Identities, cleavages and European party systems

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Identities, cleavages and European party systems

• Alistair Cole

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Is there a European party system and does it
matter?

• How important are partisan, national
  institutional, ideological factors therein?
• Do different types of party perform different
  functions within the political system? Do
  national populist and extreme-left parties have
  more in common than with social-democratic
  parties? Should we adopt different critiera to
  compare types of party?
• How best can we illustrate these arguments do we
  need to compare all parties claiming to belong to
  a certain family? Or ought we to focus on one or
  two case studies?

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Lipset and Rokkan

• Cleavages are social or value-based conflicts.
  The term cleavage structure refers to the main
  lines of political division within a society.
• In their classic work, Lipset and Rokkan identify
  three main sources of division within European
  societies society
• Anticlericalism Republic/Church , from the
  French revolution and subsequent wave of
  anti-clericalism across Europe (eighteenth)
• Centre-Periphery, from the imperfect process of
  state formation across Europe in the nineteenth
  century (19th century)
• Social class, inherited from the industrial
  revolution and the conflict between capital and
  labour, which largely structured 20th century
  politics.
• For Lipset and Rokkan most of the key cleavages
  in place in the 1960s were in place by the late
  nineteenth century their thesis on the frozen
  character of cleavages remains very influential.
  Different countries can be characterised by the
  importance of one, or more than one cleavage
  and this cleavage structure has had a very
  important effect in structuring the party system.

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Cross-cutting cleavages

• These cleavages could stand alone where there is
  only one line of cleavage the normal or
  residual social class one then this acts as the
  fundamentally structuring element.
• But other cleavages might cut across the class
  one, and be more pertinent politically this can
  be the case of religion, for example, where
  religious behaviour is very closely associated
  with a conservative orientation in most
  countries, whatever social class one belongs to.
• On the other hand, lower-level cleavages might be
  nested in higher order cleavages thus, the
  centre-periphery cleavage where minority
  nations resist the construction of a state
  might strengthen divisions based on social class
  especially if members of a minority community are
  also in an unfavourable socio-economic position.
• Thus cleavages can be structuring reinforcing or
  cross-cutting.
• Remains seminal for considering contours of
  European party system

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Tim Bale

• Bale identifies nine key cleavages that structure
  politics in Europe today in order of their
  appearance, these are
• Land-industry (18th century), representing the
  conflicting interests of the aristocracy and the
  emerging bourgeoisie gradually victory of the
  bourgeoisie and creation of bourgeois parties
• owner-worker, giving rise to the classic
  labour-capital division and to the birth of SD
  parties
• urban-rural cleavages, especially in countries
  such as Norway where the urban middle classes
  were of foreign extraction and the rural areas
  were peopled by poor indigenous peasants
  (agrarian parties, today largely disappeared)
• centre-periphery (regionalist/ minority
  nationalist parties)
• church-state (clericalism/Christian democracay
  against anti-clerical parties)
• Revolution-gradualism ( Social Democracy and
  Communist parties in 1917)
• Democracy-totalitarianism (rise of fascists in
  1930s)
• modernism/post-materialism(environmental and
  quality of life issues, from 1960s onwards
  (Greens)
• multiculturalism/homogeneity (far-right and
  populism)

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Case study of Social Democracy 11 core and
contested features

• Strong working class anchoring, but not strictly
  speaking class parties (i.e. always appealing
  beyond just the industrial working class)
• mass parties
• close relationships with the trade unions
• an interclassist electoral profile
• dominant force of the left
• accept rules of democratic game
• party of government
• national, rather than internationalist parties
• corporatism
• mixed economy
• northern-southern divide

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Croslands core values of social-democracy

• This was well described by British revisionist
  thinker Tony Crosland, who defined five features
  which constituted the core values of
  social-democracy
• political liberalism
• the mixed economy
• the Welfare state
• Keynesian economics
• a belief in equality.
• Social-democratic governmental action was
  characterised by moderate incrementalism, rather
  than systemic transformation.

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Social democracy is a policy paradigm, rather
than an organised political movement Peter Hall.

• A social-democratic ethos underpinning the
  postwar consensus? Evidence usually involves the
  following
• a new form of settlement between politics and
  markets. Acceptance of a higher degree of state
  interventionism in economic management
  (especially through the budget)
• Public ownership or regulation of certain key
  industries, especially natural monopolies like
  gas, electricity and transport.
• Governments also invented interventionist
  industrial policies where the State played an
  important role including in countries such as
  the UK.
• The SD model associated with Keynesian demand
  management in macro-economic policies the role
  of governments was to pump prime to create
  demand in periods of recession

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The social democratic paradigm 2.

