters who, whether for affective reasons or calculated ones, have a pronounced preference for the candidates of one political party or the other. They identify with that party and are strongly inclined to vote for its candidates in election after election, with little regard for particular personalities or issue positions. What personal or issue choices they may have are generally resolved in nominating contests—primary elections, local caucuses or conventions, and the like. The party’s nominee then becomes the personal choice of these base voters. If for some reason they are unusually antagonistic toward that nominee, they may choose not to vote, or at least not vote for that office—but to vote for a candidate of another party, particularly one with a different ideology, would be unthinkable. Core base voters are normally no more likely to cast a ballot for the opposing party’s candidate than they are to change their religion. Of course, all base voters do not share the same depth of party commitment. Some may stray occasionally to a candidate of the opposing party, perhaps because of a personal relationship, a favored position on an issue of singular importance to the voter, or some other reason. These voters are termed here the peripheral base and are approximately synonymous with “weak partisans.” In Figure 4.1, the peripheral base of each party is shown closer to the middle area than is the core base. To repeat our metaphor, peripheral-base voters are people who will visit a different
68
When Political Parties Die
church once in a while without considering that they have altered their religious affiliation. Those voters with little or no established preference for the candidates of one or the other party occupy the very middle region of the diagram. This segment of the electorate is described in the diagram as medial voters. Metaphorically, they are prepared to visit any church regardless of denomination, because their own affiliation is either nominal or nonexistent. Their voting choices may shift between elections—and, within elections when multiple offices are filled at the same time, they may split their tickets to vote for different party nominees for different offices. They are citizens lacking in party attachments, susceptible to appeals from candidates of any major party in any given election, and absent a fixed record of partisan voting behavior.2 It should be emphasized that this characterization of the electorate deals with voting behavior, not party identification. For many voters, party identification is the same as party choice on the ballot—but not for all. A segment of those who identify nominally with a particular party may in fact seldom vote for that party’s nominees, for a variety of reasons. For example, voters may choose to identify or register with a locally dominant party because that is where contested nominations are most likely to occur, even though they usually vote in the general election for candidates of a competing party. Or, because of family influence or other affective reasons, voters may retain a lingering emotional identification for a party whose candidates they may find themselves actually supporting infrequently in the general election. If such voters live in a locality with party registration, they may believe that social discretion requires identification with a particular party, for whose candidates they will rarely if ever vote. Such voters are not part of a core base; they are medials or, at best, peripherals. The new theories presented below rely on this dichotomy between the semipermanent base of voters each major party possesses, on the one hand, and medial voters on the other. In almost all democracies, it is medial voters who decide the outcome of elections, because no party’s base is sufficiently large to enable it to win on its own. CALCULATION OF PARTIES’ BASES AND MEDIAL VOTERS The methodology described here is a way to estimate the size of the bases for major parties, and also of the medial segment of the electorate. The objective is to develop a procedure that could be applied to any party system for any period of time during any political era, whether or not it preceded the development of exit polling and other tools of survey research.
Disalignment and Realignment
69
The following approach appears to be one that should be universally applicable to all democracies following the rise of political parties in the 19th Century. To estimate the approximate size of each party’s base, I examined election results for a period preceding the year that disalignment occurred.3 For this purpose, the core base is equated with the lowest percentage of the total national vote each party received in any election during this period. The total base is equated with the second-lowest percentage. The difference between core and total base is the peripheral base. The assumption is that only the core base voted for the party in the lowest year, and that the peripheral base voted for another party in that year but returned in the second lowest year. The further assumption is that the core base always votes for its party’s candidates, and that the peripheral base usually does, although with some exceptions. For each of the three national party systems analyzed in this book, we derive the medial electorate by subtracting the total bases of the principal parties from 100.0.4 This process, shown below for the Canadian case, illustrates the methodology, which is also utilized for the Whig and British cases. Sources of data in Tables 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 are tables of election results in the case studies (Chapters 5, 6, and 7). TABLE 4.1 Calculation of Party Bases and Medials (Canadian Elections: 1972–1988) A Lowest Percentage (Core Base)
B 2nd-Lowest Percentage (Total Base)
PC
(1980) 32.5
(1972) 34.9
2.4
na
Liberal
(1984) 28.0
(1988) 31.9
3.9
na
NDP
(1974) 15.4
(1979) 17.9
2.5
na
Total
na
84.7
na
15.3
Party*
C D Peripheral Medials, Base & Others (col. B–col. A) (100.0-col. B total)
*Parties: PC = Progressive Conservative; NDP = New Democratic Party
Note that the number for the medial electorate (col. D) also includes vote shares for minor parties. In the Canadian case, the only such party of consequence during this period was the rightist Social Credit Party, which won 7.6 percent in 1972, 5.0 percent in 1974, and 4.6 percent in 1979, and then disappeared.
70
When Political Parties Die
TABLE 4.2 Calculation of Party Bases and Medials (US Elections: 1836–1848) A Core Base
B Peripheral Base
C Total Base
D Medials & Others
Whigs
(1848) 47.3
0.8
(1844) 48.1
na
Democrats
(1848) 42.5
4.3
(1840) 46.8
na
na
na
94.9
5.1
Totals
Several minor parties, largely abolitionist, rose and fell during the Whig era. The only one of significant size was the Free Soil Party, which won 10.1 percent in 1848, approximately equal to the sum of the medial vote plus the two major parties’ peripheral bases. TABLE 4.3 Calculation of Party Bases and Medials (British Elections: 1895–December 1910)
Liberal Conservative/ Unionist
A Core Base
B Peripheral Base
C Total Base
D Medials & others
(1/1910) 43.4
0.7
(12/1910) 44.2
na
(1906) 42.5
3.2
(12/1910) 46.6
na
Labour (mean)
–
–
4.1
Totals
na
na
94.9
58.1
Although the Labour Party’s percentages of the national vote were in single digits during the elections of 1895 to 1910, its vote shares grew steadily with each successive election. Because it would therefore be misleading to select its lowest year, I have averaged its shares of the vote for this period to estimate the size of its total base and have not attempted to segment the base between its core and peripheral components. The Irish Nationalists won significant numbers of parliamentary seats during this period with small shares of the national vote, due to the geographic concentration of their support. (There were no elections in Britain between 1910 and 1918.)
Disalignment and Realignment
71
It is interesting that the medial vote and the aggregate of party bases for the American Whig period are identical to Britain’s during the two decades preceding World War I. However, Canada’s medial vote over the period of the 1970s and 1980s is more than triple that of either one. This may reflect the typically high volatility of the Canadian electorate. TABLE 4.4 Disalignment Drop-Offs from Party Bases Whigs (US)
Liberals (UK)
PC (Canada)
(1856) 21.5
(1924) 17.8
(1993) 16.0
Core Base Drop-off b
25.8
25.7
16.5
Total Base Drop-off b
26.6
26.4
18.9
Drop-off from Preceding Electionc
22.4
11.9
27.0
Disalignment Remnanta
Notes: (a) This is the percentage of the vote won by the disaligned party in the election shown. (b) The drop-off (shown in percentage points) is the difference between the remnant and the core base and total base, respectively. (c) This is the drop-off in the party’s share of the vote from the immediately preceding election (Whigs, 1852; Liberals, 1923; PC, 1988) to the disalignment remnant.
Table 4.4 shows the effects of the disalignment. Each disaligned party lost between 55 and 60 percent of its total base. Even in the face of electoral disaster, a substantial minority of the base remained loyal in each instance, but this remnant was too small to permit the party’s survival as a major competitor for power. It seems likely that a large share of the medial electorate also voted for another party in the disaligning election. In the case of the Progressive Conservatives particularly, the magnitude of the decline from the most recent preceding election indicates that nearly all medial voters abandoned the party in 1993. A THEORY OF DISALIGNMENT A disalignment occurs when a substantial portion of a party’s voter base abandons that party and casts its ballots for another. A more formal statement of the theory of disalignment is this: Statement of Disalignment Theory: Party disalignment occurs when a party’s core-base supporters permanently cease voting for that party’s
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When Political Parties Die candidates, due to divergence between those voters and that party’s leaders on a major cleavage issue of overriding economic or social importance affecting the party base’s conception of national identity. An ideologically compatible minor party must exist to receive the votes of these disaffected supporters. The disaligned party is either extinguished or reduced to minorparty status, resulting in a secular realignment during which the successor party entrenches itself at national and subnational levels where the structure of the party system so permits.
Let’s break down this theory and examine the elements of disalignment. • Failures by party elites on one or more paramount socioeconomic issues resulting in a sharp divergence between the values or ideology of the party’s base electorate on questions affecting national identity and the positions or actions of the party leaders. Leadership misjudgment, and /or substantial corruption may be relevant factors. • A decision by these base voters to abandon their long-held preference for that party and to vote for the candidates of another party. That new choice will be either a new party or one that previously was a minor party—or possibly more than one such party. The successor party will be one that is ideologically compatible with the disaligned party, or at least not ideologically antagonistic to it. • A consequent realignment that occurs over a period of several elections, in which the party system adjusts to the collapse of a former major component and to the rise of a new major party. • A period of entrenchment during which the successor party consolidates its position both nationally and subnationally, where the structure of the party system allows this process to take place.
All these elements were present in the three cases examined in the following chapters. They were also associated with the collapse of the Italian parties—except that that took place in advance of an election rather than as the direct result of one. The ideological or issue-related underpinnings of disalignment constitute its triggering mechanism. If an issue is sufficiently salient, the parties’ bases will have high expectations that their party of preference (operationally meaning the party leadership) will advance their interests and expectations. If the issue preference is sufficiently intense, leaders who fail to meet those expectations run a risk of internal dissension within the base. Wholesale abandonment of the party by base voters is the process we call disalignment. Whenever these once habitually committed voters have taken the step of divorcing themselves from the party to seek another political
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vehicle to advance their preferences and interests, it has proven irrevocable; attempts to resuscitate the former major party’s core base have always failed. These disaligning voters do not cross the line of partisan cleavage to cast ballots for their old party’s principal competitors. Instead, they vote for some new or previously minor party that they perceive may represent their traditional values or ideology: Whigs at first left for the smaller Know Nothings and then for the new Republican Party. Working-class Liberal voters shifted support to Labour, a minor party whose formation and growth the national Liberal leadership had actually aided and abetted. Progressive Conservatives in Canada’s western provinces departed for the Reform Party, created a few years earlier by disaffected Tories, while Quebec nationalists defected from the PC to the Bloc Québecois, a brand-new party of frustrated separatists. The disintegration of what had been stalwarts of the party system put strains on each of those systems that took some years to settle out. The eventual result of these periods of realignment was a new, stable party system; however, that was far from an immediate consequence—and in the Canadian case one may still not have developed. The American and British successor parties, either during or after these periods of realignment, then began a top-down process of entrenchment in which they consolidated their gains at the national level and extended them to subnational tiers—state and local governments in the United States, local ones in the Britain. (See Chapter 7 for an analysis of why Canadian federalism restricts this development.) DISALIGNMENT AND ELECTOR AL SYSTEMS There appears to be a connection between electoral systems and the potential for disalignment. Each of the three identified disalignments has occurred in FPP electoral systems with single-member districts; they may therefore represent an application of “Duverger’s Law.” Historically, FPP systems have tended to be dominated by two major parties, as the United States and Britain have been and as Canada largely was until 1993, becoming a multiparty system thereafter. FPP is a winner-take-all system and the impact of even a moderate loss of votes more or less evenly spread across districts can be magnified into disproportionate losses of legislative seats (as it also can in America’s Electoral College). Disalignment is less likely in proportional representation electoral systems because PR tends to preserve a role for parties if they meet a designated vote threshold. PR systems produce multiparty polities. Frequently,
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When Political Parties Die
parties must achieve some minimum percentage of the vote to qualify for parliamentary seats, but even a major party that has suffered a severe loss of votes is still likely to retain a vote share sufficient to earn a modest percentage of seats. Thus, even a massively defeated party in such a PR system will preserve a degree of legislative representation that roughly approximates its reduced share of the vote, although it may cease for a time to be a major party. The fact that it remains in the parliament may or may not enable it to make a later come-back. A similar devastating loss in an FPP electoral system, on the other hand, can well reduce a major party with the same share of the vote to below the level at which it can survive, because the number of seats it wins is so much smaller. For instance, the Canadian PC Party in 1993 would have won 47 seats in a “pure” PR system rather than the scant two the country’s FPP system allowed it. The importance of sustaining the loyalty of the party base is therefore disproportionately higher in FPP systems. The wonder is not so much that disalignments occur in FPP polities, but that there have been so few of them. The reason, presumably, is that there are so many other ways short of disalignment in which unhappy base voters can express their displeasure. These include contested nominations, the rise of rival contenders for party leadership, intraparty battles over programs and platforms, reductions in the number of party workers, depletions in financial contributions from disgruntled members or contributors, lower levels of support from allied interest groups, defections of disaffected factions to form new parties, and decisions by sizable numbers of base voters to withhold their votes and stay home on election day. The SPD— Germany’s Social Democratic Party—provides an example. The country’s Greens and its Party of the Left are minor parties produced at least in part by defections from the SPD. Numerous other instances of such manifestations of intraparty restiveness can be found in democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. But it is only when disaffection within the base reaches a critical mass that disalignment results. The strength and force of ideological cleavage may well be a further deterrent to disalignments in multiparty systems. Parties in some of these countries may be less durable than the left–right cleavage is. Even modified by postmaterialist value changes, the left–right cleavage seems to be near-permanent and of high salience in many polities. Individual parties on either side of this divide may merge more or less freely with one another or into a major party of approximately similar philosophy—but rarely with those across the ideological rift. With some national differences, the parties of the left may exhibit varying degrees of fluidity or stability, but they almost never traverse the gulf separating them from parties of the right,
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75
and vice versa.5 In this sense, it is the ideological cleavage that represents a permanent two-party system. The old class cleavage has been combined with new postmaterialist “libertarian-authoritarian” issues and divisions to transform “the competitive space for political parties and the nature of what have been traditionally understood as ‘left’ and ‘right’ politics,” wrote Peter Siavelis. He added, “While social change, value change, and declining partisan attachments certainly have affected party competition in Western democracies, voters frequently continue to identify with the same ‘political family’ of parties.”6 In this sense, the left–right cleavage in multiparty systems remains fixed, while the extent of fluidity among parties within each pole deters possible disalignments. The right in France, the left in Germany, and the entire spectrum of Italian politics are all examples. Thus, both ideological cleavages and the effects of PR in multiparty systems appear to act as deterrents to the destructive impacts of disalignment. Given the power of an issue as strong as corruption was in Italy in the early 1990s, a process that approximates disalignment is not impossible in multiparty systems, but it seems significantly less likely than in FPP electoral systems with two dominant parties. A NEW THEORY OF REALIGNMENT Realignments are an inevitable consequence of disalignment for the reasons stated above. Realignments, however, are found even when no disalignment has taken place. Figure 4.1, at the beginning of this chapter, provides an important clue to the mechanism by which such realignments occur. If we stipulate that each major party has a base comprising loyal core voters and only slightly less steadfast voters in its peripheral base, then the remainder of the electorate can be characterized as medial voters. Because most of the movement between and among parties that occurs from election to election takes place in the medial segment of the electorate, and particularly so where these movements involve dramatic changes, it must be primarily medial voters who are the engine that drives realignments. Medials do not usually vote monolithically. In any given normal election in an FPP, two-party system, a majority of medials will cast ballots for Party X, generally sufficient to allow it to win, while there will always be a minority of some size that votes for Party Y. The modest medial majority for a Party X can be expected to produce a disproportionately large majority of legislative seats for that party, so long as the medial popular vote is geographically diffused more or less evenly, but only a modest one (or none) if medials are concentrated in a particular region. In a multiparty
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When Political Parties Die
system, the medial vote is likely to be quite widely diffused in normal elections, not only geographically (less consequential in a PR system) but also among the typically large number of parties; still, enough will move in one direction to enable a major party or coalition to win. In a disaligning election, however, an issue powerful and divisive enough to impel base voters to leave their traditional party will also move unusually large numbers of medial voters in a new direction. In a nondisaligning election where a powerful national issue leaves the party bases relatively untouched, medial voters may still be heavily driven away from one major party and opt preponderantly for a major competitor. Under both circumstances, the result may be a realignment. Realignments, it is proposed, are driven primarily by medial voters, supplemented perhaps by some segments of a party’s peripheral base that leave their party for a period of time. This new theory of realignment may be framed as follows. Statement of New Realignment Theory: Realignment represents a substantial, durable, and pervasive transfer of support among medial voters to a major party. Realignments occur when a major social or economic upheaval, possibly on a cleavage issue, produces a shift in political and/or ideological attitudes, altering voting behavior among a critical mass of medial voters. Realignments will always happen during or shortly after the occurrence of a disalignment, but realignments may also take place in the absence of disalignments. The realigning shift may occur at a single critical national election, or it may take place over the course of several elections (secular realignment). Realignments are neither cyclical nor predictable. Although not permanent and with possible occasional deviating elections, the consequent new alignment persists for a number of succeeding years, reaching down from national to subnational elections where the structure of the party system permits.
This amended theory differs from the Key-Burnham-Sundquist form in several respects: • The focus on medial voters as the driver of realignments, rather than on reshaped coalitions of support among socioeconomic segments of the electorate. • The insertion of disalignment as one cause of a realignment, while recognizing that realignments may also occur in other circumstances. • The break between realignments and a single critical election, recognizing (as Sundquist does) that the process may stretch over several elections. • The absence of a recurring pattern of realignments. • The element of entrenchment.
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77
The following discussion focuses on these differences, accepting the general consensus of the various scholars of traditional realignment theory on other points. The justification for the concept of the medial electorate as the driver of realignments has already been expressed. It should be added that this restatement of realignment theory omits reference to demographic, economic, and other interest groups that were an integral part of traditional realignment analysis. In emphasizing such subgroups of the electorate, Key, Burnham, and others may have missed the forest for the trees: Analysis of subgroups remains important to understanding any election, but not to the extent of overlooking significant macro movements. What is most significant in a realigning critical election is the shift among medial voters, a point that traditional theorists overlooked. The importance of various segments of the electorate in a realigning election is their contribution to medial vote shifts, not to those of the electorate at large. Micro analysis that ignores the macro dimension of the medial electorate misses the essential element propelling realignments. The second element, the role of disalignments, in precipitating realignments has been discussed previously. The third point of difference is primarily with Key’s and Burnham’s thesis that critical realignments are initiated at a single election. (Sundquist and Paulson recognized that several elections could be involved.) The realignments of 1896 and 1932 in the United States did indeed occur at single elections, but there have been others that were more prolonged. The realignment that followed the collapse of the Whigs stretched from 1854 until 1860, when the third-party system was installed. During the period from 1918 to 1924, Britain underwent a realignment coincident with the Liberal Party’s disalignment, but extending for a number of additional years. It can be argued that the disalignment of the PC in Canada produced a transition toward a new realignment that is still in process as Canada awaits the formation of a new, stable party system. If Paulson is correct, then a realignment in the United States that began in 1964 was not completed until 1972, although he posits 1968 as a critical election. Stonecash’s secular realignment is by definition an extended multiyear process. The fourth element of the new theory disputes the cyclicality and predictability of realignments. The periodicity of American realignments was perhaps the most controversial element of Burnham’s theory, leading him to expect future recurrences and precipitating the “waiting-for-Godot” challenges. Sundquist saw only one of his five variables as cyclical—the weakening of postrealignment party attachments and the susceptibility of a new generation of voters to making a sea change in politics. Nevertheless,
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When Political Parties Die
he described realignments themselves as “essentially accidental,” adding flatly, “There is nothing inevitable about them,”7 a point on which Paulson agreed. The consensus among most scholars today is largely with Sundquist’s judgment on this and against Burnham’s. The sweep and force of any national socioeconomic crises and issues determine the timing of realignments, and these may arise at any time. The fifth point of difference with traditional realignment theory is the addition of the concept of entrenchment. Entrenchment is a quality of realignments that has received only glancing attention in the literature. It relates to the comprehensiveness and vertical pervasiveness of the pronounced shift in party loyalties. This is true of realignments that are associated with disalignments as well as those that are not. To be a true party realignment and not merely a succession of victories at the presidential or parliamentary levels, the initiation of a realignment must be followed by a period of entrenchment in which the party solidifies its top-of-the-ticket gains and expands on them at lower levels. US realignments have tended to be top-down processes in which success at the presidential level has been accompanied and followed (or sometimes preceded) by victories at the congressional, state, and often local levels for the duration of the new alignment. This pattern characterized the 1860, 1896, and 1932 realignments. It has also been a characteristic of recent regional realignments in the United States—in the South and the Northeast. Entrenchment is a key measure in any polity by which to assess whether a sweeping victory is truly a realignment. Indeed, the subnational consolidation of party gains may well be a key test of a realigning election anywhere. The exception, of course, is a party system such as Canada’s, where there is not a one-to-one replication of the national party system at subnational levels. The literature on realignment has dealt preponderantly with American politics. Yet, if this new theory of realignment has validity, it should also apply to realignments in other countries, if any can be found. There are, in fact, several candidates that can be identified in Western parliamentary democracies. The following list is illustrative. The most dramatic instance was the realignment in Italy that resulted from the 1993 implosion of the party system, as discussed in Chapter 8. The old parties were swept away. A plethora of new ones formed, on one side or the other of the left–right cleavage—but, it should be noted, not across it. Two realignments that appear to meet the amended criteria occurred in Great Britain. The first was in 1983, when Margaret Thatcher’s ideological appeal against the public abuses of union power turned a narrow
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79
Conservative majority into a large one. Tory rule persisted for 14 more years, outlasting even Thatcher’s own long tenure. The second realignment occurred at the end of that period, in 1997, when New Labour ousted the Conservatives and won a massive parliamentary majority. This Labour government remained in power until 2010. There appear to have been at least one and perhaps two realigning periods in Canada in recent decades, both with Liberal governments. The first began in 1968 with the election of Pierre Trudeau and persisted until 1984, interrupted only briefly by a Progressive Conservative interregnum. It is still unclear, given the Liberals’ low vote shares and lack of nationwide breadth in the four elections from 1993 to 2004, whether a second realignment happened in 1993 and endured until the narrow victories of the new Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) in 2006 and 2008. The closeness of these recent elections means we do not yet know if the Canadian party system is still in transition or is beginning to stabilize. The 1983 West German realignment began with the switch of the Free Democrats, a hinge party, from alliance with the Socialists to coalition with the center-right Christian Democrats, led by Helmut Kohl. Kohl won the ensuing election and remained in power, through German reunification, until defeated by the Socialists in 1998. France has experienced several realignments since the current Fifth Republic was founded in 1958 under President Charles de Gaulle. The country has been governed by the center-right for all but 14 years. After a two-term Socialist regime (1981–1995), the Gaullists won the 1995 presidential election and the two that followed it. (Separate parliamentary elections have not always produced similar results, although they are now more likely to under legal changes that took effect in 2002.) A T YPOLOGY OF ELECTIONS V. O. Key Jr. constructed a typology of elections based on the work of the authors of The American Voter, a classic study of party identification.8 Key’s structure categorized elections based on a pattern of voters’ party loyalties and provides a system on which we can build here. He delineated four classes of elections: 1. Maintaining elections—those that “maintain the power of the ‘normal’ majority” during the then-current political alignment. 2. Deviating elections—elections that depart from the normal pattern without fundamentally altering it. “[S]ome event, condition, or candidate has the effect of displacing the normal majority from power,” but
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When Political Parties Die this displacement is only temporary. The Republican victories of 1952 and 1956 in the United States during a period of Democratic dominance, and the PC’s 1979 success in Canada, would be considered deviating elections. 3. Reinstating elections—the reassertion of the operative alignment after a period of deviations. The elections of 1960 in the United States, when the Democratic Party returned to power, and 1980 in Canada, when the Liberals did, were reinstating elections. 4. Realigning elections—those in which “a marked and enduring shift occurs in the pattern of party identification with the electorate. The minority becomes the ‘normal’ majority.”9
Our new theories of disalignment and realignment allow us to amend and expand on Key’s structure in the following ways: While retaining his maintaining, deviating, and reinstating categories, we would amend his description of realigning elections to observe that they are ones in which a substantial percentage of medial voters casts ballots for the winning party. There is a pronounced major shift in medial voters’ attitudes that results in a change in voting behavior for a number of succeeding elections. The core base of the contending parties is not substantially affected, however, although there may be some defections from the peripheral base. Following Key’s own, earlier work, our new typology also recognizes two subclasses of realigning elections—those that are sudden and those that are secular. We suggest here two new classes of elections in addition to Key’s four: 5. Disaligning elections—elections that are characteristically marked by a shattering of the affected party’s core and peripheral voter base. As a result, the party loses its ability to mobilize its traditional voters, volunteer workers, and financial contributors, and is permanently reduced to minor-party status or is even destroyed. (There is probably also a substantial loss of medial voters, but that is an aggravating factor rather than a prime cause.) The disaligned party’s place as a major party is then taken by either a preexisting minor party or a new one. Like realignments, disalignments may be either sudden or develop over time. Two of the cases analyzed in the following chapters represent sudden disalignments in which the process of disalignment occurred at a single election. The third case represents a secular disalignment that developed over the course of several elections. Both subtypes result in a secular realignment. 6. Transitional elections—those that may occur between realignments. One example is the elections that take place while a secular realignment is underway, including the periods immediately following party
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disalignments. However, there are also times in which an old alignment is dissipating but a new one has not yet materialized. In the United States, the presidential elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988 could be considered transitional, pending the arrival of the 1994 realignment. Since a new alignment has apparently not yet developed in Canada, the elections from 1997 to date may be seen as transitional.10
Some elections can be classified immediately, others only after the passage of time. Sudden disalignments are immediately recognizable; secular ones, because of the relatively gradual nature of the changes, may be discerned only in hindsight. Similarly, realignments, both sudden and secular, cannot be identified until several subsequent elections have passed and an opportunity to discern the new electoral patterns they produce has emerged. Transitional elections also are not identifiable as such until the new realignments toward which they point have been identified. The ability to recognize maintaining, deviating, and reinstating elections is dependent in the same way on recognition of the dominant political alignment of which they are part. Historical analysis is therefore an essential instrument in the classification of elections. Table 4.5 shows the author’s classification of various elections pertinent to the three cases. This amended typology expands on Key’s classification system to reflect our new theories, while retaining the merits Key ascribed to his original categorization: “This system of pigeonholes has its utility in that it focuses attention on the relation of particular elections to the underlying and enduring pattern of partisan loyalties”11—and, we may add, to the changes that disrupt them. INTRODUCTION TO THE CASES The first disaligning election occurred in the United States in 1854. The Whig Party was badly fragmented over the slavery issue, but its disintegration was primarily the product of a split between party leadership and the voter base on ethnocultural issues. The party’s core voters, strongly antiCatholic and anti-immigrant, were antagonized by the inept and unsuccessful efforts of the Whigs’ 1852 presidential campaign to reach out to traditionally Democratic immigrant voters. By 1854, the Whig base had deserted the party, briefly for the Know Nothings, and then for the new Republican Party. An attempt to resuscitate the Whig Party in 1856 failed badly, and it went out of existence. The other example of the sudden subtype was the 1993 Canadian general election, in which the governing party, the PC, lost all but two seats
TABLE 4.5 Classification of Selected Elections (United States, Great Britain, and Canada) Dominant Alignment United States
Maintaining
Deviating
Reinstating
1836–1838
”
1840
”
1842a
”
x
1844a
”
x
1846
”
1848
”
1850–1852
”
1854 1856–1858 1860 1862–1864 United Kingdom
Realigning
Disaligning
Transitional
Democrat x x
x x x
None
x
”
x
Republican ”
x x
Liberal
1900
”
1906
”
1910, January
”
x x x
1910, December
”
1918–1924
None
1929–1935
None
Canada 1980 1984–1988
x x x
Liberal ” None
1993
”
1997–2006 (4 elections)b
”
x x x x
Notes: (a) Both 1842 and 1844 may be considered reinstating elections, since the House returned to Democratic control in the earlier year and a Democrat won back the presidency in the later one. (b) The classification of Canadian elections since 1997 is tentative, pending determination of a new dominant party alignment.
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in Parliament, primarily over its handling of the Quebec issue but also because of other leadership failures. Two new parties entered Parliament for the first time—the conservative Reform Party, based in the western provinces, and the Bloc Québecois (based wholly in the province of Quebec), whose numbers enabled them to become the official opposition to the Liberals who won the election. The PC never regained more than a handful of seats and merged in early 2004 with a renamed version of Reform to become the CPC. The CPC was able to form a minority government after the 2006 election and was reelected in 2008. A secular disalignment befell Britain’s Liberal Party over a series of four elections between 1918 and 1924, three of them in the 1922–1924 period. The Liberal government had mishandled several major national crises before and during World War I, involving labor strife, women’s suffrage, the Irish problem, and—critically—the management of the war effort. As a result, a severe wartime split developed between Liberal leaders. British society had undergone considerable changes and stress during the war (including increased urbanization and unionization). At the war’s end, suffrage was substantially expanded for working-class men and for women over 30, who gained voting rights for the first time. Most of the new votes went to the Labour Party, previously a minor party. (Newly enfranchised women tended, however, to vote Conservative.) By 1924, Labour had captured most of the older working-class vote that had previously gone to the Liberals, who were reduced to a mere 40 seats in a Parliament of over 600 members. Never again was the Liberal Party a major factor in British elections. It merged in 1987 with an offshoot of the Labour right wing to form a new party, today’s Liberal Democrats, which receives seats in Parliament disproportionately below its share of the vote. Each of these countries has had different influences that have shaped its political environment. Illustratively, Britain’s population is highly urbanized, occupying a relatively small geographic area; Canada’s is dispersed within a narrow band that spans the continent; and the combined populations of these two countries are less than a third that of the United States. Both Canada and Britain have long-standing religious cleavages: the former between Catholic, francophone Quebec and the country’s Protestant anglophone majority; the latter with strife-torn northern Ireland, whose Protestant and Catholic political parties differ from those in the rest of Britain. Another religious cleavage between adherents to the Anglican Church and a variety of dissenting denominations was a major factor in 19th-Century British politics but was in the process of dissipating by the end of World War I. The religious cleavage in the United States has largely disappeared today (except between Republican-leaning evangelical
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Christians and mainstream Protestants) but was intensely felt during the Whig period when immigrant Catholics were confronted by nativist Protestants. Slavery existed in all three countries, but only in the United States did it threaten national disintegration and lead to civil war. Britain and Canada are governed under the Westminster parliamentary system, which produces a very different kind of political competition than the American presidential model. These are among the differences that have affected each nation’s history and politics, and the stories related in the case studies. Italy has a very different history but the collapse of its party system shares important characteristics with the other cases. The case studies reflect these distinctive elements. In each of the four cases, the disalignment occurred as a result of leadership failures affecting major cleavage issues and national interests (as discussed in some detail in Chapter 9). These produced disaffections among core party voters. In each instance, the disalignment resulted in the party’s displacement by a new or previously minor party that then proceeded (where possible) to entrench itself in subsequent elections. These case studies are analyzed in Chapters 5–8. HYPOTHESES This analysis will test several hypotheses against the cases: 1. Leadership failures and/or significant alterations in party policies on major socioeconomic cleavage issues affecting concepts of national identity that differ from traditional, strongly held, and sufficiently intense attitudes of core party voters cause disalignment. 2. Parties in states that utilize single-member FPP electoral systems are more vulnerable to disalignment than those in multiparty systems using proportional-representation variants. 3. Disalignment produces a permanent and pervasive displacement of a major party by a new or previously minor party that then becomes nationally and subnationally entrenched in subsequent elections where this is structurally possible. 4. Disalignments invariably result in realignments, but realignments may occur even in the absence of disalignments.
NOTES 1. James Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 264.
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2. Various other terms have been used to describe this segment of the electorate, including “independents,” “swing voters,” “unattached voters,” and the like. Each of these descriptions has taken on connotations that are obviated by the more neutral phrase, “medial voters.” 3. Specifically, back to the beginning of the American Whig era in 1836 (12 years, 4 elections); to the British election of 1895, the first post-Gladstone election (15 years to 1910, 5 elections); and to the 1972 election when pan-Canadianism was having its greatest effects (19 years, 6 elections). The Canadian elections of 1965 and 1968, years of even lower PC performance, could have been added, but that would have totaled 28 years and included the change of an entire generation in the electorate. 4. Computation of medials may include some citizens who voted in one of the elections included in these calculations but not the other. The formulas for deriving party bases and medials are, necessarily, only approximations. 5. This does not prevent parties of the left and right from joining in coalitions as needed to obtain parliamentary majorities and form governments, but these are seldom more than temporary alliances. Electoral coalitions that cross the left–right cleavage seem quite rare. 6. Peter M. Siavelis, “Party and Social Structure,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: Sage, 2006), 367. 7. James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1983), 46–47. 8. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); V. O. Key Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 5th ed. (New York: Crowell, 1964). 9. Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 536. 10. Admittedly, in the American situation, these three elections could also be viewed as deviational during a time when Democratic dominance was dissipating but had not yet ended. The elections from 1992 to date could be viewed as transitional, since no party has established conclusive national dominance. 11. Key, Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 536.
Chapter 5
The Case of the American Whig Party The American Whig Party arose after the election of 1828 to oppose what its leaders saw as the autocratic consolidation of executive power by President Andrew Jackson. The Whig Party’s rise was meteoric—but, like a meteor, it flamed out quickly, and two decades after its formation it was gone. During those two decades, it won two presidential elections and produced several towering figures of American history—notably Henry Clay and Daniel Webster—but did not long survive their passing from the scene. At the end, the party’s leaders were inundated with problems, at least partly of their own making, with which they were unable to cope. Overwhelmed, the Whigs were briefly displaced by a new party, the Know Nothings, and then by a still newer one that endures as the modern Republican Party. The Whig era was characterized by a severe sectional and socioeconomic cleavage, between the slave states of the South and those of the North where slavery had been abolished. Other social cleavages also came to the fore during the 1840s and 1850s—nativists and Protestants versus immigrants and Catholics. While the sectional issues put severe pressure on the Whigs, it was the nativist, anti-Catholic forces who abandoned the Whig Party after 1852 and caused its disalignment.
ORIGINS AND RISE OF THE WHIGS The very name of the American Whig Party was taken from the eponymous British party that had begun life in 1688 to resist royal despotism and support parliamentary restraints on executive power.1 During the American party’s life, it was sometimes the party of government at the national level and frequently so in many states in both the North and South.2
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Although it had its own ideology and programs, the glue that largely held it together for its entire life was as the alternative to the Democratic Party (or “the Democracy” as it was then often known), the normal party of government. Nationally and in most states, the electorate’s tendency was to vote Democratic unless the Whigs presented strong and cogent reasons for the alternative they offered. Thus, the posture Whigs frequently adopted in campaigns was not so much that they should be elected as that the Democrats should be defeated. This inherently defensive strategy was a liability the Whigs carried throughout the party’s existence. Several new competitive parties arose during the Second Party System. Since they sometimes appeared to offer better reasons and prospects for defeating the Democracy, the Whig Party was often in the position of having to fend off these competitors before it could wage battle with the Democrats. When one such party finally appealed successfully to the Whig voter base on ethnocultural issues, the Whigs could not survive. And yet the Whigs had a loyal and devoted following. Part of this affection stemmed, no doubt, from dedication to the principles the Whig Party espoused, but at least as much had its origins in admiration for Whig leaders, particularly Clay and Webster. Both men failed in their lifelong aspirations to become president, although Clay came close on several occasions; Webster never won nomination, although he struggled for it until the closing months of his life. There was no successor generation of Whig leaders to equal these men—indeed, there were few contemporaries of their caliber—and the party disintegrated not long after their deaths. Clay and Webster represented major political strands that came together to form the Whig Party in the early 1830s. Clay was a Madisonian in that he intensely distrusted concentrations of executive power but, as a leader of the new West, he also believed, like Alexander Hamilton, in the importance of national legislation to promote economic development. Clay won his first election to the House of Representatives in 1810 and, at the age of 33, was immediately chosen speaker. Most of his later career was spent in the Senate, representing Kentucky. Webster’s legal and political career was built in Massachusetts. His early political years and long perspective were as a Federalist. First elected to the House in 1813, Webster became a senator in 1827, serving in that body for the rest of his life except for brief periods (1841–1843 and 1850–1852) when he was secretary of state. Webster’s imposing physical appearance and spellbinding oratory brought him both a national political following and a large and highly lucrative legal practice. The concomitant to the Whigs’ opposition to a powerful central government was their support
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for states’ rights. This did not prevent their strong advocacy for national programs of economic development, especially in the West. THE 1824 ELECTION The story of the Whigs’ formation begins in the presidential election of 1824. Although a large group of men had sought support for the presidency to succeed James Monroe, only four remained in contention by the election—President Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts; the secretary of the treasury, William H. Crawford of Georgia; Clay; and Senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who had gained a national reputation for military leadership during the War of 1812. None of these candidates won a majority of electoral votes, and under the Constitution’s Twelfth Amendment the choice from among the top three candidates fell to the House of Representatives. Jackson had led in the electoral counting with 99 votes; Adams was second with 84 votes; and Crawford lagged with 37. Clay, who had come in fourth in electoral votes, was eliminated from contention, but his leadership of the House at the time gave him substantial influence in the outcome. Clay would not support Crawford, with whom he disagreed on some issues and because of concerns about Crawford’s health. Neither was he inclined toward Jackson, who was a rival for western political leadership and, as a military man, had a reputation for “high temper and unbending will.” Moreover, wrote James Hopkins, Jackson’s candidacy had “put forth no program of government, and his undeniably increasing popularity was based on military exploits and the carefully nurtured legend, born after his entrance into the campaign, of his concern for the common people.”3 Adams, on the other hand, shared many of Clay’s views about economic development and had the intellect and experience to be president, in Clay’s opinion. After a long dinner meeting with Adams, Clay gave him his support, and the House subsequently elected Adams. Although Clay had apparently decided in advance to support Adams, Jackson’s supporters alleged that Clay’s backing had been purchased by a corrupt promise to appoint him secretary of state. (The corruption charge might have been equally leveled at Webster, who had opted for Adams only after learning that he would be appointed minister to England.) There is no evidence that Adams made such a promise to Clay, but the general and his supporters believed that the charge of a “corrupt bargain” to steal the election from Jackson was valid, and they dogged Adams with it for the next four years and Clay for the rest of his career.
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THE 1828 ELECTION Enraged when the news of Clay’s appointment to Adams’ cabinet seemed to confirm his worst suspicions, Jackson used the “corrupt bargain” as his primary issue for the 1828 presidential campaign. It was not just he and his candidacy that had been victimized, Jackson said; it was also the American people, who had given him a plurality of the popular and electoral votes. Robert Remini summarized the Jacksonian view: “[T]he people’s will had been thwarted and . . . chicanery and fraud now ruled in Washington.”4 It was a powerful accusation, and it resonated not only with the public but with political leaders. Vice President John C. Calhoun, the South’s most prominent leader and a once and future senator from South Carolina, promptly abandoned Adams and threw in with Jackson, as did a rising power in New York politics, Martin Van Buren. Remini summed up the consequences: The Jackson-Calhoun-Van Buren coalition eventually became known as the “Democratic” Republican party, or simply the Democratic party, while the Adams-Clay combination was called the “National” Republican party. With respect to party principles—not that they were much discussed in the campaign of 1828—the Democrats tended, when prodded, to restate the doctrines of Jefferson, particularly those emphasizing the rights of the states and the importance of the ordinary citizen. The National Republicans, on the other hand, affirmed the need for a strong central government in advancing the material well-being of the nation. . . . [I]n 1828 there was the beginning of a genuine, nationally organized, two-party system, a system that came of age in the 1830s.5
Webster and the remaining Federalists also supported Adams and the National Republicans. Jackson’s Democrats, particularly Van Buren, pioneered in the use of partisan journalism, fund-raising and party organization down to the local level, political clubs, rallies, parades, and all manner of other campaign hoopla. The National Republicans largely neglected such organizational and promotional techniques (except in the development of their own partisan newspapers), emphasizing programs and principles, particularly the “American System,” long to be associated with Clay. The American System included programs of public works to develop and connect all parts of the country, high tariffs and other means of protecting and aiding domestic manufacturers, and promotion of cultural, educational, and intellectual institutions. Several important aspects of the electoral system in 1828 are worth noting. First was the trend toward direct popular election of presidential
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electors. By the 1828 elections, the legislatures of only Delaware and South Carolina chose electors without benefit of popular participation, and the former abandoned election by the legislature after that year. (South Carolina did not allow popular selection of electors until after the Civil War.) Second, congressional, state, and local elections had not yet been regularized in November of even-numbered years (and would not be until 1881). Rather, each state followed its peculiar calendar, so that a federal, state, or local election was being held somewhere in almost every month of the two-year cycle. This enabled politicians, journalists, and interested citizens to monitor changes in voter opinion on a more-or-less constant basis—the 19th Century’s version of survey research. Third, there was no such thing as an official ballot, prepared by state or local governments. Rather, voter ballots were printed by and for the candidates themselves in 1828, and thereafter by the political parties for the rest of the 19th Century. The importance of local political organizations lay not only in persuading and mobilizing the electorate to support preferred candidates, but also in providing it with the ballots on which to vote for them. One of the consequences of this system was that one needed little more than the names of some candidates and access to a printing press to create a new political party. New parties constantly arose, perished, merged, or eked out a brief existence. One such party, the Anti-Masons, developed in western New York in 1826 and quickly expanded into nearby states. The origin of the party was the disappearance (and presumed murder) of a member of a Masonic Lodge who had tried on several occasions to publish the order’s secrets. “Within weeks, the western counties of the state were ablaze with demands to apprehend the kidnappers and obliterate the Masonic Order,” wrote Remini. “Westerners convinced themselves that the fraternity was a conspiracy against ordinary citizens . . . by an elitist group . . . [seeking] to control everything—the government, the courts, and business.” The Anti-Mason movement quickly evolved into a political party “demanding freedom of opportunity for the individual and the elimination of all institutions and practices which impeded, threatened, or denied that freedom.”6 Led by men who would later become prominent Whigs—notably William H. Seward, a future US senator, and journalist Thurlow Weed—the party ran candidates for state office and opposed Jackson’s presidential candidacy because of his Masonic membership. The Anti-Masons had considerable, though brief, electoral success, ultimately electing 53 members to Congress in the 23rd Congress (1833–1835), before merging into the new Whig Party. Meanwhile, in the run-up to the 1828 campaign, Jackson’s appeal and the greater effectiveness of his supporters’ organizational skills enabled the
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Jacksonians to win the midterm elections for the 20th Congress (1827– 1829) from the Adams forces that previously had had majorities in both houses. The general’s backers now controlled the House 119–94, and the Senate (elected by state legislatures) 28–20. To boost Jackson’s prospects for 1828, his supporters in that Congress developed their own tariff program—termed by its opponents “the tariff of abominations”—targeted to aid the Middle Atlantic states and the West primarily. Two regions were adversely affected by the tariff, for opposite reasons: New England, because its votes were expected to be cast for Adams and written off for Jackson; and the South, which would be solidly for Jackson regardless of tariff legislation. Calhoun, however, who often found reasons during his political career to be infuriated with congressional treatment of the South, used the 1828 tariff as justification to propound a doctrine of “nullification”: that any state could negate a federal law it considered harmful to its interests. Nullification would put Calhoun in direct conflict with the president in Jackson’s administration. In both the South and the West, Jackson seemed more sympathetic to slavery and antagonistic toward Indians than Adams. But no issue advanced by either side could trump the power of the “corrupt bargain” plus “Old Hickory’s” populist campaign. Jackson, with the incumbent vice president, Calhoun, now his running mate, won an overwhelming victory, taking more than 56 percent of the popular vote and defeating Adams in the Electoral College 178–83. Adams won only New England’s electoral votes plus scattered others in the Middle Atlantic states. The new Democrats also increased their majority in the House to 139, opposed by 74 National Republicans. In the Senate, Democrats lost two seats but retained control, 26 to 22. PART Y DEVELOPMENT One of the most significant factors in the development of the Second Party System was the conscious and deliberate effort by political actors to abandon the spirit of antipartyism that had prevailed in national politics since the collapse of the Federalists and the First Party System. Opposition to partisanship was hardly new, of course. James Madison’s aversion to political factionalism had been clearly laid out in Federalist No. 10: “The instability, injustice, and confusion [that faction has] introduced into the public councils have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”7 It soon became apparent, however, that the new republic would not be immune to a pandemic of factiousness, as Madison and Hamilton, inter
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alia, demonstrated in their disputes over the latter’s programs and proposals in the Washington administration. Political parties developed almost immediately and, in 1800, openly contested the presidency. Indeed, in that year Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Virginia altered their procedures for selecting presidential electors precisely in order to favor one party over the other. As Richard Hofstadter has observed: Where the Federalists and Republicans, still enchanted with eighteenthcentury visions of political harmony, had schemed to devour, absorb, or annihilate each other, many Republicans raised on the one-party politics of the misnamed Era of Good Feelings, began to see clearly and consistently what such predecessors as Madison and Jefferson had seen only dimly and fitfully—the merits of the party organization as a positive principle, and of two-party competition as an asset to the public interest.8
The First Party System declined as the Federalists did, and the antiparty impulse grew during the presidencies of Madison and particularly Monroe. During the 1820s, no one epitomized it better than Monroe’s successor, John Quincy Adams. And no man better understood “the merits of the party organization as a positive principle” than the organizational architect of the new Democratic Party, Martin Van Buren. As Hofstadter put it, “Avoiding the black arts of political maneuver became for [Adams] almost a kind of puritan trial of virtue, a political hair shirt of his own devising. . . . Thinking of himself not as a party politician but as the custodian and spokesman of the whole nation, he never saw any way of reconciling these two roles.”9 Adams’ actions antagonized his allies. Not only did he decline to reward his friends and punish his enemies, but he often did quite the opposite. “My great object,” he said, “will be to break up the remnant of old party distinctions and bring the whole people together in sentiment as much as possible.”10 Hofstadter continued: Adams implicitly assumed that since both historic parties had had their good men and measures, they need no longer continue to contend against each other. Van Buren and his followers believed just the opposite—that if the men and the measures of the two historic parties had been, each in their way, meritorious, and if their strife had somehow served the country, then the parties and the strife should continue.11
Van Buren, a neglected thinker on democratic political parties, developed his ideas out of his experience in the Albany Regency, the dominant faction in New York State politics. In Hofstadter’s words, Van Buren believed that “parties are inseparable from free governments and in many and material respects they are useful to the country.” He also understood that
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parties required their own instrumentalities to survive and flourish: “patronage, for example, as a legitimate instrument of party cohesion and reward, and the caucus, as a necessary instrument of party decision.” Parties were “a means not merely of institutionalizing strife within manageable limits but also of cementing civic loyalty and creating a decent and livable atmosphere.” And Van Buren’s beliefs extended to “the value of opposition itself as a cohesive force.” Particularly critical to the era in which he lived, he saw a role for parties that were not merely sectional but national, as potentially “valuable instruments of intersectional cohesion.”12 Van Buren’s strong beliefs in the merits of parties led him, in the 1820s, to oppose not only Adams’ policies but also his presidency. In this, he had the president’s inadvertent assistance: “It would have taken less marksmanship than Van Buren had to harpoon a whale that rose so benignly to the surface and exposed its belly,” Hofstadter observed.13 To achieve this goal, Van Buren became a close adviser to Jackson and was instrumental in developing the innovative and effective political techniques that aided the general’s candidacy and the construction of the new Democratic Party. In so doing, he became a prime builder of the Second Party System, along with the leaders of the new opposition that was soon to arise—the Whig Party. THE JACKSON PRESIDENCY The new president’s popularity as an opponent of elitism grew in office. Democrats, especially from the South, were fractious, but that was no benefit to the National Republicans, whose image epitomized elitism and who were unable to capitalize on Democratic fractures. Vice President Calhoun, for instance, did not side with the National Republicans when he split from Jackson over personal rivalries, even though they supported him in his opposition to the president’s appointment of Van Buren to be minister to England. (Calhoun broke a Senate tie by voting against confirmation.) The National Republican failure to gain ground against Jackson was reflected in the midterm elections of his first term. Democrats gained only two seats in the House, but National Republicans lost 16, 14 of them to other parties. Actually, National Republicanism had begun to disintegrate immediately after the 1828 elections as its party organizations in most northern states fell apart, to be replaced by the fast-growing Anti-Masons as the principal opposition to the Democracy. The populist Anti-Masons found support in their advocacy for farmers, rural evangelical Protestants, and the lower classes. The Anti-Masons disliked Jackson, but they also
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had no use for the National Republican Party that seemed to them to be the party of privilege. These problems, which came to a head in the 1832 presidential election, were compounded by the issue of renewal of the national charter for the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson strongly opposed the bank and as early as 1829 asked Congress to modify its charter, but he then dropped the idea, partly because the charter ran until 1836 and partly because he did not want to give his opponents a new issue for the 1832 election. For just this latter reason, however, Henry Clay, now running for president, put the bank’s president up to asking for a renewal four years early. Following a long debate, Congress passed the renewal, which Jackson then vetoed and made into a major campaign issue. The National Republicans, knowing the bank’s popularity as a source of credit, particularly in the South and West, expected that the Democrats would fracture over the veto. Jackson’s veto message and subsequent campaign vituperations against the “Monster Bank,” however, made renewal an issue of states’ rights and of populism vs. privilege and the economic aristocracy. This tactic enabled the Democrats to fight populist Anti-Masonic fire with their own. By 1832, the Anti-Masons’ strength had grown to the point where they could run a presidential campaign. In Baltimore, in September 1831, they nominated former attorney general William Wirt at the first national party convention ever held. A few months later, at the same site, the National Republicans nominated Clay, and the first Democratic convention, in May 1832, nominated Jackson for a second term. The National Republicans converted Jackson’s veto into a crusade against a despotic executive, adopting for the first time the Anti-Masons’ language and campaign style. This was no easy change for the National Republicans because “In their eyes, the egalitarian populism of Antimasonry was just as dangerous as the antiestablishment impulse that had brought Jackson to power,” said Holt.14 Now all three parties were competing to out-populist the others. What marked the shift in National Republican tactics even more than their antityrannical rhetoric was their brilliant use of political cartooning to mock Jackson. The most famous and effective of these caricatures was called “King Andrew the First,” which portrayed the aged Jackson wearing a crown and regal robes trimmed in ermine, with a scepter in one hand and the veto message in the other, and a copy of the Constitution torn to shreds at his feet. No piece of propaganda summarized so forcefully the National Republicans’ conception of how the presidency had been perverted by Jackson, and none symbolized so well their belated turn to the public.
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When Political Parties Die Thus, at the end of 1832, the National Republicans developed the credo upon which the Whig party would be founded and which would remain its central principle.15
In some but not all states, the two anti-Jackson parties agreed on support for Anti-Mason state and local candidates in return for their backing of Clay. It was not nearly enough. The National Republicans were in such poor shape that they did not even have slates of electors in three southern states, and nowhere had they sufficient organizational strength to compete with the Democrats. Moreover, the bank issue was potent. What the “corrupt bargain” had been for Jackson in 1828, the Second Bank charter issue was for him in 1832. He won a second term with 55 percent of the popular vote to 37 percent for Clay and carried the Electoral College, 219 to 49. If the anti-Jackson forces were to have any political future, they needed new issues, new organizations, new strategies, and new faces—in other words, a new party with better prospects than National Republicanism. THE BIRTH OF THE WHIG PART Y Once the smoke of the 1832 campaign had blown away, important sectors of the South and West began to realize how valuable the Second Bank had been to their economies and prospects. Over time, they shifted away from the Jacksonian Democrats, which opened opportunities for a new opposition. Remini noted that the bank battle had additional consequences: It is clear that in terms of party history the Bank War was the single most important event during the entire Middle period of American history. Not only did it give rise to the Whig party, but the clash between the opposing Bank forces established rigid lines that lasted practically to the Civil War. It exalted such things as party loyalty; it demonstrated that the President could be a politician of the masses; and it fashioned the character of the Democratic party in terms of leadership, organizational discipline, and popular following for nearly a generation.16
It was Van Buren’s conception of the role of parties in political life that now became predominant among American political practitioners. Madisonian antipartyism as a philosophy and critique would recur from time to time throughout US history, but it was Van Buren’s thinking that would henceforth characterize the shape and character of political parties in the United States. His Democratic Party would epitomize this pattern in the Second Party System, but the emergent Whigs sought to emulate it as best they could. Several issues combined to present an opportunity for the formation of the Whigs. One of these was Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification.
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Immediately after the 1832 election, the South Carolina legislature declared recent tariffs null and void and vowed to block the federal government’s attempts to collect the funds. Jackson denounced nullification and pitted the power of the national government against that of South Carolina. A compromise was eventually reached, engineered by Clay and Calhoun (who had resigned the vice presidency and was now back in the Senate representing South Carolina). Nonetheless, some southerners were outraged by the president’s denigration of states’ rights and, in several states, broke with the president’s party to form independent groupings that adopted the Whig name to symbolize opposition to what they saw as executive tyranny. In 1833, eight southern senators formed their own bloc, which held the balance of power between the 20 National Republicans and the equal number of Jacksonian Democrats in that body. The battle over tariffs and nullification led Webster, an advocate for the protective tariffs supported by northern industry, to seek an alliance with the president. Hoping to gain Jackson’s support for an 1836 presidential candidacy, Webster’s goal was two new parties—a Jackson-Webster nationalist party against a states’ rights party presumably to be led by Calhoun and Clay. Webster’s ambitions failed, largely because of the third issue—Jackson’s actions to implement his earlier victory over the Second Bank. In September 1833, he ordered the withdrawal of federal government funds from the bank, placing them instead in favored state-chartered banks around the country, quickly labeled “pet banks.” The bank’s charter, still in effect until 1836, provided for the removal of federal deposits only if they were unsafe, and the House had declared their safety earlier in 1833. Michael Holt wrote: By executive fiat Jackson had thus ignored Congress’ will, removed government funds from an institution where congressional law mandated they be placed, and in the process apparently violated as well the constitutional clause guaranteeing the obligation of contracts. As Senator Mangum of North Carolina put it in a major speech breaking with Jackson the following February, the question was no longer Bank or no Bank, but “law or no law, constitution or no constitution”.17
Jackson thereby demonstrated once again his total command of national politics, in which Congress and its leaders and the states played no more than supporting roles. “As the epicenter of the majority party, he determined what shape the minority party would take.”18 That shape would be opposition to Jacksonian authority. Jackson gave common cause to groups that had despised each other—National Republicans who had supported the bank, and southern nullifiers and other states’ rights advocates who
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disliked the president even more than they disliked the elitism of the National Republicans. These groups now combined to take control of the Senate with a 28–20 majority. (The House remained in Jacksonian hands.) Holt dates the birth of the Whig Party from this December 1833 “parliamentary coup.”19 Clay was the coup’s leader, and he moved rapidly to capitalize on nationwide anger to mobilize Jackson’s opponents into a new political party fusing National Republicans, Anti-Masons, and southern states’ rights defenders. The chosen “Whig” name, said Holt, was a “magic label, reverberating with memories of the revered Founding Fathers who had used it during the Revolution, [that] signified that the party’s main purpose, at least originally, was resistance to King Andrew Jackson.”20 The inclusion of the populist Anti-Masons effectively removed the aroma of privileged power that had tainted the old National Republicans, whose name was now history. The challenge to executive power—and its implicit defense of legislative primacy—also made the new party attractive to many states’ rights southerners. Along with opposition to the Democracy, it was the glue that held the Whig Party together throughout its life. Another ideological element was the antiparty emotion, directed primarily at the Van Burenist character of the Democratic Party, on the part of evangelical Protestants, nativists, anti-Catholics, and antislavery abolitionists. Antipartyism was to wax and wane among Whigs: On the one hand, it made it easier to oppose Democrats who were in the process of building strong state and national party organizations. On the other, it was difficult to prevail against a well-organized political foe armed only with an antiorganizational abstraction. Consequently, the most successful state Whig parties were those that emphasized grassroots party organization. The New York party, long led by the Weed-Seward faction that had grown up in parallel with its successful rival, Van Buren’s Albany Regency, was among the most effective in adopting the vice president’s own principles of party organization. However, antiparty sentiment hampered Whig organizational development in other states such as Alabama, Illinois, and Michigan—and nationally. It would not be until 1846, with the arrival of Representative (later Senator) Truman Smith of Connecticut, that the Whig Party found a national organizational manager and political strategist of Van Buren’s caliber. Even then, the Whigs were never as successful as the Democrats at organization and the development of party loyalty, relying primarily on the force of contemporary issues that were more effective in some years than in others. Two factors illustrate the importance of this distinction. First, as Holt observes, “Antiparty sentiment . . . may explain why turnout rates for Whig voters in off-year elections, when no clear issue seemed to be at stake,
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were often lower than Democratic turnout rates.”21 Anti-Democratic voters could not be bothered to go to the polls absent an issue that angered them sufficiently to drive them there. Second, advocates for immigrant and Catholic interests tended to develop within the Democratic Party, while their antagonists—evangelical Protestant, temperance, nativist, and antislavery organizations—were at best external Whig allies, and often inconstant ones. Another factor that often hampered the Whigs’ ability to compete with Democrats lay at the core of Whig ideology. In an era when state and local affairs were usually of far more salience to the voting public, it was frequently difficult to maintain the heat of resentment over presidential excesses that so occupied Whig leaders in Washington but that often took second place (if that) to the electorate’s parochial concerns about jobs, education, and other local interests. Whigs did best nationally (frequently at the state level as well) when Democratic administrations were beset by bad economic conditions or when Whigs could appeal to national patriotism. It is significant that the Whigs’ most notable leaders, Clay and Webster, never reached the presidency and were often shunted aside in favor of patriotic campaigns and the candidacies of nonparty military heroes, two of whom were the only Whig nominees to win the White House. THE 1836 ELECTION This predilection manifested itself in the very first presidential election the new party contested. Whig candidates had done modestly well in Jackson’s last midterm election, for the 24th Congress (1835–1837), winning 98 House seats to 145 for the Democrats; Senate seats, chosen by the state legislatures, were narrowly divided, with 25 Whigs to 27 Democrats. Many of the new Whigs were optimistic that in 1836 they could defeat Van Buren, who was Jackson’s designated heir but who lacked Old Hickory’s popular appeal; others were dubious. The question was who would have the best chance: Clay, Webster, Calhoun, or a new face. One name that began to surface as a possible candidate was that of William Henry Harrison, a former member of Congress from Ohio, military hero, and Indian fighter. Clay and Webster were also seeking the nomination, but Harrison’s growing support in northern and western states made him a formidable contender. Southerners were developing their own candidate—not Calhoun who, for all his leadership of the states’ rights cause, never actively sought the presidency after 1832—but Senator Hugh White of Tennessee. The parties’ relative organizational strengths were quite vividly demonstrated by their nominating processes. In May 1835, the Democrats met in
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a national convention and quickly nominated Van Buren for president. The vice presidential nomination was more contentious: Senator Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, also a famed Indian fighter with high popularity in the West, was opposed by southerners because he lived openly with a mulatto slave and their two children. Still, Johnson won on the first ballot. The Whigs, on the other hand, held no convention, and they tried to capitalize on antipartyism by attacking the Democrats for choosing their nominees in this manner. Instead, Whig state parties nominated three candidates with regional strength, in hopes of denying Van Buren an Electoral College majority and casting the election into the House, and of optimizing the party’s coattail effect for state and local candidates. White was the nominee in nine southern and western states. Harrison was the candidate in New England—except Massachusetts where Webster ran— and the Middle Atlantic, western, and border slave states. Clay received no state nominations. Sectional issues were prominent, and Van Buren was vigorously attacked in the South for his alleged (and repudiated) backing among abolitionists. As secretary of state, Van Buren had once written a letter to the Pope, which was used against him by anti-Catholics. Other issues arose; in the end, it was a contest of organizational strength, and in this the Whigs could not prevail. See Table 5.1. Taken together, in 1836 the three Whigs won 49 percent of the popular vote and 113 electoral votes. Van Buren, with not quite 51 percent, carried 15 states, winning 170 electoral votes, 49 fewer than Jackson’s 1832 total but a clear majority. For the Whigs, Webster took Massachusetts’ 14 electoral votes; White carried only Georgia and Tennessee for a total
TABLE 5.1 The 1836 Presidential Election Electoral Votes
Popular Vote Percentage
Van Buren (D)
170
50.8
Harrison (W)
73
36.6
White (W)
26
9.7
Webster (W)
14
2.7
TOTAL WHIG
113
49.1
Mangum (Ind. D)
11
—a
Source: CQ Guide to U.S. Elections, 2nd ed., 277 & 330. Note: (a) See text.
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of 26 votes; Harrison won Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, totaling 73 electoral votes. South Carolina’s electors, chosen by the legislature, cast their 11 votes for Senator Willie Mangum of North Carolina. The rest of the United States was Van Buren country. All in all, it was a creditable accomplishment given the newness of the Whig Party and its organizational liabilities. Compared to Clay’s performance in 1832, the Whigs improved, in several cases substantially, in every region and state except the six New England states, New York, and Kentucky. Whigs made major gains in elections for the House, winning 107 seats to 108 for the Democrats (with 24 seats won by minor parties). The Senate in the 25th Congress, reflecting outcomes in state legislatures where Whigs had not done well, comprised 30 Democrats, 18 Whigs (a loss of seven seats), and 4 others. At the state and local level, Holt noted, there was little presidential coattail effect: Rather, the Whigs won legislative or gubernatorial elections only in those states where the party inherited a National Republican majority or where they carved out a distinctive and advantageous position on salient state issues. . . . Where Whigs relied solely on the presidential question in campaigns for state offices or took unpopular stands on state issues, they made their poorest showings, no matter how well their presidential candidates ran.22
Defeat can at least be an educational experience. As Joel Silbey observed, “The Whigs had learned something from the Democrats. From then on they would have a national convention, popular candidates, electioneering, and everything that was implied in the new politics of the 1830s.”23 Issues were important, often critical, but no longer sufficient to win. THE FRUSTR ATIONS OF THE 1840 ELECTION The 1840s were the heyday of the Whig Party but produced a mixed record. The successor to the Whigs’ first deceased president proved a catastrophe for the party. The second such successor presided during the development of the ethnocultural and sectional cleavages that were to destroy the party. Whigs won control of the House in only two of five elections. They held the Senate after the 1840 and 1842 elections, but never thereafter. The outcome of the 1840 presidential election illustrates two axioms of American politics: First, incumbents pay a political price for bad economic times. Second, even the best political managers seldom make good candidates. Martin Van Buren was the victim of both maxims.
