A party system is defined as the collectivity of political parties, which participate in governing a democratic state. Thus, when studying comparative party systems, the system as a whole and its effects on society are analyzed rather than the individual parties that comprise the party system. Differences in party systems can have major consequences for a democratic state, as many deficiencies found within democracies trace to the way that the party system and the parties within it function.
Development Of Research In Comparative Party Systems
Debates over the structure of party systems date back to nineteenth-century England. Walter Bagehot was one of the first to voice concern that proportional electoral systems would increase political polarization, fragmenting society into extreme and opposing views. However, Bagehot’s analysis was not comparative, as it was based only on England, and comparative studies began in the twentieth century. Classical works from an institutionalist perspective that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s include Ferdinand Hermens’s Democracy or Anarchy? A Study of Proportional Representation and Maurice Duverger’s Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. Both authors argued that the primary factor in shaping a party systems was the nation’s electoral system.
In the 1960s, Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan took another stance and argued traditional cleavages had shaped party systems in Western Europe. These systems were frozen along these lines. With the rise of behavioralism, political culture and attitudes were recognized as important explanatory factors. Party systems subsequently moved to the center of attention again in political science, during the 1980s and 1990s, as part of broader research on democratic transition and democratization. To conduct this research, political scientists developed typologies and a number of formulas to measure and compare different aspects of party systems.
Measuring And Describing Party Systems
For analytical purposes, party systems are often grouped in typologies. Giovanni Sartori proposes the best-known typology and includes seven types: (1) one-party (2) hegemonic (3) predominant (4) two-party (5) moderate pluralism (6) polarized pluralism and (7) atomized systems. Klaus von Beyme further subdivides this typology, distinguishing between moderate pluralism with coalitions, without coalitions, or those with grand coalitions or polarized pluralist systems with and without a center capable of governing. For each type of party system, three dimensions describe and distinguish a system from one another and compare them: fragmentation, polarization, and institutionalization.
Fragmentation
Fragmentation refers to how splintered a party system is, and is measured by the number of individual parties which exist within a system. This is an important indicator of a state’s stability and system functionality, since a highly fragmented party system comprised of numerous parties may inhibit the development of a stable government. Fragmentation can be measured in different ways. The simplest method counts every party at face value; however, this method does not account for differences in size. Sartori proposes counting only those parties that have potential influence on government formation or execution, but it can sometimes be difficult to define which parties actually have such influence, as a party’s power can fluctuate.
Taking party size differences into account, Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera’s index of effective party numbers is the most common way to describe and measure fragmentation. This is calculated by squaring each party’s share (ai), summing the results and inverting the sum, as the result is a number that gives larger parties more weight than smaller ones:
Fragmentation can be measured both with vote shares and parliamentary seat shares.
Disproportion effects of the electoral system cause differences between a party’s vote share and seat share. In almost all cases, they concentrate on the voter’s choice and lead to a lower fragmentation on the seat level compared to the vote level. The only possible exception is when parties run in alliances but act individually in parliament, in which case fragmentation on the seat level may be higher than on the vote level. The degree of disproportionality can be measured through Gallagher’s index by subtracting the vote share (vi) of each party from its seat share (si), squaring the results and summing them, dividing the sum by 2 and taking the square root:
Similar to Laakso and Taagepera’s index, this gives a large deviation a bigger weight than many small ones. The index runs from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating increased disproportional rates.
Polarization
Polarization describes the ideological bandwidth of a party system from one extreme to another. The greater the polarization, the less accordance between parties. While polarized systems are usually fragmented, the reverse it not always valid; fragmented systems are not necessarily polarized. The direction of competition connects to the question of polarization. Competition can either be centripetal, meaning the parties within the system compete for the political center, or centrifugal, meaning the parties try to outbid themselves by advocating extreme positions. Centrifugal competition is considered highly problematic for the stability of a party system.
Institutionalization
The last dimension used to describe a party system is its degree of institutionalization. This concept emerged with the so-called third wave of democratization starting in the 1970s. Researchers noted many parties in these young democracies were detached from society, and party systems as a whole were volatile. Parties appeared, disappeared, or changed their positions frequently. Institutionalization, then, measures this degree of volatility of a party system by focusing on the change of vote shares over two election periods. One way to measure volatility is to use Pedersen’s index. A party’s share (pi,t) at one election is subtracted from that party’s share at the previous election (pi,t-1).The results for all parties are summed and divided by 2:
This is, however, only a vague approximation for the complex concept of institutionalization.
Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully define a number of qualitative criteria for institutionalized party systems: Parties should have some stability in their existence and in their patterns of competition with other parties. Parties should also be anchored in society with a core group of supporters and voters, and be ideologically consistent—meaning they should not make radical realignments in a very short time. Party leaders should accept elections as the only method of gaining power in a country, and last, parties should not be solely dependent on a single leader, but have a solid apparatus and well-defined structures.
Conclusion
Using these tools of analysis has not settled the debate; there remain two main theories in political science to explain what determines the structure of a party system. The first theory still sees institutional factors as key, primarily the electoral system. The other theory emphasizes societal causes, such as the number of cleavages or divisions within society. Empirical evidence shows neither of these theories alone explains the structure of a party system; rather, the explanation derives from interaction of both institutional and societal factors. Further investigation on the interaction between institutional and societal factors in determining party systems is a continuing question for future research.
Bibliography:
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- Bagehot,Walter. The English Constitution. Edited by Paul Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- Von Beyme, Klaus. Parteien in westlichen Demokratien. 2nd ed. Munich: Piper, 1984.
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- Inglehart, Ronald. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
- Laakso, Markku, and Rein Taagepera. ”The Effective Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to Western Europe.” Comparative Political Studies 12, no. 1 (1979): 327.
- Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments.” In Party Systems and Voter Alignments, edited by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, 1–64. New York: Free Press, 1967.
- Mainwaring, Scott P., and Timothy Richard Scully, eds. Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
- Pedersen, Mogens N. “The Dynamics of European Party Systems: Changing Patterns of Electoral Volatility.” European Journal of Political Research 7, no. 1 (1979): 1–26.
- Sartori, Giovanni. Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes. 2nd ed. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1997.
- Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
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