Abstract
Do parties engage in open competition for power by currying favour with the electorate or do they try to limit competition for power by bending institutional rules to their advantage? In other words, do parties engage in electorate-orientated (vote-seeking) or in institutional-orientated (office-seeking) strategies? In her book Party Strategies in Western Europe, Loomes systematically assesses the extent to which Western European parties have used these two strategies in the post-World War II period. By defining how we can measure this strategic behaviour and by applying it to a large number of parties, Loomes makes a huge contribution to the study of political parties, a field in which concepts are often too loosely defined or too complex to operationalize. In particular, the efforts of (a cartel of) parties to limit competition to insiders and thereby enhance their future prospects of office payoffs – in other words, institutional strategies – are, to my knowledge, rarely collected systematically and analysed in a comparative perspective. In the case of electorate-orientated strategies, however, important empirical contributions have been made by researchers such as James Adams, Lawrence Ezrow, Sara Hobolt, Catherine de Vries, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Zeynep Somer-Topcu and Bonnie Meguid, and their findings on, for example, party responsiveness to median voter shifts and the role of issue entrepreneurs are curiously omitted.
Let’s first focus on the strong point of the book, which is the discussion on institutional-orientated strategies. Yes, politics is dirty, very dirty. To maintain their hold on power, established parties have two options. First, continuously seek to satisfy voters or, second, restrain competition in such a way that it will be difficult for outsiders to compete. Hence, established parties can agree to co-govern or govern-in-alternation and limit entrance by outsiders by making it more difficult for them to participate in elections, to deny them entry to state funds or television time, or by keeping them out of coalitions. Loomes collected and categorized large amounts of data on electoral laws, electoral systems, the organization of political television advertising, and state subsidies to probe the degree to which established parties restrict outsider parties to compete in elections. On each of these measures there is large between-country variation, but overall France and Greece are identified as the most restrictive systems and Ireland and Denmark as the most permissive systems. As a consequence, Loomes argues that in France and Greece established parties monopolize parliament and government at the expense of voter representation.
According to Loomes, voters are best represented in Portugal and Germany, because established parties rake in more than 80 percent of the vote, because votes translate rather proportionally into parliamentary seats and the electorate-orientated strategies of parties in these countries. This last concept is measured by: the degree of ideological change at the system level, parties’ strategies vis-à-vis anti-political establishment parties, the occurrence of pre-electoral coalition agreements and the length of coalition agreements. The validity of each of these measures can be disputed, but I focus here on ideological change. In line with the median voter theorem, Loomes expects vote-maximizing parties to align their ideology with that of the median voter. However, the next claim is that the higher the level of ideological change the more responsive a party is to the median voter. This is difficult to believe – as is acknowledged by Loomes because the median voter may not have changed much at all. Loomes argues that over time change in public opinion must have occurred, but that does not demonstrate that parties have in fact shifted with the median voter. In fact, no data are presented on the median voter at all. This is especially curious as many publications by researchers such as James Adams, Zeynep Somer-Topcu and Lawrence Ezrow include median voter data from the Eurobarometer surveys and analyse whether parties indeed follow the median voter or respond to other incentives. This is a much more precise way of evaluating whether parties pursue electorate-orientated strategies than the one proposed by Loomes.
Loomes presents a party-centric approach to party system change by placing party strategies as the crucial causal factor in changes in modes of representation. She does a nice job in discussing many classics of the study of political parties, but neglects some recent work by Bonnie Meguid, Sara Hobolt, Christoffer Green-Pedersen and Catherine de Vries on the role of issue competition, niche parties and issue entrepreneurs. Also, it is curious that despite the party-centric approach the analyses are mainly done at the country level rather than the party level. This blurs an analysis of why parties in fact choose institutional-orientated strategies or electorate-orientated strategies. Nevertheless, the collection and coding of a whole range of variables across 17 countries since 1950 is an invaluable data source for students of party politics. Also, by calling for renewed attention to the nastier side of party politics – the institutional-orientated strategy – Loomes has an important message for students of representation studies, who often focus on vote-seeking strategies at the expense of the more fundamental office-seeking strategies.