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Still in the process of developing their own policies and lacking any settled loyalty among their northern and southern partisans, the Whigs could have been split by the mounting campaign by abolitionists to end slavery in the nation’s capital and by the request for admission as a state from the Republic of Texas, where slavery was legal. Instead, they were saved by a severe economic downturn that struck the country in the early months of Van Buren’s presidency. That recession, with interim ups and downs, lasted for seven years. Van Buren reacted by pulling government funds out of private banks and placing them in “subtreasuries” around the country. He also halted all economic aid, adopting the view that the economy should be left to heal itself without federal government meddling. The Whigs, with little internal dissent, opted for a national economic development program based on sound currency, one that would assist private banks, boost the money supply and credit, and counter price deflation. They harshly criticized both the creation of subtreasuries and the manner in which the president had rammed the subtreasury bill through Congress. It became Whig policy, indeed nearly an article of faith, that not only a restoration of prosperity but also the development of a national economy required direct or indirect government investment. Many conservative Democrats supported the Whig view, and over the next few years the Whig Party succeeded in luring some of them into its ranks; on the other hand, Van Buren’s policy of leaving the economy to the states’ discretion brought Calhoun’s supporters back to the Democratic Party. In consequence, Holt said, The slump allowed Whigs to fashion a distinctive national and state program of government economic policy, a program that united its northern and southern wings, reinforced the partisan identity of Whig voters, and massively extended that partisan allegiance to new voters. Once created, that partisan identity became a prism through which Whig voters viewed sectional issues themselves.24
Whig fortunes ebbed and flowed inversely with the state of the economy. From January 1836 until the June 1837 economic panic, Whigs won only about 37 percent of congressional and gubernatorial races. From June 1837 to August 1838, they won over 65 percent of them. Then, during an 11-month period of recovery, they won less than half the congressional contests and slightly over a quarter of the gubernatorial ones. When the economy again went into a severe downturn, from November 1839 to December 1840, they were victors in over 60 percent of races for Congress and more than three-fourths of those for governor.25 The midterm
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elections for the 26th Congress produced a House of 124 Democrats and 118 Whigs; the Senate contained 28 Democrats and 22 Whigs. Two political developments during this period are worth noting. First, voter turnout increased phenomenally, exceeding 80 percent of the eligible population by the 1840 elections. Second, party loyalties began to solidify, creating for the first time a Whig voter base. To Holt, the various midterm elections “forged lasting partisan allegiances. . . . The state and congressional elections of 1837, 1838, 1839, and 1840, not the hoopla of the Whigs’ 1840 presidential campaign, converted hundreds of thousands of previous nonvoters into Whigs and transformed a losing party into a winner.”26 This new Whig base comprised a variety of business and agricultural interests, including their workers, in the commercial economy. The Democrats tended to attract subsistence farmers in the cash economy, people in poorly developed regions, and immigrants and Catholics offended by the attacks of Protestant groups. When the Whigs met in December 1839 to nominate a presidential candidate for the 1840 election, their prospects looked bright. They were determined to capitalize on them by putting up an exciting face that would galvanize the electorate. That countenance was to be neither Daniel Webster’s nor Henry Clay’s. Despite many attempts, Webster never really came close to being nominated. Clay’s predicament was even worse; over his entire career, he had the misfortune of losing the presidential nomination in years when he might well have been elected, and gaining it in the years when he would not. 1840 was in the former category. Instead, the nomination went to General William Henry Harrison. Harrison had done reasonably well as one of the Whigs’ presidential contenders in 1836 and had become well known as a result. His fame as “Old Tippecanoe” (named for a battle in which he had defeated the Indian chief, Tecumseh) was built on his military reputation, not on one of public accomplishment. He had no record on controversial issues that his opposition could attack, and he could appeal to the patriotic streak in the electorate. Most important, the state of the economy, now sagging again as it would though the election, could be hung around the incumbent president’s neck as the product of Van Buren’s hands-off economic policy. The Whig vice presidential nominee was Senator John Tyler of Virginia, a former governor, who was affiliated with the states’ rights element of the Whig party. William Nisbet Chambers saw Tyler as “scarcely a major figure. More headstrong than strong, his views deviated sharply on many issues from those of the main Whig body,” as party leaders were to learn to their considerable agony.27 The Democratic convention routinely
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renominated Van Buren for a second term. The continuing controversy surrounding Vice President Johnson’s domestic arrangements led the delegates to leave the choice of the president’s running mate to the states. Abolitionists, a growing antislavery force in the North, meanwhile, put together a new Liberty Party, with James G. Birney of New York as its candidate. It was a campaign of surpassing folderol, memorialized by the Whig slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” It also had its innovative aspects, developed under Thurlow Weed’s general direction: campaign staff, state organizations, development of voter mailing lists, and the like. The Democrats also exercised all their organizational and public relations resources, but the state of the economy doomed them. In the end, Harrison won 52.9 percent of the popular vote to 46.8 percent for Van Buren and 0.3 percent for the Liberty candidate. The president carried only six states (Alabama, Arkansas, and Virginia in the South; Missouri and Illinois in the West; and New Hampshire in New England) for a total of 60 electoral votes, including those given him by South Carolina’s legislature. Harrison won the rest of the country with 234 electoral votes. He carried in with him a Whig majority in the new Congress, with 133 Whigs in the House to 102 Democrats. Whig successes in state legislative elections produced a Senate of 28 Whigs, 22 Democrats, and 2 others. In Holt’s judgment, the 1840 election solidified the legitimacy of the two parties and a two-party system. “For that legitimacy to survive, the public had to believe that a change would result when they replaced one set of rulers with another.”28 Certainly, Whigs believed, with the White House and Congress in their hands, that they now had every prospect of fully implementing their policies. Unhappily, defeat was soon to be snatched from the jaws of victory. THE T YLER DISASTER Harrison died just a month after his inauguration, although not before he and Clay had clashed over cabinet and patronage selections. (Harrison took offense at Clay’s attempts to exert legislative preeminence over presidential appointments.) Patronage, recognized by the Whigs as a major source of Democratic strength under Jackson and Van Buren, was intended to be a party-building asset that would help Whigs win future elections at all levels. It became, instead, a source of great divisiveness, as factions within each state, and nationally, struggled to gain lucrative appointments and government contracts for their adherents. With no real
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experience in managing federal patronage, it might have been a difficult problem for the Whigs even if Harrison had lived. With Tyler now president, the problem became excruciating, as growing disputes with Congress led him increasingly to name his own personal supporters in place of Whig stalwarts, including many Democrats by the end. Patronage was the lifeblood of political parties during the 19th Century, and for many politicians the opportunity to gain access to it was a more important reason for winning than the chance to prevail on policy issues. For those who made, or at least influenced, appointments and government contracts, patronage was a means to build personal loyalties and organization. For the beneficiaries, it was usually a source of new or enhanced income, one that allowed (more often, required) them to engage in partisan political activity at public expense. Jobs and contracts were eagerly sought and highly competitive, and the disappointed who believed their political efforts had earned them the benefits of patronage could become alienated and perhaps vengeful. Many public officials with patronage at their disposal would agree with a statement attributed to Grover Cleveland, a president of a later era, that whenever he appointed a judge he created 10 enemies and 1 ingrate. The root of the crisis that quickly developed between Tyler and Whig congressional leaders was that he was not only a states’ rights advocate, but one of the John Calhoun stripe. For Tyler, as with Calhoun, states’ rights went far beyond the slavery question and pervaded his entire approach to federalism. For Clay, Webster, and the bulk of the Whig Party, the resources of the national government should be utilized to develop the country as a national economy; that, after all, lay at the core of Clay’s American System, which the party had long embraced. Tyler, however, opposed any measures that he perceived to intrude on the rights of the states to govern as each saw fit or that would strengthen the role of the national government at the states’ expense. He also shared the South’s preference, and the North’s dislike, for low tariffs. Such positions put him in constant confrontation with Congress. The legislative result was often poor compromises, if not total stalemate. It may well be that the heart of the difficulty was endemic to the Whigs’ core philosophy, legislative preeminence over the executive. One suspects that Clay, Webster, or any strong personality in the White House would have been in frequent disagreement with fellow Whigs whose political temperament and experience led them to challenge any action that smacked of “despotism.” Even such a leader as the future Whig president, Millard Fillmore, a conciliator by nature and hardly an overpowering personality, had no easy time with his party.
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And John Tyler was not remotely conciliatory. Before his term was over, he even sought through patronage appointments to romance the Democrats into an alliance and perhaps get their presidential nomination in 1844; by that year, however, neither party would have him. The overall consequence of Tyler’s term was that the Whig president and Congress were engaged in constant and interminable internal disputes that paralyzed their ability to legislate on a variety of matters, especially the steps necessary to bring the country out of depression. By August 1842, matters had degenerated to a point where the House responded to a Tyler veto message with a report that, as Holt put it, “castigated everything that Tyler had done since taking office, called his behavior worthy of impeachment, and recommended against formal proceedings only because Democrats could block it.”29 The chairman of the committee that drafted the report was Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, the former president. A small group of Tyler supporters in the House were denied Whig renomination. The Senate routinely declined to confirm his nominees. The party could divorce itself from the White House, but it could not make an adequate justification to the voters for the absence of legislative performance. By the midterm elections, Whigs’ hopes of using their 1840 successes to make themselves the country’s permanent majority party had gone aglimmering. The 60-plus percent of the aggregate House vote in 1840 fell to under 30 percent in 1842 elections (and did not rise even to 40 percent in elections held in 1843 and 1844). Elections for the 28th Congress produced a loss of 54 seats in the House, giving Democrats a 142–79 majority; Senate Whigs were able to retain a 28–25 majority (with one senator unaffiliated with either party). Results of state elections were equally devastating: Between 1840 and 1844, the number of state legislatures in which Whigs controlled both houses fell from 15 to 8, while the number under complete Democratic control rose from 5 to 9. This had adverse consequences for Whigs in both houses of Congress—for the Senate whose members were elected by the legislatures of the states, but also for the House, where postcensus reapportionment was required as well as the establishment, under an 1842 law, of new congressional districts, which the state legislatures were empowered to draw. For House Whigs particularly, the state legislative losses would have devastating electoral reverberations for a decade. THE 1844 ELECTION Tyler’s excommunication by the House was reflected at Whig conventions in 10 states in every part of the country endorsing Clay for president in
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1844. He was nominated unanimously at the national convention in Baltimore. Because many Whig voters had stayed away from the polls in the midterm elections, opportunities arose for other anti-Democratic parties, most notably the abolitionist Liberty Party, the forerunner of the Free Soilers. Since the middle of the 1830s, abolitionists had been attempting to submit antislavery petitions to Congress, but they were routinely turned away by gag rules on the subject that were in effect in both houses (with the active support of Calhoun, the otherwise solicitous defender of minority rights). In the mid-1840s, abolitionists began to emphasize electoral action, and Liberty Party candidates scored moderate successes in several states that they might have been denied had the Whigs there been stronger. Still in hopes of winning a full presidential term in 1844, Tyler needed an issue; he found it early in the year in Texas. Webster, who, as secretary of state, had been the only holdover from Harrison’s cabinet, resigned in 1843. After his successor was killed in an accident, Tyler appointed Calhoun to the post, with the assignment of negotiating Texas’ annexation. Tyler submitted Calhoun’s treaty to the Senate in April. Because slavery was legal in Texas, it became important to southerners that it be admitted. The platform adopted at the May Democratic convention endorsed annexation of both Texas and Oregon, the latter an area disputed with Great Britain to the point of possible war. That same convention, in a bitter fight, rejected Van Buren’s candidacy and chose instead James K. Polk of Tennessee, a former governor and speaker of the House. Van Buren had been the front-runner but lost support when he came out in opposition to annexation. Wanting to avoid war with Mexico, he feared “that annexation would inflame those dangerous passions of sectional enmity that he had labored throughout his long career to moderate and suppress,” Charles Sellers observed. The former president, “the very prototype of the scheming politician, made a conscientious decision that he knew would imperil and perhaps destroy his chances for the Presidency.”30 And so it did. Proslavery southerners and northern and western expansionists abandoned him at a contentious convention that eventually settled on Polk, the stereotypical dark horse. The Texas treaty divided Democrats; in June, eight pro-Van Buren Democratic senators joined the Whigs to reject the treaty. (It was ratified two years later.) Clay and northern Whigs opposed territorial expansion, especially the admission of an additional slave state, as they would continue to do throughout Polk’s administration. While southern Whigs were divided, many slaveholders entertained economic ambitions to move to promising new western lands, taking their slaves with them; this group supported annexation. Southern pressures led Clay to publish a letter in which he
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amended his position to express equivocal support for the admission of Texas. This did little for him in the South but enraged antislavery northerners, as did another letter (to his abolitionist cousin) in which Clay said he was neither an “ultra supporter” of slavery nor an abolitionist. Both letters provided fuel for the Liberty Party, which drew enough votes from Clay in New York and Pennsylvania to put both states in Polk’s column. Nativism also had adverse effects on Clay’s prospects in these two states. An agreement between Whigs and nativists to support Clay in return for backing nativists’ House candidates in Philadelphia, where antiimmigrants had considerable strength, backfired. The nativists, largely Democrats, did win three of four congressional seats in the city, but their agitation provoked a large turnout of heavily Democratic foreign-born voters who stuck with Polk. He carried the city and thereby won Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. The outcome in New York was particularly painful for Clay. He lost the state by 5,100 votes, with the Liberty candidate winning 15,800. Had Clay carried New York’s 36 electoral votes, he would have gained the presidency even without Pennsylvania. As it was, he won 105 electoral votes and 48.1 percent of the popular vote. Polk won 170 electoral votes and 49.5 percent. Birney, the Liberty nominee, captured only 2.3 percent—62,300 votes—but they were substantially in decisive states. Clay carried Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut in New England; only New Jersey in the Mid-Atlantic; the four border slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee (the latter, Polk’s home state, by 113 votes); and in the West, only Ohio. Few seats changed hands in the House for the 29th Congress, where the Democrats retained their majority. Democrats gained six seats in the Senate, enough to take control. THE MEXICAN WAR AND THE 1848 ELECTION President Polk presided over two major territorial acquisitions, second in size only to the Louisiana Purchase, expanding the country to the Pacific. One was the product of a peaceful negotiation with Great Britain that settled the long-standing Oregon boundary dispute at the 49th parallel and added nearly 300,000 square miles to the United States. The second acquisition was far from peaceful, but it added almost twice as much land in the West and Southwest. These gains came about through war with Mexico. They were also to rouse a raging sectional controversy over whether slavery would be permitted in the Mexican Cession, particularly since Texas had been admitted to the Union in 1845 as a slave
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state. Northern Whigs opposed territorial expansion. Northern Democrats largely supported expansion but joined the Whigs in resisting the extension of slavery in opposition to southerners of both parties. The Whigs had opposed the appropriations that supported both the war and the subsequent negotiations, charging that it was Polk’s intent to gain land onto which slavery could be expanded. Northern Democrats were also angry at Polk because of his veto of a rivers and harbors public works bill, his support for a controversial tariff measure, and his patronage decisions. Moreover, they did not want northern Whigs to monopolize the slavery issue. The opportunity to vent Democrats’ irritation with their own president and protect their antislavery flanks arose when an amendment to the military appropriations bill was offered by Representative David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat. That amendment, adopted with nearly unanimous support of northern members of both parties in the House, forbade the introduction of slavery into any territory the United States might acquire from Mexico. Opposed by southerners of both parties, the Wilmot Proviso died in the Senate. It was never enacted but became a powerful issue and a constant source of sectional friction for some years. In the off-year elections, Whigs regained control of the House for the 30th Congress (1847–1849) by a margin of 115–108, but the Senate remained Democratic with an enlarged margin, 36–21, with one unaffiliated senator. To gain his party’s nomination in 1844, Polk had promised not to seek a second term if he won, thereby allowing rival Democrats to defer their hopes for only four years instead of an interminable eight. Thus, the 1848 Democratic presidential nomination was open and keenly contested. Van Buren did not seek the Democratic nomination. In the end, the choice settled on Michigan’s Senator Lewis Cass. The Democratic platform praised Polk and his policies and “took unmistakable positions on numerous public questions, but had nothing whatever to say about slavery’s containment or extension.” Nonetheless, Holman Hamilton found that “increasing numbers of northerners—Democrats as well as Whigs—shared the conviction that slavery should not be permitted beyond the lines of the 15 states where it then was legal.”31 Among the Whigs, Clay was both an obvious and apparently unavailable choice. At the end of the 1844 campaign, he was 67 and tired, and he refused to let the Kentucky legislature send him back to the Senate. Webster was avid for the Whig nomination in 1848, as were several other Whig leaders. Party stalwarts, however, began to argue, as they had in 1840, that a fresh face was needed. Once again they looked to a man in uniform, this time one with absolutely no public record except military service. The man they sought to draft was General Zachary Taylor, who had emerged
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from the Mexican War with a reputation as the brilliant victor of a difficult battle. Taylor was a southerner, a slaveholder, and reputedly a Whig, although no one could be quite sure of his party affiliation since he was accepting local endorsements from whatever party group offered them. The general declared that he was “a Whig but not an ultra Whig,” whatever that meant.32 Even murkier were his views on the issues of the day. He did pledge not to abuse the veto if he was elected, which gratified northern Whigs, especially in the House where they dominated, because they interpreted it to mean he would not veto the Wilmot Proviso. Because he was a plantation and slave owner, Whigs in the South felt he was one of their own and needed no such promises. Taylor seemed, to his Whig sponsors, a tabula rasa on which they could write whatever they wished. As the convention approached, Clay made an abortive bid for the nomination, but by then Taylor was unstoppable. Other Whig presidential contenders also failed to catch on, and the general won the nomination with former Congressman Millard Fillmore of New York as his vice presidential nominee. Cass, the Democratic nominee, dealt with the slavery extension issue by proposing the principle of “popular sovereignty”: When each new territory was organized, its population could decide whether that territory would be slave or free, an idea that Taylor also essentially embraced. Southerners dubbed this “squatter sovereignty” but accepted the concept when the territory was admitted to statehood. Popular sovereignty was, however, insufficient for militant antislavery advocates who demanded adoption of the Wilmot Proviso. These abolitionists decided to start a new, Free Soil Party (“Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men”), and nominated Van Buren for president and, as his running mate, Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of former presidents. Initially, the Free Soilers were members of Van Buren’s New York Democratic faction, but they absorbed the Liberty Party, enlisted anti-Taylor Whigs, and rapidly gained support across the North. This new party initially lacked the organizational depth of the major parties but developed increasing grassroots strength as the campaign progressed. Taylor, the military hero, successfully maintained the ambiguity of his views throughout the campaign, giving his opponents little to attack. Democrats, on the other hand, were divided by the Van Buren campaign, which harmed Cass’ candidacy in a number of northern states. A new economic downturn in 1848 aggravated Democratic problems. Clay and his allies sat out the campaign, but that made no difference in the end. The election was not close, and the general’s partisans rejoiced at the second coming of a Whig presidency. Taylor won 47.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.5 percent for Cass. In electoral votes, Taylor took
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163 and Cass 127. Van Buren captured 10.1 percent of the vote and won no states. However, he had a major impact on the outcome. The Free Soil vote in Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York exceeded Taylor’s margin of victory. The third-party vote was particularly decisive in New York (Van Buren’s home state), as it had been four years earlier; without the former president’s candidacy pulling New York Democrats away from Cass, the national electoral vote would have been exactly the opposite of the actual result and Taylor would have lost. In elections for the 31st Congress, the Democrats narrowly regained control of the House, 112 to 109, but with nine others holding the balance of power. The Senate remained Democratic, 35 to 25, with two other affiliations. Unlike the 1840 result, the presidential outcome in 1848 therefore represented more a personal victory for Taylor than a Whig Party resurgence. There were interesting geographic dimensions to the presidential election. Except for Maine and New Hampshire, Taylor carried New England and the Middle Atlantic states, as he did the four border states. Cass won all of the western states. The South was divided: Taylor won Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina; Cass won the other southern states, including South Carolina, whose legislature awarded him its electoral votes. It may be useful at this point to recapitulate the results of the three presidential elections of the 1840s. Table 5.2 shows the regional competitiveness of the parties. The major party benefit (i.e., the percentage-point difference) was in double digits in only one of the six cases and exceeded six percentage points only twice; the average was only about four or five points. Except for the North in 1848, the two parties were closely competitive. Nor was volatility, as measured by the swing from election to election, particularly large in most cases, except in the South between 1840 and 1844 and in the North between 1844 and 1848. The South in the main did not behave aberrantly from the other two regions. TAYLOR, THE WEST, AND PATRONAGE Once in office, Taylor removed the ambiguity surrounding his views and turned out to be a strong nationalist—like Jackson, a northerner in southern clothing, thereby infuriating his fellow southerners in both parties. Believing “that the Constitution forbade federal interference with slavery in states where it was legal, he was equally convinced that the institution should not be introduced into the West,” Hamilton noted.33 Taylor proposed that California be admitted to statehood and suggested that
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TABLE 5.2 Regional Party Competitiveness, 1840–1848
1840 South Democrat Whig Party benefit
PercentagePoint 1844 Swing
45.1 50.9 54.9 49.1 9.8W 1.8D
Old Northwest Democrat 47.4 51.7 Whig 52.6 48.3 — Others — Party benefit 5.2W 3.4D North Democrat Whig Others Party benefit
47.7 50.1 52.3 49.9 — — 4.6W 0.2D
1848
PercentagePoint Average Swing Benefit
11.6
48.0 52.0 4.0W
5.8
5.2
8.6
47.4 42.5 10.1 4.9D
1.5
4.5
4.8
36.2 47.5 16.3 11.3W
11.5
5.4
Source: Data for each year from Roy and Jeannette Nichols, “Election of 1852,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, eds. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Fred L. Israel (New York: Chelsea House, 1971) vol. 2, 924, citing Joel H. Silbey, The Shrine of Party (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967). Major party benefit and percentage point and average changes were calculated by this author from Silbey’s data.
New Mexico —the vast region lying between California and Texas, today also encompassing Arizona—might also apply soon. Ultimately, California would be admitted as a free state, but the larger question at the time was the status of slavery in the New Mexico region and any territories and states to be created from it, since they abutted slave-holding lands in Texas. The new president elided the question. The Wilmot Proviso became again a burning topic. Apart from the slavery question itself, there was a huge political consideration because the admission of states as slave or free affected control of the Senate. Texas, which had the right under the terms of its statehood to divide into as many as five states if it wished, was now demanding expanded territory from New Mexico and financial compensation for any land it failed to obtain. Meanwhile, northerners were pressing to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, while southerners were
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demanding a tough new law that would require local authorities in the North to capture and return runaway slaves. Such issues roiled both the partisan and the sectional divisions within Congress. Patronage issues returned to bedevil the Whigs. Early in his administration, Taylor had come to believe that he should transform the Whigs and indeed the party system by leading a “No-Party” administration that could attract dissident Democrats from both the North and South, and he implemented that scheme by appointing sympathetic people almost regardless of party. This was not traditional antipartyism so much as an attempt to replace the Whigs with a new “Taylor Republican Party.” His plan failed utterly and contributed to Whig disarray in state and congressional elections, in Holt’s view. “Since it both exacerbated intraparty divisions and propelled the diminution of interparty differences, the party itself never fully recovered from Zachary Taylor’s first nine months in the White House.”34 Even after that period, patronage continued to present problems, in part because the confirmation power lay in the hands of the Senate’s Democratic majority. The political climate changed dramatically in July 1850 when Taylor died after a brief illness and was succeeded by Vice President Fillmore. Millard Fillmore tended to be an appeaser, and he altered Taylor’s policies and patronage practices in order to reach settlements and mollify warring factions, especially within the Whig Party. Northern Whigs were generally pleased with Fillmore’s cabinet and lesser appointments; the president’s selection of Daniel Webster to return as secretary of state gratified some southern Whigs, because Webster opposed the Wilmot Proviso as gratuitous and insulting. THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 At the age of 73, Clay returned to the Senate in 1850 and offered a complex compromise on the numerous slavery issues and those arising from the Mexican Cession. Northern and southern Democrats, who together controlled Congress, had quite different ideas about how these matters should be resolved, and considerable surgery was performed on Clay’s proposal to develop a new omnibus legislative package. Sectional differences were growing, while partisan ones were becoming blurred. Northern Whigs, for example, were becoming more concerned about challenges from Free Soilers than about threats from Democrats to southern Whigs. Whigs in the South could not afford to let Democrats appear as stronger defenders of slavery or any other issue that affected the South as a region. Growing factionalism in both sections complicated these considerations.
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Painfully and laboriously negotiated, the omnibus bill dealing with the various Mexican Cession and slavery issues had something in it to dissatisfy everyone, including President Taylor and Senator Clay himself. The president and the senator each preferred his own original plan, and extensive negotiations were required before the omnibus bill could pass. Its major provisions were eventually to be these: • California would be admitted as a free state, thereby ending the balance in the Senate between slave and free states. • The slave trade in the District of Columbia would be outlawed. • The Fugitive Slave Act would require northern authorities to pursue vigorously and return runaway slaves. • Texas’ geographic scope would be expanded somewhat, and it would receive compensation for claims that it surrendered. • Territorial governments would be organized without the Wilmot Proviso, but also without the continuance of Mexican law banning slavery. Popular sovereignty would govern each territory’s decisions about legalizing or forbidding slavery within its borders.
Meanwhile, however, the governor of Texas was threatening armed action to fulfill the state’s claims to New Mexican land. To avert that crisis, Fillmore believed he had only two immediate options: the admission of New Mexico as a state or enactment of the compromise omnibus bill. It soon became clear that the omnibus legislation might pass more easily if it was separated into its components, but that was to happen without Clay’s leadership. Old and ill, he left Washington, and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, a Democrat, became the bill’s manager. Northern congressional Whigs were deeply opposed to the omnibus bill, both on principle and for political reasons: “Whig voters could be mobilized only if they perceived conflict between their party and the Democrats.” Fillmore’s backing for the compromise omnibus would “align Whigs with the Democratic position, and strip northern Whigs of their best issue.”35 Permitting the possibility that slavery might be allowed to expand into the new territories risked a Whig catastrophe in the 1850 midterm elections. Fillmore refused to budge on his support for the package of bills but finessed the impending Texas crisis by telling the Texas governor that the boundary issue was not between residents of the two territories but between Texas and the United States government, and he threatened military force if trespassers intruded. Offers of additional land on other borders of the state plus monetary compensation facilitated a retreat by the Texas government.
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Soon thereafter, a bipartisan, bi-sectional Senate coalition passed the legislative package that constituted the Compromise of 1850. The House made minor changes and passed the entire package with subsequent Senate agreement. It became law with Fillmore’s signature. Northern Whigs were deeply divided on these votes. On the one hand, Fillmore, Clay, and Webster were delighted at the bipartisan majority that had pushed the legislation through. It was not that simple, as Holt observed: [I]t had ominous implications for the Whig party. It suggested a propensity to embrace pro-Compromise Democrats at the expense of anti-Compromise Whigs. It betokened an acquiescence in, indeed a desire for, a cessation of partisan conflict that could—and would—ultimately undermine the appeal of the Whig party to the electorate. Interparty combat had always been the nutrient that nourished the Whig party. Programmatic conflict with the Democrats had allowed it to mobilize and retain voting support. Cessation of partisan conflict, therefore, would first enervate and then kill the party.36
Some state party leaders, like Seward and Weed in New York, understood this reality all too well. Support for the Compromise by the party’s most important leaders, including Fillmore, Clay, and Webster, may have been in the national interest, but it also played into the Whigs’ great weakness and contributed to the party’s downfall. At least in the case of Clay and Webster, their personal careers were secure; it was those of other Whigs, and of the party at large, that were placed at risk. Northern Whigs now sought to save themselves in the upcoming elections by assaulting the Compromise. Fillmore would not permit it. An emerging threat of a new pro-Compromise Union Party required him to show that Whigs of both sections were united in support of the Compromise. Webster, among others, sought to purge anti-Compromise, and increasingly anti-Fillmore, Whigs; the Whig village should be burned if necessary to save it. The president himself took a somewhat less antagonistic stance. But the flames were shooting up. As the state and congressional election season progressed in the summer and fall of 1850, northern Whigs were able to counter Free Soil electoral threats and outdo Democrats only by denouncing Fillmore’s pro-Compromise position and the southern “slave power.” Even that was not enough. In 1848, Holt reported, Whigs won 10 of 14 contested governorships; in 1850, only 3 of 13. In 1848, they won 82 of 143 House contests; in 1850, 57 of 135.37 To gain control of the House in the 32nd Congress, Whigs would have to do well in elections yet to be held
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When Political Parties Die
in 1851, but most of these were in the South. To win those, southern Whigs needed to boast of just those provisions of the Compromise that Whigs in the North felt it essential to attack, particularly fugitive-slave enforcement and popular sovereignty in New Mexico. It was an impossible situation. In consequence, not only were the Whig southerners left to fend for themselves, but an increasing number of northern Whigs now found it necessary to abandon Fillmore. To prevent either the president or Webster from gaining the 1852 presidential nomination, a campaign began, two years before that election, to draft still another general, Winfield Scott. Nor was all placid in the South. Secessionist sentiment was rising because of restrictions the Compromise imposed on slavery’s expansion and its abolition in the nation’s capital. Fillmore felt the best way to counter it—and perhaps the only way—was to demonstrate the even-handedness of the Compromise, which required rigorous enforcement of the fugitiveslave law in the North. Publicized capture attempts, in turn, only increased northern opposition to the Compromise. THE 1850 ELECTION AND ITS AFTERMATH Whigs suffered severe losses in the House by the time the midterm congressional elections were over. They lost 21 seats, producing a House of 88 Whigs to 140 Democrats (plus 5 Free Soilers). In the Senate, only a single seat was lost, but the Whigs were still on the short end of a 35–24 Democratic majority (with 3 Free Soilers). At the state level, Whig performance was even worse. By the end of 1851, there were Whig governors in only 5 of the 31 states. Whigs controlled both legislative houses in a mere 4 states, compared to 16 for the Democrats.38 By now, Holt wrote, “[e]ven some of Fillmore’s greatest admirers . . . no longer believed that his twin goals of saving the country and the Whig party were compatible. To secure the former, they advocated abandoning the latter for a bipartisan Union party of pro-Compromise Whigs and Democrats.”39 The president opposed the idea, precisely because he thought he could save the party by saving the country. Webster, on the other hand, who had his own ambitions for 1852 and was angered by the apostasy of northern Whigs, called openly for a Union Party. Even Clay endorsed a new party and declared he would join if the alternative was the incorporation of abolitionism into Whig principles. Continued resistance to the fugitive slave law, he said, would lead to two new parties, one supporting the union, the other opposed to it. The idea of a Union Party also had its boosters in the South, among pro-Compromise, antisecessionist Whigs and Democrats. A large Union
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coalition in Georgia and some other southern states was joined by “[t]he vast majority of Whigs and half of the Democrats” in that state, but it did not last, Holt found. Most Democrats slowly returned to the fold; “many Georgia Whigs, in contrast, would never return to their old party.”40 Similar developments occurred in Mississippi and Alabama. Good Whig showings in some other southern states in 1851 damped down sentiment for a new party, but it remained strong in other parts of the South and among many pro-Compromise northerners. The Union movement lingered on awhile but went into suspended animation until Fillmore himself revived it in 1856. THE 1852 ELECTION Poor Whig results in the off-year elections led many in the party to look to 1852 for salvation. Economic conditions, bolstered by booming railroad construction, foreign investment, and California gold strikes (whose annual value was soon to exceed the revenues of the federal government) appeared favorable to Whig prospects. But who should be the presidential nominee? Webster, actively promoting himself even though he was still a member of Fillmore’s cabinet, was opposed by anti-Compromisers in the North and had few southern backers. Fillmore himself was initially ambivalent about running and did nothing to advance himself. The Whigs had ridden to victory in 1840 and 1848 on the backs of military heroes, and General Winfield Scott certainly fit that job description. But Scott’s supporters, all Compromise opponents, had done badly in the elections in every state where they promoted his candidacy in their own campaigns. Whig voters were roused to enthusiasm, and high turnout at the polls, only when there were sharp differences between the party and its Democratic opposition. Since the Jackson era, the Democratic Party was the driver of American politics, and Whigs succeeded only when they could effectively mobilize those who opposed the Democracy; when they could not, other anti-Democratic parties arose to do the job. The political system, however, was increasingly characterized by sectional rather than party differences. In both the North and the South, the Compromise brought together bipartisan coalitions of both supporters and opponents. In such circumstances, what role was there for the national Whig Party? A successful campaign in 1852 was required to justify the party’s continued existence. Strong leadership would have built on the strengths of the Whig base while campaigning for support from medial voters—perhaps through proposals to deal with growing public fears roused by the influx of immigrants. Such leadership was absent from the 1852 Whig presidential
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When Political Parties Die
campaign. The candidate and his campaign managers were to commit a fatal error that antagonized and undercut the Whig base. Clay, now in his middle seventies, had no taste for another campaign, particularly since he believed 1852 would be a Democratic year. Webster, only a few years younger, saw that year as his last chance and pursued his campaign even at the risk of antagonizing the president in whose cabinet he served. With little support among Whigs outside New England, Webster saw his best chance in a Union Party, but prospects for that new party crumbled in early 1852 as southern Union groupings disintegrated. Perhaps what killed the idea of a Union Party was that there was nothing to oppose it, and parties in the Second Party System survived on opposition; apart from a few southern secessionists, nobody at that time was against preservation of the union. But that did not mean there was no role for another third party. The Free Soilers were still there to mobilize antislavery, anti-Compromise voters, although many of their supporters, especially in New York, seemed to be returning to the Democratic Party. A political voice for nativism still lay ahead. Fillmore, who had been rampantly ambiguous about seeking a full term, finally dropped a broad hint in January that he might run after all. Although he was a New Yorker, southern Whigs found Fillmore attractive because of his support for the Compromise, but they insisted that any candidate they supported must endorse “finality,” that is, a conclusive end to attacks on slavery. In the North, anti-Compromise forces detested Fillmore. Those who supported the Compromise liked him but feared he could not win. Once again, the argument that a fresh military face was needed if the party was to prevail in 1852 seduced many Whigs who might otherwise have opted for the president. Winfield Scott was a “political general” whose ambitions exceeded his astuteness. There was nothing that he could say on slavery-related issues that would not get him into trouble: If he supported finality, he would antagonize the North; if he opposed the Compromise, he would alienate the South and half the North; if he supported it, he would lose the other half. The problem Scott and his managers confronted was that the southern demand for a written statement contradicted what was otherwise his best strategy—simply saying nothing. This problem could not be finessed, and it harmed Fillmore as well as Scott. Fillmore could not be nominated if southern Whigs stayed away from the convention or abandoned the party; Scott could be nominated without southern support, but how could he win the election on northern votes alone? In the end, the southerners allowed themselves to be mollified by a conciliatory, pro-Compromise platform (denounced by many antislavery
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119
northerners), but the Whig convention reached the 53rd ballot before the nomination was resolved. By insisting on remaining in the contest, Webster had prevented either Fillmore or Scott from winning a majority until that point. Without Webster’s stubbornness, Fillmore probably would have been the nominee; instead, the nomination went to General Scott. Fillmore’s secretary of the navy, William Graham of North Carolina, was the vice presidential nominee. Meanwhile, the Democratic convention nominated Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire and William King of Alabama on a strongly proCompromise platform. The two parties therefore had similar planks on the Compromise, and both avoided any reference to finality. The failure of the Whigs to differentiate a clear difference with the Democracy on this crucial national issue would prove deadly. There were no economic issues on which Whigs could run in 1856. Times were prosperous, but the credit went to the vibrancy of the private sector that seemed little affected by government policies. But, to Whig discomfiture, social issues began to make themselves felt. TEMPER ANCE, IMMIGR ATION, AND CATHOLICISM The temperance movement was rising rapidly across the country and the “Maine law,” imposing total prohibition of alcoholic-beverage manufacture, sale, and consumption, was being actively promoted as a model in many other states. Northern Whigs, wrote Holt, were especially susceptible to zealous pressure from prohibitionists “because their core electorate, the self-defined ‘respectable’ middle classes who prided themselves on their sobriety, their female-centered home life, and their regular attendance at Protestant churches, enthusiastically took up the cry for prohibition.”41 On the other hand, “wets” among Whigs and others were offended that they should be told how to conduct their personal lives. There was also the danger that the temperance issue could rouse an immigrant vote that, though heavily Democratic, had been largely somnolent. The number of immigrants was surging, with nearly half a million from Europe just since 1845, most of them from Ireland and Germany. A huge number had satisfied residence requirements by 1852 and would be eligible to vote. Scott’s managers felt they needed to find a way to either hold the immigrant vote down or get a much larger share than Whigs had heretofore. The arrival in New York of Hungarian rebel exile Louis Kossuth was a vast complication. Kossuth took the country by storm, drawing vast throngs to hear him speak wherever he went. He urged the formation
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When Political Parties Die
of an Anglo-American alliance to attack the Austrian Empire and free the Hungarian people. Political leaders, of course, recognized the absurdity of his proposal, but German and other immigrants applauded it. The Irish, on the other hand, wanted no part of an American alliance with Great Britain for any purpose. (Southerners, with their own fears of slave rebellions, intensely disliked calls for uprisings of any kind.) Moreover, Kossuth’s appeal to fight the Catholic Hapsburgs was perceived by the Catholic Church’s US hierarchy as an assault on Catholicism. The clergy’s resistance to Kossuth’s ideas plus the temperance issue that Irish immigrants strongly opposed led Whigs to believe that at least the Irish vote might be winnable. Furthermore, perhaps German Catholics could be separated from Protestant Germans, particularly in the Great Lakes states where German immigrants predominated. Scott tried to capitalize on all this. He himself was not Catholic—he could never have been nominated if he was—but he was sympathetic to Catholicism, and his daughter, a convert, was a nun. To win Catholic votes, Whigs falsely charged that Pierce was anti-Catholic. Scott spoke often of his personal fondness for the Irish and sought immigrant votes by proposing to shorten the naturalization period for immigrants who served in the armed services.42 The ploy backfired. Nativists were antagonized by Scott’s affinity to Catholicism but feared that attacks on Catholics would propel them, particularly immigrants, into the Democratic column. They therefore tried to split the Whig vote by printing Webster’s name for president on party ballots in Pennsylvania (where they were particularly strong) and in New Jersey and New York. The Whigs’ attempt to woo Catholic votes in 1852 was unavailing. William Prendergast wrote that neither Scott’s promise to liberalize the naturalization period nor the attack on Pierce seems to have pried Catholics away from the Democratic ticket. On the contrary, according to the New York Herald, the Whig strategy lost two Protestant votes for each Catholic vote it gained. . . . To Catholics, the Whigs and their candidate lacked credibility. In his quest for the presidential nomination going back to 1840, Scott had cultivated the support of nativists. . . . And, in the two previous presidential campaigns Whigs had joined in alliances with the foes of Catholicism. In 1848, the Native American party had been the first to endorse Zachary Taylor for president.43
Overall, the November election was a rout of Whig hopes. Scott carried only Vermont, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Tennessee, for a total
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of 42 electoral votes. His share of the popular vote set a new Whig low— under 44 percent. Pierce won almost 51 percent of the popular vote and 254 electoral votes. The Free Soil candidate, John Hale, took just under five percent. Once again, the Free Soilers affected the outcome in several states by capturing more votes than Pierce’s margin over Scott, New York and Ohio among them, but it would have made no difference in the national outcome. Pierce’s victory was overwhelming. He carried in with him a House of 159 Democrats to 71 Whigs (and 4 others). The Senate of the 33rd Congress was controlled by Democrats 38–22 (plus 2 others). It was the Whig Party’s worst performance in a presidential election, and it was the last in which they would compete. Coming on top of a series of state and congressional losses that began in 1849, the 1852 outcome convinced many Whigs that their party was doomed. Moreover, the party was now leaderless. The deaths that year of the two lions of Whig politics symbolized the party’s coming demise: Henry Clay died on June 29, shortly after the Republican convention. Daniel Webster died in November, a week after the election. Scott was discredited by the magnitude of his defeat. The hesitant Millard Fillmore was now therefore the closest approximation to a national leader the Whigs had left. Several interesting observations can be derived from Table 5.3: First, over the course of the five elections, the Whigs won a slightly higher average share of the vote than the Democrats, even though the latter party won three of the five elections. Second, Clay, who lost in 1844, had a higher percentage of the vote than Taylor, who won in 1848; of course,
TABLE 5.3 Summary of Presidential Popular Vote Percentages, 1836–1852 1840
1844
1848
1852
Average
Whigs
1836 49.1a
52.9
48.1
47.3
43.9
48.3
Democrats
50.8
46.8
49.5
42.5
50.8
48.1
Others b
—
0.3
2.3
10.1
4.9
na
+11.7
+3.8
–4.8
–0.8
–3.4
na
Whig Change from Previous Election
Source: Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections, 2nd ed. (Washington: CQ, 1985), 330–333. Notes: (a) Combined percentages of all three Whig candidates. (b) Others are Liberty Party in 1840 and 1844; Free Soil Party in 1848 and 1852. Averages calculated by this author.
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When Political Parties Die
Taylor had a stronger third party to contend with than Clay, but the falloff between the two elections was smaller for the Whigs than for the Democrats. Third, the impact of the Free Soil Party appears to have hurt the Democrats in 1848 more than the Whigs, but less so in 1852, even though the Free Soilers’ share of the vote in the latter year was less than half of their 1848 percentage. Nonetheless, the Democrats survived; the Whigs did not. THE K ANSAS-NEBR ASK A BILL AND THE END OF THE WHIGS Despite their electoral failure, the Whigs fully expected they would at least be able to benefit from the same kinds of arguments over programs and patronage under Pierce that had beset their own and earlier Democratic administrations, and that by lying low, Democratic dissensions would hand them future victories. Their forecasts of intraparty Democratic disputes were accurate; where Whigs erred was in their expectation of being able to capitalize on these predictions. The political situation in 1853 was vastly different than it had been in the 1840s. Prominent Whigs had come to believe that, as a party, they were intellectually and politically bankrupt, and many chose to retire from public life. Horace Greeley, veteran New York journalist and Whig promoter, called on the party to disband and urged Whigs in Congress to ally themselves with Democrats who agreed with their positions. Former Senator Truman Smith, who had long functioned as a de facto national party chairman and had done more than anyone else to strengthen party organization, was now contemptuous of the party’s condition and prospects, telling another party leader that “the party is not worth preservation” and should “be broken down and put out of the way.”44 There was still a niche for opposition to the Democrats, but it was one the Whigs were decreasingly able, and in many cases willing, to fill. The Know Nothings were soon to move into the vacuum this created on ethnocultural issues, but even they were to have little to say when the next sectional issue, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, arose in 1854. Douglas, who had become the prime advocate for the Compromise of 1850 after Clay’s departure, was the Kansas-Nebraska bill’s author. His interests were personal as well as political, in that he had substantial investments in railroads and western real estate. He was particularly interested in constructing a rail line to the Pacific that would originate in Chicago, but he recognized that was not possible until territorial governments were organized in the region. Rapid population growth now made new territories
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feasible, but southern opposition had defeated an attempt to authorize a railway in the previous Congress. An obstacle to southern support was the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had barred the introduction of slavery north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes in the lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Under southern pressure, Douglas agreed to nullify that language, voiding the Missouri Compromise. The bill further declared that the Kansas Territory would include the lands directly west of Missouri. The larger area to the north that lay west of Minnesota and Iowa would be the Nebraska Territory. Each territory’s population would decide whether or not to allow slavery, but there was disagreement over whether popular sovereignty would be allowed during territorial status or not until the territory applied for statehood; in the end, this question was left to judicial interpretation. President Pierce endorsed the bill. A group of six congressional Free Soilers immediately denounced the Kansas-Nebraska bill and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as “a gross violation of a sacred pledge” in statements that appeared in a number of newspapers.45 An opposition movement gradually began to swell across the North. Opponents derided Douglas’ claim that the Compromise of 1850 implicitly substituted popular sovereignty for the Missouri Compromise. They attacked southerners for abandoning promises whenever convenient, noted William Gienapp, charging that the bill “was merely one step in a larger scheme to extend slavery and make the country a slaveholding republic” with the goal of “Africanizing the whole of the American hemisphere.”46 These attacks, initially by Free Soilers and then by growing numbers of other northerners, said Holt, now made passage of the bill, to which some southern Whigs had previously been indifferent, “a matter of southern honor, just as resistance to the Wilmot Provision had been.”47 Whigs in the South could not afford to let Democrats get between them and regional “honor,” and all but one of them (with three absent) voted with Democrats for Senate passage by a vote of 37–14. The bill then went to the House, where delaying tactics stalled it until May, when it passed 113– 100. Northern Whigs in both houses opposed it. Northern Democrats in the House divided almost evenly on the bill. Southern Whigs were also divided on it but provided the votes needed for passage. Pierce soon signed it into law. Northerners were outraged by the Kansas-Nebraska bill’s enactment. Free Soilers now began to pressure northern Whigs to renounce their southern colleagues and join in a fusion movement to create a new antislavery party. In fact, such a party, the Republicans, had already been formed
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When Political Parties Die
in Wisconsin and several other states. With the 1854 congressional elections looming and “[w]ith eyes on the election of 1856, [northern] Whig leaders had either to effect a merger between nativists and anti-slavery Republicans, or choose between them, for they despaired of running candidates under the tattered Whig banner,” according to Roy Nichols and Philip Klein.48 THE K NOW NOTHING SURGE Sectionalism had died down somewhat after antipathy toward the 1850 Compromise tapered off, only to be replaced as a source of Whig desperation by the surge of antiimmigrant, anti-Catholic resentment and the temperance movement. The rise of nativism was a direct reflection of burgeoning immigration into the United States. The earliest colonists had been British, and their descendents were no doubt a core of the nativists. The number of immigrants who poured into the United States between 1820 and 1850 grew at nearly double the rate (441 percent) as the total population (242 percent). Table 5.4 shows this accelerating increase and its European sources.
TABLE 5.4 US Immigration and Its Major Sources, 1820–1850
Germany
Other Western Europe
3.6
1.0
0.5
4.9
0.5
0.7
1.2
2.7
2.0
1.3
9.0
20.9
8.3
3.4
80.1
2.6
39.4
29.7
8.0
114.4
109.3
19.2
44.8
34.9
10.4
370.0
308.3
51.1
164.0
78.9
13.1
Total Europe
Year
Total
Britain
1820
8.4
7.7
2.4
1825
10.2
8.5
2.1
1830
23.3
7.2
1835
45.4
42.0
1840
84.1
1845 1850
Ireland
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975). (Numbers in thousands, rounded.) Comments: Other significant sources of immigration did not occur until later years. Sizeable immigration from Italy and China, for example, did not begin until the middle 1850s; and from Mexico, other Latin American and Caribbean countries, and Japan until the early 1900s.
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125
Antiimmigrant resentment was a matter of competitive economics, just as it was in both northern working-class opposition to slavery and bias against freed slaves. Willing to work for less, immigrants (and ex-slaves) frequently took jobs that otherwise would have gone to the native-born. Citing a study by Robert Vogel, Holt asserted that “the massive railroad construction between 1849 and 1854 helped cause the Know Nothing outburst by bringing immigrant construction crews into areas that had never seen a foreigner and by destroying the jobs of workers in communities hitherto dependent on water transportation.” Then, when recession struck in 1854–1855, these new immigrants competed with long-time residents for a shrinking number of jobs.49 In addition to differences of language, accent, and culture, and their more-or-less voluntary segregation, there was also a difference of religion, most notably among the Irish, who were the predominant immigrant group, but also among many Germans. Historic animosities between Protestants and Catholics in Europe translated across the Atlantic, aggravated by the increase in the number of Catholic adherents. See Table 5.5. According to Nichols and Klein, resentful Protestants, angered by allegations like that attributed, in 1850, to the Archbishop of New York “that the Pope planned to convert all inhabitants of the United States to Catholicism,” rioted and burned Catholic churches.50 Protestants were also infuriated in 1853 by Catholic clerical demands for equal treatment and funding from state and local authorities for Catholic and public schools. A visit to America later that year by a papal nuncio provoked more rioting
TABLE 5.5 The American Catholic Population, 1790–1850 Percentage of Total Population
Increase in Native Catholic Populationa
Increase in Immigrant Catholic Population a
Year
Number of Catholics
1790
35,000
1.0
—
—
1820
195,000
2.0
—
—
1840
663,000
3.9
95,400
240,000
1850
1,606,000
6.9
198,900
726,100
Source: William B. Prendergast, The Catholic Voter in American Politics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999), Tables 1-1 & 1-2. Note: (a) Data for decade ending in year shown.
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When Political Parties Die
and nearly led to his murder. Both parties were seen as flouting the views of the native Protestant majority—the Whigs by Scott’s pander to immigrants and Catholics in 1852 and the Democrats by President Pierce’s appointment of a Catholic as postmaster general. Resentments against immigrants, Catholic or not, had been rising for a number of years but reached a critical point in 1850 when nativists, initially in New York and other eastern cities, began to form secret lodges. The “Know Nothing” lodges were dedicated to the preservation of republicanism and traditional American society, both of which were perceived as under threat from immigrants and Catholics. Sworn to silence about their rituals and activities, members were instructed that, if asked, they were to say that they “knew nothing” about the organization, hence their popular name. The Know Nothings soon transformed themselves into a new American Party. In rural areas, they allied themselves with the temperance movement. The Know Nothings endorsed Maine-type prohibition legislation in a number of states in 1854. Northern lodges also opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act; however, this was not yet a national position and would divide the Know Nothings from their southern lodges when it later became one. At least as important to their success was their intense opposition to the existing parties and the manner in which they conducted politics. The Know Nothings and their American Party thus were a contradictory incarnation of antipartyism in the process of becoming a political party. Despite that position, the rapid growth of the American Party and its ethnocultural issues soon rivaled, and in some areas eclipsed, the KansasNebraska issue. The Know Nothings proved exceptionally adept at infiltrating and controlling state political conventions of Whigs and of groups seeking to establish fusion parties among Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers. Later, some politicians would attempt the same maneuver, enlisting their supporters to join local Know Nothing lodges and state councils, in order to take them over. (After the 1854 election, Fillmore and his allies undertook their own infiltration attempt with the intent of converting the Know Nothings into a Union Party.) Whig leaders, still trying to hold their party together and be a competitive force in the 1854 elections, Holt reported, “collided with a burgeoning Know Nothing movement that abruptly shattered all calculations based on the potential impact of ‘this Nebraska business’ and that threatened, far more seriously than did the entreaties from Free Soilers for a new antislavery organization, to disembowel the Whig Party.”51 Because the party system was now rapidly fragmenting, it is difficult to say who won the 1854 elections, but it was apparent to Gienapp who lost.
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127
“There were two clear casualties of the 1854 election, the Pierce administration and the Whig party.”52 Democrats were damaged by the loss of two-thirds of their northern seats, but the most severe injury was to the president’s political credibility, which quickly led others in the party, notably Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan, to begin planning their own candidacies for 1856. As for the Whigs, their destruction, begun after the 1852 loss, “climaxed in 1854. Almost everywhere the party met defeat as vast numbers of former supporters deserted for new connections.”53 Wide and confusing arrays of anti-Democratic groups were now on the scene: Fusion parties here, Republicans there, Free Soilers and Know Nothings elsewhere—plus Fillmore’s new attempt at a Union Party seeking to take over the Know Nothings from within and without. The fragmentation of the party system was vividly demonstrated when the 34th Congress convened. The new House, Holt wrote, comprised “anti-Nebraska Democrats, who clung to the Democracy even as they opposed Pierce, straight Whigs, Know Nothing / Whigs, Know Nothing / Democrats, Know Nothings of Free Soil or nonpartisan background, and anti-Nebraska fusionists, many of whom by December 1855 sought an exclusively northern and overtly antisouthern Republican party.”54 Fillmore attempted a resuscitation of the Whig Party in 1856 by running for president under the “Whig–American” label, a repackaging of his Union Party. By that time, however, most Whig voters had migrated elsewhere, mostly to the new Republican Party. Fillmore won less than 22 percent of the vote, carrying the single state of Maryland. Other anti-Democratic fragments came together in that year’s elections under the Republican banner, nominating John C. Fremont for president against Buchanan, the Democratic candidate. Running only in the North, Fremont still won a third of the popular vote and 114 electoral votes, carrying all of New England plus a group of states that stretched from New York to Iowa. Four years later, in a northern sectional victory, the first Republican president would be elected against badly divided Democratic opposition (as shown in Table 5.6). Abraham Lincoln won no southern states but swept the North. His election precipitated southern secession and the Civil War. THE WHIG RISE AND FALL As shown in Table 5.7, Whigs held a majority in the House in only the 27th and 30th Congresses. Their high point was in the former when they controlled 133 seats. Thereafter, they ebbed and flowed until after the 1854 elections, when those members elected as Whigs became Republicans as
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When Political Parties Die
TABLE 5.6 Presidential Elections, 1856–1864 Electoral Votes
Popular Vote Percentage
Fremont (Republican)
114
33.1
Buchanan (Democrat)
174
45.3
8
21.5
Lincoln (Republican)
180
39.9
Douglas (Democrat)
12
29.5
Breckinridge (Southern Democrat)
72
18.1
Bell (Constitutional Union)
39
12.6
212
55.1
21
44.9
1856
Fillmore (Whig-American) 1860
1864 Lincoln (Republican) McClellan (Democrat)
Source: Congressional Quarterly, CQ Guide to U.S. Elections, 5th ed., 682–684 & 767–769. Note: Electoral vote totals varied in each year because of (a) the admission of new states (Minnesota, 1858; Oregon, 1859) and (b) the exclusion of the Confederate states from voting in 1864.
the 34th Congress convened. In the Senate, the number of Whigs never exceeded 25, and they controlled that body only in the 27th and 28th Congresses (1841–1845). By December 1855, when the new Congress convened, only a few senators retained their Whig affiliation before later becoming Republicans as most of their party colleagues already had. As for the Know Nothings and their American Party, life was brief. They reached their peak in the House in 1855–1857, fading quickly afterward. They were a transitional party, between the dying Whigs and the new Republican Party. Primarily an ethnocultural voice during a brief respite from sectionalism with no time to become entrenched, the Know Nothings were washed into the new antislavery party that swept the North after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In Gienapp’s words, . . .[T]he Know Nothings served as the bridge between the death of the Whig party and the growth of the Republican Party. By providing a focus
TABLE 5.7 Party Composition of the US House, 1835–1863 1835– 1837– 1839– 1841– 1843– 1845– 1847– 1849– 1851– 1853– 1855– 1857– 1859– 1861– 1837 1839 1841 1843 1845 1847 1849 1851 1853 1855 1857 1859 1861 1863 Whigs
75
100
109
142
72
79
116
108
85
71
0
0
0
0
Democrats
143
128
125
98
147
142
110
113
127
157
83
132
83
44
Republicans
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
90
116
108
American
0
0
0
0
0
6
1
1
0
0
51
14
5
0
Other
24
14
8
2
4
0
3
10
21
6
100a
1
34
31
Whig change
+75
+25
+9
+33
–70
+7
+37
–8
–23
–14
–71
NA
NA
NA
Republican change
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
+90
+26
–8
Source: http://clerk.house.gov/house_history/party div.html. Changes computed by this author. Note: (a) These were a scattered array elected from miscellaneous parties, most of whom switched to the Republican Party by the time Congress convened in December 1855.
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When Political Parties Die
for the forces that destroyed the Jacksonian alignment, the American movement was primarily responsible for the Whig party’s demise. The nativist order enjoyed a brief period of ascendancy, but it in turn was destroyed by the sectional forces that produced the Republican party. Different political forces, in other words, were responsible for the disintegration of the second party system on the one hand and the ultimate form and direction that the third party system assumed on the other.55
After 1854, a few northern state Whig organizations survived the disintegration of the national party for a brief time by focusing on state and local issues, but ultimately they all migrated into the new Republican Party. In the South, Whigs shattered and were briefly replaced by Know Nothings. Thereafter, interparty politics in the region largely disappeared; there was no one for southern Democrats to oppose except each other. Table 5.8 shows the increase in Whig governors (and Whig power at the state level) up to 1848, their gradual decline thereafter, and their replacement from 1854 on by various other parties. The last northern Whig governor was elected in Rhode Island in 1855. He was reelected the following year as a Republican with American Party endorsement. Among southern and border states, Georgia elected its last Whig governor in 1845, North Carolina in 1848, and Tennessee in 1851. Alabama, by then part of the Confederacy, elected a Whig governor in 1863 and 1865. Republican entrenchment at the gubernatorial level began in 1854, the year of the party’s founding, and overlapped with the Know Nothings’ American Party through 1856, after which the latter merged into the Republican Party. The number of Republican governors elected reached 10 in 1859 and 1860 but then declined when minor parties won statehouses as the Civil War proceeded. It is significant that the number of Democrats elected dropped even more substantially during this period, mirroring that party’s declines in the US House. Whig decline and Republican entrenchment proceeded at the local level as well, as shown by the nationwide biannual summaries of party affiliations in state legislatures in Table 5.9. Whigs held a majority of total seats only in 1837 and 1847 and also outnumbered the Democrats (although with only a plurality) in 1849. From 1837 through 1849, the Whig share of state legislative seats never fell below 46 percent, dropped to its lowest percentage ever in 1851, but then climbed back nearly to the 1835 level. (Unfortunately, data for the American Party were not identified as such in the compilation used as a source for Table 5.9, which provides numbers for only two “other” parties each year without identifying those parties. It may be assumed that most of
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131
TABLE 5.8 Results of Gubernatorial Elections by Party, 1845–1863 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 Whigs
5
7
5
10
4
3
3
2
2
3
1
Democrats
7
6
9
4
11
9
10
13
13
3
6
Independents
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
American
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
5
Republican
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
3
3
Fusion
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
Equal Rights
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Union
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 Whigs
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
Dems.
6
9
2
8
3
3
2
1
Ind. Dem.
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
Amer.
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Repub.
6
9
7
10
10
6
6
5
Fusion
1
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
Other Rep.
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
3
Union
0
0
0
0
0
2
2
3
Source: Calculated from data in Congressional Quarterly, CQ Guide to U.S. Elections, 5th ed., 1477–1539. Note: This table summarizes the results of elections (not governors in office) in the year shown. Columns do not have equivalent totals because of (a) increases in the number of states, (b) variations in gubernatorial terms (ranging from one to four years), and (c) changes in those terms during this period. 1863: One Whig was elected in Alabama in 1863 and reelected in 1865.
those designated as “other” party were probably Free Soilers in 1851 and Know Nothings in 1855.) Republican entrenchment proceeded apace after 1855. Republicans had a plurality of seats in state legislative bodies in 1857, and an absolute majority from 1859 on, although the data for the Civil War years (1861–1865) were for the North only. Even in the prewar year of 1859, the unpopularity
TABLE 5.9 Party Affiliations in State Legislatures, 1835–1865 1835
1837
1839
1841
1843
1845
1847
1849
1851
1853
1,200
1,211
1,310
1,481
1,427
1,449
1,664
1,543
1,253
1,321
Republicans
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
Democrats
1,529
967
1,478
1,551
1,621
1,472
1,536
1,448
1,420
1,638
162
9
14
2
7
29
32
224
692
153
Whigs
Others Total
2,819
2,189
2,805
3,033
3,065
2,961
3,234
3,215
3,375
3,112
42.57%
55.32%
46.70%
48.83%
46.56%
48.94%
51.45%
47.99%
37.13%
42.45%
1855
1857
1859
1861
1863
1865
Whigs
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
Republicans
519
1,264
1,432
1,048
1,903
1,962
Democrats
1,030
1,158
884
456
637
648
759
226
155
391
167
9
Whig Percentage
Others Total Republican Percentage
2,320
2,659
2,471
1,894
2,707
2,600
22.37%
47.54%
57.95%
55.33%
70.30%
75.46%
Source: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, Study 16, “Partisan Division of American State Governments.” Annual data were originally compiled by Walter Dean Burnham for each state. For purposes of simplicity and clarity, data are aggregated here for odd-numbered years only. Data in this table have been calculated from those in the Burnham database. Other parties are not differentiated or identified for state legislators in the database; see text. Because of the inadequate quality of state records from this period, these data cannot be considered wholly authoritative, as indicated, for example, by the widely varying numbers of total legislators; Burnham’s database is, however, the only nationwide one of its kind in existence for this period. Database decoded by Alice Barrett Mack.
