Party Systems: Two-Party and Multiparty Patterns

Yale University Press Chapter Title: Party Systems: Two-Party and Multiparty Patterns Book Title: Patterns of Democracy Book Author(s): Arend Lijphart Published by: Yale University Press. (2012) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bg23.9 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Yale University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Patterns of Democracy This content downloaded from 117.97.164.147 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:29:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Chapter 5 Party Systems: Two-Party and Multiparty Patterns he fi rst of the ten variables that characterize the majoritarian-consensus contrast, presented in Chapter 1, was the Tdifference between single-party majority governments and broad multiparty coalitions. This fi rst difference can also be seen as the most important and typical difference between the two models of democracy because it epitomizes the contrast between concentration of power on one hand and power-sharing on the other. Moreover, the factor analysis reported in Chapter 14 shows that it correlates more strongly with the “factor” representing the fi rst (executives-parties) dimension than any of the other four variables that belong to this dimension. It would therefore make sense to devote this chapter—the fi rst of nine chapters that will discuss the ten basic variables1—to this fi rst and most typical variable. For practical reasons, however, it is necessary to discuss the subject of party systems fi rst. The classifi cation of cabinets—single- party cabinets versus multiparty coalition cabinets, and bare- majority cabinets versus minority cabinets and cabinets that have 1. Two of the variables—constitutional rigidity and judicial review— will be discussed in one chapter (Chapter 12). 60 This content downloaded from 117.97.164.147 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:29:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PARTY SYSTEMS 61 “unnecessary” parties in them—depends a great deal on how political parties and the numbers of parties in party systems are defi ned. Hence these defi nitional problems have to be solved be- fore the question of cabinet types can be properly addressed. It is worth noting, however, that the type of party system is also a strong component of the executives-parties dimension. To preview the factor analysis in Chapter 14 once more, the party-system variable correlates with the fi rst “factor” almost as strongly as the type of cabinet and more strongly than the remaining three variables. Two-party systems typify the majoritarian model of democracy and multiparty systems the consensus model. The tradi- tional literature on party systems is staunchly majoritarian and emphatically favors the two-party system. Two-party systems are claimed to have both direct and indirect advantages over multiparty systems. The fi rst direct benefi t is that they offer the voters a clear choice between two alternative sets of public policies. Second, they have a moderating infl uence because the two main parties have to compete for the swing voters in the center of the political spectrum and hence have to advocate moderate, centrist policies. This mechanism is especially strong when large numbers of voters are located in the political center, but its logic con- tinues to operate even when opinions are more polarized: at the two ends of the spectrum, the parties will lose some of their sup- porters, who will decide to abstain instead of voting for what is, to them, a too moderate program, but a vote gained in the center, taken away from the other party, is still twice as valuable as a vote lost by abstention. Both claims are quite plausible—but also contradictory: if the programs of the two parties are both close to the political center, they will be very similar to each other and, instead of offering a meaningful “choice” to the voters, are more likely to “echo” each other.2 2. Most two-party theorists do not make both of the competing claims simultaneously. The advantage of party moderation is typically asserted by the American school of thought, whereas the claim of a clear-cut choice refl ects the British two-party school. This content downloaded from 117.97.164.147 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:29:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 62 PARTY SYSTEMS In addition, two-party systems are claimed to have an important indirect advantage: they are necessary for the formation of single- party cabinets that will be stable and effective policy-makers. For instance, A. Lawrence Lowell (1896, 70, 73–74), one of the fi rst modern political scientists, wrote that the legislature must con- tain “two parties, and two parties only, . in order that the parliamentary form of government should permanently produce good results.” He called it an “axiom in politics” that coalition cabinets are short-lived and weak compared with one-party cabinets: “the larger the number of discordant groups that form the majority the harder the task of pleasing them all, and the more feeble and unstable the position of the cabinet.” In the next two chapters I confi rm Lowell’s hypothesis linking party systems to types of cabinets and his “axiom” that single- party majority cabinets are more durable and dominant than coalition cabinets. The majoritarians’ preference for two-party systems is therefore clearly and logically linked to their preference for powerful and dominant one-party cabinets. Furthermore, in Chapter 8 I show a strong connection between party systems and electoral systems, which further explains the majoritarians’ strong preference for plurality, instead of proportional representation, because of its bias in favor of larger parties and its contribution to the establishment and maintenance of two-party systems. How- ever, whether this syndrome of features actually translates into more capable and effective policy-making than its consensual counterpart is another matter entirely. Lowell simply assumes that concentrated strength means effective decision-making; in Chapter 15 I show that this assumption is largely incorrect. In this chapter I fi rst address the question of how the number of parties in party systems should be counted and argue that the “effective number of parliamentary parties” is the optimal mea- sure. I also try to solve the problem of how to treat factionalized parties as well as closely allied parties: Should such parties be treated as one party or as more than one party? Next, the average effective numbers of parliamentary parties in our thirty-six de- This content downloaded from 117.97.164.147 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:29:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PARTY SYSTEMS 63 mocracies are presented and discussed; these numbers exhibit a wide range—from well below two to more than fi ve parties. I close with a brief discussion of the relationship between the numbers of parties and the numbers and types of issue dimensions that divide the parties. THE EFFECTIVE NUMBER OF PARTIES Pure two-party systems with, in Lowell’s words quoted above, “two parties, and two parties only,” are extremely rare. In Chap- ter 2, the party systems of Britain, pre-1996 New Zealand, and Barbados were also described as two-party systems in spite of the usual presence of one or more additional small parties in the legislature. Is this a correct description, or should it be modifi ed in some way? This question points to the most important problem in determining the number of parties in a party system: whether to count small parties and, if not, how large a party has to be in order to be included in the count. One well-known solution was proposed by Giovanni Sartori (1976, 122–23). He suggests, fi rst of all, that parties that fail to win seats in parliament be disregarded, that the relative strengths of the other parties be measured in terms of parliamentary seats, and that not all parties regardless of size can be counted, but that one cannot establish an arbitrary cut-off point of, say, 5 or 10 percent above which parties are counted and below which they should be ignored. These preliminary assumptions are unexcep- tionable. More controversial are his “rules for counting.” He ar- gues that only those parties should be counted as components of the party system that are “relevant” in terms of having either “coalition potential” or “blackmail potential.” A party has coalition potential if it has participated in governing coalitions (or, of course, in one-party governments) or if the major parties regard it as a possible coalition partner. Parties that are ideologically un- acceptable to all or most of the other coalition partners, and that therefore lack coalition potential, must still be counted if they are large enough. Examples are the strong French and Italian This content downloaded from 117.97.164.147 on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:29:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 64 PARTY SYSTEMS Communist parties until the 1970s. This is Sartori’s “subsidiary counting rule based on the power of intimidation, or more ex- actly, the blackmail potential of the opposition-oriented parties.”3 Sartori’s criteria are very useful for distinguishing between the parties that are signifi cant in the political system and those that play only a minor role, but they do not work well for counting the number of parties in a party system.

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