STABILITY AND CHANGE IN PARTY SYSTEMS

\n obvious, though sometimes overlooked, point about party systems is how [urable they are. Of the twenty-three established, independent liberal democraies in the late 1950s, only four had a radically different party system thirty years 1ter at the end of the 1980s: I Belgium (where a two-and-a-half party system had transformed into fragmented multipartism); France (where polarized multipartism had been replaced by a more moderate multipartism); India (where the previously predominant Congress Party had lost that position); Israel (where consolidation of the right-wing parties in Likud transformed the dynamics of the multiparty system). lere were three other countries where less radical changes in the party system re evident. In Norway and Denmark the declining vote of, respectively, the ')our and Social Democratic parties had altered the position of the previously 1stpowerful party in the system. In addition, the Liberal Party in Norway and Radicals in Denmark had experienced long-term decline. The third country ; Iceland where the basic configuration of the parties persisted, but where at very end of the 1960s the party system became far more prone to electoral 1tility and to the entry of new parties. However, the overwhelming impres1, at least when first glancing at this list of countries, is one of continuity in ;t party systems.

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When speaking of continuity, it must be emphasized just how much countries vary in the propensity of parties to split (and re-fuse) and of new parties to develop. Yet our concern is not with short- or medium-term 'adjustments' to a party system, but with shifts in relations between parties that are so fundamental that the dynamics of the system become very different. Now the impression of continuity in most party systems might seem paradoxical-after all, from the mid-1970s onwards, many political commentators were arguing that mass electorates were becoming more volatile in their behaviour. How do we square this with the idea of stability in most party systems? In fact, there are two different sets of questions that need to be distinguished. (1) Is it actually the case that electorates have become more volatile? Is it more likely now than it used to be that a person who voted for party x at the last election will vote for a different party at this election? (2) To the extent that there is volatility, do voters turn mainly to new parties, or do they switch their vote to parties that are fairly similar to the one they are leaving, or do they switch to old parties that are very different to the one they are leaving? We examine these two issues in turn.

Italy) were becoming less so. The most notable feature of his findings was the lack of an overall trend. This conclusion suggests caution should also be exercised in considering the experience of the early 1990s when once again a number of countries have seen significant shifts in support for parties: Sweden, where the 1991 general election produced a major decline in the share of the vote (5.5 per cent of the total) for the governing Social Democrats. Belgium, where greatly increased support in 1991 for the right-wing Flemish Bloc, combined with continuing party fragmentation, indicated that a form of polarized multipartism might be developing. Italy, where the 1992 election saw significant gains made by the separatist Northern League, and where subsequently the collapse of Christian Democracy and the Socialists prompted a major upheaval in the party system in 1994. (The 1994 election saw parties organized into three main electoral alliances, with the centre alliance that included the successor party to the DC being squeezed between the left and right blocs of parties.) France, where electoral support for the ruling Socialist Party collapsed in the 1993 Assembly elections, prompting speculation of a fundamental realignment in that country. Japan, where the 1993 election ended the rule of the LDP and where the electoral reforms of the new non-lDP government indicated that one-party dominance might never be restored. Canada, where the ruling Conservative Party retained only two parliamentary seats in the 1993 election when two new parties (the Bloc Quebecois and Reform) became the second and third largest parties in the system. Austria, where the right-wing Freedom Party took an unprecedented 22 per cen t of the vote in the 1994 general election. Against this evidence of massive shifts in electoral support could be placed the evidence of elections in countries such as Denmark, Britain, Greece, and Norway which very much suggested 'politics as usual', and even the post-reunification election in Germany did not suggest that an overturning of the party system in the FRG was imminent. While electoral volatility in the 1990s may be affecting even more countries than in the 1970s, there is no evidence of its being a universal phenomenon. Furthermore, one of the countries that seemed to be experiencing party system change at the beginning of the 1990s, Sweden, reverted to an older pattern of voter support in 1994 when the Social Democrats recovered their 'lost' voters and were able to form a minority government after the general election.

1. Volatility and Realignment

Electoral volatility
The argument that mass electorates were more volatile than they had been gained considerable force in the mid-1970s from the coincidence of several events, including: the huge increase in support for the British Liberals in the 1974 elections; the sudden rise of the Progress Party in Denmark in 1973; the decline of party identification in the United States after the mid-1960s, and the outcome of the 1972 election that produced a Republican landslide in the presidential election with safe Democratic majorities in the Congress. Yet at the end of that seemingly turbulent decade Pedersen analysed European elections since the Second World War and could find no overall pattern of party system change.2 Two countries (France and Germany) had experienced high volatility between elections earlier on but had become much less volatile, while Denmark and Norway had moved in the opposite direction. Among the other states there was less variation from one election to another, and of these countries some (Switzerland, Britain, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands) were becoming somewhat more volatile while others (Austria, Belgium, Ireland, and

Political realignment? While there appears to be no universal trend towards greater electoral volatility, it is true that there have been elections in established liberal democracies that have featured a large amount of vote switching. For example, 40 per cent of those who voted in the 1971 Danish election voted for another party in the 1973 election. This kind of behaviour might indicate that a massive transformation in a party system is possible when, for whatever reasons, voters become disillusioned with the party they supported previously. However, the evidence suggests that the connection between electoral volatility and long-term change in a party system is not at all straightforward. First, note that in the 1973 election only 3 out of the 40 per cent of electoral 'switchers' changed to an 'old' party that was very different from the one they were leaving-for example, social democrats switching to a non-socialist party. Nine per cent of voters moved to 'similar' parties while 27 per cent voted for new, minor parties. Then again Mair has noted that not only are 'old' parties continuing to receive a relatively large percentage of the vote of a now much larger electorate, but they are also polling substantially more votes than they used to.3 This suggests at least one imp'ortant source of continuing stability in party systems. But what of the new parties? The behaviour of voters in Denmark in 1973 might suggest that, infrequent though they are, when electoral upheavals occur, they can transform a party system. The Danish case is an instructive one to examine because there are relatively few barriers to the formation of a new party in Denmark, and party splits and subsequent re-fusing are quite common; in this regard it differs from Britain, where the electoral system, amongst other factors, works against the establishment of new parties. In fact, in the long term the Danish party system seems to have changed remarkably little despite the 1973 election. Consider the data in Table 7.1 which shows the share of the vote obtained by the parties in the 1971 and 1990 general elections (excluding parties that did not get more than 2 per cent of the vote in either election). The percentage of the vote obtained by four of the five largest parties is virtually the same in 1990 as in 1971-between them in 1971 they received 78.7 per cent of the total, in 1990 77.5 per cent. The main difference between the two years lies in the dramatic decline in support for the Radical Liberal Party and the emergence of the Progress Party and the Centre Democrats who, between them, in 1990 obtained about the same proportion of the vote as the Radical Liberals had lost. For all the turbulence associated with the 1973 election, its long-term impact on the Danish party system cannot be said to have been that great. There has been change-it would surely be extraordinary if there had not been anybut it is rather modest change. If the Danish example suggests anything, it is the durability of party systems even when circumstances generate high electoral

Table

7.1. The percentage of the popular vote obtained by each of the parties in the Danish general elections of 1971 and 1990

Social Democrats Conservative People's Party Liberals Socialist People's Party Progress Party Centre Democrats Radical Liberal Party Christian People's Party

37.3 16.7 15.6

9.1

37.4 16.0 15.8

8.3

6.4
5.1 14.4

3.5
2.3

1.9

volatility at a particular time. It confirms the conclusion that change in party systems, at least major change, is not that common. The rest of this chapter examines the sources of stability and of change in party systems. It does so by looking at three factors: (1) Political institutions: this is the shortest section, as a number of the arguments have been introduced already (in Chapter 6). (2) The composition of the electorate. (3) Social cleavages, political values, and issues: this is the longest section and it examines a number of different kinds of change in party systems.

