POLS 3311: Social Cleavages, Party Systems, and Party Competition

Social Cleavages, Party Systems, and Party Competition

  • Democracies are often categorized by their party systems.
  • Political scientists focus on the size and number of parties within a country.
  • There's a distinction between two-party systems (like the United States) and multi-party systems (like the Netherlands).
  • A country’s party system is the result of social and institutional forces.

Party Systems

  • Political party definition: “a group of officials or would be officials linked with a sizeable group of citizens into an organization; a key objective of the organization is to make sure that officials attain power or are maintained in power” (Shivley, 2001).
  • In simpler terms, a political party is a group of people, including officeholders and those who help them get and keep power.
  • The primary goal of a political party is to gain power.
  • The distinction between parties and interest groups (e.g., the National Rifle Association) is that the latter seeks to influence policy without taking power.

Types of Party Systems

  • Five types: nonpartisan, single-party, one-party dominant, two-party, and multi-party.
  • Single-party systems are typically dictatorships; nonpartisan and single-party systems are rare in democracies.
  • Democracies are usually categorized as two-party systems (USA) or multi-party systems (Netherlands).
  • Scholars argue that political parties are core democratic institutions (Lipset, 1996).
  • Examples of non-partisan democracies: Nauru, Tuvalu, Palau, and Micronesia.
  • Examples of single-party systems: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.
  • Liberia is considered the first single-party system: True Whig Party (1878-1980).
  • One-party dominant system: multiple parties exist, but only one has a realistic chance of winning.
  • Two-party system: only two major political parties have a realistic chance of holding power (USA, Jamaica).
  • Multi-party system: more than two parties have a realistic chance of holding power (Brazil, Israel, and Netherlands).

Effective Number of Parties

  • A measure to count political parties (Laakso and Taagepera, 1979).
  • This measure counts every party in a system but weighs them by their size:
    • Vote share: measures the effective number of electoral parties.
    • Seat share: measures the effective number of legislative parties.
  • This helps determine how many parties won seats in the legislature and how these seats are distributed across different parties.
  • Example: Belize vs. Brazil

Where Do Parties Come From?

  • Two views by political scientists:
    • Primordial party formation view: parties naturally represent people with shared common interests. “Natural” divisions or cleavages in society lead to the emergence of political parties representing these interests (bottoms-up approach).
    • Instrumental view of party formation: parties are teams of office seekers, focusing on the role of political elites and entrepreneurs (top-down approach).

Types of Political Parties and Social Cleavages

  • The key function of a political party in a democracy is to represent, articulate, and champion its members' interests.
  • The types of political parties in a country are related to the country’s social cleavages or divisions.
  • Types of cleavages:
    • Urban-Rural Cleavage
    • Confessional Cleavage
    • Secular-Clerical Cleavage
    • Class Cleavage
    • Post-Material Cleavage
    • Ethnic and Linguistic Cleavages

Number of Parties: Duverger’s Theory

  • Social cleavages help explain the different types of parties that exist in a country. What explains the number of parties?
  • According to Duverger, the primary engine behind party formation is in social divisions. The more divisions there are, the greater the demand for party formation (Clark and Golder, 2006).
  • The way membership is distributed across the divisions determines pressures for distinctive representation.

Country A: Uncorrelated Cleavages

  • According to Duverger, Country A’s “engine” of social forces is propelling the party system to a multi-party system because they are just as likely to demand political representation as rich Catholics, rich Protestants, poor Catholics, and poor Protestants as they are as Catholics, Protestants, the rich, and the poor

Country B: Correlated Cleavages

  • In Country B, half the population are rich Protestants, and half are poor Catholics. In Country B, the two cleavages are perfectly correlated. If we knew if someone was Catholic or Protestant, we would also know if they were rich or poor and vice versa.

  • A country with correlated latent attributes is known as a country with reinforcing cleavages. While there are two cleavages (wealth and religion), the characterization of the political competition will be by just one cleavage, poor Catholics, and rich Protestants.

  • Country B’s “engine” of social forces is propelling the party system to a single-party system.

