If good politics unifies, rather than divides, populations; achieves political goals and reflects the will of the electorate, politics would be better without political parties. Partisan politics stokes unproductive national division, reduces the quality of political discussion, hinders political progress and allows for the corruption of the government by corporate and foreign - non-constituent - agents. Nevertheless, the weight of criticism of partisan politics has not yet resulted in detaching politics from partisanship. Citizens of liberal democracies live in a state of “partisan realism”; to appropriate Mark Fisher’s description of capitalism, “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to political parties.”. The fact that only ten sovereign states lack political parties - seven of which are absolute monarchies - justifies the belief that parties are the gatekeepers to politics and immutable components of democracies. Therefore, in addition to outlining how political parties make politics worse, this essay will offer solutions to escape our present partisan realism. By detaching electoral processes from partisan labels, reducing the power of party executive structures and restricting the financial influence of parties, we can reduce the relevance of political parties to the extent that we have politics without political parties and thus make politics better.
The absence of political parties would improve politics by making for more meaningful political disputes and thus a more constructive political sphere. Political disputes would be strictly policy-driven, rather than blind opposition on the grounds of partisan labels. At the level of government, this purer politics would address the “alternate domination” of rival groups “sharpened by the spirit of revenge” referenced by President Washington in his farewell address. He here alludes to the idea that partisan politics means that parties devote much effort to limiting the influence of their opposing faction, rather than enacting their ideological goals. This idea is substantiated by efforts from governing parties to reduce the power of opposition parties. In 2015, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Government reduced the annual payment to parties in the Opposition - commonly referred to as “Short Money” - by 19%, limiting the ability of non-Conservative Parties in the UK to staff parliamentary offices. Given that parliamentary offices tend to employ policy writers and researchers, the Conservatives’ cut to Short Money directly impacted the ability of parties such as Labour and the Liberal Democrats to devise convincing policies for election campaigning. In addition to comprising weaponisation of the state to harm political opposition, partisanship, in this instance, has reduced the volume of research needed for constructive political debate. Motivated by in-group loyalty, the Conservatives, in reducing Short Money, may have prevented the conduction of research that enriches political debate. By detaching parliamentary politics from partisanship, we can achieve greater unity by discarding arbitrary divisions, while ensuring that all political disunity among politicians arises from differences in opinion rather than differences in arbitrary allegiance.
Osborne’s attack on Short Money demonstrates how political parties enable the tyranny of the majority. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison notes that “popular government” allows the sacrifice of “the rights of other citizens” to the will of the majority. Alexis de Tocqueville similarly writes that the number of people in favour of enacting oppressive legislation does not justify the act in question. Madison and de Tocqueville would agree, for instance, that if it is unduly authoritarian for a king to ban the practice of a certain religion, it is equally immoral for a group to coalesce and deem said religion illegal. The existence of political parties such as the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Labour Party facilitates such authoritarian measures, allowing for agents within each group to identify their preferred objects of domination and proceed accordingly. Banning all candidates for legislative office from affiliation with a political party would prevent the “domination” of any arising factions over another. Without formal party labels, it is impossible to enact legislation that identifies and hinders the activity of particular political groups.
Among the non-politician public, the weakening of political parties would improve politics by ensuring that it reflects the balance of popular opinion rather than the force of partisan labels. In democracy-professing countries, such a reflection would serve to legitimise the government and its actions. Currently, the partisan nature of politics leads much of the electorate to support policies on those grounds, rather than on the grounds of genuine opinion. Research by Kevin Mullinix of Appalachian State University shows that voters are more likely to support hypothetical policies when they are told that the policy belongs to their political party. This demonstrates that the existence of partisan politics encourages people to espouse views that they would not otherwise. Parties, here, are not unifying organisations for those with similar beliefs but organisations that dictate opinion. Given that the consent of the governed legitimises governments in liberal democracies, partisanship’s prevention of the expression of genuine popular consent delegitimises governments. One element of partisan realism is the parties’ status as the gatekeepers of political discourse. As a result of the domination of politics by parties, issues are effectively nonexistent if not mentioned by the major parties and opinions on such issues are not considered unless expressed in the manifestoes of political parties. As a result of this, it is difficult to detach genuine public opinion from party-infused public opinion. However, politics can get closer to a state “without political parties” by adopting elements that are not strictly partisan, such as referenda. While political parties often sponsor and take stances in the buildup to referenda in Switzerland, single-issue votes are always less partisan than votes for the election of government officials. Ultimately, single-issue votes force voters to contemplate their stance on a real-world issue, rather than the strength of their bond to specific colours or a particular figurehead. Given that Mullinix’s research found that stressing the importance of an issue eliminates the effect of partisan labels, it is reasonable to think that implementing elements from direct democracy such as referenda could mitigate the damages of party labels.