In general, the institutional structures facing political parties change only very slowly. Major change is most likely to occur when a liberal democratic state has collapsed. The breakdown of democracy may well lead to institutional 'engineering' when democracy is restored-'engineering' designed to prevent the subsequent collapse of the regime. The instability of democracy in South America has produced many attempts at this, though in Europe too there have been a number of instances of regime rebuilding: Austria, the FRG, and Italy (after the collapse of dictatorship in the Second World War), France (in 1958), Greece (in 1974 after the collapse of the military regimes established in 1967), Portugal (in 1974-6), and Spain (in 1977).4 In the Austrian and German cases the new political structures were designed to give a central role to parties in governing; and in the other countries too the institutions of the new regimes all had the effect of strengthening parties as links between government and mass electorates.

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The net effect of this institutional 'engineering' on the party systems has been to increase the power oflarge parties. With the exception ofItaly, all these countries avoided a high level of party fragmentation: France established moderate pluralism (with four major party groupings, at least until the mid-1980s); with the exception of 1987, Portugal had only four significant parties at each election; Austria and the FRG developed two-and-a-half party systems; Greece moved towards a two-party system, and Spain towards a multiparty system with a single large party (the Socialists). Even in Italy, the opportunities for the parties to 'colonize' various state and quasi-state bureaucracies strengthened the position of the largest parties (especially the DC, the Socialists, and the Communists), preventing a still more fragmented party system from developing. In Austria the use of a proporz system of appointment (appointing officials to state and quasi-state boards and so on, on the basis of balancing appointments between the parties) helped both to sustain the dominance of the two main parties and to prevent a return to the virtual civil war between the sub-cultures that had been a feature of politics in the 1920s. Nevertheless, major institutional 'engineering' is uncommon, except when a new regime is being established; frequent changes of the rules of the game would be likely to undermine mass and elite commitment to the liberal democratic regime. The apparent losers from the new rules would be much more tempted to resort to unconstitutional means to restore their lost power, thereby threatening the regime's stability. For similar reasons, even changing the electoral system in order to reduce the possibility of electoral defeat is not common; political opponents would be tempted to engage in yet more institutional manipulation once they were returned to office. However, there are some instances in recent decades of this form of 'engineering'. The government of the Canadian province of British Columbia introduced the Alternative Vote system in the early 1950s in a successful attempt to keep the social democratic party (the CCF) from winning provincial elections. In 1951 the French government modified the PR system to reduce the number of seats that the anti-regime Communists and Gaullists would win. The French Socialist government introduced legislation before the 1986 National Assembly elections to substitute a party list form ofPR for the twoballot electoral system; this failed to prevent their opponents from winning a majority (though it did reduce the number of seats lost by the Socialist Party), and subsequently the centre-right government reintroduced the old electoral system.

In 1989 the PASOK government

in Greece adopted PR in a successful effort to prevent its opponents from winning an overall parliamentary majority in the two general elections that year.

In general, though, modifications to PR systems tend to follow changes in the number of parties, rather than being the cause of a rise or fall in the number of parties. Research has shown that changes to more proportional electoral rules occur after the number of parties has already started to increase; similarly the adoption of rules that are less proportional tends to have taken place after the number of parties has started to decrease.s This suggests two conclusions about the connection between electoral systems and party systems in long-established democracies. Radical changes of electoral rules are uncommon; and less radical changes in electoral rules seem to be not the causes of changes in party systems but, at most, factors which extend changes that are happening already. The New Zealand experience is wholly exceptional but is worth mentioning because it exposes the role that chance can sometimes play in institutional reform. The adoption of a German-style Additional Member form ofPR in 1993 was the culmination of a process that had begun a few years earlier when the then Prime Minister misread a cue card during a television broadcast! He promised a referendum on the electoral system-a referendum that neither of the two large parties wanted. Given the Labour and National parties' dominance in the legislature under plurality voting, they could have resisted parliamentary pressure to adopt PR, under which smaller parties will secure much greater representation thereby preventing the re-emergence of single-party majority governments. In addition to the electoral system, there is a whole range of practices and rules which could be modified in an effort to weaken opposition parties. For example, patronage positions in government might be abolished, or the powers of local governments might be reduced if these are strongholds of opposition power. But such reforms may not produce the transformation of the party system that might be expected: other strategies may be open to the parties adversely affected by them, which modify or counteract the effects of the reforms. In Britain in the 1980s the removal of many powers from local governments and the reform of laws governing trade unions by the Conservative government all served to weaken sources of continuing power for the Labour Party. But the effect on the party system was modified by the Labour Party's response in the form of revising its policies and emphasizing moves towards a fully membership-based party; these were arguments that developed more quickly within the party than would have been possible if Labour's organizational base had not been attacked so directly by its opponents. One result of this response was to reduce the possibility of a predominant party system emerging in Britain in the long term. To summarize: the persistence of institutions, and the ability of parties to counteract institutional reform, limit party system change. This does not negate

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the arguments developed in Chapter 6 about the role of institutions in shaping party systems. Nor does it involve denying that party leaders can and do try to 'develop' political cleavages. But it does suggest that once they have been formed, party systems tend to be preserved by the institutional context in which they were formed.

3. The Composition

of the Electorate

There are three main ways in which the electorate of a state can change from one election to another: migration to and from the state; territorial changes in the state, with new lands being added or existing lands being ceded to other states or being granted independence; the death of some voters and the coming of age of others. All three of these ways in which the composition of an electorate may change could possibly help to transform a party system. We examine in turn the likelihood of each of them actually doing so.

Migration
One of the measures of the strength of political parties is their ability to accommodate new citizens, and their particular interests, so that these people do not look to forming new parties to protect those interests. For example, in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Democratic and Republican parties organized and mobilized vast numbers of immigrants (mostly non-English speakers from Central and Southern Europe). Similarly, in both Australia and Canada in the years since 1945 the existing parties have been able to bring into the political process new migrants without disruption (or, at least, direct disruption) to the existing party system. Nevertheless, that in many cases migration has relatively little impact on the party system overall should not lead us to conclude that party systems are always immune from its effects. In particular, two outcomes deserve attention. First, despite the American experience, large-scale immigration (in relation to the size of the existing population) can transform a party system especially when the culture of the newcomers is significantly different from that of older residents. The clearest example of this in contemporary democracies is Israel. The Israeli state was founded in the 1940s by Jewish emigres and refugees from Europe, many of whom had been active in socialist parties in their countries of origin. For more than twenty years this facilitated Labour Party dominance of

government. However, by comparison with other contemporary liberal democracies, Israel continued to be a country of high immigration-its population rising from 716,000 in 1948 to 3.1 million by 1972. Increasingly, its immigrants were Jews from North Africa and the Middle East who shared few of the experiences of European social democracy that had influenced many of the state's founders. These groups could be mobilized by the right-wing parties (which coalesced first to form the Gahal Alliance and then as the Likud list).6 By the mid1970s Likud could obtain well over 30 per cent of the vote, making it a party of equal size to the Labour Party. From that time until the election of 1992 when Likud fared disastrously, Labour was either out of office entirely or was involved in a power-sharing arrangement with Likud. Undoubtedly, the highly proportional electoral system in Israel contributed to the speed of the impact of immigration on the party system, but the sheer scale of the change in population would probably have brought about a new party system irrespective of the electoral rules used. Secondly, immigration can facilitate conflict within societies, especially during times of relatively high unemployment. (This raises issues about the impact of social cleavage change which we examine in a later section, but it is useful to consider the issue also in this context.) Immigrants may be perceived by longerestablished residents as 'taking jobs away' from them. This becomes the source of social division when newcomers are readily distinguishable from others because of their skin colour, religion, language, or customs: white Australians in Earl's Court are much less likely to be targeted by a white English person as the cause of his or her failure to find a job than are those of Afro-Caribbean or South Asian origin. When existing parties do not respond to the backlash against immigrants by embracing the racial politics of the longer-established groups, new parties can arise to develop this cleavage. In the last two decades many European countries have experienced these kinds of social tensions-involving immigrants from North Africa (in Southern Europe), from East and South-Eastern Europe (in Germany and elsewhere in Northern Europe), and from ex-British colonies (Britain). Examples of the effect on party development are the rise of the National Front in France (in the mid1980s) and that of the far-right parties in Germany since unification in 1990. But only in France, and to some extent in Italy, has the scale of voter support so far prompted a partial transformation of the party system itself. Much earlier, in the 1970s, the British National Front had enjoyed increased electoral support, drawing on white opposition to racial minorities, but it never came close to winning any parliamentary seats. America too had its 'nativist' movements, from about 1840 to the 1920s, in reaction to the mass immigration to the country by non-Protestants. For example, the revival of the Ku -Klux -Klan in the early twentieth century was not

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primarily in its earlier anti-Black guise, but as an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic body. The Klan enjoyed electoral success at the state level-including at one point winning the governorship of Colorado-but the structure of American political institutions worked against its becoming a national political party. In recent decades too there has been a 'nativist' reaction against illegal immigration by Latinos from various countries in Central and South America, but the direct effects of this on the party system so far are still rather small.