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133
of Democrats produced a historic low-water mark among the legislatures of all states, declining still further during the war years. CONCLUSIONS Wholly apart from the effects of particular issues, the Whigs always labored under a party disadvantage of leadership and organization relative to the Democrats in most states and nationally. This liability had its origins in the ideological strains that came together to produce American Whiggery. First, there was a strong adherence to antipartyism, especially among the Anti-Masons and the evangelical Protestants. Party organization implies a degree of party discipline. Yet, to these groups, accepting discipline for the sake of winning elections meant foregoing liberty of conscience, a principle they were unwilling to abandon. Second, and partly in consequence, Whigs frequently had difficulties in agreeing on specific issues. Their ideology, embodied in their very name, embraced resistance to executive power, which they equated with British royal despotism. They could therefore often agree on what they opposed, but less often on what they supported. Third, their initial impetus, opposition to concentration of presidential power, did not easily translate into state issues and the development of strong state and local Whig parties. State and local issues were typically far more important to individual voters than were federal ones, and Whigs sometimes had difficulties developing state issues and causes that clearly differentiated them from Democrats. Without such issues, it was hard to motivate the creation and maintenance of strong local party organizations. Despite their congressional luminaries (primarily Clay and Webster), the Whigs had a scarcity of leaders capable of effective party-building; Thurlow Weed in New York and Truman Smith nationally were the principal exceptions. Democrats had few such difficulties. Martin Van Buren in particular learned the importance of local political organization from his experience in the Albany Regency, and he preached the virtues and importance of party organization until the end of his life. To the extent that any individual can be considered the father of the concept of strong party organizations and local grassroots voter mobilization in American political life, it is Van Buren. Democrats parted company with Van Buren on particular issues, especially after he left the White House, but they accepted and implemented his belief in strength and electoral success through party organization at all levels. This is perhaps the key reason why the Democratic Party was able to survive the political chaos of the 1850s when the Whigs could not. As a
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When Political Parties Die
party, the Democrats were as unpopular as the Whigs, but the loyalty and strong organization of the Democratic base sustained them. Whigs, substantially and relatively, lacked these assets. Despite the severity of their losses in 1854, the Democratic Party was therefore able to come back in 1856 and win the presidency against energetic opposition. Democrats lost in 1860 because they were badly divided; Lincoln was elected with less than 40 percent of the popular vote and won only northern states. By the early 1850s, a principal characteristic of the Second Party System was not two major parties, but four—two in the North and two in the South. Increasingly over time, northern Democrats and northern Whigs came to have more in common with each other than with their counterparts in the South. This was also true of southern Whigs and Democrats. What united northern and southern Whigs at the beginning of the Second Party System were certain common principles, chiefly opposition to a dominant national executive and to centralized governmental financial authority, and belief in a federal role to promote economic development. What held them together at the end was no more than the desire for federal patronage spoils obtainable only by winning the presidency. Disagreements and clashes were the sustenance of the Second Party System. Modern exhortations for political consensus would have been alien to the electorate after 1824. It was intense party competition, Holt observed, that both northerners and southerners believed protected the republican values “they cherished most—self-government, freedom, and equality.”56 Citizens, he wrote, therefore expected political quarrels about different ways to attack problems and issues; that was the purpose of parties. Party health and popular faith in the political process therefore depended on the perception of party difference, which in turn depended on the reality—or at least the appearance—of interparty conflict. As long as the parties seemed different from each other, voters viewed them as viable vehicles through which to influence government. . . . If conflict sustained the old two-party system, what destroyed it was the loss of the ability to provide interparty competition on any important issue at any level of the federal system. . . . What destroyed the Second Party System was consensus, not conflict.57
Many Whig leaders understood this, and they understood further that an increase in consensus endangered their party more than it did the Democrats. The question, therefore, is why they allowed a reduction in conflict to develop. Faced with mounting crises and calls for southern secession, leaders like Clay and Fillmore believed it was more important to save the union than to save the party, and certainly more important than
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135
the eradication of slavery. Their patriotism on the sectional divide helped doom their party but, in the end, did not prevent the war to come. To the contrary, the loss of faith among voters in the ability of party competition to sustain republican values may have exacerbated sectional divisions, Holt wrote: Between the late 1820s and early 1850s, the sectional conflict had been contained and prevented from disrupting the nation. As long as men had placed loyalty to their own party and defeat of the opposing party within their own section ahead of sectional loyalty, neither the North nor the South could be united into a phalanx against the other. . . . By the end of 1853, the danger was that, with faith in the old parties eroded, men might reverse their priorities between party and section and change the methods they used to secure republican government.58
The Whig elite’s failure to oppose the Democrats effectively thereby enabled the sectional divisions to come to the fore and brought secession and war that much closer. On the ethnocultural questions, Whig motivations were not a matter of patriotism so much as tactical politics. Whigs sought, unsuccessfully, to break into the surging immigrant and Catholic vote, as monolithically wedded to the Democratic Party of the day as the African American vote is today. A vital difference is that few of today’s white Republicans resent their party’s attempts at outreach to blacks. In the 1850s, however, the reaction within the Whig base was furious, a sense of betrayal of the values Protestants and nativists held dear. In sum, the prime cause of the disalignment of the Whig Party was the multidimensional failures of party leadership on national-identity cleavage issues. The problem of the dearth of leadership has been blurred by debates about the relative importance of sectional and ethnocultural issues to Whig disalignment. It is worth attempting to sweep away the political murk of the 1850s to clarify each of these dimensions of leadership failure. First, progressive exacerbation of sectional issues did grave damage to both parties, but to the Whigs especially. Cooperation between Whigs and Democrats in passing the Compromise of 1850 demonstrated to the Whig base in the North that the party no longer was playing its expected role of opposing Democrats. Northern Whigs found that they could not appear to be any less opposed than northern Democrats to “the slave power.” They did not make the same mistake in the debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 that they had made in 1850—but by then it was too late to regain the confidence of the party’s core voter base. Whigs in the South, left by their northern colleagues to fend for themselves, felt the need to be as
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When Political Parties Die
militant as the Democrats in defense of southern culture and institutions, at the cost of eliminating the Whigs’ claim to a distinctive difference between the parties in the region. Stronger national party leadership that recognized the interdependence of the Whigs’ regional wings, both before and after 1850, might have approached legislation in ways that shored up both the northern and the southern parties, but such an effort was never undertaken. Second, on the long-festering ethnocultural issues of temperance, nativism, and anti-Catholicism that took center stage in 1852–1853, Whigs sought to ignore the problems as long as they could, and to conciliate and gain support from the extreme critics when they could not. Scott’s attempts in 1852 to ingratiate himself with Catholics and immigrants was a serious political blunder in the climate of his time and lost Protestant votes without gaining Catholic ones. The message to the Protestant and nativist elements of the Whig base was that the party could not be trusted to defend their interests. Whigs had never developed the urban organizational strength that would have permitted them to mobilize immigrants as the Democrats could. And the American Party would not have arisen had Whig leadership understood that it was far too late to outbid the Democrats for the surging immigrant vote. By 1854, these voters were part of the Democratic base, inaccessible by any Whig campaign. Third, what united Whigs, North and South, from their very beginnings was their opposition to the Democracy. In this, they were usually doomed to be America’s second party, rarely its first. The failures of Whig leaders in the 1850s to perform according to supporters’ expectations convinced the base electorate that the party had come loose from its moorings and that new vehicles were needed to oppose the Democratic Party. The rise of new anti-Democratic parties tore the Whigs apart in state after state, election after election, until even the most dedicated loyalists realized that the party no longer had the critical mass to survive. In Holt’s phrase, they “bled to death.”59 Fourth, another failure of party leadership that dated from the party’s beginnings was the inadequacy of a party-building organization, which left the Whig Party crippled in its long-term capabilities to compete effectively with the Democrats. Whigs were motivated in the near term by fear that, as a party, they would be “ruined”—the word appears often in the writings of individual Whigs—if they failed to win the next election.60 Such a focus on the immediate was an obstacle to constructing a party for the long term, as Van Buren had in the 1830s. Only Truman Smith came close among national Whig leaders (plus Thurlow Weed in New York) in
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137
recognizing what was required to building an enduring party, and he was finally beaten down by the insuperable challenges. The Whig base was consistently large but not strong. Its size is demonstrated by the fact that, from 1836 to 1850, the party averaged 48 percent in presidential elections, 44 percent in House elections, and 47 percent in state legislative membership. The Whigs’ liability was their leadership’s inability to persuade supportive interests to make the kind of lasting commitments to the party that Democratic interests did. Many would back Whig candidates in one election, only to run off in the next when a momentarily more exciting anti-Democratic party arose. The difference, after 1852, was that they fled for good. This fragility of the base did not have to equate with inevitable lethality. A glass will break if dropped on the floor, but if it is stored and treated carefully—that is, well “organized”—it will last indefinitely. The Whigs’ failure to organize adequately meant that they were unable to protect against their inherent weaknesses, as Weed was largely able to do in New York. Smith tried to persuade other state parties to organize, with small success. Most state party leaders declined to divert efforts from imminent elections to longer-term purposes. They could, for example, have attempted over the years to show local nativists why repeated Whig successes were in their overall economic or other interests. Such a program could not wait until nativists and other erstwhile supporters began to panic in the face of Scott’s ill-advised campaign. And so the Whig glass fell and shattered. Fifth and finally, these failures can be laid at the doorstep only of Whig leaders. The party’s core voters did not abandon the party until after they perceived that the party had abandoned them. The Whig Party’s sizable core base of voters stood with their party only so long as it was perceived to be the defender of their interests and an effective electoral competitor. When the party’s leadership failed in those roles, their supporters abandoned it and brought about the disalignment of the American Whig Party. Its successor party, the Republicans, quickly entrenched itself at all levels, becoming the predominant party of government for most of the next 70 years. NOTES 1. During the period of the American Whig Party’s life, its British namesake was in the process of amalgamating with the Radical grouping to form the Liberal Party. While the British Whigs were somewhat left of center, the American party represented more conservative interests. See Chapter 6.
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When Political Parties Die
2. In this chapter, the South refers to those states that later seceded (except for Tennessee, which is considered a border state). 3. James F. Hopkins, “Election of 1824,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, eds. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 1, 378. 4. Robert V. Remini, “Election of 1828,” in Schlesinger and Israel, History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 1, 414. 5. Ibid., 418. 6. Ibid., 429–431. 7. James Madison, “The Federalist, No. 10, November 22, 1787,” in Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 8. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the US, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 212. 9. Ibid., 231. 10. Quoted in ibid., 233. 11. Ibid., 235. 12. Ibid., 224–226. 13. Ibid., 236. 14. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14. 15. Ibid., 17. 16. Robert V. Remini, quoted in Joel H. Silbey, “Election of 1836,” in Schlesinger and Israel, eds., History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 1, 579. 17. Holt, American Whig Party, 24. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 26. 20. Ibid., 28–29. 21. Ibid., 32. 22. Holt, American Whig Party, 49. 23. Silbey, “Election of 1836,” 600. 24. Holt, American Whig Party, 61. 25. Ibid., 74, table 5. 26. Ibid., 76. 27. William Nisbet Chambers, “Election of 1840,” in Schlesinger and Israel, History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 1, 664. 28. Holt, American Whig Party, 121. 29. Ibid., 149. 30. Charles Sellers, “Election of 1844,” in Schlesinger and Israel, History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 1, 761. 31. Holman Hamilton, “Election of 1848,” in Schlesinger and Israel, History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 2, 866.
The Case of the American Whig Party 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.
43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.
139
Quoted in ibid., 869. Hamilton, “Election of 1848,” 896. Holt, American Whig Party, 414. Ibid., 553. Ibid., 543. Ibid., 596. Ibid., 672. Ibid., 599. Ibid., 607. Ibid., 699. William B. Prendergast, The Catholic Voter in American Politics: The Passing of the Democratic Monolith (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999), 42. Ibid. Quoted in Holt, American Whig Party, 771. William E. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 71. Ibid., 76–77. Holt, American Whig Party, 817. Roy F. Nichols and Philip S. Klein, “Election of 1856,” in Schlesinger and Israel, History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 2, 1013. Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 10. Nichols and Klein, “Election of 1856,” 1013. Holt, American Whig Party, 835. Gienapp, Republican Party, 161. Ibid. Holt, American Whig Party, 962. Gienapp, Republican Party, 444. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Norton, 1978), 138. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 138. Holt, American Whig Party, 839. Holt, American Whig Party.
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Chapter 6
The Case of the British Liberal Party
Over the course of several general elections from 1918 to 1924, Great Britain’s Liberal Party suffered a series of defeats from which it never recovered. Once the dominant party of British politics, the Liberals were permanently reduced to third-party status and ultimately merged with another minor party to form today’s Liberal Democratic Party. Beset by a series of domestic crises with which they could not cope, Liberal leaders had entered into a world war that aggravated the country’s socioeconomic cleavages and left them and their voter base severely divided. Among these cleavages were two religious divisions—between Irish Catholics and Protestants in England and Ulster, and between Anglicans and a broad spectrum of other religious denominations (collectively termed Dissenters or Nonconformists). Equally significant was the cleavage between the middle and upper classes on the one hand, and the working class on the other; class consciousness, though always present in British society, grew significantly among working people during the first two decades of the 20th Century and was important in the rise of the Labour Party. Still another social division separated suffragists—militant campaigners for enfranchising women—from those who believed that men should retain a monopoly on voting. Over a six-year period, a series of elections in which a substantially enlarged electorate participated resulted in the Liberals’ displacement as a major party by Labour, previously a minor party. Labour attracted the Liberal Party’s working-class constituency, while middle-class elements, including many newly enfranchised women voters, defected to the Conservatives.
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When Political Parties Die
ORIGINS AND RISE OF THE LIBER ALS The origin of the Liberals can be traced back to the 1830s, with the rise of various political reformers who became known as the Radicals. Gradually, over the next quarter century, they made common cause with the Whig faction of the aristocracy, and in the mid-1840s with a group of free-trade Conservative defectors. Although there were often personality and political differences among these groups, they began to identify themselves with a common label, “liberal,” which contrasted with the conservativism of the Tories. In 1859, these liberals resolved enough of their disputes to unite under the leadership of Lord Palmerston as a more-or-less modern and somewhat disciplined political party. During these years, these various groups were an inchoate lot. As Alan Sykes described them, “[t]he self-styled Liberals more closely resembled a shoal of fish, a swirling mass forever changing shape and composition, fragmenting and recombining but never a single unit.”1 The important elements of this piscine school merit a closer look. The Whigs were the oldest grouping, comprising those members of the aristocracy who, after the English Civil War and the Revolution of 1688– 1689, insisted that the powers of the restored monarchy be subject to parliamentary restraints. This is the reform impulse that connects the Whigs of the Glorious Revolution with the elements that combined to form the Liberal Party almost 200 years later. By the early 19th Century, the Whigs had become a centrist group situated between the Conservatives and the Radicals, willing to support modest social and economic changes. The Whigs, like the rightist Tories, were scions of the landowning families who historically had dominated British politics. The Radicals on the other hand, although they included some members of the aristocracy, were predominantly of the rising middle class. They sought extensive reforms in politics, public life, and the relationship of the individual to government and society. Many of their leaders were men, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, who had made (and were making) fortunes from businesses created as Britain industrialized. They were also fervent believers in the free-market teachings of Adam Smith and his followers. The Radicals were typically Dissenters (or Nonconformists), adherents to religious denominations other than the established Anglican Church. Not all were affluent; poorer groups also played a role, such as the Chartists, who, in 1832, demanded a set of political reforms that were intended to increase parliamentary responsiveness to economic and social grievances. Radicalism, under various names, became a permanent theme of leftist British political life, extending through socialism to Tony
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143
Blair’s “third way.” Indeed, the Radicals’ advocacy of capitalism unfettered by government, a concept ultimately abandoned by Liberals and Labourites, was to find a modern voice in the Conservative policies of Margaret Thatcher. Liberalism as the term is used in Britain and throughout Europe bears little resemblance to the liberalism of American politics and should not be confused with it. American liberalism is a left-of-center movement favoring active government intervention to achieve increased redistribution of economic assets and incomes and greater equality of social roles and classes. Its aspirations are, if not Marxist, akin to European social democracy. American liberals might more accurately be termed “progressives,” a substitute label they have become increasingly happy to adopt in an essentially center-right country. European liberalism, by contrast, has its roots in the Enlightenment and the great classical economic and social theorists of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Nineteenth-Century liberalism, as Eric Hobsbawm summarized it, perceived that “the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimize his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others, and ‘naturally’ recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges.”2 Such utilitarian thinking had earlier expressed itself in the writings of James and John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. It had “provided the sharpest of radical axes with which to chop down traditional institutions which could not answer the triumphant questions: is it rational? Is it useful? Does it contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number?”3 Adam Smith and David Ricardo had been classical liberalism’s founding economic prophets. Smith’s view of the social and economic benefits brought by the “invisible hand” of competition meant that “Progress was therefore as ‘natural’ as capitalism.”4 Ricardo’s analyses found flaws in Smith’s economic naturalism, primarily by focusing more on distribution than production, but they still enhanced the theoretical justifications for individualistic capitalism on which liberals seized, notably free trade and opposition to the concentration of land ownership. The gloomy demography of Thomas Malthus did not appreciably reduce liberals’ enthusiasm for libertarian individualism. Free trade particularly was always a fundamental Liberal tenet. As the Industrial Revolution evolved, Britain came to depend increasingly on imports of raw materials and food stuffs and on the export of finished goods over and above that which could be absorbed domestically. To protect
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When Political Parties Die
British farmers—that is to say, the landowning aristocracy—the protectionist Corn Laws were adopted as early as 1793 and strengthened during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The 1815 law in particular imposed tariffs on grain and food imports to prevent their prices from undercutting the domestic market, even after the war’s end. These laws became increasingly controversial among businesses because they raised costs and restricted trade; among workers because they produced high food prices; and among Dissenters because they subsidized the Church of England through its vast estates. Campaigns to repeal these protectionist statutes culminated in the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1839 (perhaps the first interest group to apply what today we would describe as grassroots lobbying techniques). The idea of free trade divided the Conservatives between its Cobdenite supporters and those who advocated a mercantilist economic nationalism— that is, policies to protect domestic businesses and insulate them from external competition. Free traders sought to open up global competition in order to provide consumers with enhanced products, greater competition, and lower prices. In Britain’s case, the objective was to encourage the import of low-cost agricultural and other raw materials, which British manufacturers could improve and export at job-creating profits. Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel finally won repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, but at the price of being driven out of the Conservative Party, which thereupon reverted to mercantilist-protectionist policies. Peel himself died in 1850. His free-trade followers gradually migrated to become, with the Whigs and the Radicals, the third strand of the Liberal Party. LIBER AL DOCTRINES Could this “swirling shoal of fish” share any common principles? As a philosophy or ideology, liberalism antedated the Liberal Party, just as it has survived the party’s demise. In Victorian England, it was the political expression of the Enlightenment of the previous century—summarized by Sykes as “faith in nature, reason, and the overwhelming importance of the individual. . . . Liberalism was preeminently a doctrine of opposition, whether to the pretensions of a monarch, a corrupted parliament, a selfserving aristocratic elite, an established church, or, indeed, any authority or regulation that restricted the legitimate liberty of the individual.”5 Whigs would not subscribe to all these tenets, but they saw constitutional liberty as the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and regarded Parliament as the custodian of the rights of all Englishmen. They also tended to have a more “metropolitan outlook” than the “country party” of
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145
Conservatives. Moreover, added G. R. Searle, “the patrician Whig landowners had always prided themselves on playing a skillful mediatory role between Crown and ‘people’, and the social unrest produced by population growth and industrialization gave them plentiful scope for exercising these particular talents.”6 The very word, “Whig,” came over time to mean not just a group of aristocratic families, “but was often applied to cautious and moderate Liberals, regardless of their social backgrounds.”7 The Radicals always remained what the word implies, reformers in the vanguard of social, economic, and political change. They helped achieve the abolition of “rotten boroughs”8 and actively supported every extension of the voting franchise from 1832 on. They attacked the “land monopoly” of the aristocracy and all that went with it, including primogeniture and low probate taxes, up through Lloyd George’s attempts at land reform. As the political voice of Dissent, they constantly assaulted the privileged position of the Church of England on almost every possible ground. They advocated greater morality in the Realpolitik of British diplomacy, and many of them were pacifists at one time or another. Searle noted that Cobden particularly, Adam Smith’s intellectual heir, “wanted the country’s political institutions and practices to be brought into harmony with its economic base, so that the importance of manufacturing and trading would be fully recognized,” and the agricultural bias of British policy and politics reduced.9 By the end of the Gladstone era and the 19th Century, wrote Vernon Bogdanor, the “fundamental Liberal aims” were “universal suffrage and the reform of the House of Lords.”10 Notwithstanding their detestation of feudalism and the land monopoly, the Radicals needed the alliance with the Whigs. Despite the political reforms of 1832 and later years, it would be decades before the Radicals— who subsequently took the name New Liberals—had sufficient power in Parliament to achieve their goals on their own. And even after 1886, when the Whigs abandoned the Liberal Party over Gladstone’s home rule bill for Ireland, the Liberals who remained often felt their absence. As Bogdanor summarized it, “the Whig/Liberal approach remained the dominant public philosophy in Britain at the turn of the century. Liberals believed that the cure for the ills of the political system lay not in confining or limiting democratic government, but in improving its quality.”11 THE AGE OF GLADSTONE The dominant figure of Victorian Liberalism for nearly 30 years was William Ewart Gladstone. First elected to the House of Commons in his early twenties as a Conservative, he left that party over the free-trade issue and
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remained formally apart from both Conservatives and Liberals for about a decade. His reputation was built on successful terms as chancellor of the exchequer under several prime ministers of both parties. Gladstone became Liberal Party leader in 1867 and prime minister the next year. He was to hold that office four times, on and off until his final retirement in 1894. (He retired for the first time in 1875 but then returned in 1880 in a campaign fought over the foreign policies of Benjamin Disraeli, his Conservative archrival.) As prime minister, Gladstone’s foreign policies had a strong moral tone, advocating amity among states based on free trade. This was in sharp contrast with the pragmatic diplomacy of his predecessor, Lord Palmerston. Many Whigs were more supportive of the international ventures of Disraeli, who alternated with Gladstone as prime minister for a time, than of the moralistic Whig leader. Between Palmerston and Gladstone, wrote Sykes, “they endowed the Liberal party with two conflicting approaches to international tension, a fundamental fault-line in the Liberal party throughout its history. . . . Belligerence was incompatible with Liberalism, but not with a particular strain of evangelical Radicalism, in which Britain became . . . ‘the knight-errant of the human race.’ ”12 On several occasions during his long tenure, Gladstone pursued advocacy of what today would be termed human-rights policies in various countries and crises. With the principal exception of the Crimean War, Britain avoided major armed conflicts until after he left office (although the Boer War followed swiftly thereafter). Domestically, Gladstone introduced the direct income tax on the affluent as a way to minimize the tax burden on the middle and working classes. He also sought on the one hand to reduce government intrusion in the economy, and on the other to expand the right to vote. In order to promote social stability, Gladstone preached the unity of Britain’s classes: Workers should be glad for capitalist profits since they produced job-creating capital; enterprise owners in turn, he maintained, were happy to see rises in workers’ wages and well-being. It was Panglossian Liberalism at its finest, but even leaders of the emerging trade unions were believers at the time in the doctrines of Adam Smith. As a result, Sykes said, Gladstone was the workers’ hero. Gladstone became the “people’s chancellor” and the “people’s William” because the policies of free trade, a non-interventionist, neutral, minimal state, low taxation, low military expenditure, religious liberty and constitutional progress, a moralist foreign policy and avoidance of foreign entanglements represented, in large measure, the vision that the various sections of
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the Liberal party, but especially the radical section, had of Liberalism as a political creed. The independence that began for working-class Radicals as a moral imperative extended into economic and political values, and translated in industrial society into collective self-help, trade unions, the extension of democracy and local self-government.13
Gladstone’s Liberals also eliminated most of the grievances of the Nonconformists, a core Liberal constituency. However, as religious issues declined in salience and Nonconformists became increasingly prosperous economically, they began to share the values of other middle-class voters, a phenomenon that was to have later repercussions for the Liberal Party.
GLADSTONE AND IRELAND The status of Ireland was Gladstone’s most tumultuous domestic issue, as it was to be for his successors until the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921, and in the violence besetting Northern Ireland for decades thereafter. Ireland was Britain’s first colony and arguably its most difficult. English conquests and Irish rebellions date at least as far back as 1171. Cromwell suppressed one such revolt in 1650 during the English Civil War, and the defeat of the Catholic King, James II, by Protestant William III took place in Ireland 40 years later at the Battle of the Boyne. Despite this long history of English dominance, Ireland was not formally annexed as part of the United Kingdom until 1801 (although Henry VIII had proclaimed himself king of Ireland in 1541). The Irish were separated from the rest of the British Isles by far more than water. Where the British were Protestant (and officially Anglican), Ireland was Catholic except in the six northern counties of Ulster where there was (and is) a Protestant majority. Ireland’s people were for a long time victims of religious, economic, and social oppression; it was not until 1829, for example, that Catholics were allowed to sit in Parliament. Land issues, difficult as they were in England, were even more controversial in Ireland, particularly problems of tenancy on estates owned by absentee Englishmen. Such difficulties were aggravated by Britain’s neglect of Ireland’s domestic needs—most notably the failure to assist when the potato famine struck in 1846, a disaster in which half the Irish population starved and died and many of the remainder fled to America. Ireland’s leaders, including its representation in Parliament, had long clamored for independence, or at least home rule, that is, self-government. Both Conservative and Liberal governments at Westminster, including Gladstone’s, had refused these pleas. Then, in the mid-1880s, Gladstone
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had a change of heart and endorsed home-rule legislation. However, not only did the bill fail in 1886, as also did his second bill in 1893, but it produced a breach in the Liberal Party. A largely Whig group, led by Joseph Chamberlain, opposed to any measure that would dilute the bond between Ireland and the rest of Britain, took the name Liberal Unionist and became a separate party, supported by many Nonconformists opposed to special treatment for Catholic Ireland. These Liberal Unionists voted with the Conservatives against home rule, although their Whig beliefs sometimes led them to support the Liberals on other issues. (They ran as a separate party in the elections of 1892 and 1895, and on a joint line with the Conservative Party in 1900. In 1906 and the two elections of 1910, Liberal Unionist and Conservative candidates ran under the Unionist banner. A formal merger occurred in 1912, resuming the Conservative Party name.) The departure of these 70-plus Liberal Unionists in 1886 made Gladstone politically dependent on the 85 members of the Irish Nationalist Party for his majority in the House of Commons. The Liberals lost that year’s election but returned in 1892 with a minority government kept in power only by the Irish Nationalists. The Conservatives and Liberal Unionists then won the 1895 and 1900 elections. Gladstone’s last year as prime minister was 1894. He died four years later. Ireland notwithstanding, his leadership of the Liberal Party was its golden age. To be sure, on occasion an expanding electorate ousted the party in favor of Conservative government (notably under Disraeli), and for several years Gladstone temporarily stepped aside from Liberal leadership and the prime ministry. But in the main, he and his party together shaped Britain’s middle and late Victorian era. As his biographer, Roy Jenkins, put it, Gladstone “was the quintessential statesman of [Queen Victoria’s] reign, its epitome and, almost as much as herself, its symbol. His death announced the conclusion of the Victorian age only a little less clearly than did her own two and a half years later.”14 THE PREWAR YEARS Gladstone’s party did not remain in office long past his retirement. His immediate successor as Liberal leader, Lord Rosebery, led the party to defeat in the 1895 elections, and he was replaced the following year by William Harcourt. Harcourt was succeeded in turn by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1899. Under him, the Liberals lost the election of 1900, but then in 1906 scored a sweeping victory. See Table 6.1. The 1900 election was significant in several respects. First, it reflected the unremitting antipathy of anti-Catholic Nonconformists to Irish home
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TABLE 6.1 1900 General Election Results Partya
Percentage of Vote Change b
Elected
Pctg. of Change b Total Seats c
Conservative & Liberal Unionist
50.3
+1.2
402
–9
60.0
Liberal
45.0
–0.7
183
+6
27.3
Labour
1.3
+0.3
2
+2
0.3
Irish Nationalist
2.6
–1.4
82
nc
12.2
Source: F.W.S. Craig, British Electoral Facts, 1832–1987 (Dartmouth, England: Parliamentary Research Services, 1989), Table 1.17. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Conservatives and Liberal Unionists ran on a single, Unionist ticket. (b) Changes from previous general election; by-elections excluded. (c) Total seats (670), includes 1 other affiliation (not shown).
rule and to the Liberal alliance in Commons with the Irish Nationalists. It therefore also reflected Dissenters’ continued electoral support for Conservatives and Unionists, which had first appeared in the 1895 election. Moreover, the middle classes generally, regardless of religious belief, were hostile to the doctrines of socialism and to trade unionism, to both of which many Radicals were sympathetic; this was despite the support of many socialist and union leaders for such Nonconformist goals as temperance. Gladstone’s successors lacked his ability to mute class cleavages and mobilize large segments of the electorate on Liberals’ behalf. In addition, the 1900 election was the first in which candidates running under a national Labour Party banner were elected to Parliament (although several individual trade unionists had won election independently in earlier years). Liberal leaders at the national level had gone to considerable lengths to foster the growth of labor unions and to remove legal impediments to their formation and growth. In 1892, for example, the Liberal leadership advocated monetary compensation for members of Parliament because, Sykes wrote, that “was essential if ever working-class representation was ever to become a reality in any numbers.”15 The party also sought to avoid three-way contests, where Labour candidates might have a good chance of defeating Conservatives. At the constituency level, however, class cleavages were more pronounced, and few local Liberal associations were willing to nominate working-class candidates, despite encouragement to do so from the national party leadership.
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A generational difference arose among union leaders, with older ones continuing to urge support for the “Lib-Lab” (Liberal-Labor) alliance. Younger leaders were more militant and increasingly believed that working-class goals could not be achieved without a political as well as an industrial strategy. The continued preference of local Liberal associations for middle-class candidates only played into this political militancy. Ramsey MacDonald, later to be the first Labour prime minister, believed that the Liberals were on the side of the “interests,” not the working class. Three “Independent Labour” candidates had been elected in 1892, and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) was formed the next year at a conference chaired by one of them, Keir Hardie. In 1895, the ILP ran 28 candidates but won only 1 percent of the vote and elected none. The ILP was more focused in 1900: It ran only 15 candidates but elected 2 (one each in England and Wales), increasing its share of the vote slightly (to 1.3 percent).16 Three issues were responsible for the resuscitation of the Liberal Party after 1900: First, revelations of appalling social conditions in South Africa after the Boer War were disastrous to the Conservative government, which had claimed great credit for the war itself. Second, government promotion of an educational reform was carried out in a way that alienated Nonconformists and drove them back to the Liberal Party. Third, advocacy of protectionist tariff reforms by Joseph Chamberlain, the former Liberal now in the Unionist government, unified many middle-class constituencies against the Unionists and in favor of the Liberal Party. The result was a great victory for Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals in the 1906 election. See Table 6.2. TABLE 6.2 1906 General Election Results Partya
Percentage Pctg. of of Vote Change b Elected Change b Total Seats c
Unionist
43.4
–6.9
156
–246
23.3
Liberal
49.4
+4.4
399
+216
59.6
Labour
4.8
+3.5
29
+27
4.3
Irish Nationalist
0.7
–1.9
82
nc
12.2
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.18. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Conservatives and Liberal Unionists ran on a single, Unionist ticket. (b) Changes from previous general election; by-elections excluded. (c) Total seats (670) include 4 other affiliations (not shown).
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Although the Unionists lost less than 7 percent of the vote—and Liberals gained under 5 percent—the change in seats was enormous, thanks to the first-past-the-post electoral system. The governing party lost 246 seats, falling from 60 percent of the seats in Commons to about 23 percent. Liberal candidates won nearly the same percentage of seats that Conservatives had held in the 1900–1906 Parliament. Campbell-Bannerman thus had the luxury of governing without need for either Labour or Irish Nationalist support in the House of Commons. The House of Lords, in which Conservatives were predominant, was quite another matter, however. The Unionist Party and its leader, Arthur Balfour, did not intend to let the Liberals govern easily, particularly after the new Parliament triumphantly reaffirmed support for free trade and censured the Tories’ recent South African high commissioner. Balfour had decided after the election that the Unionists would not allow defeat to prevent their controlling parliamentary events to the maximum extent possible; Lords was key to this strategy. An education bill that was intended to satisfy the demands of Nonconformists for equal treatment of their schools, correcting an earlier Unionist educational “efficiency” measure, passed Commons but “was so badly mauled by the Lords that it had to be abandoned.”17 Legislation on licensing of drinking establishments, in which temperance confronted property rights, was similarly treated. Attempts to legislate in both areas were killed again in 1907 and 1908. The only significant areas in which the Conservatives allowed Parliament to legislate were labor law and social reform, particularly on matters favored by trade unions. “Both major parties viewed the political arrival of organized Labour with some concern, and Balfour deliberately avoided confrontation by allowing labour and social reform legislation to pass unhindered through the Conservative-dominated House of Lords,” Sykes wrote.18 Thus, new enactments occurred on children’s welfare, the coal miners’ work day, and old-age pensions, the latter carried, Roy Jenkins added, because “the Commons firmly announced that a Lords’ amendment to a money bill was inadmissible” and the Lords “accepted this as sound if unwelcome constitutional doctrine.”19 The pensions issue was financed through the budgetary reforms of Chancellor of the Exchequer H. H. Asquith. Asquith also reduced military spending and sugar and tea import duties, while raising death taxes and taxing unearned income at a higher rate than earned income. In Jenkins’ view, “Asquith’s modest steps towards higher direct taxation on the rich [led] the way forward for a Liberal party apparently moving from traditional Radicalism to ‘social democracy.’ ”20 The paucity after 1906 of legislative achievements other than Asquith’s budgets made his star shine
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more brightly, perhaps, than it might have otherwise. In any event, when failing health led Campbell-Bannerman to resign in 1908, Asquith was the Liberals’ unchallenged choice to succeed him. On April 8, 1908, Herbert Henry Asquith accepted the invitation of King Edward VII to become prime minister. The new cabinet contained two other rising Liberals: David Lloyd George as chancellor of the Exchequer, and Winston Churchill, a once and future Conservative, assuming his first ministry as president of the Board of Trade. (Counting Asquith himself, this made three members of the cabinet who were to be wartime prime ministers—Asquith and Lloyd George in the First World War and Churchill in the second.) In view of future events, there is irony in Lloyd George’s letter of acceptance to Asquith: “I shall be proud to serve under your Premiership and no member of the Government will render more loyal service and support to his chief.”21 THE HOUSE OF LORDS BATTLE By 1908, Britain was suffering from a severe recession, in which “unemployment among trade unionists had gone up to nearly eight percent, its highest point since 1886,” Searle noted.22 Asquith’s new government lost considerable public favor, as measured by a series of by-election losses, seven of them that year. His challenge was how to lift the government’s political prospects, which at the moment looked gloomy for the next election. Social policy seemed the most promising way forward. Because the Lords had long accepted the principle that they could not reject money bills, and they had recently also accepted its extension to oldage pensions, the budget was the logical vehicle through which to legislate further social reforms. Moreover, resentful of the treatment the education and licensing bills had received in the House of Lords, the Asquith cabinet was seeking a way to restrict the Lords’ ability to block or damage government legislation. The chosen route was Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909, a package of various reform proposals that particularly included additional land taxes and a surtax on high incomes. The Irish Nationalists and the Unionists opposed the budget, each for their own reasons, while Labour supported it. These tax increases became so controversial that, by September 1909, Jenkins wrote, “attention had moved from the merits of the Budget to the still more important question of whether the Lords dare to break a 250-year-old rule and reject it.”23 Asquith himself concluded that this was more likely than not but argued publicly that Lords’ rejection or even amendment of the budget was unthinkable—“That way
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revolution lies,” he said in a Birmingham speech—because he wanted the voters to understand the constitutional significance in the event of an early election.24 The cabinet decided that rejection would precipitate an immediate election, and this in fact happened. But even if the Liberals won the election, forcing acceptance of the budget might require the creation of several hundred new Liberal peers, which King Edward VII regarded “as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords.”25 The king therefore privately insisted to Asquith that before enlargement could take place, a second election, to be fought solely on that issue, would be required. Events then proceeded on this course. The Conservatives in Lords rejected the budget, Parliament was dissolved, and an election was called for January 1910. The January election produced severe losses for the Liberals. Their share of the national electorate fell by nearly six percentage points, which was sufficient to deprive them of almost one-third of their seats in Commons. With 274 seats, they had only two more than the Unionists and would be dependent on the Irish Nationalists and Labour for a majority. The Nationalists held steady at 82 seats, although they had increased their share of the popular vote. Labour’s vote percentage rose to 7 percent, electing 11 new members (for a total of 40). Yet for the Liberal Party, there was a positive side to the election outcome. The still-limited working-class vote went preponderantly for the Liberals. “It seemed as if the combination of social reform plus the TABLE 6.3 1910 ( January) General Election Results Percentage of Vote
Changeb
Elected
Changeb
Percentage of Total Seatsc
Unionist
46.8
+3.4
272
+116
40.6
Liberal
43.5
–5.9
274
–125
40.9
Labour
7.0
+2.2
40
+11
6.0
Irish Nationalist
1.9
+1.2
82
nc
12.2
Partya
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.19. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Conservatives and Liberal Unionists ran on a single, Unionist ticket. (b) Changes from previous general election; by-elections excluded. (c) Total seats (670) include 2 other affiliations (not shown).
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commitment to mildly redistributive fiscal policies was making Liberalism the popular cause,” Searle wrote. “Indeed, so successful was Lloyd-Georgian Radicalism that some Labour candidates in 1910 found it difficult to carve out a distinctive niche for themselves.”26 Still, the Liberals were starting to be torn two ways. To win elections, the Liberal Party needed not only workers’ votes but also the continued support of its middle-class base. Many of those latter supporters, notably including affluent Dissenters, were put off by the Radical social-reform agenda. Although a few Nonconformist denominations (e.g., Methodists) often identified with the working class and supported Labour, at the local level most Dissenters, and middle-class Liberals as a whole, viewed the political rise of workers with “a combination of condescension and apprehension,” Sykes observed.27 But the party was retaining support, wrote Searle, from the professional middle class—“journalists, writers and lecturers, plus lawyers and doctors with a social conscience.”28 Businessmen were largely divided between Unionists and Liberals, but the bulk of the latter’s financial support was still business-derived. (Lloyd George, for all his radicalism, was personally close to many wealthy business people, to the point of being publicly wounded in 1912 by his implication in the insider-trading Marconi scandal.) With the support of the Irish Nationalists and Labour after the January 1910 election, the Liberal Party had a healthy majority in the House of Commons—but only with their support. As events were to show, Asquith and the Nationalists were in fact chained to each other for survival. The Irish sought to demonstrate the government’s dependence on them by insisting that they would not support the annual budget without reductions in liquor taxes and unless the issue of the Lords’ veto was brought up in the same parliamentary session. But this was a hollow threat: Only the Liberals supported them on home rule, and there would be no such legislation until the veto was removed. If Nationalist recalcitrance brought the government down, the Unionists would take over, ending any prospect of home rule. Agreement was therefore finally reached that legislation curbing the Lords’ veto would follow once the budget was passed, with home rule to be brought up shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, from 1910 on, the Liberal Party was never again free to set its own policies without recourse to other parties (including the Conservatives after the wartime coalition was created in 1915). The dramatic confrontation between Commons and Lords, Liberals and Unionists, prime minister and two kings, was a milestone in the evolution of the British Constitution.29 In sum, the cabinet’s position was, first, that the Lords could not amend or reject a money bill; second, that
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155
ordinary legislation could not be delayed past three parliamentary sessions or two years; and, third, that the maximum duration of parliaments should be reduced from seven years to five. Before these resolutions could be adopted by Commons, however, King Edward died and his son succeeded to the throne as George V. As reluctant as his father to “pack” the House of Lords if it failed to adopt the proposed reforms, the new king asked that some compromise be effected. In an attempt to resolve the deadlock not only over the veto but on other issues as well, a small group of Liberal and Unionist leaders therefore met extensively in the fall of 1910. In the course of these discussions, Lloyd George put forth two ideas that, although nothing came of them at the time, pointed the way to future developments. One was for a LiberalUnionist coalition government that would bring together centrist majorities of both parties while excluding the more extremist elements. This was significant because it showed, in Sykes’ words, that coalition was “a central element in Lloyd George’s political thinking well before the outbreak of war.”30 His second scheme was to deal with the Irish problem by granting home rule not only to Ireland but to other British regions as well, perhaps even other parts of the empire. (Nearly half a century was to pass before Britain freed most of its colonies, and 90 years before Scotland and Wales gained home rule.31) The key topic of the constitutional discussions, however, was the matter of the Lords’ veto, on which neither party was prepared to yield its position; the meetings therefore came to naught. Asquith then obtained the king’s promise to create new peers if Lords rejected the reform resolutions, provided that the government was returned in an early election; this had also been his father’s condition. Parliament was then dissolved and the December election held. The campaign was waged largely on the issue of the powers of a hereditary body to obstruct those of a popularly elected one. See Table 6.4. Despite the historic constitutional issues involved, the December election results virtually replicated January’s. The Unionists lost a small percentage of the vote and a single seat. The Liberals gained a slightly larger share of the vote than they had won 11 months before but lost two seats to Labour. The Nationalists also gained two. There was barely any difference between the old Parliament’s composition and that of the new one. What was not known at the time, of course, was that it would be eight years before Britain held another general election. Asquith’s hope was that the results of the election would persuade the Lords to cave in to the reforms without a further battle. The hope was misplaced. Commons passed the Parliament bill (the reform resolutions) in mid-May 1911. Lords put off consideration until after King George’s
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TABLE 6.4 1910 (December) General Election Results Percentage of Vote
Changeb
Liberal
46.6 44.2
–0.2 +0.7
271 272
–1 –2
40.4 40.6
Labour
6.4
–0.6
42
+2
6.3
Irish Nationalist
2.5
+0.6
84
+2
12.5
Partya Unionist
Elected Changeb
Percentage of Total Seatsc
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.20. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Conservatives and Liberal Unionists ran on a single, Unionist ticket. (b) Changes from previous general election; by-elections excluded. (c) Total seats (670) include 1 other affiliation (not shown).
coronation in June but then wreaked havoc on it. Later that summer, the government made known the king’s willingness to appoint however many new Liberal peers were necessary to avoid another defeat of the bill in Lords. The Unionists at this point divided between those who wished to yield and the die-hards. Following contentious debate, the issue was finally settled on August 10 in the Lords by a vote of 131 to allow the bill to pass to 114 against. As enacted, the Parliament Bill of 1911 (a) replaced Lords’ absolute veto over legislation (except money bills) with a suspensory veto that allowed only a limited period of delay, thereby establishing the primacy of the House of Commons; (b) codified a long tradition that only Commons could adopt money bills; and (c) required that a term for Commons could not exceed five years without elections without the consent of Lords. Asquith’s strategy was not altogether innovative. In 1830–32, the Whigs under Lord Gray (and with the connivance of King William IV) had also used a threat to pack Lords with new peers to win reluctant acceptance of the 1832 Reform Act. Still, it was a momentous victory for Asquith, and one that demonstrated his strategic and tactical skills at their height. But new crises were already emerging, and in none of them was Asquith’s performance as stellar as it was in the victory over the House of Lords. Britain’s accumulation of social, economic, and international problems now began to erupt. Over the next three years, it was as if the nation was coming apart along its lines of cleavage, with repeated crises exploding over labor, women’s suffrage, and Ireland, sometimes seriatim, sometimes
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together. Asquith must have felt that he was living on the side of a volcano, threatened with lava flows descending on him from all directions. In the end, he was engulfed—not by the domestic crises alone but also the sudden outbreak of war in Europe, which put at least some of the internal issues into a state of suspension. After the conquest of Lords, the faltering qualities of his leadership exhibited themselves repeatedly during the three years before the war, but it was his management of the war effort that brought about Asquith’s downfall. LABOR DISCORD Trade unions arose in parallel with the Industrial Revolution, many of them utilizing what Hobsbawm termed the “form of periodic ‘collective bargaining by riot,’ ”32 a tactic that persisted well into the 20th Century. Labor unions were well advanced by the middle-Victorian period, although their political development took somewhat longer. Labor turbulence in the late-Victorian and the Edwardian eras arose regardless of which political party controlled the government. Nonetheless, Liberals, especially the Radicals, lent considerable support both to the rising union movement and to its subsequent political manifestations. Workers showed no gratitude. Local labor disputes, often violent, had arisen in the autumn of 1910, went into a lull, and then erupted again in the summer of 1911 with a railway strike. Asquith was sympathetic to the strikers’ complaints but did not communicate his feelings to the strikers, instead ordering them back to work. He sent Lloyd George to apply his persuasive skills on both the union leaders and the employers; in 48 hours, the strike was over. (Although this was a triumph for the chancellor, George Dangerfield believed that it was at this moment that Lloyd George began to lose support among the working men who up to then had regarded him as their champion; had he not intervened, they believed they might have won outright.33) The episode also illustrated a problem that was to bedevil Asquith continually. He was not good at communicating emotions publicly; it often may not have occurred to him that he needed to speak from the heart as well as the head. In this, he was the opposite of Lloyd George, whose oratory, frequently bombastic, moved throngs. That the prime minister was capable of strong emotions that he could not verbalize is not in doubt; Dangerfield describes a vivid moment: In the winter of 1912, the coal miners struck over the lack of a minimum wage. The government eventually enacted legislation that left both employers and miners dissatisfied; however, for a time it was not certain that the strike would end. Asquith
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When Political Parties Die
appealed in Commons for a termination of the dispute, saying he and the government had done all that they could, and uncharacteristically exhibiting a depth of feelings he had not expressed to the miners. “He stood there, struggling for words; and they would not come. The House watched him, fascinated and appalled: something was taking place before its eyes which not one of its members had ever expected to see. The Prime Minister was weeping.” Dangerfield adds interpretively: “Those tears which he shed in Commons seem more and more like a tragic confession, not merely of a personal failure, but of the failure of Liberalism itself.”34 Next came a 1912 dockers’ strike that collapsed in the face of employers’ intransigence. The restlessness of the unions had implications for Asquith’s government that were political as well as economic. Its majority was completely dependent on the support of the Labour members and the Irish Nationalists. Accordingly, it adopted a landmark health-insurance program that turned out, however, to be lacking in popularity among its beneficiaries (to say nothing of angry physicians). The Liberals also partly overturned an earlier court decision that had prevented the unions from using members’ funds for political purposes. And, most important to Labour’s members of Parliament, the government enacted legislation paying lawmakers a salary for the first time. None of that, however, placated the ordinary workers, who resented their low wages and working conditions and who were growing increasingly class-conscious and militant in their antipathy toward employers and the social and political establishment. Labor unrest continued sporadically during the war despite workers’ major contributions to economic mobilization. WOMEN’S SUFFR AGE If the workers were militant, no less so were the women demanding that they be granted the vote. Feminist demonstrations had begun in 1905, and over the years had turned increasingly violent. Art works were defaced, and windows, including buildings on Downing Street, were broken. Properties were torched. MPs were physically attacked, as was Asquith himself in 1913—the same year that a suffragist threw herself in front of the king’s horse and was killed. Feelings both for and against the vote for women were expressed with equal fervor, if less violently among those opposed to women voting. But highly unfavorable publicity resulted from revelations that demonstrators, who often went on hunger strikes when arrested, were being forcibly fed by means that came close to torture. In Roy Jenkins’ description, the prime minister found the women’s movement incomprehensible. He was personally opposed to enfranchising
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women, and the more violent the protests became the more opposed he became. In part Asquith’s attitude toward the suffrage question was due to a failure of imagination. He simply could not understand why anyone, man or woman, should get so excited about the matter. It should be settled, not on the basis of abstract right, but by the practical test of whether or not a change would be likely to improve the system of government. . . . [H]e tried unsuccessfully to take the passion out of an essentially passionate controversy.35
Asquith’s position “was bizarre because it placed him in opposition to a majority of his Cabinet, to a majority of the Liberal parliamentary party, and to Balfour, whose own attitude placed him in turn in opposition to the majority of the Unionist party.”36 Parliamentary developments were equally bizarre. The cabinet agreed that there should be a free vote (i.e., not a party issue) on suffrage as part of 1912 legislation to expand the male franchise. This approach was derailed, however, by the speaker of the House, who ruled that a women’s suffrage amendment would so alter the bill as to force it to be withdrawn and reintroduced. Female suffrage came up again a few months later as a private members’ bill but was defeated. Meanwhile, “[o]utside the law-breaking and the arson continued, but against growing public hostility and at the price of increasing dissension within the suffragette movement itself.”37 Still, the prestige of neither the government nor the prime minister was enhanced by the way the issue was handled. In 1912, some suffragists formed an alliance with Labour and helped the party to capture two Liberal seats in by-elections. Searle believed that, under such pressure, the Liberals, had they won the election that all expected to occur in 1915, would have granted women the vote shortly thereafter.38 Sykes added that even a Conservative victory in that election would have produced enfranchisement at least for presumably “pro-Conservative propertied women.”39 Whatever the consequence of that not-to-be election might have been, the suffrage issue dragged on, unresolved, until the outbreak of war in August 1914, at which point the suffragists suspended their activities. Over the next four years, substantial numbers of women were mobilized on the civilian side of the war effort. Partly because of this and partly because the time to resolve the issue had finally come, women aged 30 and over were given the vote as part of broad 1918 franchise legislation. John Curtice noted that “. . . an entirely artificial age barrier of 30 was imposed initially to ensure that women did not constitute a majority of the electorate,”40 but in 1929 the franchise was extended to women aged 21 and older.
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THE IRISH CRISES If Asquith felt it necessary to appease Labour, it was all the more essential that he retain the support of the 80-plus Irish Nationalists. If ever they turned on him, his government would fall immediately. (For this reason, the Unionists regarded the government’s commitment to home rule as the Liberals’ part of a corrupt bargain.) The Nationalists had supported him in his battle with the Lords because the parliamentary reforms were vital to enactment of a home-rule bill, and he had had to promise them a bill in the current Parliament. Gladstone had failed twice; Asquith needed to succeed on this third occasion. In drafting the bill, the cabinet had two questions to answer. The first was the easier: How extensive should be the powers of an Irish parliament; and the decision was: not very, Jenkins commented—“. . . closer to a ‘glorified county council’ than to a sovereign assembly.”41 The other issue was far more difficult: Should home rule apply to all of Ireland (as the Nationalists of course wished) or should it exclude the six Protestant counties of Ulster? As early as 1910, Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Northern Irish Protestants, had begun mobilizing them for resistance “the morning Home Rule is passed.”42 The Conservative Unionists continued to oppose any form of home rule, but they recognized that support for the Protestant Orangemen was their strongest tactic. The antipathy, particularly of English Nonconformists, to forcing a group of Protestants to live unwillingly under “Rome rule,” was a threat to the Liberals and a strong political asset for the Conservatives. The Conservatives themselves desperately needed an issue. The disreputable tactics they were later to employ, notably in abetting a military mutiny, need to be understood in terms of their intense political frustration, as Jenkins described it: The Conservatives of those days were sick with office hunger. Three successive electoral defeats had severely shaken their self-confidence. . . . The Liberals had established themselves as the natural mandarins of Whitehall, and the Conservatives had become the lesser-known, inexperienced men. When would it end? From the perspective of today it is easy to look back on the last pre-Great War years as the obvious swan song of the old Liberal Party. At the time it was much less obvious that the swan was going to die.43
The Conservatives also feared that resolution of the long-festering Irish question might give the Liberals an unbeatable issue for the anticipated 1915 elections. Therefore, home rule needed to be defeated, both on its merits and for reasons of Tory survival.
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Initially, the cabinet decided that home rule would apply to all of Ireland; however, it gave itself the option of withdrawing Ulster if Protestant resistance proved too great. Under Carson’s leadership, and with vehement Conservative support, the Orangemen grew increasingly militant, to the point of organizing a voluntary militia. The Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, who had succeeded Arthur Balfour in 1911, went so far as to pressure King George to dismiss the Asquith government if the country was not to be bitterly divided. There was even talk of civil war. On the other side, the Irish Nationalists in Parliament were under great pressure at home from ultra-nationalist groups for whom home rule for all of Ireland, if indeed not complete independence, was the barest minimum they would accept. Asquith, playing his preferred wait-and-see game, took no legal action against those preaching sedition and violence—nor could he in fact do so without throwing the conspiratorial Conservative leadership into jail. The legislation for Irish self-government passed Commons in January 1913 and was promptly rejected by the House of Lords. It could not be enacted, Jenkins wrote, “without the protection of the Parliament Act and the three laps of the parliamentary circuit which this involved.”44 The “three laps” were a barrier to a negotiated solution. He added: The Parliament Act procedure put a premium on delay. The first two circuits were dummy runs. Why should anyone settle until they saw what the disposition of the forces was likely to be when it came to the final confrontation? . . . The Nationalists and many of the Liberal back-benchers would not countenance the division of Ireland until they were convinced that this was the only way to avoid civil war.45
Discussions in late 1913 between Asquith and Bonar Law, and later between the prime minister and Carson, produced no agreement toward a settlement of the issues. In March 1914, however, Asquith, under pressure from the king, negotiated an agreement with the Irish Nationalist leader that Ulster would be exempted from home-rule provisions for six years. Later that month, concerns grew of insurrection in Northern Ireland and even the possibility that Carson would proclaim a provisional government there. The question then arose as to whether the army, and particularly those of its officers who were Ulstermen, would defend the Crown. It turned out that many, perhaps 60 officers, would prefer dismissal to initiating military operations. Mistakes and misunderstandings, on the part of both army officers and cabinet members, complicated the issue—but so apparently did encouragement to the mutineers from Conservatives.
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When insurrection and gun-running arose on April 24, the cabinet retreated from taking any action. Further political discussions ensued, the House of Lords dug in its heels, arms smuggling and violence occurred in both the north and the south—and then war broke out in Europe. Asquith acceded to a Conservative proposal that home rule be indefinitely postponed, and so it was, for two years. Home rule may have been put on the back burner, but Irish nationalism had not. Despite their name, the Irish Nationalists represented a relatively moderate force in their country’s politics. The more fervid believers in Irish independence took two courses during the war. First, their hatred for Britain led many of them to sympathize with Germany, and the Germans responded with support and arms for the militants. Second, they formed a new party, Sinn Fein, and a guerrilla force, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). On Easter Sunday of 1916, they staged a major insurrection for the cause of Ireland’s independence. That event was an attempted revolution intended to establish a republican government in Ireland, supported by ammunition Germany had tried (and failed) to smuggle in. There was considerable violence on the part of the Irish—and in response more violence, deaths, and executions at the hands of the British. Asquith, concluding that the suspended 1914 home rule agreement would no longer work, sent his best negotiator, Lloyd George, to work something out with both northern and southern Irish leaders. Lloyd George’s proposal, for immediate home rule for the south, with Ulster excluded until at least the end of the war, was acceptable both to Carson and the Nationalists but, as it turned out, not to a large body of Conservatives in both houses of Parliament. The settlement fell through. Britain continued its rather repressive administration of Ireland for the remainder of the war and faced in consequence an unpopular reaction both in Ireland and in America, whose entry into the war Britain was seeking. The final chapter leading to Irish independence took place after the war and the 1918 election, by which time Lloyd George had been prime minister for two years. The Nationalists had been soundly defeated in that election, replaced by the more militant Sinn Fein. The newly elected MPs refused to take their seats, proclaimed a new Irish republic, and themselves members of its parliament. Murderous guerilla war broke out between the new Irish Republican Army and a British-sponsored volunteer force, dubbed the “Black-and-Tans,” whose tactics were no less violent than the IRA’s. The government’s policies came under increasing Labour and Liberal criticism, accompanied by growing public revulsion at the unremitting violence.
