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Party Systems and the Representation of Social Groups
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
Sociologists and laymen have often seemed to differ over the nature of democracy. Public opinion generally gives prominence to the freedom of citizens to elect representatives, and until recently political scientists devoted most of their attention to the instituted rules which safeguard these rights and make them effective. The sociologist's concentration upon elites and social processes must often haye seemed, to both layman and political scientist, to blur the distinctions between democracy and totalitarian or aristocratic forms of government. This difference in emphasis sometimes reflects the gap between wish and reality; sometimes, however, it is due to the sociologist's excessive neglect of formal institutions. In this omission, the sociologist is frequently suffering from the undue influence of certain ideas in the sociological tradition, which, when first stated, were salutary correctives of older misconceptions. Thus Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter stressed, as the distinctive and most valuable feature of democracy, the formation of the political elite in a competitive struggle for the votes of a mainly passive electorate (I). On account of its heritage of ideas, sociology has yet to create the single theory which will give due weight to the autonomy of legally-constituted elites as well as to the influence of the various other social groups involved in the democratic process.
- Type
- Industrial Society and Representative Government
- Information
- European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , June 1960 , pp. 50 - 85
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- Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1960
References
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“The first phase in the moulding of the prevailing spirit in modern Europe ended with the appearance and development of the socialist parties […]. Between 1900 and 1914, the bipartisan tendency which had dominated the preceding century was replaced everywhere by a swing towards tripartisanship; the ‘conservative-liberal’ duo now changed to a ‘conservative-liberal-socialist’ trio”. Duverger, Maurice, Public Opinion and Political Parties in France, American Political Science Review, XLVI (1952), p. 1070.Google Scholar
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(30) The one other country which I know of that has a system akin to the American primaries is Uruguay, the most stable democracy in Latin America. In Uruguay, the various factions within the two major parties may each nominate a presidential candidate. On election day, the voters choose the man they prefer. When votes are counted, the party which has a majority counting the votes of all its presidential candidates wins the election, and the candidate of that party who received more votes than any other one of the party is elected president. In other words, Uruguay combines the primary and the final election on the same ballot. For plans to form a similar system in Brazil, see Szulc, Tad, Brazilians Plan Voting Alliance, New York Times, 12 29, 1959.Google Scholar
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(33) There is in fact one long-term experiment in Finland with a constitutional system that combines a strong president with a relatively weak cabinet which, as in the Fifth Republic, is responsible to Parliament rather than to the president. This Finnish version of a “Gaullist” constitution has not reduced the number of parties in the country; there are currently seven main groupings, and, on average, there has been a cabinet shake-up every year since 1917. It should be noted that although Finland has a strong presidential system, the President is elected indirectly rather than by the people, and both presidential electors and members of parliament are elected under a system of proportional representation. Consequently, there is little scope for the presidential nature of the system to reduce the number of parties. However, the Finnish sociologist Heikki Waris reports that, “By dividing the power between a stable authority, the president, and a temporary authority, the Cabinet, the Finnish Constitution has considerably lessened, if not eliminated, the apparent instability which is the great weakness of the cabinet system in multiparty countries. The Finnish system […] has assured a certain continuity of policy”. Waris, Heikki, “Finland”, in Rose, Arnold ed., The Institutions of Advanced Societies (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1958), p. 211.Google Scholar
In European states where local government is highly centralized through the prefectorial system, the argument that strengthening the presidency will stabilise democracy must meet the counterargument that, by reducing parliamentary control over the state bureaucracy, a strong presidency might weaken still further those local centres of power and responsibility which, ever since Tocqueville, have been regarded as the best foundations for democratic order. The formula for responsible republican government, it seems, must include both a strong, directly elected president and elected local officers possessing real power. Where the local elected officials are the puppets of an appointed prefect, they are in a similar position to that of parliamentary politicians in a weak multiparty system: neither can be held accountable for long-term policies. This evil is greatest when, as often in France, local and national politicians form a single class of men. The liberal and democratic argument against centralized internal authority was forcibly restated as recently as 1944 by Luigi Einaudi, subsequently the first president of the Republic of Italy: “Democracy and the prefect are profoundly repugnant to each other […]. Neither in Italy, nor in France, nor in Spain, nor in Prussia has there ever been, nor will there ever be, democracy so long as there exists a centralized type of government of which the prefect is the symbol”. “Via col prefetto”, Il buon governo (Bari, 1954), p. 52Google Scholar; cited by Price, Roy, The Italian Local Elections 1956 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1956), p. 2Google Scholar. It does not seem to have been heeded by any of the countries possessing a prefectorial system, except for some of the German states.