The end of partisanship would legitimise government in representative democracies by holding representatives more directly accountable to the constituents to whom they are theoretically accountable. Partisanship means that representatives are foremost accountable to their party executive structures. In the UK, for instance, the power of a party whip to enforce adherence to party leadership is buttressed by threats to exclude rebels from honours lists and appointments to Cabinet positions. This means that any MP with political ambitions must lay the desires of their constituents secondary to the opinion of their party leadership. Moreover, the existence of parties within legislatures causes partisanship to corrupt the operation of institutions meant to improve the country. In this way, partisanship is an obstacle to political progress. If MPs can be excluded from positions of authority within Government for failing to conform to the whip, the resultant Cabinets are made up of those most obedient to the party leadership, rather than those most suitable for executive government. Politics without political parties may be actualised by weakening the powers of party whips. Here, the elimination of partisan labels within legislatures would again ensure that MPs are free to vote per the wills of their constituents, or, at the least, per their consciences.
Political systems with strong political parties do not allow for diversity of political thought at the governmental level. In addition to discouraging political dissent with the use of party whips, parties homogenise thought by, in some cases, monopolising funding for political campaigns. The £50.8 million and £31.4 million spent by the Labour and Conservative Parties respectively in 2021 indicate their positions as chief avenues of political funding in the UK. The sheer volume of this funding means that independent candidates begin their campaigns from a point of disadvantage. Alongside their accrued party name recognition that, as earlier demonstrated, can change voters’ perceptions of topics, parties wield financial capital that enables them to disseminate mainstream, conventional opinion at a greater rate than independent candidates. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the only independent MPs currently in the Commons had partisan affiliations at the time of their election. In this way, political parties become the gatekeepers of government. Parliament hopefuls must become members of established parties to have genuine election chances. Once members, they concede their right to conscience-based or constituent-based politics. The resultant uniformity of political thought is a barrier to political progress in that it prevents the proposition of novel solutions, barring their authors from discourse at the governmental level.
Although party-dominated politics homogenises opinion, it is naive to assume that weakening political parties always encourages more variety in thought. Following the unleashing of American political donations in Citizens United v FEC, the fall in the influence of political parties coincided with a growth in the influence of billionaires in political processes. While party leadership structures allow for very limited political discourse, a system in which the investment of a billionaire decides election outcomes would not make for better politics. Understanding this, any effort to curtail the financial influence of political parties via expenditure should also consider the influence that businesses, trade unions and wealthy individuals might have on the electoral process.
Defenders of political parties often consider modern democratic politics to be impossible without them. Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation appealed to the “scale and scope” of modern democracy as a summary of why democracies need political parties. This is the crux of partisan realism; political parties are so intertwined with electoral, legislative and executive processes that we cannot imagine anything else. Drutman juxtaposes “strong, functioning, long-lasting political parties” with an alternative that is “chaotic”. In attempting to demonstrate that “weak” political parties are the primary cause of autocracy, Drutman (via Kim Lane Scheppele) invokes the example of Hungary. “The path that led to … Orbán involved progressively narrowing party choices, ending eventually in an election in which the budding autocrat was the only reasonable-looking option... In short, party collapse preceded democratic collapse.” Scheppele’s attribution of “democratic collapse” to “weak” political parties is reductive. While the Orszod speech certainly contributed to the decline of MSZP by presenting them as a corrupt and ineffective ruling party, this would not have led to Orbán if not also for Fidesz’s self-presentation as the antidote to Hungary’s woes. In this way, the rise of Orbán is explained by the combination of the weakening of one political party and the simultaneous strengthening of another.
