The Legacy of the Crash

by Terrence Casey

  The evolution of the mass party in the UK

  The landslide victory of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee in the 1945 election concretized the shift to modern mass political parties in the UK (Garnett and Lynch, 2007). According to Maurice Duverger (1964) – building on the earlier work of Robert Michels (1962) – the centralized, disciplined, and ideologically-based ‘mass’ party was the essential twentieth-century political organization. The socialist (and later communist) parties that evolved to represent the newly enfranchised working class in rapidly industrializing late nineteenth-century Europe pioneered the form, which became so electorally successful that it was replicated successfully by ideological movements of the far right (Fascism and Nazism) and the center right (British conservatism, post-1945 Christian democracy): a process described by Duverger as ‘contagion from the Left’.

  The evolution of mass parties in the UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stemmed from the electoral reforms of 1832, 1867, and 1884. These reforms – combined with rapid industrialization, urbanization and the increasing dissemination of socialist ideas – ignited a perfect storm amongst the newly enfranchised and rapidly growing working class (Epstein, 1967; Strayer, 2009). Trade unions emerged to voice their concerns but found inadequate room for the representation of working-class interests within the Liberal and Conservative parties, which were dominated by landed and business interests respectively. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) thus became the propelling force behind the creation in 1900 of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) that laid the groundwork for the Labour Party (Beer, 1982; McKenzie, 1963).

  In the 1918 election another extension of the franchise to all men aged over 21 and all women aged over 30, combined with the social unrest generated by the First World War, led to a dramatic surge in support for Labour. As working-class voters rallied increasingly behind the burgeoning mass party, the existing major parties were forced to either adapt or be overtaken. In the inter-war years the Conservatives successfully evolved organizationally and ideologically to the new mass party politics while the divided Liberals floundered and were reduced to clear minority party status by the 1930s. The Tory adaptation had been in progress since the 1860s when Benjamin Disraeli had the foresight to create the National Union of Conservative Associations in an effort to mobilize Tory support among the middle and working classes. After 1918, while Labour relied on the trade unions, the National Union served as a recruitment and organizational tool for the Conservatives (Blake, 1970; Pugh, 1982).

  Whereas nineteenth-century British party politics was characterized by loosely organized coalitions in Parliament (Duverger’s ‘cadre parties’), twentieth-century politics became characterized by majoritarian mass party government. In the nineteenth century religion played a key role in determining the British vote, but by 1945, Labour had succeeded in making social class the predominant basis for division in British politics. The political conversation now revolved around the level of unemployment, the social conditions of the working class, and the nationalization of industries. This was buttressed by the social fabric of twentieth-century British society where nearly half of the population consisted of manual laborers. Although there was always a significant working-class electoral ‘defection’ to the Conservatives, by mid century manual workers constituted a formidable electoral base for the Labour Party (Halsey, 1986; Beer, 1982).

  In the post-Second World War era each major party, Conservative and Labour, would be characterized by a mass, dues’ paying membership and a highly structured national organization that wielded tight control over its local branches (McKenzie, 1963). The freedom of MPs was also severely limited by the threat of expulsion from the party. Beer termed this the end of the individualistic structure of representation and the dawn of a collectivist era that gave greater power to the mass membership of the parties (Beer, 1982). McKenzie gave some caution to this characterization by observing the inevitability of bureaucratic top-down governance in any large social organization invoking Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ (McKenzie, 1963). Nevertheless, compared to the mid nineteenth century, power had decisively seeped away from the individual MP toward the party leader, the party whips, and the national party organization.

  The period 1945–70 constituted the apogee of two-party politics in Britain. The two major parties regularly captured over 95 percent of the two-party popular vote and almost 100 percent of the seats in the House of Commons. Both parties had developed hierarchical national organizations that held MPs accountable for enacting the party’s program.

  In the post-war years the UK’s mass parties came closest to exemplifying the ‘responsible party government’ that so impressed American political scientists dissatisfied with the current state of the American major parties. The foundation of the British system was the two-tiered structure of British society: essentially a class dichotomy that persisted from the end of the First World War into the 1960s (Butler and Stokes, 1974). While there were clear ideological differences between the major parties, a rough consensus persisted between them on an interventionist economic policy, the maintenance of the welfare state, the Atlantic Alliance, and the supremacy of the House of Commons in Britain’s liberal democratic political system. All of these would come under challenge, as would the two-party system itself and the nature of mass party politics, in Britain after 1970.

  America’s anomalous party system

  The American party system has long been regarded as an oddity by comparison with the post-Second World War party systems of the other major industrial democracies (Duverger, 1964). The most conspicuous difference has been the absence of the mass party form and the mass socialist or communist parties of the left that spawned it in the European context (Michels, 1962). Numerous explanations have been proffered for this aspect of ‘American Exceptionalism’. The most commonly accepted versions have held that America’s individualistic, ‘Lockean Liberal’ political culture precluded socialism from even emerging as a substantial political force (Hartz, 1955; Lipset and Marks, 2000). Others focused on the additional factor of historical timing and the enfranchisement of a mass electorate in the US by 1830, prior to the onset of the cataclysmic social forces – rapid industrialization, urbanization and political democratization – that would help to unleash socialism in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Epstein, 1967). Other versions explained the limited appeal of socialism to the American masses in terms of a weakened working-class consciousness due to mass immigration in the late nineteenth century, higher working-class living standards, and political repression, or a combination of the three (Kolko, 1967).