Territorial change
Only occasionally do liberal democratic states add or shed territory, and relatively small boundary adjustments are likely to have little effect on a party system. But larger shifts of territory may do so, so that it is worth while considering both actual occurrences and potential ones. Of the twenty-three long-standing liberal democracies mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, two (Britain and Germany) have experienced major changes of territory since 1918: Britain. The non-participation of United Ireland Party MPs in the Westminster Parliament' after 1918 and subsequent Irish independence changed the balance in the British party system. With over eighty MPs the Nationalists sometimes held the balance of power between Liberals and Conservatives in the years 1886-1918. Their removal from Westminster in 1921 helped to facilitate the emergence of two-partism in the British Parliament by the 1930s. Germany. As was noted in Chapter 6, the boundaries of the new German state in 1949 resulted in a polity in which Catholics were a far more important minority than they had been previously. In turn, this provided favourable conditions for the formation of a 'Christian' party that embraced both Catholics and Protestants. The party system that emerged was different from the one that would have developed had the Western allies and the Soviet Union reached the kind of deal about a neutral Germany that they were to reach later over Austria. With reunification in 1990, the potential for some change in the FRG party system was opened up because the new voters had rather different values from those in Western Germany, and lived in an economically backward region. This is an issue explored further in Section B. The end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe has led to the creation of some states supposedly based on relatively small, ethnically distinct populations-in the Baltic states, for example, and in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. (In fact, the situation is far more complex than this. Most of the new small states still contain quite large ethnic minorities.) However, the emergence of new, small states may also act as a catalyst for particular territories in ethnically divided societies in the older liberal democracies and increase demands for independence.

At the moment, the state seemingly most in danger of 'breaking up' is Canada, and this example illustrates well how the loss of territory could change a party system radically. Generally, the governing party in Canada has enjoyed strong electoral and elite support in both of the largest provinces, Ontario and Quebec. Bloc Quebecois secured a majority of In 1993, however, the separatist-inclined federal parliamentary seats in Quebec. Independence for Quebec would completely change party strategies for coalition building in the remainder of Canada; it is quite possible that a complex form of multipartism, based partly on regional parties, could emerge in place of the two-and-a-half party system of the present day. Certainly, the removal of Quebec would change the dynamics of the party system, assuming that the rest of Canada remained as one country-an assumption that itself might well be questioned.

So far we have been considering rather unusual changes in the voting population of a state. But all states experience change between elections through the death of some voters and the coming to voting age of younger people. Considerably more than half of the voters who can vote in an election today could not have done so thirty years ago-they would have been too young or they had not been born. Yet, as was observed at the beginning of the chapter, comparatively few party systems changed in the period between the late 1950s and late 1980s. Indeed, the point can be made more broadly than that-the party systems in many democracies are remarkably similar to those that developed in the 1920s following the era of democratization. But very few of the voters from that decade were alive at the end of the 1980s. So why was it that old parties survived the loss of their original voters and did not lose out to new parties? One answer to this is that in some countries, starting up a new party has been extremely difficult-simply because the rules of the electoral game have made it hard to achieve an electoral breakthrough. The threshold to gaining power is too high. Obviously, this argument has force in relation to the United States, or Britain, but it is less plausible in countries which have highly proportional electoral systems (such as the Netherlands). Yet even in these countries large parties survive. More significant is the dual connection-between parties and existing voters, and between the latter and their children. To understand this we should return to the distinction between the three kinds of ways in which people can be linked to political parties (introduced in Chapter 6). In general, the era of democratization saw a weakening of material links between superiors and inferiors within social hierarchies. Instead, building up reliable support for a party depended on exploiting social solidarity or on develOping emotional attachments to parties that were like the attachments that many

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people had to a particular social group. In other words, it was the social solidarity link that provided the best means of tying voters to a party. In some cases-as with most Socialist and Catholic parties-the political party grew out of a broader social movement, organization, or set of attachments. You expressed solidarity with fellow members of the working class by joining the union, taking industrial action when necessary, and identifying with, and voting for, the socialist party. In other cases itwas less specific attachments-to the nation, perhapswhich could stimulate loyalty to the party. You would demonstrate your pride in Britain, perhaps, through your support for the Conservative Party. Sometimes just the need to identify with some institution in the society prompted individuals to seek a connection with a party: this was evident in the United States as much as anywhere, with identification with either of the parties being a means by which a person could express attachment to the American way of life and to American institutions. It was the act of expressing an identity that was important for such Americans; it could be identity with either the Democrats or the Republicans, just as in baseball it could involve rooting for the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, but in both spheres of life it was the fact that you had a 'team' that signified you belonged in that society. In all these ways different parties were able to create loyal electorates-voters who did not have to be convinced about their party's policies or image, but who gave their support to the party because it represented identities that they had of themselves. These identities with particular parties were handed down from one generation to the next, even in families that were rather inactive in politics, except in voting. Children identified with their parents and took on their parents' identity with a political party. To some extent, support for existing parties was self-sustaining; the parties themselves did not have to expend huge resources in making contact with new generations. Political socialization, particularly through the medium of the family, did much of the job for the parties. That job was made easier to the extent that the party identity of the family was reinforced by the same identity in the immediate neighbourhoods and in places of work. Often party identities survived changes in family lifestyles-upwardly mobile working-class families, for example, might well transmit identification with a socialist party to their children. Obviously, though, social mobility was a key factor tending to weaken these ties as children came into contact with other kinds of identification in circumstances that their parents had not experienced. communities-in which the Furthermore, the breakdown of homogeneous dominant identity might be with, say, the working class or with a particular ethnic group-did help to erode the strength of identity people had with the party 'attached' to these identities. The working-class Briton of the 1960s might still claim to be a Labour identifier, and the Irish-American might still claim to be a Democrat, but the declining importance of these identities made it increasingly

likely that they would not actually vote for 'their' party. Their identity with their respective parties involved a much looser kind of relationship than their grandparents had had with political parties. The activities of the parties themselves served to weaken the link between voter and party. In the early twentieth century their social and recreational activities brought together voters and fostered a sense of community within the party. As noted in Chapter 2, increased affluence, and the availability of entertainments that could be enjoyed on an individual basis, reduced the attraction of parties as centres of social life. They could no longer match the alternative recreations available elsewhere. The net result of all this was to weaken social solidarity as a link between voter and party. In its place, image, personality, and issues increasingly became the means by which a party could attract voters to itself. To the extent that this supplanted social solidarity, it made support for a party 'performance related'-a vote would be conditional on the image, personality, or issue corresponding as far as possible to what the voter wanted. Of course, to some extent what someone in one generation wants is learnt from previous generations through socialization experiences within the family. But outside influences are more likely to interrupt the transmission of wants than they are the transmission of identitieswhether they be identities with sports teams or parties. Thus, in general, it would seem that parties now would have a more tenuous link to their supporters than they used to. But does this mean that party systems are now more likely to change? And, if it does, how are we to explain the stability seemingly evident in most party systems from the late 1950s until (at least) the 1980s? These are questions that can be addressed as we turn to examine social cleavages, political values, and issues.

