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V O L 7 . N o . 3 pp. 277–296
Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications
London
Thousand Oaks
New Delhi
THE PROBLEM OF CANDIDATE SELECTION AND MODELS OF PARTY DEMOCRACY Richard S. Katz ABSTRACT
Candidate selection is vital to political parties but it also poses a dilemma, which is particularly acute in the cartel party, stemming from the position of MPs as both the base of the party in public office and the delegates of the party on the ground. One response is for leaders to democratize candidate selection in form, while centralizing control in practice. An inclusive but unorganized selectorate may give the appearance of democracy without the substance.
KEY WORDS ! Cartel Party ! democracy ! nomination
Candidate selection is a vital activity in the life of any political party. It is the primary screening device in the process through which the party in public office is reproduced. As such, it raises central questions about the ideological and sociological identities of the party as a whole. Moreover, because different modes of selection are likely to privilege different elements of the party and different types of candidates, they may raise questions about the nature of the party as an organization as well. Candidate selection has the potential to raise significant problems in all parties, or in the context of all major models of party, in large measure because of the location of candidates and MPs (as successful, and generally would-be repeat, candidates) midway between the party on the ground and the core leadership of the party in public office. As argued below, however, these problems should be especially sharply focused in the context of the cartel party model. This article therefore focuses on the puzzle of candidate selection in the cartel party as a window onto the problems of candidate selection in the development and functioning of party organizational types more generally.
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The Centrality of Candidate Selection Political parties are among the principal channels for popular political participation in democratic polities. Like the physical channels from which the metaphor is derived, however, they not only concentrate and direct popular input, but also constrict or even restrict popular input. Thus it is not surprising if feelings that government is insensitive to the demands of the citizenry are translated into calls for more open and democratic parties. There are many aspects of party life that might be democratized. Members, or supporters more generally, could be given a larger role in the selection of party leaders, both within government and without. They could be given more influence over party manifesto pledges or coalition decisions. Perhaps most aptly, given the tendency to personalize politics even in parliamentary systems and against the popular image of important decisions being made in ‘smokefilled rooms’, the process of candidate selection could be democratized. Candidate selection is one of the central defining functions of a political party in a democracy. This is true not only in the sense that selection of candidates to contest elections is one of the functions that separates parties from other organizations that may try to influence electoral outcomes and governmental decisions, but also in the sense that the candidates it nominates play an important role in defining what the party is. More particularly, candidates as persons, and candidacies as roles or positions, serve at least four interrelated functions within contemporary political parties as organizations and contemporary democracies as systems of governance. First, a party’s candidates in large measure define and constitute its public face in elections. Collectively, they manifest the demographic, geographic, and ideological dimensions of the party. They articulate and interpret the party’s record from the past and its program and promises for the future. Obviously, not all candidates are equal in these regards. A candidate nominated to the bottom of a closed party list or to contest a hopeless single member district will count for less than one whose ultimate election is highly likely or even certain; a candidate who is likely to achieve ministerial office counts for more than a candidate destined for the back benches. Nonetheless, the nomination of more women or more minority group members or more members of some religious sect or more workers or more farmers signals something about the party as a whole, as do the nominations of more ecologically sensitive candidates or more individuals associated with the economic left wing of the party. Second, as indicated by the distinction between selection and election as two separate phases of recruitment (Norris, 1997), candidates are one of the main recruitment pools, and candidacy is one of the main recruitment routes, for membership in the face of the party that Katz and Mair (1993) identified as the ‘party in public office’. This is particularly so where an intraparty electoral choice allows voters to contribute to the choice among a party’s nominees. Moreover, although some members of the party in public 278
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office may owe their positions to appointment rather than election, it is a hallmark of democracy that elected officials occupy the dominant roles. Clearly, one can debate the degree to which individual MPs in any particular political system, party, or circumstance are simply ‘lobby fodder’.1 Often, however, they are considerably more. Particularly in parliamentary systems, one generally cannot become either party leader or Prime Minister without first having served in parliament, and one cannot serve in parliament without first having been a candidate. Thus, even if individual MPs (that is successful candidates) have relatively little power, collectively they form a large portion of the recruitment pool from which holders of more important offices are drawn. Further, given the nature of democratic political parties as voluntary organizations, and the general constitutionalization of the principle that MPs hold a