  Universal adult, white, male enfranchisement by the 1820s gave rise to America’s first seriously organized and durable national political party in the form of the Jacksonian Democrats (Wilentz, 2005). Jackson’s various opponents had similarly organized themselves into the Whig Party by the time of the 1836 election. The Jacksonian parties were highly decentralized with real authority lying with largely autonomous state and local party leaders and the national party only really having an existence in presidential election years (Silbey, 1994). By the 1840s many of these local organizations had morphed into ‘political machines’ with local bosses controlling party nominations and blocs of voters and rewarding their supporters with the spoils of office – patronage and favors. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the most powerful state and local machine bosses essentially determined the choice of the party’s presidential nominees at the quadrennial national party convention.

  These party machines were highly organized and disciplined in their own locale but they were definitely not mass membership organizations on the lines of the emerging European model. To say the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American parties were not ideological would be an exaggeration except in a very strict Marxist sense of the term. Their differences on policy issues were real and they clearly represented differences in approaches to government and society to the vote
rs of their day (Gerring, 1998). The differences with European – and particularly British – parties became more pronounced when the latter adopted a clearly mass party form in the early twentieth century (Michels, 1962; Duverger, 1964) while the American parties retained their very loose definition of party membership, and their other decentralized, relatively non-ideological, characteristics. Indeed, the American parties were organizationally weakened by the reforms of the Progressive Era (1900–17) which were specifically designed to reduce the influence of party bosses and machines over American politics (Hofstadter, 1955).

  How then were the clearly aberrant American parties to be explained? For Duverger (1964) the only answer was that the American parties were pre-modern ‘cadre parties’ based on local cliques of notables that would hopefully eventually evolve along European mass party lines. The American political scientists who authored the 1950 APSA report and the other admirers of the post-war UK parties shared this hope, although in general they were fairly pessimistic that America’s apparently ramshackle and nebulous major parties could be so transformed (Committee on Political Parties, 1950; White and Mileur, 2002). The post-New Deal Democratic Party with its reactionary southern segregationist wing that dominated the US Congress in the post-war years seemed like a very poor analogue for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party. Neither of the American parties made much sense in European ideological terms.

  Leon Epstein (1967) was very much the exception among scholars of political parties on both sides of the Atlantic in taking the American parties seriously on their own terms. He did not see them as retrograde forms of a predominant and desirable European mass party model but as adaptations by American parties to specifically American conditions: to the ‘American Mold’, as he put it in his later textbook on US parties (Epstein, 1986). He also did not view the mass party European model as necessarily enduring. Social change in European societies prior to the Second World War has given rise to the mass party, but Epstein anticipated that continuing social change in post-war Europe might well begin to erode the predominance of class-based mass parties. Since the mid 1960s this is exactly what has happened in the UK, as we shall see in the next section. On the other side of the Atlantic, American parties have also undergone an adaptation to a changed social and political universe that has brought them somewhat closer in form to their European counterparts. Yet there remain specifically American social features that explain persistent differences in the nature of party cleavages in the two countries.

  British parties since 1970

  By comparison with the mid twentieth century, the dominance of the UK’s major parties has significantly attenuated. Party membership, which had peaked in the 1950s at 3 million for the Conservative Party and 1 million for Labour, had fallen by 2009 to a meager 250,000 and 166,000 respectively (Marshall, 2009). Additionally, although both major parties have maintained a top-down hierarchical structure, recent decades have witnessed several rebellions of parliamentary backbenchers, and even cabinet ministers, who were nevertheless able to survive politically with little disciplining from the party leadership. Furthermore, the political conversation between the parties had changed from the ideologically polarized class politics of the immediate post-war decades. New Labour’s triumph in 1997 did not promise any new nationalization of industries or an expansion of redistributive economics. Instead the 1997 party manifesto focused on the stabilization of the economy, improvement of government services and constitutional reforms (Seyd, 1998). Finally, one need look no further than the resurgence of the Liberal Party since the mid 1960s and the emergence of the nationalist parties as a major political force in Scotland and Wales (and the divorce of electoral politics in Northern Ireland from UK party politics following the onset of civic unrest in the province in the late 1960s) to recognize that significant electoral gains can now be made without appeal to class antagonism. Thus, in all significant respects, the UK has witnessed a significant erosion of the two-party system and the mass party model (Webb, 2000; Lynch, 2007).