4. Social Cleavages, Political Values, and Issues

A useful starting-point for the analysis is an argument developed by Lipset and Rokkan that we mentioned at the end of Chapter 6, Section A. Having provided an explanation of how party systems developed, they then went on to suggest that cleavages, and hence voter alignments with parties, had become 'frozen'. The bal~nce between parties that had been established by about the 1920s persisted; Identification with a party was handed on from one generation to another. By the mid-1960s-the time at which Lipset and Rokkan were writing-party systems thus tended to reflect social divisions of fifty or so years earlier. There is much to be said for this analysis of the state of party systems. In the mid-1960s the major party families-Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats, Liberals, and so

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on-were the families that had contested elections decades earlier. No new, major types of party had developed in the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s. Clearly, this prompted the question of what would happen to party systems in the future. It is a question with which political scientists are still grappling and to which no single answer has commanded universal support. Broadly speaking, three kinds of answer might be provided: a gradual transformation of parties from representatives of conflicting groups in society into teams of politicians who compete for power for themselves and who must mobilize mass electorates to do so (parties as officeseekers). But these electorates will no longer be firmly divided into distinctive social groups. the development of new lines of division in society that will prompt an organizational response in the form of new parties" or other structures, that represent these interests (new cleavages and new parties). existing cleavages will decline but not disappear completely, and new lines of division may well emerge. Existing parties will survive and their leaders will seek to 'develop' cleavages to obtain power (the persistence of parties). The third answer differ,s from the first in that it sees divisions of interest and identity persisting in societies, and forming the context in which parties must operate. Unlike the second answer, however, the third one sees party leaders in existing parties capable of adapting to mobilize new identities. We now examine each of these answers in turn.

Parties as office-seekers
The idea that existing parties would have a different kind of relationship with mass electorates in the future than they had in the first half of the twentieth century was first mooted in two important interpretative works on political parties written at about the same time as Lipset and Rokkan were concluding their study. One was an essay published in 1966 by Otto Kirchheimer, in which he introduced the concept of the 'catch-all' party.? The other was Leon Epstein's book Political Parties in Western Democracies which was published the following year. 8 Quite independently, they reached broadly similar conclusions about the direction in which parties were moving. Parties were no longer connected to loyal electorates through appeals based on ideology made primarily through organizations associated with the party. Instead, parties were now utilizing different methods of reaching voters and were considerably widening their target. They were now looking to attract voters by whatever means they could and from whatever social groups they could; this is the sense in which they were 'catch-all'. The change involved was an organizational change, but its impact would be to make change in party systems possible. If more parties were now 'casting their net' widely in the pursuit of votes,

the old, frozen cleavages which underlay existing party systems might be weakened and transformations in party systems would be more possible. One attraction of this type of account in the late 1960s was that it meshed well with the notion that in the post-war years ideology was declining in Western political systems. Affluence, and change in socio-economic structures, which meant that manual workers were a declining element in Western societies, were transforming the social world in which parties competed for power. Parties of the left could no longer appeal to the working class to support them through their commitment to socialist ideology; and any bourgeois parties which tried to woo mass electorates on the basis of an ideological appeal to the free market would be equally unsuccessful, since the experience of economic depression in the 1930s had undermined such a vision. If electorates were no longer as divided as they had been, parties could try to appeal to as many different voters as possible by diluting whatever ideological commitments they had. Moreover, as societies became more secular, and as regional and ethnic divisions continued to decline, so this trend to 'catch-all' parties would become yet more evident. Power within parties would pass to the leaderships who would use modern electronic technology to appeal directly to voters; party members would be largely irrelevant. Parties would be teams of leaders seeking office for themselves; in doing so they would develop whatever images and policy promises were necessary to maximize their chance of winning office. This kind of 'loose' connection between voters and parties would provide for change in party systems during the period of transformation from old -style to newstyle parties. But, according to Epstein, if not Kirchheimer, European parties would become more like American parties, and in doing so the need for new parties would be much reduced once the new system was in place. The reason for this is that these new kinds of parties would be so adaptable that any failure to reach mass electorates would result in the party changing its image and its policies; the enhanced ability of the parties to respond to what the electorate wanted would make it difficult for new parties to gain a foothold. As in the United States, the very adaptability of the major parties would mean that there was no opening for other parties. This type of account of party system transformation rests on four assumptions: the the the the are weakening of pre-existing cleavages in Western societies; absence of new social cleavages around which parties could mobilize; reduced power of ideology in mobilizing mass electorates; ability of parties to transform themselves organizationally, so that they able to implement 'catch-all' strategies. all four assumptions are open to

In the light of experience since the mid-1960s challenge.

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Are existing social cleavages weakening? Certainly the decline of the class cleavage is evident in most countries as social structure has changed. Nevertheless, the weakening of class seems to have permitted even older cleavages (such as regional and ethnic divisions) to re-emerge as foci of discontent about economic decline and so on. (Perhaps the most extreme instance of this was Belgium where linguistic divisions intensified as class receded in importance.) There has not been a general move towards homogeneous, non-divided societies. The particular experience of the years 1945-70 in which that social transformation did seem possible can now be seen as an unusual one. Are there new social cleavages around which parties could mobilize? This issue will be considered in greater detail shortly. For now it should simply be noted that in the 1970s considerable attention was paid to the question of whether 'postmaterial' and 'lifestyle' issues-such as environmental concerns-were developing among sections of the middle class in ways that constituted a cleavage in Western societies, dividing these groups from those dependent on maximizing economic growth. The possibility that this might constitute a new line of cleavage does cast doubt on the 'parties-as-office-seekers' model of party system change. Is ideology less important in mobilizing mass electorates? The rise of 'New Right' ideas in the Anglo-American democracies in the 1980s (and especially Britain, New Zealand, and the United States) undermined the argument that parties generally were abandoning ideological appeals to mass electorates. In place of the consensual politics of the 1950s and 1960s these countries experienced party campaigning that was geared around a particular ideology-that of the unfettered market in most areas of social life. The ideological battleground was somewhat different than in the 1930s, but the general argument, that the post-war years marked an end to ideology, cannot be sustained. Have parties been able to transform themselves organizationally? Many party systems now do have some 'catch-all' parties-Belgium being perhaps one of the few exceptions. These parties have been able to utilize organizational forms-a high degree of centralization, weak membership control, and so on-necessary for practising a 'catch-all' electoral strategy. But other kinds of parties survivepartly because the 'catch-all' model does not seem to be all-conquering, and partly because traditions of membership involvement, or a history of factionalism, may prevent the required organizational structures from being adopted. There is something to the argument of the 1960s that 'catch -all' parties were a model for the future-but only 'something'. By the 1980s it was becoming clear that these parties were nc.t the only model that could function in liberal democracies. As was noted in Chapter 3, by 1980 Epstein himself recognized, in his

introduction to a reissued edition of Political Parties in Western Democracies, that he might have overstated the likely trends in Europe.9 Correspondingly, there was not the major change in West European party systems that a full conversion to 'catch-all' parties would have brought about.