personal mandate even if they were elected from closed party lists (e.g. Article 38 of the German Basic Law; see also Müller, 1994), party leaders can lead only to the extent that their followers are willing to follow. Indeed, not only are party leaders generally chosen from among members of the parliamentary party, they often are chosen and removable by members of the parliamentary party. In this sense, successful candidates in their subsequent roles as MPs can impose significant constraints on higher and ostensibly more powerful party leaders. Also in their role as MPs, successful candidates, even more than they did when they were ‘merely’ candidates, occupy a ‘bully pulpit’ for influencing public opinion, and through that route for influencing their leaders in a positive way as well. Even if, in the words of British satirists Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn (1990), backbench MPs are only ‘a bunch of self-opinionated windbags and busybodies, [they do] suddenly find people taking them seriously because they’ve got the letters “MP” after their names’. Third, MPs, and the candidates that they were before they were elected, are not simply interchangeable parts of the party in public office as a collectivity. They are also representatives of individual constituencies. Constituencies generally have significant local ties, even in systems like The Netherlands, where the nominally single national electoral district actually is divided into 19 local kieskringen. Without even this public institutional device, Israeli parties have created territorial constituencies as units entitled to reserved places on their lists of candidates (Hazan, 1999). While a party’s candidates collectively contribute to its image as for example ‘regional’ or ‘national’ (the first function cited above), its individual candidates are part of the linkage between center and particular elements of the periphery, both at the governmental and at the party-internal levels. The ‘psychological constituency’ of a candidate (the group of people who believe they are represented by the candidate and whom the candidate believes himself or herself to represent) may also be defined sectorally, and indeed in the Israeli case there have been sectoral constituencies defined within the parties’ candidate selection rules alongside the territorial ones. Such institutionalization is not necessary, however, for a female candidate to represent the 279
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constituency of women, a Sami candidate to represent the constituency of Samis, or an Irish-speaking candidate to represent the constituency of Irish speakers, and so to contribute to the linkage of these social segments to government and party. Fourth, in part for the reasons just suggested, candidacy for an individual – and candidacies for members of a group – is a token in intraparty politics. Candidacy is valuable because of the constraints, influence, and power that can be exercised by candidates, and even more because of the constraints, influence, and power that they will be able to deploy if they are elected. Candidacy also is valuable because changes in the party’s public face, and in the degree to which various constituencies are or feel connected to the party, are likely to produce as well as reflect changes in its policy proposals and in its behavior in office. Candidacies may also be valued, and therefore usable as a medium of exchange within the party, for reasons that are irrelevant or irrational to politics in strictly Downsian terms, even as they play an important role in the ‘internal economics’ of a party.2 Examples of such reasons why candidacies might be demanded or accepted in exchange for other things include private ego gratification or personal aggrandizement (e.g. personal publicity that is valuable in some other sphere of life).
MPs Between the Party on the Ground and the Party in Public Office As an important means through which the party in public office reproduces itself, as a key arena for intraparty politics, and as a prominent reflection of the public face of the party, candidate selection is an important function in all political parties. As it is about the allocation of a scarce and valuable ‘commodity’, candidate selection will often be a point of conflict within a party. This conflict can take either or both of two forms. On one hand, it can focus narrowly on the question of who should be selected within the framework of agreed procedures. This often will extend beyond the purely personal to touch on questions of ideology and policy, but while it may involve strong conflicts among groups within the party, it raises the question of who will make the candidate selection decisions only in the sense of asking which groups will be strongest in the arenas where the decisions are made. On the other hand, recognizing that different procedures are likely to be to the advantages of different candidates or types of candidates, conflict over candidate selection can focus on the selection procedures themselves. Given the importance of candidate selection, such procedural conflicts can raise dilemmas touching on the very nature of the party. While potentially contentious in all types of parties, candidate selection is a particular theoretical problem for the cartel party because the model suggests two potentially contradictory hypotheses or ideas. While these 280