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(37) Although the Country and Liberal parties usually do not run against each other and act, in effect, electorally as the rural and urban wing of the non-socialist party, the continued existence of two such parties is facilitated by the fact that Australia has adopted the preferential ballot system with the single-member constituency. Under this system voters list the order of preference for all candidates on the ballot. Thus when there are Liberal and Country candidates in the same constituency, a Liberal voter will mark the Country candidate as his number two choice, and Country party supporters will do the same for the Liberals. This system has also encouraged occasional splits from the Labor party, since minority Labor party candidates can pick up first votes without these votes being permanently lost to the major party backed by such protest voters. See Miller, J. D. B., Australian Government and Politics (London, Gerald Duckworth, 1954), PP. 85–86.Google Scholar
(38) See Lakeman, Enid and Lambert, James D., Voting in Democracies (London, Faber and Faber, 1955), pp. 223–230.Google Scholar
(39) Basil Chubb, Cabinet Government in Ireland, Political Studies, III (1955), p. 272.Google Scholar
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(47) See Hermens, F. A., The Representative Republic (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), p. 201.Google Scholar
(48) “Electoral procedures based on territorial… [as distinct from “representation through interest-groups”] is precisely the technique for the organic integration of the whole. As a matter of principle the individual delegate represents the entire area. The ensuing separation into parties according to political tendencies implies then only differences of belief concerning the means by which the welfare of the nation is to be achieved”. Simmel, Georg, The Web of Group Affiliations (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1955), p. 194.Google Scholar
(49) For a detailed description of the system and an analysis of the events leading to the downfall of the first Austrian republic, see Gulick, Charles, Austria: From Habsburg to Hitler (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1948)Google Scholar. A recent study of elections in the first and second republics demonstrates that the second one is genuinely different from the first in that the two major parties, though based on the same groups as before 1934, have much more support today within “opposition strata” than their predecessors did. Thus the conservative People's party is much stronger today among workers, residents of Vienna, Protestants, and irreligious people, than was the pre-1934 Christian Social party. Conversely, the Socialists though weaker in Vienna are much stronger in the outlying provinces than earlier, and they have increased their vote among peasants considerably. Paralleling the growth of the two parties within segments once overwhelmingly opposed to them has been a sharp decline in ideological cleavage. The conservative party is no longer a Christian or Catholic party, and the Socialists have dropped their adherence to Marxist doctrine. See Simon, Walter B., Ethik, Politische und Struktur, Politische, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, XI (1959), 445–459.Google Scholar
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(51) Cited in Humphreys, John H., Proportional Representation, A Study in Methods of Election (London, Methuen and Co., 1911), p. 58.Google Scholar
(52) Ibid., p. 57; a similar point is made by Duverger, Maurice in L'influence des systèmes électoraux sur la vie politique (Paris, Armand Colin, 1950), pp. 39–40Google Scholar; see also Lakeman, Enid and Lambert, James D., Voting in Democracies (London, Faber and Faber, 1945), pp. 63–64Google Scholar. The latter contend also that “An instance of the unifying effect of proportional representation is Czechoslovakia after the first world war, where representation of their respective minorities prevented what might have been a sharp cleavage between Bohemia and Slovakia”. Loc. cit.
(53) Herbert Tingsten, Stability and Vitality in Swedish Democracy, The Political Quarterly, XXVI (1955), 140–151.Google Scholar
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(56) See Political Man, op. cit., pp. 77–96Google Scholar; as Walter Bagehot put it almost a century ago: “The functions of […] royalty are for the most part latent […]. It seems to order, but it never seems to struggle. It is commonly hidden like a mystery, and sometimes paraded like a pageant, but in neither case is it contentious. The nation is divided into parties, but the crown is of no party. Its apparent separation from business is that which removes it both from enmities and from desecration, which preserves its mystery, which enables it to combine the affection of conflicting parties—to be a visible symbol of unity […]”. Bagehot, , op. cit., p. 40Google Scholar. Bagehot's use of the distinction between manifest and latent activities and functions is, I think, one of the first uses of these concepts in social science.
(57) Michel Debré, the first Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic, argued in 1947 that the Fourth Republic would inevitably collapse because it used proportional representation. See his La mort de l'État républicain (Paris, Gallimard, 1947).Google Scholar
(58) Dankwart Rustow, Some Observations on Proportional Representation, The Journal of Politics, XII (1950), 107–127.Google Scholar
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(61) Weber, Max, op. cit., p. 226Google Scholar. These concepts are elaborated in an unpublished paper by Richmond, Patricia, “Democracy and Party: The Problem of Political Stability in the Mexican ‘One-Party’ System”Google Scholar, which has greatly influenced my thinking on these issues.
(62) Duverger, M., Political Parties, op. cit., p. 278.Google Scholar
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(64) Diamond, Martin, Democracy and The Federalist: A Reconsideration of the Framers' Intent, American Political Science Review, LIII (1959), pp. 56–57.Google Scholar
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