New cleavages and new parties

In the 1970s increasing attention was paid to the development of new kinds of values that were evident in advanced industrial societies. In a well-known study based on survey data compiled at the beginning of the decade, Ronald Inglehart drew a distinction between 'material' and 'post-material' values-the former prioritized economic and physical security, while the latter prioritized participation and freedom of speech.1 0 This distinction captured important dimensions of political conflict in the 1960s-associated with opposition to the Vietnam war in the United States (and elsewhere), with the student revolt in France in 1968, and so on-but it did not embrace all the sources of conflict that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and which seemed to fall outside traditional class, religious, linguistic, and territorial cleavage patterns. On the one hand, there was evidence of sources of division within Western societies that centred on 'material' values but which were not embraced by the traditional class framework. In particular, conflict centred on the role of the state in providing for economic and social well-being. Societies, it was argued, were becoming divided between those wholly dependent on the private sector for their livelihoods and those who, directly or indirectly, depended on some form of state intervention for theirs. This cross-cut old-style class politics in that a significant minority of the middle class were either state employees, or relied on contracts awarded by the state, or were employed by firms that relied on grants or subsidies from the state. Related to, though separable from, this source of division was another one-between those for whom there was no alternative to the welfare state if their needs were to be met and those who would be able to meet some of their needs through private provision. On the other hand, there was evidence of new social movements mobilizing around issues that were not traditional material ones, but which could not be fitted neatly into Inglehart's 'post-material' category. Environmentalism did not do so because it posited a notion of physical security (involving not wasting nonrenewable resources) that was entirely absent from older political debates. It was even more difficult to fit movements based on gender into a post-material category, since many of the issues raised by feminists were precisely those of economic rights and physical security. While there was variation from state to state as to the form these movements and issues took, as well as differences in their relative importance, there was little

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doubt of their growing significance in dividing sections of the public. What was less clear was whether any of them represented an entirely new line of social cleavage akin to class, or whether they were less 'fundamental'-in two senses. First, in that they were not likely to persist for as long; for example, was economic dependence on the state something that could be marginalized by New Right policies which eliminated many programmes and subsidies? Secondly, in that they did not divide such large segments of society as the older cleavages had done-in brief, the question might be asked as to whether either environmentalism or feminism, for example, was merely the politics of a relatively small minority of the middle class. Assessing just how fundamental these new issues and divisions are is a difficult task-partly because there is disagreement as to what would count as evidence of their persistence. But, certainly, the na'ive New Right belief that reducing state activities would weaken support for state intervention has not been borne out. Cross-national survey data indicate that, with respect to many aspects of state welfare provision and state intervention in the economy, 'public attitudes ... were (and are) out of sympathy with the prevailing international mood of politicians and governments in favour of market-led provision'. 11 While support for some kinds of intervention has declined in many countries, support for other forms of intervention has been maintained or increased. Even, or perhaps especially, in those countries like Britain and the United States which had the greatest experience of New Right policies, support for a positive state role has not diminished, and remains a source of division between mass electorates. The case that such a cleavage was not a fundamental one has not been disproved, though neither has it been proved. The resolution of the question was made more difficult by the fact that the organizational forms adopted by many activists in the new social movements reflected antagonism to traditional kinds of political organization. Political parties resembling the ones that arose in response to class conflict were regarded with suspicion-partly because of doubts about what they might achieve and partly because of a commitment to forms of participation that were believed to be impossible within the hierarchies characteristic of parties. Participation should be direct and leaders should be instructed by followers. Politics was to be conducted through social movements, and not through parties. The West German Greens started out as a movement, and its decisions to become more 'party-like', such as running candidates in elections, were highly controvers~al within the movement. Similarly within feminist movements there was often dISagreement as to whether traditional electoral politics should be embraced at all. It remains, therefore, a matter of some speculation as to how much an inroad into existing party systems these movements would have made, and might still make, had their orientation been more towards the conventional mobilization of

mass electorates. Except in West Germany, where the Greens did gain as much as 8.3 per cent of the vote in 1987, Green parties hitherto have usually obtained little more than 5 per cent of the vote in elections to national parliaments. In response to the new social movements, existing parties have sought to capitalize on the issues by adopting environmental and equal opportunity policies, promoting the candidacies of women, and so on-thereby preserving existing party systems. The central problem of movement politics-how to preserve activism during periods when an issue 'cools' in public attention-has meant that the new organizational forms these movements introduced have not supplanted the kinds of organizations used by parties. The answer to the question of how 'fundamental' are the lines of social division exposed by new social movements cannot be answered directly, therefore, by looking at change in the party system. But there is little reason to believe that the kinds of issues the movements have thrown up can be resolved in the way that many narrowly drawn issues can be. Moreover, there is little evidence to support the claim that these movements are the politics of small minorities. On the contrary, changes in class structure and social practices are likely to make at least some of the values espoused by the movements attractive to a growing proportion of the population. But, for our purposes, the important point is that existing parties have displayed considerable capacity to respond to new divisions, and this suggests the plausibility of the third approach identified earlier, and it is to this that we now turn.

The persistence of parties

The third approach to the future of liberal democratic party systems sees both social cleavages and the traditional style of political party persisting. It does not, though, see social conflict and parties as locked in some kind of 'time warp'. It re~ognizes that what divides people will change-but its argument is that societies will always be divided, and the diminishing of old class alignments does not a.ltert.hat; all that alters is how they are divided. Moreover, while many old parties Willretain their position, some will not; some new parties will arise and some part~ systems will thereby be transformed. But the key point to be emphasized h~re ISthat parties will not generally be superseded by new forms of'looser', more dlrectly partICipatory, organizations. .. th This approach starts from the kind of assumption about divisions in society . at Schattschneider made (which was discussed in Chapter 6). Societies are split In a numb er 0 f d'f" . ., o . I lerent ways; sometimes these cleavages do dIsappear, whIle d~er~ ~nse, but the central task of party leaders remains that of trying to get their finltlOn of what is the most important division (or divisions) accepted by Voters.That is their route to political office and power. The problem with the

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'catch-all' model of party is that it does not seek to divide people on lines that correspond to social divisions; it may succeed in the short term in mobilizing voters, but in the longer term large numbers of them may exit to parties that are 'exploiting' cleavages. The more open a party system is to the formation of new parties or to the splintering of old parties, the greater the constraints on parties taking on a purely 'catch-all' form. This approach recognizes that long-standing divisions-such as ethnic, regional, and linguistic ones-can intensify, and have done so in countries like Belgium and Canada. And it recognizes that changes in social structure also provide opportunities for parties to 'exploit'. For example, the emergence of conflicting interests within the middle class, between those 'dependent' on the state and those whose livelihood is independent of it, would permit the redefinition of cleavages by parties and would provide an incentive for at least one of them to attempt that redefinition. Moreover, this approach can take account of the fact that particular policies can help to 'fix' cleavages. A good example of this is the cold war, which had a major impact on the party systems of the liberal democracies. The advent of the cold war created still more divisions within the European left: the potential for co-operation between Socialists and Communists became even more restricted. Moreover, it provided opportunities for other kinds of parties to define the fundamentallines of political division to their own advantage. The classic example of this is the Italian Christian Democrats. Its electoral strength came from the fact that it was anti-Communist but also a party of the centre, rather than a conventional right-of-centre party. Although its support was eroding through the 1970s and 1980s, and although it was a highly factionalized party, it retained its position as the largest party, and one that had to be in any Italian government. The ending of the cold war removed much of its raison d' etre: there was no longer an international Communist threat, and the already much modified PCI was trying to convert itself into an orthodox social democratic party (the PDS). The Communist/anti-Communist cleavage did not matter any more, even though some of the issues that traditionally divided left and right remained salient. The DC's electoral support declined-the party lost to the regionally based Northern League in the north, and to other right-of-centre parties elsewhere. In the 1994 elections it even had a new name, the Popular Party, but the bloc of parties it led came a poor third behind the left and right blocs of parties. The Italian example is useful in showing how the third approach to future party system development can take account of both the potential for change and stability in party systems. Some party systems may undergo extensive chan~e, because their cleavage structure, institutional structure, and policy 'underpll1ning' is itself transformed. But where this transformation is less pronounce~, existing parties-because they have the advantage of being parties already 111

existence-are likely to adapt themselves to new circumstances; they will seek to redefine the lines of political division to keep themselves in power, and this will restrict the opportunities for new parties, and for new rivals to parties (such as social movement organizations).

