Abstract
How important are political parties and party systems for the survival and the quality of our democracies? This is the main political question behind this tremendous book written by Fernando Casal Bértoa and Zsolt Enyedi. The authors had previously published extensive research on party politics, including an original dataset about government composition in 48 European democracies since 1848 (http://whogoverns.eu/) that constitutes the basis on which the empirical contribution of the volume builds. In this respect, this is a brilliant piece of comparative politics, focusing exhaustively on democratic Europe without neglecting any of its parts: the book covers some countries that are usually left out of the scope, over a large span of time.
Trying to detect patterns of elite interactions over time, Casal Bértoa and Enyedi propose to focus on how politicians and parties co-operate and compete by looking at the way cabinets are constructed. The main result of this strategy is the concept of party system closure which, capturing “the extent to which the protagonists and the patterns of their alliances are stable” (p. 19), was already present in the latest works developed by Peter Mair (no wonder the book reminds us of some of the best pages by the Irish political scientist, since both authors are counted among his many outstanding disciples). It is a fruitful attempt to go beyond classical approaches to the understanding of party system dynamics based on electoral competition and party fragmentation. In contrast to the centrality given to voters by those approaches, party system closure clearly reflects in a better way the agency and autonomy of political actors in determining the evolution of political competition.
Of course, this proposal is not without controversy. For example, focusing on cabinets may divert our attention from parliamentary co-operation in minority governments, or from the latent evolution of elite agreements within parties. It also leaves out the disruptive role of movements and groups for party systems when party organisations lose ground withing society. In order to avoid some of these pitfalls, the authors employ concepts such as ‘poles’ and ‘blocs’ to underline the importance of identity in party co-operation, and the realistic government alternatives in a polity.
Hence, the book builds compellingly a theoretical and empirical strategy to sustain its main arguments. After introducing these key concepts in the first pages, chapters 2–5 present the dataset and the operationalisation of closure, showing the main trends and features of the many cases covered by the study. Thus, they find a stable pattern towards closure in parallel with the consolidation of democracy, although several diversions from the main trend arise related to different types of party systems. In this respect, the book forces us to think comparatively and historically across countries and across time. Even if we can raise the question of ‘which advances come from comparing micro-states like Andorra, Lichtenstein or San Marino with some of the bigger traditional democracies?’, it is precisely this disparity among countries and regimes’ evolution that produces one of the distinctive contributions of the book. Rather than Adam Pzeworski’s idea of analysing cases without names, the authors put each particular country in the broad theory with universal concepts, avoiding the comparative politics trap which “allows one to be happily irresponsible” (Mair dixit). Hence, while the conclusions are not necessarily true for any particular country, they are nevertheless certainly true more generally for all of them altogether. The resulting overview is extremely original and compelling.
The second set of chapters (6–10) analyses the sources of party system closure, namely: party system age, party institutionalisation (which is emphatically distinguished from closure), fragmentation and polarisation. In these chapters, the authors discuss some traditional assumptions about the stability of party systems, and give us important lessons to better understand their evolution. We can highlight three particular ideas. Firstly, time is important. Those regimes that have come to survive after social, political or economic turbulences are better prepared to strengthen the basis of their democratic building, making the behaviour of their elites more predictable - and, therefore, closing the party system. Of course, this suggests a bi-directional relationship between time and party system closure. The accumulation of time helps to close a party system. But the authors also demonstrate that party system closure fosters democratic survival. However, the importance of closure in this respect remains somewhat undefined since the authors do not establish any critical threshold to guarantee regime survival.
Secondly, party system level and party level should be treated separately. As the authors argue in Chapter seven, we cannot blur the boundaries between the individual components and the total sum of them. Hence, analysing party organisational continuity and party rootedness, it is shown how the routinisation of the patterns of political recruitment and intra-party decision-making contribute to strengthen the predictability of electoral and coalition behaviour, although several examples like France since the 1970s warn about a mechanical identification between both phenomena (p.167). However, we can ask ourselves how this pattern would change if we included the cabinet dimension in the definition of party institutionalisation, as party rootedness and organisational structures seem to be increasingly dependent on the executive positions of parties within the political system.
Thirdly, fragmentation and polarisation are negatively related to party system closure, but they form a complex three-sided relationship, far from simplistically mechanical determinations. In this aspect, one wonders to what extent this relationship is mostly due to the influence of the long period of stability (with moderate fragmentation, low polarisation, and increasing closure) provided by the golden years of liberal democracy after the Second World War? What if democratic political parties become used to higher levels of polarisation and more fragmented parliaments? Unless this trend would not produce new poles of competition and government alternatives, party closure may not reflect substantial alterations in the future.
The final chapters of the book deliver the fundamental findings of this volume. On the one hand, the study suggests a formal route to party system closure, which is related to other different aspects of party and party system evolution (p.229). While the model of the causal chain behind closure works as a parsimonious explanation of how party systems may evolve after democratic transitions, or after crisis of satisfaction with democracy, the actual configuration of this chain (i.e. party institutionalisation, concentration, and anti-party system decline) may operate more simultaneously than the model suggests, clouding the conceptual succession of stages proposed by the authors. On the other hand, the study tests compellingly the effect of party system closure for democratic quality and democratic survival (Chapter 11), with one clear pattern since the 19th century: openness is a necessary condition for democratic collapse (p.260). This is an important remark that should be considered in current debates about the perils of high polarisation and contentious politics. Moreover, the study provides, once more, evidence of the negative consequences of low economic development, as it undermines the positive effect of party system closure on democracy. This original contribution to the discussion about the future and threats to our democracies may be one of the most important advances made by a book that Peter Mair would have been very proud of.