Ruling the Void (4 page)

But in what sense are we without parties, and in what sense are they failing? My argument is that they are failing in two related ways, and I will go on to look at these at greater length. First, as is now well established, parties are increasingly failing in their capacity to engage ordinary citizens, who are voting in smaller numbers than before and with less sense of partisan consistency, and are also increasingly reluctant to commit themselves to parties, whether in terms of identification or membership. In this sense, citizens are withdrawing from conventional political involvement. Second, the parties can no longer adequately serve as a base for the activities and status of their own leaders, who increasingly direct their ambitions towards external public institutions and draw their resources from them. Parties may provide a necessary platform for political leaders, but this is increasingly the sort of platform that is used as a stepping stone to other offices and positions. Parties are failing, in other words, as a result of a process of mutual withdrawal or abandonment, whereby citizens retreat into private life or into more specialized and often ad hoc forms of representation, while the party leaderships retreat into the institutions, drawing their terms of reference ever more readily from their roles as governors or public-office holders. Parties are failing because the zone of engagement – the traditional world of party democracy where citizens interacted with and felt a sense of attachment to their political leaders – is being evacuated.

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THE PASSING OF POPULAR INVOLVEMENT

In this chapter I focus on the evidence of popular withdrawal and disengagement from conventional politics and discuss the emptying of the space in which citizen interaction with political representatives might be expected to be at its closest and most active. This is a relatively familiar process, which has already been dealt with, sometimes in greater detail, in the scholarly literature as well as in more popular commentaries. However, what is often missing from those treatments is the awareness of just how pervasive and wide-ranging the process actually is. Moreover, while some aspects of popular withdrawal have received ample attention, others have not, and hence the whole gamut of features has not been brought together in one overall and accessible assessment. This chapter aims to do that, and to indicate the breadth and variety of the modes of disengagement, even if some of these are clearly less substantial than others. Here and elsewhere in this book, I assume that withdrawal and disengagement are symptomatic of a growing indifference to conventional politics – that is,
they are symptomatic of indifference to politics with a capital
P
, which may not mean indifference to Beck’s ‘sub-politics’ (Beck, 1992)
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I also want to show here that this indifference is evident on both sides of the democratic bridge. That is, I am concerned to emphasize the evidence of indifference on the part of both the citizenry
and
the political class: they are withdrawing and disengaging from one another, and it is in this sense that there is an emptying of the space in which citizens and their representatives interact.

Party democracy, which would normally offer a point of connection and site of engagement for citizens and their political leaders, is being enfeebled, with the result that elections and the electoral process become little more than ‘dignified’ parts of the modern democratic constitution. That is, elections have less and less practical effect, because the working, or ‘efficient’ part of the constitution is being steadily relocated elsewhere (Katz and Mair, 1995: 22).
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This enfeeblement is expressed by citizen withdrawal from active engagement in, and commitment to, conventional political life, on the one hand, and by the retreat of political leaders into the institutions of the state, on the other. This process has had two notable concomitants, which should be mentioned right away. First, in terms of politics on the ground, the
widening gap between rulers and ruled has facilitated the often strident populist challenge that is now a feature of many advanced European democracies – the challenge represented by the far-right People’s or Progress parties in Denmark and Norway, by Strache and Wilders in Austria and the Netherlands, De Winter and Le Pen in Flanders and France, and by Blocher and Bossi in Switzerland and Italy. Each of these particular versions of the challenge to the political mainstream has its own nationally specific set of ideas, policies and interests, often revolving around shared expressions of xenophobia, racism and cultural defence, and usually emerging on the right wing of the political spectrum (Mudde, 2008). But each is also marked by a common and often very explicit hostility to what is seen in the different countries as the national political class. In other words, I argue that because of the gap that has been created by the process of mutual withdrawal, and really for the first time in postwar political history, the political class itself has now become a matter of contention in a large number of democratic polities.

The second concomitant – in part a cause of the withdrawal and in part a consequence – operates at the level of public policy, and may be seen in the growing acceptability and legitimation of non-political, or depoliticized, modes of decision-making. Among the important manifestations of this tendency are the growing significance (in both range and weight) of so-called ‘non-majoritarian institutions’; the growing importance of the European Union as a decision-making forum, and, on a wider stage, the greater weight accorded to other supranational and international agencies, including the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, and so on; the increasing tendency for citizens and politicians to seek redress for grievances and problems through
judicial or quasi-judicial solutions; and the growing acceptance that the modern state is regulatory in character, and hence limited in its capacities, rather than political or redistributive.