• Social democracy sophisticated Welfare states
• But is a difference between the Universal
  Beveridge principle in the UK and Scanidinavia
  and the Corporatist contributions based models in
  France, Germany , Austria
• As a counterpart, the purest Social-Democrat
  regimes such as those in Sweden relied on
  high redistributive taxation to provide finance
  and secure equality as the main goal of public
  policy.
• In its purest form (Austria, Germany,
  Scandinavia) a corporatist style of state-group
  relations complemented these macro-tendencies.
• The role of social partners vital in some
  versions of Social Democracy, less so in others.
  Generally a belief that industrial policy should
  be coordinated by the Iron Triangle of State,
  Business and Labour.

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A word of caution

• The welfare state was not invented by
  social-democrats, but predated social-democracy.
• In the UK, Germany, France, the basic
  architecture predated 1945.
• Social-democrats were not the only players in
  developing the postwar consensus.
• In Italy the right dictated the terms of the
  postwar constitutional settlement.
• In Austria, nationalisations, welfare reforms
  and state economic interventionism were
  consensual measures emanating as much from
  traditions of social christianity, as from social
  democracy.

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What Went Wrong?

• The basic assumption of social-democracy had been
  that an interventionist state could control the
  economic cycle through the use of Keynesian
  demand-management techniques.
• Damaged by the move to global recession after
  1973-4.
• Keynesian policies, where applied, increased
  public expenditure and aggravated inflation.
• Inflation, unemployment, balance of trade crises
  and state debt put paid to Keynesianism.
• While certain features of social-democratic
  management initially appeared strengthened by
  the 1970s crisis (notably attempts at
  corporatist-style management), others were
  irremediably weakened.
• Even successful social-democratic governments -
  such as those in Scandanavia - began to cut back
  upon the huge bureaucracies they had created, and
  to adopt anti-inflation programmes.

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Comparing Social Democratic Parties today

• Social-democratic parties have always followed
  the nature of capitalism (Bull, 1998). They have
  provided responses to the evolution of capitalism
  at any given point in history.
• there is an argument that social-democratic
  parties in the late 2000s can at best adapt to
  common externally driven convergence pressures.
• Comparison provides more precise responses

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Hypothesis One externally driven convergence

• Social-democratic parties are converging towards
  a common pattern of political management, under
  the influence of the separate but related
  exogenous pressures of globalisation and
  Europeanisation.
• The essence of the external convergence
  argument is that economic globalisation and
  European integration have combined to disempower
  social-democratic parties in office.
• These pressures include the impact of
  globalisation, the ascendancy of a particular
  type of European integration project (EMU), the
  contingent necessity for domestic budget and
  welfare state retrenchment and changing policy
  fashions, rendering more difficult traditional
  interventionist industrial policies.

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Hypothesis Two Internally driven convergence

• Parties also respond to pressures for internally
  driven convergence EU societies are becoming
  more and more similar. They have had to affront
  comparable cultural and political effects of
  social change.
• There has been a lessened significance of
  cleavages based on social class.
• In their internal programmes, parties have
  abandoned Marxism and responded to the emergence
  of new political agendas and ideas based on
  post-materialism and individualism.
• Parties have reacted in similar manners to
  comparable domestic demographic and economic
  changes.

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Hypothesis 3 institutional and cultural
differentiation.

• Institutional and cultural forces differentiate
  between parties, and are more important than any
  pressures for convergence.
• According to this hypothesis, party performance
  is above all shaped by the very different
  national institutional arrangements and
  incentives. This can include institutions stricto
  sensu ( the structure of executive leadership
  executive-legislative relations electoral laws,
  and central-local relations), but also the myths
  and symbols attached to institutionalist
  perspective.
• It also comprises different discursive traditions
  and rhetorical devices which are themselves
  rooted in nationally specific cultural
  traditions.

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Hypothesis 4. parties matter.

• The structure and functioning of the domestic
  party system determines party performance in
  office.
• Governmental performance will depend on the
  structure of political competition in national
  party systems (bipolar and centripetal?
  fragmented and centrifugal?) upon the stability
  of political supply and demand single-party
  majority or coalition the importance of parties
  as organisational entities vis-à-vis of parties
  in office the emergence of new players
  articulating new political agendas (the greens
  and post-materialism).
• Are there inherent social-democratic party
  features that determine outcomes ?

