by Naim, Moises
The Advantage Enjoyed by Incumbents Is Disappearing
It’s generally the case that though incumbent parties and coalitions have built-in advantages such as patronage and visibility, they are likely to lose some votes, if only because their sympathizers may have lost enthusiasm while their opponents have a record to criticize. In recent years, the incidence of this phenomenon has increased: an analysis of seventeen established democracies in Europe showed that in every decade since the 1940s, the average loss of votes by incumbents facing reelection has risen. In the 1950s, incumbents had lost on average 1.08 percent of the vote; by the 1980s, the average loss was 3.44 percent; and in the 1990s, it almost doubled again, to 6.28 percent. In the 1950s, thirty-five cabinets in the countries surveyed won reelection whereas thirty-seven lost; in the 1990s, only eleven cabinets won reelection whereas forty-six lost. Hanne Marthe Narud and Henry Valen, the political scientists who carried out this analysis, also pointed out that the trend was as strong in established democracies such as the United Kingdom or the Netherlands as it was in new democracies such as Greece or Portugal; in other words, the trend was impervious to the length of democratic experience and tradition.19
Governments Are Falling More Quickly
There is also evidence that since World War II, governing coalitions or cabinets have increasingly tended to end due to political infighting before their term is up. Political scientists distinguish between two kinds of cabinet termination. One is technical—that is, pertaining to constitutional reasons particular to the country in question or to situations in which elections are due by law or a prime minister dies and must be replaced. The other kind of cabinet termination is discretionary—in other words, due to political volatility, as when a cabinet resigns due to political dissension or loses a vote of confidence in parliament. According to a study based on the same data set of seventeen parliamentary democracies in Europe since 1945, there were more discretionary terminations than technical terminations in the 1970s and 1980s (72.9 percent and 64.7 percent, respectively) than in previous decades. In the 1990s the proportions balanced out, however, with an equal number of technical and discretionary terminations.20
Not surprisingly, in the first decade of the twenty-first century this trend toward discretionary terminations accelerated. Since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, governments fell, cabinets collapsed, coalitions frayed, ministers were fired, and once-untouchable party bosses were forced to resign. As economic problems raged throughout Europe, the inability of the powerful to tame the crisis became dramatically apparent.
EVEN OUTSIDE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEMS, EVIDENCE ABOUNDS OF the constraints that now undermine the seeming mandate of an election victory. In the United States, one source of increasing frustration for each presidential administration is how long nominees take to get confirmed by the Senate. As New York University scholar Paul Light has observed, “A nomination and confirmation process lasting more than six months was nearly unheard of between 1964 and 1984.” In that same period, only 5 percent of appointees waited more than six months between being contacted in advance of nomination and actually getting confirmed. By today’s glacial standards, that past performance is unbelievably speedy. Between 1984 and 1999, Light found, 30 percent of appointees needed more than six months to get confirmed. On the other hand, quick confirmations—those taking just one to two months—occurred in 50 percent of the cases between 1964 and 1984 but only 15 percent of the cases between 1984 and 1999. In the following decade, as political polarization became more acute, this trend would only get worse.
FROM PARTIES TO FACTIONS
Party bosses chomping on cigars and trading patronage favors as they set out their platforms and policies and candidates—the image looms large in political mythology, but it is further and further removed from reality. Exhibit A is the shifting fortunes of the Republican Party in the United States. Not so long ago, the GOP epitomized buttoned-down business conservatism and the discipline that came with it—characteristics that it succeeded in maintaining in the face of concerted, and sometimes successful, agitation by social-conservative-issue groups. The rise of the Tea Party has proved to be more of an organizational challenge. Tellingly, the Tea Party is not a party at all but a loose amalgam of organizations and factions and affinity groups and individuals motivated by the ideas (themselves fluid) that they associate with the “Tea Party” concept and brand. Some Tea Party candidates and groups have garnered funding from powerful business interests that have considerable experience influencing American politics (e.g., David and Charles Koch, the billionaires who run Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States). Other Tea Party components resemble nothing more than grassroots direct-democracy activist movements in a long-standing tradition of American political participation. These disparate elements come together in a way that no traditional political party, with its committees and rules and small circle of elite power-brokers, could hope to contain. It took only months from the emergence of the Tea Party in 2009 for it to reshape Republican and, with it, American politics, driving primary victories for rank outsiders and others not preferred by the party establishment. Indeed, in the 2008 election, the Tea Party did not exist; four years later, the contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination all eagerly sought its mantle.