In sum, because of the growing enfeeblement of party democracy, and the indifference towards party democracy that is being expressed on both sides of the political divide, we now find ourselves being offered as alternative scenarios either the populist or the ostensibly non-political expert.
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Although concern about citizen disengagement from conventional politics is now more and more frequently expressed, both in the scholarly literature and in the popular media, the evidence of this withdrawal is sometimes disputed. It is also quite scattered, making an encompassing picture more difficult to sketch. A major purpose of this chapter is therefore to bring together the disparate sets of evidence with a view to underlining the degree of coherence and consistency they reflect. Indeed, one of the reasons this evidence, or, more properly, the weight of this evidence, is sometimes disputed, is that the different elements are seen in isolation from one another. The fact that levels of participation in national elections do not always register a sharp or very steady decline, for example, is sometimes cited as evidence of a continuing popular commitment to conventional
politics, even though the small changes that do occur in this regard are often consistent with other trends that appear to underline a wide-scale pattern of withdrawal. In other words, even a small decline in, say, the level of turnout at elections, may be seen to weigh more heavily when placed in the context of other equivalent shifts in mass political behaviour.

In fact, what we see here are two features that are not normally seen to be applicable to changes at the level of mass politics in Europe. The first is that virtually all of these separate pieces of evidence point in the same direction. This in itself is very unusual. Analysts of data relating to mass politics almost invariably expect to find mutually opposing trends in the different streams of indicators – that is, while one indicator might point in one direction, it is often contradicted by a second indicator pointing in a different direction. Mass politics rarely moves in concert, but in this case it is precisely the consistency of the trends that is striking. Second, virtually all of these trends in the data are consistent across countries. This again is most unusual. The normal expectation in comparative political research is that while particular trends in mass politics may well be noted in some countries, they are almost never pervasive. Some countries may shift together, but it is only very rarely that all, or even most, shift in the same way and at the same time. What we see now, however, is a much clearer indication of cross-national convergence in the trends that matter. In other words, not only are these various trends now pointing in the same direction, they are also doing so almost everywhere.

So what trends are we talking about here? Let me begin with the most obvious and most immediate indicator: the level of participation in national elections. Given what has been said about citizen withdrawal in the more popular media in particular, it is by means of this indicator that we might expect some of the most striking trends to be identified. At the same time, however, it is often this particular evidence that is most strongly disputed. In other words, while various expectations regarding the possible decline in levels of electoral turnout have been current for some years, they have often been found to have little backing in the aggregate empirical data. Reviewing the evidence from the 1960s through to the end of the 1980s, for example, Rudy Andeweg (1996: 150–51) noted that most countries in Europe were exhibiting more or less trendless fluctuation in turnout levels: although participation rates among those eligible to vote had indeed fallen in some countries in this thirty-year period, they had increased in others, resulting in what was in fact just a very small decline in Europe as a whole across this period. Taking a much larger set of countries, and looking at data running through to a later date, Pippa Norris also found little or no evidence of serious decline. Among the advanced, postindustrial democracies, turnout as a percentage of the voting age population rose during the 1950s, stabilized in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and then underwent what Norris refers to as ‘a modest slippage’ in the 1990s. This slight fall was statistically insignificant, however, leaving a more generalized pattern among the majority of nations of ‘trendless fluctuation or stability’ (Norris, 2002: 54–55, 67). Another assessment, by Mark Franklin (2002), was also inclined to dismiss any real concern. Franklin noted that although turnout in
the long-established democracies might have declined at the end of the century, this was usually only relative to the very high levels recorded in the 1960s, and was probably reflecting simply a short-term lack of interest in contingently quite non-divisive contests: ‘elections in recent years may see lower turnout for the simple reason that these elections decide issues of lesser importance than elections did in the late 1950s’ (2002: 164). Once more important issues were at stake, he implied, participation levels could be expected to increase again. If, of course, these important issues never materialized – as I argue is the most likely scenario, given the decline of party democracy – then turnout might never pick up. Elsewhere, in a very extensive and precise analysis, Franklin (2004) linked the slight decline in turnout to the effects of generational replacement: turnout falls because non-participating younger people replace participatory older generations in ever-changing electorates. In this case, it is not so much that existing citizens withdraw or disengage, as that younger citizens, whose demographic weight naturally increases with time, were never engaged to begin with.