  • Key in influencing party demand is not necessarily the total number of cleavages, but rather the total number of cross-cutting cleavages.

  • The logic is that the social pressure for distinctive representation and a large party system is dependent on the number of cleavages in a country, and increases with the degree to which these cleavages are cross-cutting rather than reinforcing.

Electoral Institutions

  • Why does an increase in the number of cleavages have a different effect on the size of party systems in different countries?

  • Shift to post-materialist values was greater in some countries than in others.

  • Duverger argues that it is likely because of the electoral institutions (electoral rules) in different countries. He asserts that disproportional electoral systems such as the SMDP system act as a “brake” on the likelihood for social cleavages to turn into new parties.

  • Duverger’s theory: increasing the number of cleavages in a country has less of an effect on the size of the party system if the electoral system is disproportional than if it is proportional.

  • The two reasons for why disproportional electoral systems have this moderating effect are referred to as “mechanical” and “strategic” effects of electoral laws.

The Mechanical Effect of Electoral Laws

  • Refers to the way votes are translated into seats.

  • Punishes small parties and rewards large ones.

  • The reward and punishment extent is dependent on how proportional the system is. The higher the disproportionality (SMDP), the more likely the large parties will be rewarded, and the small parties punished (hard to win seats).

  • “Duvergerland” (hypothetical), and the UK (real-world) example.

  • In Duvergerland, the Green Party fails to win a single seat, while in the Liberal Democrats in the UK elections managed to win 20 seats (3.1%) even with a smaller share of the national vote than the Greens in Duvergerland.

  • This is because the extent to which the mechanical effect of the SMDP system punishes small parties is directly related to how the electoral support is geographically dispersed.

The Strategic Effects of Electoral Laws

  • Is how the way in which votes are translated to seats influences the strategic behavior of voters and elites

  • Because of how the mechanical effect of disproportional electoral systems punishes small parties and rewards large ones, voters are incentivized to engage in strategic voting while the political elites have an incentive to strategically gain entry.

  • Disproportional electoral systems create incentives for the political elite to engage in strategic entry. This refers to the decision by political elites on whether to enter the political scene under the label of their most preferred party or under the label of their most preferred party with a realistic chance of winning.

  • In the Duvergerland example, this would mean confronting the dilemma of running as a Green Party candidate and possibly not getting elected because of the SMDP system and the party’s support distribution across Duvergerland. You could run as the “lesser evil” of the parties to have a realistic chance at winning. This also helps with one’s policy agenda if a party has a legislative majority.

Summarizing Duverger’s Theory

  • The size of a country’s system depends on the complex interplay of both social and institutional forces.
  • A country’s social structure characteristics provide the driving force behind the formation of parties.
  • The more cross-cutting cleavages, the more distinct positions that need to be represented.
  • Whether these distinct positions are ultimately translated into distinct parties depends on the proportionality of the system.

Duverger’s Theory Implications summary

  • Duverger’s law: Single –member district plurality systems encourage two-party systems.

  • Duverger’s hypothesis: Proportional representation rules favor multiparty systems.

    • The UK and Green Party example.

  • Duverger’s key implication on the two reasons a party system may have few parties:

    • Some countries have few parties, despite being socially heterogeneous, because they have an electoral system that is non-permissive that prevents social heterogeneity from being reflected in the party system.
    • Some countries have few parties no matter how permissive the electoral system because of few social divisions.

  • The only way to have multiple parties is to have a heterogeneous society and a permissive electoral system.

Party Competition

  • Policy competition
  • Issue competition
  • Valence Competition
  • Clientelistic Competition

Conclusion

  • Democracies are categorized by their party system.
  • Party system size is shaped by the level of social diversity in a country and the permissiveness of the electoral institutions.
  • The driving force behind the multiplication of parties is social cleavages which provide the demand for distinctive representation.
  • Electoral laws, however, modify how the social divisions are translated to parties. Duverger’s theory states that countries will only have a large multiparty system if they have both high levels of heterogeneity and permissive electoral systems.