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Conservative Unionists, however, resolutely continued to oppose not only concessions but even negotiations “with murderers,” wrote Peter Rowland.46 Still a new home-rule proposal was prepared, which Sinn Fein completely rejected. Extended negotiations and conferences ensued throughout 1921. In the end, a settlement was arranged that gave the southern counties independence as the Irish Free State (equivalent to dominion status), which would recognize the crown as head of state; a boundary commission was to determine which parts of the northern counties would be included. A treaty was signed, but the new Irish president, Eamon de Valera, rejected it and resigned. Civil war erupted within the new Irish Free State, and the northern counties became “a beleaguered fortress.”47 It was June 1922 before any semblance of calm returned. Decades were to pass before amicable relations between Ireland and Britain evolved. Conditions in Northern Ireland between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority remained unsettled nearly until the end of the 20th Century—and even afterward have had their testy moments. Nevertheless, to Rowland, “The Irish settlement was the greatest triumph of Lloyd George’s career.”48 COALITION AND WAR MANAGEMENT In 1914, the “guns of August” produced an internal armistice, but these domestic issues were only deferred. The challenges posed by the unions and political labor continued to ferment with some outbreaks during the war. Ireland, which was quiescent for a time, presented its new crisis in 1916. Women’s demonstrations disappeared throughout the war. The conduct of the Great War (as the First World War was termed until there was a second after 1939) is outside the purview of this work, but a discussion of the events that led to Asquith’s toppling and the rise of Lloyd George is necessary. These events set the stage for the split between the two factions of the party that surfaced in the 1918 election. The coalition government that ruled Britain for most of the war was not formed immediately, largely because the country’s leaders expected the fighting to be short. However, it was not brief, and its first months went poorly for Britain. In May 1915, two severe setbacks forced the Liberal cabinet to invite the Conservative opposition into coalition. The first was the revelation that the British army was lacking in adequate munitions for its battles in France. The second was the Gallipoli campaign, which not only diverted naval ships from the European fighting but failed in its objective of getting Turkey out of the war. The new government continued to be led by Asquith, but several Liberals in the cabinet were
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replaced with Conservatives. The last wholly Liberal government had come to an end. The establishment of the wartime coalition had two important political consequences: First, the Liberals had no further need for the Irish Nationalists, who, bereft of any prospect of home rule for the foreseeable future, were thereby left weakened and vulnerable to the rise of the militants. Second, the “Lib-Lab” alliance came to an end; the two parties would no longer support each other’s candidates. Labour, however, participated in the coalition (to reduce, in Asquith’s view, the possibility of union unrest) and, later, in Lloyd George’s five-member War Cabinet. At Asquith’s request, Lloyd George took command of munitions supply and brought in many private-sector executives who applied business methods to substantially expand the supply of weaponry. This enhanced Lloyd George’s prestige and led to his promotion to war secretary in June 1916. Of the new Conservatives in the cabinet, only the former leader, Balfour, was given an important ministry; others, including the current leader, Bonar Law, were assigned relatively minor posts. This turned out to be a major political error, because it promoted little loyalty among Conservatives toward Asquith. The schism between Asquith and Lloyd George arose over differing philosophies about conscription (the draft) and the management of the war effort. To most Liberals, forcing British citizens into uniform and sending them to war involuntarily was a profound violation of individual beliefs and party principles. But in the fall of 1915, several Conservatives in the cabinet joined with Lloyd George to advocate military conscription. When it was adopted the following May after a severe division among cabinet Liberals, Asquith blamed Lloyd George “for the betrayal of both principles and colleagues.”49 What, after all, asked Sykes, could have been further from libertarian and Liberal doctrine than compelling men into the army against their will? The prime minister’s hesitancy on the conscription issue, on the other hand, “merely reinforced the image that both he and the Liberal party had already acquired, of being insufficiently committed to the war and dilatory in its conduct.”50 Meanwhile, Lloyd George was becoming increasingly authoritarian and hierarchical in his view of war management, moving closer to Conservative opinion and further away from traditional Liberal principles. Perhaps those same tenets lay behind Asquith’s reluctance to streamline cabinet decision making to the exigencies of the war. As Searle observed, “The large cabinet of twenty-two members could not provide effective overall direction, and smaller [specialized] bodies . . . , which might theoretically have performed this function, lacked real authority, since any decision that they reached could always be challenged in full Cabinet.”51
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It was this issue that provoked the rift between the two Liberal leaders, because by mid-1916 Lloyd George had come to believe that “strategic command would have to be wrested from the military and transferred to a streamlined civilian administration. Yet such a reform Asquith was neither able, nor perhaps willing to promote.”52 At first, facing resignation threats from Lloyd George and Bonar Law’s Conservatives, Asquith yielded and agreed to create a small War Committee to bypass the cabinet and oversee the military without his own participation. Then, angered by intimations in a news story apparently leaked by Lloyd George’s allies that the prime minister might be replaced, Asquith reneged on the agreement and insisted that he must chair the committee. Rowland, Lloyd George’s biographer, insists that “the one thing that he did not want was a break with Asquith. He had achieved most of what he had set out to gain and was willing to give the new arrangement a fair trial.”53 On December 4, 1916, Asquith submitted the cabinet’s resignation, receiving the king’s approval to reconstruct the government. “When I fully realized what a position had been created,” Asquith wrote a few days afterward, “I saw that I could not go on without dishonour or impotence or both; and nothing could have been worse for the country and the war.”54 It was an egregious blunder. Asquith had every intention of remaining prime minister. At first, he believed that he would retain the support of leading Conservatives, enabling him to form a new cabinet in which Lloyd George would be absent. He quickly learned better, that the Tories would not support him. The king then invited Bonar Law to form a government, but he declined in favor of Lloyd George. Neither Asquith nor any of his first-rank Liberal ministers were willing to serve in a Lloyd George cabinet. Lloyd George, therefore, headed a cabinet comprising largely Conservatives in all the important posts with a smattering of Liberals in lesser ministries. He did not become Liberal Party leader, however; Asquith, though now a back-bencher, retained that position for himself. And with that, the rift between the Liberal Party’s two most illustrious leaders became inevitable. To Lloyd George’s Liberal supporters, he was the man to lead the nation to victory in the war. To the Asquithians, Sykes commented, the new prime minister “was a traitor who had conspired with the political enemy to unseat Asquith for his own ends.”55 The 1916 rupture was quite unlike the divorce of 1886. In the earlier case, after the departure of the disgruntled Whigs, there was no doubt but that the remaining Liberals retained, in Gladstone, a single unquestioned leader. But in 1916, the Liberals were a party with two leaders—Asquith, a proponent of traditional Liberal values, and Lloyd George, a man with “the potential to distort the nature of Liberalism itself” by making new claims
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of state power superior to the party’s historic libertarian philosophy. Even worse, Sykes added, “there were two men who might call officially upon the loyalty of the party, a leader who was no longer prime minister, and a prime minister who was not leader of the party.”56 It was a formula for disaster. Even after Roy Jenkins’ superb biography, Asquith remains an enigmatic and even contradictory personality. Brilliant in Parliament as cabinet minister and, as prime minister in his taming of the House of Lords, he thereafter seemed at a loss in dealing with labor crises, home rule and the military mutiny, and women’s suffrage. He was probably no more culpable than any other European leader for the stumble into World War I, but he then gave to his cabinet colleagues the appearance of being out of his depth in leading the war effort. By 1915, wrote Rowland, Asquith, whose authority and powers were now in decline, was more concerned with keeping his new administration together than winning the war, and painstakingly devised and imposed a series of compromises in an effort to keep his critics at bay and paper over the cracks. . . . Asquith’s ambition was to remain primus inter pares, whatever the consequences, and to this end he resorted to every subterfuge that he could think of—wonderfully oblivious to the fact that he was thereby doing more than anyone else to undermine his own position.57
By resigning in 1916, Asquith committed a deadly political miscalculation, one that proved lethal not only to his own career but ultimately to his party as well. His resignation was not the prime cause of the Liberals’ disalignment eight years later; however, the resulting, possibly avoidable, rupture with Lloyd George certainly facilitated the party’s demise. Cerebral and publicly passionless in his politics for most of his career, Asquith’s comportment from 1918 to the fatal election of 1924 gives the impression that he was driven largely by anger, resentment, and frustration. His motivations remain a mystery; in Alan Sykes’ phrase, “Asquith is still impenetrable.”58 Lloyd George was a sharply contrasting figure. A man of vision, or perhaps multiple visions, he could see further ahead than most of his contemporaries. He was an inspiring orator before almost any audience. Rowland summed up the “typical Lloyd Georgian methods—patient, conciliatory discussions, sudden storms of rage, truculence one moment and sweet reasonableness the next, pleadings, wooings, threats, frankness, generosity and guile.”59 He used all these contradictory skills and traits to transform the war effort, to persuade the United States to bring its might to bear on Britain’s behalf, to achieve an armistice, and to negotiate the peace. But there was a personal cost, and the man who entered 10 Downing Street was not the
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same man who left it. Both during the war and afterward, his political philosophy drew away from traditional Liberal libertarianism as he exhibited an increasing preference for a strong state role in British society. In December 1916, newly installed as prime minister, Lloyd George was almost boyishly eager and excited about his new role. But the longer he remained in power, the greater his arrogance grew. As his biographer Rowland wrote: The time would eventually come when he would cease to marvel at the position in which he found himself, and regard the adulation of the mob as no more than his rightful due. The cheerful good humor would slowly dissolve into a colossal egotism. The swarm of parasites would increase. The colleagues wishing to see him would find themselves waiting longer and longer. Supporters who had struggled manfully on his behalf at the lowest ebb of his fortunes would find themselves curtly dismissed without a word of thanks. . . . Eventually, indeed, the sheer novelty of being Prime Minister would itself begin to pale . . . and the man who had wanted to get things done would look around for an equally exalted but, if possible, more leisurely sphere in which he could still remain in the public eye but be responsible, ideally, to no one but himself. How else, after all, are Gods supposed to function?60
By 1918, those new traits began to come to the fore, and Lloyd George would see himself as a man who could discard his old Liberal allies and transform British politics. THE EXPANDED ELECTOR ATE The 1918 election began the Liberal Party’s secular disalignment, which climaxed in 1924. A hugely enlarged electorate significantly affected the first postwar election, and an explanation of those changes must preface an understanding of the disalignment period. Extensions of voting rights had occurred at several points in the 19th Century between 1832 and 1884. With the latter expansion, most men acquired the right to vote by being householders, which effectively still excluded young adults living with their parents and those who often changed residences. The result was that only about two-thirds of voting-age males were actually on the registration lists. On the other hand, many businessmen retained the right to vote in multiple locations if they had significant and geographically dispersed interests. Moreover, university graduates and faculty also enjoyed extra representation. Nonetheless, wrote Bogdanor, “The Reform and Redistribution Acts of 1884–5 . . . had set in motion an important principle, namely that the House of Commons represented not communities, but individuals.”61 The 1918 expansion of the electorate was the most comprehensive in British history. Residency requirements were relaxed, business people were
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restricted to two votes (the university franchise was retained), and various other steps were taken to allow very close to universal suffrage among men aged 21 and over (19 and older if they had served in the war). At least as important was the extension of the right to vote to women 30 years and older; women accounted for about 40 percent of the registered electorate in 1918.62 As Curtice put it, “Together, the widening of the male franchise and its extension to women produced the single biggest expansion in the size of the electorate (from well over seven million to over 21 million) in the history of the franchise in Britain. For the first time ever the majority of Britain’s adult population had the right to vote.”63 In addition, the law widening the franchise also extensively redrew constituency boundaries. One of the oddities about the 1918 election was the sharp drop in voter turnout. Turnout in elections since 1885 had ranged from nearly 75 percent to almost 87 percent (in January 1910). But it fell to a little over 57 percent in 1918, even though special arrangements had been made for soldiers and other absentees for postal or proxy votes. (In contrast, turnout in 1945 was actually higher than in the last election before World War II.) Perhaps the explanation is simply the unfamiliarity of the voting process to newly enfranchised voters; or perhaps it is the unusual complexity of the ballot that year (in England, up to 13 parties competed in some constituencies). In any event, turnout returned to its more-or-less normal range for the elections of the 1920s. THE 1918 “COUPON” ELECTION Domestic politics was relatively placid following Lloyd George’s assumption of the prime minister’s office. Neither Conservatives nor Labour gave him much trouble, and there was only a single occasion when Asquith led his group of Liberals in a vote against the government. That occurred in April 1918 and resulted from a charge by a retired general that the army was undermanned in France and that the government’s statistics were fudged. The Liberal majority supported Lloyd George but 98 followed Asquith. This had the effect of solidifying the party split and led to the beginnings of the electoral coalition. Lloyd George had begun to negotiate an electoral alliance with Conservative leaders in March, Sykes wrote, reflecting his “belief that the old Liberal party was beyond resurrection.”64 Negotiations continued during the summer and early fall, although all expected that the country would still be at war when the next election took place. The talks produced an approved list of coalition candidates that contained the names of 374 Conservatives,
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159 Liberals, and some minor-party candidates (including a few Labourites). Each received “a letter of support jointly signed by Bonar Law and Lloyd George which Asquith promptly and contemptuously termed, ‘the coupon.’ ”65 As it turned out, it was not to be a wartime election. Germany collapsed with unexpected speed, the armistice was signed on November 11, and the election was called for December 14. The Liberals were split between those who were “couponed” and those who were not, although the official party organization gave support to both. Labour, which had left the coalition a few days after the armistice, made its first major electoral bid, fielding 388 candidates, some of whom also received Liberal support. The young party had its own internal divisions, said Sykes: “Increased class consciousness intensified trade-union opposition to middle-class socialists.”66 Indeed, many voters of all classes found the new party constitution’s commitment to the development of socialism in Britain threatening. Still, Labour had come through the war well. It had gained governmental experience through participation in the coalition. Moreover, Sykes added, [w]orkers in general, and trade unions in particular, gained a hitherto unknown importance. Wartime shortages and government regulation, both of which were seen to discriminate against the working classes, aggravated class feeling and left militancy bubbling below, and often through, the surface of patriotic unity. [Union] Membership increased from 4.5 to 6.5 million, whilst the unions lost much of their earlier suspicion of political involvement.67
The election was a coalition triumph, with 473 successful candidates, mostly Conservatives; Liberals comprised about a quarter. “Uncouponed” Conservatives also did well. Labour won over a fifth of the vote but elected only 57 candidates (8 percent of all seats), a 15-seat gain over the second 1910 election. Asquith’s “uncouponed” Liberals were badly hurt by association with his perceived “failures” as prime minister, electing only 36; this was not only below Labour’s performance but substantially below the number of coalition Liberals. Asquith himself lost his seat (but returned in a 1920 by-election). Taken together, all Conservatives (both with and without the “coupon”) gained 111 seats from their December 1910 total. Both categories of Liberals combined lost 109 seats. See Table 6.5. Although Asquith’s Liberals received only about 8,000 fewer votes than coalition Liberals and an almost identical percentage of the vote, the discrepancy in seats won was substantial—127 for Lloyd George’s Liberals but only 36 for Asquith’s. Taken together, the combined Liberal vote share was under 26 percent, a drop of over 18 percentage points from
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TABLE 6.5 1918 General Election Results Percentage of Voteb
Elected
Percentage of Total Seatsc
Coalition Conservative
32.2
332
47.0
Coalition Liberal
12.9
127
18.0
Coalition Labour
0.4
4
0.6
Partya
All other Coalition (Total Coalition) Other Conservative Asquith
Liberal d
Other Labour Irish Nationalist
1.6
10
1.4
(47.2)
(473)
(67.0)
6.2
50
7.0
12.9
36
5.1
20.8
57
8.1
2.2
7
1.0
Sinn Fein
4.6
69
9.8
All others
6.1
15
2.1
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.21. (Column 4: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Changes in percentage points and seats not shown because candidates included some with the coalition “coupon” and some without; see text. Redistricting also occurred before the 1918 election. Irish Nationalists lost 0.3 percentage points but 77 seats. (b) Craig’s percentages of the vote are incorrect; those shown in this column are the author’s. (c) Total seats (707) include 1 other affiliation (not shown). (d) 9 Asquith Liberals accepted the coalition whip after the election.
December 1910. Labour’s combined vote amounted to 21 percent, an increase of nearly 15 points. Thus, the aggregate British left won 47.0 percent, a modest three-point decline compared to 50.6 percent eight years earlier. The combined Conservative share of the vote of 38.4 percent in 1918 was a fall-off of eight points from the second 1910 election. (Various other parties won about 13 percent of the 1918 vote, compared to less than 3 percent in the December 1910 election.) The obvious conclusion is that Labour’s increase came at Liberal expense. However, a serious complication to such an analysis was the neartripling of the potential electorate at war’s end, and the doubling of the actual total vote. As previously noted, women accounted for about 40 percent of the vote in 1918. In the opinion of Curtice, a great many of these were middle-class voters who voted Conservative. “Evidence for the interwar period, prior to the advent of regular survey research, is inevitably
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patchy but even then it appears likely that women gave more support to the Conservatives than did men.”68 Since the tools of exit polling still lay two decades in the future, much of what follows relies necessarily on supposition and assumptions to attempt an examination of whether, and which, working-class males switched from Liberal to Labour: The aggregate 1918 vote was 10.8 million compared to 5.2 million in December 1910, an increase of 5.6 million. Data on gender are available only for those registered, not those who actually voted; however, if we assume the 40 percent fraction nonetheless, that is, that women represented two-fifths of the actual vote (4.3 million), then only 1.3 million of the new voters were men. Some unknown share of these were middle-class and unlikely to vote Labour, given bourgeois fears in 1918 about unions and socialism. Moreover, a significant but equally unknown number of working-class voters probably voted for coalition candidates and perhaps for noncoalition Liberals or Conservatives. We may guess, therefore, that perhaps 0.7 million of the new male working-class voters cast Labour ballots, as did possibly 1.1 million working-class voters of both sexes. Since the combined vote for Labour candidates grew by about 1.9 million by 1918, this implies that 0.8 million of the Labour increase were votes cast by previous electors. The Asquith Liberal vote fell by close to half a million between the two elections, and it may not be unreasonable to conclude that Labour captured all of this decrease in net. Furthermore, the enlarged cohort of younger working-class voters, lacking their parents’ identification with the Liberal Party, probably shifted to Labour, in Sykes’ judgment. “Even before the war, sections of the Liberal party were wary of the effect of enfranchising young workers against whom the pre-war franchise was particularly biased,” in the belief that their ballot preferences would be for Labour.69 It was these youthful voters—not the working class as a whole—that actually had “enjoyed a majority in the electorate after 1884”—who joined the group of eligible voters in 1918, Sykes observed. “The 1918 reforms did not enfranchise a new, lower class of voters, but extended the franchise to the disfranchised within social groups that already had the vote. They had only a limited impact on the class composition of the electorate.”70 Paul Adelman cited data estimating that the working class constituted about 60 percent of the electorate before the war and 80 percent afterward.71 It appears likely, therefore, that it was the younger generation of workingclass voters that gave Labour a disproportionately higher percentage of their votes than did the older generations who, to some extent, may have retained their identification with the Conservative or Liberal Parties but that were thinning out with age and death. Constituency realignment in
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1918 also helped Labour win seats by creating new constituencies in which workers comprised a clear majority. A systemic factor was the weakness, aggravated during the war, of local Liberal party organizations, unlike the organizational strength retained by both Conservatives and Labour. The war devastated local Liberal organizations. Herbert Gladstone (the late prime minister’s son) summarized the situation: The result of 1918 broke the party not only in the House of Commons but in the country. Local Associations perished or maintained a nominal existence. Masses of our best men passed away to Labour. Others gravitated to Conservatism or independence. Funds were depleted and we were short of workers all over the country. There was an utter lack of enthusiasm or even zeal.72
The combination of these factors was that “[t]he Liberal electoral base had been destroyed during the war,” Sykes reported. “In 1918, of 144 three-cornered contests, the Liberals won only 12, but most significantly, they came third in 92.”73 Sykes continued, Coalition Liberalism turned its back upon the working classes, which had become crucial to Liberal party success by the end of the nineteenth century. . . . Lloyd George sought to occupy a middle ground that did not exist. Since it did not, he competed with Conservatism for the middle classes, and abandoned the Liberal heartland to Labour. So, however, did the Independent [Asquith] Liberals. Asquith’s refusal to fight the 1918 election in determined opposition to the coalition virtually invited any Liberal who wished to oppose the Conservative party to vote Labour.74
The disalignment of the Liberal Party was underway. Labour, in contrast, was growing in organizational strength, aided by an increase in class consciousness among workers and by the growing power of trade unions, who sponsored nearly half of Labour’s candidates in 1918 and who were a major source of Labour’s funds. THE 1920s During and after the war, Liberals’ ideological commitment crumbled. To Adelman, “The impulse of ‘New Liberalism’ [successor to 19th-Century radicalism] . . . had now died away; and leading Liberals, even among the intelligentsia, found it difficult to know how to respond to the doctrine of Socialism when it had become identified with the Labour Party.”75 This represented a sharp contrast to the late 19th- and early 20th-Century
The Case of the British Liberal Party
173
years, when the social programs of the New Liberals attracted workingclass votes. Meanwhile, the division between the two Liberal factions continued over the next four years in which Lloyd George remained prime minister. The Asquith bloc constituted itself as Independent Liberals in opposition to the coalition Liberals. Their behavior under Asquith’s leadership demonstrated the continued deterioration of the former prime minister’s judgment, Adelman wrote: They represented no clear region or interest, suffered lethargic leadership and were deeply divided on policy. . . . Asquith saw no “logical antithesis between Liberalism and Labour, and Independent Liberals believed, against all the evidence, that Labour would come to an agreement with them, and the next “Liberal” government would involve both parties. . . . Asquith was the despair of his colleagues, roused to aggression only in defense of the past.76
In fact, Labour took every opportunity to advance itself at the Liberals’ expense. The latter supported some Labour by-election candidates, but there was no reciprocity. Labour’s leadership demonstrated its belief that their party’s growth required that they undermine the Liberals at every turn. Lloyd George, vehemently opposed to Labour, operated under illusions of his own, said Sykes. His alliance with the Conservatives led him to believe that a new centrist party could be created. “It was [however, to be] a union of interventionist, authoritarian radicals, not conservative Liberals and liberal Conservatives.”77 He found little support in either party, however, and the mood of the country, including both business and unions, was against it. His fall-back position was the formation, in January 1922, of a new National Liberal Party that amounted to not much more than a restructuring of his coalition Liberals. Back-benchers in both coalition parties rebelled and brought about the disintegration of the coalition. Parliament was dissolved and new elections were called for October 1922. See Table 6.6. The result was a Conservative sweep, winning 56 percent of the seats. Asquith’s forces won nearly twice as many votes as Lloyd George’s and gained some additional seats. The prime minister’s National Liberals suffered a severe defeat. But Labour was the big winner on the left. Its share of the vote rose to almost 30 percent, and it more than doubled its number of seats to 142 (including some former Liberal MPs), besting the combined Liberal performance on both measures. In Sykes’ view, Labour enjoyed a strong “socio-regional basis of support in the industrial constituencies. . . . The pre-war polarisation was re-emerging, albeit with
174
When Political Parties Die
TABLE 6.6 1922 General Election Results Partya Conservative
Percentage Percentage of of Vote Changea Elected Changea Total Seatsb 38.5
+0.1
344
–38
55.9
National Liberals (Lloyd George)
9.9
–3.0
53
–74
8.6
Asquith Liberals
18.9
+6.0
62
+26
10.1
(28.8)
(+3.0)
(115)
(–48)
(18.7)
29.7
+8.5
142
+81
23.1
0.4
–1.8
3
–4
0.5
(Total Liberal) Labour Irish Nationalists
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.22. (Column 4: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) “National Liberals” supported Lloyd George; “Liberals” were Asquith supporters. Changes compare Conservatives with 1918 aggregate (coalition plus noncoalition); National Liberals with 1918 coalition Liberals; Liberals with 1918 Asquith Liberals; and 1918 aggregate of coalition plus noncoalition Liberals. (b) Total seats (615) include 10 other affiliations (not shown).
Conservatism much stronger, and with Labour increasingly occupying the old Liberal bases.”78 Bonar Law, who became prime minister after the 1922 election, retired shortly thereafter because of ill health and was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin, by expressing support for a system of protective tariffs and imperial preference, brought the two Liberal factions back together in support of free trade. In the next year’s election, they campaigned as a united party formally under Asquith’s leadership, although with considerable resentment over Lloyd George’s refusal to contribute to the combined Liberal campaign from his substantial (and highly controversial) political fund.79 The result was a modest Liberal improvement in vote share and 43 additional seats. But it was a momentary lull in the decline. Labour continued to strengthen. Conservatives lost their majority but remained the largest single party. See Table 6.7. A minority government was formed in early 1924 under Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister. Although supported by Asquith’s enlarged Liberal contingent, Searle observed, Labour was, as usual, unappreciative: “Far from being grateful for Asquith’s assistance, the new Cabinet went its own way and refused even to consult with the Liberal MPs on whose votes it depended.”80 Moreover, the large majority of Labour
The Case of the British Liberal Party
175
TABLE 6.7 1923 General Election Results Percentage of Vote
Changea
Elected
Changea
Percentage of Total Seatsb
Conservative
38.0
–0.5
258
–86
41.9
Liberalc
29.7
+0.9
158
+43
25.7
Labour
30.7
+1.0
191
+49
31.1
0.4
nc
3
nc
0.5
Party
Irish Nationlist
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.23. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Changes from previous general election; by-elections excluded. (b) Total seats (615) include 5 other affiliations (not shown). (c) Liberal changes measured against combination of Lloyd George and Asquith Liberals in 1922 election.
MPs, on a free vote, opposed a Liberal proportional representation bill. Labour’s strategy was to replace the Liberal Party by destroying it. Labour was therefore actively preparing, to the Liberals’ shock, to run candidates against them in the next election, even in constituencies where this would probably produce a Conservative victory. It is difficult to believe that, almost to the end, the Liberals failed to grasp Labour’s strategy of facilitating its growth through Liberal demolition. The final election in the Liberals’ secular disalignment occurred in the fall of 1924. Lloyd George continued to hold tightly to his financial hoard, apparently in the belief that it could fund his personal political future. The party organizations, still under Asquith’s control, were lacking both in funds of their own and in the ability to raise them and could field only 340 candidates (55 percent of the 615 constituencies). The result was a rout in which the Conservatives triumphed. Labour lost 40 seats despite a small increase in its percentage of the vote. But for the Liberals, the election was a disaster: They lost 12 percentage points in vote share, falling below 18 percent, and were left with only 40 seats, a drop of 118. Asquith, once again, was among those who lost their seats. See Table 6.8. Party factionalism continued to worsen thereafter. Asquith’s defeat and a policy dispute over the 1926 general strike led to his retirement and ascent to the House of Lords. Lloyd George, though now party leader, found himself the target of attacks from “orthodox” Liberals, including Gladstone’s children (the party’s “holy family,” as some called them). Still,
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When Political Parties Die
TABLE 6.8 1924 General Election Results Percentage of Vote
Changea
Conservative
46.8
+8.8
412
+154
67.0
Liberal
17.8
–11.9
40
–118
6.5
Labour
33.3
+2.6
151
–40
24.6
Party
Elected Changea
Percentage of Total Seatsb
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.24. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Changes from previous general election; by-elections excluded. (b) Total seats (615) include 12 other affiliations (not shown). TABLE 6.9 1929 General Election Results Percentage of Vote
Changea
Elected
Changea
Percentage of Total Seatsb
Conservative
38.1
–8.7
260
–152
42.3
Liberal
23.5
+5.7
59
+19
9.6
Labour
37.1
+3.8
287
+136
46.7
Party
Source: Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 1.25. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Changes from previous general election; by-elections excluded. (b) Total seats (615) include 6 other affiliations (not shown).
he was indisputably leader of a party that had, equally and indisputably, come to the end of the road. The crowning ignominy came as a result of the 1929 election. The Labour Party won a plurality of seats but not a majority. The Liberal Party scored modest gains, enough to give Labour a governing majority in a new Lib-Lab coalition. Instead, Labour froze out the Liberals, opting to share power with the Conservatives, with MacDonald as prime minister, a position he held until 1935. See Table 6.9. Thereafter, the Liberal Party entered into a long, lingering decline that lasted for over half a century. An especially desperate and poignant moment was the party’s embrace of protectionism in 1931–1932 (over Lloyd George’s vehement objections), abandoning the doctrine of free trade that had almost defined the Liberal Party for all of the preceding century. See Table 6.10.
TABLE 6.10 Summary of Liberal Party Performance, 1900–1987 Election
Seats Won
Total Seats
Seat Percentage Vote Percentage
1900
183
670
27.3
45.0
1906
399
670
59.6
49.4
1910 ( Jan.)
274
670
40.9
43.5
1910 (Dec.)
272
670
40.6
44.2
1918a
163
707
23.0
25.6
1922b
115
707
16.3
28.8
1923
158
615
25.7
29.7
1924
40
615
6.5
17.8
1929
59
615
9.6
23.5
1931
36
615
5.9
7.0
1935
21
615
3.4
6.7
1945
12
640
1.9
9.0
1950
9
625
1.4
9.1
1951
6
625
1.0
2.6
1955
6
630
1.0
2.7
1959
6
630
1.0
5.9
1964
9
630
1.4
11.2
1966
12
630
1.9
8.6
1970
6
630
1.0
7.5
1974 (Feb.)
14
635
2.2
19.3
1974 (Oct.)
13
635
2.0
18.3
1979
11
635
1.7
13.8
1983c
23
650
3.5
25.4
1987c
27
650
4.2
22.5
Source: Col. 4 calculated from Craig, British Electoral Facts, Tables 7.05 and 14.03. Cols. 2, 3, and 5 from Craig, Table 7.05. Notes: (a) Figures for 1918 combine results for coalition (Lloyd George) Liberals and Asquith Liberals. (b) Figures for 1922 combine results for National (Lloyd George) Liberals and Asquith Liberals. (c) Figures for 1983 and 1987 represent combined performance of the Liberal / Social Democratic Party alliance.
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When Political Parties Die
From the elections of 1931 through 1970, the Liberal vote share was in mere single digits in 10 of 11 cases, rising to a high point for this period of 11.2 percent in 1964. The party’s percentage of the vote rose into double digits in the two elections of 1974 and in 1979 but never exceeded 20 percent. Labour suffered a severe but temporary division in 1931, reuniting by 1935. In the early 1980s, the Labour Party’s right wing split off to become the new Social Democratic Party. The SDP and Liberals ran in tandem in 1983 and 1987, winning 25.4 percent and 22.5 percent respectively. The 1987 election was the Liberal Party’s last. Thereafter, it merged with the SDP to form a new bloc, the Liberal Democratic Party. LOCAL ELECTIONS Did the Liberal Party disappear only at the national level, or was its demise all-encompassing at local levels too? Partial evidence, shown in Table 6.11, indicates that the party’s collapse was pervasive, as implied by Herbert
TABLE 6.11 Results of Elections to London Metropolitan Area Borough Councils, 1900–1931 Liberal
Conservative
Labour
All Othersb
Total Seats
1900
463
794
—
39
1362
1903
620
539
35
168
1362
1906
238
876
34
214
1362
1909
258
878
32
194
1362
1912
251
944
41
126
1362
1919
129
570
572
91
1362
1922
3a
732
259
368
1362
1925
21
676
364
305
1366
1928
47
703
461
174
1385
1931
43
798
257
287
1385
1934
—
555
729
102
1386
Source: David Boothroyd, http://www.election.demon.co.uk Note: (a) National Liberal (Lloyd George). (b) All Others includes independents, representatives of various minor parties, local civic and taxpayer associations, and so on.
The Case of the British Liberal Party
179
Gladstone’s statement (quoted above), and that it was displaced by Labour at the level of local government as well as nationally. For the first three decades of the 20th Century, the compiled results of local elections are available only for the 28 boroughs of the London metropolitan area. Still, greater London contains nearly a quarter of the total British population, and these results may therefore be indicative of what happened in the country as a whole. Table 6.11 reports the aggregate number of seats on London-area borough councils won by the various parties in elections from 1900–1934. Liberals won a majority on the London-area borough councils only in 1903, but they were a significant minority up until 1912. In the first postwar local elections (1919), the number of Liberals dropped in half and Labour had a slight plurality over Conservatives. There were three National Liberals elected in 1922, increasing modestly to 21 seats in 1925. A temporary resuscitation occurred in 1928 and 1931 when Liberals won 47 and 43 seats respectively, but these were washed away in 1934 and all subsequent elections until 1962, when 12 Liberals won election. From 1934 on, Labour enjoyed large aggregate majorities on these borough councils. It seems safe to conclude that the Liberal Party’s disalignment was not merely a parliamentary phenomenon but one that was pervasive at all levels, at least in and around the capital. Labour’s subsequent entrenchment proceeded quickly. CONCLUSIONS We know how the Liberal Party died—it lost the middle class, especially new women voters, to the Conservatives, and an increasing share of the working class, particularly younger voters, to the Labourites. Thus, the Liberal base largely evaporated. We need still to understand why. And there is dispute about when its terminal illness began. The latter question may be a good point at which to start. George Dangerfield’s book made the case that the death of “liberal England” occurred in the 1910–1914 period. Led by a prime minister whom Dangerfield portrays as out of his depth if not indeed inept, Britain fell into crisis after crisis with which its Liberal government could not cope. The book’s tone and content is in no sense objective, but the author’s story is not incorrect. What Dangerfield does not describe is Asquith’s distinguished record before he became prime minister and through 1911. The peak of H. H. Asquith’s achievements was his victory over the House of Lords, after which that hereditary body’s powers were subordinated to those of the elective House of Commons. Thereafter, Asquith had increasing problems
180
When Political Parties Die
coping—with rising labor militancy, with feminism, with home rule for Ireland, and with the management of the war effort. His difficulties became especially manifest after his misjudgment in resigning as prime minister in 1916 when he still had the support of most of his party (and mistakenly thought that of Conservatives as well), the ensuing rupture with Lloyd George, and then in Asquith’s deteriorating leadership after 1918. Perhaps Dangerfield’s most serious error, implied throughout the book, is that British liberalism died in the four years between 1910 and the onset of the war. It may well be that the demise of the Liberal Party began in this period, but important elements of 19th-Century liberalism survive to this day. It was the Liberal Party that perished, not liberalism. The party’s core voter base did not lose faith in the ideology but in the party that had embodied it. The failures of the British Liberal Party were not wholly those of Asquith and Lloyd George. In many ways, the party as a whole had lost its mission—its sense of what it existed to accomplish. Searle contrasts the distinctions among the parties in the dimension of values: For most of the twentieth century the Conservatives tended to subscribe to values of hierarchy, tradition and deference, while Labour historically drew upon the loyalty generated by class solidarity. The old Liberal Party, by contrast, was a party of ideas and ideals, much given to discussion and argument.81
But that was the old Liberal Party. By 1918, let alone the ensuing years, Liberal ideas and ideals seemed to have run aground. What was once a highly idealistic party had become, like so many other political parties before and afterwards, committed mainly to staying in power and keeping the competition out. It had become, in fact, a very conservative (with a small “c”) party, and the conservatism of its last years alienated much of its actual and potential base: • The Dissenters (by its education bill); • Women (by its position on suffrage and the treatment of suffragists); • Irish sympathizers (by almost bringing about war in Ulster and maladroit management of the home-rule question); • Labor (by the consistent refusal of constituency parties to nominate working-class candidates).
It is hard to justify these decisions, either as a matter of pragmatic politics or as the exercise of the party’s historic principled idealism. They are explicable only as the decisions of a party that, regardless of its traditions and ideology, had hardened itself against change.
The Case of the British Liberal Party
181
An important task of political leaders is to present new ideas and persuade the rest of the party to follow them. After 1911, Asquith showed neither comprehension of the changes that were sweeping British society nor the ability to lead his party in coping with them. Lloyd George had new ideas, but they were increasingly statist, and he could not persuade a party that retained at least a semblance of libertarianism to follow. Perhaps his most egregious error was his embrace of the coupon that so badly divided the Liberal Party in the 1918 election and pushed it down the road to disalignment. Labour’s success was a direct consequence of the Liberal leadership’s inability to grasp the rising aspirations of working people. Searle and Adelman argue that, for all of the Liberals’ support for nascent unionism and its political manifestation, the Lib-Lab pact, Liberals never accommodated themselves to the political rise of the working class. Sykes adds that this was because Liberal leaders understood little and cared less about workers’ underlying political concerns: “Working-class politics was about improved working and living conditions, but it was also about recognition and status. Lloyd George promised the former, was dismissive of the latter, and delivered on neither. . . . Asquith offered only platitudes, and in 1924 defaulted even on those.”82 To Adelman, this failure of understanding pervaded the entire Liberal Party structure. Fundamentally, the Liberals “were a middle-class party through and through, in leadership, Parliamentary representation, organization, and ethos. This was seen in their traditional support for nonconformist grievances over education, religion, and the drink trade.”83 For all of the national leaders’ rhetoric about being a classless party, local Liberal associations in the constituencies made clear their own middleclass preferences by declining time and again to nominate working-class candidates for Parliament. Adelman notes, “In 1914 there were 105 businessmen sitting on the Liberal benches—about one-third of the Parliamentary party—but only eight manual workers.”84 Moreover, said Searle, [T]he Liberals continued, right until the end, to have very ambivalent feelings about trade unionism. In most of the big industrial disputes of the period, the Liberals were at best neutral and more often hostile to the cause of the strikers. This allowed the Labour Party to establish itself in the affections of many working-class communities. And as Labour extended its organisation in the 1920s, the old working-class Liberal vote atrophied.85
The same ambivalence applied to the Labour Party’s embrace of socialism, notwithstanding the antipathy with which many unionists (as well as most middle- and upper-class Britons) regarded that ideology at the time.
182
When Political Parties Die
The Liberals, even Lloyd George, chose not to exploit public hostility toward socialism in anywhere near the same way that Conservatives did— but then, by the 1920s, as Ross McKibbin wrote, “it was known that the Conservative Party was the party of bourgeois propriety and dignity.”86 Middle-class voters—especially women—therefore gravitated toward the Tories, even as the working class, especially its younger members, was increasingly voting for Labour. Sykes believed that this middle-class shift may have had its initial impetus as early as 1886: “In moving to the Conservatives, the Whigs also appropriated to Conservative use key elements of Liberal ideology, in particular the connection between property, freedom of contract and individual liberty.”87 Beyond ideology, Sykes added, the Conservative Party benefited from the war as “the party of patriotism and strong defense.”88 It also benefited from the splits on the left, both between and within the Labour and Liberal Parties. The Conservatives had as much to gain as Labour from Liberal disintegration, because the Tories were the logical beneficiaries of the Liberals’ middle-class constituency. As a consequence, the Conservatives went on to dominate British politics for most of the 20th Century. The 1918 election marks the onset of the Liberals’ six-year secular disalignment. During that period, they lost not only medial, swing voters, but also those elements of the middle and working classes that had constituted the party’s base. The conclusion is clear: no base, no party. The consequence of such a disalignment is inevitably a party realignment—because the disaffected voters move to another party. In this case, the primary beneficiary of the Liberals’ disalignment was a previously minor party, Labour, although the Conservatives also gained much of the Liberals’ middle-class support. An essential characteristic of a realignment is the period of entrenchment in which the successor party solidifies itself at national and subnational elections. Entrenchment is the essential dimension that gives a realignment its staying power. It implies not only an increase over time in numbers of officials elected at all levels, but also an increase in the depth of loyalties transferred to the successor party from its predecessor. In this case, Labour entrenched itself as the Liberals’ successor in parliamentary elections from 1929 on, and even earlier at the local level, as evidenced in the borough council elections of the London metropolitan area from 1919 on. This entrenchment demonstrates the durability of the realignment that was the necessary concomitant of the Liberal disalignment. The Liberal Party was disaligned from its core voter base because it lost its vision; neglected the interests of both middle-class and workingclass voters, especially younger ones; was guilty of both misfeasance and
The Case of the British Liberal Party
183
nonfeasance in its management of government; and suffered severe failures of leadership that culminated in the breach between its two most prominent leaders and in profound internal factionalism. All these faults and flaws were brought to the fore by the changes in British society in World War I, and that resulted in massive changes in the electorate. There is a well-known metaphor (attributed to Trevor Wilson) that the Liberals were like an ailing man struck down by a runaway bus (the changes brought about by the war) while loitering without intent. Alan Sykes memorably modifies the analogy: The Conservatives recognized the bus and jumped on board; the Liberals mistook the direction it was traveling and threw themselves in front of it . . . the Labour party stepped aside, and stripped the Liberal corpse of its valuables when the bus was safely gone. . . . The final verdict on the party is not inevitable decline through old age, nor accidental death, but suicide while the balance of politics was disturbed.89
NOTES 1. Alan Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–1988 (London: Longman, 1997), 45. 2. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 235. 3. Ibid., 236. 4. Ibid., 238. 5. Sykes, British Liberalism, 1. 6. G. R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2001), 16. 7. Ibid., 17. This usage contrasts with the approximately contemporaneous adoption of the name by the more conservative eponymous American party. 8. These were parliamentary constituencies represented in the House of Commons despite their minuscule populations. They were usually under the political control of a local notable, often a landed aristocrat, who in effect “owned” his own MP. 9. Searle, Liberal Party, 13. 10. Vernon Bogdanor, “Introduction,” in Bogdanor, ed., The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4. 11. Ibid. 12. Sykes, British Liberalism, 65, quoting the Radical leader, John Bright. 13. Sykes, British Liberalism, 73. 14. Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (New York: Random House, 1997), 631. 15. Sykes, British Liberalism, 145. 16. F.W.S. Craig, British Electoral Facts (Dartmouth, England: Parliamentary Research Services, 1989), tables 1.15, 1.16, and 1.17.
184 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.
When Political Parties Die Sykes, British Liberalism, 154. Ibid., 153. Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London: Collins, 1965), 188. Ibid., 155. Quoted in ibid., 182. Searle, Liberal Party, 71. Jenkins, Asquith, 199. Quoted in ibid., 200. Quoted in ibid., 203. Searle, Liberal Party, 86. Sykes, British Liberalism, 175. Searle, Liberal Party, 88–89. See, for example, George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London: Serif, 1997); and Roy Jenkins, Mr. Balfour’s Poodle (London: Heinemann, 1954). The history of the range of 20th-Century reforms, actual and proposed, is more analytically discussed in Rhodri Walters, “The House of Lords,” in Bogdanor, ed., The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, chap. 6. Sykes, British Liberalism, 164. See Brigid Hadfield, “The United Kingdom as a Territorial State,” in Bogdanor, ed., The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, chap. 15. Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (New York: New Press, 1999), 67. Dangerfield, Strange Death, 227. Ibid. Jenkins, Asquith, 247. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 250. Searle, Liberal Party, 117. Sykes, British Liberalism, 180. John Curtice, “The Electoral System,” in Bogdanor, ed., The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, 490. Jenkins, Asquith, 274. Quoted in ibid. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 279. Peter Rowland, David Lloyd George: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1976), 552. Ibid., 574. Ibid., 555. Sykes, British Liberalism, 204. Ibid., 203. Searle, Liberal Party, 129. Ibid., 130.
The Case of the British Liberal Party 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.
63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.
80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.
185
Rowland, David Lloyd George, 363; emphasis in original. Quoted in ibid. Sykes, British Liberalism, 206. Ibid. Rowland, David Lloyd George, 325. Sykes, British Liberalism, 275. Rowland, David Lloyd George, 555. Ibid., 376. Bogdanor, “Introduction,” 24. The female share of the electorate rose in subsequent elections—from 39.6 percent in 1918 to an average of 42.7 percent in the three elections of 1922– 1924, and then to 52.7 percent in 1929 after the voting age for women had been lowered to 21. See Craig, British Electoral Facts, Table 4.04. Curtice, “The Electoral System,” 487. Sykes, British Liberalism, 211. Ibid. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 213–214. Curtice, “The Electoral System,” citing James Ross, Elections and Electors: Studies in Democratic Representation (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955). Sykes, British Liberalism, 267. Ibid., 265–266. Paul Adelman, The Decline of the Liberal Party, 1910–1931 (London: Longman, 1995), 68. Quoted in Adelman, Decline, 67. Sykes, British Liberalism, 217. Ibid., 232. Adelman, Decline, 71. Ibid. Sykes, British Liberalism, 220. Sykes, British Liberalism, 229. The fund was established through political contributions allegedly made in exchange for peerages and other honors. Legal at the time, the practice was banned by the Honours Act of 1925. Searle, Liberal Party, 150. Searle, Liberal Party, 3. Sykes, British Liberalism, 268. Adelman, Decline, 63. Ibid. Searle, Liberal Party, 170. Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990); quoted by Searle, Liberal Party, 171; emphasis in original. Sykes, British Liberalism¸ 271. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 273.
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Chapter 7
The Case of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party
Canada’s 1993 federal election was an experience from which the country’s party system still has not recovered. The Progressive Conservatives (PC), one of the country’s two traditional major parties, not only lost their governing majority, but came within two seats of being completely eliminated from the House of Commons. A minor party, the New Democrats (NDP), also suffered severe losses, while two new regional parties entered Parliament for the first time: the Bloc Québecois (BQ), whose members of Parliament were elected solely from the Province of Quebec, and the Reform Party, all but one of whose new parliamentarians were elected from the four western provinces. These new political parties captured between them 30 percent of the vote and 36 percent of the parliamentary seats. The Liberal Party, with barely 40 percent of the vote, gained a majority of seats. A relatively stable two-and-a-half party system suddenly became an unstable five-party system. Scholars have described the 1993 election as one “of the greatest democratic electoral earthquakes ever recorded”1 and as “the most devastating reversal for a government party anywhere in the democratic world.”2 The Liberals retained control of the government through three ensuing elections until 2006, when they were defeated by the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). This new party is the product of a merger of the remnants of the PC with the former Reform Party (renamed the Canadian Alliance in the interim). The roots of this political upheaval lie in Canada’s cleavages, the most significant of which are religious, linguistic, and regional. The first two in
188
When Political Parties Die
toto, and the third in significant part, are centered on a single place: the province of Quebec. Nearly 250 years after Great Britain captured France’s territories in what is now Canada, Catholic Quebec retains its French language and culture, asserting its status as a society distinct from the country’s largely Protestant, English-speaking majority. Quebec’s claims to special status are a significant factor in Canada’s regional divisions. An additional factor has been the belief of Canadians in the four western provinces that they have been the victim of economic discrimination at the hands of elites in Ottawa and Toronto, the nation’s political and economic capitals, both located in the Province of Ontario. The chronically depressed Atlantic provinces3 also claimed discriminatory treatment by economic elites in the past while demanding increased economic aid from the national government. These assertions by western and Atlantic Canadians are classic examples of a center-periphery cleavage that the party system was largely unable to resolve.4 The various sets of negotiations between the national government and Quebec in recent decades have significantly shaped the country’s contemporary federalism. In order to placate angry regimes in Quebec, successive political elites in Ottawa would offer concessions that the other provincial governments then demanded for themselves. To avoid asymmetries between French and English-speaking provinces, arrangements were negotiated that produced asymmetrical divisions of power between the federal government on the one hand and all the provinces on the other. Political elites in Ottawa faced a constant array of unpleasant choices to maintain the overall integrity of the Canadian federation: angering rebellious, secessionist regimes in Quebec; angering the other provinces by conceding to Quebec’s continual demands for preferential status; or offering concessions to all the provinces that weakened the overall federal power structure. QUEBEC AND REGIONALISM IN CANADA Canada, unlike many other western democracies, was created peaceably. Neither revolution nor military conquest marked its establishment as an independent state in 1867. Indeed, there has been no armed conflict on Canadian soil since the War of 1812. Canada is fortunate that its internal tensions and cleavages never led to civil war, as they did in its neighbor to the south. (An observation by Edward N. Luttwak is noteworthy in the context of Canadian history: “An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace.”5 The Quebec cleavage was the product of a war without a later one that might have resolved it.)
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Nonetheless, a war waged centuries ago left an enduring mark on Canada that has shaped its history to this day. Modern Quebec is a legacy of French colonization of 17th- and 18th-Century North America. The Seven Years War, which ended in 1763, marked the conquest of a major French territory in North America and its incorporation into the British Empire. Quebec ceased to owe political allegiance to France, but it has remained French in language and culture over the intervening quartermillennium, resisting efforts to assimilate it into the rest of Canada. Quebec’s nationalism has therefore been present in one form or another since Canada’s beginnings. The social cleavage between French and English Canadians was instrumental in determining the country’s governmental structure at confederation in 1867. The resulting need to assure provincial autonomy required that Canada be organized as a federal state rather than a unitary one like the British mother country. Regionalism in governmental organization thus dates back formally to that year when the colony of Canada was partitioned into two provinces, Ontario and Quebec. The Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were added, though treated as a single region for purposes of representation in the appointed Senate. Later, the western provinces were treated the same way. Each of these regions had its own distinctive combination of economic, linguistic, and cultural characteristics (to which must be added the distinctive traits of Canada’s aborigines). What made all this workable, wrote James Bickerton, was that “[p]olitical elites could fashion a mutually acceptable set of institutional arrangements for union, and then through the party system politically manage the new country’s divisions in order to hold it together.”6 He added that regionalism has persisted politically in contemporary Canada “because of the decline of an integrated national party system, the transformation of a borderless French-Canadian identity into a Quebec-centered regional nationalism, the general expansion of provincial powers, and the increasingly continental (as opposed to national) integration of Canada’s regional economies.”7 In order to create a national economy, beginning in 1879 and continuing well into the 20th Century, Ottawa imposed tariffs and transportation policies (“the National Policy”) that favored domestic industries selling for domestic consumption in Ontario and Quebec, to the distress of other regions. The maritime provinces protested their consequent economic marginalization. Western agricultural producers objected to restrictions that limited their ability to export grains to the United States. The purpose of the National Policy was to unite Canada’s economy on an east–west basis. It could not, however, survive the disruptive attractions of the huge US
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market. By the dawn of the 21st Century, exports to the United States comprised about a third of gross domestic product. The United States takes 85 percent of all Canadian exports and provides nearly 60 percent of the country’s imports.8 Canada is organized politically from east to west, but its economy has increasingly evolved north to south. This redirection has had uneven regional consequences that are often beyond the control of political and economic elites. In the 1920s, the nationalistic economic policies and the protests that accompanied them led to the formation of three western political parties, whose legacies persist in contemporary parties. The Progressives, an agricultural party, later merged into the PC. Social Credit, a right-wing populist party, became a power in Alberta; one of its provincial premiers was the father of Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party. The leftist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) subsequently joined with a group of union leaders to create the New Democratic Party. Nation-building economic programs, wrote Bickerton, were accompanied by an appeal to a common British heritage and allegiance [that] may have been the essential glue that held English Canada together. Time and again, it was used to shore up support for national policies or controversial government actions. . . . The “loyalty cry” was an effective political device for cementing together the diverse regional and class interests of English Canada. Its repeated use, however, simultaneously reinforced French-Canadian nationalism and gradually alienated French Canadians from the national party that most zealously and regularly donned the mantle of “Britishness,” the Conservative Party. . . . In this way, English-Canadian unity and integration were secured, but at the cost of contributing to the rise in Quebec of a genuine regional nationalism.9
This was a major factor in building a bastion of Liberal Party strength in Quebec. Another consequence, Bickerton added, was that francophone Quebecers came, particularly in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, to transmute their identity as French Canadians into “the more secure, secular, and regional identity of ‘Québécois.’ ”10 THE UNASSIMILATED PROVINCE Quebec’s struggles for better treatment and status have frequently been met with opposition and protest in the English-speaking provinces. The social and geographic cleavages and tensions that their linguistic and cultural differences provoked have had a pervasive impact on Canadian
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politics. Political leaders consistently straddled the issue, seeking votes on both sides. Only in recent decades have the major parties tried to come to grips with the problem of Quebec. A significant but unsuccessful attempt to do so was the immediate cause of the PC’s disalignment in 1993. As much as Canada is a federation of provinces with substantial powers of their own apart from those of the national state, it is also an uneasy federation of two languages and several cultures. Where English-speaking Canada is largely Protestant, francophone Quebec is heavily Catholic; the Church was a dominant force in Quebec society until recent decades. Quebec was also slower to develop economically than much of anglophone Canada, particularly its neighbor to the west, Ontario, long the economically and politically dominant province in the Canadian federation. With varying degrees of success, English-speaking Canada, much like the United States, has absorbed into its “melting pot” immigrants from many nations, while Quebec has remained determinedly apart. Indeed, Quebec has demanded the right to control immigration into the province to assure the continued dominance of French culture. Many of Canada’s numerically dominant anglophones have long resented the refusal of francophones to assimilate culturally and linguistically. A result was that French Canadians were often the victims of social and economic discrimination. Their bitter resentment at this treatment was summed up in the title of a book written by a Quebecer, Pierre Vaillières, in 1971: White Niggers of America.11 Unlike blacks in the United States, however, French Canadians wished to be “separate but equal.” Englishspeaking Canadians, on the other hand, tended to resist treating them equally so long as they insisted on remaining separate. Quebec nationalism manifests itself in the assertion that it is a “distinct society” whose own language and culture warrant recognition as an equal partner with all of anglophone Canada,12 and not merely as one of 10 provinces. As Robert Young has noted, “The point to stress here is that there is very strong support for such recognition among both Quebec elites and the general Francophone population. It is regarded as a bulwark against homogenizing laws and court decisions, as well as a symbolic affirmation of the conception that Canada is a country made up of two founding peoples, groups that are, in a deep sense, equal.”13 The rest of Canada has long resisted Quebec’s demands for parity and preference. These tensions manifested themselves in the West and sometimes in Atlantic Canada, where there are significant numbers of both francophones and anglophones. More tolerant Canadians, usually including both Liberal and Conservative leaders, were often caught in the middle. Two recent prime ministers, Liberal Pierre Elliott Trudeau
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and Conservative Brian Mulroney (both Quebecers), made serious efforts to deal with Quebec nationalism by accommodating both sides in the hope of advancing the cause of integrating the Canadian state. They did not succeed, because a great many Quebecers do not believe that the Canadian constitution legitimately applies to them and to their province. Quebec nationalism is a phenomenon of long standing, but it was transformed in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s. The Quiet Revolution was a cultural, social, economic, and political phenomenon that also had major psychological implications. One consequence was that provincial citizens began to think of themselves less and less as French Canadians and more and more as Quebecers. The traditional power of the Catholic Church diminished as religious beliefs were jettisoned and transmuted into new secular ideals—first Quebec culture and then nationalism. Thus, separatism became for many the new religion, much as nationalism had in central and eastern Europe half a century before. An important expression of this assertive nationalism was the creation of the Parti Québecois (PQ—a provincial party organizationally separate from the later federal Bloc Québecois).14 The PQ was first elected to power in 1976 on a platform of secession and independence for Quebec. The party applied its nationalistic fervor in cultural as well as political matters. For example, the inclusion of French in everything from official documents to store signage and product packaging became mandatory in the province (Bill 101), a change that angered English-speaking Canadians in Quebec and elsewhere. However, Quebecers are not of a single mind about nationalism, and especially on the question of the province’s relationship with the rest of Canada. The spectrum of opinion ranges from that of the “sovereignists,” who want Quebec to secede from Canada and become an independent state, to “soft nationalists,” who seek special treatment for Quebec within the Canadian federation, to “federalists,” who consider Quebec as neither less nor more worthy or important than any other province, oppose secession, and are committed to the principle of an undivided Canada. Prominent among the sovereignists are the PQ and the Bloc Québecois (BQ). The provincial Liberal Party in the main exemplifies the soft nationalist position as, apparently, does a newer party, Action democratique du Quebec (ADQ), which supports the undefined principle of “autonomy” for the province. Former federal prime ministers Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, both Liberal French Canadians from Quebec, were firm federalists. Former PC Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was also a Quebecer and a federalist who, like
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Trudeau, sought to placate the province with important constitutional concessions. The sovereignist PQ mounted two provincial referenda over the past quarter century on the question of whether Quebec should secede from the rest of Canada. The first, in 1980, found 40 percent in favor of secession. A factor in the referendum’s defeat may well have been Trudeau’s promise of “renewed federalism” if Quebec rejected secession. For more than a century, Canada had lacked an independent constitution, governed instead by legislation of the British Parliament. In 1982, Trudeau engineered the “patriation” from Britain of Canada’s constitution, accompanied by a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The new Constitution Act made a number of important reforms, including formalizing the official status of both French and English, but it neither modified the division of powers between Ottawa and the provinces nor altered the status of Quebec. Unaddressed were Quebec’s claims for recognition as one of Canada’s founding nations, for an enhanced role for the province in future constitutional amendments, and for a voice in naming the Supreme Court judges who would interpret the Constitution and Charter—all fundamental demands of Quebec nationalists. The implicit message of patriation, that Quebec would be treated no differently than any other province, was unacceptable to and rejected by Québecois. The Constitution Act took effect without Quebec’s assent and over its strenuous objections. With the exception of the insertion of bilingualism as a constitutional requirement, the Constitutional Act could have been written almost as if the French influence in Quebec did not exist. If Trudeau’s intent through patriation was to subdue and suppress the nationalist movement in Quebec and reunify Canada, it backfired. Resentment in Quebec increased, as did Anglophone antipathy toward French separatism. Two years after patriation, Trudeau’s Liberal government was ousted by the PC in the 1984 election. Its disastrous consequences included the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, the PC’s disalignment in 1993, and the destabilization of the party system. The second Quebec referendum, in 1995, was narrowly defeated with 49.5 percent favoring secession, which produced another sense of national crisis. The rest of Canada, particularly the West, has resisted Quebec’s “distinct society” demand because of a widely held view that all provinces should be treated equally, without granting one special status. Nonetheless, in 1997, the provincial premiers, and then their legislatures, unanimously adopted the Calgary Declaration, which, in Robert Young’s words, “attempted to square the circles of provincial equality and Quebec’s distinctiveness.”15
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As a nonbinding resolution, its significance was no more than rhetorical and, in any event, the PQ promptly denounced it. Federalists found cause for satisfaction in a 1998 decision by the Canadian Supreme Court. That decision said that Quebec cannot unilaterally secede from Canada, but that the federal and other provincial governments are obligated to negotiate Quebec’s separation if a clear majority of Quebecers vote in favor of it. The Clarity Act, passed the next year, gave Parliament the right to determine if a future referendum question met the Court’s criteria. The Quebec government rejected the applicability to the province of both the Court’s decision and the Clarity Act. The hard core of secessionists may be in the range of 40 to 45 percent, using the Bloc Québecois’ share of the vote in recent elections as a rough guide. Opinion polls in recent years indicate Quebec voters oppose secession by about a three-to-two margin.16 That some 60 percent of Quebecers appear to oppose secession is less impressive than the 40 percent who support it—and the 49.5 percent who did so in the 1995 referendum. Future PQ leaders might well seek to magnify this support should some inflammatory incident occur to reinforce the belief that secession and national independence are the only route to the dignity and respect for which Quebec continues to search. As Nelson Wiseman has observed, “symbolically, Quebec’s ‘sovereignty’ referendums may be seen as attempts to undo at the ballot box—a twentieth-century battleground—what Wolfe’s muskets accomplished on the plains of Abraham in 1759.”17 Montcalm might yet prevail. The PQ was defeated by the federalist Liberals in the 2003 and 2007 Quebec elections, coming in third in the latter year. (In close second place was ADQ, the newest and most conservative of the provincial parties.) WESTERN PROTEST Opposition, resentment, and hostility to Quebec’s appeals for special treatment have existed throughout anglophone Canada, but have been particularly high in the western provinces. Many westerners oppose Quebec’s demands, not least because, as Kent Weaver has pointed out, “It is Quebec, the region that has benefited most [in recent decades] from the Canadian electoral system’s tendency to overrepresent some regions in the federal governing party caucus, that is considering leaving the country, while the West, which was seriously underrepresented for most of the same period, is not.” In the same vein, the three prime ministers who were predominant in the final decades of the 20th Century—Trudeau, Mulroney, and Chrétien—were all from Quebec (as was Chrétien’s successor, Paul Martin).
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Weaver commented that westerners therefore ask what Quebecers have to complain about “when they are always in power in Ottawa.”18 Western antipathy has been aimed not just at Quebec but also at Canada’s economic and political elites, long distrusted in Canada’s regional politics. As David Laycock noted: “In some form or another, the idea that big-city Central Canada dominates the policy and spending priorities of the federal state has been around since before 1867. The region where it has been most effectively propounded—the West—is also the one where it has had the most significant consequences, with respect to both the orientation of the regional political culture and the development of new forms of political organization and representation.”19 Westerners have cited various other causes for protest against these elites. Western protest movements have often been anchored in an agrarian populism that claimed western farmers were oppressed by the elites, particularly by restrictions associated with the National Policy on agricultural exports to the United States. Westerners have also complained that federal energy and natural resource policies operate to the detriment of their provinces and that they are shortchanged by Ottawa. An example was federal taxation and regulation of oil production, exports, and prices. These were keenly resented in the West, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan, because by lowering prices and exports they deprived provincial governments of tax revenues they would otherwise have collected. Another example was the obstacles that the Liberal Trudeau government presented to Alberta’s Conservative government beginning in 1971, when the province initiated a new economic development program centered on expansion of the oil industry. Trudeau’s National Energy Program (NEP) sought to divert energy exploration and development away from the West to oil fields offshore and in the North, which were under direct federal control. “In the West, the NEP became a hated symbol of regional discrimination,” Bickerton wrote.20 Geography is a substantial influence on trade and economic policy. On the one hand, federal policy has always sought to develop the national economy. Most of Canada’s population—and its business enterprises—are located within a band that stretches from coast to coast but whose northern edge is rarely more than 100 miles or so from the US border. Exporters in Vancouver, for example, are therefore unlikely to favor a policy that forces them to do business with customers in Toronto or Halifax when it is logistically easier to sell to buyers in Seattle. Even with 21st-Century transportation and communications technology, it is often easier for Canadian firms to sell to Asia or Europe than to customers elsewhere in Canada. The easiest of all, of course, are firms in the United States, but
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that has led to enormous US trade dominance. To dilute US economic influence, the Harper Conservative government is pursuing trade deals with the European Union and countries in Asia and Latin America. This, too, has generated both support and opposition from Canadian interests, depending on whose ox is being gored. Hence, both Quebec and the West have long felt oppressed by the economic and political elites of Toronto and Ottawa. The regional cleavages these grievances produced were, and are, part and parcel of Canadian politics. Attempts to resolve them by expanding the party system underlay the “earthquake” of 1993. THE PART Y SYSTEM The inability of the party system to resolve Canada’s cleavage issues—on the contrary, frequently straddling or evading them—is embedded in its fundamental characteristics and has long hampered the integration of Canada as a nation. Along with the Quebec issue itself, the failures of the party system were a prime cause of the 1993 election outcome. Neither party ever wished wholly to embrace or repudiate the cause of the West or of Quebec, just as both parties felt impelled to shun almost any ideological cause that might lose at least as many votes as it attracted. The Liberal and Progressive Conservative Parties competed in the first post-Confederation election in 1867. (Indeed, both parties existed even before Confederation).21 Every Canadian government has been led by one or the other of them without resort to coalition partners, most often by the Liberals, who won 22 of the 41 elections between 1867 and 2008. In the 20th Century particularly, the Liberals were considered the “normal” party of government. In most elections prior to 1984, the two parties were competitive across the country. Quebec usually voted Liberal, the West leaned PC, and both parties had strong bases of support in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. Varying somewhat with each election, Ontario contributes about 35 percent of the national vote, Quebec a little over a quarter, the Atlantics less than 10 percent, and the West about 30 percent. Canada’s two traditional major parties differ in significant respects from parties in other parliamentary democracies. Neither was ever a mass integration or cadre party based on social class distinctions. From the start, the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives were ideologically and organizationally “catch-all” parties that acted as brokers between society and state. Otto Kirchheimer’s description of the characteristics of European catch-
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all parties—minimal ideology, strong party leadership, low importance of individual party members, remoteness from particular social groups or classes and indeed from ordinary voters in preference for a quest for support in the electorate at large, and maximal involvement with a wide variety of interest groups—all describe the Canadian Liberal and Progressive Conservative Parties throughout their entire histories.22 Indeed, it is fair to say that catch-all parties were “invented” in Canada long before they arose in Europe. The analysis of cleavage structures and party systems in European countries by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan has some relevance to Canadian parties. Canada’s geographic, religious, and agriculturalindustry cleavages correspond to some extent to those Lipset and Rokkan discussed. But Canada has never experienced an “owner–worker” cleavage of the kind Lipset and Rokkan describe—at least not a political one;23 only the left-wing minor parties (CCF and its successor, the NDP) made an attempt to introduce class differences into political debate, and with little success. On the contrary, whenever differences between social classes emerged as a potential political issue, the major parties diverted it into a debate about regional differences or those between the French and English cultures. Similarly, when feminist and aboriginal issues arose more recently, R. Kenneth Carty and his colleagues wrote, “all three parties had precisely the response to the emergence of newly salient cleavages that one would expect of parties trying to straddle fundamental cleavages: they tried to appeal to new groups of voters without alienating any traditional supporters of the party.”24 Neither traditional party ever sought to champion only one side of Canada’s cleavages, except for the linguistic-cultural division. Because the PC long sought to be the voice of English-Canadians, the Liberals benefited from a favored position in Quebec almost by default. On other cleavage positions and issues, the major parties practiced the politics of accommodation and brokerage, seeking to represent a broad range of interests and viewpoints, evading differences, and appealing widely to the electorate as a whole. Although on occasion the parties have felt the need to shore up and reinvigorate their core bases, in the main divisive issues have gone unaddressed or have been sidestepped. The virtue of this strategy for the party system has been a high degree of competitiveness on overlapping issue positions. The liability for the parties themselves, as for all catch-all parties, has been reduced voter emotional commitment and high volatility from election to election—that is, weak commitment by the party base, a critical liability for the PC in 1993.
