Notes 1 The Theory of One-Party Dominance 1. Combining the degree of party system fragmentation and polarisation in a two-dimensional format, Sartori indicates that centrifugal forces are pulling the system towards its two extreme ideological poles: in post-war Italy towards the left under the influence of the Communists and towards the right under the influence of the neo-Fascists. 2. To characterise a party as dominant scholars tend to use either a party’s share of the vote or a party’s share of seats, although some definitions use a plural- ity of votes/seats as a benchmark and others require an absolute majority or even a qualified majority of seats. 3. After the 2012 French presidential and legislative elections, the French Socialist Party controlled the presidency, both houses of the legislature, all but one French region and most of the country’s departments, big towns and communes. 4. During the period 2003–08, United Russia controlled two-thirds of the seats in the Duma and a majority of seats in all regional legislatures and 78 of Russia’s 83 regional administrations were headed by party members (Reuter, 2009). 5. The Republicans were strongly dominant in 2002–06 and less so after the mid-term elections in 2010 when they regained control of the House of Rep- resentatives and controlled 25 state legislatures, leaving the Democrats in control of the presidency and nominally in control of the senate under its arcane supermajority rules. 6. For Sauger incumbents are in a dominant position if their individual chance of staying in office after the next election is superior to a predetermined threshold (set at 90 per cent), meaning that they are likely (with less than 10 per cent chances of error) to keep their dominant position after the next election. Sauger argues that this definition corresponds to classical definitions of dominance that posit the necessity to hold an office for at least three consecutive terms to be acknowledged as dominant (Sauger, 2010: 110). 7. In his study of Mexico’s PRI Greene defines dominance as ‘continuous exec- utive and legislative rule by a single party for at least 20 years or at least four consecutive elections’ (Greene, 2007: 12). 8. However, quirks of majoritarian voting systems can occasionally deliver more seats to a party with a smaller aggregate share of the popular vote than the best-placed party (as in the United Kingdom in 1974), but this is rare even under biased electoral systems, such as SMP rule. 9. Under Wilfrid Laurier the Liberals’ national appeal was based on ‘a nation- wide coalition of supporters, an expansionary role for government, an intimate connection with business, and an accommodation between the 214 Notes 215 French and the English’ (Clarkson, 2005: 8). But a puzzling survey suggests that Liberal electoral dominance has rested on a significant religious cleavage in English-speaking central and eastern Canada, where the Liberals receive a disproportional share of the Catholic vote without which their dominance ‘would disappear’ (Blais, 2005). 10. The sale of council housing at a huge discount triggered rising property prices and helped fuel a property boom and credit crisis two decades later and reduced significantly the stock of social housing at the disposal of local councils. 11. One of the most notable examples was British Telecom (BT). Two million people applied for BT shares in its 1984 sell-off, including two Conservative MPs who made multiple applications and had to resign. 12. This study includes four dominant party systems using majoritarian voting systems (Britain and Canada under SMP, France under two-ballot plurality and Japan under the old single non-transferable voting system) and three types of PR (Sweden, Ireland and Italy under the old preference voting system). 13. Recent research shows that Labour’s advantage is less a function of malappor- tionment (soon to be addressed in a review of constituency boundaries) and more a function of vote distribution and to a lesser extent abstention result- ing from Labour’s ability to win relatively small inner-city seats and con- stituencies with lower turnouts (Borisyuk, Thrasher, Johnston, and Rallings, 2010a, 2010b). 14. In contrast the 1922 election launched two-party politics in Britain. The Conservatives and Labour won between them 68 per cent of the popular vote. By 1951 only nine MPs did not follow the Labour or Conservative whips. This number rose to 12 MPs in 1970, 27 MPs in 1979 and 85 MPs in 2010. After the 2010 general election 57 British MPs were taking the Liberal Democrat whip; 28 MPs from minority parties gained an aggregate 9.7 per cent share of the popular vote. 15. The Conservatives won big in 1983 because the Labour Party split. Labour and the Alliance (the Liberals and the new SDP, now Lib Dems) each received a little over a quarter of the national vote, but Labour won 209 seats and the Alliance a mere 23 seats. 