Ruling the Void (14 page)

The second procedural function that needs highlighting is that assigned to parties in the organization of parliament and government. This is potentially the most important function that they are required to perform, and yet, perhaps because of an American bias in the relevant literature, and because of the excessive attention paid to parties in presidential regimes, it is often overlooked. In systems of parliamentary government, the necessity for parties is self-evident. Governments in such systems need to be formed in the first place, often through coalition negotiations between potential competitors; responsibilities in government then need to be allocated across different departments or ministries; and, once formed, the maintenance of these governments in office requires the continuance of more or less disciplined support in parliament. None of these crucial tasks is feasible without the authority and organizing capacities of political parties.
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Moreover, and even within presidential or semi-presidential systems, parties also facilitate the organization of legislative procedures, the functioning of legislative committees, and day-to-day agreements on the legislative agenda. There is little to suggest that the importance of this function has declined over time – and it is really only since the end of the 1980s that scholars in America have begun to emphasize its importance even on Capitol Hill (e.g., Cox and McCubbins, 2007).

The conclusion that can be drawn from this general overview of party functions is clear, and wholly consistent with the earlier assessment of the changing location of parties: the representative functions of parties are wasting away or being at least partly absorbed by other
agencies, whereas their procedural functions have been maintained and sometimes become more relevant. In other words, the functions that parties do perform, are seen to perform, and are expected to perform, have changed from combining representative and governing roles to relying almost exclusively on a governing role. This is the final passing of the traditional mass party.

The key element within this transformation, whether seen in terms of the location of the parties within the polity, or in terms of the functions parties are expected to perform, is the ascendancy of the party in public office. Parties have reduced their presence in the wider society and become part of the state. They have become agencies that govern – in the widest sense of the term – rather than represent. They bring order rather than give voice. It is in this sense that we can also speak of the disengagement or withdrawal of the elites. For despite the rhetoric, it seems that they too are heading for the exits, although with this obvious difference: while the exiting citizens are often headed towards a more privatized or individualized world, the exiting political elites are retreating into an official world – a world of public offices.

The safe havens that are being sought in the wake of the passing of the mass party may be different; the withdrawal is mutual, however, and this is the conclusion that needs to be most clearly underlined. It is not that the citizens are disengaging and leaving hapless politicians behind, or that politicians are retreating and leaving voiceless citizens in the lurch. Both sides are withdrawing, and hence rather than thinking in terms of a linear sequence in which one of the movements leads to the other, and hence in which only one side is assumed to be responsible for the ensuing gap – the crude populist interpretation – it makes much more sense to think of a process of mutual reinforcement. The elites are inclined
to withdraw to the institutions as a defence against the uncertainties of the electoral market. Just as state subventions to political parties have compensated for the inability of parties to raise sufficient resources from their own members and supporters, so the security of an institutional or procedural role can compensate elites for their vulnerability in dealing with an increasingly disengaged and random electorate. At the same time, citizens withdraw from parties and a conventional politics that no longer seem to be part of their own world: traditional politics is seen less and less as something that belongs to the citizens or to the society, more and more as something done by politicians. There is a world of the citizens – or a host of particular worlds of the citizens – and a world of the politicians and parties, and the interaction between them steadily diminishes. Citizens change from participants into spectators, while the elites win more and more space in which to pursue their own particular interests. The result is the beginning of a new form of democracy, one in which the citizens stay at home while the parties get on with governing.

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POPULAR DEMOCRACY AND THE EUROPEAN UNION POLITY

The widespread drift towards forms of decision-making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control, in Europe and elsewhere, furnishes us with a context in which the European Union’s ‘democratic deficit’ may best be understood. Despite its evident idiosyncrasies, the EU should not be seen as particularly exceptional or sui generis, but rather as a political system that has been constructed by national political leaders as a protected sphere in which policy-making can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy. The scale of the European construct may be unique and without precedent, but the rationale that underlies it conforms closely to current thinking about the role of non-majoritarian institutions, on the one hand, and about the putative drawbacks of popular democracy, on the other. To study the EU in isolation is to miss this wider, and increasingly relevant picture. The fact that conventional forms of democracy and representative government are difficult to apply at the level of the EU is not so much exceptional as symptomatic, and if the
Union could be democratized along such lines, then it probably would not be needed in the first place.

It is probably fair to say that the world is now more favourably disposed towards democracy than at any point in our history. By the year 2000, some 63 per cent of the independent regimes in the world, home to some 58 per cent of the world population, could be classified as democratic. Half a century earlier, despite the temporary optimism of postwar reconstruction, just 28 per cent of independent regimes, accounting for 31 per cent of the world population, had been classifiable as democratic. Further back again, in 1900, there were no fully fledged democratic regimes at all, with countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States combining widespread democratic practices in the exercise of public office with severe restrictions on the scope of the franchise. In fits and starts, or in what some have seen as more or less sustained waves (Huntington, 1991; Doorenspleet, 2000), democracy in the past one hundred years has therefore taken root and blossomed, and now flourishes widely. Small wonder, then, that the 1900s have been hailed as the ‘Democratic Century’.
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As Axel Hadenius (1997: 2) put it in his introduction to an end-of-century Nobel symposium, ‘the principles of democratic government … have been triumphing.’ More important perhaps, by the end of the century these principles seemed neither subject to challenge nor capable of being challenged. ‘After the fall of the Berlin wall,’ noted
Juan Linz (1997: 404) in the same symposium, ‘no anti-democratic ideology appeals to politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders … as an alternative to political democracy.’ Or, as Linz and Stepan (1996: 5) noted, democracy was now ‘the only game in town’.

But what sort of democracy was this? As recently as the 1980s, this might have seemed a bizarre question. Up to that point, and certainly during the peak years of the Cold War, the political world had been divided into three more or less simply defined categories: the first world, which was capitalist and also mainly, but not exclusively, democratic; the second world, which was that of the Soviet Union and China, and the rest of the Communist bloc; and the third world, which was courted and contested by both first and second worlds, and which was neither especially democratic nor powerful. Within this tripartite division, democracy was more or less just democracy, and while it was important for scholars and policy-makers to distinguish between democratic and non-democratic forms of government, and, especially in Cold War terms, to distinguish between different types of non-democracy, the democratic world itself usually remained undifferentiated. This view eventually began to change in the 1980s, at least in scholarly discourse, with the shift in perspective being facilitated partly by the so-called neo-institutional turn in political science. If the state was to be brought back in as an independent variable, and if institutions were to be used to explain individual behaviour and choice (e.g., Shepsle, 1995), then it was obviously going to be necessary to highlight differences between institutions and between various forms of democracy as well: otherwise there would never be enough variation to weigh in the explanations. The shift in perspective was also helped by the influential work of Arend Lijphart, who had initially sought to identify a distinct democratic regime type,
consociational democracy, and who later, in a widely cited book, specified the various institutional differences that could be associated with the contrasting majoritarian and consensus models of democracy (Lijphart, 1984).