  Several alternative theories of political parties and party systems have risen to fill the explanatory vacuum. The ‘catch-all party’ model emphasizes the declining role of ideology after the 1960s and presents the major parties as opportunistic marketing organizations, willing to highlight party personalities in order to have a centrist appeal (Kirchheimer, 1966). The ‘cartel party’ model depicts the major UK parties as aiming for control of state resources in order to deny the minor parties the ability to achieve power. Like the ‘catch-all party’ this theory de-emphasizes ideology in favor of a more hardnosed thirst for electoral spoils (Katz and Mair, 1995). Perhaps the most accurate alternative model (and one that also has relevance for political parties in the contemporary US) is Panebianco’s (1988) ‘electoral professional party’, which correlates recent social and technological developments with changes in the campaign practices of political parties as the latter, by electoral necessity, respond to these changes. The UK parties now rely more on big donations from wealthy businessmen than on dues from a dwindling mass membership to run their campaigns. As technology and political media have evolved (for example, television and the internet) the perceived relational distance between the voter and the candidate has decreased. These developments have allowed political party campaigns to become increasingly more professional and technocratic, employing a specialized array of opinion pollsters, speech writers, political consultants, and spin-doctors. The marketing of candidates now emphasizes personality rather than party ideology and relies on a scientific understanding of the electorate to ‘target’ specific categories of voters. Whatever the theoretical advantages or disadvantages of either of the preceding theories, their similarities reveal a definite waning in the appeal of the mass party model as a function of the decline of party ideology, the rising emphasis of candidate personality over party policy, and the decline in party membership.

  The erosion of the mass party model has been in large part a consequence of the breakdown of the socio-economic realities that legitimatized it as a workable theory. Britain came out of the Second World War as a battered and bruised second-tier power that still experienced high economic growth and rising living standards during the 1950s and 1960s. The rapid changes that struck British society had also transformed the occupational division of labor. Manual laborers in 1900 comprised close to three-quarters of the British workforce. By 1950, this number had dropped to below two-thirds, and by the time of New Labour’s victory in 1997 to below a third. Replacing the decrease in the traditional working class was a robustly growing sector of white-collar, professional, and technical workers (Halsey, 1986). In their classic work on the British electorate, Butler and Stokes (1974) found some evidence of what they have termed a class ‘de-alignment’ as Labour’s traditional working-class base appeared less likely to vote loyally for the party. Heath et al. (1985) observed that the core class-based electoral constituencies of the Conservative and Labour parties had in fact largely adhered to their traditional party allegiances, but the relative sizes of the traditional Labour and Tory bases had decreased within the overall electorate. This development offered an opportunity for the Liberal Party and the Nationalists in Scotland and Wales to make gains amongst the growing sector of white-collar professionals.

  Ronald Inglehart (1977) has proposed that in times of political peace and relative economic growth, the priorities of voters change from basic material needs to more value-laden and lifestyle-oriented concerns. If correct, the post-materialist theory could afford us an explanation as to the new consensus and cleavages in British party politics. The Labour victories following the Conservative Thatcher–Major era (1979–97) did not see the repeal of the relatively popular planks of Tory policy – privatization, lower taxes, and restrictions on trade union power. Thus, as it concerns the economy, there has developed a degree of consensus (not without marginal differences) between the parties on fiscal policy and economic management. Tony Blair’s 1997 victory was to a great extent d
ue to an increase in voters’ confidence that the Labour Party could manage the economy as well as the Conservatives (not to mention his decision to jettison the cherished Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution that committed the party to state ownership of industry). New Labour’s promise not to raise taxes nor extend nationalization of industries seemed to leave no substantive differences between the Labour and Conservative parties on the economy (Seyd, 1998). The greater differences between the parties now concerned constitutional reforms, improvement of government services, devolution, and the UK’s degree of integration with the European Union (EU).

  This shift has been accompanied by a fragmentation of politics at the regional level – most particularly in Scotland and Wales – and a lack of party cohesion in European policy. As already mentioned, John Major in the early 1990s could not bring the Conservatives together under a common European policy, but neither did Blair succeed in doing so with Labour after 1997. Tony Blair’s pro-European integration policies and speeches were commonly met by opposition from his Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who wielded great influence amongst Labour MPs (McKay, 2006).

  In conjunction with determining its future in Europe, Britain is also treading new political territory at home by experimenting with its own version of federalism. During the heyday of the two party system in the 1950s, there was relatively little regional deviation from national electoral results in terms of the performance of Labour and the Conservatives. Since the 1960s stark regional variations in support for the major and minor parties have appeared leading commentators to talk of a so-called ‘North–South divide’ with a dramatic decline in support for the Conservatives in northern England, Wales and Scotland, and for Labour in the South and South East of England. In large tracts of Britain, either the Liberal Democrats or Nationalists are the greatest electoral threat to Labour or the Conservatives. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland’s politics are now characterized by multiparty electoral systems and Coalition governments encouraged by the proportional electoral systems used to elect the devolved Parliaments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast (Webb, 2000; Lynch, 2007). Indeed, after four years of leading a minority government the Scottish Nationalists secured an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament as a result of their stunning success in the May 2011 elections, perhaps portending a shift toward a ‘dominant party’ model within a multiparty system in Scotland.