Abstract
The editors dedicate this volume to Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and declare it as a commemoration of his 65th birthday. Correspondingly, the largely well-known authors deal with topics that have repeatedly occupied Ferdinand Müller-Rommel: comparative party and government research, elite research, institutional design and democracy. Like an invisible common thread, the current problems of democratic political systems run through the whole book which, together with the thematic connection to Müller-Rommel’s work, gives it a middle-ranged degree of coherence.
The title of the book promises more than it delivers, because the reader gets only a few insights into different areas of party-, government- and democracy-research, but these are worth reading and convince through empirical diversity, remarkable ideas and a very high awareness of the current situation of democracies. In the rest of this review I will provide an overview of the different aspects the edited volume wants to address.
First of all, there is the often stated crisis of representation, most prominently elaborated by Kris Deschouwer, who speaks of a “malaise of electoral representation” (p. 75) of the established parties. He recognizes a clear de-alignment process and erosion of traditional cleavage structures, which has led to the emergence of new parties. However, Deschouwer sees this emergence not as a solution to the representation problem but as an indicator. Anyone looking for solutions is partially satisfied through Hans Keman’s aggregated data analysis of various democracies, in that he distinguishes between the electoral and parliamentary-governmental arenas of party competition. Keman clearly identifies the difference between responsiveness in the former and responsibility in the latter as the main functions of the parties. Finally, he urges parties to find a balance here, but without becoming more specific as to what this should be. Keman points out that opposition parties are more responsive.
Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Darina Gancheva and Bernhard Weßels, who take up the interrelation between representation and party competition with their approach of representation through election programs, confirm the earlier mentioned finding. For 10 political systems in Central and Eastern Europe, they compare the substantive positions of parties with those of voters on the classical left-right dimension and link these factors to other aspects such as the clarity of the political offer, the effective number of parliamentary parties, and the permanence of parties.
Unsurprisingly, they note that the strategic behavior of the parties, the structure of the offer and the programmatic differences between them determines the voter choice. If the three authors plead for the traditional right-left dimension to analyze the lines of conflict in party competition, Wolfgang Merkel already proclaims a new cleavage in party competition. In his plausible concept the cosmopolitans, who advocate the process of globalization both economically and culturally, are contrasted with the communitarians, who are very skeptical about these economic and cultural consequences. However, Merkel does not explain how this conflict deviates from the two fundamental conflict dimensions, the socio-economic and the socio-cultural. In my opinion, it is possible to integrate Merkel’s distinction into the traditional conflict dimensions and find its economic and cultural expression. For example, right-wing populist parties emphasize authoritarian values, while left-wing populist parties emphasize state intervention.
The emergence of the socio-cultural conflict line since the 1970s becomes clearer from the two contributions by Thomas Poguntke and Detlef Jahn. Poguntke analyzes the development of the organizational structures of the German Greens since their founding; Jahn compares the assertiveness of environmental movements in Western democracies. In view of the dominance of economic topics as an important consequence of the financial market crisis in 2008/2009, Jahn sees a decline in the influence of ecological aspects, Poguntke a more general adaptation of the Greens’ party structure to that of its competitors in the party system.
Another factor of the crisis of democracies, the issue of corruption, is the main topic of two other contributions: Ina Kubbe addresses this problem more closely in European democracies and points out that “honest and committed political leadership” is essential for combating it. This is in line with the findings of Tom Koelble, who takes a closer look at the situation in South Africa in a case study and underlines the importance of the President’s standing and behavior: “And while its President is one of the most implicated individuals in the world corruption problem, the problem is not likely to be solved” (p. 299).
Florian Grotz and Till Weber, together with Jean Blondel also turn to the subject of leadership. Grotz and Weber investigate the factors that determined the election of the heads of government in Central and Eastern European party democracies. They distinguish between post-electoral and replacement contexts. While, immediately after elections, the leader of the government’s main constituent party often takes over the office of head of government, it is often an experienced cabinet member within the legislature, in the event of premature change, who takes this position. Blondel analyzes the role of six African Presidents (Benin, Botswana, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda) in their respective political systems in terms of systemic stability.
Jessica Fortin-Rittberger addresses another, often neglected, aspect of the institutional design of post-communist countries and finds that less intrinsic features of presidential systems favor a systemic concentration of power than “the conditions that facilitate the installation of vertically-concentrated executive power” (pp. 206–207). Interestingly, she regards Hungary as a less power-fostering political system. Manfred G. Schmidt turns to Western democracies and asks what factors favor the participation of social democratic parties in the period from 1950 to 2015. As result of his multiple regression analyses, Schmidt considers their participation in government between 1919 and 1949 and a proportional electoral system as major factors, while families of nation and cleavage structures are insignificant. Finally, Dirk Berg-Schlosser designs perspectives for Comparative Politics and wishes that “problem-driven rather than purely method-driven research” (p. 317) should determine the future of this sub-discipline. This position is fully convincing if political science also wants to have power outside the University and wants get attention outside its own discipline.