Additionally, Scheppele’s argument wrongly implies that Fidesz is something other than a political party and therefore excluded from assessments of what strong and functioning political parties look like. Fidesz is and was a political party; it is not merely a name for supporters of the autocrat Orbán. Therefore, rather than describing the course of events as “the budding autocrat was the only reasonable-looking option”, it is more accurate to write that “a popular [albeit an illiberal one] party replaced an old unpopular one.” Fidesz’s show of autocracy in the adoption of an illiberal constitution does not demonstrate the importance of healthy political parties. Instead, it affirms the idea that having formal political parties allows governing factions to enshrine their authority via tyranny of the majority and thus discredits the idea that political parties are good for politics.
Much of the academic discussion on the role of political parties focuses on their bids for power at elections, with some political scientists rigidly defining parties as simply the candidates that compete at the ballot box. However, such definitions are unduly narrow as they fail to recognise that parties vy for political power through the channels available to them. In liberal states that allow for any political group to register for elections, the distinction is meaningless, but the expanded definition of political party recognises that a group like the African National Congres (ANC) was a political party long before it was permitted to compete in South Africa’s electoral system. Therefore, the exclusion of a political group from competing in elections should not exclude them from the label “political party”, granted that they would compete in elections if permitted. This distinguishes political parties from advocacy groups that could restructure themselves to compete for seats in councils and parliaments but choose to remain outside of government.
Having accepted that advocacy groups qualify as political parties, the question of whether politics would be better without political parties shifts. Criticisms that parties misuse government power or homogenise thought cannot apply to political parties systematically disenfranchised. By contrast, the ANC, for instance, persistently challenged the South African apartheid regime’s mistreatment of the non-white majority, while expanding the political discussion within South Africa. In particular, the ANC’s long-term organisation of civil unrest, from the Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s to its series of guerilla attacks in the late 1980s, brought about such widespread internal condemnation of the South African government that apartheid ceased to be financially or politically viable. In the twilight years of the apartheid regime, the ANC played a pivotal role in democratising South Africa through negotiations with the white minority government. Without the ANC, black advocates in South Africa would not have been able to organise such a campaign so complex that it brought civil rights to tens of millions of people. When at the vanguard of liberation movements, political parties improve politics.
Assessment of the ANC’s impact on South African politics since 1994 highlights the distinction between how parties affect politics when not involved in governance and how governing parties impact politics. Since evolving to fit the more traditional definition of a political party and winning a series of elections, the ANC has begun to display all the ailments of governing political parties. Motivated by the desire to consolidate their political power, the ANC violated the South African Constitution to replace the country’s independent anti-corruption task force, the Directorate of Special Operations, with an organisation subject to presidential oversight. Such a measure demonstrates that the vestment of governing power in a political party brings about the degradation of important institutions by partisanship. Driven by partisanship, the ANC has used the government, by enacting the Protection of State Information Bill, as a vehicle to censor potential corruption whistleblowers. Although integral in ending apartheid, since accession to government, the ANC has demonstrated how political parties make for worse politics.
Having concluded that politics, at the governmental level, would be better without political parties, it is left to be shown how politics might function without them. In countries with first-past-the-post constituency elections such as the United Kingdom and the United States, the absence of party labels would reduce the importance of national debates during general elections. Instead, each of the 650 constituency races in the UK would become a genuinely local election, contested by candidates vying for government on the merits of their own policies and careers. The present combination of national political parties competing in theoretically local constituency races creates the false perception that Members of Parliament aim to promulgate the agenda of their constituents, rather than the opinion of their party leadership. Once elected, officials might form informal factions in attempting to enact articles of legislation. Such an arrangement does not, as partisan realists might claim, show parties to be immutable. The absence of party whips and large party financial systems that pre-ordain election outcomes would leave officials free to enact the agenda on which they were elected at the local level. Moreover, the lack of rigidly defined party trenches would destigmatise deviation from groups a legislator might have previously argued or voted alongside. In polities where party-list proportional representation is the norm, the end of political parties would mark a more seismic shift. Without political parties, those eighty-five states would likely adopt the variant of first-past-the-post described above.