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ideas may come into conflict in many venues, the most significant is parliament. The source of the conflict is the position of MPs (i.e. successful candidates) on one hand as the representatives of the party on the ground and of party voters more generally, but on the other hand as the ‘base’ of the party in public office. The puzzle of candidate selection arises when, and to the extent that, these two positions imply contradictory pressures. The pattern of interparty relationships postulated to exist among the parties forming the eponymous cartel, like the pattern of relationships among social segments and the political parties that represent them postulated in Arend Lijphart’s (1968) model of consociational democracy, assumes and requires a considerable degree of elite autonomy. With regard to parliament, this means either that ordinary MPs must be relatively marginalized or else must be considered and behave as part of the deal-doing elite. The hypothesis of marginalization, however, conflicts with the obvious potential power that the parliamentary party exercises over its leadership. Thus one horn of the dilemma is that fleshing out the cartel party model appears to require one to think about the parliamentary party as a core constituent of the party in public office, and so as part of the relatively unconstrained party elite. The cartel model suggests that one strategy used by party leaders in order to gain the necessary autonomy to participate effectively in a cross-party cartel is formally to empower the ordinary party members, or an even broader range of party supporters (Mair, 1997: 149–50). The suggestion is that this increase in the nominal power of the base of the party on the ground comes at the expense of the power or influence of middle-level activists, who might be able to coordinate an effective challenge to their top leaders, rather than at the expense of their (i.e. the top leaders’) own power. Coupled with this was a suggestion that parties would move toward a stratarchical form of internal power relations (see Eldersveld, 1964), in which the central leadership would gain autonomy at the national level in part by ceding autonomy to the local branches or their equivalents with regard to local affairs. Traditionally, selection of candidates has been regarded as one of the essential prerogatives of local party organizations (e.g. Gallagher, 1988: 245; Obler, 1973; Ranney, 1965). This, then, raises the other horn of the dilemma: that the careers of individual MPs potentially are in the firm grip of the party on the ground. On one hand, MPs are assumed to require and have autonomy from the party on the ground, while, on the other, selection of candidates, who are the future MPs, is ostensibly in the hands of the party on the ground. Of course the contradiction may be more apparent than real, as my constant use of terms like ‘ostensibly’ and ‘nominally’ to qualify the power ‘apparently’ being ceded to the rank-and-file of party members or supporters indicates. Nor is the problem potential of the locations of MPs, both as representatives/agents of the party on the ground and as a core element of the party in public office, unique to the cartel party. Nonetheless, it suggests 281
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that MPs, as once and future candidates, are in a nexus that is worth further exploration, and that this is likely to be a particularly sensitive nexus in the case of the cartel party. Before returning to this, however, it will be helpful briefly to elaborate the key relevant features of the cartel party argument, particularly as they bear on the problem of candidate selection and the relationship between the party in public office and the rest of the party organization in the models of party that preceded the cartel party.
The Cartel Party Model The cartel party model postulates a process that has elements of a cyclical pattern of development and elements of a stimulus-response or dialectical pattern. In neither respect, however, does it suggest that the cartel party is either the logical fulfillment or end state of a historical process. In this, it contrasts quite markedly with many of the previous models of party. In particular, Duverger (1954) and Kirchheimer (1966) write as if they respectively believed the ‘mass party of integration’ and the ‘catch-all party’ to represent not only the wave of the future in the sense of being an increasingly common type, but also a terminal state in the sense that the processes that they see to have motivated the development of parties (expanding suffrage, development of universal education, emergence of widely available mass media) had in the late twentieth century reached their fulfillment. In contrast, whether understood as a synthesis/thesis in a dialectic process or as the next stage in a cyclical process, the cartel party argument not only suggests that the cartel party does not represent a steady state, but also has suggested that the ‘antiparty-system parties’, to use Bille’s term, are the natural reaction to the rise of the cartel party. This suggests that just as there have never been fully fledged mass parties or fully-fledged catch-all parties, because these models, in effect, have been superceded before they have been fully achieved, so the cartel party represents an ideal type toward which there are strong pressures, but which also generates its own counter-pressures. Since the closer reality comes to realization of the cartel model, the stronger these counter-pressures become, the model suggests that the cartel party type is self-limiting. In historical terms, the cartel party argument begins with the cadre or elite party typical of the stable and stratified (and largely rural) societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and also typical of the limited suffrage of the contemporaneous régimes censitaires. Essentially a party of local notables whose party leadership was at base an expression in the explicitly political sphere of their more general position in civil society, the elite party needed, and had, only limited formal organization. In terms of the ‘three faces of party organization’, the party on the ground was the personal following of the same individuals (or perhaps the following of the patrons of the individuals) who formed the party in public office. (See, for 282