Immediately after the elections in 1981 it was plausible to argue that the political institutions of the Fifth Republic had completed the transformation of the complex French party system. There was now, it might have been argued, a two-party tendency in France, and with the Socialist victory in 1981 the system could be said to be in balance. The left was the equal of the right in terms of electoral competitiveness. The complex patterns of party politics of the Fourth Republic had given way to something more 'orderly'-not unlike the German two-and-a-half party system, or the 'classic' British two-party model of the 1935-64 era. The problem with such an analysis is that within a matter of two or three years it was no longer plausible! In particular, the rise of the National Front suggested that the dualist tendencies imposed by presidential competition were not nearly as strong as the 1981 election suggested. The far right in France had been marginalized since the end of the Algerian War in 1962. Its reappearance in the mid-1980s provides further evidence against arguments that social cleavages would disappear with increased prosperity or that the 'catch -all' party would become the dominant party model. The National Front had the usual right-wing policies on issues like law and order, trade unions, and on social matters (such as abortion). But it was its policies on immigration ~nd on the role in French society of non-white minorities that provided the Impetus for its surge in support from the early 1980s. Its first electoral success nationall Y was 111eI'ectlOns to t h e European Parliament in 1984. As elsewhere . (such as' 111B'ntam m 1989 with the strong performance by the Greens) the . . . E uropean elections could provide an important platform for a minor party' voters ~re likely to treat these elections as less 'serious' than elections to a nat'ional parh~ment) and may indulge themselves by voting for parties that they would not Vote Into th elr own par l'lament, at least at that time. The 11 per cent of the vote .

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the FN obtained in 1984 gave them a platform for contesting the 1986 National Assembly elections, which were fought under a system of proportional representation. That year the FN won 9.7 per cent of the vote. Then, in the first round of the presidential election of 1988, the party's leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen', won 14.4 per cent of the vote, running ahead of the Communist candidate and only just behind the UDF candidate. The Front lost seats in the subsequent Assembly because of the reversion to a second-ballot electoral system, but by then it had established itself as a medium-sized party. Once PR had been replaced by the second-ballot system for Assembly elections, the FN posed major problems for the RPR and the UDF, and to a lesser extent for the PS also, in relation to electoral strategy. None of these other parties wanted to be seen as courting, or even relying on, the support ofFN voters in the second round of balloting for the presidency or the Assembly. The second-ballot system provides a strong incentive for a party to build alliances with other parties that will persuade the latter's supporters to switch their vote when their firstchoice party has been eliminated. However, the 'mainstream' parties did not wish to be seen as the beneficiaries of switching by FN voters, but neither did they wish their opponents to benefit from this. Consequently, devising electoral strategies became a far more complex matter. The rise of the FN prompts the question of just how different the French party system is from the party system of the Fourth Republic. Allowing for the different state institutional structures, the enormous changes in French society, the organizational consolidation of the major parties, and so on, it is interesting to note at least some resemblance between the party systems in the two eras. For purposes of comparison, the 1993 elections are not very useful because of the huge voter backlash against the unpopular Socialist government; the 1988 Assembly elections are a more fertile source for comparison. Compare the share of the vote obtained by parties in the last election in the Fourth Republic (1956) with the 1988 Assembly result (Table 7.2). Obviously, it is no longer a party system 'driven' by the extremes, as it was in the 1950s; it does not exhibit polarized multipartism, and that does represent a sea change in French politics. But for all the dualist pressures imposed by a semipresidential system, this is not a party system that bears much resemblance to those in Britain or Germany. Looking simply at the distribution of votes between parties, and that can be very misleading, the French system perhaps looks more like the complex multipartism of Finland than anything else. This suggests both the limits and also the potential of constitutional 'engineering' in relation to party systems: party systems are not simply the product of the interaction of different social cleavages, but neither can a particular type of party system be 'manufactured' merely by selecting the appropriate set of political institutions. Besides the rise of the FN the other great subject of debate about change in the

Table 7.2. The percentage of the popular vote won by each of the parties in France at the general elections of 1956 and 1988

Communists Socialists Radicals and Allies MRP Conservative Moderates Gaullists Right-Wing Extremists

and Independents

25.7 15.2 15.2 } 11.1 14.4 4.4 13.3

11.3 34.7
UDF 18.5

2.9 19.2
FN 9.7

French party system stems from the crushing defeat of the PS in 1993. One popular argument was that it was a blow from which the left could not recover and certainly, the resulting intra-party conflict suggested the Socialists would hav~ great difficulty in winning the presidential election of 1995. But it is a mistake to see a landslide defeat as necessarily prompting a transformation in the party system, or even having strong effects in the medium term. Both the British Conservatives in 1945 and the American Democrats in the presidential election of 1972 suffered electoral defeats on a scale that prompted commentators at the time to speak of a new era in electoral history; but in both cases electoral victories for these parties a few years later produced very different interpretations of how the political universe had actually changed.

Germany
The stable two-and-a-half party established fairly quickly in the early years of the FRG has been threatened by two successive developments since the end of the 1970s: the rise of the Greens and the reunification of the country. It would be plausible, though somewhat misleading, to see the rise of the Greens '" hi' . . as ongmatmg w 0 ly m the development of new lines of social division WIthm th FRG d' . . h . . . . e , IVlSlOnst at the eXlstmg partIes could not take account of. It is mIsleading because at least part of the impetus for the formation of the Greens came from t' . h' h enslOns WIt m t e SPD. Thanks to the transformation of its policy programme at Bad Godesberg in 1959, the SPD had become the model of policy moderation among late 1960s . I d' West European socialist parties. The political turmoil of the . . -me u mg 0pposltlOn among the young to the Vietnam war-made party manag ement more d'ffi cu I1. A ft er 1969 the SPD was the major partner in a I

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coalition government and this exacerbated the problem. The resignation of Willy Brandt as Chancellor in 1974, and his replacement by the more right-wing Helmut Schmidt, then added to the party's problems as a credible party of the left. But in a state where there was a legal ban on the Communist Party, and in which the 5 per cent 'threshold' of the electoral system made forming new parties difficult, those on the left of the party had no alternative party to which to 'exit'. This explains part of the attraction of new social movements as foci of attention for the disaffected left in the FRG. The Greens began life as a movement, then ran candidates as 'Alternative Lists' in 1977, before taking on the form of a party-albeit a party with a different kind of internal structure-in 1980. They contested the federal election that year and first won representation in the Bundestag after the 1983 elections. Critical to their growth in the early-to-mid 1980s was the intensification of the cold war, and the consequent fear of a nuclear war in which Germany would be the first battleground. For those with pacifist views in the SPD the Greens provided an attractive alternative. Of course, the Greens cannot be understood simply as a splintering from the SPD. They were able to draw support from those who had not been SPD voters through their appeal on environmental as well as peace issues. They were able to 'tap' support on new issues, primarily of concern to the middle class. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that much of the support for the Greens was at the expense of the SPD. In four elections between 1969 and 1980 the SPD received between 42.6 and 45.8 per cent of the total vote; in the 1983, 1987, and 1990 elections it obtained 38.2,37.0, and 33.5 per cent. The rise of the Greens contributed to a reversal of the general trend in the FRG, from 1949 to the mid-1970s, towards greater two-party dominance in the electorate. This becomes apparent when looking at the share of the vote received by the CDU/CSU and SPD since 1949 (Table 7.3). Together with evidence of voter attitudes towards parties, it constitutes part of a case for suggesting there is some voter dealignment in Germany. For example, in 1972 55 per cent of Germans claimed to identify either 'strongly' or 'very strongly' with a political party. By 1991 only 35 per cent of the population in the former West Germany made this claim. 12 However, the extent of dealignment should not be exaggerated-most Germans still identify with a party, and this is a regime which has linked parties very closely to the operations of the state so that they have considerable resources with which to combat the effects of declining partisan identification. One approach to the reunified Germany is to argue that the absorption of East Germany will result in the older parties making similar alliances with voters as they did in West Germany. The result would be, after a short transitional period, a party system nationally like that in Western Germany. There are several objections to this argument, however. One is that the enormous gap in economic

Table 7.3. The percentage of the popular vote won by the CDU/ CSU and the SDP in general elections in Germany since 1949 1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 1969 1972 60.2 74.0 82.0 81.5 86.9 88.8 90.7 1976 1980 1983 1987 1990 1994 91.2 87.4 87.0 81.3 77.3 (80.0 in the former West Germany) 79.0

development between the two regions may produce strains within voting alliances in the West as well as producing support for new parties in the East. One manifestation of this in the early 1990s was growing support for parties on the extreme right, especially in the East. Moreover, the initial alignments of voters with parties in the East produced a reversal of the traditional class alignment. 13 A majority of the working class supported the CDU, while white-collar state employees gave disproportionate support to the SPD. To the extent that the parties try to build on their initial electoral coalitions in the East, they may end up by constructing rather different kinds of parties there. Such a development would provide the potential for fragmentation in the party system later on.