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At various times, minor protest parties of both right and left have appeared on the scene, but they seldom did well or endured long.25 One that did for a time was a right-tilting populist party, Social Credit that did moderately well in the West (and in Quebec) from 1935 on, disappearing after 1984 into what would later become the Reform Party. NDP, created by labor and the left in 1961, has been the most durable minor party. With its reliance on both dues-paying membership and labor union subsidies, it sought to become an ideological mass party but never succeeded. NDP’s strength has been primarily in the West plus pockets of support in Ontario and Nova Scotia, often electing federal MPs in significant numbers and controlling some provincial governments.26 Occasionally, when neither major party had a parliamentary majority, NDP has briefly lent the government its votes on certain issues (as Social Credit also did in its time), particularly to avoid an election for which it was not prepared. Conversely, when partisan circumstances hold out the prospect of improving the party’s situation, it has cooperated with other parties in an attempt to bring the government down and hold an early election (a strategy that works best when the government party lacks a parliamentary majority). For instance, NDP cooperated with the Conservatives and Bloc Québecois in 2004 to bring an end to the Martin Liberal government. The Liberals, under their new leader, Michael Ignatieff, were making a similar effort to derail the Harper Conservative government in the winter of 2009–2010, with which NDP has not so far cooperated. NDP is rooted in social democratic ideology, but it also provided the West a vehicle for populist, nonideological protests against economic elites and the policies of the major parties. For many voters in the West, NDP’s greatest asset may have been that it was neither the PC nor the Liberals. When a more appealing protest vehicle arose in 1993, these voters therefore readily switched allegiances, even though Reform, in many respects, was as far to the right as NDP was to the left. In 1993, Reform, not NDP, was the party of dissent in the West. As a result, two-thirds of NDP’s seat losses that year occurred in the four western provinces. REGIONAL AND PROVINCIAL COMPETITION National two-party competition disappeared after 1993 and has not been restored since the center-right merger. Instead, there have been regional and provincial variations among principal electoral competitors. In Saskatchewan, for example, the top two parties were Reform /Alliance and NDP in 1997 and 2000; the CPC and Liberals in 2004; and the CPC and NDP in 2006. Duverger’s Law seems no longer applicable to contemporary
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Canadian provincial politics, even though it is still germane in individual parliamentary districts (“ridings”). The Liberal Party has been a prime contender in most provinces in most of the recent elections, but not all. Each of the parties has had to deal with the problem of running a national campaign when there is no single opponent with which to compete. In 1997 and 2000, the Liberals’ principal competitor in the West was Reform/Alliance (except, as noted, in Saskatchewan); in the Atlantics, the PC (except Nova Scotia where it was NDP); in Ontario, Reform/Alliance; and in Quebec, the BQ. In those same two elections, the PC was competitive with Liberals mainly in the Atlantics, but in the earlier year it also faced Reform in Manitoba and Ontario. In recent elections, the competitive situation has settled out only partially (even excluding Quebec where the BQ continues to be strong). In 2004, the Conservatives and the Liberals were the two leading parties in nine provinces, but NDP was close in the four western provinces plus Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In 2006, NDP finished second in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia, and was a close third in Manitoba and New Brunswick. Elsewhere, it was essentially a Conservative–Liberal competition in both years. NDP did somewhat better in 2008, although it carried no province. It finished second in each of the four western provinces and in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. It ran third in the other Atlantic provinces and in Ontario, and fourth in Quebec. The Conservatives won the four western provinces, carried Ontario, and divided the Atlantics with the Liberals, who carried no province west of that region. First place in Quebec went to the BQ, of course, followed by the Liberals and then the Conservatives. Both Liberals and Conservatives aspire to be national parties, competitive in every province, but achievement of that goal remains elusive. Of course, the BQ is an obstacle in Quebec. In the rest of Canada, as long as NDP can capture more than a sixth of the vote nationally (and almost onefifth in Ontario) it will be an obstruction for the two larger parties. And, with 80 seats (over a quarter of the total) between them, the two smaller parties threaten a constant hindrance to a parliamentary majority for either of the large parties. ELECTOR AL STRUCTURE AND SERIAL PART Y SYSTEMS The structure of the electoral system has been consistent throughout Canadian political history, with important implications for the party system. The Canadian pattern largely emulates Britain’s Westminster model.
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Members of the House of Commons are elected from FPP, single-member districts, with a plurality of the popular vote required for election within each riding. As in other FPP systems, there is no requirement for a majority vote and hence none for run-off elections. This system often results in disparities between each party’s share of the vote and its percentage of seats won. In 1993, for instance, the Liberal Party won 60 percent of the seats with 41 percent of the vote, while the PC with 16 percent of the vote gained less than 1 percent of the seats. (The other house of Parliament is the Senate, whose members are appointed for life, effectively by the prime minister, and which has relatively minor legislative powers.) While the electoral system has been consistent over time, other significant elements of the party system have gone through evolutionary phases. Carty, Cross, and Young summarized the mechanisms of change: [P]arties provide the central political linkage of a democratic system between the society and its governing institutions. . . . [C]hanging forms of governance have prompted changes to the party system. . . . Over the course of Canadian history, the parties have always had to struggle to link society to government. . . . When the politics of the changing country outruns its governing formula, then the party system that links the two snaps, and whole new patterns of competition and linkage need to be built.27
These changes in “competition and linkage” have produced four separate party systems, Carty maintains, with the fourth beginning in 1993—even though the same two parties were dominant throughout the country’s history.28 The first and second party systems lasted, respectively, from Confederation to the end of World War I, and then to 1957. Initially cadre organizations, they were characterized by the growth of local and then national party structures, strong parliamentary caucuses, and then by a shift from the caucuses to national conventions to select party leaders. PAN-CANADIANISM IN THE THIRD-PART Y SYSTEM The party system changed again in the late 1950s with the advent of “pan-Canadian” politics, characterized by a shift from regional and provincial campaigns to those of national sweep and reach, enabled by increased political professionalization, the advent of public opinion polling, and particularly by television, which enabled party leaders to communicate to the entire country. The PC under John Diefenbaker was the first party to use these techniques successfully. However, Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the dominant political figure during
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this third-party system, extending pan-Canadianism from politics to governance. Trudeau led the country almost without interruption from 1968 to 1984. During this period, administrative decision making began to be delegated from the cabinet level down into the bureaucracy. The growth of the welfare state occurred primarily at the provincial level, but it was stimulated by programs and funding from Ottawa. The whole purpose of panCanadianism was to further the integration of the country through large national programs that were intended to enhance citizens’ loyalty to the federal government. To a significant extent, they had the opposite effect, however, since their execution was by provincial agencies. The blame for their huge cost was laid at the door of the federal government, so that the provinces won the credit and Ottawa received the blame—a formula familiar to analysts of the Great Society programs in the United States during the same time period. In Carty’s words, Trudeau sought to “construct a Canadian identity” by implementing “bilingualism and multiculturalism as pan-Canadian policies to mitigate or replace provincial and regional political identities.”29 Trudeau’s 1982 patriation of the Constitution, with its new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was an important element in pan-Canadianism. From Trudeau’s point of view, the Constitution and Charter were essential in building a sense of national unity and identity without giving special status to any province. Gagnon has described Quebecers’ quite different perceptions of the situation: Quebec’s search for special status during this period continued to be frustrated by Prime Minister Trudeau, who refused to give a positive hearing to Quebec’s Premier. On November 5, 1981, the other [provincial] premiers agreed with Trudeau to patriate the constitution with an entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms, without first having secured Quebec’s consent. In effect, Quebec was shut out of the process. In its absence, an amending formula was adopted that denied Quebec a veto, while affirming the principle of equality of provinces. This created a situation in which Quebec was forced to abide by rules set by others.30
One might quarrel with the reasonableness of Quebec’s position, but unquestionably it was deeply felt. Mulroney was to capitalize on this grievance in his appeal to Quebec in 1984. It became one of the issues in the Meech Lake negotiations. Pan-Canadianism worked only to a point. To some extent, Trudeau’s efforts backfired by producing resentment in both Quebec and the West. Quebec’s nationalists had created the PQ, which gained control of the
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provincial government in 1976. Although no new party formed in the western provinces during this time, resentment of federal economic policies and the biculturalism fostered by Ottawa and the elites began to increase (often using votes for NDP as a protest outlet), fueling the Reform Party a few years hence. Western umbrage focused on programs that sought to centralize control in Ottawa over energy and natural resources and other economic policies at the expense of the provinces, notably the western ones. In this way, an important consequence of pan-Canadianism was to heighten both a sense of national identity as well as a cross-cutting increase in regional resentment. While the provincial governments were quite happy to accept Trudeau’s money to finance the major programs that were the building blocks of the new welfare state, they were unwilling to swallow the pan-Canadian hook that lay inside this bait. Many Quebecers actually disliked Trudeau’s promotion of bilingualism, because it prevented them from adopting French as the province’s only language. They also opposed his constitutional agenda, because their voice in its adoption would be no louder than that of any other province. As Gagnon implies in the above quotation, a Quebec that is treated as an equal with each of the other provinces is a Quebec whose French character has lower status than the “Englishness” imposed unilaterally by the rest of Canada. And, as noted, westerners felt particularly aggrieved by Liberal economic and natural resource policies, which they felt were imposed on them by the elites of Toronto and Ottawa. And yet there was a net shift of political power from the federal government to the provincial ones during the Trudeau era that was probably as substantial as it was unintended. The provincial premiers, who had the responsibility for implementing the new programs of the Canadian welfare state, decided to meet annually to coordinate their positions and policies, lest they be preempted by federal policymakers. The latter were thus prodded into launching their own series of First Ministers conferences. These meetings enabled the provincial and federal prime ministers to negotiate important policy and sometimes constitutional decisions (e.g., the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords discussed below). They have become an important, but extraconstitutional, instrument that has inadvertently strengthened provincial power and diluted that of the national government. This process, termed executive federalism, lies completely outside of constitutional authority. It has played a de facto role possibly analogous to that of legislative upper houses in some strong bicameral federal systems—for example, Germany’s Bundesrat—but it is very difficult for other outsiders to imagine how it works. Americans might consider the vast implications
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of a new process in which the president and the state governors get together from time to time without congressional or constitutional sanction, not only to coordinate administrative programs but also to develop and execute new constitutional initiatives. The mind boggles at the political uproar that would ensue in the United States. Yet, while there have been some objections to this process, the attitude among most Canadians seems to be little more than, “well, the elites are at it again.” MULRONEY AND THE MEECH LAK E ACCORD Trudeau led the Liberal Party and the country from 1968 until 1984, except for a brief interlude of PC government under Joe Clark in 1979–1980. The 1979 election was a demonstration of the distortions a single-member FPP electoral system can produce: The Liberals received over 40 percent of the vote and the PC less than 36 percent; the latter, however, won 136 seats (less than a majority) while the Liberals won only 114. Clark thus became prime minister of a minority government and Trudeau announced his retirement. After only nine months in power, however, Clark lost a budget vote when a minor party (Social Credit) abstained, and his government fell. Trudeau then decided he would not retire after all and led the Liberals back to power in the 1980 election. Regionalism played a key role as a campaign issue. Clark’s government had proposed changes in energy pricing that favored the energy-producing western provinces at the expense of the more highly populated eastern and central energy-consuming provinces. The PC won only in the West; the Liberals won pluralities in Ontario and in Atlantic Canada, plus a two-toone majority in Quebec, to carry Trudeau back into office. PC dissatisfaction with Clark’s leadership led to a new party election in 1983 that Clark lost to Brian Mulroney. Mulroney, from Quebec, was completely bilingual and seemed the obvious choice to end Liberal dominance of federal elections in his home province and thereby lead the PC back into power. Carty and colleagues summed up the new PC strategy: Mulroney set out to construct an electoral coalition of several disparate groups, employing precisely the kind of elite-level accommodative techniques for which the party system was best known. Western Canada already provided the Conservatives with a solid base of support, and the antipathy between many westerners and the departing prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, served only to bolster that Conservative base. Parts of Ontario were reliably Tory blue, as were parts of the Atlantic provinces. But to form a solid and
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stable majority government that could govern effectively, Mulroney had to win a substantial number of seats in Quebec, long a Liberal stronghold.31
Mulroney’s 1984 campaign capitalized on a severe economic recession and his pledge to retain the social programs the Liberals had instituted. But his major promise was a new constitutional effort that would accommodate both Quebec and the rest of Canada. That enabled him to appeal broadly for support to Quebec nationalists and erstwhile advocates for independence, recruiting many of the best known to run for Parliament under the PC banner. Mulroney’s success in his home province was mirrored in a resounding victory throughout the country. See Table 7.1. The PC carried every province, capturing half the vote and almost threefourths of the seats; this was the party’s best showing since 1958. Particularly notable was the vote in Quebec, which the PC had not carried since that year. In 1984, Mulroney won 50.2 percent of the Quebec vote and 58 of the province’s 75 parliamentary seats. As is so often the case with campaign promises, Mulroney’s pledges to Quebec were far easier to make than to keep. His first attempt to do so was through the 1987 Meech Lake Accord, a pact negotiated with the 10 provincial premiers. This agreement sought to meet five of Quebec’s demands: recognition of the province as “a distinct society” and of Canada’s “linguistic duality” in the federal Constitution; a requirement for unanimity among the provinces in the adoption of constitutional amendments (thus giving Quebec a right of veto); provincial input on appointments to the
TABLE 7.1 1984 General Election Results Percentage of Vote
Changea
PC
50.0
+17.5
211
+108
74.8
Liberal
28.0
–16.3
40
-107
14.2
NDP
18.8
–1.0
30
–2
10.6
Others
3.2
–0.2
1
+1
0.4
Party
Seats Won Changea
Percentage of Seatsb
Source: Bickerton, Gagnon, and Smith, Ties that Bind: Parties and Voters in Canada (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1999), Tables A-3 and A-4. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: Author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Changes from 1980 general election; by-elections excluded. (b) Total seats, 282.
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205
Canadian Supreme Court (which not only interprets the Constitution, but also is empowered to advise Parliament on the constitutionality of proposed amendments and legislation); the right of each province to withdraw from a national program and establish its own version with federal funds; and increased provincial control over immigration. Meech Lake was important for several reasons. First, it would have significantly increased the already substantial powers of the provinces relative to the federal government. Second, it was the price Quebec required to sign onto repatriation of the Constitution, which had gone into effect without Quebec’s agreement. Third and most important, it would have represented a substantial advance toward placating Quebecers and particularly their independence-minded nationalists, and thereby progress toward national unity. The Accord was supported by Liberals, NDP, and many in the PC, though not by aboriginal and feminist groups, who protested that it neglected their particular demands. Many anglophones, including Conservatives in the West and elsewhere, also opposed the agreement as appeasement of Quebec. A specific western grievance in 1987 was the CF-18 affair, which related to the Mulroney government’s decision to give a jet fighter contract to a Montreal defense company in preference to a lower bidder in Winnipeg. The Manitoba company was also recognized as technologically superior, and the Mulroney government was widely accused of unfairly favoring Quebec in the contract award. Like Meech Lake itself, the CF-18 contract was seen by many westerners as special treatment for Quebec that in this case came at the direct expense of the West. Mulroney denied the accusations of preferential treatment for Quebec, but there was probably some truth to them. To the PC leadership, approval of the Accord was vital, and Mulroney wanted Quebec’s strong support. With it, the PC could reasonably expect to carry Quebec in future federal elections and thereby gain long-term parliamentary majorities. Meech Lake therefore held out the glowing promise for Mulroney and the PC of a historic role as Canada’s unifiers, as well as the prospect of replacing the Liberals as the “normal” party of government. The Accord, which had been approved by all the provincial premiers, required the unanimous consent of the provincial legislatures within a three-year period beginning with the first ratification (Quebec’s in June 1987). Meanwhile, however, the 1988 election intervened. PRELUDES TO DISASTER Despite the opposition to Meech Lake, the Accord was formally supported by all three political parties (although not by the Liberals’ future leader,
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When Political Parties Die
Jean Chrétien) and hence was not a particularly divisive campaign issue. Thus, despite its highly controversial nature and content, the Canadian electorate was given no opportunely to vote on it. Instead, the Free Trade Agreement Mulroney had negotiated with the United States became the focus of the 1988 campaign. An important dimension of Canada’s economic and political cleavage is its occasionally uneasy relationship with the United States, a country with nine times Canada’s population and an economy 12 times larger. As noted previously, US trade is an immense component of the Canadian economy. Nonetheless, trade policy is as controversial in Canada as it is in the United States and elsewhere; those who would gain from it want to see trade expanded, while those actually or potentially hurt argue for restrictions. Canada’s catch-all major parties are untroubled by any necessity for ideological consistency and over the years have been on both sides of this issue, depending on where the interests and the votes are. In the 1988 campaign, Mulroney and the PC supported the trade agreement that he and his government had negotiated, using the argument that exports and jobs would increase. The Liberals and NDP in turn opposed the Free Trade Agreement because of job threats to workers in industries faced with import competition. Because the votes of trade opponents were divided between the two opposition parties, the Conservatives were reelected—but with only 43 percent of the vote and 42 fewer seats. Significantly for the future, the PC lost votes in anglophone regions, declining from 50.0 to 39.5 percent (and losing 47 seats) outside Quebec. The structure of the national electoral system gave the PC an overall majority of 43 seats. In Quebec, although Meech Lake was not on the ballot, the good will toward the PC that the Accord had engendered was beneficial to the party. Compared to the 1984 result, the PC’s share of the vote increased from 50.2 to 52.7 percent, and it gained five additional seats. This election represented NDP’s high point, the only time it has reached 20 percent of the national vote, primarily because of gains in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The 1988 campaign was the first one contested by the Reform Party, although it won no seats and only 2.1 percent of the national vote (but gained 15 percent in Alberta). Quebec and Alberta were the only two provinces in which Mulroney’s party won outright majorities, an irony given that these provinces were to become the heartland of the new protest parties five years later. See Table 7.2. Meanwhile, the three-year Meech Lake ratification period was proceeding. The terms of the agreement required its unanimous approval by
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207
TABLE 7.2 1988 General Election Results Percentage of Vote
Changea
Elected
Changea
Percentage of Seatsb
PC
43.0
–7.0
169
–42
57.3
Liberal
31.9
+3.9
83
+43
28.1
NDP
20.4
+1.6
43
+13
14.6
Party
Reform
2.1
—
0
—
0
Others
2.6
-0.4
0
—
0
Source: Bickerton, Gagnon, and Smith, Ties that Bind, Tables A-3 and A-4. (Columns 3, 5, & 6: Author’s calculations from source data.) Notes: (a) Changes from 1984 general election; by-elections excluded. (b) Total seats, 295 (+13).
the provincial legislatures. The ratification deadline in June 1990 came and went without the necessary approval by the legislatures of Newfoundland and Manitoba. The former province had had a change of government, and the latter was unable to overcome the legislative objections of an aboriginal member. The Meech Lake Accord was dead. That failure triggered the launch of the Bloc Québecois. Several Quebec Conservatives resigned from their party, including Lucien Bouchard, a personal friend of Mulroney and a cabinet member. Some Liberals from Quebec also left their party caucus to protest the opposition to Meech Lake of the newly elected Liberal leader, Jean Chrétien. BQ fund-raising and organizational efforts began, aided by the provincial PQ. Bouchard became the first leader of the BQ and later was to lead the PQ. Mulroney gave his predecessor, Joe Clark, a cabinet portfolio to develop an alternative to Meech Lake that would be acceptable to all sides. After extensive negotiations with a wide variety of interests, the result, agreed to by the federal and provincial premiers and again endorsed by all three political parties, was the 1992 Charlottetown Accord. To mollify anglophone opponents of the earlier attempt, a number of its provisions were diluted versions of ones from the Meech Lake Accord. Added to Charlottetown were clauses recognizing a right of self-government by the aborigines, and promising Senate reform. To avoid the complexities posed by the previous requirement for provincial legislative ratification and the accusations of an undemocratic method of approval, this time a national popular referendum was called
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When Political Parties Die
for October 1992 to adopt the new Accord. Charlottetown suffered the fate of the political haggling that produced it and ran into trouble immediately. It was opposed by important forces in Quebec, because it did not go far enough, and in the West, because it went too far. Referenda often provide the electorate with a means to express grievances only indirectly related to the ballot question, and that was certainly true in this case, especially in the western provinces. The Reform Party and its leader, Preston Manning, won wide attention for their campaign against the referendum. Popular resentment of manipulation by political elites was growing, and the prime minister was seen as the arch-manipulator. Both Charlottetown and its predecessor, Meech Lake, were widely perceived, wrote two political analysts, “as illegitimate deals concocted behind closed doors by selfserving first ministers.”32 In the end, Charlottetown was defeated with 54.4 percent against it nationally; in Quebec alone, 57 percent opposed it. (Technically, there were two referenda: one in Quebec and the other in the rest of Canada. Both would have had to pass.) It was the end of Mulroney’s efforts to salvage pan-Canadianism by accommodating both Quebec and English-speaking Canada. It was also the end for Mulroney himself; he resigned in February 1993. He was replaced in June by the country’s first female federal prime minister, Kim Campbell, a member of Mulroney’s cabinet from British Columbia. Her tenure was brief. THE 1993 EARTHQUAK E Campbell’s accession did little to bolster failing PC prospects. Mulroney was gone, but he and his party were still blamed for the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debacles, as well as for the country’s deep economic recession and an unpopular new tax on services. Distrust was not limited to the West; in both Ontario and the Atlantics, Mulroney and the PC were considered unresponsive to local needs.33 Campbell herself proved an inept candidate. Peter Woolstencroft summed up Campbell’s campaign deficiencies, observing that she had neither the organizational preparedness nor clear and defensible policies. . . . Campbell quickly created the impression of uncertainty, indecisiveness, and weakness while her main opponent [the new Liberal leader, Jean Chrétien] was successfully portraying himself in the opposite terms. The lack of preparedness that marked the debates and press interviews were hallmarks of a campaign that produced nothing but bad news which became worse.34
The Case of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party
209
An unpopular record, a poor candidate, and a dismal campaign provided a recipe for disaster. The disalignment that struck the Progressive Conservative Party occurred on November 27, 1993. The PC received a mere 16 percent of the popular vote, losing every province. Its representation in a House of Commons of 295 members plummeted from 169 seats to just two. The prime minister and her entire cabinet (save only a single junior minister) were ousted from Parliament. NDP also suffered; it was reduced to its lowest share of the vote and number of seats ever. Even the Liberals, nominally the victorious party, won only 177 seats, a majority of 29, with only 41.3 percent of the national vote, the smallest share ever won up to that point by a victorious Canadian party. See Table 7.3. Two large new regional parties suddenly appeared: The Reform Party, whose support base was almost totally in the western provinces, principally Alberta and British Columbia, won 52 seats with under 19 percent of the national vote. The Bloc Québecois became the official opposition party despite the fact that all 54 of its elected candidates were from a single province. In Quebec, the BQ won just under half (49.3 percent) of the vote; the Liberals received 33 percent. The PC, which had captured almost 53 percent of the provincial vote in 1988, was reduced to less than 14 percent. The defeat of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords had undone not only the coalition with Quebec nationalists that Mulroney had assembled in 1984, but also the Progressive Conservative base in the rest of the country. A 1993 postelection survey found that of Quebec voters who had supported the PC in the 1988 election, 62 percent voted against Charlotteown and 68 percent voted for the BQ. In the rest of the country, 49 percent of those who voted PC in 1988 opposed Charlottetown and the same percentage voted for the Reform Party; even among those 1988 PC voters who supported the 1992 referendum, 28 percent voted Reform the next year.35 To Bickerton and his colleagues, an internal party cleavage was a significant factor in the implosion of the PC base: [The PC’s] Quebec caucus, membership, and voter base was [sic] distinctly to the left of the rest of the party on social policy and had a starkly different understanding of the character of the national identity and Quebec’s place within Confederation. In the end, the effort to bridge these yawning differences created the agents of the Conservative Party’s demise (in the guise of Reform and the Bloc), and prevented the Tories from making the necessary adjustments once it was clear that the new protest parties were stealing away the Conservative Party’s support base.36
TABLE 7.3 1993 General Election Results Liberal Newfoundland 7 seats Nova Scotia 11 seats New Brunswick 10 seats Prince Edward Island 4 seats Quebec 75 seats Ontario 99 seats Manitoba 14 seats Saskatchewan 14 seats Alberta 26 seats British Columbia 32 seats Yukon/NW Territories 3 seats CANADA TOTALS 295 seats
PC
NDP
Reform
BQ
Others
67.3% +22.3 7 (+2)
26.7% –15.5 0 (-2)
3.5% –8.9 0 (nc)
1.0% +1.0 0 (nc)
— nc 0 (nc)
1.5% +1.1 0 (nc)
52.0 +5.5 11 (+5)
23.5 –17.4 0 (–5)
6.8 –4.6 0 (nc)
13.3 +13.3 0 (nc)
— nc 0 (nc)
4.4 +3.2 0 (nc)
56.0 +10.7 9 (+4)
27.9 –12.5 1 (–4)
4.9 –4.4 0 (nc)
8.5 +8.5 0 (nc)
— nc 0 (nc)
2.7 –2.2 0 (nc)
60.1 +10.2 4 (nc)
32.0 –9.5 0 (nc)
5.2 –2.3 0 (nc)
1.0 +1.0 0 (nc)
— nc 0 (nc)
1.7 +0.6 0 (nc)
33.0 +2.8 19 (+7)
13.6 –39.1 1 (–62)
1.5 –12.4 0 (nc)
— 49.3 nc +49.3 0 (nc) 54 (+54)
2.6 –0.5 1 (+1)
20.1 +20.1 1 (+1)
— nc 0 (nc)
3.4 +0.6 0 (nc)
52.9 +14.0 98 (+55)
17.6 6.0 –20.6 –14.0 0 (–46) 0 (–10)
44.9 +8.4 12 (+7)
11.9 –24.5 0 (–7)
16.6 –4.7 1 (–1)
22.4 +19.1 1 (+1)
— nc 0 (nc)
4.2 +2.2 0 (nc)
32.1 +13.9 5 (+5)
11.3 –25.1 0 (–4)
26.6 –17.6 5 (–5)
27.2 +26.5 4 (+4)
— nc 0 (nc)
2.8 +2.3 0 (nc)
25.1 +11.4 4 (+4)
14.6 –37.1 0 (–25)
4.0 52.3 –13.4 +37.0 0 (–1) 22 (+22)
— nc 0 (nc)
4.0 +2.2 0 (nc)
28.1 +7.7 6 (+5)
13.5 15.5 36.4 –21.8 –21.4 +31.5 0 (–12) 2 (–17) 24 (+24)
— nc 0 (nc)
6.5 +4.1 0 (nc)
— nc 0 (nc)
2.4 –0.8 0 (nc)
49.5 +19.5 2 (nc)
16.8 –12.9 0 (nc)
21.1 –15.9 1 (nc)
10.2 +10.2 0 (nc)
41.3 16.0 6.9 18.7 13.5 +9.4 –27.0 –13.5 +16.6 +13.5 177 (+94) 2 (–167) 9 (–34) 52 (+52) 54 (+54)
3.6 +1.0 1 (+1)
Source: Bickerton, Gagnon, and Smith, Ties that Bind, Appendix Tables A-4 & B-21, and author’s calculations. Notes: Shown are percentages of the vote, numbers of seats won, and changes in both. “nc”= no change.
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211
As a result, the BQ took away the PC vote in Quebec, Reform took it in the West, and the Liberals took it in Atlantic Canada and divided it fiveto-two with Reform in Ontario. NDP, long the beneficiary of populist and protest votes in the West, lost those votes to Reform: NDP national vote fell from over 20 percent in 1988 to less than 7 percent in 1993, and its parliamentary representation dropped from 43 seats to 9. Its support dropped heavily throughout the West: In British Columbia, for example, NDP vote fell from 37 percent to 15.5 percent, while Reform votes rose from 5 percent to 36 percent. Canada has a history of minor parties that thrive on protest voting, but the number of votes opposed to both traditional major parties reached unparalleled heights in 1993. Almost 43 percent of Canadian voters cast ballots for a minor party that year, the largest such percentage ever.37 Because the BQ (in Quebec) and Reform (in the West) were seen as more authentic protest vehicles than the traditional NDP, the latter was essentially caught in the backlash against the PC. Even the victorious Liberals suffered. In 1984, even while they were being routed nationally, they had still managed to win 35 percent in their Quebec stronghold. In 1993, while winning nationally, they took only about the same vote share (33 percent), because Quebecers who had opted for Liberal candidates prior to 1984, and for the PC in 1984 and 1988, this time cast ballots for the new BQ. THE NEW PROTEST PARTIES The two new protest parties together won 106 seats, over a third of the House of Commons, with the BQ ahead of Reform by only two seats. The BQ’s program was (and remains) a single issue: The achievement of national independence for Quebec. It would like to retain some kind of economic relationship with the rest of Canada, but not at the expense of its sovereignty. The Bloc Québecois belongs to a different species than other political parties, whose purpose is to win elections and gain or retain power. Unlike even the provincial PQ, the federal BQ does not share that purpose. It runs candidates in no province outside Quebec, has no aspirations to govern Canada, and remains more a single-issue, nationalist movement that runs some candidates than a traditional political party. The Reform Party was also initially a regional party, primarily representing the West, although it offered candidates in every province except Quebec. Reform sought to be more than just another prairie protest party by advocating a neo-conservative perspective well to the right of the other parties, especially in the area of eliminating the federal deficit. Its platform
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When Political Parties Die
was also neo-conservative on social policy (or perhaps libertarian), advocating equality for citizens as individuals and opposing multiculturalism and affirmative action for minorities and women. Reform was intensely critical of what it saw as special interests and sought to exclude them from participating in legislative and administrative policy development. In this, it resembled reform groups in the United States and elsewhere, except that the Canadian party was rightist and preferred that these issues be resolved in the marketplace or elsewhere in the private sector. Reform’s core positions, however, dealt with institutional change: the introduction of direct democracy—referenda and initiatives on issues, and recall of MPs; abolition of party discipline among MPs, insisting that they vote the views of their constituencies, not those of party leaders; and replacement of the toothless upper house with a “Triple-E Senate” that would be elected, equal (the same representation for each province), and effective. Unlike the BQ, Reform was seriously interested in becoming the government party but was hindered by the conservative views of its leadership on economic and social issues. Initially, said Heather MacIvor, the Reform Party had the characteristics of a mass party—in that it “emerged outside the state and tried to make it accountable to (and representative of) particular economic interests”38 and, in Reform’s case, social ones as well. Another view of the Reform Party saw it as Canada’s postmodern political party. Extending to Canadian politics earlier analyses of the new right in Europe, Richard Sigurdson described the Reform Party’s 1993 campaign as expressing “conservative postmodernism,” which he said “appeals to the widespread feelings of fear, anxiety and resentment experienced by a growing number of citizens in the Western world. Conservative postmodernism seeks to provide security and a sense of identity and worth, often at the expense of outsiders and in opposition to the new values and lifestyles so prevalent in contemporary society.”39 After losing the 1997 election (which one student of Canadian politics believed it had expected to win40), Reform tried to expand its appeal eastward, especially into Ontario, where it had won almost a fifth of the vote but no seats. In the spring of 2000, the party moderated some positions, changed its name to the “Canadian Alliance” (CA), and replaced its founder, Preston Manning, as party leader. His successor, Stockwell Day, an Albertan Christian fundamentalist, expounded what Laycock saw as a “traditionalist Manichean moralism and social conservatism”41 that had small appeal to Ontarians. In that fall’s election; the party marginally increased its vote share in the province but did win two seats. Day’s views and leadership style generated dissension within the Alliance, and he was ousted in 2002 by Stephen Harper, another Albertan.
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213
Harper became the architect of a new national strategy for Reform. In the process, he shed his earlier ideological stridency, eventually abandoning nearly everything the party had stood for, to broaden the party’s appeal across the continent. Later still, in order to create a new national party, Harper arranged a merger with what was left of the PC. By that time, the Reform Party had become the Canadian Alliance, and, as Harper began to moderate his previous conservativism, the Alliance began increasingly to resemble an ideology-free, catch-all party, much like the model typified historically by Canada’s old major parties. This trend accelerated after the merger with the PC. CONTINUIT Y OF CHANGE: 1997– 2002 The elections of 1997 and 2000 demonstrated the continuity of the changes that began in 1993 (see Table 7.4). In 1997, Chrétien’s Liberals were reelected, although with a reduced vote share and 22 fewer seats despite capturing 101 of Ontario’s 103 seats. Reform and the BQ were the next largest parties—the BQ lost 10 seats and Reform gained 8 and became the official opposition. Reform made a major effort in 1997 to extend its gains into giant Ontario, which elects one-third of all the members of Parliament but failed to reelect even its single member from that province. Reform did add eight additional members, all from the West. NDP, still in fourth place, scored some gains, winning 21 seats, most of them in the West but also in Nova Scotia, home to the party’s new leader, Alexa McDonough. The PC also had a new leader, Jean Charest of Quebec. Under him, the PC increased its vote share slightly and won 20 seats, most of them in Atlantic Canada. (Charest had been one of the two PC parliamentarians to survive the 1993 tsunami that swamped and drowned the rest of his party. Shortly after the 1997 election, Charest resigned, accepting a draft to become the provincial leader of the Quebec Liberals and became premier in 2003. Canadian political leaders are nothing if not flexible.) Except for the CA (originally Reform), which won 66 seats and over a quarter of the vote, the 2000 election outcome did not differ greatly from the 1997 results and echoed those of 1993. The Liberals also restored their vote share and number of seats to almost their 1993 level. The BQ lost six seats, holding only two more in Quebec than the Liberals. NDP lost most of the seats it had gained in 1997, including half of its Atlantic MPs. Under new (and former) party leader Joe Clark, the PC vote fell to a new low of 12 percent, winning only 12 seats, the minimum needed to qualify as a parliamentary caucus. Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien had now led his party to its third successive victory. In short, the political
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When Political Parties Die
TABLE 7.4 1993–2000 General Election Results PC
Liberal Reform/CA
NDP
BQ
Other Total*
1993 Vote % Seats #
16.0 2
41.3 177
18.7 52
6.9 9
13.5 54
3.6 1
100.0 295
1997 Vote % Seats #
18.8 20
38.5 155
19.4 60
11.0 21
10.7 44
1.6 1
100.0 301
2000 Vote % Seats #
12.2 12
40.8 172
25.5 66
8.5 13
10.7 38
2.3 0
100.0 301
1997 : 1993 Vote % Seats #
+2.8 –8
–2.8 –22
+0.7 +8
+4.1 +12
–2.8 –10
–2.0 nc
na
2000 : 1997 Vote % Seats #
–6.6 –8
+2.3 +17
+6.1 +6
–2.5 –8
nc –6
+0.7 –1
na
2000 : 1993 Vote % Seats #
–3.8 +10
–0.5 –5
+6.8 +14
+1.6 +4
–2.8 –16
–1.3 –1
na
CHANGES
Sources: Calculated from data in Bickerton, Gagnon, and Smith, Ties that Bind, Appendix Tables A-4, B-21, & B-22; and Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan, eds. The Canadian General Election of 2000 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2001), p. 320. Changes are author’s calculations. Notes: *= Percentages may not equal 100.0 because of rounding; “nc” = no change; “na” = not applicable.
changes in the party system that occurred in 1993 seemed at the time to have taken root. RENEWAL OF CHANGE: 2004–2008 Party-system stability, which had seemed so apparent after the 2000 election, proved illusory by 2004 as a result of the merger of the PC with the CA. In addition, the 2004 campaign was waged with new leaders in
The Case of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party
215
the Liberal and New Democratic Parties as well as in the new Conservative Party that now united Canada’s center right. Stephen Harper had become the new Alliance leader in 2002. In June 2003, Peter MacKay had been elected as the new leader of the PC, replacing the retiring Joe Clark; to win, MacKay had promised that he would not support any effort to achieve a merger with the Canadian Alliance. That fall, after a rather brutal campaign to force Chrétien out, former finance minister Paul Martin won the Liberal leadership in November 2003 and became prime minister. The same year, Jack Layton, an academic and Toronto City Council member, was elected to lead NDP, succeeding McDonough. Gilles Duceppe of the BQ was the only party leader remaining since the election of 2000. These changes in leadership were significant, but it was the union of the center-right parties that affected the structure of the party system. The strategy of the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance had paralleled that of the British Labour Party 70 years before: The PC had been crushed just as the British Liberal Party had been. The victor’s objective now was to put the remnant out of its misery and mobilize the center-right under a consolidated brand. In both instances, the disaligned party was eliminated as a major party, enduring for a time (unlike the American Whigs) before merging with another minor party. In the British case, Labour replaced the Liberals as a major party. In Canada, no new major party emerged until the PC merged with the Alliance, one of its two successor parties. The PC had wanted to win; now it needed to survive. After the 2000 election, the PC looked near death. In that year’s election, it had dropped to 12 percent of the vote and to a bare dozen seats, nine of them in the Atlantic provinces. It was in second place in 32 ridings but was reduced to third or lower (sometimes fifth) in 243 ridings, with another eight in which it ran no candidate.42 The party’s future looked imperiled, and prospects for a return to major-party status were dim to vanishing. For its part, Reform’s rebranding as the CA had not worked, Weaver said in his interview. The Alliance had to find a way to broaden its appeal to central and eastern Canada if it was to have any hope of becoming a national party that could compete with the Liberals for control of the government. Moderation of the party’s positions on the Quebec question was important not only to voters in that province, but also to Ontarians, who were tiring of the constant bickering over the status of their neighboring province, Weaver noted. The existing electoral system plus the regionalization of politics kept either party from building a majority.43 For both parties, amalgamation seemed the best solution to their dilemmas. Merger offered the PC survival
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When Political Parties Die
TABLE 7.5 Hypothetical Results of a PC-CA Merger, 1997–2000 Progressive Conservative
Canadian Alliance
Hypothetical Union
Liberal
Canada 1997
18.8
19.4
38.2
38.5
Canada 2000
12.2
25.5
37.7
40.8
Source: Table 7.4 and author’s calculations.
and an opportunity to participate in future governance. The benefit to the Alliance was a way to moderate its hard-right image and gain access to the legacy of the Conservative brand name. Reform’s change of name had proven an unsuccessful strategy and Harper needed a dramatic new one. As Table 7.5 shows, tacticians in both parties could assume that a merged party would be highly competitive with the Liberals nationally, provided that the new party would retain all the votes won by its components. The structure of the electoral system was therefore an important factor. As both Carty and Weaver have observed, the logic of merger would have been quite different if Canada had adopted a PR system of voting—but, of course, it has not.44 On the other hand, in an FPP system an undivided center-right vote in a number of ridings would have elected more MPs than was actually the case in 1997 and 2000. In 1997, there were 43 ridings—27 in Ontario alone—in which the combined vote shares of PC and Alliance candidates were greater than those actually won by their Liberal or NDP opponents. In 2000, there were 40 such ridings, again including 27 in Ontario, giving a hypothetical merged party a plurality of seats.45 On paper, therefore, a merger appeared feasible. This proved a partly questionable assumption, as the 2004 results were to show. Clark and the so-called Red Tories (moderates) were resolutely opposed to a merger with the Alliance. They opposed it on ideological grounds, and they opposed it because Reform had been an instrument of the PC’s near-destruction in 1993. But to MacKay and his supporters, after the PC’s decade in the wilderness, there was no alternative if the party was to have any hope of survival in any form. Notwithstanding his pledge to shun a merger, therefore, MacKay entered into negotiations with Harper. By October of 2003, they reached an agreement in which the two parties merged, ostensibly as equals, under the banner of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC). The new party would
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217
maintain relationships with provincial PC organizations and assume both old parties’ financial assets and liabilities. Harper’s eagerness to gain the more moderate Conservative brand was signaled by his capitulation to MacKay on almost all issues of party policy and intraparty voting rights; Reform’s old positions on social policy and populist institutional change were largely swept off the table.46 The parties’ elder statesmen, Brian Mulroney and Preston Manning, backed the merger, but opposition to it still arose, especially on the PC side. Several MPs and provincial party leaders “attacked the deal as a betrayal of the history and principles of the Progressive Conservatives,” and a few of them switched to the Liberals or became independents, Ellis and Woolstencroft reported. Joe Clark said he would not join the new party “and would finish his political career as an independent.”47 These opposition arguments had little effect on the PC’s membership: Over 90 percent of the PC rank-and-file supported the merger in the December voting, as did about 96 percent of Alliance members. The merger’s timing was important, because a new campaign finance law was about to go into effect that would enable the new CPC to receive public funding. The question of the new party’s leadership was potentially contentious and divisive. MacKay was urged by some of the Red Tories to challenge Harper, since, in truth, there were no other remotely viable candidates, although MacKay probably lacked the votes to prevail. Still, had he done so, MacKay might have produced a divorce in the new party even before its wedding night. In the end, he chose not to challenge Harper for CPC leadership. Two Ipsos Reid polls conducted just before and shortly after consummation of the merger were not immediately promising for the new party. Public support for the CPC was only 21 percent, compared to a combined 24 percent for the new party’s parent parties immediately prior to merger. Liberal support increased from 43 percent to 48 percent,48 but the full force of an emerging Liberal scandal in Quebec was yet to strike. For a change, economics was not an issue in the 2004 campaign. The dominant issue, largely of Martin’s own making, was the Chrétien government’s sponsorship of an advertising and communications program intended to persuade Quebecers of the benefits of remaining in the Canadian federation. The program had been used as patronage for Chrétien supporters, and Canada’s auditor-general charged financial irregularities in a series of reports. Martin campaigned across the country to express outrage about the scandal, implicitly blaming Chrétien and his government as if they were of an opposition party. They were not, of course, and nearly everyone in Canada recognized the fact except Paul Martin, who seemed
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more determined to exterminate any last influence of his predecessor in the Liberal Party than to win election. Martin had been finance minister when the money was spent and, according to Pammett and Dornan, his claims of innocence and outrage sparked public cynicism—“if he did know he now was lying about it, and if he didn’t know he was incompetent.”49 Public support for the Liberals dropped substantially. Nonetheless, Martin called a new election because it would give him an opportunity to purge Chrétien’s remaining adherents within the party. Martin, the more experienced politician and candidate, was able to turn his campaign around by capitalizing on Harper’s errors, and by charging that the CPC and its leader were really far-right wolves masquerading as moderate sheep. Martin received help in this from some of the CPC’s more vocal far-right candidates. In the end, the tactic worked and the Liberals won, albeit with 37 fewer seats, a minority government, and less than 37 percent of the vote. Although the CPC won under 30 percent, it gained 21 seats. Martin would need not only NDP support but also BQ votes to get his legislative program enacted. The 2006 campaign, although it opened at the instigation of the opposition parties rather than the incumbent government, resembled the campaign two years before—the issues were similar, the party leaders unchanged, and the climate of public opinion not much different than election night of 2004. The differences were that the Liberals had been in disarray since the 2004 election, while their opponents (particularly the CPC) had improved their campaign readiness. A demonstration of that effectiveness was Harper’s success (after several false starts) in enlisting NDP and the BQ to bring down Martin’s government in a vote of confidence in November 2005, with the election called for January 23, 2006. Although Martin was never personally implicated in the Quebec ad sponsorship scandal, continuing status reports on official investigations kept the issue alive and, in Quebec, heated. A new issue was added by the announcement of a police investigation into leaked financial information prior to release of the government budget, damaging the credibility of the Martin government. Harper, meanwhile, took a variety of steps to present the CPC to the voters as a centrist party in the mold of the PC of yore. He reached out particularly to the Quebec electorate and drew support from many federalists who had been in the habit of voting Liberal. Ellis and Woolstencroft described a March 2005 CPC convention (held in Montreal to show Harper’s desire to embrace Quebecers) that had made considerable progress in moving the party toward the center, with policy declarations “reflecting much more the PC rather than the Reform-Alliance side of its past . . . effectively [eliminating] most of the
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social conservative and populist hot button issues that allowed their opponents to label the Conservatives as extreme and accuse them of harboring hidden agendas.”50 Even Preston Manning accepted this rationale. The purpose of the 2006 CPC platform, he said, “was to send a message TABLE 7.6 2004–2008 General Election Results Conservativea Liberal NDP BQ Greens Others Total* 2004 Vote % Seats #
29.6 99
36.7 135
15.7 12.4 19 54
4.3 0
1.0 0
99.7 308
2006 Vote % Seats #
36.3 124
30.2 103
17.5 10.5 29 51
4.5 0
1.0 1
100.0 308
2008 Vote % Seats #
37.7 143
26.3 77
18.2 10.0 37 49
6.8 0
1.0 2
100.0 308
2004 : 2000 Vote % Seats #
–8.1 +21
–4.1 –37
+7.2 +1.7 +6 +16
+3.7 nc
+0.5 nc
na
2006 : 2004 Vote % Seats #
+6.7 +25
–6.5 –32
+1.8 -1.9 +10 –3
+0.2 nc
nc +1
na
2006 : 1993 Vote % Seats #
+1.6 +70
–11.1 –74
+10.6 –3.0 +20 –3
na nc
–2.6 nc
na
2008 : 2006 Vote % Seats #
+1.4 +19
–3.9 –26
+0.7 –0.5 +8 –2
+2.3 0
nc +1
na na
2008 : 1993 Vote % Seats #
+3.0 +89
–15.0 –100
+11.3 –3.5 +28 –5
na na
–2.6 +1
na na
CHANGES
Sources: Election data from Pammett and Dornan 2004, App. A, 362; Pammett and Dornan 2006, App. A, p. 328; Pammet and Dornan 2008, App. A, p. 314. Changes are author’s calculations. Notes: (a) Comparisons of 2004 and 2006 Conservative results are with hypothetical combined vote shares of PC and Reform in 2000 and 1993. * Percentages may not equal 100.0 because of rounding. “nc” = no change. “na” = not applicable.
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that we are a safe choice. There is not a wild idea in there. . . . From that standpoint it [i.e., the platform and its campaign execution] was eminently successful.”51 Added Plamondon, “To Mulroney, the party being led by Stephen Harper was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the party Mulroney had led in 1984.”52 So much for the PC legacy. Both men could only hope that Harper would make more effective use of his mandate than Mulroney had. Refocused and repositioned, the CPC gained its first victory in 2006, winning seats in every province except Prince Edward Island. But like Martin’s success two years before, it was only a plurality victory with 124 seats, 31 seats shy of a majority, leaving the new Harper government dependent on other parties to pass legislation. Paul Martin gave Harper an extended grace period by announcing his resignation as Liberal leader on election night; almost a year was to pass before his successor, Stéphane Dion, was chosen in December 2006. The 2008 election was, in many respects, a repetition of that in 2006. Called under the threat of the other parties to bring down Harper’s government, the CPC actually improved its position slightly, while the Liberals and BQ lost both votes and seats; NDP made small gains on both measures. Despite the CPC gains, Harper remains a dozen seats short of a majority, extending the country’s string of minority governments. Dion was forced to resign in 2009. His successor, Michael Ignatieff, appears to be a tougher opponent for Harper and has been pressing the other opposition parties to join in a vote of confidence to defeat the Harper government. Fearing losses in another early election, NDP has so far been supporting Harper, but the likelihood of an early national election seems high. It is potentially significant for the future that the CPC won 10 seats in Quebec in both 2006 and 2008, after losing, in 2004, the single seat the PC had won in 2000. In the Atlantic provinces, a net loss of two seats in 2004 was regained two years later, with another seat added in 2008. The West, which had produced two additional seats in the earlier election, took away three in the later one but then added seven in 2008. In the 2004 election, the new CPC made important gains in Ontario, where its parental parties had almost been frozen out after 1993. As shown in Table 7.7, the CPC expanded further on these advances in 2006, winning 40 seats in Canada’s largest province, and another 11 in 2008—giving it a plurality of all seats elected from Ontario. These gains were important for future CPC prospects in that the party obtained representation in every region, enabling both the Conservatives and the Liberals to claim national-party status. Over half the seats (52.4 percent) won by the Conservatives came from the western provinces, while Ontario provided an identical percentage of total Liberal
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TABLE 7.7 Changes in CPC Regional Representation, 2000–2008
Region
2000 (hypothetical)a 2004
Change Change Change 2004 : 2006 : 2008: 2000 2006 2004 2008 2006
Atlantics
9
7
–2
9
+2
10
+1
Quebec
1
0
–1
10
+10
10
nc
Ontario
2
24
+22
40
+16
51
+11
West
66
68
+2
65
–3
72
+7
TOTALS
78
99
+21
124
+25
143
+19
Sources: Pammett and Dornan 2004, App. A, 362; Pammett and Dornan 2006, App. A, 328; and Pammett and Dornan 2008, App. A, 314. Changes are author’s calculations. Note: (a) Hypothetical combined vote shares of PC and Reform in 2000.
parliamentarians. In 2008, Liberals won 36 percent of Ontario’s seats, while the Conservatives advanced to 48 percent. Of the 92 seats elected by the four western provinces, CPC won 72 (78 percent) in 2008. NDP elected only 14, and the Liberals’ showing, at 7 seats, was even worse. The continued strength of the BQ inhibits both Liberals and Conservatives from achieving major gains in Quebec and, absent such gains, from electing a national majority in the near future. BQ’s total seats dropped from 54 in 1993 to 38 in 2000. The number rose back to 54 in 2004 and is now at 49 seats. The party’s share of the vote in Quebec has remained around 40 percent. The other major province, Ontario, has provided significant support for the CPC, enabling Harper to achieve his limited victories in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Of the 19 seats the party gained nationally in 2008, 11 came from Ontario, 7 from the West, and 1 from the Atlantics. On balance, the structure of the party system and the size of the four parties that now comprise it are likely to inhibit any single party from obtaining a majority in Parliament or from serving a full four-year statutory term in office. WHO WON THE MERGER? The theory of disalignment predicts that the PC would disappear as part of a subsequent merger with another minor party. Ten years after its disalignment, the PC did indeed merge with another party. The question is whether the circumstances of the merger meet the requirements of the theory, or not. Was the CPC the product of a merger of equals, an acquisition
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by the CA, or just the same old PC in a new dress? Will the new party hold together, or might it fragment into its original components under the stresses of some future defeat or other pressures? The first question can be analyzed by posing additional inquiries: Whose issue policies did the new party adopt, and why? Who invested the most political capital? Whose leadership dominates? During the negotiations, Harper acceded to MacKay on most of the public policy issues the new party would adopt. These were well to the left of the Alliance’s positions. Moreover, most of the populist and socialconservative stances Reform and the CA had previously embraced were dropped at the 2005 Montreal Convention. Harper and the CA wanted to win future elections, but the evidence of the 1997 and 2000 elections made it clear that they could not do so without adopting positions acceptable to PC and medial voters in central and eastern Canada, particularly Ontario. This required not only a shift in ideology, but also the adoption of a strategic asset—the embrace of the still-valuable Conservative brand name. The western base of the CA was readily placated. “The West wants in,” had been Reform’s old rallying cry. With almost 9 out of 10 MPs in the merged party from the western provinces in the 2000–2004 Parliament (57 percent after the 2004 election)—and a party leader from Alberta who favored more authority for the provinces—it was clear by the time of the Montreal Convention that the West was now in and that its regional economic and political interests would be well protected. The old social and governmental reform positions were scrapped without protest. In forming his first government, Ellis and Woolstencroft reported, Harper “appointed nine ministers with PC pedigrees. . . . In comparison, only seven members of the new cabinet had been previously elected as Reform or Alliance members, including Harper.” There was even a former Liberal cabinet minister.53 This balance was not substantially altered after 2008. On its face, therefore, it would appear as if Harper gave away the store in the negotiations and in their consequent implementation. But by allowing MacKay to translate a position of acute weakness into an appearance of success, Harper allowed the merger to look like one of equals, which it in fact was not. The new party could now thereby campaign under a name with historic significance, rid of an extremist image and policies that had denied it access to the vote-rich provinces of Ontario and east. But the new party’s base and leadership were predominantly from Reform. Parties merge from perceptions of internal weakness. Both the CA and the PC had needs that the other could potentially fill. After the 2000 election, the PC was again at a low ebb, reduced to a scant dozen seats in the
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House of Commons, with no real prospect of substantially enlarging that number. A union with the Alliance offered the PC hope of survival and resurgence to major-party status in a new form. The CA appeared to be in a stronger position. With 66 seats, it was the official opposition party. It had shown small ability, however, to gain seats in central or eastern Canada, winning only two seats in Ontario in 2000 and none in the Atlantic provinces or Quebec. By merging, the two parties could also reduce the number of contests in individual ridings in which they divided the center-right vote, enabling the Liberal or NDP candidate to capture the seat; this had been a particularly significant factor in Ontario in 2000. A merger with the PC offered the CA the chance to capture the Conservative brand name with all the affective voter support that word could bring, and thereby appeal to former and current PC voters in Ontario and east. That entailed the adoption of PC principles and policies to the left of those the Alliance had previously espoused, and other concessions that departed from the rightist and populist positions on which Reform and the Alliance had previously campaigned. The CPC achieved an early, if partial, success in 2004 by reducing the Liberals to a minority government. Two years later, it became the largest party in Parliament, with nationwide representation, albeit also with a minority government. The center right was finally back in power—a position that was slightly enlarged in 2008. On the other hand, the CPC parliamentary caucus and the party structure are dominated by people who came out of the CA. In the opinion of both Carty and Weaver, the Alliance came out on top. Carty believes the new party leadership is basically the same people who used to run the old PC, who had agreed with Mulroney’s Quebec strategy but then became estranged from it.54 Bickerton and Gagnon put it more strongly, viewing the post-1993 fate of the PC as “its absorption (deigned a merger) into a new Conservative Party dominated by its key rival, the Canadian Alliance.”55 In Carty’s judgment, the story of the merger is unfinished.56 The key question for the future is whether the CPC can hold together or whether it will be rent by internal stresses. Its time of greatest peril will come after electoral defeat. As long as the new Conservatives win elections, retention of power is likely to insulate them from serious dissension. Defeat at the polls, however, could bring intraparty cleavages to the fore. In Weaver’s opinion, however, rightist ideologues, in the West and elsewhere, no longer have prospects of forming a successful new party. A change in the electoral system could upset such calculations, especially if it facilitated the rise of new small parties.57
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When Political Parties Die
Electoral success, and particularly winning an outright majority in Parliament, hinges on Quebec. The Conservatives are now trying to reconstruct Mulroney’s old strategy of cultivating votes in Quebec—a strategy that comes readily to Harper, who Carty sees as a weak federalist favoring more powers to the provinces.58 If the party fails to improve its position in Quebec, however, and particularly if it loses power as a result, Harper may find his leadership challenged, both by the western forces that have expressed anti-Quebec sentiments in the past and also by the Red Tory faction in the central and eastern provinces, which may see an opportunity to reacquire power. “But many have erred by dismissing Harper’s chances at each stage of his remarkable rise to power, and few would now disagree that he has the grit, purposefulness, and willingness to do what is necessary to achieve clearly established goals,” Ellis and Woolstencroft wrote.59 PROVINCIAL VS. FEDER AL PART Y SYSTEMS Disalignment theory predicts that the stricken party will disappear as a major contender and that its successor party will become entrenched subnationally in the ensuing realignment where this is structurally possible. We need to examine the national and provincial party systems in Canada to see what has happened and why. Subnational party systems in many federal states—the United States and Germany, for example—generally bear a close resemblance and organizational connection to the national party system. Canadian provincial party systems, however, bear only a partial resemblance to the federal party system. For one thing, a number of provinces are modifying their electoral systems in ways that vary from the national system and from each other, moving to fixed elections in some instances and considering the introduction of forms of PR in others. For another, the parties themselves vary widely: No Reform Party was ever created at the provincial level in the West or elsewhere, for instance. In two of those provinces plus Quebec, neither the PC nor a CPC exist. In five other provinces, the PC is currently or has recently been the majority party, and in two more has won a majority at some point after 1993; none of these provincial parties were ever affected by the disalignment of the federal PC, nor by its subsequent merger with the CA. A Liberal Party exists in all 10 provinces (in 3 of them as the current majority party) but sometimes occupies the center-right zone of the political spectrum. NDP is more or less active in nine provinces, currently governs two of them, is the major opposition in two more, and is a minor factor in five.
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The following synopsis briefly sketches out the state of the provincial party systems in late 2008 and in their first post-1993 elections.60 British Columbia: The two major provincial parties are the Liberals, who occupy what would be the center-right niche elsewhere, and NDP. There is no conservative party as such. The Liberals scored a massive victory over NDP in 2001 and retained a narrower majority four years later. The latter had won the 1991 and 1996 elections. This is an environmentally conscious province where the Greens might be expected to be particularly powerful, but they took only nine percent in 2005 (down from 12 percent in 2001), perhaps because the larger parties have captured the Green agenda. Alberta: In this most conservative of Canadian provinces, the PC has long won substantial majorities in the provincial legislature. Despite its name, it has been closely allied to Reform/Alliance. The Liberal Party has been the PC’s principal competitor. NDP has been a minor player since 1993 but wins a few seats. Manitoba: The PC held a majority in the Manitoba legislature after the 1995 election but has been the principal opposition party since 1999. NDP has governed since that year. The Liberals are a minor factor but have regularly held a few seats. Saskatchewan: NDP has long been the governing party in this province but won only narrowly over the center-right Saskatchewan Party in the 1999 and 2003 elections. This latter party was formed in 1997, mostly by former PC members plus some Liberals after the PC’s defeats in 1991 and 1995. The PC no longer exists as a distinct party in the province, and the Liberals, who have declined steadily since 1995, barely do. Ontario: The PC and the Liberals are the two major parties in the country’s most populous province; NDP is now only a minor player. A substantial Liberal majority was elected in 2003 and reelected in 2007, succeeding the PC government that had gained power in 1999. In 1995, in the first provincial election following the PC’s national disalignment, the PC won a substantial majority, replacing an NDP government that had been elected in 1990. Quebec: The Liberal Party retained leadership of the provincial government in the election of 2007 but now shares power in coalition with Action démocratique du Québec, the newest and most conservative of the province’s three parties. The Liberals had had an outright majority after the 2003 election. The separatist Parti Québécois controlled Quebec’s government after the 1994 and 1998 elections. ADQ’s rise has been sudden: It had won a single seat in each of the 1994 and 1998 elections, then four in 2003. Then, in 2007, ADQ captured 41 seats, putting it ahead of the
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When Political Parties Die
PQ and not far behind the Liberals. Neither the PC nor the CPC exists at the provincial level. Newfoundland and Labrador: The PC gained control of this province in 2003 and increased its majority in 2007. Liberals had won a majority in 1993 and had held it for the next two elections. NDP has played only a small role in Newfoundland politics. Nova Scotia: The PC continues to be Nova Scotia’s largest party, but it has not had a majority of legislative seats since the 1999 elections. NDP, the second largest party, has gained strength in the two most recent elections, now outnumbering the Liberals. The first post-1993 election occurred in 1998 when Liberals, tied with NDP in the number of seats won, formed a minority government; the PC was the smallest party that year, although it increased its number of seats. A 1993 provincial election held about six months prior to the federal election produced a large Liberal majority, with the PC and NDP lagging well behind. New Brunswick: The PC and the Liberals have regularly alternated as the majority party since 1995. In that year, the Liberal Party had a massive majority, which it then lost almost as massively four years later to the PC. Since 2003, these two parties have been balanced rather evenly, with a small PC majority yielding to a small Liberal one in 2006. NDP held only a single seat from 1995 to 2006, losing it in the latter year’s election. Prince Edward Island (PEI): Liberals won a substantial majority of seats in the PEI legislature in May 2007, ousting the PC, which had governed with large majorities since the 1996 election. The PC had regained power that year, following the 1993 election in which the Liberals won a big majority in the province. NDP is virtually nonexistent in PEI. In sum, the PC won the first post-1993 elections in four of the eight provinces where the party existed at the time, and it lost in four. Indeed, as David Stewart and Kenneth Carty have noted, “in the years after the 1993 electoral realignment virtually wiped them off the national electoral map, the PCs were the country’s most successful provincial political party, winning more elections than any other party.”61 At this writing, the PC governs or is the largest party in four provinces, the Liberals in four, NDP in two.62 There is currently no PC, Alliance, or CPC structure in three of the 10 provinces—British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Quebec. Liberals compete in all 10 provinces, but as a weak third party in three of them. NDP is a major party in four provinces, a minor one in another four, and dormant or nonexistent in two. Subnational entrenchment has not occurred in Canada for any party since 1993. At the provincial level, the PC remains alive and competitive in seven provinces, only one less than in 1993. Of the two successor
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parties, Reform/CA has never existed at the provincial level;63 the BQ has, in the PQ, a close provincial counterpart, but only in Quebec. The question is why the PC remained competitive in so many provinces after the 1993 disalignment, and why entrenchment did not occur after 1993 for its successor parties. Examining the post-1993, premerger national election results from a regional perspective, one would expect the PC to be weak in Ontario and relatively strong in the West and the Atlantics. In fact, it is (or recently has been) the majority party in Ontario and all four Atlantic provinces, as it also is in Alberta and, to a lesser extent, Manitoba. But the PC does not exist at all in the other two western provinces, even though they rather consistently elected Progressive Conservatives to the federal Parliament. There are also unexpected provincial disparities in the strength of the other two parties. In the Atlantics, NDP is strong in Nova Scotia but weak or nonexistent in the other three provinces; in the West, conversely, NDP is weak in Alberta but a power elsewhere; the Ontario NDP has been a declining factor in provincial politics since the early 1990s. Even the Liberal Party, which is the only one that functions in all 10 provinces, is the number-three player in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. In the judgment of Stewart and Carty, “This unique capacity of the Liberals to compete in every province has come at a cost, for to survive the party has had to adapt itself to the provinces’ distinct and different party systems. This means that it stands for quite diverse positions and policies across the country depending upon the local structure of competition it faces.”64 Entrenchment is not possible where the provincial party systems differ so widely from the national party system and from each other. This is a pattern quite unlike that of the United States with its federal system, in which state politics has been important in the Whig era (and since). The pattern also differs from that of Britain, where subnational politics in the 1920s was at the local level. In both the United States and the United Kingdom in the modern era, each major national party has affiliated subnational counterparts. One reason for these political conditions is asymmetric ideology. Canada’s provincial parties are more ideologically bipolar than the national parties, Carty has noted, but the poles differ from province to province. Ideological asymmetry also exists between the national parties and the provincial ones. Liberals may be center-left in most provinces, but what that actually means varies from province to province: What is center-left in one province may be center-right in another. Another important indicator is the ease with which political figures cross party lines when moving between national and provincial arenas, as illustrated by Jean Charest’s
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When Political Parties Die
migration from PC national leader to head of the Liberal Party of Quebec and provincial premier. A more pervasive reason may be provided by the Chhibber-Kollman analysis of party-system development in four countries, Canada among them. Party systems, Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman suggested, “are shaped by social cleavages, electoral rules, [and] political entrepreneurs,” but also by “the distribution of authority across different levels of government.”65 It is this latter factor that they believe has been a notable influence on the structure of party systems in Canada. Canada, like the United States (but unlike Britain, a unitary state), has a federal system. But where the American states have lost power to the national government, Canada’s provinces have gained it. “By the end of the twentieth century, Canada was one of the most decentralized nation-states in the world,” Chhibber and Kollman wrote.66 To a considerable extent, the Quebec situation has been responsible for this state of affairs. National leaders could not make asymmetric concessions to Quebec without alienating the governments of other provinces, particularly since the rise of the First Minister’s conferences. What Ottawa conceded to Quebec, it was forced to give to all. Decentralization has had consequences then, not only for the structure of government, but for the party system as well. The growth of provincial power, Chhibber and Kollman said, was related to the attenuation of ties between the political parties at the federal level and their provincial counterparts that began during the pan-Canadian period. They concluded that the growth and separation of the provincial parties from Canada’s national parties was a direct reflection of the increased power of provincial governments in the country’s federal system. This explains why today the national and most provincial parties each has its own separate political organizations down to the grassroots level, sometimes with little or no connection with each other. For example, even while the PC was virtually wiped out at the federal level in Ontario, the provincial party controlled the Ontario government from 1995 to 2003. As we have seen, similar patterns manifested themselves in other provinces. The exception is in the Atlantics where, Carty has said, the interplay of party patronage and high dependence on federal financial support enhance a stronger relationship with the national parties than occurs elsewhere.67 Chhibber and Kollman contrasted the Canadian party system with that of the country’s southern neighbor: “The strong provincial powers in Canada . . . as opposed to the post–New Deal centralization in the United States, opened up more space for provincial-level parties to form and be completely separate from national parties in Canada.”68
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Kent Weaver has a different analysis of the divergences among federal and provincial party systems. In his view, different cleavage structures among the provinces explain why these party systems vary so. In Quebec, for example, the religious and linguistic cleavages underlie the party system structure, he believes. In British Columbia, on the other hand, it is the rural/urban and class cleavages that are the root explanation, in his judgment. Weaver believes that the wide variations found among Canadian party systems are inevitable in a large and diverse country that utilizes the Westminster system, with the high degree of party discipline that is integral to it.69 Whichever theoretical explanation comes nearest to the truth, it is important to realize that there is also a behavioral explanation at work. Because the parties are different at the federal level than the provincial one, party loyalties may take a different shape in Canada than in other federal systems. Party loyalty is strengthened among partisans by repeated votes of support. Attitudes can affect behavior, just as behavior can affect attitudes. Fewer opportunities to vote for one’s party weaken loyalties, because there are fewer resulting opportunities to strengthen partisanship overall. Thus, the number of medials may grow at the expense of each party’s core base. Whether the explanation lies in varying cleavage structures, or in the high degree of intergovernmental decentralization since the advent of panCanadianism, or perhaps in some combination of the two, the diversity of federal and provincial party systems is a reality in Canadian politics. Subnational entrenchment did not occur in Canada after 1993, because the structure of the party system did not permit it. Relative ease of defections among politicians from one party to another may be a symptom of this. CONCLUSIONS The PC had gained power in 1984 by adding Quebec nationalists to its traditional base of English-speaking Canadians. The party did so by promising to accommodate both Quebecers and anglophones in resolving the historically contentious issue of Quebec’s relationship with the rest of the nation. The defeat of PC Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s attempts to define a new, nationally acceptable constitutional relationship undid not only the coalition with Quebec nationalists, but also the traditional PC constituency among anglophone Canadians in Ontario and the West. As a result of a swollen protest vote across the nation, wrote Carty, the “Progressive Conservative Party broke into three distinct pieces—traditional Conservative supporters, populists in western Canada . . . and French Canadian nationalists.”70
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When Political Parties Die
The PC’s disalignment was accompanied by the onset of a secular realignment. What had previously been a two-party system that also contained a minor third party was transformed in 1993 into a five-party system. The merger 10 years later of the center-right parties indicates that this secular realignment is probably not yet completed. The long-term causes of this classic disalignment were regional cleavages, the Quebec problem itself, and the historic tendency of the party system to straddle this most controversial of Canadian issues. Mulroney and the PC brought these forces into collision. The principal immediate cause of the PC’s ruin in 1993 was its missteps on the Quebec problem—with a sagging economy, an unpopular new tax, and an incompetent political campaign as exacerbating factors. In its effort to broaden its base and resolve the Quebec problem, the PC’s initial success in 1984 sowed the seeds of its own downfall nine years later. In reaching out to a new segment of Quebec voters, it underestimated the depth of the cultural cleavage in anglophone Canada, became disaligned from its traditional voter base, and was effectively destroyed. Had it not sought to bring in Quebec nationalists, the PC might have been doomed to longterm opposition status, but it would probably have retained its base among Anglophones, provided little opening to Reform, and still be a strong and viable political party. Mulroney’s inability to forge a national consensus on the Quebec question contributed to a sharp drop in his popularity, his resignation as prime minister, and the massive electoral defeat of his party. The party was never able to regain more than a small number of parliamentary seats in the ensuing elections and appeared doomed to remaining a minor factor in national politics. As a by-product, NDP’s populist constituency in the West was also largely lost to Reform, seen as a more authentic protest voice, and this constituency has apparently now been transferred to the CPC. The Liberal Party won in 1993 and was reelected in 1997 and 2000. The regionalization of Canadian politics during this period prevented any single competing party from mobilizing the strength to oust the Liberals, win a majority, and form a government. Even the Liberals were regionalized, winning almost 80 percent of their seats from Ontario and Quebec, two provinces in central Canada that comprise only 60 percent of the national population; the remaining 20 percent of Liberal seats was spread thinly across eastern and western Canada. (By contrast, after the Conservative victory of 1984, PC seats outside Ontario and Quebec accounted for over 40 percent of the party’s parliamentary total, about the same distribution as that of the national electorate.)