The idea that representative democracies need political parties has long been the orthodoxy. Now oft-espoused by partisan realist academics, the idea was expressed by Washington as long ago as 1796; he lamented that the “spirit of [political] party is inseparable from our nature.” Parties’ past domination of our governments, however, need not mean that they continue in that vein. Parties make for less meaningful political disputes, corrupt executive office and impede political office. In short, political parties make politics worse. Knowing this, we have the imperative to reduce their influence wherever possible, irrespective of whether we can imagine a system without them.
The absence of political parties would improve politics by making for more meaningful political disputes and thus a more constructive political sphere. Political disputes would be strictly policy-driven, rather than blind opposition on the grounds of partisan labels. At the level of government, this purer politics would address the “alternate domination” of rival groups “sharpened by the spirit of revenge” referenced by President Washington in his farewell address. He here alludes to the idea that partisan politics means that parties devote much effort to limiting the influence of their opposing faction, rather than enacting their ideological goals. This idea is substantiated by efforts from governing parties to reduce the power of opposition parties. In 2015, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Government reduced the annual payment to parties in the Opposition - commonly referred to as “Short Money” - by 19%, limiting the ability of non-Conservative Parties in the UK to staff parliamentary offices. Given that parliamentary offices tend to employ policy writers and researchers, the Conservatives’ cut to Short Money directly impacted the ability of parties such as Labour and the Liberal Democrats to devise convincing policies for election campaigning. In addition to comprising weaponisation of the state to harm political opposition, partisanship, in this instance, has reduced the volume of research needed for constructive political debate. Motivated by in-group loyalty, the Conservatives, in reducing Short Money, may have prevented the conduction of research that enriches political debate. By detaching parliamentary politics from partisanship, we can achieve greater unity by discarding arbitrary divisions, while ensuring that all political disunity among politicians arises from differences in opinion rather than differences in arbitrary allegiance.
Osborne’s attack on Short Money demonstrates how political parties enable the tyranny of the majority. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison notes that “popular government” allows the sacrifice of “the rights of other citizens” to the will of the majority. Alexis de Tocqueville similarly writes that the number of people in favour of enacting oppressive legislation does not justify the act in question. Madison and de Tocqueville would agree, for instance, that if it is unduly authoritarian for a king to ban the practice of a certain religion, it is equally immoral for a group to coalesce and deem said religion illegal. The existence of political parties such as the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Labour Party facilitates such authoritarian measures, allowing for agents within each group to identify their preferred objects of domination and proceed accordingly. Banning all candidates for legislative office from affiliation with a political party would prevent the “domination” of any arising factions over another. Without formal party labels, it is impossible to enact legislation that identifies and hinders the activity of particular political groups.
Among the non-politician public, the weakening of political parties would improve politics by ensuring that it reflects the balance of popular opinion rather than the force of partisan labels. In democracy-professing countries, such a reflection would serve to legitimise the government and its actions. Currently, the partisan nature of politics leads much of the electorate to support policies on those grounds, rather than on the grounds of genuine opinion. Research by Kevin Mullinix of Appalachian State University shows that voters are more likely to support hypothetical policies when they are told that the policy belongs to their political party. This demonstrates that the existence of partisan politics encourages people to espouse views that they would not otherwise. Parties, here, are not unifying organisations for those with similar beliefs but organisations that dictate opinion. Given that the consent of the governed legitimises governments in liberal democracies, partisanship’s prevention of the expression of genuine popular consent delegitimises governments. One element of partisan realism is the parties’ status as the gatekeepers of political discourse. As a result of the domination of politics by parties, issues are effectively nonexistent if not mentioned by the major parties and opinions on such issues are not considered unless expressed in the manifestoes of political parties. As a result of this, it is difficult to detach genuine public opinion from party-infused public opinion. However, politics can get closer to a state “without political parties” by adopting elements that are not strictly partisan, such as referenda. While political parties often sponsor and take stances in the buildup to referenda in Switzerland, single-issue votes are always less partisan than votes for the election of government officials. Ultimately, single-issue votes force voters to contemplate their stance on a real-world issue, rather than the strength of their bond to specific colours or a particular figurehead. Given that Mullinix’s research found that stressing the importance of an issue eliminates the effect of partisan labels, it is reasonable to think that implementing elements from direct democracy such as referenda could mitigate the damages of party labels.