Broadly speaking, Britain remains a two-party system. That having been said, the dynamics of the system have changed over the last fifty years, particularly the role played by third parties in that period. Consider first the share of the vote obtained by the Conservative and Labour parties (as a proportion of the total vote) in general elections since the Second World War (Table 7.4). The most striking feature about this data is the difference in the performance of the two parties before and after 1974. Before that date the lowest share of the vote they received between them is 87.5 per cent (in 1964); from 1974 onwards their highest combined share is only 80.9 per cent (in 1979). This suggests that a major shift in voter support for the two parties occurred during the early 1970s. While this view is substantially correct, the situation is rather more complicated than that and it is possible to identify five distinct phases in the post-war party system: 1945-58, 1958-71/2, 1971/2-9, 1979-87, and 1987 onwards.

Phase 1-1945-1958.

This is the 'classic' two-party phase. The share of the vote received by third parties, especially the Liberals, collapsed. The Labour and

Table 7.4. The percentage of the popular vote won by the Conservative and Labour parties in general elections in Britain since 1945 1945 1950 1951 1955 1959 1964 1966 88.1 89.6 96.8 96.1 93.2 87.5 89.8 1970 1974 (F) 1974(0) 1979 1983 1987 1992 89.4 75.1 75.1 80.9 70.0 73.0 76.3

called-during the turmoil of the miners' strike-meant that an election was held in circumstances more like those of by-elections, and the vote for the two large parties collapsed. (Labour received 5.8 per cent less of the vote than in 1970, the Conservatives 8.5 per cent less.)

Conservative governments came to accept many of the same policy objectives and policies. In general, the Conservatives acted as a 'catch-all' party, but Labour retained a formal commitment to certain policies, including nationalization, which indicated that it did not fully accept the 'catch-all' approach. Voter attachment to the two main parties was high, and the vote was evenly divided between them. Evidence of low electoral volatility is found in the behaviour of voters at by-elections: defeat for the party which already held the seat was comparatively rare. However, the extent of two-partism in this era can be exaggerated; one of the reasons for the depressed Liberal share of the vote was their strategy in the 1950s of contesting only a relatively small number of parliamentary seats. This makes the two-party dominance seem rather more secure than it really was. The symbolic end of this period is the Torrington by-election of 1958 when the Liberal Party captured a seat previously held by the Conservatives.

Phase 4-1979-1987. At the time, the 1979 election might have been thought of as marking the end to this period of volatility, but it did not because of what was happening internally within the two main parties. The Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher embarked on a radical 'New Right' policy agenda, cautiously at first, which could command the support of only 40 to 45 per cent of the voters. The party won four elections in succession, but at each election its share of the vote fell slightly-from 43.9 per cent in 1979 to 41.9 per cent in 1992. While the Conservatives moved to the right after 1979, Labour was engaged in fierce intra-party conflicts, with the left gaining increased power in the years up to the 1983 election. In 1981 some right-wing Labour MPs and supporters split with the party to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP) which contested the 1983 and 1987 elections in alliance with the Liberals. Inter-election voter volatility persisted, but the anti-Conservative vote at general elections was divided between Labour and the Alliance, thereby presenting the Conservatives with huge parliamentary majorities. Phase 5-1987 onwards. Between 1983 and 1987 the Labour Party had started to
reverse its left-wing image, and this process accelerated after the 1987 election. Although the party's share of the vote increased in both 1983 and 1987, it failed to remove the third party threat (from the now merged Social and Liberal Democrats) in by-election campaigns. The Liberal Democrats remained a significant party of protest against the government. More importantly, in the 1992 general election the Labour Party with a moderate programme could still not erode the third party vote sufficiently to win office; it received 2.6 per cent of the vote less than it had obtained in its 1979 defeat. Overall, the years between 1945 and the early 1990s witnessed three major changes within the framework of a two-party system. First, a transformation in the British social structure weakened the competitiveness of the Labour Party. Unlike the Swedish Social Democrats, Labour had never been very successful in mobilizing mass electorates outside its base in the organized working class, the families of trade union members. As the working class declined in numbers, the Labour Party could no longer compete on equal terms with the Conservatives. Its move leftwards in the early 1980s made worse its problem in voter mobilization. Secondly, from the late 1950s voter volatility increased-first in by-elections and then, by the early 1970s, in general elections as well. Thirdly, the role of the third parties changed. In the period immediately after 1945 they were completely

Phase 2-1958-1971/2. During this second phase there were periodic surges by
third parties (the Liberals and the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists) in byelections. Anti-government voting behaviour in by-elections became far more common; during Conservative governments these protests frequently involved high levels of voting for the Liberals who captured parliamentary seats from time to time. While the Liberals' share of the vote increased from its very low levels of the mid-1950s, it was unable to sustain its inter-election performances. Easily its best result was in 1964 when it obtained over 11 per cent of the total vote, but its vote share then fell at each of the next two elections.

Phase 3-1971/2-1979. In the early 1970s electoral volatility at by-elections increased even more, and with a Conservative government in office the Liberals became an important conduit for protest. The economic and industrial problems of these years made the governing parties highly unpopular. Moreover, the effects of the numerical decline of the working class were beginning to erode Labour's core support. The particular conditions in which the February 1974 election was

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marginal, but later they became vehicles of voter protest. Undoubtedly, but for the plurality voting system, this would have resulted in 'hung' parliaments after most elections. As it was, third parties held the balance of parliamentary power only once-between 1977 and 1979.

Of all the party systems in the liberal democratic world Japan's was perhaps the one that displayed the least change-at least until 1993. While there was a splintering from the LDP in 1976 with the formation of the New Liberal Club, and the party's share of the vote declined over the period as a whole, the Japanese party system of the late 1980s looked remarkably similar to the system at the end of the 1950s. Although there was multipartism during the American occupation after 1945, a predominant party (the LDP) emerged with the fusion of two large parties, the Democrats and the Liberals, in 1955. We have already noted some of the weakness of identity with the social factors which might explain this pattern-the working class and the relatively homogeneous nature ofJapanese society. But it is to the institutions surrounding the Japanese party system that attention must be given when explaining the rigidity of the system until its transformation in 1993. Three features of the electoral system are worth mentioning in this regard. The first was the 'passive' gerrymandering of electoral districts. In any electoral system that uses territorially defined constituencies ('places'), how the boundaries are drawn will affect the chances a party has of winning a seat. When the governing party can control the process of drawing the boundaries, it may be able to perpetuate its hold over power by drawing boundaries most favourable to it. This is known as gerrymandering. It was practised in many American states before the 1960s, and in the 1980s it was a device which kept in office the right-wing government in the Australian state of Queensland. In Japan it was not the overt form of gerrymandering that was evident, but rather a failure to redraw electoral boundaries to reflect shifts in the distribution of populations. Japan was one of the countries that suffered most from this kind of 'passive' gerrymandering. Electoral boundaries were left as they were, and fairly quickly this led to an overrepresentation of rural and semi-rural areas and an underrepresentation of urban areas. Through its subsidization of agriculture, the LDP acquired a loyal rural electorate which helped it to stay in office. The second feature of the electoral system was that candidates were often elected with only 15 or 20 per cent of the vote. Since voters had only one vote each in multi-member districts, candidates required little more than strong minority support to win election.