16. In 2010, 298 of the 306 seats won by the Conservatives were in England. Labour won 26 of the 37 Welsh seats with only 36 per cent of the popular vote in Wales. 17. A compelling study of the Canadian party system as a case of ‘polar- ized pluralism’ shows that outside Quebec the Liberals have dominated district-level three-party competition on a left–right ordering while on the national question they control a pole within each segment: the pro-Quebec pole outside Quebec and the pro-Canada pole inside Quebec (Johnston, 2008). 18. There were 32 electoral colleges for 630 members of the Chamber of Deputies, with a magnitude ranging from 1 to 36 members per college except for the Valle d’Aosta constituency which had a single seat. 19. Clause VI committed the Labour Party to the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. In 1960 Hugh Gaitskell had tried unsuccessfully to remove it from the Labour Party’s constitution. 216 Notes 20. In Italy a quasi-monopoly of state television existed under Prime Minister Berlusconi due to his private ownership of TV channels (his brother owns the newspaper il Giornale). 21. Alistair Campbell, frenetically feeding the ravenous British press with news fodder to try and capture the headlines, was the inspiration behind the satirical television series ‘The Thick of It’, where the key character, Malcolm Tucker, bears a distinct resemblance to Campbell, as acknowledged by him. 22. Subsequently the SAP became more vulnerable as the field of competition expanded with the entry in the Riksdag of the Greens in 1988, two new parties in 1991 (the Christian Democrats and the right-wing New Democ- racy) and a new far-right anti-immigrant party (Sweden Democrats) in 2010, which enabled a governing centre–right coalition to be re-elected for the first time (under Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt) with Sweden Democrats holding the balance of power with their 20 seats. 23. Craxi was a corrupt politician, an ineffective chief executive and a very poor party leader. He failed to sort out Italy’s deficit, ignored demands for constitutional reform and presided over a very factionalised and corrupt Socialist Party that became the target of Milan’s investigating magistrates who brought down the political establishment in the mid-1990s. 24. For example, Andreotti’s 1976 government of solidarity had the support of only 258 out of 630 deputies, but the minority government gained office comfortably due to the high level of abstentions in the investiture vote (Strom, Budge, and Laver, 1994). 25. In France top mandarins trained in the grandes écoles played a key mod- ernising role producing trentes glorieuses, 30 glorious years of high economic growth. 26. The financial institution Monte dei Paschi di Siena was for many years con- trolled by Fanfani’s faction. State radio and television RAI, controlled by Fanfani’s protégé Ettore Berabei, was in 1975 fought over by faction lead- ers Piccoli and Zaccagnini and was then split into three networks as rewards to PSI and PCI for their cooperation in previous governments (Zucherman, 1979: 123). 27. The IRI president was arrested in May 1993 for corruption and violation of party finance laws related to the construction of the Rome metro and power stations in Brindisi. He was replaced by Romano Prodi, who was head of IRI in 1982–89 and 1993–94 and was investigated but acquitted of conflict- of-interest charges. Prodi was the prime minister of Italy in 1996–98 and 2006–08 and the president of the European Commission in 1999–2004. 28. The Arezzo section of the Rome–Florence autostrada was associated with Fanfani and the one near Avellino with De Mita, a highway south of Rome with Andreotti and the autostrada from Rome to L’Aquila with Lorenzo Natali. The partially constructed autostrada in the North was named ‘PiRuBi’, based on the names of its factional sponsors Piccoli, Rumor and Bisaglia. In the late 1960s the DC set up four state-funded chemical groups, each associated with a DC faction (Spotts and Wieser, 1986). 29. Karel van Wolferen (1989: 115–9) reported that Japan’s Ministry of Construc- tion had the authority to issue licences to the entire construction industry. This accounted for between 15 per cent and 16 per cent of Japan’s gross Notes 217 domestic product (GDP) each year and involved maintaining 232 offices in construction, maintenance and research and 655 smaller area offices as well as 162 extra-departmental institutions and more than half a million public works projects (in 1986). 30. Canadian Crown corporations are instrumentally linked to the formation of the Canadian state (at federal and provincial levels).