The end of partisanship would legitimise government in representative democracies by holding representatives more directly accountable to the constituents to whom they are theoretically accountable. Partisanship means that representatives are foremost accountable to their party executive structures. In the UK, for instance, the power of a party whip to enforce adherence to party leadership is buttressed by threats to exclude rebels from honours lists and appointments to Cabinet positions. This means that any MP with political ambitions must lay the desires of their constituents secondary to the opinion of their party leadership. Moreover, the existence of parties within legislatures causes partisanship to corrupt the operation of institutions meant to improve the country. In this way, partisanship is an obstacle to political progress. If MPs can be excluded from positions of authority within Government for failing to conform to the whip, the resultant Cabinets are made up of those most obedient to the party leadership, rather than those most suitable for executive government. Politics without political parties may be actualised by weakening the powers of party whips. Here, the elimination of partisan labels within legislatures would again ensure that MPs are free to vote per the wills of their constituents, or, at the least, per their consciences.
Political systems with strong political parties do not allow for diversity of political thought at the governmental level. In addition to discouraging political dissent with the use of party whips, parties homogenise thought by, in some cases, monopolising funding for political campaigns. The £50.8 million and £31.4 million spent by the Labour and Conservative Parties respectively in 2021 indicate their positions as chief avenues of political funding in the UK. The sheer volume of this funding means that independent candidates begin their campaigns from a point of disadvantage. Alongside their accrued party name recognition that, as earlier demonstrated, can change voters’ perceptions of topics, parties wield financial capital that enables them to disseminate mainstream, conventional opinion at a greater rate than independent candidates. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the only independent MPs currently in the Commons had partisan affiliations at the time of their election. In this way, political parties become the gatekeepers of government. Parliament hopefuls must become members of established parties to have genuine election chances. Once members, they concede their right to conscience-based or constituent-based politics. The resultant uniformity of political thought is a barrier to political progress in that it prevents the proposition of novel solutions, barring their authors from discourse at the governmental level.
Although party-dominated politics homogenises opinion, it is naive to assume that weakening political parties always encourages more variety in thought. Following the unleashing of American political donations in Citizens United v FEC, the fall in the influence of political parties coincided with a growth in the influence of billionaires in political processes. While party leadership structures allow for very limited political discourse, a system in which the investment of a billionaire decides election outcomes would not make for better politics. Understanding this, any effort to curtail the financial influence of political parties via expenditure should also consider the influence that businesses, trade unions and wealthy individuals might have on the electoral process.
Defenders of political parties often consider modern democratic politics to be impossible without them. Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation appealed to the “scale and scope” of modern democracy as a summary of why democracies need political parties. This is the crux of partisan realism; political parties are so intertwined with electoral, legislative and executive processes that we cannot imagine anything else. Drutman juxtaposes “strong, functioning, long-lasting political parties” with an alternative that is “chaotic”. In attempting to demonstrate that “weak” political parties are the primary cause of autocracy, Drutman (via Kim Lane Scheppele) invokes the example of Hungary. “The path that led to … Orbán involved progressively narrowing party choices, ending eventually in an election in which the budding autocrat was the only reasonable-looking option... In short, party collapse preceded democratic collapse.” Scheppele’s attribution of “democratic collapse” to “weak” political parties is reductive. While the Orszod speech certainly contributed to the decline of MSZP by presenting them as a corrupt and ineffective ruling party, this would not have led to Orbán if not also for Fidesz’s self-presentation as the antidote to Hungary’s woes. In this way, the rise of Orbán is explained by the combination of the weakening of one political party and the simultaneous strengthening of another.
Additionally, Scheppele’s argument wrongly implies that Fidesz is something other than a political party and therefore excluded from assessments of what strong and functioning political parties look like. Fidesz is and was a political party; it is not merely a name for supporters of the autocrat Orbán. Therefore, rather than describing the course of events as “the budding autocrat was the only reasonable-looking option”, it is more accurate to write that “a popular [albeit an illiberal one] party replaced an old unpopular one.” Fidesz’s show of autocracy in the adoption of an illiberal constitution does not demonstrate the importance of healthy political parties. Instead, it affirms the idea that having formal political parties allows governing factions to enshrine their authority via tyranny of the majority and thus discredits the idea that political parties are good for politics.
