But if Trump was transformative, the more important question is: Why was he able to succeed in the first place? The most compelling theory based on historical patterns of democratic decline is that hyper-polarization cracked the foundations of American democracy , creating the conditions under which a party could break democratic norms with impunity, because winning in the short term became more important than maintaining democracy for the long term.
All of these trends are important contributors, for sure. But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U. Shapiro, the increase in affective polarization in the U. Second, the change in how Americans feel about their party and other parties has been driven by a dramatic decrease in positive feelings toward the opposing party. In most though not all of the nine democracies, voters have become a little less enthusiastic about their own parties.
But only in the U. Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro caution that the cross-country comparisons are not perfect, since they rely on different survey question wordings over time. Third, more so than in other countries, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. When asked to identify both themselves and their favored party on an point scale in a survey, Americans identified themselves as, on average, 1.
By the time the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions ZCTU launched the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change MDC in , it had gained organizational discipline from its time agitating for reform, including protesting government austerity measures and pressing for constitutional reform with a broad array of civil society organizations.
In the absence of strong political parties, labor unions may be the only preexisting mass organization that can channel discontent. In the Middle East and North Africa MENA , most political parties have historically been elite vehicles for either purely urban or purely rural interests, with weak connections to any nationwide electorate.
These weak connections between parties and voters can help explain why voter turnout in MENA has declined the most in any region the world since the end of the Cold War, a 20 percentage point drop from 62 to 42 percent. After independence, however, the leaders of many independence movements were able to transform the movements into one-party states, subordinating previously independent organizations like national labor federations and appointing party functionaries to their leadership.
Local union members would be a key part of a network that spread protests throughout central Tunisia. So: if even protest movements and labor unions are imperfect substitutes for—and frequent precursors to—political parties, what is to be done to revitalize political parties?
Elite opinion can be key to influencing mass opinion; one field experiment found that voters were more likely to support a policy if they were told that their legislator supported it, even if the voter had previously opposed the policy. The German billionaire August von Finck since at least the s has funded minor conservative and libertarian parties, often seeking to reduce the taxes paid by his individual businesses.
Der Spiegel found evidence that Finck in the s covertly provided financial support to the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany AfD for party organizing and sympathetic campaign literature. In the UK, official and journalistic investigations suggest that Arron Banks, a British businessman and prominent financier of the populist UK Independence Party, may have served as a middle man for covert Russian funding of the Leave.
EU campaign. Business elites could better moderate political behavior by calling out their fellow business owners who are violating norms of forbearance, pursuing personal profit regardless of the resulting political polarization and erosion of respect for democratic principles. Although many German banks and transportation companies ahead of the European Parliament election in May called on citizens to deny populists their vote, these same business leaders were silent on their fellow elites, like Finck, who give material support to populist parties.
On the demand side, parties face enduring challenges attracting voters because of changes to the nature of the electorate resulting from deindustrialization, globalization, and rising postmaterialism.
Greater political party outreach, engagement, and deliberation with voters is probably a more promising avenue to re-energize parties precisely because many traditional social cleavages have become less salient to political competition. Greater internal party deliberation could make otherwise apartisan voters into more reliable party supporters by satisfying their increasing demands for political participation.
Such an approach fails to engage members in debate that can sharpen their individual understandings and attachments to particular issues. For that reason, they argue that parties need to better institute more internally deliberative procedures, or discussion and debate among members. Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstien suggest parties can best increase deliberation by empowering local branches with greater decision-making power.
Branch-level representative would then debate these decisions in an executive committee. Broader deliberation can better educate both leadership and the rank-and-file of potential costs and benefits of different positions. Beyond increased deliberation, parties need to revitalize partisanship, which can lower alienation from and indifference to parties and reduce party system volatility. Some center-left European parties may be beginning to re-emphasize redistributive economic policy to distinguish themselves from their competitors.
Since the center-left Social Democratic Party of Germany SPD last took the premiership in on a more centrist platform, its vote share and membership has nearly halved, with self-described party supporters increasingly abstaining from voting or switching their party vote. Revitalizing traditional center-left parties will continue to be a challenge, as they have lost considerable support to both Green parties and right-wing populists.
Shari Berman has argued that the center-left in Europe has collapsed because of a dearth of new ideas to adjust to the realities of an ever-changing global economy. Mudde would say that social democratic party leadership and voters have become acculturated to centrist politics over the course of the past several decades, with leadership becoming accustomed to being a party in power rather than representing the interests of a social group regardless of electoral consequences, and with voters being more attuned to individualist rather than collectivist values.