The Tea Party is a very American phenomenon, whether as a reflection of the American infatuation with direct democracy, as a vehicle for injecting money into politics, or as the latest vessel for small-government populism. But its rapid emergence out of nowhere has corollaries. In Europe, the Pirate Party movement, which draws on a hacker ethos of free information and greater civil liberties, has expanded from its origins in Sweden in 2006 to Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. Its platform, the so-called Uppsala Declaration promulgated in 2009, focuses on liberalizing copyright and patent laws, promoting transparency and freedom of speech, and mobilizing the youth vote. Not only did it win 7.1 percent of the vote in Sweden’s European Parliament elections and two of Sweden’s EP seats, but in September 2011 it won representation in a state parliament by securing 9 percent of the vote in Berlin. Among the parties it outstripped were a key partner in Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition, the long-established Free Democratic Party—which didn’t even rise above the 5 percent threshold needed for state representation.21 In 2012 the Pirate Party achieved another milestone when a member of its Swiss branch won the election for mayor of the city of Eichberg.22
Another kind of campaign insurgency was carried out by Ségolène Royal in France’s 2007 presidential election. Running to lead the Socialist Party against Nicolas Sarkozy, Royal opposed all of the party’s traditional “barons” with their deep support networks among party cadres and high elected officials.
So how did Royal get to be the candidate? Through a Tea Party–like movement—and, as in America, through the use of primaries to determine the candidate. Primaries are a recent tool in democracies: in America, where they are most familiar, they really only became generalized in the late 1960s, and elsewhere they are even more recent than that. They are also increasingly common. For the 2007 election in France, the Socialist Party held a primary open to all party members—and Royal’s camp launched a massive campaign to sign up new members in time to take part. Through this device along with a website and political messaging that separated Royal from the party apparatus, she won a crushing 61 percent in the primary—although in the general election she lost.
The French Socialists, not content with this innovation, decided to take it a step further in 2011 as they prepared for the 2012 elections. This time they decided to hold primaries open to all voters, not just to their own party members. To participate, the voter needed only to sign his or her approval of a basic statement of agreement with the values of the Left—hardly a binding and enforceable arrangement. And at least one candidate signed up who was himself not a member of the party. In other words, there was no longer mu
ch that was party-like about this party’s way of selecting the candidate to oppose the incumbent president. François Hollande, who had lived with Ségolène Royal since the 1970s and with whom had four children, won the Socialist Party’s nomination and defeated Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election. By then Hollande and Royal were separated and the new president moved to the Élysée Palace with his companion, journalist Valérie Trierweiler.
The Tea Party on one side of the political spectrum and French Socialists on the other are just two examples of an international trend: across the advanced democracies, major parties are feeling the distance between leaders selected behind closed doors and those who can mobilize voters. With minority parties on the rise, the need to adapt has become urgent. In many countries, parties that for decades expected to have a share or a turn in power have opened up the way they choose their standard-bearer. Using one method or another, they are expanding the “selectorate”—a term that designates the field of people who get a say in selecting a party leader.23
The spread of primaries is a telling sign of that change. Tallying fifty major parties from eighteen parliamentary democracies, Ofer Kenig, head of the political parties’ research group at the Israel Democracy Institute, noted in 2009 that twenty-four gave their ordinary members “a significant role” in choosing the leader. The others divided between selection by members of parliament and selection by some appointed committee.24
As noted, primaries are spreading elsewhere as well.25 In Latin America, an estimated 40 percent of the presidential elections since the political transitions away from military rule in the 1980s have included at least one major candidate selected through a primary. One survey of political parties in Latin America found that more than half had used some kind of primary or primary-like internal election by 2000. Another study found that the lowest levels of confidence in political parties in Latin America were in countries, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, where no candidates had ever been selected by primaries. Overall, political scientists have found that even though open primaries—the kind that bring in the biggest “selectorate”—are in place in only a limited number of countries, a clear international trend points in their direction. And California, long a bellwether for national trends in the United States, has tilted the balance further in favor of voter over party preferences: it agreed by popular referendum in 2011 to have all primary candidates appear on a single ballot, with the top two vote-getters moving on to the general election regardless of party.