Much of the academic discussion on the role of political parties focuses on their bids for power at elections, with some political scientists rigidly defining parties as simply the candidates that compete at the ballot box. However, such definitions are unduly narrow as they fail to recognise that parties vy for political power through the channels available to them. In liberal states that allow for any political group to register for elections, the distinction is meaningless, but the expanded definition of political party recognises that a group like the African National Congres (ANC) was a political party long before it was permitted to compete in South Africa’s electoral system. Therefore, the exclusion of a political group from competing in elections should not exclude them from the label “political party”, granted that they would compete in elections if permitted. This distinguishes political parties from advocacy groups that could restructure themselves to compete for seats in councils and parliaments but choose to remain outside of government.
Having accepted that advocacy groups qualify as political parties, the question of whether politics would be better without political parties shifts. Criticisms that parties misuse government power or homogenise thought cannot apply to political parties systematically disenfranchised. By contrast, the ANC, for instance, persistently challenged the South African apartheid regime’s mistreatment of the non-white majority, while expanding the political discussion within South Africa. In particular, the ANC’s long-term organisation of civil unrest, from the Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s to its series of guerilla attacks in the late 1980s, brought about such widespread internal condemnation of the South African government that apartheid ceased to be financially or politically viable. In the twilight years of the apartheid regime, the ANC played a pivotal role in democratising South Africa through negotiations with the white minority government. Without the ANC, black advocates in South Africa would not have been able to organise such a campaign so complex that it brought civil rights to tens of millions of people. When at the vanguard of liberation movements, political parties improve politics.
Assessment of the ANC’s impact on South African politics since 1994 highlights the distinction between how parties affect politics when not involved in governance and how governing parties impact politics. Since evolving to fit the more traditional definition of a political party and winning a series of elections, the ANC has begun to display all the ailments of governing political parties. Motivated by the desire to consolidate their political power, the ANC violated the South African Constitution to replace the country’s independent anti-corruption task force, the Directorate of Special Operations, with an organisation subject to presidential oversight. Such a measure demonstrates that the vestment of governing power in a political party brings about the degradation of important institutions by partisanship. Driven by partisanship, the ANC has used the government, by enacting the Protection of State Information Bill, as a vehicle to censor potential corruption whistleblowers. Although integral in ending apartheid, since accession to government, the ANC has demonstrated how political parties make for worse politics.
Having concluded that politics, at the governmental level, would be better without political parties, it is left to be shown how politics might function without them. In countries with first-past-the-post constituency elections such as the United Kingdom and the United States, the absence of party labels would reduce the importance of national debates during general elections. Instead, each of the 650 constituency races in the UK would become a genuinely local election, contested by candidates vying for government on the merits of their own policies and careers. The present combination of national political parties competing in theoretically local constituency races creates the false perception that Members of Parliament aim to promulgate the agenda of their constituents, rather than the opinion of their party leadership. Once elected, officials might form informal factions in attempting to enact articles of legislation. Such an arrangement does not, as partisan realists might claim, show parties to be immutable. The absence of party whips and large party financial systems that pre-ordain election outcomes would leave officials free to enact the agenda on which they were elected at the local level. Moreover, the lack of rigidly defined party trenches would destigmatise deviation from groups a legislator might have previously argued or voted alongside. In polities where party-list proportional representation is the norm, the end of political parties would mark a more seismic shift. Without political parties, those eighty-five states would likely adopt the variant of first-past-the-post described above.
The idea that representative democracies need political parties has long been the orthodoxy. Now oft-espoused by partisan realist academics, the idea was expressed by Washington as long ago as 1796; he lamented that the “spirit of [political] party is inseparable from our nature.” Parties’ past domination of our governments, however, need not mean that they continue in that vein. Parties make for less meaningful political disputes, corrupt executive office and impede political office. In short, political parties make politics worse. Knowing this, we have the imperative to reduce their influence wherever possible, irrespective of whether we can imagine a system without them.
 |
| The House of Commons |
Comments
Post a Comment