Embracing redistributive social democracy tenets could prove costly to center-left parties in the medium-term if voters are initially unreceptive to the message and the center-left repeatedly finds itself out of government and in opposition. Religion can also be a more inclusive identity to mobilize a broad cross-section of support. At the same time, party leaders tend to state these as universal rather than purely Christian values to appeal to members of other faiths and even nonbelievers.
However, European Christian democratic parties, as the original catch-all, centrist parties, would be challenged to increase their partisan appeal. Christian democratic and other religious parties may have more opportunities to distinguish themselves in an increasingly secular world. After three center-right Dutch Christian democratic parties, each facing declining vote shares, merged to form the CDA in , the party would go on to be in every government for the next 13 years; [xlix] it has been in government in five of six governments in the 21 st Century.
States can play a role in increasing the demand for political parties by supporting partner organizations like labor unions, which tend to have more stable levels of electoral support. John Schnmitt and Alexandra Mitukiewicz suggest that individual government policies rather than global market forces best explain declining union membership in advanced democracies because of the wide variation in unionization trends in countries experiencing similar economic changes.
Union membership is highest in the so-called Ghent System countries of Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, in which labor unions administer publicly-subsidized unemployment insurance to members. Similar subsidies could buttress churches and other organizations that have served as the basis for Christian democratic and other religious parties. They represent and engage diffuse citizens, bringing them together for a common purpose. Without political parties, politics turns chaotic and despotic.
The Founders also would have known that plurality elections whoever gets the most votes wins tend to generate just two parties, while proportional elections vote shares in multi-winner districts translate into seat shares tend to generate multiple parties, with the district size and threshold percentages shaping the number.
But at the time, the Framers believed they could have a democracy without parties, and the only electoral system in operation was the innovation of plurality voting, which they imported from Britain without debate. Had the Framers accepted the inevitability of political parties, and understood the relationship between electoral rules and the number of parties, I believe they would have attempted to institutionalize multiparty democracy.
Certainly, Madison would have. Read: America is not a democracy. The good news is that nothing in the Constitution requires a two-party system, and nothing requires the country to hold simple plurality elections. The elections clause of the Constitution leaves states to decide their own rules, and reserves to Congress the power to intervene, a power that Congress has used over the years to enforce the very plurality-winner single-member districts that keep the two-party system in place and ensure that most elections are uncompetitive.
If the country wanted to, it could move to a system of proportional representation for the very next congressional election. All it would take is an act of Congress. States could also act on their own. Multiparty democracy is not perfect. America has gone through several waves of political reform throughout its history.
But the course of reform is always uncertain, and the key is understanding the problem that needs to be solved. In this case, the future of American democracy depends on heeding the warning of the past. The country must break the binary hyper-partisanship so at odds with its governing institutions, and so dangerous for self-governance. It must become a multiparty democracy. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. The popularity of parties is at a nadir, with both the Democratic and Republican parties in the US widely condemned as not only unrepresentative but also hijacked by elites.
That proportion is now larger than the share of voters identifying with either Republicans or Democrats. It seems to be an international phenomenon. In Europe, for example, traditionally powerful centre-left parties are being accused of ignoring their voters, potentially contributing to a backlash that helped push the United Kingdom into Brexit. The mounting animosity toward the parties has inspired debate among political scientists.
Defenders of the traditional party system contend that democracy depends on strong, organised and trustworthy political factions.
But without the parties, we'd have chaos , " says Harvard University political scientist Nancy Rosenblum, who explores the challenges facing political parties today. Yet a small group of scholars, many of them young, say it's time to start visualising a more open and direct democracy, with less mediation by parties and professional politicians. But events including the economic crisis and Donald Trump's election as president, she says, have enlarged the scope of debate.
Several trends have sped the declining popularity and power of the parties in the United States. Party-run patronage schemes that rewarded supporters with government jobs have long given way to more meritocratic systems.
This has made many candidates more entrepreneurial and less beholden to the party bureaucracy. Thirdly, parties now determine their candidates through primary elections instead of with meetings of party insiders. Just 17 primaries were held in — today every state has a primary or caucus.
This switch to universal primaries has shifted influence from party veterans to more extreme activists, who are more likely than average voters to vote in primaries, says Ian Shapiro, a political scientist at Yale.
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