As if US party bosses didn’t have already enough problems keeping their power and enforcing discipline, along came the Super-PACs, a new vehicle engendered in 2010 by the Supreme Court through its Citizens United decision eliminating limits to campaign contributions and empowering private corporations as political actors. These Super-Political Action Committees are not allowed to coordinate with the candidates they support, but in the 2012 campaign it became obvious that each of the presidential candidates (even each of the Republican party contenders for the nomination) had one or more Super-PACs which were massively funding initiatives that promoted them or attacked their rivals. Super-PACs are both a new form of substantial political power based on access to large quantities of money and an example of yet another form of fragmentation of that power. Their defenders see them as merely a healthy addition to the arsenal of those who want to bring more competition to politics. Joel M. Gora, a law professor who helped advocacy groups in their efforts to resist donor disclosure requirements, says that many of the regulations allowing access to Super-PACs are simply part of an “incumbent protection racket.” As he argues, “These laws are restricting outsiders, whether liberal or left-wing outsiders or conservative and right-wing outsiders.”26 In fact, businessman Leo Linbeck III launched a Super-PAC in 2012 whose only aim was to dislodge entrenched incumbents, whom he believes are no longer responsive to voters. As the Washington Post’s Paul Kane reported, “While most PACs aim to boost the chances of a favored candidate or to bring down an ideological opponent, the super PAC has a decidedly different goal: to oust incumbents. Of both parties. And why not? . . . [Linbeck’s Super-Pac] helped defeat two veteran Republicans and two long-time Democrats, knocking out almost 65 years of combined House experience.”27 And although Linbeck’s funds were limited and his Super-PAC was running out of money, its spokesman victoriously noted that “[w]e’ve demonstrated that our concept works.”28
Super-PACs may be a distinctly American phenomenon, but worldwide, money is clearly becoming as potent a political driver of political outcomes as ideology once was. Still, as the cases of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and many others show, money alone is far from enough these days to seal the many holes through which power seeps away.
FROM CAPITALS TO REGIONS
More countries. More democracies. More pressure to share power even in nations with authoritarian regimes while democracies offer more choices both inside and outside political parties. More frequent elections, more referenda, more scrutiny, and more contenders. All of these trends point to the same direction: the redistribution and scattering of power from established players to more competitors.
Add one more global trend to all these: power is also shifting from capitals and the executive branch to state and local governments.29
Take the United Kingdom, for example. Its political system is famously stable. Conservatives and Labour take turns in office, with Liberal Democrats holding a sliver in the center. When neither of the main parties has a majority, producing a “hung parliament,” as in 2010, a coalition with the Liberal Democrats puts either party over the top. That negotiation, while serious, is far less complicated than it would have been if it took a coalition of five or six parties to form a majority in parliament.
In Britain, those three parties control the bulk of the House of Commons, and election rules make it difficult for anyone else to break through. And so how do we explain the presence of the multiple parties we’ve heard about in recent years? The UK Independence Party, the British National Party, the Scottish National Party, Sinn Fein, the Ulster Unionists, the Plaid Cymru—the British political landscape is much more varied than the traditional picture would suggest. Some regional, some extreme, these parties have found elected office—and the media attention and credibility that accompany it—in the past two decades. How? Thanks to new elected bodies. In 1998, the vast political reform known as devolution transferred some statutory powers from the UK parliament to the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Ireland assemblies. In addition, membership in the EU brought participation in the European Parliament elections, where proportional representation opened the door for small parties to win seats. The UK Independence Party, which is skeptical of the benefits of EU membership, owes its rise to having taken part in European Parliament elections. And the far-right, xenophobic British National Party won two European Parliament seats in 2009—a small victory in numbers, but a huge breakthrough in credibility for an outfit that the political mainstream considered a pariah.
Britain is not alone. In Spain, the two main parties, Partido Popular (PP) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), have alternated power since the onset of democracy in 1978. But, like Britain, Spain also has important regional parties, and the Provincial governments (Catalonia and the Basque country, among others) have been very successful in gaining more autonomy at the expense of the power of the national government in Madrid. In Italy, the same is true with the Lega del Nord and other regional political groups.
The EU parliament has opened avenues of participation for small parties in all twenty-seven member-states. Whether the parliament has real powers does not matter as much as the path that it offers to legitimacy and viability at home. Meanwhile, devolution is an international trend. Italy set up elected regional councils as early as 1970. France followed suit with regional assemblies in 1982. Belgium turned itself into a federal system with regional assemblies in 1993. Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, and
Norway all introduced some kind of new elected body at the subnational level between the 1970s and the 1990s. In some countries, the number of municipalities with elected officials has increased: Bolivia doubled its municipalities in 1994 and increased the scope of their authority.
Here again, the increasingly established democracies of Latin America are contributing to the growing pace of decentralization. The number of countries in Latin America in which the local government executive authorities (mayors) are directly elected by the population, as opposed to appointed by the central authorities, increased from three in 1980 to seventeen in 1995.30 A study by the Interamerican Development Bank found that subnational governments in the region went from handling 8 percent to 15 percent of public expenditure in a fifteen-year period that began in 1990. In the most decentralized countries, the proportion was much higher: around 40 percent of expenditure in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. Major decentralization programs are also under way in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Estonia.31
Meanwhile, several federal systems have divided existing states into two, creating new local executive and legislative bodies. Since 2000, India has added the states of Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand and proposed another, Telangan. Nigeria has nearly doubled its number of states, from nineteen in 1976 to thirty-six today. Even Canada has divided its Northwest Territories, creating the province of Nunavut.