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example, Chubb, 1982: 19–20, describing southern Italy in the last decades of the nineteenth century.) If there were any party central office at all, it might perform some coordinating functions, but only to the extent that the local elites who were the backbone of the party were interested in being coordinated. Candidates of the elite party generally were the leaders of the party on the ground, or indeed, given that ‘membership’ in an elite party is ill-defined but must be construed narrowly to be roughly co-terminus with the elite itself, the local party ‘membership’ tout court. Because the elite party at the national level is effectively a voluntary alliance of local parties on the ground, candidate selection is naturally made at the local level; the only potential exception would be when a single patron controls more than one district, as was sometimes the case in Britain in the eighteenth century. Where leaders chose someone other than one of themselves, the candidate’s situation would have been like that of the nominated members of the British House of Commons described in Beer (1969: 23): ‘If he does not obey the instructions he receives, he is not to be considered a man of honour and a gentleman’; he certainly would not be nominated or elected again at the next election. The challenge confronting national party leaders was to establish their authority over the parliamentary party rather than to secure their autonomy from it. The problem of the autonomy of the parliamentary party from the party on the ground was oxymoronic, given their effective fusion. The mass party is the natural reaction to the elite party. The mass party typically was the party form of the working class, initially agitating for the right to vote and inclusion in full citizenship (Fitzmaurice, 1983: 28; De Grand, 1996: 28; Irwin, 1980: 170; Hancock, 1980: 187), but it might also be adopted by other groups who felt themselves shut out of or ignored by the ruling elites in their societies, even if, as in France or Germany, they were formally enfranchised (Guttsman, 1981: 15–74). (For example, the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party was for committed Calvinists what labor parties were for the working class [Irwin, 1980: 168; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967: 20].) The organizers of mass parties attempted to use numbers and organizational strength to substitute for the individual quality (wealth, position, access to politically relevant resources like newspapers) of the ‘members’ of the ruling elite parties. This, however, required a formally articulated party organization on the ground as well as a strong central office to coordinate the various local branches. As a party originally of the political ‘outs’, the mass party formally privileged the party on the ground over the party in public office; the former through its representative institutions was the party, and the latter were merely its agents. This was not only a matter of practical politics, but also reflected an innovation in political theory. In contrast to the elite party, which may have pursued narrow sectoral or personal interests, but which claimed to be pursing the collective national interest, the mass party overtly claimed that it represented the interest of only one segment of society, and touted this as 283
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a virtue rather than accepting that it was the vice of ‘faction’. But if the party represented only one segment of society, then it could not be legitimated by the electoral decisions of society as a whole – particularly in the era in which its members could not vote in those elections. Hence accompanying the idea of sectoral representation was the idea of internal party democracy, which demanded and justified subservience of those elected to public office under the party’s banner to the decisions made in the democratic, but extragovernmental, organs of the party. In reality, of course, it was often the party central office, theoretically the agent of the party on the ground but more often its creator and master, that dominated – justifying Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ (1962). Although candidate selection theoretically rests with the party on the ground, the basically hierarchical nature of a mass party often gives the party central office significant influence – whether through pre-screening of aspirants, post-selection approval procedures, or outright pre-emption of the decision. So long as the central office is clearly perceived to be the agent of the party on the ground, however, conflict over candidate selection is more likely to reflect political conflict among the various groups and interests comprising the party or a tension between centralization and local autonomy than about the proper balance between parliamentary and extraparliamentary wings of the party or the proper role of MPs within the overall party political system. Whichever extra-parliamentary face were in control in the mass party, selection (and potential deselection) of candidates would be one of the devices through which control not only of the parliamentary party, but of its leadership and cabinet members as well, would be maintained.3 In some places, even the régime censitaire involved independent electorates of sufficient size to make some organization of supporters worthwhile for some politicians associated with elite parties. For example, both Liberal and Conservative parties in Britain had rudimentary central offices by the 1870s, the Liberal Birmingham caucus and the Conservative Primrose League both predate the Reform Act of 1884, which established a male householder franchise. Even then, rather than becoming real mass parties, these organizational efforts became the embryos of the next form to develop. This transformation was stimulated by the electoral success of the mass party as well as the exigencies of mass suffrage. These led to the catch-all party, initially as a reaction from, or adaptation by, the interests represented by the elite parties. These groups generally could not appeal to class interest, because ‘their’ class was an obvious minority; their only chance of electoral success was to attract substantial numbers of voters who were in the natural clientele of the mass parties of the left. Neither were the organizers of the catch-all party interested in internal party democracy or the dominance of the extra-governmental wings of the party, given that the organizers of these parties were already established in public office and wanted organizations of supporters. Nonetheless, the catch-all parties did adopt and 284
