Ruling the Void (7 page)

This evidence of uniform decline was also reinforced by the figures for the absolute numbers of party members, for here too, and in marked contrast to the earlier pattern noted by Katz and Mair (1992), the fall-off was pervasive: in every one of the long-established democracies included in the analysis, the absolute numbers of party members had fallen, sometimes by as much as 50 per cent of the 1980s levels. In no single country had there been an increase in the number of party members. This was exit on a grand scale – both in terms of reach and direction. Throughout the old democracies, as the analysis concluded, parties were simply haemorrhaging members (Mair and van Biezen, 2001: 13). In so doing, they offered yet another telling indicator of the extent to which the 1990s had been marked by an unprecedented degree of popular withdrawal and disengagement.

This story also continued into the new century. Though the levels of party membership in absolute numbers now appear to be bottoming out – indeed, they have often fallen so low as to make it almost impossible to imagine further decline in absolute numbers without this signalling the wholesale collapse of the party organizations concerned – the scale of the decline since the high point reached in the late 1970s is unmistakable.
Table 4
shows a picture of membership loss of quite staggering
proportions. A decline in the ratio of members to eligible voters is evident in each of the long-established democracies, ranging from a fall of more than 10 percentage points in the cases of Austria and Norway to more moderate decreases of around 2 or 3 per cent in Germany and the Netherlands. In the thirteen countries for which long-term data are available, the average membership ratio has fallen by nearly 5 percentage points in the last thirty years – a huge decline. The absolute numbers have also fallen dramatically. In the United Kingdom and France, the parties have lost around 1 million members over the course of the last three decades, equivalent to approximately two-thirds of the memberships recorded around 1980. Italian parties today have 1.5 million members fewer than their counterparts of the First Republic, corresponding to a fall by more than one-third of the earlier memberships. The Scandinavian countries too, and

Table 4
Party membership change in established democracies, 1980–2009

Norway and Sweden in particular, have suffered severe losses, with the raw numbers falling by over 60 per cent and nearly 50 per cent respectively. Although the losses appear more muted in some countries, it should also be noted that in none of the established democracies have the raw memberships fallen by less than 25 per cent. On average, across all established democracies, membership levels in absolute numbers have been nearly halved since 1980.

So what can we conclude from this review of the evidence regarding citizen behaviour in western Europe? The most obvious conclusion is that it has now become more than evident that citizens are withdrawing and disengaging from the arena of conventional politics. Even when they vote, and this is less often than before, or in smaller proportions, their preferences emerge closer and closer to the moment of voting itself, and are now less easily guided by cohesive partisan cues. For whatever reason, and there is no shortage of hypotheses offering to explain this change, there are now fewer and fewer standpatters, and hence more and more citizens who, when they think about politics at all, are likely to operate on the basis of short-term considerations and influences. Electorates in this sense are becoming progressively destructured, affording more scope to the media to play the role of agenda-setter, and requiring a much greater campaign effort from parties and candidates. What we see here, in short, is a form of voting behaviour that is increasingly contingent, and a type of voter whose choices appear increasingly accidental or even random. Much of this change has only become really apparent since the end of the 1980s.

To be sure, we are dealing with sometimes quite small pieces of evidence here, and the changes which have been noted are also sometimes, though not always, relatively marginal – a trickle rather than a flood. But it is also important to appreciate that when all these disparate pieces of evidence, great and small, are summed together, they offer a very clear indication of a marked shift in the prevailing patterns of mass politics. This shift is not only consistent in focus – that is, all of these indicators now point in a common direction – but is also remarkably consistent across the range of polities. The conclusion is then clear: all over western Europe, and in all likelihood all over the advanced democracies, citizens are heading for the exits of the national political arena.

In early 2002, in an interview with the Dutch social science magazine
Facta
, Anthony Giddens drew attention to the changes that were being wrought in mass media entertainment through the growing popularity of docu-soaps and reality television. ‘A watershed has been passed here,’ he noted. ‘Previously television was something that reflected an external world which people then watched. Now television is much more a medium in which you can participate.
⁸
In conventional politics, by contrast, the shift has been the other way around. Previously, and probably through to at least the 1970s, conventional politics was seen to belong to the citizen, to be something in which the citizen could easily participate, and often did participate. Now, to paraphrase Giddens, conventional politics has become part of an external world which people view from outside. There is a world of the parties, or a world of political leaders, that is separate from the world of the citizenry. As Bernard Manin (1997: 218–35) put it, we are witnessing
the transformation of party democracy into ‘audience democracy’.
⁹
Whether the increasing withdrawal and disengagement of voters is responsible for the emergence of this new mode of democratic politics, or whether it is an emerging form of democratic politics that is encouraging voter withdrawal and disengagement is, at least for now, a moot point. What is beyond dispute is that each feeds the other. As citizens exit the national political arena, they inevitably weaken the major actors who survive there – the political parties. And this, in turn, is part of, and promotes, audience democracy. As Giovanni Sartori (2002: 78) puts it, ‘video politics’ – and hence also audience democracy – is stronger when parties are weak, and weaker when parties are strong. Strong parties are difficult to sustain when politics turns into a spectator sport, and that it should turn into a spectator sport is hardly surprising given the fading of the real differences that divided the parties in the first place. When mainstream party competition matters little for the substance of decision-making, it is only to be expected that it should drift towards an emphasis on theatre and spectacle.

2
THE CHALLENGE TO PARTY GOVERNMENT

The conflicts that divide political parties in the older democracies of western Europe have attenuated substantially in the past thirty years. This has occurred at two different levels. In the first place, there has been a reduction in the intensity of ideological polarization, as formerly ‘anti-system’ parties – that is, parties that challenge the fundamental principles on which democratic regimes are founded, and espouse a wholly alternative political settlement – have either moderated their demands and thus moved closer to the mainstream, or experienced significant losses in their electoral support. On the right, for example, the former anti-system alternative has now all but disappeared, and been replaced by far-right or national populist parties, which, though often espousing very radical and anti-consensual policy positions, do not claim to challenge the democratic regime as such (Mudde, 2007). Indeed, in more recent years, it has often proved quite easy for mainstream parties of the centre right to incorporate such parties into government – whether as fully fledged coalition partners, as in
the case of the Austrian Freedom Party, for example, the Italian National Alliance or the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List; or as formal support parties for minority governments, as in the case of the Danish People’s Party.

Anti-system parties of the left have also tended to moderate or fade away. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, communist parties either gave up the ghost or transformed themselves into more widely acceptable social-democratic alternatives, and those that chose the latter route have also enjoyed access to government office. Even Sinn Féin, once the political wing of what was a very active and highly visible terrorist group, the IRA, now shares power in the devolved government of Northern Ireland. Green parties, for their part, quickly abandoned their pretensions to operate outside the system and were easily incorporated in broad-based centre-left coalitions. In a way that would have been unthinkable in the 1950s and 1960s, therefore, more or less all west European parties have now entered the political mainstream and become
salonfähig
. In electoral politics, only the democratic alternative is now on offer.
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