What role should political parties play in democratic politics?

Kavian is itself an association and not a political party. Based on the applicable German civil laws, political parties must truly strive to obtain power and enter local or national branches of the governing system (especially in the legislative branch). This is not an objective for Kavian in Germany. Nonetheless, Kavian will principally structure itself and operate quite similar to a political party with an eye on obtaining soft power in Europe and also advising those, who try to obtain political power in Iran. It is hence of interest to consider some important ideas about parties. This text draws heavily on an article published in 2020 by the eminent political scientist, Prof. Ian Shapiro, titled 'The Idea of a Political Party'. That article can be found here.

Recently in many countries, traditional parties are considered as out of touch with voters, polarized sources of gridlock, increasingly controlled by money and special interests, incapable of containing populist demagogues, and otherwise unable to govern in the public interest. The misplaced faith in intraparty democracy is bolstered by insufficient attention to what political parties are and what role they play in effective democratic governance.

Whatever their path-dependent histories, parties must adapt to the electoral rules with which they have to contend. They must also develop systems of internal governance that facilitate effective competition with adversaries and the ability to deliver policies, when in government, that serve the interests of significant numbers of voters. How leaders, backbenchers, members, and voters conceive of their party and its purposes shape choices they make and the goals they pursue.

The distinctive job of political parties is to facilitate competition over the state’s legitimate monopoly over the use of coercive force. This peculiar kind of competition is best served by two strongly disciplined parties that compete for voter support by offering programmatic policies that they expect will appeal to as wide as possible a swath of voters.

Many will resist this view as insufficiently agent-centered, preferring to think of the voters as principals and the parties and politicians they elect as their agents. It is the apparent erosion, or outright collapse, of this principal-agent relationship that fuels the perception that democratic politics is broken, prompting demands to unbundle platforms and assert greater voter control over parties and politicians. But the net effect of such reforms is to diminish parties’ capacity to govern effectively when in office – compounding voter alienation and prompting more demands for self-defeating reforms.

The two main contending views of parties since the eighteenth century are:

-        as organizations that protect and advance the interests of some subset of a country’s population or

-        as instruments to foster democratic government in the public interest.

On the first view, good government results when contending parties are forced to compromise, either by forming coalitions, as in multiparty systems, or by legislating across the aisle in two-party systems which have been designed to make unilateral government by one party difficult.

On the second view, good government is fostered by competition between two parties, both with incentives to run on programs that will best serve the electorate as a whole, implement those programs as governments if they win, and then be held to account for the results at the next election. Ian Shapiro considers the programmatic competition induced by the second view as preferable to the bargaining-based compromises required of the first.

Strong parties that operate as teams are better placed to deliver on programmatic agendas than weak ones that are too easily controlled by unrepresentative voters and factional interests. That the trend across much of the democratic world over the past several decades has been to weaken parties in the name of greater grass roots democracy. Far from empowering voters, enhancing internal party democracy produces governments that are less able to serve their interests.

Parties are widely assumed to represent different interests, but politicians seeking office routinely insist that the people want and that the people believe whatever it is that they are proposing. Partisan as they might be, they claim nonetheless to be committed to the public interest—and worthy of support for that reason.

When a policy would manifestly deliver benefits or harms to particular interests, as with adopting or abolishing environmental regulations, the proponents invariably claim to be doing this in the public interest. They sense that voters discern a difference between shelling out clientelist payouts to sectional interests and governing in the public interest, and that they expect politicians to do the latter—however underspecified and discursive their efforts might be.

What determines the likelihood that parties will in fact hew to this latter course? Here America’s founders partly stumbled onto the right answer by opting for single member districts with plurality rule that, under the conditions that prevail in the United States, produces two large parties.

Two party systems have the unique feature that they produce winner-take-all, and therefore loser-lose-all, contests. These contests create powerful incentives for parties to embrace platforms that can appeal to as many voters as possible, because that last vote your party fails to win might be the difference between winning and losing everything. This is not true in multiparty systems, where even small parties that appeal to narrow interests might be needed to form a government.

