Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, May 09, 2011

Changes in traditional parties

Along with the decline of the welfare states (see The shrinking of the social welfare state), the traditional "big tent" political parties are suffering from competition with smaller parties with narrower constituencies.

The shrinking big tents

Across Europe, once-dominant political parties are seeing their support fragment (see chart). Some "natural" parties of government, such as Fianna Fail in Ireland and the Social Democrats in Sweden, are out in the cold after decades of hegemony. In Britain and Germany systems in which power alternated between centre-left and centre-right for generations have been upset by the strength of smaller parties. A new politics has emerged in which old allegiances have frayed, political identities have blurred and voters’ trust in familiar parties has crumbled. One result [or is it a cause]is that voter turnout has fallen almost everywhere.

Recent elections have laid bare the established parties’ woes, but the causes go back decades. One is the decline of institutions that linked individuals to parties—the church in countries with a tradition of Christian democracy, or trade unions that channelled funds (and votes) to left-wing parties. With pews empty and unions shrinking to a mostly public-sector rump, old parties are seeing their membership lists shrivel and their financing dry up.

Class allegiances and tribal ties have also lost their force. Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties could once rely on millions of “votes for life”. No longer. Voting has become more a matter of consumer choice than of ideological fealty. The cosy consensus that so often marked post-war politics is gone. “People are no longer spending 20 years in a party, a union or even a job,” says Bruno Cautrès at Sciences Po university in Paris. “They don’t like organisations to speak for them; they want to speak for themselves.”

In the decades after the war, when strong forces forged political consensus, economies were growing fast and demography seemed favourable, the big-tent parties could make a clear offer to voters: state health care, government-funded pensions. Today, when governments seem unable to stop factories shifting jobs to Asia or immigrants flooding in, voters find the big parties less appealing...

As the big parties flounder, a cadre of challengers is on the march. In some countries former fringe parties have joined the mainstream, often holding the balance of power. Britain’s Liberal Democrats, whose predecessor party took just 3% of the vote in the 1950s, joined a Tory-led coalition after winning 23% last year. Germany’s Greens, who are soaring in the polls, may join the federal government again after the next election. Regional parties are growing in such countries as Britain, Italy and Spain, sometimes joining or becoming key supports for national governments.

But the phenomenon that has grabbed most attention is the rise of populist parties often termed “far right”. The label can be misleading...

Yet they share a dislike of immigrants and the European Union. Their leaders, often charismatic, telegenic personalities, rail against the establishment both at home and in Brussels...

Not all new parties thrive. Yet several are changing national politics...

This suggests that the mainstream parties are running out of coping strategies. “This is not going away,” says André Krouwel at the Free University in Amsterdam. “The economic crisis, the Arab spring, immigration pressures on Europe—it is only going to get worse for the established parties.”...

The next threat may be splits. “Without a strong ideology, there’s little reason why big parties should hold together,” says Peter Mair of the European University Institute in Florence. “If you’re an ambitious politician, why not form your own grouping?”...