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Hypothesis 5 political autonomy.

• Politics and party programmes matter. Parties in
  office are able to devise original solutions to
  identified policy problems they dispose of far
  more autonomy than deterministic theories allow.
• There are limits to the convergence theses, in
  spite of the narrowing of possibilities for
  autonomous political action.

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Comparative indicators Adaptation?

• European integration has called into question
  many features traditionally associated with the
  politics and policies characteristic of
  social-democratic governmental experience.
• European integration agenda threatens the
  social-democratic model of public service and of
  political economy.
• how have social-democratic parties coped with
  common externally driven convergence pressures?
• Adjustment, adaptation, rejection, reframing?
  Responses reveal clear differences between
  European social-democratic parties from the
  pan-European activism of the French Socialist
  party - calling for a Keynesian relaunch at the
  European level and a concerted European effort
  against unemployment - to the proselytising
  neo-liberal flexibility of the Blair
  administration.

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Comparative indicators Re-regulation?

• While globalisation introduces a new form of
  macro-economic regulation, European integration
  provides a political arena whereby European
  polities (Social-democratic parties in
  particular) can combine their governance capacity
  to create (or strengthen) a European political,
  social and economic model.
• Given the weakness of the nation-state, the
  European arena is the only arena where politics
  can reinvent new forms of political regulation
  faced with economic globalisation.
• This underlies mainstream French perceptions of
  the single currency. It underpinned the efforts
  of the Jospin government to strengthen social and
  employment policies at the European level.
• The credibility of such a perspective has
  increased with the dysfunctionning of the global
  economy and international financial markets in
  particular.

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Comparative indicators (3) programme adaptation.

• Attempts to define a new equilibrium for the
  European centre-left sparked fraternal rivalries
  between Blair and Jospin in particular.
• In response to Blairs third way between the
  old left and the new right, Jospin has
  pointedly refused to define a new orientation
  between social-democracy and liberalism.
• While the new Labour enterprise was intended to
  demarcate the party from the perceived defeats
  and bankruptcy of traditional social-democracy
  (Randell, 1998), the French Socialist
  administration rediscovered a familiar
  social-democratic political style.
• While Blair looks to the international
  centre-left (to Clinton and the new Democrats in
  particular), Jospins activity focussed more
  firmly on reorientating the European centre-left
  towards a new equilibrium less favourable to
  globalised international exchanges and more
  resolutely favourable to EU-level and state
  public policy intervention
• Schroder somewhere in between

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New Labour against social democracy?

• While the landmark reforms of the Jospin
  premiership were implemented in the face of
  fierce business opposition (35 hour week), Blair
  appeared more wary of espousing anti-business
  policies for fear of damaging a sustained effort
  at repositioning and repackaging an old party.
• Acting on the environment, embracing
  globalisation and increasing labour flexibility
  and employability were the key cognitive codes of
  the Blair universe. They break with
  social-democracy in a more distinctive manner
  than in France or Germany.

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National versus partisan responses

• the importance of national and partisan contexts
  as filters of change and tellers of truth.
• While all parties in government have had to cope
  with similar pressures, national responses have
  varied.
• In a narrower time frame, parties have also to
  react to the institutional and policy legacies of
  previous governments. Thus, Blairs new Labour
  has incorporated a more radical paradigm shift
  than is the case for the French Socialists
• National contexts might matter much more than the
  partisan ones.

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Intellectual traditions allow politics a more or
a less important role.

• The perception of the available margins of
  manoeuvre provides the clearest manner of
  drawing a distinction between the parties in
  government. In France, the underlying philosophy
  of the Jospin government was that margins exist.
  We must use them to the full. The Jospin
  government attempted to restore faith in
  politics, and to make full use of the limited
  policy autonomy that exists.
• The discursive basis of Jospins method is that
  politics does matter in the permanent compromise
  between politics and markets, economic
  imperatives must be counterbalanced with a
  respect for social equilibrium. This discourse
  retains a strong faith in voluntaristic action to
  combat unemployment.

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Social democracy and party systems

• How do the contours of domestic party systems
  impact upon the operation of social democracy in
  power?
• Is there a uniform model of centripetal party
  competition (with successful social-democratic
  parties occupying a shifting centre of gravity),
  or do national political circumstances condition
  the social-democratic strategy and discourse?
• How do these parties manage relations with their
  neighbouring competitor parties, such as the
  greens in Germany, the communists in France and
  Italy, the liberal democrats in UK