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adapt many of the organizational features of the mass party, in particular the idea of a formal membership organized in local branches and represented in a regular party congress. The catch-all parties also organized more elaborate central offices than their elite predecessors had maintained. But while the form may closely resemble that of the mass party, the substance is quite different. The party central office serves as a locus of leadership and as a coordinating body, but on behalf of the party in public office rather than on behalf of the party on the ground. The party on the ground, in turn, is organized to be a support mechanism for the party in public office rather than to be its master. With the advent of the catch-all party, the problem potential of candidate selection increases. On one hand, the shift of dominance over the party central office to the party in public office means that central involvement in the selection process is likely to raise not just questions of local autonomy but also questions of the ability of the party on the ground to control the party in public office. This shift, moreover, is likely to be both imperfect and contested. On the other hand, the catch-all model entails the weakening or severing of organizational ties to some ancillary organizations, but groups that no longer have a clear place in the formal party structure may nonetheless claim the right to influence the choice of candidates in return for their electoral support. This raises the question of how privileged the position of formal party members will be, and creates a pressure for the leadership of the party in public office (as the primary beneficiaries of external electoral support) to defer to groups outside of the formal party organization and traditional party family. The result is that candidate selection becomes a problem not just of persons or of policy lines, but of the fundamental nature of the party and its place in the democratic order. So long as the party on the ground can be satisfied with the prospect of electoral victory – either because there are sufficiently great differences in the policies that alternative governments would pursue or because party loyalty remains strong – there may not be significant problems. If those conditions erode, as in fact they appear to have done (Mair, 1997: Ch. 6), the dilemma of the cartel party, alluded to above, is raised in heightened form. Both the organization of the catch-all party, and the socio-economic changes in Western democracies that accompanied the electoral success of mass parties (whether or not brought about by the mass parties themselves) created tensions, first within the mass party and then within the catch-all party as well. A large part of the political program of many mass parties involved demands for social provision of services like health care and education; part of the organizational glue that strengthened the parties’ hold on their members was that they were part of a network of organizations that provided some of these services in the absence of state provision. Electoral success, however, converted the parties from the relatively ‘easy’ position of demanders to the much more ‘difficult’ position of responsible providers; achievement of social provision made the services provided by the party and 285
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its allied organizations less necessary; trends like globalization, aging populations, lengthening periods of ‘normal’ or ‘necessary’ education, and mounting public debts forced consideration of retrenchment even on the parties that had built their support around expansion of public services. But clearly, this necessity was far more obvious to leaders with personal responsibility in government than it was to followers, especially ideologically committed followers, in the party on the ground. The success of catch-all parties in appealing to members of the classes gardées of the mass parties creates a political pressure for the mass parties to attempt to broaden their appeal as well. One consequence is the weakening of the organizational linkages between the party and other organizations within its clientele class, in particular the trade unions, suggested above. In turn, this had the consequence of forcing the political career to stand more clearly on its own – an out-of-office politician was less likely to find a sinecure in a trade union, for example, while waiting for the next electoral cycle. More generally, there has been a rise in the prominence of professional politicians in the catch-all parties as well, in part driven by an increased importance of technical expertise and in part by the decline in the economic security of the upper middle classes and of the beneficiaries of inherited wealth and position. More politicians are living from politics rather than living for politics, and therefore needing to worry about such mundane matters as their own job security. Moreover, as society in general has become more capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive, the costs of doing politics have increased, while with the weakening of social ties associated with the idea of ‘mass society’, the willingness of party members to contribute enough to meet those costs has decreased. The results can be summarized under three headings. First, governing politicians are more constrained in what they can deliver, and thus need to free themselves from the (unrealistic) expectations and demands of their followers. Politicians increasingly need resources beyond the willingness or ability of their followers to provide. Politicians are increasingly professionals, for whom the personal stakes of failure are high. The result, according to the Katz and Mair (1995) hypothesis, is the tacit formation of a cartel among the ruling parties. As has been accurately pointed out (e.g. Koole, 1996), the cartel hypothesis is as much a description of a party system (a pattern of interactions among parties) as it is a description of a type of party itself. The Katz and Mair contention, however, is that just as firms in commercial cartels end up different in their internal organization and behavior from firms that are engaged in free market competition, the system level cartel has consequences for the internal dynamics of the parties within it that are sufficiently strong and sufficiently pervasive to define a new party type. While this development has been couched in stimulus-response terms, it can also be seen in cyclical terms. This idea comes particularly from noting 286