The large catchall parties in two-party systems are themselves coalitions of groups that would constitute distinct parties in a multiparty system. In one case the coalition is formed before the election and in the other it is formed afterwards, but perhaps it doesn’t much matter. After all, the alternation between left-of-center social democratic policies and right-of-center pro-market policies has not obviously been that different in a multiparty system like Germany when compared with the United Kingdom’s two-party system over the decades since World War Two. They have comparable welfare states, universal systems of health insurance, and environmental regulation.

Indeed, if there is a difference, there is scholarship suggesting that multiparty systems are more responsive to median voters and more redistributive than are two-party systems. There are good reasons to suspect, however, that this greater relative responsiveness to median voters was an artefact of features of their economies that no longer hold.

The winner-take-all dynamic in two-party competition creates more powerful incentives for governments to pursue programmatic policies that will appeal to as broad as possible a swath of voters than do the post-election dynamics in multiparty systems. One reason is that those who create the big-tent parties in two-party systems have an interest in internalizing the costs of the deals that they make, whereas in multiparty systems the incentive is to externalize those costs when forming a coalition.

Parties in two party are composed of what has been described as “long coalitions,” committed to sustaining their policy brands over time, as distinct from the “short coalitions” that we see in multiparty systems—where uncertainty about who their future partners will be makes this more difficult. This difference becomes more pronounced as the number of parties in multiparty systems increases. Parties in such coalitions are unlikely to identify with others and end up in a common project of “regulated rivalry” geared to governing in the public interest.

Comparable rigidity often affects identity based parties, in which all supporters tend to be like activists or primary voters in larger, more diverse parties. Two-party competition is analogous to last-best-offer arbitration. Everyone knows that the party that most voters pick will become the government. Accordingly, their incentive is to run on platforms that aim at the political middle.

In multiparty systems, by contrast, everyone knows that the election will be followed by a negotiation among parties that ultimately will form the government. The ex-ante incentive is therefore to create a surplus that can be bargained away during subsequent negotiations. This incentive becomes more powerful with identity-based or other single-issue parties that have few, if any, prospects for expanding their electoral support, so that the election is mainly about turning out their supporters.

Another distinctive feature of two-party competition is that in assembling platforms to run on, leaders face powerful incentives to discount everything they propose by everything else they propose, an incentive that is weaker in multiparty competition—if it is present at all. That is what political parties do on a larger scale. They bundle issues into platforms in which they discount everything they propose by everything else they propose in ways that they believe, or at least hope, will appeal to the broadest possible cross-section of voters.

In two party systems, there is a “loyal” opposition that presents itself to the electorate as a government-in-waiting. As well as criticizing the government and holding it to account for failures, the opposition’s incentive is to articulate and defend the alternative that voters will get if they vote the government out.

In multiparty systems, by contrast, there is less accountability and no coherent alternative. There is less accountability because parties in government can deflect blame to others in the coalition, or to post-election compromises they were forced to make when forming a government, for failing to deliver on promises on which they campaigned. There is no coherent alternative because voters cannot know what the alternative to the government will be following the next election; it will depend on future coalition possibilities at that time.

In short, two-party systems institutionalize programmatic competition over alternatives that governments, if elected, will try to implement and for which they can more easily be held accountable if they fail. Multiparty systems might be more representative at the electoral stage in that voters elect parties and candidates that are closer to their ideal preferences, but this comes at the price of accountable government.

A different objection with regards to two-party system. Parties with strong incentives to aim at the electoral middle will offer the same policies, giving voters little meaningful choice. That might be true on paper, but in reality partisan conceptions of the public interest operate differently. Programmatic competition is competition over questions, in which the goal must be to convince as broad as possible a swath of voters that your party’s approach will be best. The cost of appealing to smaller groups of core supporters or sectional interests will likely be defeat, loading the dice against clientelism. But the parties will be Tweedledee and Tweedledum only on issues where there is widespread agreement about what is best.

The governance of parties might endemically be contested, but that does not forestall critical evaluation of the possibilities. Rather, it highlights the fact that arguments about party governance depend in turn on prior commitments, often left implicit, about what the purposes of parties should be. If the goal is to offer voters contending partisan conceptions of the public interest, then strong parties are preferable to weak ones.