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Thus, the Liberals were preponderantly a party of the two largest provinces, not the country as a whole. But no other party had even that limited breadth of representation. The CA was essentially a western party, and the BQ was (and is, by its own choice and policies) limited to Quebec. NDP’s efforts to climb back from the defeat into which the PC disalignment had carried it were complicated by its necessity to campaign against the Alliance in the West and, for the most part, the Liberals in the East. All this changed with the merger of the PC and the Alliance, and the formation of the new Conservative Party of Canada. This is consistent with the theory of disalignment, which predicts the disappearance of the disaligned party, either outright or in a merger that produces a new party. The theory of disalignment also predicts that the successor party will become entrenched at subnational levels—in Canada’s case, the provinces— in elections that follow the disalignment, where this is structurally possible. As we have shown, entrenchment has not occurred in Canada because of the structural differences between the national party system and those of the provinces (as well as among them). Despite the concessions to the PC and the accompanying rhetoric, the union appears to have been more an acquisition by the CA than a merger of equals. Both before and after the elections of 2004 and 2006, the large majority of the new party’s MPs and leadership were and remain in former Alliance hands. Although cabinet seats were divided more or less evenly between PC and CA personalities, the prime minister’s office is considered firmly in control of policymaking and public pronouncements. It and the party leadership are controlled by Alliance alumni who had defected from the PC in the 1980s.71 As also predicted by disalignment theory, the PC has disappeared as a distinct political entity. The question for the future is whether the new party can remain whole. It may not yet be sufficiently institutionalized to avoid potential future fragmentation. On the other hand, the peril of serious defections will be minimized as long as the Conservatives retain power, particularly if they are able to win a majority in the next Parliament. Power is a centripetal force for political parties. The dangers will come to the fore when the party loses a future election, but the longer that evil day can be postponed the fewer the risks to the CPC’s integrity, because institutionalization will have had a longer time to develop. One key will be the success of policies that satisfy both the West and Ontario. Another will be the conciliation of Quebec, ever the pivot of Canadian politics. Prime Minister Harper needs to expand the 10-seat beachhead the CPC won in that province in October 2008 if he is to win a majority in the next national election. He has taken a number of steps to mollify
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Quebec, aided by his personal bent toward increased powers for the provinces and also by the emergence of a new, relatively conservative party, the ADQ, in the province. Yet, with the country’s linguistic and social differences only partly abated at best, it is an open question whether Quebec can ever be wholly appeased. Efforts to do so risk the ire of Harper’s fellow westerners, always sensitive to appearances of discrimination at their expense. It is possible, even likely, that Quebec will continue to bring forth a stream of new grievances, enabling it to further polish a strategy of ongoing “blackmail” politics that extort constitutional, policy, and financial concessions from Ottawa and English-speaking Canada, an approach at which both Quebec Liberals and the PQ have proven adept. Many such concessions will need to be shared with the other provinces, thereby further advancing the decentralization of both the governmental and party systems. Weaver believes that there will therefore never be a permanent solution to Canada’s Quebec problem, and that there will always be tensions. On the other hand, he has noted, changing demography may tend to mitigate the province’s nationalistic stridency in future decades. A stream of new immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, for instance, will be less concerned with questions of sovereignty and maintenance of Quebec’s distinctive character as an island of French language and culture, and more motivated to use English as the language of economic success.72 The root of the political earthquake lay in the tendency of Canada’s opportunistic, brokerage, catch-all parties to straddle vital issues and cleavages, attempting to be all things to all interests. By neglecting and occasionally exacerbating the Quebec problem, the parties and the party system made it difficult to find a later reconciliation formula acceptable to both Quebec and the rest of Canada. Trudeau could not win Quebec’s assent to the new Constitution and Charter, and Mulroney failed to win acceptance of the Accords. Harper is challenged to succeed in holding together Canada’s diverse elements and regions where Mulroney in particular could not. Meanwhile, the cleavages of the Quebec question remain unresolved, with potentially destabilizing implications for the party system and for Canada itself. Montcalm’s defeat on the Plains of Abraham at the hands of the British continues to echo down the corridors of Canadian history. NOTES 1. R. Kenneth Carty, William Cross, and Lisa Young, Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), 12.
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2. James Bickerton, Alain-G. Gagnon, and Patrick J. Smith, Ties That Bind: Parties and Voters in Canada (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44. 3. Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The latter three are often collectively referred to as the maritime provinces. Newfoundland (now formally termed Newfoundland and Labrador) was long an independent state, then once again a British colony. It did not join Canada until 1949. The term Atlantic provinces refers to all four. 4. Claims of discrimination have also been advanced by the country’s aborigines and feminists. For the most part, these lie outside the purview of this discussion. 5. Edward N. Luttwak, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1999, 36. 6. James Bickerton, “Regionalism in Canada,” in Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), 218–219. 7. Ibid. 8. Calculated from data in The Economist, Pocket World in Figures, 2007 edition, (London: Profile Books, 2006), 126–127. 9. Bickerton, “Regionalism,” 222. 10. Ibid. 11. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971. 12. There are Canadians (e.g., aborigines) who speak languages other than French or English—“allophones.” Some of the aborigines in Quebec object as vigorously to the imposition of French culture on them as the Québecois protest Anglophone preferences. 13. Robert Young, “Quebec’s Constitutional Futures,” in Bickerton and Gagnon, eds., Canadian Politics, 306. 14. Provincial political parties are organizationally distinct from federal parties, in Quebec and in most other provinces. We will return to this separation later in this chapter. 15. Young, “Quebec’s Constitutional Futures,” 307. 16. Surveys by Léger Marketing, reported in James P. Allan and Richard Vengroff, “The Changing Party System in Quebec: The 2003 Elections and Beyond,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the New England Political Science Association, Providence, RI, May 2003. 17. Nelson Wiseman, “Provincial Political Cultures,” in Provinces: Canadian Provincial Politics, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Dunn (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), 25. 18. R. Kent Weaver, “Political Institutions and Canada’s Constitutional Crisis,” in The Collapse of Canada?, ed. R. Kent Weaver (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1992), 70. Also see Richard Johnston, “Canadian Politics at the Millennium,” Choices: Strengthening Canadian Democracy 6, no. 6 (September 2000): 34, n. 40:“[B]efore 1993, having a leader from Quebec was worth 13 points in Liberal [vote] share.”
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19. David Laycock, The New Right and Democracy in Canada: Understanding Reform and the Canadian Alliance (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2002), 67. 20. Bickerton, “Regionalism in Canada,” 229. 21. Originally the Conservative Party, the PC name was adopted in 1942. 22. Otto Kirchheimer, “The Catch-all Party,” in The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), chap. 5. 23. See Lipset and Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures,” for a fuller description of the owner-worker cleavage. 24. Carty, Cross, and Young, Rebuilding, 92–93. 25. Minor parties often have done better in provincial elections than nationally, as discussed below. 26. Bickerton, Gagnon, and Smith, Ties that Bind, 88–123 and 214–215. In the 1997 election, NDP made some atypical gains (eight seats) in the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (perhaps because the new party leader was from the latter province) but lost half of them in 2000. 27. Carty, Cross, and Young, Rebuilding, 212–213. 28. Ibid. Bickerton dates the start of the fourth party system in 1984. 29. Ibid., 215. 30. Gagnon, “Quebec’s Constitutional Odyssey,” 289. 31. Carty, Cross, and Young, Rebuilding, 37. 32. Richard Simeon and Ian Robinson, “The Dynamics of Canadian Federalism,” in Canadian Politics, 4th ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004), 105. 33. Interview with R. Kent Weaver, Brookings Institution and Georgetown University, June 29, 2007, Washington, DC. 34. Peter Woolstencroft, “Doing Politics Differently: The Conservative Party and the Campaign of 1993,” in The Canadian General Election of 1993, ed. Alan Frizzell, Jon H. Pammett, and Anthony Westell (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 23. 35. Carty, Cross, and Young, Rebuilding, 46–47. 36. Bickerton, Gagnon, and Smith, Ties that Bind, 47. 37. The combined share of the 1993 vote for all parties other than the Liberals and PC was 42.7 percent and remained unchanged in 1997. In 2000, it rose to a record high of 47.0 but then declined to about a third of the vote in both 2004 and 2006. Source: Table 7.4. 38. Heather MacIvor, “Do Canadian Political Parties Form a Cartel?,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, June 1996, 318. 39. Richard Sigurdson, “Preston Manning and the Politics of Postmodernism in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, June 1994, 252. 40. Source: R. Kenneth Carty, University of British Columbia, interview by the author, May 3, 2007, Vancouver, BC. 41. Laycock, The New Right, 178. 42. Author’s calculations.
The Case of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party 43. 44. 45. 46.
47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.
61. 62. 63. 64. 65.
66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.
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Carty interview. Carty and Weaver interviews. Author’s calculations. Bob Plamondon, Full Circle: Death and Transfiguration in Canadian Conservative Politics (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2006), 290–320; Faron Ellis and Peter Woolstencroft, “A Change of Government, Not a Change of Country: The Conservatives and the 2006 Election,” in Pammett and Dornan, eds., The Canadian General Election of 2006 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2006)81–83. Ellis and Woolstencroft, “New Conservatives, Old Realities,” 83. Cited in Plamondon, Full Circle, 338–339. Pammett, Jon H., and Christopher Dornan, eds., The Canadian General Election of 2004 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2004), 21. Faron Ellis and Peter Woolstencroft, “A Change of Government, Not a Change of Country,” 64–65. Quoted in Plamondon, Full Circle, 405. Ibid. Ellis and Woolstencroft, “Change of Government,” 87. Carty and Weaver interviews. James Bickerton and Alain-G Gagnon, “Political Parties and Electoral Politics,” in Bickerton and Gagnon, eds., Canadian Politics, 4th ed., 246. Carty interview. Weaver interview. Carty interview. Ellis and Woolstencroft, “Change of Government,” 88. Sources: Web sites of provincial electoral agencies supplemented by telephone inquiries. For fuller descriptions, see Dunn, ed., Provinces, especially the chapters by Wiseman, Dyck, Stewart and Carter, and Siaroff. David K. Stewart and R. Kenneth Carty, “Many Political Worlds? Provincial Parties and Party Systems,” in Dunn, ed., Provinces, 100. As of May 2007, no provincial PC organization had changed its name to Conservative. A single Alliance member was elected in Alberta in 2004. Stewart and Carty, “Provincial Parties,” 100. Pradeep K. Chhibber and Ken Kollman, The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 18. Ibid., 107. Carty interview. Chhibber and Kollman, National Party Systems, 187, n. 6. Weaver interview. Carty, R. Kenneth, “Political Turbulence in a Dominant Party System,” PS: Political Science and Politics 39, No. 4 (October 2006): 825. The dominance of former Alliance leaders in the new party is, of course, not exclusive. Former PC partisans also participate (e.g., Peter MacKay, who has
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served as Harper’s foreign minister and defense minister). This parallels the situation in the merger that produced Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party, leaders of which included Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams from the Social Democrats, as well as former Liberals David Steele and Paddy Ashdown. Similarly, the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was a Whig congressman from Illinois in the 1840s, and his secretary of state, William Seward, had long been a Whig senator from New York. 72. Weaver interview.
Chapter 8
The Case of the Italian Party System This chapter, unlike the preceding three, focuses on the collapse not of a single political party, but of an entire party system—the parties of Italy’s so-called first republic in 1992–1993.1 The questions that arise are: Was this collapse a true disalignment? Why or why not? How does the case illuminate disalignment theory and the argument advanced in this book? The disintegration of an entire party system is unique among the great democracies. The elements of the Italian case differ in important respects from our other cases studies; not the least of these differences is that elections in Italy in the nearly 50 years following World War II were largely conducted under rules of proportional representation in multimember constituencies—unlike the American, British, and Canadian cases, all of which took place in single-member district, first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral systems. The greater significance of the Italian experience is its possible parallel to other countries, particularly the United States in these early decades of the 21st Century. The most important responsibility of a party system is its ability to supply the state with a functioning government. In contemporary America, however, important segments of the electorate are questioning the ability of a sharply polarized party system to produce governance that meets perceived national needs (as discussed in Chapter 10). Similar differences characterized the period of Italy’s party collapse.
THE RISE OF THE ITALIAN STATE The decade from 1860 to 1871 was one of the most significant in shaping state and society in western civilization: Bismarck’s armies marched into France and in the process unified the German states under the Prussian
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crown. France was permanently established as a republican government. The United States fought a civil war that definitively recognized the primacy of the federal government over the states. Canada became an independent state. The political parties of Great Britain became firmly organized along recognizably modern lines. And Italy was unified as a single state (under the Sardinian monarchy) for the first time since the fall of Rome. In all these countries, new socioeconomic cleavages arose and existing ones were aggravated. Democratic government and politics had yet to put down universal roots, but the new social changes were increasingly reflected in new political parties and party systems that were evolving to affect electoral and legislative processes. The consequences have influenced the shape of the modern state throughout western society down to the present day. The introduction of a new Italian nation-state in particular was inevitably accompanied by the production of cleavages and therefore of political parties to express the interests of the cleavage poles. Historically, the Italian peninsula was a region of disparate states, fragmented since the demise of the Roman Empire, and victimized by invasions from the north and predations by local warlords. Support for Italian unification dates back at least to the time of Machiavelli, who ended The Prince in 1513 with a plea to Lorenzo de Medici to lead an army to drive out the invaders and unify the land. Machiavelli both admired and deplored the political skills by which the Vatican’s balance-of-power policy kept the numerous Italian city-states divided and constantly at war with each other, and therefore too preoccupied to unite against the Papal States. As a result, however, they were also kept “hopelessly vulnerable to the intervention of the states beyond the Alps,” wrote John Burrow.2 But it was not until the 1860s that the forces of Garibaldi and Cavour brought the Italian mini-states together under the Sardinian monarchy. Unification, the Risorgimento, aggravated old cleavages and produced new ones, all reflected in a kaleidoscopic and ever-changing array of new political parties and consequent shifts in the party system. INFLUENCES ON THE PART Y SYSTEM The new Italian state was beset from its beginnings by linguistic fragmentation, geographic division, and the four Cs: clientelism, corruption, criminal organizations, and clericalism and its opposition. In varying degrees, these still persist. Language: Nationalistic movements often take inspiration from a common language. Italians, however, spoke a variety of languages and dialects. In addition to Italian, at least eight other languages were spoken in
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various regions of the country. The Fascist regime sought to ban the use of non-Italian tongues; however, even the most dictatorial government in the country’s modern history could not always impose its edicts on citizens long accustomed to shrugging off unpopular laws—an experience shared by more recent Italian governments attempting to cope with widespread tax evasion and pervasive petty crime. Linguistic unification did not begin until World War I and was completed only after the spread of national television. Geography: The creation of a modern Italian state has been hampered historically by social and economic divisions between north and south that long antedate the Risorgimento of 1860. Unification was propelled by and from the north where it was immensely popular. To the northern bourgeoisie, the Risorgimento was an expression of nationalistic fervor— the chance to build a new nation. Southerners, on the other hand, saw just one more intrusion of foreigners, this time from the North; Italy’s first prime minister, Camille Cavour, could never even bestir himself to visit the southern regions during his time in office. The North quickly began to industrialize and assume the other trappings of an advanced European society. The mezzogiorno (the South) remained primarily agricultural, an impoverished peasant economy dominated by large landowners, the Church, the Mafia, and other clientelistic interests. Despite recent land reforms and massive development programs financed by both Rome and the European Union, the continuing relative poverty of the South is illustrated by the ongoing migrations of its people to cities in the North and abroad, in search of jobs and a better life. In Italy, as elsewhere, geography is history. In a 1993 study, Robert Putnam found considerably greater effectiveness among northern and central regional governments than among southern ones, a disparity that he explained in terms of centuries of northern construction of social capital, civic trust, cooperative traditions, state–citizen relationships, and various beneficial sociopolitical norms—qualities, Putnam said, that have always been far weaker in the South, retarding its development.3 Clientelism, Corruption, and Consociationalism: Clientelism has become a pervasive mediating technique of government and politics throughout Italian society, but most extensively in the South. Clientelism is, in essence, the use of political power and public resources and processes for private purposes, including the enhancement of wealth and the acquisition of further power. The client “buys” public and economic goods from a patron, paying for them at least partly in the currency of power, votes, and political support. Clientelism is one of the most important means through which politicians and power brokers build and maintain political support
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at all levels, from the national to the local. It facilitates the corruption that besets Italian politics and has been a significant lubricant of the channels between political leaders and the Mafia and other criminal networks.4 Clientelistic structures tend to be systems in which the relatively powerless gain jobs and other economic resources in return for pooling what power they possess and putting it at the disposal of a more powerful patron. Americans, whose immigrant parents and grandparents often lent their votes to an urban political machine in return for patronage jobs and winter coal, are familiar with clientelism as it was expressed in the United States. So are Latin Americans who have often given political support to some local or national caudillo who reciprocates with economic rewards. Clientelism exists under almost any political system, but it is more prevalent in some than others. In Italian society and politics, it is rife. “Politicians don’t lead here, they reinforce what they think people want in order to nurture their clientele.” Although the statement was made by a former Greek finance minister, it would have been an equally appropriate description of Italian politics.5 Consociationalism is a related concept, whose workings are particularly exhibited in Italy and other pluralistic countries with proportional representation voting systems. Instead of majoritarian democracy, it substitutes decision-making cooperation by elites representing various social and economic cleavage interests. It is “government by elite cartel.”6 In theory, consociationalism assures that each interest group, no matter how small, is proportionally represented in decision making—in contrast with majority or plurality decisions that may exclude participation by political minorities.7 Consociationalism and proportional representation (PR) operate to assure full participation of interests at the possible expense of effective decision making; plurality governance (FPP) operates to assure effective decision making—including the ability to form a government—at the possible expense of widespread participation of interests. In practice, however, even PR regimes often operate to the inclusion of some interests and parties and the exclusion of others—as in Italy’s long isolation of the Communist Party from mainstream politics. Consociationalism has been expressed in Italian politics as partitocracy, governance not by the state but by party elites acting to control and divide among themselves the government and its power centers. An extreme form was formalized in “The Cencelli Manual” (named for its author, a first republic Christian Democratic bureaucrat), which actually provided a mathematical formula for dividing up ministries and other governmental posts according to the electoral strength of factions within the Christian Democratic Party (DC), and later of all parties in each governing
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coalition. This was pure spoils-system politics, in which neither merit nor policy nor any other aspect of legitimacy played any role. The Catholic Church: For most of two millennia, the Roman Catholic Church was the single most important power and influence in Italy. The Vatican was the center of global Catholicism and a major force in the wars, diplomacy, and politics of Europe and Latin America.8 Among the medieval city-states and into the modern era, the Church guided the spiritual and moral life of most Italians and, through the Papal States and the Church hierarchy, was a principal political and often military power throughout the Italian peninsula. The Church was hostile to the Risorgimento, at least partly because of the anticlericalism of many proponents of unification, which presented obstacles to any kind of conciliation between political and Catholic elites. Indeed, Italy’s king was excommunicated in 1871 after his troops attacked Rome. Italian Catholics were barred from voting for many years, not by state action but by a papal edict that was increasingly ignored but not formally withdrawn until 1919. The Church’s power and landholdings were trimmed during the rise of anticlerical Socialists in the decades after the Risorgimento, but Vatican influence was strong enough to expedite both the ascent of Mussolini and the Fascists after World War I (in fear of an anticlerical revolution from the left), and then his fall in the midst of World War II. At the end of the war, the Vatican was instrumental in the formation of the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and the rise to power of its first leader, Alcide de Gasperi (a veteran politician for whom the Church had provided employment during most of the Mussolini years). The DC was the political instrument of the Catholic Church throughout the duration of the Cold War. Despite the growth of secularism in Italian society in more recent years, the Church’s influence remains substantial. Ideology: As in most democracies today, Italy’s right–left divide is probably the most important and enduring of all socioeconomic cleavages, because it has tended over time to absorb most of the others. Thus, it has been instrumental in reshaping parties more in the direction of catch-all models, particularly in the second republic. But the ideological divide has also itself been reshaped since World War II, not only by rapid industrialization but also by the rise of subsequent postindustrial values such as environmentalism and feminism. The country has also experienced great population dislocations, through both emigration to other countries (within Europe and to the Americas) and also through interregional migration, primarily southern peasants moving north to become part of the industrial economy. More recently, immigrants, many illegal, have come to Italy from Africa and from former
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Yugoslav countries. Such factors and influences have shaped and reshaped the country’s interests and politics. Before industrialization and Italy’s great internal migrations, the South was dominated politically by rightist (and monarchist) landowners and the conservative Catholic Church. Even after peasants and farm workers were allowed to vote, clientelist local leaders manipulated their electoral choices. Much of that changed after southern agricultural laborers moved north and into the cities to take industrial jobs and later to unionize. Their cause was championed there first by Socialists and subsequently also by the Communists, a powerful force even in opposition. Since the Second World War, when Italy abandoned its monarchy and became a republic, these parties, though schismatic, have dominated the left. Sometimes they cooperated, but more often not, especially after the Socialists were invited by the DC to participate in government. Except for a brief period right after the war, the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) was completely frozen out of government during the entire first republic. The party fragmented at about the same time that the Soviet Union collapsed. With the Cold War ended, ex-Communists now participate with various Socialist parties in the second republic’s left alliance, and have even been premiers—something that would have been unthinkable during the years of the first republic. The dominant party of first republic politics was the DC, ideologically center-right in Italy, as in other European countries with Christian Democratic parties. It provided political representation for the Church, employers, and much of the growing middle class. In the second republic, the dominant party of the right is currently the People of Freedom (PdL), the product of a merger of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) with a former neo-fascist party. Rightist coalitions (also including monarchists and the regional Northern League) have alternated in controlling the government with those on the left in second republic elections. THE QUASI-STABLE PART Y SYSTEM From unification to the present day, Italian politics has always been a multiparty game. As noted above, the primary purpose of a party system is to supply the state with a government. But the fragmentation of Italy’s party system produced innumerable governments of unstable tenures, from unification up to the Fascist period and then again from the postwar restoration of democracy until the collapse of the party system in 1992. Frequent changes of governments, however, barely disguised an underlying continuity: Within the life of individual Parliaments and, frequently, stretching
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across successive Parliaments, not only did many of the same political parties participate in governmental coalitions, but so did most of the same people. Party leaders typically rotated among positions from one government to the next and occasionally held on to the same ministry for years. Thus, quasi-stability might be a better description of the Italian system than instability. Between unification and 2001 (with the exception of the Fascist period), there were a total of 116 governments, each lasting an average of only about one year. This average tenure was approximately the same in pre-Fascist Italy, over the life of the first republic, and during the second republic up until 2001. Berlusconi’s second government (2001–2006) broke this pattern and was the longest in Italian history, the only one coterminous with the length of its Parliament. (Alcide De Gasperi and Giulio Andreotti each served longer than Silvio Berlusconi, but the former headed eight successive governments during his eight years [1945–1953], and Andreotti’s six years occurred during seven governments scattered over a 20-year period [1972–1992]). Berlusconi’s rightist government was defeated in the 2006 elections, replaced by Romano Prodi’s center-left regime. The Prodi government then lost a vote of confidence in 2008 and was defeated in elections that year by the center-right alliance, led once again by Berlusconi. His third government has been in power since that year. Berlusconi’s governments have been marked by personal and governmental scandals, legal actions, adverse judicial decisions, and charges of unproductivity, but his regimes have provided governmental stability in a country that previously achieved it only during the Fascist dictatorship. Electoral Systems: Party systems are strongly influenced by the electoral system, which in postwar Italy has largely been one variant or another of proportional representation. Initially, through World War I, Italy used an FPP system and later PR within five-member constituencies. During this latter period, the Liberal and Socialist Parties largely dominated in most elections, which were marked by restricted electorates and widespread fraud. Electoral reforms in 1919 expanded male suffrage9 and introduced multimember, party-list voting within the 54 constituencies into which the country was divided. The Parliament elected that year was made up predominantly of Socialists, Liberals, and a new Catholic party (Partito Populare Italiano—PPI). Elections in 1921, under a slightly modified PR system, produced a similar party lineup. A new National bloc (Fascist) gained seats at Liberal expense; its leader, Benito Mussolini, became prime minister in 1922. From the end of World War I up to Mussolini’s ascent, Italy had seven governments in five years. In 1924, his Fascist Party
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won 65 percent of the seats and put an end to Italian democracy until after World War II. THE POST WAR PART Y SYSTEM TO 1992 PR voting was adopted for the election of a 1946 Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution for Italy and was retained for parliamentary elections up until the early 1990s. Party lists, proposed by the parties themselves, contended in multimember constituencies organized along provincial lines. Each voter cast ballots both for a party list and for up to four preferred candidates on that list. Seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate were allocated among the parties in proportion to their shares of the vote, with the top vote-getting candidates on the party lists (almost invariably the party leadership) winning seats. Because no minimum percentages of the vote were established to gain entry into Parliament, even the smallest parties could win seats. Seven parties won representation in the Parliament elected in 1948; this number slowly grew (particularly from 1979 on) to a total of 11 in 1992. The parties of the first republic may be divided into three tiers based on size and political influence: Alone in the top tier was the center-right DC, heir to the PPI as the political voice of the Catholic Church. The DC never won a majority of the popular vote, but it was always the dominant force in the country’s politics and for decades provided the prime minister. In the second tier were the two large groupings of the left, the PCI and the various Socialist parties. A variety of parties occupied the third tier— Monarchists, Neo-Fascists, Social Democrats, and Liberals, and later on, the Northern League. The following discussions focus on the parties of the two most significant tiers, Italy’s mass parties. Christian Democrats (DC): Formed near the end of the Second World War with strong backing from the Vatican and the Allied powers to which Italy had surrendered, the DC also gained the support of the middle class and a significant share of working-class Catholic families. It also quickly became the political voice of large employers. The close ties it established with major companies helped advance the country’s rapid economic growth and influenced DC policies over the succeeding halfcentury, but they also were instrumental in the corruption that eventually led to the party’s disintegration. During the Cold War, the primary policy objective of the DC, the United States (Italy’s principal NATO ally), and the Vatican was to keep the Communist Party out of the Italian government. The overriding fear was that the PCI and its Socialist allies were creatures of the Kremlin and
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would therefore seek to promote Soviet interests and the disintegration and restructuring of Italian politics and society.10 Promised remedies to a backlog of domestic socioeconomic needs and interests received little attention. As a result, Paul Ginsborg wrote, the mandate for domestic reform given to De Gasperi “by the country in 1948 was to a great extent wasted in the following five years, and the DC under his leadership became the party of stagnant centrism and virulent anti-communism. To hold power in the face of the enemy became almost an end to itself, to which essential reforms were to be subordinated.”11 The validity of this indictment held throughout the first republic. “The wasted mandate” also applied to the parties of the left and center-left. “If there is a single, recurrent, almost obsessive theme in the political history of postwar Italy, it is that of the need for reform and of the failure to achieve it. . . . [The nation’s] immense desire and potential for reform remained almost entirely unrealized.”12 The left was later to support social and economic reforms, and some of the changes that did occur with left-wing backing were adopted either by popular referendum (e.g., legalization of divorce) or by Parliament (e.g., legalization of abortion), only over the objections of recalcitrant Christian Democrats. The DC leadership was fundamentally antireform and its governments largely marked by immobilism. The DC won a majority of seats in 1948, the nation’s first postwar election, thanks to substantial intervention by the United States, which was intensely motivated in these early years of the Cold War to prevent a Communist victory. The United States also intervened again in 1953 with the same aim amid charges (unproved but widely believed) that Italian Americans were being encouraged to return briefly to their home country to cast votes for the DC. The DC had hoped to win a majority of the popular vote in that election and had adopted a law that would have given the center coalition two-thirds of the seats if it gained a popular majority. Objections to this “swindle law” and dissatisfaction with the lack of reform produced party defections, a loss of votes particularly in the mezzogiorno, and gains for parties of both the far right and left. De Gasperi was denied the chance to form a new government and died a year later. Not only did the DC lose its parliamentary majority, but it was never again to approach one. It remained Italy’s dominant party, but its continued rule always depended on parliamentary support from other parties (although not necessarily as cabinet participants). These coalition partners usually included the Social Democrats, the Republicans, and sometimes the Liberals (the latter two small parties of the
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center-right). This coalition, led at the time by Aldo Moro of the DC, finally allowed the Socialists (PSI) to enter the government in 1963. DC leaders headed all these governments until 1983 when PSI leader Bettino Craxi became the Socialist prime minister of the first republic. From 1981 on, the governing coalition comprised all five parties, known as the pentapartito. The rigidities of the party system became even more pronounced during the pentapartito years. Even while winning between a quarter and a third of the vote in this period, the Communists continued to be frozen out of government, and there was therefore no possibility of alternation in regimes. Political clientelism solidified and the Cencelli Manual governed allocation of national ministries and even all local offices, including the patronage that came with them. Anyone who sought a license, subsidy, or contract from Rome or a local government had to deal with pentapartito lawmakers or officials. Corruption was not only prevalent but institutionalized. Companies seeking price increases were allowed to cover the costs of bribes, for example. “All this meant that in the end the entire burden of corruption was carried by the state budget,” wrote Gianfranco Pasquino. “Indeed, the public debt of the pentapartito era skyrocketed and its size had become greater than the Italian Gross National Product. Can one find a better indicator of the size of corruption than the growth of public debt in a period of economic expansion?”13 (One beneficiary of this system was Berlusconi, who amassed his near-monopoly of Italian television under the patronage of Bettino Craxi.) Pentapartito leaders regularly blocked all attempts by prosecutors and the judiciary to indict legislators and ministers. By the time the long-feared PCI and its Soviet patron collapsed, clientelism, not raw anticommunism, had become the dominant ideology. By the 1992 election, the electorate had had enough, particularly in the North where the right-wing Northern League made a remarkable advance, thanks to middle-class abandonment of the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, and the rest of the pentapartito. With the end of the Cold War and the PCI’s reorganization and division, the DC’s long appeal to anticommunism became meaningless. Communists: Despite political repression, the PCI showed an enormous capability to rake in votes—regularly in a range of at least 22 percent (in the early years) and rising to more than a third of the vote in 1976. Much of this was a protest vote on the part of the working class, resentful of the absence of promised socioeconomic changes. The DC’s margin, which in previous elections had ranged from about 10 to almost 20 percentage points, narrowed in 1976 to barely 4 points. It soon became clear
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to working-class voters and other Communist supporters, however, that the PCI was unable to deliver what the DC refused to deliver. In the 1979 election, the DC’s edge rose to nearly eight points but then dropped in 1983 to only three percentage points. In the earliest years, the Communists, under Palmiro Togliatti, actually cooperated closely with the DC, foregoing tactics of working-class militancy to achieve a unity government and hoping to eventually win DC adoption of the PCI’s political program. Togliatti’s belief that he could persuade De Gasperi to his point of view was a fatal misjudgment. Fears of a Communist takeover were an important motivator to DC voters throughout the Cold War. De Gasperi’s “virulent anti-Communism” had strong backing, not only from the United States, but also from the Catholic Church. Communists and Socialists participated in De Gasperi’s governments only until their expulsion in 1948. Decades later, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 significantly reduced those fears, perhaps signaling the DC’s coming collapse. However, the fears were very real in the late 1940s and 1950s and led to the DC’s determination that the Communists were never to be allowed into the government. Public opinion toward the Communists was acutely bifurcated. On the one hand, the PCI’s network of organizations strengthened throughout the nation and party membership grew, reaching a high of 2.1 million in 1954. Its vote totals and percentages continued to climb into the middle 1960s, reflecting the frustrations of the working class with a static social system. The PCI was a classic model of a mass political party. On the other hand, the Communists were frozen out of participation, not only in the governance of the nation, but also in society. As Ginsborg put it, “. . . the intense propaganda of the Cold War had stigmatized them as the lepers of the nation.”14 Moreover, Togliatti’s “Stalinist model [for the PCI] was positively harmful. The belief in Socialist revolution as something that was brought in from outside deprived the Italian working class of any chance of evolving a revolutionary strategy that was based on their own resources. . . . [And] as long as Stalinism was synonymous with socialism, vast numbers of ordinary Italians continued to prefer the capitalist system, for all its injustice.”15 Events abroad made 1956 a year of crisis for the PCI. First came Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin and his crimes, then news of Polish suppression of a workers’ insurrection, and finally, the attempted revolution in Hungary, terminated by the invasion of Soviet troops. In each of these events, the PCI resolutely followed the Kremlin line. Although Togliatti thereafter sought a measure of distance from Moscow, there was no open break until 1981. The result within the PCI of the late 1950s, however, was
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widespread dissension, purges, and massive resignations of membership, abetted by Togliatti’s Stalinist leadership style. Nonetheless, the most important measure of Communist strength was its share of the vote, which increased steadily from 1963, when for the first time it exceeded a quarter of the vote, to 1976, when it topped 34 percent, only four points below the DC. Thereafter, it declined progressively; in 1987, the last election before the party fragmented, the PCI’s share of the vote fell below 27 percent. The student rebellions of 1967 and 1968 were nearly as incomprehensible to the PCI as to the parties of the center-right. Ideologically Marxist in much of their rhetoric, the largely middle-class rebels nonetheless were as opposed to Italian communism as to capitalism. On the other hand, as the student uprisings evolved into the worker revolts and other social protests that followed (lasting until 1973), the PCI and the trade unions it dominated provided active leadership, probably bolstering the Communist vote during this period. The Red Brigades (BR) of the late 1970s represented a new phase in this unrest, utilizing not public demonstrations but tactics of terror and murder to achieve social change. Over a four-year period, the BR killed nearly one hundred people and injured hundreds more. Their most notable victim was DC leader and former prime minister Aldo Moro, whom they kidnapped and later killed in 1978. During the period of his captivity, the Socialists argued in favor of bargaining with the BR for Moro’s release; the divided DC reluctantly opposed negotiations; only the PCI among the major parties resolutely stood against negotiations with terrorists. Eventually, the police arrested and imprisoned the relatively small number of BR members. In 1973, Enrico Berlinguer, the new party leader, sought to break out of the PCI’s political ghetto by offering a so-called historic compromise that would enable Italy to cope with the social problems brought to the fore by years of demonstrations, revolts, and rebellions, and that was intended to preclude a widely feared right-wing coup. Berlinguer proposed a new coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Christian Democrats that would be a meld of Catholic and Communist morality. With NATO encouragement, the pentapartito again rejected the entry of the PCI into government. The possibility that the PCI might surpass the DC as the largest party in the 1976 election appeared real for a time, but eventually the DC prevailed. Nothing came of the “historic compromise” because Berlinguer, like Togliatti a quarter-century before, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the DC. Christian democracy in Italy had never been a party dedicated
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to national reform but only to maintaining itself in power, which required it to keep communism at bay. For a time, the DC accepted PCI support in Parliament so long as cooperation went no further than that. The exquisite irony of Italian politics was that the existence of the Communist Party was all that kept the DC alive in its final years. The PCI rupture with Moscow took place in 1981 over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Later, the party accepted, for the first time, Italy’s membership in NATO. Berlinguer’s funeral, in 1984, brought over a million people into the streets of Rome to mourn both him and the gradual passing of the old Communist cause. With the end of the Cold War in 1990, Achille Occhetto, the party’s newest (and last) leader, sought to modernize and democratize the PCI, with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms as an approximate model. The next year, the Communist name was dropped and the PCI became the Democratic Party of the Left (PdS), changed still later to the Democratic Left (DS). Occhetto quickly suffered two serious setbacks: First, hard-line conservatives split off to form a new party, the Communist Refoundation (RC). Second, the new PdS was severely defeated in the 1992 elections, losing four million votes from the previous election of 1987 (a drop of 10 percentage points) and 70 seats, giving the PdS its lowest delegation (107) since 1948. Even if the new party had retained the 5.6 percent taken by the RC, it was still a poor showing. In making the change of name as he did, Occhetto had failed to grasp the symbolism and importance of the Communist “brand name” to the millions of Italians who had taken pride in the party’s name and history. In any event, the old PCI, which had once been a muscular player in Italian politics and also a major influence in the Cold War, was now dead. Socialists: The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was formed in 1892 but endured numerous splits—the first in 1912 when Benito Mussolini’s revolutionary wing drove out reformers, the second in 1921 when the Communist Party was created. The party re-formed after World War II as the Party of Socialist Proletarian Unity (PSIUP) and won over 20 percent of the vote (second only to the DC) in 1946 elections for the Constituent Assembly. The PSIUP’s right wing defected the next year to become the Social Democratic Party (PSDI) over the issue of establishing a popular front with the Communists. For nine years thereafter, the mainstream Socialists under Pietro Nenni were almost a satellite party of the PCI, closely adhering to the Communist line and tactics. It was not until the highly publicized repressions of 1956 (when Stalinist regimes in Poland and Hungary put down civic and worker revolts) that the Socialists (now again the PSI)
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broke their unity pact with the Communists and began, for the first time, acting independently. In 1961, Nenni embraced Italy’s membership in NATO, departing from his previous neutralism between East and West and decisively so from his earlier pro-Soviet stance. About the same time, the DC began considering how best to assure that the left would remain split. In 1963, Moro brought the PSI into the DC coalition by offering a program of increased state intervention to expand services to the new urban social classes. Little of this promised program was actually achieved, but it did deliver new sources of patronage and other spoils for the coalition parties. In the late 1960s and 1970s, various Socialist factions again merged, divorced, and remerged, largely over the question of participating in DCled cabinet coalitions. The temptations presented by clientelism and the spoils system were irresistible, overwhelming any remaining social-reform impulses and moving the PSI steadily rightward. This process accelerated with the selection in 1976 of Craxi as party secretary. As Michael Foot noted, Craxi’s conception of reform was some distance removed from the Socialist heritage: “Craxi reinvented the party as a post-labourist body, breaking not just with the symbols of socialism (the hammer and sickle), but also with its traditional base (the industrial working class). The party adopted a modernist and strongman rhetoric that proved extremely popular with the new middle classes of an increasingly wealthy Italy.”16 Maneuvering with skill between the two larger parties, Craxi took on both the DC and PCI at the national and local levels. In 1978, he achieved the election of the country’s first Socialist president, Allesandro Pertini. The party’s share of the vote in parliamentary elections rose from 9.6 percent in 1976 to 14.3 percent in 1987. After the DC loss in 1983, Craxi became prime minister—the first leader in postwar Italy who was not a Christian Democrat. He wanted power for both his party and for himself; moreover, as events would later show, he also wanted the wealth that power could bring. Craxi shunned the DC style of negotiating with major interest groups in favor of the tactics of confrontation, often ruling by decree when he ran into problems in Parliament. His popularity was demonstrated and enhanced by a surprising referendum victory over the PCI, which had challenged his reduction of wage indexation. Such successes strengthened Craxi’s political dominance of both the Christian Democrats and the Communists. Craxi remained in office for four years, longer than any prime minister since De Gasperi. After the 1992 elections, he sought to return to office but was prevented by the outbreak of corruption scandals and Mafia killings in Milan, his home city. Fearing his own arrest—he was subsequently
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TABLE 8.1 Major-Party Percentages of the Italian Vote, 1953–1992 Parties 1953 1958 1963 1968 1972 1976 1979 1983 1987
1992
DC
40.1
42.3
38.3
39.1 38.7
38.7
38.3
32.9
34.3
29.7
PCI
22.6
22.7
25.3
26.9 27.1
34.4
30.4
29.9
26.6
16.1a
PSI
12.7
14.2
13.8
14.5
9.6
9.6
9.8
11.4
14.3
13.6
All others b
24.6
20.8
22.6
19.5 24.6
17.3
21.5
25.8
24.8
40.6
Total
100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Source: Michael Foot, Modern Italy (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Box 4, 10d, 202. Note: DC = Christian Democrats. PCI = Communists. PSI = Socialists. a Democratic Party of the Left in 1992. b Derived subtotals. TABLE 8.2 Percentage Point Drop-Off from Best Year to 1992 DC
–12.6
(1958)
PCI
–18.3
(1976)
PSI
–0.9
(1968)
Source: Table 8.1.
convicted in absentia of taking bribes—Craxi fled to his villa in Tunisia, where he died in 2000. Table 8.1 shows the results for the three largest parties of general elections from 1953 until the end of the first republic. Table 8.2 shows how much each of these parties fell in share of the vote. The DC’s percentage of the vote declined after 1958 but to a plateau that lasted until 1979, then falling to its low-point in 1992. The Communist vote share rose over much of this period, hitting its high in 1976 and its nadir in 1992. The Socialist percentage declined into single digits in 1972, rising in the Craxi era and then falling somewhat in the last election before he fled the country. THE COLLAPSE OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC The Italian judiciary, both judges and prosecutors, has long remained largely independent of the political system and free of corruption. Under
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both republics, the judicial system has been seen by the public as its defense against the most extreme expressions of political venality, while tangentopoli (“bribesville”) became an increasingly popular description of the political establishment. The disintegration of the old parties was triggered by the judiciary’s “clean hands” investigation of political corruption and links with organized crime. The probes began slowly in 1992 but then accelerated after the murders of a number of politicians and prosecutors. These crimes were attributed to the Mafia and other crime gangs in retaliation for the unusually long prison sentences imposed on their members by the courts. The killings sought to frighten law enforcers and abort further prosecutions of gang members and their political allies. The grisly and well-publicized tactics backfired by enraging both the public and the judiciary, which increased the pace of its investigations. According to Patrick McCarthy, by September 1993, 2,600 people were under judicial scrutiny, 325 of whom were parliamentarians.17 The political toll exacted by these investigations and indictments began to accelerate. Both the DC and PSI began to lose local elections, many in long-time bastions of support, to the benefit of the new separatist Northern League, other right-wing parties, and the PdS. Frightened of a Communist resurgence, the Catholic Church sought to shore up the DC by backing a reformer, Mario Segni, who had been the architect of a 1991 referendum and the new electoral system it produced; however, he quit the DC in disgust in March 1993, although he continued to work outside the party for electoral reforms. The DC and the PSI never formally disbanded. Having lost nearly all credible leadership and core base support, they simply disintegrated under the pressure of unending local electoral defeats and the prospect of political devastation in the next national elections. Their demise was a classic instance of two simultaneous disalignments—except that they occurred, not at a national election, but in anticipation of one. These disalignments produced a realignment—the product of which is the second republic. Various wings and factions of both parties defected to form new parties—former Socialists and Communists eventually uniting with other parties of the left—and former Christian Democrats joining Forza Italia, the Northern League, or the neo-Fascists. New Catholic parties were later to include La Margherita on the left and the Union of Christian and Center Democrats (UCCD) on the right. Indeed, new parties proliferated in the early years of the second republic. The electoral system in effect for the whole of the first republic may not have produced the clientelism, crime, and corruption that were crippling
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Italian democracy, but it facilitated the political system in which they occurred. By giving political parties parliamentary representation that was proportional to their shares of the vote, the electoral system gave seats to the smallest parties and prevented any single party from gaining a majority and thus becoming accountable to the electorate for the performance of the government. De Gasperi’s 1953 attempt to gain an enlarged parliamentary majority through bonus seats if the DC won a majority of the popular vote was denounced as a swindle law; it might, however, have produced more responsible government. (A version of this “swindle law” was adopted by the Berlusconi government in an attempt to win a larger parliamentary majority in the 2006 election. The gambit backfired and gave Romano Prodi’s left-wing government the enlarged majority Berlusconi had desired for himself.) In any event, two nationwide popular referenda were organized in 1991 and 1993 to overturn the existing, discredited electoral system; they passed by overwhelming margins despite the opposition of the established political party leaders. The clear intent of the second referendum particularly was to install an FPP electoral system. The 1991 referendum to eliminate the old PR process was approved by over 90 percent of the voters. In response, Parliament then adopted a new two-ballot procedure in which three-quarters of the deputies would be elected in single-member districts with plurality voting; the remaining one-fourth would be chosen proportionally by party lists. This system was in force for the elections of 1994, 1996, and 2001. Even though only a quarter of the seats were filled by PR voting, the effect of the party lists— which ranked party candidates in preferential order—was to assure that party leaders were safely reelected. “[A] change of system could not transform the ingrained habits of Italian political life. Politicians continued to change sides with great regularity within parliament, and from election to election. . . . Horse-trading was immense,” Michael Foot wrote.18 The DS (ex-Communists) proposed a change to a French-style two-round FPP procedure but received little support. The electoral system has shifted back and forth in the second republic. Variations of proportional representation were in effect for the elections of 2006 and 2008. Frequent party switching (i.e., transformism) has long been an institutional defect of the Italian party system—the ability of politicians to “change sides with very little consequence for themselves or their parties, but with enough effect to make these changes worthwhile.”19 The country’s modern history is rife with examples of parties or factions switching sides in this manner. One such instance occurred in 1994 when the Northern League’s abandonment of the first Berlusconi government brought
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it down and put the left into power. Transformism is a systemic defect because it facilitates “the lack of a clear distinction between government and opposition.”20 That distinction is important to political stability and to public confidence in the party system. To some extent, the complex political system of the second republic is a deterrent to transformism because it encourages party alliances. What is significant is that these alliances have continued to exist even if the parties that comprise them (or at least their party labels) have appeared to come and go. Although the names of the alliances have also changed frequently, their political identities have endured. Thus, each election has always pitted an alliance of the left against one representing the right—a rough caricature of a two-party system. This system has since been changed on several occasions, generally for the purpose of boosting the prospects of the incumbent coalition. Regardless of the formal rules governing each election, however, Italian voters in the second republic have regularly rotated governments, ousting the incumbent parties of government and replacing them with their ideological competitors. Thus, the second republic has seen a steady alternation of governments; this is quite the opposite of the first republic’s pattern but very similar to the behavior of electorates in the post–Cold War democracies of central Europe. Much has changed in Italy since the demise of the first republic, but much has not. The Catholic Church remains a powerful force in society, but so do the Mafia and other elements of organized crime. Despite ongoing programs by both Rome and the European Union (EU) to develop the mezzogiorno, economic and social disparities are still substantial, with unemployment virtually at zero in much of the North but at 15–20 percent in the South.21 Northern restiveness over the cost of these programs continues to power the separatist Northern League and the right generally. Clientelism and consociationalism continue to characterize Italian society and politics. Despite the changes in the party system since the collapse of the first republic, lingering institutional problems remain. The good news is that no party is frozen out of the system without prospect of entering government, as the Communists long were, and that no party has a monopoly on cabinet participation as the DC long did. Another related piece of good news is the movement toward two opposing ideological alliances alternating in power. The lack of electoral alternation and the problems associated with Italian consociationalism were major deficiencies of the first republic. Whether these alliances can solidify to the point of at least resembling France’s “plural left”—if not the more-or-less unified single
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party of the French right—is an open question, but Italian politics might become more stable and healthier if that does happen. The bad news is that underlying the existing alliances there still remains a fractured network of political parties, even more numerous than under the first republic. The characteristic that unites these parties is the urge to retain or gain power, a desire no electoral system can alter and that frequently had led to transformism. Long-term, Italy’s success as a society will depend on the party system’s ability to produce governments that can tackle its chronic and endemic problems. A fragmented and consociational party system has already proven its inability to deal with these issues. If a new two-party system that could produce stable governments backed by electoral majorities could actually evolve out of the present-day alliances, perhaps it would have a better chance. However, Italy’s experience under Silvio Berlusconi’s long tenure does not add credence to this proposition. The corruption scandals and electoral changes that ultimately destroyed the mass-membership parties of the first republic did not eliminate consociationalism in Italian politics; they merely altered its mechanics. The new ideological party alliances of the second republic now require preelection agreements among the participating parties. “If one were to be extremely cynical, it could be argued that now the ‘Cencelli Manual’ is also applied before the election, not just afterwards.”22 Moreover, the unprincipled bargaining associated with legislative negotiation in the first republic seems not to have altered in any way in the second. At a tactical level, Italian politics continues to be conducted as it always has been. Berlusconi remains the dominant figure in Italy. His entry into electoral politics at the beginning of the second republic was motivated by fears that the Communists would successfully fill the vacuum created by the extinction of the old parties; however, the Communists have long since gone. His personal appeal was that of a new face promising major reforms, the popular owner of the championship Milan soccer team and a man so personally wealthy that he would be untemptable by the widespread graft of the pentapartito.23 The irony, of course, was that his wealth was a consequence of clientelistic benefactions by Bettino Craxi and other political patrons and has became the object of numerous investigations and judicial proceedings, the results of which Berlusconi has largely evaded to date. His control of television networks, newspapers, and magazines has helped him organize the Italian right and dominate the second republic’s political and governmental life. Berlusconi’s predominance is, moreover, personalistic and funded by his personal fortune. Now in his seventies, he seems prone to well-publicized
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sexual escapades. His national leadership style resembles that found in a developing country rather than that of the advanced societies of West Europe and North America. He is a wealthy caudillo, not an internationally respected statesman. For better or worse, it seems unlikely that any other figure in Italian life can step into his leadership prominence once he passes from the scene. ITALY: CONCLUSIONS AND OUTLOOK The question posed at the beginning of this chapter was whether the implosion of the first republic’s political parties was a genuine disalignment. More specifically, does the disintegration of the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, and the other elements of the pentapartito meet the requirements of disalignment theory? Why or why not? And what light does the Italian case throw on the theory? The cataclysmic end of the pentapartito differs from the other disalignment cases, not only because it involved multiple parties, but also because they disintegrated prior to an election. Moreover, this is the single instance of a disalignment occurring under a proportional representation electoral system. On the other hand, there certainly were widespread leadership failures on major issues of national importance (pervasive corruption and crime) that alienated the core bases of the political parties. Although successor parties on the left were marked by fragmentation and ranged from hard left to center left, they have been able to form functioning electoral alliances that bear some resemblance to a major party. A similar alliance, dominated up to now by Berlusconi’s wealth and media control, was formed on the right. These successor parties are the product of a sweeping realignment of the party system. There are indications that this realignment is incomplete and still in a state of flux. Party entrenchment has not occurred; moreover, no clear successor parties have firmly emerged. Ideological contests are carried on by polarized, semi-permanent party alliances that may represent an inchoate two-party system. Regrettably, the fluid party structures of the second republic seem no more inclined or able as yet to deal with the country’s continuing problems than was its entrenched and rigid predecessor. Despite its mixed characteristics, the collapse of the old Italian order seems more clearly a disalignment than not. It is to date the only disalignment of an entire party system. Italy remains both an extreme case of paralyzed politics and a warning to other polities that are beginning
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to exhibit some of the same characteristics—that is, a failure to resolve chronic national problems. We will return to this subject in Chapter 10. NOTES 1. The first republic is an informal term that describes the period from the adoption of the 1948 Constitution to the disintegration of the party system and the creation of a new electoral law in 1993. The so-called second republic describes Italian politics and governance since then. In reality, Italy is still governed under the 1948 Constitution and there has legally been only a single republic from that year to the present; the popularity of the distinction between the two “republics” reflects the dominant influence of the party state and the importance of the 1993 changes. (Because the terms are journalistic rather than legal, they are not capitalized in this book.) 2. John Burrow, A History of Histories (New York: Knopf, 2008), 274. 3. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Tradition in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 4. For example, Giulio Andreotti, prime minister during the 1970s and the last Christian Democratic prime minister in the first republic, allegedly had close ties with the Sicilian Mafia, although he was acquitted of criminal charges in 2005. Subsequently, he received a presidential appointment as one of the country’s seven senators-for-life, perhaps even on merit. 5. Stefanos Manos, quoted in the Financial Times, May 15, 2010, p. 2. 6. Richard S. Katz, “Party in Democratic Theory,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: SAGE Publications, 2006), 39. 7. The authoritative discussion of consociationalism is found in Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 8. For example, Brazilians speak Portuguese today, while the rest of Latin America is Spanish-speaking, because of arbitration between the two Iberian countries by Pope Alexander VI in the late 15th Century. 9. Women did not gain the right to vote until 1947. 10. Neo-Fascist and other far-right parties were also excluded. 11. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 144. 12. Ibid., 52. 13. Gianfranco Pasquino, “Political Development,” in Italy since 1945, ed. Patrick McCarthy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 83–84. 14. Ginsborg, 195. 15. Ibid., 88. 16. Michael Foot, Modern Italy (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 177.
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17. Patrick McCarthy, The Crisis of the Italian State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 141. 18. Foot, 203. 19. Ibid., 162. 20. Ibid., 161. 21. Tony Barber, Financial Times, April 13, 2006, 15. 22. Foot, 203. 23. Berlusconi’s appeal brings to mind Ross Perot’s similar campaign in the United States in 1992. It would be interesting to know what influence Perot’s campaign had on Berlusconi.