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the similarities of the elite or cadre party and the cartel party, especially from the perspective of outsiders. (In this respect, Katz and Mair are basically in agreement with Koole’s [1992] use of the descriptive term ‘modern cadre party’.) These include: the ‘real’ issues are kept off the political agenda; there is a limited and self-perpetuating (self-vetting) class of inside participants; rules (e.g. electoral laws) are structured to disadvantage, if not to completely shut out, challengers to that class of participants. In this sense, the antiparty-system party is analogous to the newly rising mass parties of the late nineteenth century, for example with their emphasis on internal democracy, even when it is the ‘democracy’ of a charismatic leader rather than of equal deliberation, or the idea of party as the organized political part of a way of life rather than just an expression of political opinions.4
Inside the Cartel Party Just as the catch-all party is in some senses (particular emphasized by Kirchheimer) a development or fulfillment of the mass party model and in other senses (particularly emphasized in the Katz and Mair articles) an alternative or response to it, so the cartel party is in some senses the fulfillment of the catch-all party model and in other senses a response to it. Whether seen as fulfillment or response, however, the cartel model has several implications concerning the internal organization of parties. The cartel party is a party headed by leaders who are professional politicians in two senses. In the first place, party leadership in the age of the cartel party requires a variety of specialized skills and a range of technical expertise at a level normally associated with other professions. While a variety of jobs in the ‘chattering classes’ or ‘brokerage occupations’ (Norris and Lovenduski, 1995) may help to develop some of these skills, it is increasingly the case that the requisite honing of skills, the forging of the requisite personal relationships, and the acquisition of the requisite knowledge both of government and of politics can be achieved only through experience in politics. In a sense, the rapid rise to political prominence of such outsiders as Ross Perot or Silvio Berlusconi are the exceptions that prove the rule; on one hand, both headed movements that were distinctly outside whatever party cartel there is in their countries, and on the other hand neither is in high office, and while Berlusconi remains important in Italian politics and may yet return to power, Perot appears to have no such prospects. Especially within a cartel party, positions of leadership are reached over time from below, not by immediate lateral transfer from some other hierarchy; the leaders of cartel parties have made careers as party politicians. And this, as suggested above, is the other sense in which cartel party leadership is professionalized. While politics may be a passion, it is also a job. In the terms classically elaborated by Weber (1958), the leaders of cartel parties are professionals who live from politics rather than merely amateurs who 287
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live for politics. Indeed, this process of professionalization reaches below the top leadership ranks to include ordinary MPs as well (King, 1981; McAllister, 1997: 20; Roberts, 1988: 113; Wessels, 1997: 94–7) The willingness of such leaders to trade public concerns like ideology or policy for private needs like security of income and position is correspondingly increased relative to previous party types. Professionalization of party leadership in these twin senses then suggests several more characteristics of party leadership. One is that party leaders, like other professionals, come to ‘share certain characteristics in terms of similar educational backgrounds, common standards regulating, qualifying and restricting members for entry, and recognized hierarchical pathways for career promotion. As a result there is a shared professional community so that members can easily recognize who does, and does not, belong’ (Norris, 1999). The old French saw that two deputies have more in common, one of whom is a Socialist, than two Socialists have in common, one of whom is a deputy, rings increasingly true at the level of MPs, and even more at the level of cabinet ministers. While this increasing commonality of situation and orientation among leaders of different parties is a descriptive characteristic, however, it is also a facilitating characteristic in that it provides a common ground for understanding and accommodation across party lines. Also like other professionals, party leaders increasingly see the questions with which they must deal as problems of technical or professional expertise (with regard to which they should play a privileged role) rather than as problems of taste or preference (which ought to be resolved democratically). Thus a second implication of professionalization is a desire for autonomy, in particular from those who are more inclined to see the problems of government in ideological rather than managerial terms. This autonomy is also required for effective participation in a cartel. The members of the party on the ground (of any party type except the elite party – for which the existence of the party on the ground as a distinct face is problematic) are generally motivated by solidary incentives such as group identification (we versus they) or ideology (Panebianco, 1988). Compromise across party lines necessarily debases these values. If leaders are to make compromises nonetheless, they must limit the severity of the constraints imposed on them from below. In the ultimate compromise of forming an all-inclusive cartel, they might have to free themselves from such constraints altogether. A third implication of the professionalization of party leadership is a need for a secure and reliable font of resources, particularly financial resources. This has several roots. There has been a ‘commercialization’ of politics in the sense that the things needed both for internal organization and for electoral campaigning increasingly are of a type that must be bought rather than being volunteered; the labor of party members will not substitute for a good media consultant or pollster or adequate office space. The separation of parties from other organizations makes it harder to borrow these resources. The costs of these requisites are rising more rapidly than the willingness of 288