Together with the third feature, the local and personal nature of the contests, this made it difficult for any dissatisfaction with the governing party to be translated into change in the balance of power between parties. (Or rather, it was more difficult than in most other types of electoral system.) Even when there was great popular dissatisfaction with the LDP, most LDP candidates, especially incumbents, could organize sufficient electoral support through their own campaign organizations (koenkai) to win. That at least some of the support for a candidate was 'personal' (and not support for a party) helped to protect the party from the consequences of unpopularity. In this respect the Japanese Diet was not unlike the US Congress where opinion polls over the last two decades have revealed great dissatisfaction with its work. At the same time more than 95 per cent of congressional incumbents have usually won re-election, so that popular dissatisfaction does not produce much change in the legislature's composition. (The ability of the incumbent to win re-election stems from being able to blame others for the failure of the institution, and from generating a 'personal' vote for himself or herself.) The 1990 election was the last one fought under the old order, even though the subsequent election, in 1993, was contested under the same electoral rules. Continuing corruption scandals in the LDP finally produced strains within the party that proved too great even for it. An anti-corruption party, the Japan New Party, was formed in 1992, and before the 1993 election two further parties, formed by former LDP politicians (the Japan Renewal Party and the New Party Harbinger), added to an increasingly complex party system. Between them these three parties obtained 21 per cent of the vote in 1993. All three entered the sevenparty coalition government after the election-joining the SDJP, the Democratic Socialists, Komeito, and the small Shaminen party. Given the role of institutions in bolstering the LDP before 1993, it is not surprising that the coalition government formed after the election gave high priority to institutional reform. Alongside, for example, proposals to weaken the power of bureaucrats, whose links with the LDP and industrialists had been the basis of the old order in post-war Japan, was reform of the electoral system. Legislation was introduced, replacing the semi-proportional system with a combined system of plurality voting in single-member constituencies for 300 seats with the remaining 200 seats allocated using PR. Not only would this make it more difficult for the LDP to win parliamentary majorities should it return to the level of electoral support it had in the 1970s and 1980s, but it would make it far more difficult for the heavily factionalized LDP to practise the level of party discipline that it had in that era. New electoral boundaries and single-member constituencies would likely weaken the glue that held the factions to each other. For the new parties in government, reducing the base ofLDP power in this way was essential for the preservation of their influence in the longer term. Even after

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the 1993 election the LDP remained much the largest party in the Diet. The coalition government was always in danger of breaking up, partly because of the number of parties it embraced and partly because of the range of party ideologies represented in it-from the Socialists to parties that had broken away from the LDP.Without institutional reform, the LDP would have opportunities on the fall of the government to make deals with particular party groupings and to restore the status quo ante. It was to prevent this that the government gave such a high priority to changing the rules of the 'political game'.

identifiers or not-were forms this took:

likely to alter the support they gave. There were two

switching from voting, say, for a Democrat at one presidential election to

voting for a Republican at the next one;

'ticket splitting', in which at the same election a voter would vote for the

Republican candidate for one office (say, the presidency) and for a Democrat for another office (say, the US Senate). The period from the mid-1960s to the present provides considerable evidence of the effects of this behaviour. For example, there have been far more electoral 'landslides' in presidential elections (1964, 1972, 1984) than in earlier eras. Of the eight presidential elections after 1960, five (1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988) saw the concurrent election of a Republican president and a House of Representatives with a solid Democratic majority. This behaviour gave rise to the argument that the United States was experiencing electoral dealignment. Voters were no longer very much attached to parties per se and would vote on the basis of their attraction to a particular candidate-this produced the higher levels of both vote switching between elections and 'ticket splitting' at the same election. It marks a major change in the American party system. Previously the United States had displayed a remarkably consistent pattern of party stability which lasted for about thirty years at a time; there would then follow a relatively short period of electoral turbulence during which the party system would realign. These realignments had occurred in the late 1820s and the early 1830s, when the one-party dominance of the Democratic-Republicans was replaced by a two-party system pitting the Democrats against a new party, the Whigs. the mid -1850s, when the Whigs collapsed and a new party, the Republicans, arose, mobilized initially around the issue of slavery. After the Civil War (1861-5) there was an era of intense electoral competition. the mid-1890s, when the Republican Party became the dominant party nationally, and most of the states became uncompetitive-the Democrats dominating the South, the Republicans the rest of the country. the early 1930s,when the Democrats became the dominant party nationally and when party competition started to increase again in all areas except the South. Given this pattern, it would have been predicted that a realignment would take place at the end of the 1960s. Instead, the weakening of the link between parties and leaders produced a different pattern: the Republicans becoming the dominant party in presidential elections with the Democrats remaining the majority party at other levels of electoral competition, including elections for the Congress. However, there remains the question of why the earlier kind of pattern should

The parties in the United States provided the model for the future of European parties in Epstein's Political Parties in Western Democracies. American parties already had the organizational structures necessary for them to appeal to wide sections of the public. The politics of the neighbourhood, in which precinct captains who were tied into the patronage of party machines cajoled their friends and neighbours into voting for their party, had given way to a different kind of relationship between party leaders and voters. It was a relationship that relied on making direct appeals to voters through the media (especially television) and on learning about voter preferences through such devices as opinion polling. But at the time Epstein was writing this book most Americans still identified with a particular party, and that identification was the most important factor determining how they would vote. Within just a few years this was no longer true. One of the first signs of a changing relationship between parties and voters was the increase in the number of people who claimed to identify themselves as 'Independents', rather than as Democrats or Republicans, from about 10 per cent of the population to about 30 per cent. However, this was not quite the great transformation that it seemed to be at the time. Studies revealed that many of those who now called themselves 'Independents' behaved in the voting booth more like those Republicans or Democrats who claimed to identify strongly with their party than those who described themselves as 'weak' party identifiers; they tended to vote for candidates of one party much of the time. Unlike 'Independents' previously, who had no political 'leanings' and who were often illinformed about politics, the new 'Independents' were usually quite wellinformed and had fairly consistent patterns of voting behaviour. Clearly, what it meant to be a party identifier had changed. The really significant development in the American party system was not the increase in so-called 'Independents', but a different connection between party identification and voting behaviour. Increasingly voters-whether party

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have developed in the first place. Why should the American party system have collapsed about every thirty years? In no other country do we find such regularity in shifts in the party system, so they can yield few direct clues as to the source of this instance of American 'exceptionalism'. One clue to a possible explanation of the phenomenon can be found in the work of Walter Dean Burnham who sees it as the result of the tension between a highly developed economic system and an underdeveloped political system.14 The dynamic economy produces social divisions to which the political system cannot respond adequately; the divisions build up and produce volatile electoral behaviour, often in the form of support for third parties. Vote switching at key elections produces a realignment in the party system. That new system is then able to satisfy sufficient voters so that electoral volatility is then damped down. It remains stable until once more new social forces start producing demands to which the existing party system cannot respond. Unfortunately, Burnham does not provide a detailed account of the argument. One way in which it could be developed further, though, is to examine the impact of a fragmented institutional structure-resulting from federalism, the separation of powers, and so on-on the socio-economic system. Compared with most European systems of government, it is difficult for the American federal government (or any level of government in the United States) to respond to socio-economic crises, because power is so decentralized. Response is only forthcoming once the stability of the party system has been shaken. The more centralized European polities have neither such dynamic social forces with which to contend nor the problem of co-ordinating decision-making that is endemic in the United States. Consequently, this is a pattern of party system change not seen outside the United States.