Chapter 9
Comparative Analysis of the Cases The cases of disalignment described in the preceding chapters demonstrate the almost immediate extinction of one party (the American Whigs); the reduction to minor-party status of two other parties, each of which subsequently disappeared through mergers with another minor party; and the evaporation of an entire party system and the parties that comprised it, the Italian pentapartito. Of the two merged parties, one (Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party) has been kept in minor-party status through the workings of the FPP system, while the other (the new Conservative Party of Canada) surmounted these difficulties to become the party of government. The tasks of this chapter are, first, to determine the conditions under which disalignment occurs and, second, to analyze whether the evidence presented in the case studies validates the hypotheses set out in Chapter 4. This will set the stage for Chapter 10’s concluding observations about disalignment and its implications for the future of parties and party systems, particularly in the United States. CONDITIONS NECESSARY FOR DISALIGNMENTS Based on analysis of the case studies, there appear to be five conditions that provide the setting required for party disalignments: • • • • •
Leadership failure Intensity of national identity cleavage issues and positions Alienation of the core base Availability of a successor party or parties Probability of an FPP electoral system
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When Political Parties Die
Each of these conditions is discussed in more detail below, substantiated by the case studies (except for the Italian case and the fifth condition). It is important to stress that disalignment takes place only if all the first four requirements are present. Failed leadership is not, in and of itself, sufficient to bring about a disalignment; the other necessary preconditions must also be in place. Failures by political elites are not particularly uncommon, sometimes even on cleavage questions affecting national identity.1 Disalignment also requires that these failures estrange core-base party voters—and, even then, there must exist another party, acceptable to these voters, to which they can flee. As for the fifth precondition, the presence of an FPP electoral system greatly facilitates the likelihood that a severe party defeat will turn into disalignment, but this may not be absolute. The 1993 collapse of the Italian parties indicates that there may be circumstances in which parties in a PR system may be disaligned. Two party attributes are not essential conditions. First, it is not necessary that the victim of the disalignment be the party of government, although the exigencies of politics may make such a party more vulnerable than its opposition. The PC was still in power at the moment of the disaligning election, but the Whigs and the British Liberals no longer were. The constituents of the pentapartito were the government parties when they went out of existence, but they disappeared prior to an election, as did their long-time opponents, the Communists. The second irrelevant attribute is the party’s age. The PC was 126 years old when it was disaligned; the Liberals were about half that age (or older, depending on when one dates their founding as a political party); but the Whig Party had existed for only 16 years. The Italian parties all arose (or were re-created in different forms) after the defeat of fascism in World War II and had therefore existed for less than half a century. Leadership Failure
Each of the disalignment cases demonstrated poor performance on the part of party elites. Leadership failures, however, is a category that comes in several different forms, sometimes even in the same political party, ranging from errors of judgment to sheer incompetence to outright corruption. Scott and the Whigs
The leadership failures of Winfield Scott and the Whig elite during the 1852 campaign were compounded of misjudgment, incompetence, and unacceptable deviations from party orthodoxy. Apart from a shared dislike for concentrated federal power, the glue that held the Whig base together was distrust and antipathy toward Democrats and
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the socioeconomic groups that comprised the Democratic base. Nativism and anti-Catholicism were prominent among Whig voters, especially in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Scott’s campaign brought these strains to a head in 1852. In deciding to appeal actively for the votes of Catholics and urban immigrants, both pillars of the Democratic base, Scott antagonized nativists and strongly anti-Democratic Whig voters. He and other party leaders were oblivious that they were taking the party headlong to defeat. The Whig disalignment that came to a head in 1854 was caused by the party elite’s deviation from base voters’ beliefs about American identity and their failure to persuade the base that a change in traditional ideology was desirable and necessary. From a distance of over 150 years, we may applaud Scott’s overtures to excluded groups. In the climate of the time, however, it was a major political blunder on two counts. First, the Whigs’ outreach was predicated on the assumption that the new citizens at whom Scott’s appeal was aimed comprised medial voters; they did not. Urban immigrants and Catholics were unmoved, seeing the Whig campaign as a cynical ploy (which it was), and they steadfastly remained within the Democratic base in the election. Second, the Whig leadership’s attempts to attract the immigrant and Catholic vote alienated Whig voters, who saw these fast-increasing groups as a threat to their livelihoods and to American cultural identity. The party’s strongest supporters, strongly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, were antagonized by the party elite’s outreach to these bastions of the Democracy. If the Whig leadership was to abandon the perceived self-interests of its nativist Protestant base by appealing to the alien values of loyal Democrats, why then should disaffected rank-and-file Whig voters stand with the party any longer? The Know Nothings’ American Party was available and eager to receive them. The Whig Party’s vulnerability on the complex issues of slavery and states’ rights between its northern and southern wings, exacerbated by party leaders’ actions in the Compromise of 1850, compounded the problem. The Whig base was substantial but fragile, and significantly less organized than that of the Democrats. Because of inadequate organization by party leaders, voters were often tempted by ephemeral parties that appeared to offer more effective opposition to the Democracy. Weak party organization meant weak party loyalty within the base, both of which contributed to the exodus of Whig voters in and after the failed 1852 campaign. The Whig disalignment flowed directly from incompetent miscalculations about where the party’s interests lay and what deviations from orthodoxy the party base would tolerate. The base electorate deserted the party in 1853–1854 for the Know Nothings, and afterward for the new
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Republican Party. An attempt to resuscitate the party in 1856 failed badly, and it went out of existence. Asquith and Lloyd George
Incompetence of a somewhat different sort was the undoing of H. H. Asquith. Neither his biographer nor historians of the Liberal Party offer any explanations of his failures after 1910. A successful chancellor of the Exchequer who, after he became prime minister, was skillful in leading the drive to curb the powers of the House of Lords, Asquith then went into decline. He was unable to comprehend the rationale of the women’s suffrage movement. He failed to manage either rising labor unrest or the problem of Ireland and was forced to turn to Lloyd George to mitigate these crises. His management of the war effort led to a bipartisan cabinet revolt that produced his ouster, and he misread where his political support lay in the government. Rather than accept his defeat and retire to the back benches or to Lords, he waged a continuing battle with his Liberal successor that contributed significantly to the party’s split and to its disalignment. Granted that Asquith was beset with crises that were singly and collectively overwhelming, crisis management is, after all, part of the portfolio of any head of government. Whatever the personal instabilities that clouded his judgment and abilities after 1910 were, Asquith was wholly out of his depth as prime minister and, as he showed in his dealings with Labour and in the four election campaigns of 1918–1924, as party leader. David Lloyd George cannot be charged with incompetence. His leadership failures were partly political and partly ethical. Widely considered brilliant, and skilled at moving people in both public and private, Lloyd George often succeeded in resolving problems where Asquith could not, particularly managing the war effort and bringing the conflict to a close. He moved progressively away from his party’s traditional libertarian ideology during the war and the 1920s, opting frequently for a stronger governmental role on major issues. Hoping to engineer an eventual merger of rightist Liberals with mainstream Conservatives, his contrivance of the 1918 “coupon” split the Liberals and set them on the road to disalignment. Surprisingly, given his intellect, in some respects he understood no better than Asquith (or local party constituency organizations) the changes that were sweeping over Britain, particularly the new role and power of the working class that had long been part of the Liberal base. Ethically challenged, Lloyd George set up a political fund that he alone controlled, and he financed it by the sale of peerages and other state honors. He was probably not the first prime minister to take money for this purpose, but he was the last to do so legally; Parliament outlawed the practice in 1925
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as a result of loud public outcries. The money was used to advance his own political agenda, and he declined to share it with the local and national Liberal Party groups that were destitute after the war, both financially and organizationally. The party’s impoverished condition was a direct consequence of the divisions produced by Lloyd George’s coupon campaign. The Liberal Party never recovered from the resulting intraparty split, which left it debilitated and unable to mount effective campaigns in the elections that followed. Over time, Lloyd George’s once keen ear for what Liberal activists and the public expected of his policies and actions slowly turned to tin. In the end, his intellectual rigidity, arrogance, manipulations, and unscrupulous behavior contributed as much to the Liberal collapse, as did Asquith’s ineffectiveness. Asquith and Lloyd George share the blame for allowing their antipathy and feuding to sharply divide the Liberal Party and demoralize its activists. Their mutual self-indulgence contributed directly to the party’s collapse. Mulroney and Campbell
The leadership failures exhibited by the elite of Canada’s Progressive Conservatives were also compound. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s inadequacies were errors of judgment, based on miscalculations of what the PC base and the Canadian electorate at large expected, demanded, and would tolerate. Fundamentally a visionary and a risk taker, he lost the gamble that he could close the gap between the social and political demands of Quebec nationalists and what the rest of Canada, especially the rebellious West, would countenance. In the midst of a severe recession, he also lost his bet that he could sway Canadians to accept an unpopular tax on services, and a trade agreement with the United States that many of his countrymen believed endangered their jobs. He left office deeply unpopular. Mulroney’s leadership failures, however, were quite different from those of his successor, Kim Campbell. Like Winfield Scott, she showed that stubbornness and ego are not substitutes for intellectual clarity and insight. She was not in office long enough to show what kind of prime minister she might have become, but the incompetence she demonstrated during the 1993 campaign was monumental. Woolstencroft described her political performance as unprepared, uncertain, indecisive, and weak,2 an assessment that remains widely shared. Granted, the unpopularity of Mulroney and his record was a difficult basis on which to campaign, but a more proficient effort by Campbell might have rescued some portion of the PC seats (including her own) that were washed away in the tsunami that struck her party.
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The Pentapartito
The prime causes of the disintegration of Italy’s party system were not complex: Their leadership was largely and visibly corrupt, and allied with the criminal gangs that infested the mezzogiorno. The credibility of party and government leaders was destroyed by indictments of hundreds of political figures, assassinations of legal investigators, and the subsequent flight of a former prime minister to another country to avoid prosecution. The Christian Democrats, the dominant party in the pentapartito, had been held together by the party’s resolute opposition to communism. The dissolution of the Communist Party at the end of the Cold War also dissolved the glue that had held the DC together; the elements of the Christian Democratic base saw no further reason to remain loyal to a demonstrably corrupt leadership whose raison d’être no longer existed. The enactment of electoral reforms by referenda and the defeat of government parties in a series of local elections provided convincing evidence that these parties had lost the support and loyalty of their bases. What differentiates the destruction of the pentapartito was that it occurred prior to a national general election; by the time of the 1993 elections, the old parties had gone. They were not defeated in the usual way but rather evaporated in anticipation of destruction. *** Hence, leadership failures took various forms in precipitating party disalignment in each case—incompetence, mismanagement, or corruption in some instances, political misjudgment in others. In each instance, the behavior of leaders led directly to a loss of confidence in them among the party faithful. Politics in democracies is inevitably a messy business, and the 20/20 hindsight of later analysts is what facilitates normative judgments about the actions of past leaders. It would be unfair to criticize the leaders of the disaligned parties because of unknown and unknowable facts or circumstances. In these cases, however, the fact is that they could, or should, have been aware of the consequences and implications of what they were doing or failing to do, but either disregarded or were oblivious to the potential outcomes, and thereby brought about the disalignment of their parties. Intensity of National Identity Cleavage Issues and Positions
Disalignments occur over cleavage issues that affect the party base’s fundamental conception of the country’s national identity. In effect, a new cleavage appears, one that polarizes and separates the base from the
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leadership on such issues. Mere policy disputes that divide a party are not unusual, but it is rare for them to threaten its ability to survive. These national identity cleavage issues may be posed as a series of questions. The Whig Issues
In the Whig situation there is a single question: Is the United States to be a nation predicated on nativist, Protestant values, or are those cultural values to be commingled with, and therefore changed by, the values of immigrants and Catholics? (The slavery and states’ rights issues, although they were soon to lead to civil war, were not the precipitating causes of the Whig disalignment.) The Whig rank-and-file was hostile to both immigrants and Catholics, let alone to new citizens who were both. This animosity was aimed principally at the Irish, by far the single largest immigrant group at the time, who were not only Catholic but also largely loyal adherents of urban Democratic political organizations. Given the ill will of Whigs toward Democrats, plus the competition for jobs that Irish immigrants often presented, these newcomers were unwelcome in Whig eyes for multiple reasons. Moreover, the reputed Irish fondness for alcohol was troubling to the temperance movement that widely overlapped with nativism. (Despite speaking a different language, Germans, the second largest immigrant group, were spared much of this antagonism, in part because many of them were Protestant and also because so many dispersed to rural areas where they quickly became part of the agricultural community. Immigrants from Protestant Britain, the third largest group in 1850, seemed to assimilate almost instantly, wherever they settled.) To the Protestant, nativist Whig Party base, the Irish were deeply threatening to the cultural, religious, and social values that made up Americans’ concepts of self-identity. General Scott’s appeal to these immigrants opened a breach with the Whig base that could not be healed. The Liberal Issues
The cleavages that produced the disalignment of Britain’s Liberal Party were also centered on issues of national identity. There were two such questions. The most important was focused on the rapid rise of militant and political labor: Is British society to continue to be one in which the values of the upper and middle classes remain predominant, or are these values to be altered by the injection of working-class values, increased class consciousness, and socialist ideology? In the eyes of the British middle and upper classes, the repeated confrontations between the fast-growing working class and employers and the government, which occurred immediately prior to and during World War I,
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were a threat to their traditional values. The bent of the labor unions to negotiate by riot (in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase) was deeply troublesome to Britons who prized social stability, and who perceived wartime labor unrest as unpatriotic. Rising class consciousness among working people, the growth of the Labour Party, and the association of many of its leaders with socialism seemed, in combination, to pose a risk of social revolution. Britons, who associated prosperity and empire with capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and patriotism, saw in union militancy the undoing of all they held dear. To the working class, however, unions and the growing power of the Labour Party (if not necessarily socialism) were the path to a decent income and the prosperity that their “social betters” had too long enjoyed at their expense. The Liberal Party could not come to grips with this cleavage. Its base had long comprised both the middle and the working classes, but sympathy for the aspirations of working people was largely confined to national party leaders—whose Lib-Lab pact had, after all, abetted the rise of political labor—and by no means all party leaders. (Asquith did not understand what labor restiveness was all about; Lloyd George pandered publicly to the ambitions of the working class, while privately disdaining them.) In any event, what Liberal sympathy existed for workers was largely confined to Westminster. At the constituency level, local party leaders were happy for the votes of the working class but had little interest in nominating more than a few of its members for Parliament. The Labour Party could only benefit from this exclusion. The great expansion of the working-class vote in 1918 propelled the Labour Party at Liberal expense. Depending on their sense of social class, most new women voters probably voted either for Labour or the Conservative Party in the elections of 1918–1924. There was not much left for the Liberal Party. The long-festering problem of Ireland posed the second question of national identity: Is Great Britain to remain a political union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, or are the Irish to be allowed to withdraw? Despite their mistreatment of the Irish, the English, at least, had considered Ireland to be a British possession for centuries, longer even than Scotland. Protestants in Northern Ireland were determined to remain British. Unionism was a strong force in the British electorate, but the financial and emotional cost of suppressing the seemingly endless Irish rebellions, and popular revulsion over the tactics employed by both sides in the guerilla war, finally produced the treaty that gave independence to the Catholic South in 1921. Those Liberals who were still unionists may well have felt betrayed by their government’s acquiescence in the creation of the Irish Free State.
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Other issues of national identity—women’s suffrage and tolerance for non-Anglicans—had affected Britain profoundly in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but they were largely settled after 1918 and were not significant factors in the Liberal disalignment. The PC’s Issues
For Canada, the primary national identity cleavage issues were those of Quebec and regionalism. The first question was: Are the traditional values of British Canada to continue to prevail, or are they to be altered and diluted by ceding parity to a francophone culture and society based largely in a single province? Anglophone Canadians regarded French Canadians as a people stubbornly refusing to assimilate with the dominant British culture, and Quebec as a single province unreasonably demanding parity with all the Englishspeaking provinces. Why could their country not emulate the United States, whose people had long proclaimed the values of the “melting pot” and of equal legal status for all states within a single federal system? Francophone Canadians had the converse view—that theirs is a distinct culture entitled, if not to independence, then at least to be treated on a basis that is “separate but equal.” (The contrast of this sentiment with racial segregation in the United States is truly ironic.) Two prime ministers tried to resolve this conflict. Pierre Trudeau largely failed but left office wearing the aura of a national statesman. Brian Mulroney also failed, and his failure led directly to the disalignment of his Progressive Conservative Party, partly at the hands of the Bloc Québecois. As long as Quebec remains a part of Canada, it is hard to see a resolution of this cleavage issue. The second major national identity issue is geographic, the grievances of Canada’s outlying regions against the economic and political domination of Ontario—a classic center–periphery cleavage: Will Canada be a centralized federal state in which the decisions of political and economic elites predominate, or will regional socioeconomic values be expressed in terms of considerable provincial authority and autonomy? Wholly apart from its linguistic and religious cleavage, Canada is a fragmented country. If all Quebecers were to renounce French language and culture tomorrow, and immediately convert en masse to Protestantism, the country would continue to be wracked by its geographic cleavages. The Atlantic provinces have long borne a sense of discrimination and injustice at the hands of central Canada’s elites, but they are too small, too poor, and too dependent on largesse from Ottawa to do much about it. The equally resentful West, by contrast, is large and increasingly wealthy and was able to mount an indigenous political movement that,
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for now, has taken control of the federal government after persuading what was left of the PC to merge with it. At the western pole of Canada’s geographic cleavage, the Reform Party was as responsible as the BQ for the PC’s disalignment in 1993. Ethnic and gender cleavages also remain significant. Italy’s Issues
The Italian case is quite different. Communism, and the DC’s staunch and long-standing opposition to it, were the most important ideological issues dividing Italy during the Cold War years—and the Christian Democrats never failed in their role of keeping the communists out. So long as the DC and the pentapartito performed as the Church and other anticommunists demanded, Italians were willing to tolerate a half-century of failed promises and moderate corruption. Like any other democratic people, Italians believe that they are entitled to reasonably honest performance of governmental programs and services. But on the other hand, clientelism pervades Italian society and produces a cynical expectation that the hands of public officials are always in someone else’s pocket. A modest degree of corruption may therefore to be expected. What finally outraged the Italian electorate was that there was neither honesty nor performance; a half-century of promises by the Christian Democrats and their allies were largely unfulfilled, while at the same time bribery of national leaders and parliamentarians grew ever more rampant. Once it became clear that the PCI was no longer a threat, the DC lost its national rationale. The issues of corruption, negligence, and criminal alliances then rose to the fore, and the pentapartito disintegrated. If there was an overriding ideological cause in Italy in the years following World War II, it was anticommunism. The DC’s designated mission was to preserve the liberties restored to Italians after the fall of fascism by assuring that the Communists had no chance to enter and subvert the government, and the DC did not fail the country on this issue. Throughout the Cold War, successive Christian Democratic leaders kept the Communists isolated, co-opting their Socialist allies, and forcing the PCI eventually to move away from Moscow’s dominance and toward pragmatic centrism on domestic issues. The DC promised many other benefits and improvements to Italy and delivered on none of them, because the entrenched power structures did not allow it. At the very least, however, it was assumed that a modest and reasonable degree of honesty prevailed. As it turned out, this was not remotely true. The DC did not collapse because it failed to keep the Communists out of power; it succeeded all too well. The DC and the pentapartito
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disintegrated because with the end of the Cold War they were no longer needed, and their long-ignored defects created their own destruction. *** In sum, in all four countries, cleavage issues involving differing perceptions of national identity were at the heart of party disalignments. Each disaligning election was as much a referendum on these national identity issues as a verdict on the performance of political elites. Put differently, disalignment is a product of ideological disruption. A party that loses ideological cohesion also loses reasons to remain united in times of crisis. Alienation of the Core Base
As noted in previous chapters, disaffection within a party’s base may be limited or extensive in size and scope. It can also be expressed in a variety of ways short of disalignment. Disalignment results when this disaffection becomes so pervasive and intense that the voters who comprise the base come to believe that the party no longer represents their values and interests. It represents a complete divorce between the base electorate and the party leadership. Reconciliation in the form of a return to the fold has never occurred. (Some may argue that former PC voters in Canada did return after that party’s merger with the Canadian Alliance. The response is that the party they returned to, although it bears a similar name, is a new one, with a leadership cadre that largely originated in the Alliance, headed by a prime minister who formerly led the western party, and in which former PC elites play a lesser role.) In the case of the Whigs, the evidence is clear-cut that the preponderance of the base deserted the party, opting temporarily for the Know Nothing American Party, and then for the Republican Party. By 1856, the Whig presidential candidate won less than half the share of the vote his party’s previous presidential nominees had gained from 1836 through 1848. Even the scorned Winfield Scott, whose 1852 campaign strategy and tactics precipitated the mass departure of once loyal Whig voters, had received about 44 percent of the vote. Fillmore, in 1856, won less than 22 percent. A similar exodus of base voters was the Liberal fate in 1924, the final election of that party’s secular disalignment, when the party won less than 18 percent. After the 1920s, the Liberal vote ranged from a low of under three percent in the 1950s to a high of about 18–19 percent in the two elections of 1974. Not until the formation of the alliance with the Social Democrats in 1983 and 1987 did the two parties reach a combined vote share exceeding 20 percent, and much of that was the Social Democrats’ contribution.
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The PC share of the popular vote, seemingly at its nadir of 16 percent in 1993, fell to just over 12 percent in the election of 2000. Without the merger, the PC had little hope for significant future improvement. Table 9.1 shows the percentage of the popular vote that each disaligned party won in the last predisalignment election and in the disaligning election, and the estimated size of the party’s core base. (The Italian vote is omitted because disalignment was not an electoral event.) In each case, the result of the disalignment was a drop-off of 26–27 percentage points from the last predisalignment election. This drop-off represented 55 to 83 percent of the core base and shows the extent to which the base abandoned the party in the disalignment. In the case of the Whigs, some of this drop-off occurred at the 1852 election, with the bulk of it occurring afterwards. This is consistent with the party disintegration that largely took place in and after the elections of 1853–1854. The Whig and Liberal defeats show roughly similar drop-offs; the PC’s loss was much greater. For all three parties, the defections within the core base ware substantial and proved irreversible. These voters made a rational decision that the party elite no longer represented their interests or values. This decision was colored by history. The Whigs were created to oppose Jackson’s strong centralizing policies, and in this they were more truly the heirs to Jeffersonian distrust of TABLE 9.1 Disaffection of Party Bases
Whigs Liberals PC
1. Pre-Disalignment Vote Sharea
2. Disalignment Vote Share
3. Core Base 4. Drop-off c
(1848) 47.3
(1856)b 21.5
47.3
25.8 (54.5%)
(12/1910) 44.2
(1924) 17.8
43.4
26.4 (60.8%)
(1988) 43.0
(1993) 16.0
32.5
27.0 (83.0%)
Sources: Tables 4.1–4.3; 5.3 & 5.6; 6.10; 7.2 & 7.3. Notes: (a) Percentage of the vote at the most recent election preceding disalignment. (b) Because of the chaotic state of the party system in 1854–1855, the 1856 presidential vote is used as a proxy. 1848 was the low point of all Whig presidential vote shares prior to disalignment, which is why the percentages in Cols. 1 and 3 are the same. (c) Top number in each cell in Col. 4 is the remainder of Col. 1 minus Col. 2; the bottom number is this remainder calculated as a percentage of the core base (Col. 3).
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concentrated governmental power than were the Jacksonian Democrats, despite the latter’s claim to descent from the party of Jefferson and Madison (and notwithstanding the role that the New England Federalist remnant played in the Whig Party’s founding). Throughout the Whigs’ short life, their supporters always demanded of their leaders effective opposition to the Democracy. The softening of this opposition, represented in 1852 by the Whig elite’s attempt to romance a core Democratic constituency, affronted the Whig base as much as the breach with nativism itself. Antagonisms between British and French Canadians are centuries old. While many anglophones were willing to accept the attempts to conciliate Quebec that the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords represented, it was a step too far for many others in the PC base. Following Trudeau’s failure to win Quebec’s assent to the repatriated constitution, a substantial number of English-speaking PC voters felt there was no limit to Quebec’s expectations of special treatment. Mulroney was seen as yielding too much to Quebec’s apparently endless and insatiable demands. Francophone anger over the dilution of Meech Lake’s promises played into English Canadian resentment and contributed to the destruction of the PC base in the West as well as in Quebec. For the British Liberals, the voters’ rebellion had partly different causes. To be sure, disaffection over leadership failures was a major factor, but so were the vast socioeconomic alterations and stress that British society had undergone in World War I—including increased urbanization, unionization, and class consciousness—all of historic proportions. Asquith and Lloyd George either did not perceive the wave of changes sweeping over their followers (and the rest of Britain), or chose to ignore it. It was not that the Liberal leadership struck off toward new goals that the base found unacceptable—which was the situation in the Whig and PC cases—but rather that the party elite failed to follow the new direction society and Liberal voters were taking. This was completely consistent with the Liberal leadership’s abandonment of the party’s Radical heritage. A party that runs dry of new ideas tends to run dry of votes (as Labour was to discover in 1979 and the Conservatives in 1997). Closely related to the wartime social upheaval was the 1918 expansion of the electorate that granted voting rights to women over 30 and extended suffrage to a substantially broader group of working-class men. Over the six-year disalignment period (four national elections), the working-class vote (both old and new) migrated to the Labour Party, while newly enfranchised middle-class female voters tended to vote Conservative. The damage to the Liberal base was the loss of most of its working-class adherents and much of its middle-class support, both considerably expanded.
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In sum, the disalignment of all three parties represented a substantial electoral revolt by a largely alienated party base. It is not really possible to quantify the damage done to the parties of Italy’s pentapartito because all of them collapsed prior to the 1993 election. Since none of them competed, their effective percentage of the vote was zero. This was also true of the Communists, who had previously divided into two parties and then competed under rival banners. Still, as we have noted, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Communist Party removed any ideological justification for a party, the Christian Democrats, that had existed almost solely to keep the Communists out of government. Availability of a Successor Party or Parties
As Mair, Siavelis, and other scholars have noted, voters are more willing to cross party lines than to traverse the boundaries of ideological cleavage.3 Accordingly, relatively few departing American Whigs would have voted for Democrats, British Liberals for Conservatives, or PC voters for the Canadian Liberals.4 For disalignment to occur, an ideologically compatible alternative must be available to receive the emigrating voters, in the form of either a new party or an erstwhile minor one. This is a sine qua non of disalignment. Without an acceptable party to move to, disalignment does not occur. Migrating Whigs needed the American Party initially before embracing the new Republicans. The Labour Party provided an acceptable political vehicle for disaffected Liberals, especially the enlarged group of workingclass voters. Alienated voters in Quebec found a new home in the Bloc Québecois, just as those in the four western provinces did in the Reform Party. Similar patterns of political migration occurred in second-republic Italy after the collapse of the DC and PSI. Various wings and factions of all the parties reformed and coalesced under new names and platforms. Legacy right-wing parties of the first republic remained on the right in the second republic, while leftist parties in the second republic were composed of the remnants of the first republic’s left. Transformism does not cross the ideological bar. The Electoral System
Each country in the American, British, and Canadian cases employed an FPP electoral system (that is, plurality voting) in single-member districts. (A few multimember districts still existed in Britain in the 1920s, and indeed up to 1950, but were not a significant percentage of all parliamentary constituencies.) In most FPP countries, including those studied
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here, a plurality of votes is sufficient to win.5 At the time disalignment occurred, the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada were each dominated by two major parties; minor parties existed but had not previously threatened the large parties with displacement. The plurality-voting system distorts both victories and defeats. Generally, but not invariably, FPP awards the victors percentages of seats (or presidential electoral votes) that are in excess of their shares of the vote; losing parties usually receive smaller proportions of total seats than their popular-vote percentages. This means that a party that suffers a severe loss in popular support generally wins a disproportionately smaller share of the seats. Occasionally, however, FPP can produce a political victory for the second-place party in the popular vote (e.g., Canada in 1979, the United States in 2000). Third parties displace a previously major party only when a disalignment occurs. Even then, the party that is the beneficiary of a disalignment may not immediately (or ever) become a governing party. Conversely, in PR systems, each party’s share of parliamentary seats won is approximately equal to its share of the popular vote (discounting vote thresholds, statistical modi operandi, and other restrictions on “pure” PR). Such systems tend to abet the formation of multiple parties—as they did in Italy—frequently requiring coalitions of parties to produce governing majorities. Under PR, a 15-percent share of the vote will give a party approximately 15 percent of the seats, while the same vote share in an FPP system may well award a party a much smaller percentage of the seats, and perhaps none at all. Therefore, disalignment can more readily occur under FPP than under PR. As the Italian implosion implies, the destruction of a major party is not impossible under a PR system, but it is much less likely. Disalignment occurs more easily under an FPP electoral system, because it tends to magnify the adverse legislative (and, in the United States, electoral-vote) consequences of a party’s drop in popular support. Conversely, winning parties generally reap a larger crop than their share of the popular vote would justify. Third parties may do better than their popular-vote percentage if their support is geographically concentrated (e.g., Irish Nationalists before World War I, the BQ in Quebec, Republicans in the North in 1860), but worse if it is diffused (e.g., Reform and NDP in 1993). Table 9.2 shows the distortions between distribution of the popular vote and the political outcome in disaligning elections. The cost of FPP to the disaligned parties, compared to a strictly proportional result, ranged from about 11 to almost 19 percentage points. Winning parties in these elections gained a bonus of 13.5 to over 20 percentage points. These imbalances demonstrate not only how FPP exaggerates the
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TABLE 9.2 Results of Selected Elections under FPP 1. Percentage of Popular 2. Outcome 3. Distortion Vote (Percentage)a (Percentage Points)b United States 1856 Whig Democratic Republican
21.5 45.3 33.1
2.7 58.8 38.5
–18.8 +13.5 +5.4
Britain 1924 Liberal Conservative Labour
17.8 46.8 33.3
6.5 67.0 24.6
–11.3 +20.2 –8.7
Canada 1993 PC Liberal Reform Bloc Québecois New Democrats
16.0 41.3 18.7 13.5 6.9
0.68 60.0 17.6 18.3 3.1
–15.3 +18.7 –1.1 +4.8 –3.8
Notes: (a) Shares of parliamentary seats for Britain and Canada; shares of electoral votes for United States. (b) Column 3 = column 2 minus column 1. Disaligned party shown in bold.
outcome of elections, but also why it is so destructive to disaligned parties. Had the latter won legislative seats or electoral votes approximately proportional to their percentages of the popular vote, they might well have been able at least to survive. Under wholly or partly proportional voting systems, this destructive effect is usually mitigated, sometimes considerably, depending on the actual structure of the PR system. In Germany, for instance, which has a mixed electoral system, any political party that wins at least five percent of the PR party-list vote is guaranteed legislative representation, even if it wins no seats in the FPP single-member district segment of the voting. This does not mean that disalignment is impossible in a PR system, only that it is less likely. PR is more protective of parties than FPP, especially parties that suffer a significant loss of voter support, because an electoral residue of their core base usually qualifies them for some minimal number of legislators. However, even PR provides no absolute guarantees against political catastrophe. No electoral system, nor set of legal protections, can offer a party an absolute safeguard against destruction if the alienation of
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the base is sufficiently sweeping. Although the Italian parties imploded prior to an election, the results of preceding national electoral-reform referenda and of local elections produced an expectation of looming disaster. That prospect led to a flight of leaders and base from the parties. On balance, however, the risks of disalignment remain substantially greater in FPP systems. ANALYSIS OF THE CASES AGAINST THE HYPOTHESES How does the evidence in this and previous chapters shape up against our hypotheses? A brief recapitulation substantiates each of them. Hypothesis 1: Leadership failures and/or significant alterations in party policies on major socioeconomic cleavage issues affecting concepts of national identity that differ from traditional, strongly held, and sufficiently intense attitudes of core party voters cause disalignment. In each of the primary cases, leadership mistakes relating to the depth and breadth of national socioeconomic and geographic cleavages, and of perceptions of national identity, were the independent variable in bringing about party disalignment, the dependent variable. The disappearance of an internal communist threat and the perception of a right to honest and ethical government qualify as independent variables in Italy. Hypothesis 2: Parties in states that utilize single-member FPP electoral systems are more vulnerable to disalignment than those in multiparty systems using proportional representation variants. The electoral system acts as an independent variable, with disalignment as the dependent variable. FPP distorts and magnifies the damage to defeated political parties and tends to enlarge the payoff (legislative seats or electoral votes) won by victorious ones in ways that proportional representation does not. Parties suffering a severe defeat in a PR system have a better chance of survival than those experiencing a similar loss under FPP, assuming a comparable share of the popular vote. Disalignment is not impossible in PR systems, but it is much less likely to occur than it is in single-member polities where pluralities decide elections. Hypothesis 3: Disalignment produces a permanent and pervasive displacement of a major party by a new or previously minor party that then becomes nationally and subnationally entrenched in subsequent elections where this is structurally possible. Here, disalignment is the independent variable. Entrenchment is a condition modifying displacement, the dependent variable. As noted above, the American Whigs were replaced by the Know Nothings and then the
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Republicans; the Liberals of the United Kingdom by the Labour Party; Canada’s Progressive Conservatives by the Reform Party and the Bloc Québecois; and the Italian pentapartito by the new parties of the second republic. All of these were new or previously minor parties. The prediction of post-disalignment entrenchment was borne out by the successes of Republicans at presidential, congressional, and state elections from the 1860s on, and by Labour’s growth at both the national and local levels after the 1920s. The Canadian case is more problematic because, while the successor parties maintained themselves after 1993, no subnational entrenchment occurred thereafter. As discussed in Chapter 7, the explanation is that the federal party system is structurally different from the provincial party systems, each of which also differs in significant and varying respects from the others. The Liberal Party of Quebec, for example, does not have much in common with the national party of that name nor with the Liberals of British Columbia. Parties bearing the PC name maintain an independent existence even though the national Progressive Conservative Party has disappeared. The new Conservative Party has no provincial eponyms. Only the minor New Democratic Party maintains relatively close connections with its sometimes more powerful provincial counterparts, and even these are absent in two provinces and weak in four others. In other words, and consistent with the hypothesis, entrenchment did not occur in Canada because it was not structurally possible for it to do so. Hypothesis 4: Disalignments invariably result in realignments, but realignments may occur even in the absence of disalignments. Disalignment is, again, the independent variable, while realignment is dependent in one clause and independent in the other. A disalignment necessarily produces a realignment, because not only the other parties but also medial voters must now adjust to the removal of a major player from the game. Those medial voters who had voted for candidates of the disaligned party must now go elsewhere, perhaps but not necessarily to a successor party. (In Italy, the establishment of the second republic marked a total realignment of the party system, the results of which still have not completely shaken out.) In the United States, in the elections of and following 1860 (considered a classic instance of realignment by theorists), the bulk of medial voters in the North lent continuing support to the Republican cause. The decade that followed the 1924 election in Britain was a period of transitional elections in which neither Labour nor the Conservatives consistently dominated. Realignment occurred in the mid-1930s when the medial segment of the electorate shifted in favor of Conservatives who then proceeded
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to dominate British politics for most of the remaining elections of the 20th Century. A new realignment produces a new party system. In the case of a realignment brought on by a disalignment, the transition period to a new party system may be brief or it may be prolonged, depending on how easily the new and remaining parties adjust to the disrupted political pattern. The transition that followed the Whig disalignment was fairly short; in Britain the new realignment took about a decade to develop. A similar pre-realignment transition period appears to have occurred in Canada as a result of the 1993 PC disalignment and still may be in progress almost two decades later. Arguably, the decade of Liberal dominance after that year could be construed as a realignment favoring that party. The Liberal share of the vote, however, was modest, never exceeding 4 voters out of 10 and often setting new lows for percentages of the vote won by a party of government. Like the immediate post-disalignment years in Great Britain, Canada appears still to be in a period in which no party has yet won the lasting affections of a preponderance of medial voters. Electoral repetition of minority governments dominated by the Conservatives would indicate that the post-disalignment transition to a new realignment has not yet concluded. In Italy, the party system also seems to remain in flux. *** To summarize, the validity of the four hypotheses establishes that the cases of the American Whigs, British Liberals, and Canadian Progressive Conservatives were all true disalignments. The Italian experience is unique. First, the collapse of the party system occurred in anticipation of widespread defeat and not at an election itself. Second, Italy utilized a PR variant at the time rather than the FPP system that governed US, British, and Canadian elections. The Italian cataclysm was a disalignment, but there is no other event that matches all its characteristics. We can therefore assert only that the presence of an FPP electoral system probably facilitates disalignment if the other conditions exist. NOTES 1. Examples include, among others, Republican elites in the United States in 1932, 1974, and 2006–2008, and Democrats in 1980 and 1984; Canadian Liberals in 1984 and 2004–2006; Britain’s Labour Party in the early 1930s and in 1979; Germany’s Social Democrats during the 1950s and early 1960s; the French Gaullists in 2003–2007; and Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party
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2.
3.
4.
5.
When Political Parties Die in 2009. Some but not all of these were governing parties. In the case of the Gaullists, leadership failure did not even produce electoral defeat in 2007, nor did it for Canada’s Liberals in 2004. In all these cases, party core bases remained sufficiently intact (even with occasional defections) that disalignment was not a danger. Peter Woolstencroft, “ ‘Doing Politics Differently’: The Conservative Party and the Campaign of 1993,” in The Canadian General Election of 1993, ed. Alan Frizzel, Jon H. Pammett, and Anthony Westell (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 23. Peter Mair, “Cleavages,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: Sage, 2006), 374; Peter M. Siavelis, “Party and Social Structure,” in the same volume, 367. The exceptions would be rightist middle-class British Liberals who, after World War I, found the Conservative Party more ideologically compatible than Labour; and so-called Red Tories, who found Canada’s Liberal Party more ideologically appealing than the BQ or Reform. France utilizes a modified form of FPP. A majority of the vote is required to win, with the top vote-getters from the first round of elections competing in a second, run-off election.
Chapter 10
Conclusions and Implications for American Politics in the 21st Century So, what are we to make of all this? Are disalignment and realignment merely distant abstractions? Or might there be some relevance to contemporary party politics in the United States and elsewhere? How can political practitioners protect their parties against disalignment? What is the likelihood of these electoral earthquakes, particularly in the United States? Are they predictable? PROTECTING THE BASE Political parties exist to win elections. Up to a point, that usually involves the necessity of reaching out from the party base to medial voters who normally hold the balance of power. The skill of political leaders lies in knowing where that point is at any particular moment, an ability that Whig leaders, for example, lacked in 1852. The hazard is that, in reaching out to medials, party elites risk angering the party’s base and endangering its loyalty. Protecting the integrity and loyalty of the party base is a high priority for most political practitioners. It is also the best safeguard against disalignment. Both parties in the ideologically tenuous coalition formed after the 2010 British elections will need to tread with great care to keep their respective party bases supportive. For each party, compromising on important principles was the price of power; base voters will support these continued compromises only as long as they believe that holding power is worth the sacrifice. An example of politically hazardous policies occurred at the close of the George W. Bush administration and the opening of President Barack
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Obama’s. The financial crisis that began in 2007 terrified officials in both administrations, who were fearful that mistakes could send the country headlong into an economic dislocation rivaling that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In a resurgence of Keynesian economics, hundreds of billions of dollars were pumped into the economy, notably into the financial and automobile industries, hugely increasing an already substantial federal deficit. In the main, the creditworthiness of large companies was restored, while that of many small businesses and individuals remained in suspension, as banks that had been “bailed out” remained reluctant to lend. Both administrations were bitterly accused by Democratic and Republican partisans of “favoring Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.”1 There may have been a brief window of opportunity opened by the cooperative financial policy efforts of leaders in the outgoing Bush administration and the new Obama government in which some bipartisan coalition-building could then have taken place on healthcare legislation and later issues. However, public abhorrence of the bank bail-out triggered rigid, perhaps even reflexive, opposition on the part of congressional leaders in both parties, aborting any further chance of legislative compromise. The lost opportunity was reminiscent of the brief but unviable bipartisan “honeymoon” that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Medial voters may condemn the air of sharp partisanship, but the core base of each party tends to abhor compromise and cooperation with the other party, very much as the Whig rank-and-file did 150 years ago. Party elites find the need to placate the base more pressing than the opportunity to cooperate with the other party. Grassroots Republicans, particularly, were enraged at what they saw as a betrayal of the traditional fiscal conservative principles that they believed had long characterized the Republican Party (even if they had been hugely honored in the breach by the Bush administration). This anger within the Republican base swelled in the summer of 2009 as the large costs associated with healthcare legislation (and with the legislative tactics needed to pass it) were publicized. Antigovernment “tea parties” and other reflexively right-wing populists, arose to threaten an internal Republican rebellion that led finally to the unanimous opposition of Republicans in Congress to federal healthcare legislation. Many of these angry citizens vote as part of the Republican base. Others may consider themselves Democrats, but their actual voting behavior places them within the Republican base. As we noted in Chapter 4, it is voting behavior and not nominal affiliations that places voters within the base of a political party; few of the tea-party protesters are likely to be Democratic voters today. Still other citizens, refusing in protest to vote at all,
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effectively neuter themselves; there is little reason for a candidate in either party to pay attention to the views of an individual who boasts of political abstinence. To mollify these extreme elements of the Republican base, party elites had to mobilize virtually total opposition to an issue that had once been a favorite cause of medial voters. The alternative was to risk the loyalty of the party base, and the possibility that Republican incumbents in even safe districts might lose primary or general election contests. A Democratic victory in late 2009 in a previously safe Republican congressional district against ideologically divided Republican candidacies was widely perceived as evidence of the reality of this threat. At about the same time, liberal Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, fearful of just this danger, defected to Democratic ranks (while a conservative southern Democrat in the House, Parker Griffith of Alabama, was crossing the aisle to the Republican side). Specter’s prescience was borne out in the spring of 2010 when tea-party and other right-wing activists were able to deny party nominations to several Republican incumbents perceived as insufficiently conservative. Ironically, both Specter and Griffith lost their primaries after changing parties. Medials, also irate at the Republican growth in public spending, demonstrated in the autumn of 2009 that they were not to be taken for granted by helping elect Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, and then, in early 2010, a Massachusetts Republican, Scott Brown, to a US Senate seat that had been in the Democratic hands of the Kennedy family for over 60 years. Party elites must always be aware of the breaking point for voters in the party’s base, including those who are nominally independent. The critical decision is to know how far leaders can go to expand the vote and win elections, without jeopardizing the loyalty of the base. In the Massachusetts instance, the Republican Party was able to go much further than Democrats who had to defend an issue (healthcare) that had become unpopular not only with the Republican base but also with medial voters. At the same time, a risk of over-interpretation exists: Medial voters always rebel against the incumbent party during periods of recession and high unemployment; both the economy and President Obama’s healthcare proposals were factors in the outcome of the Massachusetts contest. BASE INTEGRIT Y AND PART Y POLARIZ ATION For better or worse, however, ideological protection of the base tends to result in partisan polarization across the party system. Polarization is often decried as an ailment, even an evil, besetting the political system. From
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the standpoint of medial voters this may well be true if it means that their preferences for moderate policies and candidates are getting short shrift in comparison to the desires of the parties’ core bases. Parties that alter their fundamental ideologies in order to attract medial voters may (or may not) succeed at the polls, but they risk alienating their true believers in the process. Conversely, viewed as a measure of stability of the party system, partisan polarization is a healthy indicator because it means that partisan cleavage lines are sharp and that the parties are tending to the ideological needs of their respective bases. Polarization may not necessarily produce good governance—it frequently does not—but the welfare of the polity as a whole requires vigorous, well-integrated political parties with strong bases supporting strong leadership. Lacking such bases, the party system flounders. Healthy democracy requires healthy parties, and ideological polarization may be the necessary price democracy must pay to get them. Polarization may also reflect acute divisions among medial voters who are not always of the same mind on public policy concerns. Polarization contributes to party accountability. In the 1940s and 1950s, ideological differences between America’s two major parties were blurry. Republican opinion stretched from moderate to conservative. Among Democrats, the ideological spectrum was even greater, from northern leftists to southern segregationist conservatives. Legislative majorities in Congress were frequently assembled from participants in a bipartisan “conservative coalition” that was generally opposed by liberal Democrats. The presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower is often cited as a model of overt efforts to assemble legislative majorities from among moderate conservatives in both parties. There were strong ideologues on both sides, but it could not fairly be said that either party as a whole represented an ideological pole at that time. Indeed, bipartisan majorities in behalf of any particular issue were portrayed as a positive good, and President Eisenhower boasted of his ability to persuade Democratic leaders in Congress to help him construct such nonideological coalitions. Those same leaders (Lyndon Johnson in the Senate and Sam Rayburn in the House) were equally pleased to be seen as working closely with the popular Republican president. The displeasure of a small number of polar ideologues in both parties was perceived to be an unfortunate circumstance that could be readily ignored. To many public commentators and political scientists, however, this was a deplorable state of affairs. If neither party spoke for a reasonably homogenous political philosophy, they felt, then voters had no assurance that their views would be reflected by the public officials and parties they
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elected, and there was no way to hold those parties accountable for performance. Winning parties could not truly boast of a policy mandate from the electorate, and without one, what did victory really mean beyond the acquisition of the spoils of power? Even Martin Van Buren, who appreciated the value of spoils as much as any 19th-Century politician, believed that political parties ought to be organized around principled differences on public policies. Thus, in an era when ideological distinctions between the parties were blurred almost to the point of invisibility, the formation by the American Political Science Association (APSA) of a Committee on Political Parties was a notable development in the search for improvements in party accountability. The committee comprised some of the most distinguished scholars of American politics active at the time. Indeed, the committee’s 1950 report is a landmark in political science that, 60 years later, remains required reading for students in the field. The committee saw political parties as “indispensable” to effective governance but urged reforms to strengthen philosophical differences and partisan accountability. The committee recommended that each party’s rank-and-file membership participate in the formulation of party policy to which party nominees would commit. Thus, the electorate could be assured that those nominees, if elected, would work toward the achievement of the party’s policy goals, while the opposition party would have the role of developing and presenting meaningful alternatives. Not all the committee’s recommendations were practical. For instance, there is no real way for party “members” to participate in policy development, because American parties lack formal memberships as European and Canadian parties have. Nonetheless, the importance of the APSA committee’s report is not its specifics so much as its broad endorsement of parties as the instruments of governance and its exhortation that they be organized around policies and principles. The way that the American parties have evolved in the intervening years since 1950, however, is another reminder of the adage to be careful what one wishes for. Parties provide the channels through which interests seek to influence the selection of public officials and policies and therefore remain the instruments of governance, but in the United States changes in the party system now clog the policy-making pipes—at least partly because of the kinds of recommendations advocated by the APSA committee and other “reform” advocates. The purpose of political parties is to provide society with a government. More specifically, the APSA scholars believed, it is to facilitate the choice of public policy alternatives by enabling the selection of public officials who
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will carry out those alternatives. Responsible parties would develop philosophical policy alternatives and bring forth candidates to promote, defend, and execute them. The consequence was to be more effective governance. Instead, however, the consequence has become obstructive governance and parties whose intense partisanship verges on the irresponsible. There are multiple causes for this state of affairs. THE OBSTRUCTION OF GOVERNANCE First, the Republican and Democratic Parties are indeed now organized around policy differences, but to the point where those differences have become so intensely polarized that they impede rather than fortify the legislative process. During the years prior to (and following) the APSA report, the US political parties may not have been “responsible” in the committee’s use of the word, but there was often bipartisan cooperation nonetheless: As we have observed, moderates and liberals in both parties could work together on issues of mutual interest, and the conservative coalition was even more effectively institutionalized. The legislative process in Congress was flexible and functioning, and both parties were proud of their ability to produce bipartisan consensus. On the other hand, neither party could really be held accountable if consensus was unachievable. At the beginning of the 21st Century’s second decade, however, the legislative process is rigid and barely functioning, but partisan accountability is usually clear. Before the January 2010 Massachusetts special Senate election forced the healthcare issue back to the drawing boards, for example, each house of Congress had passed its own version of the issue by party-line votes; no Republican voted for it in the Senate and only one in the House. Observers of the issue’s legislative history and vote trading were reminded of the maxim attributed to Otto von Bismarck that those who enjoy politics and sausage should not inquire too closely into their manufacturing or their ingredients. To be sure, the bills had their admirers, but few of them would have used the word “responsible” to describe the manner of their enactment. While ideological bifurcation is commonplace in both houses of Congress, it seems especially institutionalized in the rules of the Senate. Constitutionally, only a numerical majority is required for passage of most bills, but the Senate’s rules permit unlimited debate unless a three-fifths majority can be mustered to end a so-called filibuster. Nothing controversial can be passed, therefore, without at least 60 votes. Fifty years ago, probably less than a tenth of the most important Senate bills were filibustered; today almost three-quarters are. Other Senate institutions also facilitate
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delay: The objection of a single senator can delay consideration of a presidential nomination almost indefinitely, or require that the full text of a bill or amendment be read aloud before a vote may be taken, for example. The Senate filibuster has existed since the 19th Century. (Indeed, John C. Calhoun’s theory of concurrent majorities proposed, in effect, that supermajorities become the legislative norm.2) The contemporary process of ideologically polarized parties began with a vote to break a Senate filibuster on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That vote and the legislation itself gained the support not only of northern liberal Democrats but also of most northern Republicans (there were almost no southern Republicans at that time), who still regarded themselves as members of the party of Lincoln on race relations. However, a minority of Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Act in the name of states’ rights and then supported the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater in that year’s election. The tacit or even overt opposition of many moderate and liberal Republicans (most prominently, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York) to Goldwater’s candidacy was subsequently used by the party’s newly energized conservative wing to begin the process of isolating and excluding them from power. Although Goldwater lost badly, his nomination precipitated the beginnings of the Republican Party’s 30-year conversion to conservative—and southern—dominance. Indeed, the presidential victor in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson, predicted to an aide that enactment of the Civil Rights Act meant an end to the era of a one-party South. It is unlikely that Ronald Reagan or the two George Bushes (father and son) would have achieved the presidency had Goldwater not paved the way for Republicans in the South in 1964. That campaign began the process by which Democratic hegemony, which had characterized southern politics since Reconstruction, was broken, and Republican candidates began to prevail. Indeed, the growth of the Republican Party in the South between 1964 and 1994 (when Republicans gained control of Congress) represents a classic illustration of a secular disalignment and subsequent realignment and entrenchment. Democrats reached a similar watershed in the struggle for their party’s 1972 presidential nomination. What Goldwater symbolized for Republicans after 1964, George McGovern represented in 1972. McGovern was the candidate of the most left-wing interests within the Democratic Party, especially those most opposed to the war in Vietnam. His candidacy was vigorously and vehemently opposed by center-right Democrats and urban party organizations. Left-wing demonstrators and police battled outside the convention hall while, inside, delegates shouted down speakers and revolted against all attempts to impose parliamentary order.
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The Democratic National Convention of 1972 adjourned with the party in a shambles, paralleled only by that of the Republicans in 1964. The consequences were similar. Just as 1964 began the process that, over time, left the Republicans as the party of America’s right, so 1972 launched the Democrats in the ideological monopolization of the nation’s left. By the 1990s, partisan polarization had provoked an era of ugly politics in which congressional Republicans, rampant in their newly won majorities, sought to set up Democratic President Bill Clinton for reelection defeat in his first term and then to remove him from office via the impeachment process in his second. For both parties, the mechanisms of ideological monopolization were similar. In the South, moderate to conservative Democratic congressional incumbents gradually retired (or, less often, were defeated), generally to be succeeded by Republicans. In some instances, especially after the watershed election of 1994, Democratic incumbents changed their party affiliations to Republican. In the northeastern states, moderate Republicans hung on for a while but were gradually replaced by liberal Democrats. Some Republican retirements were voluntary; some were not. And often, where Democratic incumbents were insufficiently liberal to satisfy the party’s base, a primary contest ensued. The effect was to press northeastern Democrats further and further to the left, just as the same process has made the southern Republican Party increasingly conservative. Another effect is partisan entrenchment, particularly in state legislatures that decennially reapportion congressional districts (and their own district boundaries), which tends to produce packages of districts that are safe for each party with relatively few that are genuinely competitive. The lawmakers brought forth by this gerrymandering process often are less fearful of the other party’s candidates than of competitors within their own party. The process places a premium on ideological partisanship; fewer and fewer moderates prevail. These regional disalignments (and consequent realignments) have given each party regional and ideological strongholds, buttressed by state and local entrenchment. Political patterns in the Pacific coastal states have resembled those in the Northeast, but they have been more muted in the Midwest. The Mountain states tend to vote Republican, though less strongly than the South. As a direct consequence, candidates affiliated with the peripheral base in both parties are under great strain.3 Party discipline in Washington (and state capitals) plus threats from the party wings of primary election challenges exert constant pressure on incumbents not to stray too far from
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ideological purity. Sometimes these threats succeed in the short run and sometimes not, but in the long run they always do. As a result, William A. Galston has written, “The current Congress—the 111th—is the most ideologically polarized in modern history. In both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. If one defines the congressional ‘center’ as the overlap between the two parties, the center has disappeared.”4 Classic illustrations of intraparty strife have occurred in recent years. In 2006, Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut was defeated for renomination in the Democratic primary election by a more liberal opponent. The state’s laws permitted Lieberman then to run as an independent candidate, which he did, garnering enough votes from Republicans to win the general election. In 2009, a moderate Republican was selected as the party’s nominee for a special election to fill a vacancy in an upstate New York congressional district that had not been won by a Democrat since before the Civil War. She was opposed both by a Democrat and a Conservative.5 Conservative Republicans in New York and across the nation rallied in support of the latter candidate, forcing the moderate out of the race the weekend prior to the election. The seat was then won by the Democrat. Political mistakes and ideological overreaching by Republicans, plus an unpopular war in Iraq, brought about a liberal Democratic resurgence in the elections of 2006 and 2008. The effect has been to freeze in place the ideological polarization of US politics. In early 2010, Republicans, now in the minority, were as determined to oppose and obstruct President Obama and the Democratic congressional majority as the Democrats were in opposition to President George W. Bush, and as the Republicans had been to President Bill Clinton. Each party must enjoy massive (and, inevitably, temporary) majorities for anything to get done. In order to satisfy their respective core bases, it is more important to defeat the legislative initiatives of the other party than to enact one’s own changes and reforms. Both factors contribute to a frozen legislative process in which relatively little can be accomplished. THE INTENSIT Y OF BELIEF The second cause of obstructionist politics flows almost inevitably from the philosophical restructuring of the political parties. The polarized attitudes expressed by each party’s elites reflect the intensity of ideological beliefs held by and within their bases, limiting the ability of the elites to negotiate and compromise. Political leaders must be out front, and yet not so far out front that the base declines to follow.
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The problem is hardly new. Edmund Burke put it well in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: “In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct.” The 19th Century French politician, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, expressed the same idea rather more cynically: “I am their leader, I really had to follow them!”6 Political leaders who decline to advance the speed of the party’s agenda may find themselves replaced by bolder competitors. But those who move too fast may find that the base is no longer supportive. The risk of disalignment to political elites—that is, the danger that party leaders will lose the support of the base—promotes the ideological harmonization of internal partisan opinions but also, therefore, their polarization externally. This presents a trap in which party leaders and public officials can occasionally become ensnared. An example was the attempt to reform immigration laws, changes proposed by President George W. Bush and supported by Senator John McCain, the Republican Party’s 2008 presidential nominee. It might have been possible to garner enough Democratic votes to pass an immigration reform bill, but it was the Republican base that objected on philosophical grounds and that prevented congressional conservatives from supporting the legislation. McCain was forced to backtrack on his support during his presidential campaign. Similarly, President Obama’s continued prosecution of the war in Afghanistan puts him at cross purposes with elements of his Democratic base, which oppose the war. Opinion polls show that the harsh partisanship exhibited by the parties in Congress (and in many states) is widely supported within their respective voter bases. The contention between major interests may cripple the governmental process, as it conspicuously has in California: Democratic elites in that state, funded by public employee unions, have long been determined to uphold liberal programs and to obstruct further budgetary cuts. Conservative Republicans remain ideologically opposed to any tax increases. A moderate Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, wildly popular when he was elected six years ago to resolve the budget crisis, now is deeply unpopular because he cannot. The result is total paralysis of the nation’s largest state. Ideological majorities within each party’s base prevent effective negotiation and compromise, in the apparent belief that resolute adherence to their respective principles is more important than allowing government to function and the public interest to prevail. An unyielding philosophical rigidity may produce the “californization” of federal fiscal policy after the 2008–2009 rescue of financial institutions
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and the resulting huge increase in the national debt. An illustration occurred in the US Senate in January 2010: Legislation to establish a bipartisan commission that would have authority to restrain the growth of the federal budget deficit was defeated. Left-leaning Democrats feared the commission would recommend cuts in favorite social programs; rightist Republicans were afraid that tax increases would be proposed. President Obama used his own authority to establish the commission, but its recommendations can now be only advisory. The rise of candidate-centered politics was, once upon a time, seen as a way to evade such restrictions, because each candidate was a self-promoting entrepreneur whose strength of party ties ebbed and flowed with the circumstances necessary to win the general election. The intensity of ideologies within each party’s base now, however, constrains excessive selfpromotion, because those who range too far afield of what the base will accept risk failure to survive their primary elections. The threat to such potential defectors motivates them either to modify their views in harmony with those of the base, or to switch party affiliation. Examples of both exist today. As political journalist Dana Milbank has observed, “[I]n our increasingly tribal politics, both sides are more demanding of ideological purity than they were. . . . The constant purging of heretics has left Congress ever more polarized.”7 Indeed, Republicans have even given serious consideration to a proposal to deny financial support to candidates who are at odds with official party positions on social and fiscal issues. In Britain, both parties in the ideologically tenuous coalition formed after the 2010 election need to tread carefully to keep their respective bases supportive. For both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, compromising on important principles was the price of power; base votes will support these continued compromises only as long as they believe that holding power is worth the sacrifice. There is, however, a cyclical dimension to intraparty civil wars. They can be maintained only while the party prevails in general elections. But after a time, medial voters in particular tend to become alienated by the spectacle of ideological purification or by the candidates the process produces, and the party begins to suffer electoral defeats. Like Germany’s Green Party, a debate now ensues between the Realos who want to win elections, and the Fundis who want to stay ideologically pure. As we have frequently observed in this book, political parties exist to win elections, and so it is the pragmatists who tend to prevail. These intraparty ideological debates are more typical of mass parties than the catch-all variety. Perhaps what is happening is that the catch-all parties that have characterized West European and North American politics
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are being replaced in the 21st Century by parties of ideological purity— that is, political parties that are less concerned with aggregating voters aligned with a wide multiplicity of interests than with enlisting true believers, those who strongly adhere to the party’s ideology almost as an article of faith. There are elements of this perspective in the Republican and Democratic Parties, both British major parties, and in at least some of the Canadian parties. It remains to be seen if this quest for political revealed truth is an ephemeral development or the wave of the future. THE CARTEL PARTIES The third cause of policy paralysis is structural collusion between the major parties that is a barrier to entry of serious new political competition. As much as the Democratic and Republican Parties have become ideologically antagonistic, they still act as a cartel to isolate and exclude new parties that could pose a threat to their duopoly. In Chapter 2, we discussed some of the devices parties in various countries employ to minimize the possibility that unwelcome competitors may arise. In the United States, the principal means is the complex body of federal and state election laws and regulations. Notwithstanding their electoral and legislative antagonisms, between them the two parties together have so structured the corpus of legal requirements governing parties, elections, and campaign finances at all levels as to make it virtually impossible for a new major party to arise, put down roots, and position itself as a longterm replacement for either the Republicans or the Democrats. Without some other place for the party’s core voter base to go to, disalignment cannot occur—and both parties have made sure that alternative major parties cannot rise and survive. Much like European countries, there has been some relaxation and liberalization in the United States in recent years of the legal regimes governing parties and elections. But, again like these other countries, the major parties have probably benefited more than small or new ones. The plurality electoral system also restricts the ability of third parties to flourish. FPP enhances the ability of dominant parties to gain a majority of the vote or at least a victorious plurality, and to multiply the legislative effects of success in the popular vote. Fearful of “wasting” their votes on some quixotic cause, voters in FPP systems tend to vote for parties with a good chance to win. Thus, the major parties usually prevail; third parties are left to remain minor, with a short life expectancy. The indecisive 2010 British elections illustrate the point. Neither major party won a majority, but an attempted surge by the perennial third party
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also failed to gain it additional seats. Although it was instrumental in putting together a new coalition government with the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats began the campaign as a minor party and ended it the same way.8 New political parties have usually arisen in the United States to advance new ideas or new ideologies. America’s political history is littered with the carcasses of third parties that sprang up, offered some new political agenda, and then died out for lack of substantial and enduring support. In every instance, the cause of death was the larcenous impulses of the existing major parties that have co-opted every new, appealing proposal. For example, in the early decades of the 20th Century, the socialist and the progressive movements offered a number of social, economic, and political reforms that might have been expected to activate new major parties. That failed to happen because one or the other existing major party “stole” those new ideas and made them its own. Other causes have occasionally reached a pinnacle of legislative achievement and then died out—as the temperance movement did. In more recent years, for instance, many environmental proposals have been endorsed, usually by the Democratic Party. The role of the environmental movement has been to develop new ideas and press for the adoption of their older ones—that is, to act more as a lobby than a political party. Social movements and interest groups in the United States have been unsuccessful in making a lasting transition to political parties as Germany’s Green Party has. Parties are always torn between the desire, on the one hand, to reach out to medial voters, among whom elections are usually won or lost and, on the other, the need to avoid going beyond what the party’s base voters will tolerate. The latter option is the most important one. If a party’s leaders fail to make a persuasive case to medial voters, they will lose that particular election; in an unusual, worst-case scenario, the party may even become the victim of a realignment. But the party will survive to compete another day. However, if the voters in the base are sufficiently antagonized, they may abandon the party altogether for another. That is the definition of disalignment, and on the evidence to date, it is a permanent loss of major-party status if not outright destruction. At best, a remnant may survive to merge with another party, but it will be a different party with a different “brand name” and a different base. Can that happen to the two major American political parties? Under the existing political conditions and circumstances (as this is written, at the beginning of 2010), probably not. Important elements of the Democratic left are unhappy with their congressional leaders and President
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Obama because of what they perceive to be inadequate federal healthcare legislation and inattention to other issues such as climate change. Significant right-wing Republican factions are at least as angry with their party’s leaders over the magnitude of counter-recessionary federal spending programs, the large companies that are the beneficiaries of those programs, and the enormous federal budget deficits they create. Could one or the other of these party extremes seek to capture their party’s leadership? Possibly, but the result would be an internecine battle—along the lines of 1964 or 1972—with painful and lingering scars. In the meantime, they press for influence and success in their party’s state-level nominating processes. In theory, an angry and frustrated political faction could defect to another major party, if one existed in the United States. But where could it go? There is no party to defect to that is on the same side of the right–left divide. Could either of the “ultras” seek, then, to form a new party, in the manner of Germany’s Party of the Left? NEW PART Y BARRIERS The barriers to entry are forbidding in their magnitude. It is probably more difficult to create a new major party in the United States than in any other democracy—not only because the American parties are more highly regulated than those in other countries, but also because they have developed intricate compliance mechanisms that are hard to emulate. As a practical matter, 51 new parties would be necessary, one in each of the states plus a federal-level party organization. The laws governing new parties are different at each of these levels, and organizational expenditures would be enormous—not least for the army of lawyers that would be needed, especially if the rebels sought to co-opt the Republican or Democratic brand name. But without that brand name, the new group would be just another short-lived minor party. Compliance with different ballot-qualification requirements is highly complex, especially within individual states such as New York, where the intricacies of the law are deliberately and habitually manipulated by party elites to facilitate internal discipline. Fund-raising would be equally difficult, whether by creating a new grass-roots program or by recruiting a group of major donors, or both; the maze of federal and state election finance laws and regulations is even more formidable than the organizational issues. And that still leaves a welter of other questions governing candidate recruitment and campaign management. This enormous complex of federal and state laws governs the parties in virtually all dimensions. Moreover, it is the major parties that write these laws and regulations. One telling illustration: Campaign finance
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requirements for presidential and congressional campaigns are the province of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a six-member body divided evenly (as a matter of practice) between the two parties; since decisions require a majority of four members, nothing can be done unless both parties cooperate. Party finances are highly regulated by the FEC. Career regulators are supervised by the commissioners, all of which are Republicans and Democrats appointed by the president on the recommendation of each party’s congressional leaders. The commissioners cooperate (or decline to) on policy matters where and when it suits them, and they act to assure that the nation’s two-party system does not become a multiparty system. In effect, the regulated are the regulators. All in all, the American party duopoly has created barriers, which have proven insuperable, to permanent entry by potential competitors. No new party has surmounted these barriers to replace one of the existing major parties since the foundation of the Republican Party prior to the Civil War.9 THE REFORM PART Y EXPERIENCE The experience of the Reform Party, which attempted to arise as a new major party in the 1990s, illustrates the difficulties. The party was founded in 1992 by a wealthy industrialist, Ross Perot, whose campaign was largely based on his opposition to the growth of federal expenditures and of government generally. Volunteers were mainly Republicans and independents who shared Perot’s views on federal spending. After several halting maneuvers, Perot made his serious entry into the presidential campaign with the new Reform Party as the vehicle. In the main, the party and his campaign were largely funded out of his personal wealth, enabled by a decision of the US Supreme Court, which permitted candidates to use their personal funds for their own campaigns but not for the campaigns of any other individual.10 Perot drew less than 19 percent of the popular vote, but no electoral votes. Four years later, he ran once more as the Reform Party candidate, again self-funding his presidential campaign; he received only 8.5 percent of the popular vote in the general election. Perot did not run in 2000. Instead, the Reform Party structure and treasury were taken over by a far-right social conservative, Patrick Buchanan, who became the party’s presidential nominee. Buchanan was not in a position to fund the campaign and party personally, and federal law prohibited donors (potentially including Perot) from giving more than $5,000 each. Buchanan received a minute percentage of the 2000 vote, and the party dissolved thereafter. The Reform Party’s story is a classic illustration of the obstacles the existing system presents to a potential competitor. The only practical way for
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a new American major party to begin life has been through the personal largesse of a wealthy founder with the money to fund a personal presidential campaign but who is as limited in making financial donations as any other citizen in passing a political legacy along to another candidate. Only a fundamental judicial or legislative change can alter this legal regime of party regulation. Could this change? In January 2010, the Supreme Court overturned earlier decisions to permit corporate and labor union expenditures that benefit particular candidates (although the funds may not be directly contributed to them). The effect would be to allow a company, union, or other incorporated organization to spend unlimited sums advocating the election (or defeat) of political candidates so long as there was no actual coordination with the candidates. The earlier restrictions, the justices held, violated the First Amendment’s protection of political free speech.11 The Citizens United decision freed corporations and advocacy groups (including labor unions) to make unlimited (but publicly disclosed) contributions urging election or defeat of political parties and their candidates. The Court also removed restrictions on corporate contributors’ ability to advertise in support of or opposition to particular legislative issues. (President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are pursuing legislation to limit the effects of the decision and expand its disclosure requirements.) In one sense, the decision harms the parties, because it leaves them subject to federal and state regulations and financial ceilings, while interest groups are now free to spend without limits. On the other hand, the two major parties will both benefit, at least indirectly, from higher corporate and union political expenditures; and nothing in the decision threatens their advantage relative to minor parties. This may well, therefore, be another instance in which the major party duopoly reaps greater benefits than small (or new) parties. Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, was once asked what he would do if a certain highly regarded public official died in office. McCain joked that he would put a pair of dark glasses on him, prop him up in a chair, and hope no one noticed. That seems to be the situation of America’s two major political parties. Minus the dark glasses, they seem frozen in place. They cannot collapse and they cannot be challenged. Under such circumstances, disalignment cannot occur. CLARIT Y OF CHOICE As a result of the interplay of all these factors, there is less ambiguity today about the choices presented to medial voters than there was in most elections
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of the 20th Century. To vote Republican now, and with far fewer exceptions than in the 1950s and 1960s, is to vote for candidates and policies of the right. Similarly, a Democratic vote is now clearly and sharply in support of left-wing candidates and policies. These choices are generally clearer, and party accountability is strengthened. Consequently, the American parties are stronger because their bases are more ideologically coherent. They will remain so as long as the views of their voter bases and their leadership are relatively synchronized. In many respects, they are coming to resemble once again ideologically “pure” mass parties rather than relatively shapeless catchall parties that are more interested in collecting votes from any source. It is frequently argued that ideological coherence and political polarization are a formula for defeat. This is often true when moderates and pragmatists divide the parties from their ideological wings, but less so when it is the centrists who are severely weakened. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan moved the Republican Party to the right, with an eventual payoff in political power. Franklin Roosevelt moved the Democratic Party to the left in the 1930s and assured the party’s long-term success. Margaret Thatcher had similar electoral success after repositioning the Conservative Party in the 1980s, as William Gladstone had with the late 19th-Century Liberal Party. Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Elliott Trudeau gave their parties governing ideologies (Gaullism and Pan-Canadianism, respectively) that helped keep them in power through a number of elections. These successes were durable if not permanent, ultimately failing because of the inadequacy of later leaders. Successful political leaders are practitioners of the art of the possible. They can take their party’s followers into new and strange lands but, like Moses, only so far. To demand of the party elite that they exceed the limits of the base’s tolerance and credulity on a vital issue is to ask that they either fall on their swords or jeopardize the party’s very existence. Perhaps the most important conclusion of this book, therefore, is that political parties that wish to maintain major-party status must protect the integrity of their partisan-voter base. Loss of the medial vote risks realignment and long-term electoral defeat, but loss of the base threatens disalignment and the party’s survival as an independent entity and contender for power. Partisan and ideological polarization has strengthened the structural integrity of the American parties. Whether it has made them “responsible” is a very different question. THE ITALIAN ANALOGY As discussed in Chapter 8, Italy’s “first republic” party system collapsed for two reasons: first, because corruption and criminal behavior became
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excessive, even by that country’s lax and tolerant standards; and second, because the vast level of social and economic problems Italy inherited at the end of World War II were barely remedied under all the years of Christian Democracy and the pentapartito. The party system saw to it that the state was nearly paralyzed in many respects, dealing with the business institutions of the prosperous north to assure economic growth and with the Mafia and other criminal elements to keep the mezzogiorno in an almost feudal condition. What relevance does this have to American politics? The potential “californization” of the federal government is a frightening prospect, which partisan and ideological polarization both enables and facilitates. The financial and automobile manufacturing rescues, while apparently economically essential, incurred massive increases in the federal deficit and debt. President Obama and Congress have pledged to dilute (if not eradicate) all this red ink, but nothing in recent experience makes such a promise (by either party) believable.12 Similar promises to operate a new healthcare program, as well as the Medicare and Medicaid systems in the black, also lack credibility. The propensity of the American left has been to put forth expensive new social programs, to be vaguely funded at some future time or by confiscatory taxes on the affluent. The Republican right, reflexively antipathetic to anything with the slightest whiff of a tax increase, was no less restrained than the Democrats in its reckless spending when it controlled Congress—see, for instance, “earmarks,” “farm subsidies,” and the Alaskan “bridge to nowhere.” Thus, neither party is entitled to much credibility with the electorate when one looks out on a vast, decades-long, unmet public agenda ranging from Social Security reform, tax simplification, and national transportation policy to infrastructure modernization and security, climate change, and energy resource improvements. It is difficult to envision disalignment of either major party (or the party system) occurring because elected policy makers continue to ignore issues like these, but the collapse of the pentapartito was not widely foreseen either. What can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence is that a party system that neglects major national needs in order to continue ingratiating itself with rent-seeking interest groups has trouble in its future. COULD DISALIGNMENTS RECUR? Can we envision circumstances in which future party disalignments might occur? As discussed above, there are four absolute preconditions and one partial condition. For a major party to be disaligned, there must be (a) a leadership failure on (b) an intensely felt cleavage issue affecting
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national identity that (c) alienates the party base, in a political environment in which (d) a new or existing minor party that is ideologically compatible is available to receive disaffected base voters, a situation that is more likely to arise in (e) an FPP electoral system but may also be possible where elections are held under PR. The particular lesson of the Italian experience, so far a unique one, may be that if disaffection of the party base is great enough, party death may occur in expectation of electoral disalignment. Moreover, if the pentapartito parties had held together sufficiently despite this expectation, disalignment might have taken place in a PR system, assuming the other relevant conditions had remained in place. These conditions could facilitate a disalignment scenario. For instance, a number of countries are experiencing population declines and birthrates below the level of replacement. Many of these are advanced economies with extensive and costly social safety nets (state pensions, healthcare, etc.). Government leaders might possibly conclude that these social programs cannot continue to be financed without politically unacceptable tax increases and equally unacceptable program cuts. In order to expand the base of workers whose wages can be taxed to fund the safety net, the government party might therefore opt to open the country up to new immigrants from poorer nations. If this policy is widely opposed by the party’s base electorate (for nativist, competitive, or protectionist reasons), and if a new or smaller party exists that shares this opposition, the government party may be defeated in the next election. If the rebellion among disaffected party voters is extensive enough, that defeat could turn into a disalignment. This scenario is not completely far-fetched, given the demographic problems that many of the advanced democracies now face and which few seem currently prepared to tackle. There may well be other issues affecting a country’s national identity that could arise from time to time in various democracies and where a mistaken leadership judgment could lead to a rupture with the party base. (Nations’ responses to global warming, resource shortages, or energy crises could well provide other such scenarios.) The point is that disalignments may be rare, but political circumstances could arise to facilitate them at any time. A limiting factor, however, would be the absence of another party available to receive disaffected party loyalists. During the Whig era, new political parties could, and did, arise at any time. Today, however, the Democratic and Republican Parties are so embedded in and protected by federal and state laws, regulations, and judicial opinions that it is difficult under present circumstances for a new party to rise and challenge one or the other of
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them. No legal provision can prevent angry voters from taking their political business elsewhere, but there must be a competitive major party available to receive them. No such party exists on either the right or the left in the United States, and it is difficult to envision circumstances that would allow one to be created. A number of candidates for Congress, driven out of their parties by the ultras, are running as independents, leading to speculation that this may become a significant national trend. Nonparty candidates can run and win, but where do they go then? Both houses of Congress are organized along party lines. A senator or representative who declines to join a party caucus will have difficulty getting good committee assignments and other seniority benefits. For that reason, Connecticut’s senator, Joseph Lieberman, rejoined the Democratic caucus and retained his committee chairmanship. It is likely that other so-called independents, once elected, will also end up staying within the party caucus system to avoid becoming neutered. Greater opportunities for new parties exist in other plurality-election countries, especially Canada and Great Britain. In the former, the sudden rise of two new major parties in 1993 showed the relative ease with which new parties can form in that country, as they also can in Britain. The principal deterrent to new parties in the United Kingdom is Duverger’s Law and the FPP system, which rarely reward minor parties and often discourage prospective supporters from “wasting a vote” on minor-party candidates; adoption of some other voting system, as the Liberal Democrats are demanding, would probably result in a multiplicity of new parties. In Canada, Duverger’s Law operates primarily at the constituency level, rather than nationally as it does in Britain. Still, there are few structural impediments in either country to keep new parties from emulating the success of Canada’s Reform Party and BQ, assuming they can develop enough of a geographically concentrated vote to win parliamentary seats. It is this latter point that hampers new parties in both countries under FPP. Support for such rising parties as the euroskeptic UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Canadian Greens has been sufficiently diffuse to limit or prevent their representation in Parliament. For example, in the 2005 British general election, UKIP won 2.2 percent of the vote across the country but no seats, while more concentrated support for the Scottish National Party enabled it to win six seats with only 1.5 percent of the vote. In Canada’s 2008 election, the 6.8 percent received by the Green Party was sufficiently spread across the country to deny them any seats, even in British Columbia, the Greens’ strongest province, where the party won over 9 percent. But because the BQ’s support is geographically compact, 10–12 percent of the national vote is enough to earn it about 50 seats.
