Abstract
The thesis of When Political Parties Die by Charles S. Mack is that when re-alignment is followed by the demise of a party, that death is owing to five factors: failures of leadership, ‘intensity of national identity cleavage issues and positions’, alienation of the core base, the availability of a successor party or parties, and the ‘probability’ of a single-member district electoral system with plurality election (FPP). From these conditions flows the dis-alignment of a sufficient number of a party’s core and probable voters to ensure its death.
The first factor is indisputably relevant, and the book does a good job of showing the mis-calculations and blundering of party leaders. As to the second, sharp cleavage divisions do clearly contribute to party decline and sometimes to death, but the term ‘cleavage’ is used very loosely here and made to include merely transient issues in a discussion that in addition places far too much focus on disputes about national identity while underestimating the much more seriously divisive power of the socio-economic concerns that motivated voters in all four cases. The third factor, ‘alienation of the core base’, is a product of the first two – poor leadership and deep divisions – and so should be treated as an intervening variable, however crucial a step on the way to demise it may be. As for looking around for existing alternatives (factor four), alienated core and peripheral voters can and often do instead join independent voters (especially swing independents, here termed ‘medials’) to form new parties both before and immediately after deserting their own. Finally, Mack does not really mean that the probability of there being an FPP system is one of the causes of dis-alignment; he means that, if such a system exists, party demise is more likely, although by no means certain. (Sad to say, in this otherwise lively and well-written book, problems of syntax and diction recur throughout. Other important examples include idiosyncratic usage of the terms ‘cleavage’ [already noted], ‘consociationalism’ and ‘secular’; usages either too limited, too broad or simply inappropriate today.)
What finally triggers the absolute demise of a party? The role of medial voters is crucial. Medial voters are not necessarily situated in the middle and certainly not average in size, so this term is also problematic, but the phenomenon is real. Medials are independents capable of swinging the election who are no longer willing to vote for the party in question. When they are joined by enough voters from the party base the result is a re-alignment. Re-alignment may then lead to dis-alignment, not to de-alignment, which means that voters abandon all parties or at least hold them in profound contempt. Dis-alignment means that enough re-aligning voters leave their party permanently and change their allegiance to other parties to cause the party to fail. It means death.
As noted, the first step must be a re-alignment. Chapter 3 offers a succinct and useful summary of the re-alignment debate, beginning with Walter Dean Burnham’s vexatious re-writing of V. O. Key and the sometimes fuming rectifications offered by the vexed. The debate has produced very little of significance to the study of parties as agencies of democracy, and little agreement among those who engage in it, but the question continues to nag: why do voters move, and why do they stay or not stay away when they do? Mack provides a new and original extension of re-alignment theory and seeks to test that theory against the cases of four party deaths drawn from the political histories of the USA, Great Britain, Canada and Italy.
Unfortunately, however, the next four chapters, and the summarizing penultimate chapter, do not manage to test the theory adequately in the cases at hand nor demonstrate their usefulness for understanding comparable cases. The study is too thin, the cases offer too many exceptions to the rule, and the assertions of wider comparability are simply not credible. The last point is the most egregious: to convince readers that the data produced by a very few case studies are applicable elsewhere requires knowing other cases well, i.e. possessing a far greater depth and breadth of comparative knowledge than we find in this book. Mack scarcely mentions other systems (a paragraph on Germany, a sentence on Eastern European parties) and dismisses all party systems outside North America and Western Europe out of hand – clearly beneath notice. He makes no effort even to hint at how his theory might work in explaining the demise of parties in any of the developing nations, nor, for that matter, in developed nations outside the NATO perimeter.
But all is not lost. The story of the rise and fall of the Whigs in 19th-century US political history is very well told, and the subsequent accounts of the deaths of the British Liberals, Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party and the twists and turns of the Italian party system, although not always convincing with respect to the thesis at hand, are nonetheless also absorbing to read.
The chapters on Britain and Canada are particularly rich and informative, although one can quibble that it is never safe to take examples from London politics to represent the whole nation (p. 79) and that the complicated history of Canada’s Conservative Party does not rule out the suspicion that that party’s zeitgeist has simply pursued its path through multiple alliances right up to the present day. The problems with the Italian case are much more serious, much more fundamental. It is simply inappropriate to use this case to test the book’s thesis. A party and a party system are two entirely different entities and it makes no sense to shift from a single party to a whole party system when seeking to test the applicability of a theory of party demise. And why on earth make this indefensible shift when the death of one Italian party, the Communist Party, is right there begging to be explored?
To keep the record straight it should also be noted that in any case the Italian party system has not died. The players and the names have changed, but the characteristic deficiencies of the system remain. To these deficiencies have been added a higher level of corruption and a further decline of democratic values, but these are differences of degree, not of kind. There are some very unpleasant odours, but there is no corpse.
The book concludes with a discussion of the flaws in the contemporary US party system. The chapter purports to be looking for ‘Implications for American Politics in the 21st Century’, but there are very few references to the cases studied and links to the question of dis-alignment are sparse and unconnected: excessive polarization and obstruction of governance are mentioned, but almost no attention is given to the massive de-alignment of US voters nor to the movement of core or medial voters. Dis-alignment is deemed unlikely in the United States because voters have no viable ‘other’ party to turn to (not coincidentally, Mack is a strong defender of the two party system, aware but un-concerned that it is achieved in the US by state legislation crushing the possibility of meaningful third-party participation).
His conclusion is appropriately modest: although there may be ‘defining attributes and conditions’ that could produce future party dis-alignments in the US or elsewhere, there is no way of knowing in advance. There is nothing cyclical about re-alignments nor, therefore, of dis-alignments.
Overall, Mack has put forward some eminently plausible reasons for party demise, but has not adequately demonstrated empirically their validity. His cases are not up to the task he gives them and he brings no wider knowledge of parties elsewhere to assist: the book is definitely not a significant contribution to the comparative study of political parties. It does, however, provide interesting insights into three of the specific cases studied and is in that respect often a good read.