One definition of strong parties would be “…unified, centralized, stable, organizationally complex, and tied to long standing constituencies“. More simply put, strong parties operate as teams on which everyone is pursuing the same goal: to come up with strategies that will win and retain widespread voter support over time. Backbenchers in strong parties delegate considerable authority, including the authority to discipline the leaders, but this will be conditional on the leaders coming up with and implementing winning strategies.

One symptom of the weakness of American parties is that leaders can survive without delivering victories, as with the House Republicans for decades before 1994 and more recently when Nancy Pelosi led Democrats to four successive defeats between 2010 and 2016 without losing her leadership position. Successful leaders should play major roles in selecting backbench candidates and in disciplining them to support a Party’s national program. The reason: whereas candidates face powerful incentives to protect themselves in their districts, whether by delivering local private goods, bridges to nowhere, or by catering to intense or well-funded local groups that might primary them, national party leaders need backbenchers who can both win in their districts and support a winning national platform that they know they need to deliver when in government.

Backbenchers allow themselves to be disciplined to take difficult votes, but only in service of a cause that is in their longer-term interest. This does not obviate the importance of securing grass roots support for selecting candidates and in crafting platforms. On the contrary, parties that do that poorly will do less well than parties that are better at it. This gives parties good reasons to pay substantial attention to finding out what voters need and what will motivate them to turn out for candidates and support a party platform.

Until the 1970s, presidential primaries in the U.S. were information-generating exercises through which candidates sought to demonstrate their electoral viability. Presidential primaries did not achieve their almost sovereign authorizing status in a principal-agent relationship until the McGovern-Fraser Reforms restructured the Democratic Party in the early 1970s, creating a bottom-up model for selecting candidates and writing platforms that the Republicans would soon emulate. The changes sounded, and were believed by many to be, more democratic than proverbial smoke-filled rooms. In reality, the enhanced role for primaries greatly weakened both parties, rendering them vulnerable to hostile takeovers of the sort staged by Donald Trump in 2016.

Another objection to the two-party system is a version of the Tweedledee and Tweedledum. This is especially leveled at Joseph Schumpeter’s analogy between parties and firms. The idea takes the form of objecting to the oligopolistic character of two-party political competition. Whereas both parties in two-party systems have incentives to run on platforms that can win as many voters as possible, but it is multiparty systems that generate incentives for coalition members to collude in ways that create negative externalities for others. The winner takes all character of two-party competition prevents this, except in unusual circumstances.

Schumpeter’s market analogy is incomplete and partly misleading, but he was right that it is better to think of the relations between parties and voters as analogous to that between firms and consumers, rather than to firms and the interests of their shareholders. To the extent that they do the latter, they will deliver clientelist benefits to sectional interests, whether this turns out to be the wholesale clientelism that is extracted by single-issue parties in multiparty systems or the retail clientelism that operates in two-party systems when the parties are weak. If we want parties to cleave instead toward governing in the public interest, it is better to give them incentives to pursue their partisan conceptions in ways that will appeal to as many voters as possible.

There is, however, a different difficulty with Schumpeter’s analogy. The difficulty stems from the reality that there is no good political analogy for the shareholders in a firm – no political equivalent of a residual claimant. In all of this, referendums empower intense single-issue activists to impose their preferences on the rest of society without confronting the costs.

The principal-agent view is superficially appealing because it tacitly assumes that democracy is fundamentally about the people ruling themselves, a phrase that it is easier to affirm with table-thumping conviction than to turn into institutionally viable politics. But the people can rule themselves only as a single collective entity if they are to rule themselves at all, which in practice means living with majority rule unless they are willing to risk revolution—after which all bets are off. Democratic theory does better when it starts by recognizing that power is a natural monopoly and then gets to work on how best to manage it in the public interest, rather than by insisting that the people should rule themselves without coming to grips with what that means in practice.

Democratic regimes will be healthier when parties must aspire to govern in the public interest if they want to win or retain power than when they become the ossified factions that the American founders rightly feared or vehicles for those with intense preferences to indulge themselves while others bear the costs. There are no guarantees in politics, but strong parties, provided there are two of them, will more likely nurture that health better than will the going alternatives.