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In most European polities operating under PR, vote thresholds of varying percentages restrict the ability of minor parties to enter national parliaments, and they therefore have much the same effect as the absence of geographically concentrated support under single-member FPP electoral systems. Overall and in varying degrees, party systems in all the advanced democracies exhibit such cartel-party characteristics, which include practices that limit the ability of new parties to form, or at least that minimize the competitive danger they present to the major parties. As a result, new challenger parties rise and fall with great frequency, although a few, as in the Netherlands and Germany in recent years, do occasionally prove viable and may present potential threats to existing major parties should the preconditions of disalignment ever arise. ARE DISALIGNMENTS CYCLICAL? About 70 years after the destruction of the American Whigs, the disalignment of Britain’s Liberal Party took place. After another 70-year interval, Canada’s Progressive Conservatives were disaligned, the Italian implosion occurred, and the long-term decay of the Democratic Party in America’s South reached a climax. Is there a recurring pattern here, perhaps like the one Burnham and other theorists perceived in realignment? The answer is, probably not. Two intervals of seven decades each are insufficient to discern a repeating cyclical pattern. Moreover, just as with the apparent periodicity (for a time) of realignments, it is difficult to accept without additional evidence that there exists some hidden political timing mechanism or that the voters undergo a periodic, collective hormonal change that precipitates party disruption. Disalignments, like realignments, occur because of major shifts in voting behavior among important segments of the electorate; such changes can take place whenever all the requisite conditions exist. Assuming the timing of the most recent events is not merely a historical coincidence, however, the question then rises about the cause of the nearly simultaneous instances of party collapse in different polities in the early 1990s. It is possible that higher levels of voter education, postmaterialist “raised consciousness,” and restlessness in party electorates may have made them less tolerant of leadership failures—but this would explain only the 1993–1994 occurrences, not the earlier ones, nor the coincidence of timing. I can offer only the scholar’s cop-out, that this is a question that merits additional research. There are common and defining attributes and conditions that determine when a disalignment could occur, but disalignments themselves are
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atypical and individually unique events. There may never be another, or new ones could happen at any time if the preconditions are met. From what we presently know, there seems nothing inherently cyclical or predictable about them except their shared characteristics. But that conclusion may be erroneous. We will know sometime in the decade of the 2060s. NOTES 1. This expression, one of the great political clichés of the past quarter-century, became prominent in political discourse once again after the post-2008 financial crisis. See, for instance, “Main Street Slams Wall Street,” Washington Post, April 30, 2010, p. A6. 2. For an analysis of Calhoun’s political theories, see H. Lee Cheek Jr., Calhoun and Popular Rule (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). For texts of Calhoun’s works, see: John C. Calhoun, Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross M. Lence (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992). 3. Approximately 40 moderate Democrats remain in the House Democratic Caucus, calling themselves “Blue Dogs.” Occasionally, they manage to hold the balance of power on key issues, such as healthcare in 2010. The number of moderate Republicans is far fewer, and apparently declining rapidly. 4. William A. Galston, “Can a Polarized American Party System Be ‘Healthy’?” Issues in Governance Studies, Brookings Institution, Number 34, April 2010, p. 4. 5. New York State’s Conservative and Liberal Parties are minor parties that almost always function in support of their major-party allies, the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively, while pressing for ever more ideologically extreme nominees and issue positions. 6. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1999 [1790]), p. 41. Ledru-Rollin, quoted in Elizabeth Knowles, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 6th ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 478. Burke was less pragmatic in his earlier years: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion” (speech to the citizens of Bristol, 1774). 7. Dana Milbank, “To War with the Lieberman They Have.” Washington Post, December 20, 2009, A23. 8. The absence of a clear-cut party majority did earn the Liberal-Democrats the right to negotiate with the major parties for their support. 9. See Daniel H. Lowenstein, “Legal Regulation and Protection of American Parties,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: Sage, 2006), 467–470, for a detailed discussion of this point. 10. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 US l.
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11. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, slip opinion, January 21, 2010. 12. In rebuttal, Democrats point proudly to budgetary surpluses amassed during the Clinton administration. In truth, federal fiscal policy had less to do with these surpluses than did the bonanza economy of the 1990s, which paid in record levels of taxes until the technology bubble was finally punctured.
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Selected Bibliography This bibliography is divided into five sections. The first section lists general and theoretical works, plus sources dealing with specific countries other than those treated in the case studies. Materials related exclusively to each case appear in Sections II–V. I. PART Y SYSTEMS, LEADERSHIP, AND REALIGNMENT Aldrich, John A. “Political Parties in a Critical Era.” American Politics Quarterly 27, no. 1 ( January 1999): 9–32. Aldrich, John A. Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Bass, Harold F. Jr. “Background to Debate: A Reader’s Guide and Bibliography.” In The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Beck, Paul Allen. “The Dealignment Era in America.” In Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment?, ed. Russell J. Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan, and Paul Allen Beck, chap. 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bowler, Shaun, Elizabeth Carter, and David M. Farrell. Studying Electoral Institutions and Their Consequences: Electoral Systems and Electoral Laws. University of California Irvine: Center for the Study of Democracy, 2001, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7dc5b9dg. Budge, Ian. “Identifying Dimensions and Locating Parties: Methodological and Conceptual Problems.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 36. London: Sage, 2006. Burnham, James. The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. New York: John Day, 1943. Burnham, Walter Dean. “Constitutional Moments and Punctuated Equilibria: A Political Scientist Confronts Bruce Ackerman’s We the People.” Yale Law Journal 108, no. 8 ( June 1999).
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Burnham, Walter Dean. Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: Norton, 1970. Burnham, Walter Dean. “Critical Realignment: Dead or Alive?” In The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Burnham, Walter Dean. “The End of American Party Politics.” Society, January/ February 1998 (originally published 1969): 12–22. Burnham, Walter Dean. “Party Systems and the Political Process.” In The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, ed. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, chap. 10. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Burnham, Walter Dean. “Realignment Lives: The 1994 Earthquake and Its Implications.” In The Clinton Presidency: First Appraisals, ed. Colin Campbell and Bert A. Rockman. New York: Chatham House, 1996. Burnham, Walter Dean. “Revitalization and Decay: Looking Toward the Third Century of American Electoral Politics.” Journal of Politics 38, no. 3 (August 1976): 146–172. Burnham, Walter Dean. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The Nation, April 17, 2000: 11–15. Burrow, John. A History of Histories. New York: Knopf, 2008. Calhoun, John C. Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun. ed. Ross M. Lence. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992. Caramani, Daniele. The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Western Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Chambers, William Nisbet, and Walter Dean Burnham, eds. The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Chhibber, Pradeep K., and Ken Kollman. The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Crotty, William. “Party Transformations: The United States and Western Europe.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 43. London: Sage, 2006. Dahl, Robert A. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Dalton, Russell J., and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds. Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. Dalton, Russell J., Scott C. Flanagan, and Paul Allen Beck, eds. Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Deschouwer, Kris. “Political Parties as Multi-Level Organizations.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 24. London: Sage, 2006.
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Diamond, Larry, and Richard Gunther, eds. Political Parties and Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper, 1957. Dulio, David A. “Party Crashers? The Relationship between Political Consultants and Political Parties.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 28. London: Sage, 2006. Duverger, Maurice. “Caucus and Branch, Cadre Parties and Mass Parties.” In The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair, chap. 3. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. Duverger, Maurice. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1978. Epstein, Leon. Political Parties in Western Democracies. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1980. Flanagan, Scott C. “Changing Values in Advanced Industrial Societies.” Comparative Political Studies 14 (1982): 403–444. Flanagan, Scott C., and Russell J. Dalton. “Models of Change.” In The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair, chap. 16. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. Franklin, Mark N. Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies since 1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Goodman, Paul. “The First American Party System.” In The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, ed. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, chap. 3. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hames, Tim. “The United Kingdom: Change within Continuity.” In Political Parties and the Collapse of Old Orders, ed. John Kenneth White and Philip John Davies, chap. 2. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Robert Scigliano. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Hanley, David. Party, Society, Government: Republican Democracy in France. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the US, 1780–1840. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Hopkin, Jonathan. “Clientelism and Party Politics.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 34. London: Sage, 2006. Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Johnson, James. “Political Parties and Deliberative Democracy.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 5. London: Sage, 2006. Katz, Richard S. “Parties in Democratic Theory.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 4. London: Sage, 2006. Katz, Richard S. A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 (paperback ed., 2007).
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Katz, Richard S., and William Crotty, eds. Handbook of Party Politics. London: Sage, 2006. Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party.” Party Politics 1(1995): 5–28. Kenney, Charles D. “The Death and Rebirth of a Party System, Peru 1978–2001.” Comparative Political Studies 36, no. 10 (December 2003): 1210–1239. Key, V. O. Jr. Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 5th ed. New York: Crowell, 1964. Key, V. O. Jr. “Secular Realignment and the Party System.” Journal of Politics 21 (May 1959): 198–210. Key, V. O. Jr. “A Theory of Critical Elections.” Journal of Politics 17 (February 1955): 3–18. Kirchheimer, Otto. “The Catch-all Party.” In The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair, chap. 5. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. Kitschelt, Herbert. “Movement Parties.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 23. London: Sage, 2006. Krouwel, André. “Party Models.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 21. London: Sage, 2006. Ladd, Everett Carll. “1996 Vote: The ‘No Majority’ Realignment Continues,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 1–28. Ladd, Everett Carll. “Like Waiting for Godot: The Uselessness of Realignment for Understanding Change in Contemporary American Politics.” In The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer, chap. 2. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Lawson, Kay, and Peter Merkl, eds. When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Lawson, Kay, and Peter Merkl, eds. When Parties Prosper: The Uses of Electoral Success. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007. Lewis, Paul G. “Party States and State Parties.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 40. London: Sage, 2006. Lijphart, Arend. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments.” In The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. Lowenstein, Daniel H. “Legal Regulation and Protection of American Parties.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 39. London: Sage, 2006. Luther, Kurt Richard, and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, eds. Political Parties in the New Europe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mahoney, James. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Mainwaring, Scott, and Mariano Torcal. “Party System Institutionalization and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 18. London: Sage, 2006.
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Mair, Peter. “Cleavages.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 30. London: Sage, 2006. Mair, Peter. “Party System Change.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 7. London: Sage, 2006. Mair, Peter, ed. The West European Party System. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. Mair, Peter, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Fritz Plasser, eds. Political Parties and Electoral Change: Party Responses to Electoral Markets. London: Sage, 2004. Markovits, Andrei S., and Stephen J. Silvia. “Green Trumps Red? Political Identity and Left-Wing Politics in United Germany.” In Transformation of the German Political Party System, ed. Christopher S. Allen, chap. 5. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. Mayhew, David R. Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Michels, Robert. Political Parties. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962. Mosca, Gaetano. The Ruling Class. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939. Müller, Wolfgang C., and Ulrich Sieberer. “Party Law.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 37. London: Sage, 2006. Nassmacher, Karl-Heinz. “Regulation of Party Finance.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 38. London: Sage, 2006. Neumann, Sigmund. “The Party of Democratic Integration.” In The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair, chap. 4. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Paulson, Arthur. Electoral Realignment and the Outlook for American Democracy. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England and Northeastern University Press, 2007. Revised edition of Paulson, Realignment and Party Revival. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Pomper, Gerald M. Passions and Interests: Political Party Concepts of American Democracy. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992. Rae, Nicol C. “Exceptionalism in the United States.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 17. London: Sage, 2006. Sartori, Giovanni. Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Sartori, Giovanni. “The Party Effects of Electoral Systems.” In Political Parties and Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, chap. 5. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Sartori, Giovanni. “Structuring the Party System.” In The West European Party System, ed. Peter Mair, chap. 7. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990. Scarrow, Susan E. “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Modern Political Parties: The Unwanted Emergence of Party-Based Politics.” In Handbook of Party
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Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 2. London: Sage, 2006. Schattschneider, E. E. Party Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960. Shafer, Byron E., ed. The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Shafer, Byron E. “The Notion of an Electoral Order.” In The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer, chap. 3. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Shea, Daniel M. “The Passing of Realignment and the Advent of the ‘Base-Less’ Party System.” American Politics Research 27, no. 1 ( January 1999): 33–57. Shugart, Matthew Soberg, and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds. Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Siavelis, Peter M. “Party and Social Structure.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 29. London: Sage, 2006. Silbey, Joel H. “Beyond Realignment and Realignment Theory: American Political Eras, 1789–1989.” In The End of Realignment? Interpreting American Electoral Eras, ed. Byron E. Shafer, chap. 1. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Steinmo, Sven, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds. Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Stonecash, Jeffrey M. Political Parties Matter: Realignment and the Return of Partisan Voting. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. Sundquist, James L. Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1983. Taagepera, Rein. “The Number of Parties as a Function of Heterogeneity and Electoral System.” Comparative Political Studies 32, no. 5 (August 1999): 531–548. Vanke, Jeffrey. “Georges Marchais and the Decline of French Communism.” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 90–94. Vassallo, Francesca, and Clyde Wilcox. “Party as a Carrier of Ideas.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 35. London: Sage, 2006. Ware, Alan. “American Exceptionalism.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 22. London: Sage, 2006. Wattenberg, Martin P. The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–1996. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Wattenberg, Martin P. The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Selected Bibliography
309
Webb, Paul, David Farrell, and Ian Holliday, eds. Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. Webb, Paul, and Robin Kolodny. “Professional Staff in Political Parties.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 27. London: Sage, 2006. White, John Kenneth. Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion Ended the Reagan Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. White, John Kenneth. Still Seeing Red: How the Cold War Shapes the New American Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. White, John Kenneth. “What Is a Political Party?” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 1. London: Sage, 2006. White, John Kenneth, and Philip John Davies, eds. Political Parties and the Collapse of Old Orders. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Wolinetz, Steven. “Party Systems and Party System Types.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 6. London: Sage, 2006. Wolinetz, Steven. “The Transformation of Western European Party Systems.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 15. London: Sage, 2006. Ysmal, Colette. “French Political Parties: A State within the State.” In Political Parties and the Collapse of Old Orders, eds. John Kenneth White and Philip John Davies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
II. THE AMERICAN WHIG CASE Chambers, William Nisbet. “Election of 1840.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 1, 643–744. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Congressional Quarterly. Guide to U.S. Elections, 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1985. Crotty, William. “Party Origins and Evolution in the United States.” In Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, chap. 3. London: Sage, 2006. Gienapp, William E. Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987. Hamilton, Holman. “Election of 1848.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 2, 865–918. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Norton, 1978. Holt, Michael F. Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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Hopkins, James F. “Election of 1824.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 1, 349–409. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Lublin, David. The Republican South: Democratization and Partisan Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. McCormick, Richard P. “Political Development and the Second Party System.” In The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development, ed. William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, chap. 4. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Nichols, Roy F., and Philip S. Klein. “Election of 1856.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 2, 1007–1094. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Nichols, Roy, and Jeannette Nichols. “Election of 1852.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 2, 921–1003. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Peterson, Merrill. The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Prendergast, William B. The Catholic Voter in American Politics: The Passing of the Democratic Monolith. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999. Ranney, Austin. “Parties in State Politics.” In Politics in the American States, ed. Herbert Jacob and Kenneth N. Vines, chap. 3. Boston: Little Brown, 1971. Remini, Robert V. Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time. New York: Norton, 1997. Remini, Robert V. “Election of 1828.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 1, 413–492. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Remini, Robert V. “Election of 1832.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 1, 495–574. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Remini, Robert V. Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union. New York: Norton, 1991. Sellers, Charles. “Election of 1844.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 1, 747–861. New York: Chelsea House, 1971. Silbey, Joel H. “Election of 1836.” In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Fred L. Israel. Vol. 1, 577–640. New York: Chelsea House, 1971.
III. THE BRITISH LIBER AL CASE Adelman, Paul. The Decline of the Liberal Party, 1910–1931. London: Longman, 1995. Blake, Robert. Disraeli. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
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Bogdanor, Vernon, ed. The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bogdanor, Vernon. “Introduction.” In The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, ed. Vernon Bogdanor. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Boothroyd, David. Politico’s Guide to the History of UK Political Parties. London: Politico’s Publishing, 2001. Butler, David, and Donald Stokes. Political Change in Britain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971. Catterall, Peter. “The British Electoral System, 1885–1970.” Historical Research 73, no. 181 ( June 2000): 156–174. Cook, Chris. A Short History of the Liberal Party, 1900–2001. London: Palgrave, 2002. Craig, F.W.S. British Electoral Facts. Dartmouth, England: Parliamentary Research Services, 1989. Later edition: London: Colin Rallings & Michael Thrasher, 2000. (Earlier edition published as British Parliamentary Statistics, 1918–1968.) Curtice, John. “The Electoral System.” In The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, ed. Vernon Bogdanor. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Dangerfield, George. The Strange Death of Liberal England. London: Serif, 1997. Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. New York: Vintage Books, 1996 (originally published 1962). Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution. New York: New Press, 1999 (originally published 1968). James, Lawrence. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. London: Folio Society, 2005. Jenkins, Roy. Asquith. London: Collins, 1965. Jenkins, Roy. Gladstone. New York: Random House, 1997. Jenkins, T. A. Liberal Ascendency, 1830–1886. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994. Lynch, Philip, and Robert Garner. “The Changing Party System.” Parliamentary Affairs 58, no. 3 (2005): 533–554. Rowland, Peter. David Lloyd George: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 1976. Searle, G. R. The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929, 2nd ed. London: Palgrave, 2001. Sykes, Alan. The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–1988. London: Longman, 1997.
IV. THE CANADIAN PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE CASE Bernard, Andre. “The Bloc Québecois.” In The Canadian General Election of 1993, ed. Alan Frizzell, Jon H. Pammett, and Anthony Westell, chap. 6. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994.
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Bickerton, James. “Regionalism in Canada.” In Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 10. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999. Bickerton, James, and Alain-G. Gagnon. “Political Parties and Electoral Politics.” In Canadian Politics, 4th ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 12. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004. Bickerton, James, Alain-G. Gagnon, and Patrick J. Smith. Ties That Bind: Parties and Voters in Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1999. Carty, R. Kenneth. “Political Turbulence in a Dominant Party System.” PS: Political Science and Politics 39, no. 4 (October 2006): 825–827. Carty, R. Kenneth, William Cross, and Lisa Young. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000. Clarkson, Stephen. “Disaster and Recovery: Paul Martin as Political Lazarus.” In The Canadian General Election of 2004, ed. Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan, chap. 2. Toronto: Dundurn, 2004. Clarkson, Stephen. “How the Big Red Machine Became the Little Red Machine.” In The Canadian General Election of 2006, ed. Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan, chap. 2. Toronto: Dundurn, 2006. Cross, William, ed. Political Parties, Representation, and Electoral Democracy in Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2002. Doran, Charles F. Why Canadian Unity Matters and Why Americans Care: Democratic Pluralism at Risk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Dunn, Christopher, ed. Provinces: Canadian Provincial Politics, 2nd ed. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006. Dyck, Rand. “Provincial Politics in the Modern Era.” In Provinces: Canadian Provincial Politics, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Dunn, chap. 2. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006. Eagles, Munroe. “Elections.” In Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 16. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999. Ellis, Faron, and Peter Woolstencroft. “A Change of Government, Not a Change of Country: the Conservatives and the 2006 Election.” In The Canadian General Election of 2006, ed. Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan, chap. 3. Toronto: Dundurn, 2006. Ellis, Faron, and Peter Woolstencroft. “New Conservatives, Old Realities: The 2004 Election Campaign.” In The Canadian General Election of 2004, ed. Jon H. Pammett and Christopher Dornan, chap. 3. Toronto: Dundurn, 2004. Fraser, Graham. “How Meech Changes History.” In Canadian Politics, 5th ed., ed. Gregory S. Mahler and Roman R. March. Guilford, CT: Dushkin/ McGraw-Hill, 2000. Frizell, Alan, and Anthony Westell, The Canadian General Election of 1984. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1985. Frizzell, Alan, Jon H. Pammett, and Anthony Westell, eds. The Canadian General Election of 1993. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994.
Selected Bibliography
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Frizzell, Alan, and Jon H. Pammett, eds. The Canadian General Election of 1997. Toronto: Dundurn, 1997. Gagnon, Alain-G. 1999. “Quebec’s Constitutional Odyssey.” In Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 13. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999. Gaines, Brian J. “Duverger’s Law and the Meaning of Canadian Exceptionalism.” Comparative Political Studies 32 (October 1999): 7. Gibbins, Roger. “Constitutional Politics.” In Canadian Politics, 4th ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 12. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004. Johnson, Arthur L. “Canadian Political Parties: Contemporary Changes.” In Political Parties and the Collapse of Old Orders, ed. John Kenneth White and Philip John Davies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Johnston, Richard. “Canadian Elections at the Millennium.” Choices: Strengthening Canadian Democracy 6, no. 6 (September 2000): 4–36. Kanji, Mebs, and Antoine Bilodeau. “Value Diversity and Support for Electoral Reform in Canada.” PS: Political Science and Politics 39, no. 4 (October 2006): 829–836. Laycock, David. The New Right and Democracy in Canada: Understanding Reform and the Canadian Alliance. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2002. MacIvor, Heather. “Do Canadian Political Parties Form a Cartel?” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 29 ( June 1996): 317–333. Massicotte, Louis. “Parliament in the 1990s.” In Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 8. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999. Pammett, Jon H., and Christopher Dornan, eds. The Canadian General Election of 2000. Toronto: Dundurn, 2001. Pammett, Jon H., and Christopher Dornan, eds. The Canadian General Election of 2004. Toronto: Dundurn, 2004. Pammett, Jon H., and Christopher Dornan, eds. The Canadian General Election of 2006. Toronto: Dundurn, 2006. Pammett, Jon H., and Christopher Dornan, eds. The Canadian General Election of 2008. Toronto: Dundurn, 2009. Plamondon, Bob. Full Circle: Death and Transfiguration in Canadian Conservative Politics. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2006. Robinson, Ian, and Richard Simeon. “The Dynamics of Canadian Federalism.” In Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 11. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999. Siaroff, Alan. “Provincial Political Data since 1900.” In Provinces: Canadian Provincial Politics, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Dunn, chap. 6. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006. Sigurdson, Richard. “Preston Manning and the Politics of Postmodernism in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 27 ( June 1994): 249–276.
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Simeon, Richard, and Ian Robinson. “The Dynamics of Canadian Federalism.” In Canadian Politics, 4th ed., ed. James Bickerton, and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 5. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004. Stewart, David K., and R. Kenneth Carty. “Many Political Worlds? Provincial Parties and Party Systems.” In Provinces: Canadian Provincial Politics, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Dunn, chap. 3. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006. Tanguay, A. Brian. “Canada’s Party System in the 1990s: Breakdown or Renewal?” In Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., eds. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 15. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999. Weaver, R. Kent. “Political Institutions and Canada’s Constitutional Crisis.” In The Collapse of Canada?, ed. R. Kent Weaver. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1992. Wiseman, Nelson. “Provincial Political Cultures.” In Provinces: Canadian Provincial Politics, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Dunn, chap. 1. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006. Woolstencroft, Peter. “ ‘Doing Politics Differently’: The Conservative Party and the Campaign of 1993.” In The Canadian General Election of 1993, eds. Alan Frizzell, et al., chap. 2. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994. Young, Robert. “Quebec’s Constitutional Futures.” In Canadian Politics, 3rd ed., ed. James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, chap. 14. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999.
V. THE ITALIAN CASE Carter, Nick. “Italy: The Demise of the Post-War Partyocracy.” In Political Parties and the Collapse of Old Orders, ed. John Kenneth White and Philip John Davies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Foot, Michael. Modern Italy. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Lyttelton, Adrian, ed. Liberal and Fascist Italy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002. McCarthy, Patrick. The Crisis of the Italian State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. McCarthy, Patrick, ed. Italy since 1945. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pasquino, Gianfranco. “Political Development.” In Italy since 1945, ed. Patrick McCarthy, chap. 4. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000. Putnam, Robert D. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Index Abolition of slavery. See Slavery Adams, John Quincy, 89, 92, 93 Adelman, Paul, 173 Alberta, Canada, party system, 225 Aldrich, John, 37, 51–52, 55 American Party, 124 –27, 128, 130 American Political Science Association, Committee on Responsible Parties, 283–84 American System, 89 Andreotti, Giulio, 243 Anti-communism, 244 – 45, 247, 268– 69 Anti-Masons (United States), 91, 94–95, 96 Antipartyism, 98– 99, 133 Antipathy toward politics, 25–26 Asquith, H. H.: assessment of, 179 –80, 181; budgetary reforms, 151–52; election (1918), 168– 69, 170, 172; House of Lords battle, 152–53, 155–57; Irish crises, 160, 161, 162; labor discord, 157–58; leadership failures, 262; Lloyd George and, 152, 164 – 67; women’s suffrage, 158–59 Balfour, Arthur, 151 Bases. See Party bases Beck, Paul Allen, 56 Berlinguer, Enrico, 248– 49 Berlusconi, Silvio, 243, 246, 253, 255–56 Bickerton, James, 190, 209 Bloc Québecois: as contender, 199; election (1993), 209, 211; launch of, 207; as protest party, 211; as secessionist party, 192, 194; strength of, 221
Bonar Law, Andrew, 161 Brand names, party, 16, 18–19 Britain. See Great Britain British Columbia, Canada, party system, 225, 229 Buchanan, Patrick, 293 Burnham, Walter Dean, 44 – 46, 49, 77–78 Bush, George W., 279 –80 Business-firm parties, 36 –37 Cadre parties, 34 Calhoun, John C., 89, 92, 94, 96 – 97 California: admission to United States, 111–12, 114; partisanship, 288 Campaign contributions, 294 Campbell, Kim, 208– 9, 263 Canada: cleavage issues, 267– 68; election (1980), 203; election (1984), 203– 4; election (1988), 206; election (1993), 208–11; election (1997), 212, 213, 216; election (2000), 213–14, 215, 216; election (2004), 214 –15, 217–18; election (2006), 218–20; election (2008), 220 –21; electoral system, 29, 32–33, 33–34, 199 –200; entrenchment, lack of, 276; establishment of, 188; executive federalism, 202; minor parties, 17; National Policy, 189 – 90, 195; new parties, opportunities for, 298; new realignment theory applied to, 79; oil industry, 195; pan-Canadianism, 200 –203; party bases and medial voters, calculation of, 69, 71; party development in, 27; party system, 196 – 98,
316
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200 –201; party systems, provincial versus federal, 224 –29; realignment, 279; regionalism, 189 – 90, 267– 68; tariffs, 189 – 90, 195; trade with United States, 189 – 90, 195– 96, 206. See also Progressive Conservative Party (Canada); specific parties Canadian Alliance, 212–13, 215–17, 221–24, 231. See also Conservative Party of Canada; Progressive Conservative Party (Canada); Reform Party (Canada) Candidate-centered politics, 53–55, 289 Cartel parties, 36, 290 – 92 Carty, R. Kenneth, 200, 203– 4 Cases: comparative analysis of, 259 –77; disalignments, conditions necessary for, 259 –75; hypotheses tested against, 9 –10, 85, 275–77; introduction to, 81, 84 –85. See also Italy; Liberal Party (Great Britain); Progressive Conservative Party (Canada); Whig Party (United States) Cass, Lewis, 109, 110 –11 Catch-all parties, 35–36 Catholic Church, influence on Italian party system, 241 Catholicism, in United States, 120, 125–26, 136, 265 “Cencelli Manual,” 240 – 41, 246, 255 CF-18 affair, 205 Charest, Jean, 213 Charlottetown Accord, 207–8, 209 Chhibber, Pradeep, 228 Chrétien, Jean, 217–18 Christian Democratic Party ( Italy): Catholic Church and, 241; cleavage issues, 268– 69; Communist Party of Italy and, 244 – 45, 247, 248– 49; disalignment, 252; leadership failures, 264; in postwar party system to 1992, 244 – 46 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (United States), 294 Civil Rights Act (United States), 285 Clarity Act (Canada), 194 Clark, Joe, 203, 216, 217 Class values, 265– 66 Clay, Henry: Compromise of 1850, 113–14, 115; election (1824), 89;
election (1832), 95; election (1844), 107–8; election (1848), 109, 110; political career overview, 88. See also Whig Party (United States) Cleavage issues: Canada, 267– 68; described, 5; disalignment and, 74 –75, 264 – 69, 275; Great Britain, 265– 67; Italy, 268– 69; Liberal Party (Great Britain), 265– 67; Progressive Conservative Party (Canada), 267– 68; United States, 265; Whig Party (United States), 265 Cleavages: defined, 21; described, 22; ideological, 74 –75; left-right, 23; libertarian-authoritarian, 23; new, 23; religious, 84 –85 Clientelism, 24, 239 – 40 Communist Party of Italy, 244–45, 246–49, 268 Competition, in party systems, 28–29 Compromise of 1850, 113–16, 118–19 Conservative Party (Great Britain), 15, 160 – 62, 182 Conservative Party of Canada (CPC): election (2004), 217–18, 220; election (2006), 218–20; election (2008), 220–21; formation, 14, 216–17. See also Canadian Alliance; Progressive Conservative Party (Canada) Conservative postmodernism, 212 Consociationalism, 32, 240 – 41 Consolidated party systems, 19 –21 Constitution Act (Canada), 193, 201 Core base: alienation of, 269 –72; calculating, 68–71; defined, 8; described, 67; Liberal Party (Great Britain), 269, 270, 271; pentapartito, 272; Progressive Conservative Party (Canada), 269, 270, 271; Whig Party (United States), 269, 270 –71 Corn Laws (Great Britain), 143– 44 Corruption, influence on Italian party system, 239 – 41, 251–52 Crawford, William H., 89 Craxi, Bettino, 250 –51 Critical elections, 8 Critical realignments, 43– 45, 51 Cross, William, 200
Index Dahl, Robert A., 39 Dalton, Russell, 55–56, 57–58 Dangerfield, George, 179 –80 Day, Stockwell, 212 Dealignment, 50, 53–54, 55, 56–57, 58–60 De Gasperi, Alcide, 247, 253 Democratic Party ( Japan), 14 Democratic Party (United States): disalignment threats to, 7; election (1828), 90; election (1836), 99–100, 101; election (1848), 109, 111; election (1852), 119; extreme members, 291–92; ideology, 286–87, 294–95; loyalty to, 98–99, 133–34; McGovern and, 285; realignment theory applied to, 50–51; regional disalignments and realignments, 286; survival of, 133–35; Whig Party as alternative to, 88 Democratic Party of the Left ( Italy), 249. See also Communist Party of Italy Deviating elections, 79 –80 Disaligning elections, 80 Disalignments: causes, overview of, 3, 5–6; characteristics, 6–7; cleavage issues and, 74–75, 264–69, 275; conditions necessary for, 259–75; core base alienation and, 269–72; defined, 2, 8; electoral system and, 73–75, 272–75; elements, 72–73; importance of, 2; leadership failures and, 260–64, 275; party defeats versus, 2–3; as rare event, 3–4; realignment and, 7, 276–77; realignment versus, 65–66; recurrence of, 296–99; secular, 7, 8; successor party availability and, 272; sudden, 7, 8; theory, statement of, 71–72; timing of, 299 Divided government, 54 –55 Douglas, Stephen A., 122–23 Duverger’s Law, 6, 33, 73, 298 Edward VII (King of Great Britain), 152, 153, 155 Effective parties, 14 –15, 16 –17, 19 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 282 Elections, typology of, 79 –81 Electoral systems: Canada, 29, 32–33, 33–34, 199 –200; disalignment and, 73–75, 272–75; Europe, 29 –30; Great
317
Britain, 29, 31–32, 33, 34; Italy, 243– 44, 252–53; United States, 29, 33, 34, 90 – 91. See also First-past-the-post electoral systems; Proportional representation electoral systems Elite parties, 34 England. See Great Britain Entrenchment: defined, 9; hypothesis relating to, 275–76; realignments and, 78; Republican Party (United States), 131, 133, 137 Europe: electoral systems, 29 –30; liberalism, 143 Executive federalism, 202–3 Federal Election Commission (United States), 293 Federalism, executive, 202–3 Filibusters, US Senate, 284 –85 Fillmore, Millard: election (1852), 117, 118, 119; election (1856), 127; presidency, 113, 114, 115, 116 Financial crisis, US, 280, 288–89 First Party System (United States), 92– 93 First-past-the-post (FPP) electoral systems: described, 29 –30, 31–32, 33–34; disalignment and, 6, 73, 74, 272–74, 275, 277; plurality and, 240, 273; third parties in, 290 France, 79 Franklin, Mark, 59 – 60 Free Soil Party (United States), 110, 111, 123 Free trade, 143– 44, 146 Free Trade Agreement (Canada and United States), 206 Gagnon, Alain-G., 201, 209 Geography, influence on Italian party system, 239 George V (King of Great Britain), 155–56 Germany, 17, 18–19. See also West Germany Gienapp, William E., 128, 130 Gladstone, Herbert, 172 Gladstone, William Ewart, 145– 48 Goldwater, Barry, 285 Government, divided, 54 –55
318
Index
Great Britain: class values, 265– 66; cleavage issues, 265– 67; election (1900), 148– 49; election (1910), 153–54; election (1922), 173–74; election (2010), 31–32, 290; electoral system, 29, 31–32, 33, 34; free trade, 143– 44, 146; new parties, opportunities for, 298; new realignment theory applied to, 78–79; party bases and medial voters, calculation of, 70 –71; party development in, 27; utilitarianism, 143. See also Liberal Party (Great Britain); specific parties Green parties, 22–23 Green Party (Germany), 17, 22 Green Party (United States), 18, 22 Harper, Stephen: merger with Progressive Conservative Party, 216 –17, 222; as prime minister, 218–20; Quebec and, 224, 231–32; as Reform Party leader, 212–13 Harrison, William Henry, 99, 100, 103, 104 Healthcare legislation, US, 280, 281, 284 Hofstadter, Richard, 93 Holt, Michael F.: election (1832), 95– 96; election (1836), 101; political quarrels, 134, 135; Second Bank of the United States, 97; Whig economic policy, 102 House of Lords (Great Britain), 151, 152–57 Hypotheses, 9 –10, 85, 275–77 Ideological cleavage, 74 –75 Ideology: bifurcation and obstructive governance, 284 –87; influence on Italian party system, 241– 42; intensity of beliefs, 287– 90 Immigration, US, 108, 119 –20, 124 –26, 136, 265, 288 Independent Labour Party (Great Britain), 150 Independent voters. See Medial voters Ineffective parties, 14, 15, 16 –18, 275–76 Inglehart, Ronald, 22 Institutionalized party systems, 19 –21 Institutions, defined, 65
Interregnum state, 45, 54 Ireland, status of, 147– 48, 155, 160 – 64, 266 Iron Law of Oligarchy, 38 Italian Socialist Party, 249 –51, 252 Italy, 237–57; anti-communism, 244 – 45, 247, 268– 69; cleavage issues, 268– 69; collapse of first republic, 251–56; conclusions and outlook, 256 –57; electoral systems, 243– 44, 252–53; influences on party system, 238– 42; lesson of, 297; migration, 241, 242; new realignment theory applied to, 78; postwar party system to 1992, 244 –51; quasi-stable party system, 242– 44; relevance to US politics, 295– 96; rise of Italian state, 237–38; Socialists, 249 –51, 252; transformism, 253–54; as unique case, 277 Jackson, Andrew, 89, 91–92, 94–96, 97–98 Jenkins, Roy, 158–59, 161 Johnson, Richard M., 100 Kansas-Nebraska bill, 122–23 Key, V. O., Jr., 43– 44, 46, 49, 79 –80 Know Nothings (United States), 124 –27, 128, 130 Kollman, Ken, 228 Kossuth, Louis, 119 –20 Labels, party, 16, 18–19 Labour Party (Great Britain): election (1900), 149; election (1918), 168–72; election (1922), 173–74; election (1929), 176; minority government (1924), 174–75; party bases and medial voters, calculation of, 70–71; post-1920s, 178; rise of, 141 Ladd, Everett Carll, 48, 49 –50, 60 Language, influence on Italian party system, 238–39 Leadership, perspectives on, 37–39 Leadership failures: disalignment and, 260–64, 275; Liberal Party (Great Britain), 262–63; pentapartito, 264; Progressive Conservative Party (Canada), 263; Whig Party (United States), 135–37, 260–62
Index Left-right cleavage, 23 Liberal Democratic Party (Great Britain), 31–32 Liberalism, 143– 45. See also Liberal Party (Great Britain) Liberal Party (Canada), 196 – 97, 199, 211, 227, 230 –31 Liberal Party (Great Britain), 141–83; cleavage issues, 265– 67; coalition and war management, 164 – 68; core base, alienation of, 269, 270, 271; decline, 176, 178; disalignment causes, 180 –83; disalignment overview, 4, 84, 141; disalignment timing, 179 –80, 182; during 1920s, 172–78; election (1900), 148– 49; election (1906), 150 –51; election (1910), 153–54; election (1918), 168–72; election (1922), 173–74; election (1923), 174; election (1924), 175; election (1929), 176; elections, local, 178–79; expanded electorate, 167– 68; Gladstone, age of, 145– 47; Gladstone and Ireland, 147– 48; House of Lords battle, 152–57; ideology, 181–82; Irish crises, 160 – 64; labor discord, 157–58; leadership failures, 262– 63; liberal doctrines, 143– 45; origins and rise, 142– 44; party bases and medial voters, calculation of, 70 –71; prewar years, 148–52; resuscitation of, 150; women’s suffrage, 158–59. See also Great Britain Liberal Unionist Party (Great Britain), 148, 154–56 Libertarian-authoritarian cleavage, 23 Liberty Party (United States), 107, 110 Lieberman, Joseph, 287, 298 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 22 Lloyd George, David: Asquith and, 152, 164 – 67; election (1918), 168, 172; labor discord, 157; leadership failures, 262– 63; party factionalism, 175–76; political thinking, 155; as prime minister, 166, 167– 68, 173 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 238 MacKay, Peter, 215, 216 –17, 222 Madison, James, 26, 92– 93 Maintaining elections, 79
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Mair, Peter, 28 Major parties, 14 –15, 16 –17, 19 Manitoba, Canada, party system, 225 Manning, Preston, 219 –20 Martin, Paul, 217–18 Marxism, 38–39 Massachusetts, Republican Party in, 281 Mass parties, 34 –35 Mayhew, David, 48 McCain, John, 294 McGovern, George, 285 Medial voters: calculating, 68–71; defined, 9; described, 68; major-party base voters versus, 9, 16; as realignment driver, 76, 77; rebellion of, 281; voting behavior, 75–76 Meech Lake Accord, 204 – 6, 206 –7 Michels, Robert, 37–38, 39 Minor parties, 14, 15, 16 –18, 275–76 Missouri Compromise, 123 Moro, Aldo, 248 Mosca, Gaetano, 37–38, 39 Mulroney, Brian: Charlottetown Accord, 207–8; election (1984), 203– 4; Free Trade Agreement, 206; Harper and, 220; leadership failures, 263; Meech Lake Accord, 204 – 6, 206 –7 Mussolini, Benito, 243– 44 National Energy Program (Canada), 195 National Front (France), 24 Nationalist Party ( Ireland), 160, 161 National Policy (Canada), 189 – 90, 195 National Republican Party (United States), 90, 94–96. See also Whig Party (United States) Nativism, 108, 119 –20, 124 –26, 136, 265 Nenni, Pietro, 249 –50 New Brunswick, Canada, party system, 226 New Democratic Party (Canada), 17, 198, 199, 211, 227 Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, party system, 226 New party barriers, 292– 93 Nonconformists (Great Britain), 147, 148– 49 North-South divide, influence on Italian party system, 239
320
Index
Nova Scotia, Canada, party system, 226 Nullification, 92, 96 – 97 Obama, Barack, 25, 279–80, 281, 289, 294 Obstructive governance, 284–92; cartel parties and, 290–92; ideological belief intensity and, 287–90; ideological bifurcation and, 284–87 Occhetto, Achille, 249 Oligarchy, Iron Law of, 38 Ontario, Canada, party system, 225, 228 Pan-Canadianism, 200 –203 Pareto, Vilfredo, 37–38, 39 Parties: age of, 260; barriers to new, 292–93; brand names, 16, 18–19; business-firm, 36–37; cadre, 34; cartel, 36, 290–92; catch-all, 35–36; conflict within, 134–35; defeat verus disalignment, 2–3; defined, 19; development of, 26–27; effective, 14–15, 16–17, 19; elite, 34; functions, 13–14; green, 22–23; identification versus voter behavior, 68; importance in democracies, 2; ineffective, 14, 15, 16–18, 275–76; major, 14–15, 16–17, 19; mass, 34–35; minor, 14, 15, 16–18, 275–76; polarization, 281–84, 287–90; purpose, 13; successor, 272, 297–99; third, 290–91; types, 34–37. See also specific parties Parties in service, 37, 55 Parti Québecois, 192 Partisan-focused realignment, 45 Partitocracy, 240 – 41 Party bases: calculating, 68–71; importance of, 15; integrity of, and party polarization, 281–84; peripheral, 8, 67–71; protecting, 279–81; total, 68–71. See also Core base; Medial voters Party systems: Canada, 196 – 98, 200 –201, 224 –29; competition in, 28–29; consolidation and institutionalization of, 19 –21; defined, 28; described, 13, 28–29; United States, 28 Path dependence, 4, 65 Patronage, 104 –5, 113 Paulson, Arthur, 48– 49, 50 –51, 52, 53 PC Party. See Progressive Conservative Party (Canada)
Peel, Robert, 144 Pentapartito, 246, 264, 268– 69, 272, 296 –97. See also Italy Peripheral base, 8, 67–71 Perot, Ross, 293 Personalistic preference, 24 –25 Philosophical realignment, 49 –50, 60 Pierce, Franklin, 119, 120, 121 Plurality electoral system. See First-pastthe-post electoral systems Polarization, party, 281–84, 287– 90 Political parties. See Parties Polk, James K., 107, 108– 9 Postmodern political parties, 212 Postpartisan realignment, 45 PR electoral systems. See Proportional representation (PR) electoral systems Prendergast, William, 120 Prince Edward Island, Canada, party system, 226 Prodi, Romano, 243, 253 Progressive Conservative Party (Canada), 187–232; cleavage issues, 267– 68; continuity of change: 1997–2002, 213–14; core base, alienation of, 269, 270, 271; disalignment causes, 229 –30; disalignment effects, 230 –32; disalignment overview, 1, 4 –5, 81, 84, 187–88; election (1993), 208–11; electoral structure and serial party systems, 199 –200; leadership failures, 263; merger with Canadian Alliance, 215–17, 221–24, 231; Mulroney and Meech Lake Accord, 203–5; new protest parties, 211–13; pan-Canadianism, 200 –203; party bases and medial voters, calculation of, 69, 71; party system, 196 – 98; party systems, provincial versus federal, 224 –29; preludes to disaster, 205–8; provincial disparities in, 227; Quebec as unassimilated province, 189, 190 – 94; regional and provincial competition, 198– 99; regionalism in Canada, 189 – 90; renewal of change: 2004 –2008, 214 –21; Western protest, 194 – 96. See also Canada; Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) Proportional representation (PR) electoral systems: consociationalism and,
Index 240; described, 29 –31, 32–33; disalignment and, 6, 73–75, 273, 274 –75. See also Italy Punctuated equilibria metaphor, 45– 46 Quebec, Canada: as cleavage issue, 267; conciliation of, 231–32; francophone nature of, 191; party system, 225–26, 229; Progressive Conservative Party disalignment and, 230; secession referenda, 193– 94; as unassimilated province, 189, 190 – 94 Quiet Revolution, 192 Radical party (Great Britain), 142– 43, 145 Rae, Nicol, 36 Realigning elections, 80 Realignments: critical, 43– 45, 51; cyclicality and predictability of, 45, 46, 77–78; dealignment and, 60; dealignment versus, 53; defined, 8, 44 – 45; disalignment and, 7, 276 –77; disalignment versus, 65– 66; entrenchment and, 78; number of elections involved in, 77; overview, 7–8; partisan-focused, 45; philosophical, 49 –50, 60; postpartisan, 45; secular, 8, 43– 44, 52; sudden, 8, 43– 44. See also Realignment theory Realignment theory: criticisms of, 47– 49; new, 75–79; origins, 43– 47; overview, 7–8; political change outside United States, 55– 60; revival of, 49 –53; statement of new, 76 Red Brigades ( Italy), 248 Reform Party (Canada), 24, 209, 211–12. See also Canadian Alliance Reform Party (United States), 293 Regionalism, in Canada, 189 – 90, 267– 68 Reinstating elections, 80 Religious cleavages, 84 –85 Remini, Robert, 90, 96 Republican Party (United States): base, 15, 280–81; disalignment threats to, 7; entrenchment, 131, 133, 137; extreme members, 291–92; Goldwater and, 285; ideology, 285, 286–87, 294–95; realignment theory applied to, 50–51; regional disalignments and realignments, 286; state legislative seats, 131, 132
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Ricardo, David, 143 Rokkan, Stein, 22 Rowland, Peter, 166 – 67, 167– 68 Sartori, Giovanni, 30 Saskatchewan, Canada, party system, 225 Scott, Winfield, 117, 118, 119, 120 –21, 260 – 61 Searle, G. R., 180, 181 Second Bank of the United States, 95, 96, 97 Second Party System (United States), 92– 94, 134 –35 Secular disalignments, 7, 8 Secular realignments, 8, 43– 44, 52 Segni, Mario, 252 Service, parties in, 37, 55 Seven Years War, 189 Shafer, Byron E., 54 Siavelis, Peter M., 58, 75 Silbey, Joel, 47 Slavery: Compromise of 1850, 113–16; election (1844), 107–8; election (1848), 110; election (1852), 118–19; KansasNebraska bill, 122–23; territorial expansion and, 108–9, 111–13 Smith, Adam, 143 Smith, Patrick J., 209 Smith, Truman, 133, 136 –37 Social Democratic Party (Germany), 74 Socialists, in Italy, 249 –51, 252 Specter, Arlen, 281 Split-ticket voting, 52–53, 54 –55, 58–59 Stonecash, Jeffrey, 52–53, 56, 60 Strong partisans. See Core base Successor parties, availability of, 272, 297– 99 Sudden disalignments, 7, 8 Sudden realignments, 8, 43– 44 Sundquist, James L., 46 – 47, 77–78 Swing voters. See Medial voters Sykes, Alan, 146 – 47, 169, 172, 183 Tariffs: Canada, 189 – 90, 195; United States, 92, 97 Taylor, Zachary, 109 –11, 111–13, 114 Tea-party protesters, 280 –81 Temperance movement, 119, 136
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Territorial expansion, US, 107–8, 108– 9, 111–12 Texas, admission to United States, 107–8, 112 Third parties, 290 – 91 Ticket-splitting, 52–53, 54 –55, 58–59 Togliatti, Palmiro, 247– 48 Total base, 68–71 Transformism, 253–54 Transitional elections, 80 –81 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 191– 92, 192– 93, 195, 200 –202, 203 Tyler, John, 103, 104 –7 UK Independence Party (UKIP), 298 Union Party (United States), 116 –17, 118, 126 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United States: antipartyism, 98–99, 133; base, protecting, 279–81; base integrity and party polarization, 281–84; campaign contributions, 294; candidatecentered politics, 53–55; cartel parties, 290–92; Catholicism, 120, 125–26, 136, 265; choice, clarity of, 294–95; cleavage issues, 265; disalignments, future occurrence of, 296–99; divided government, 54–55; election (1832), 95–96; election (1994), 46; electoral system, 29, 33, 34, 90–91; entrepreneurial nature of candidates and office-holders, 55; financial crisis, 280, 288–89; financial involvement by interest groups, 55; healthcare legislation, 280, 281, 284; ideological bifurcation, 284–87; immigration, 108, 119–20, 124–26, 136, 265, 288; immigration reform, 288; Italian party system relevance to, 295–96; liberalism, 143; medial voters, rebellion of, 281; minor parties, 17, 18; new party barriers, 292–93; obstruction of governance, 284–92; party bases and medial voters, calculation of, 70, 71; party development in, 26–27; party systems, 28; patronage, 104–5, 113; polarization, 287–90; Senate filibusters, 284–85; state legislative seats, 130–32; successor parties, lack of, 297–98; tariffs, 92, 97; tea-party
protesters, 280–81; temperance movement, 119, 136; territorial expansion, 107–8, 108–9, 111–12; trade with Canada, 189–90, 195–96, 206. See also Whig Party (United States); specific parties Upper houses, of national legislatures, 34 Utilitarianism, 143 Van Buren, Martin: election (1828), 89; election (1836), 99–100, 101; election (1840), 103–4; election (1844), 107; election (1848), 110, 111; party development, 93–94, 96, 133; presidency, 101–2 Voter behavior versus party identification, 68 Voter turnout, 59 – 60 Voting rights, 34, 158–59 Wagstyl, Stefan, 30 Wattenberg, Martin, 50, 51, 53–54, 55, 57 Weaver, Kent, 229 Webb, Paul, 57 Webster, Daniel: Compromise of 1850, 115; election (1828), 89; election (1852), 117, 118, 119; party development, 97; political career overview, 88. See also Whig Party (United States) Weed, Thurlow, 133, 136 –37 West Germany, 79. See also Germany Whig Party (Great Britain), 142, 144 – 45 Whig Party (United States), 87–137; base, 137; birth of, 96 – 99; Catholicism and, 120, 125–26, 136; cleavage issues, 265; Compromise of 1850, 113–16, 118–19; core base, alienation of, 269, 270 –71; disalignment overview, 4, 81, 84 –85, 87; election (1824), 89; election (1828), 90 – 92; election (1836), 99 –101; election (1840), 101– 4; election (1844), 106 –8; election (1848), 109 –11; election (1850), 116 –17; election (1852), 117–21; election (1854), 126 –27; election (1856), 127; end of, 123–24; governors, 130; immigration, 108, 119 –20, 124 –26, 136; Jackson presidency, 94 – 96; Kansas-Nebraska bill, 122–23; Know Nothings, 124 –27, 128–30; leadership failures, 135–37,
Index 260 – 62; origins and rise, 87–89; party bases and medial voters, calculation of, 70, 71; party development, 92– 94, 136 –37; rise and fall, 127–33; sectional issues, 135–36; state legislative seats, 130; Taylor, the West, and patronage, 111–13; temperance movement, 119, 136; territorial expansion, 107–8, 108– 9, 111–12; Tyler presidency,
104 – 6. See also Republican Party (United States); United States Wilmot Proviso, 109, 110, 112, 113 Wolinetz, Steven, 28 Women’s suffrage, in Great Britain, 158–59 Woolstencroft, Peter, 208 Young, Lisa, 200
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About the Author CHARLES S. MACK was an association executive, and a consultant to business on politics, government relations, and public affairs. After retiring, he undertook a program of graduate studies in world politics from the Catholic University of America, receiving his PhD in 2008. He is currently a Post-Doctoral Scholar in Politics at Catholic University. When Political Parties Die: A Cross-National Analysis of Disalignment and Realignment is adapted from his doctoral dissertation. It analyzes the underlying causes of the demise of political parties in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Italy. His four previous books (all published by Quorum Books) are: Business Strategy for an Era of Political Change, published in 2001; Business, Politics, and the Practice of Government Relations (1997); The Executive’s Handbook of Trade and Business Associations (1991); and Lobbying and Government Relations (1989). The author was president and CEO of the Business-Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC) until his retirement at the end of 1998. He previously was president of the New York State Food Merchants Association (now the Food Industry Alliance of New York State) and, before that, director of public and government affairs for CPC International Inc., a multinational food manufacturer. Earlier in his career, he served on the staffs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican National Committee. He has taught government relations management at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is a graduate of Haverford College with Honors in Political Science. He is a former treasurer and governor of the University Club of Washington and serves currently as a member of the University Club Foundation’s Board of Directors.