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party members and other donors to pay, at least in part because a variety of societal changes have made individuals less willing to join parties, and joiners less willing to pay (Katz et al., 1992; Katz, 1990). At the same time, the degree to which the ability to raise funds has personal as well as electoral consequences for party leaders has increased; although electoral victory clearly is one likely route to personal and resource security (direct access to resources of the state and the prerequisites of office; groups contributing in the hope of securing access or policy favors are more inclined to support parties in office), access to resources may loom larger than policy, and stability of resources may become more important than maximization. That the leaders of all significant parties share a common orientation and face the same needs furthers the conditions required for the formation of a cartel, while their financial needs in particular provide a powerful incentive to form a cartel. As in economic cartels, there are two sides to this. On one hand, a cartel facilitates more effective rent-seeking; the parties in aggregate do better with a cartel. On the other hand, it also provides security, by limiting the consequences of electoral defeat – even while limiting the benefits of victory. The most apt analogy is to a professional sports league. By forming a cartel, the owners of the sports teams are able to increase their ability to extract rents, from fans, broadcasters, and trade-mark franchisees for example. There is real competition in the sport, but it is spectacle rather than the point of the cartel which is profit. Sharing the revenue, particularly of the latter two types, ensures the viability of all the teams and protects them against the economic consequences of defeat on the field; even if teams that win consistently do better financially, even the consistent losers are guaranteed against real loss. Correspondingly, cartel parties engage in ‘real’ electoral competition – and winners do fare better than losers – but the competition is more show than substance. Divisive issues are kept off the agenda, and the organizational and personal costs of losing are contained. Looking to the party on the ground, the observation above that its members are ‘generally motivated by solidary incentives such as group identification (we versus they) or ideology’ actually glossed over an important distinction. Especially as social divisions have tended to become blurred and the connection between sociology and party has weakened, the group identification that leads to party membership is more likely to be party identification per se, rather than identification with a party as one of an interconnected panoply of groups and organizations that collectively define the member’s identity vis-a-vis the social world as a whole. Party identification often is ‘content free’ – the party identifier does not expect his party to agree with him, rather he takes his positions from his party. Party identification is likely to lead to a personal identification with the party’s leader, as the personal embodiment of a valued object, much as citizens may develop a positive attachment to a king or queen as head of state and thus as the embodiment of the nation. In contrast, those whose membership is based on ideology are more likely 289
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to be loyal to policy than to person. Membership based on ideology is likely to imply both greater information and sophistication, and greater commitment. As a result, party activists, as opposed to ‘rank-and-file’ members, are more likely to come from among those motivated by ideological solidarity. But, while the show of electoral competition may be adequate for those motivated by group identification, for those motivated by ideology – including the core of activists within the party on the ground – it is much less likely to be adequate. Because of their activism, however, these more ideologically motivated members are in a position to be influential within the party as a whole, to the extent that the party on the ground has influence. They, thus, may impose constraints on the ability of the leaders of the party in public office to pursue the cartel strategy. Logically, the leaders of a cartel (or would-be cartel) party have two potential strategies to limit the impact of this constraint. On one hand, they can attempt overtly to disempower the party on the ground. This strategy presents two disadvantages, however. First, it runs counter to the prevalent democratic ideology and so is likely to be electorally costly (although this is a price that most cartel party leaders probably would pay, if it were necessary to cartel maintenance and were the only cost) and, more importantly, given the proliferation of party laws that tended to accompany the introduction of public subventions of parties it also often is illegal. On the other hand, even if the relative value of party members has declined, they are by no means worthless (e.g. Scarrow, 1996), and overt disempowerment is likely to alienate not only ideologically motivated activists, but other members as well. The leaders of the party in public office can attempt to disempower the party on the ground covertly, by decapitating it – that is by denying to the ideologically motivated activists the opportunity to organize and speak for the party identification motivated rank-and-file. The most prominent example of this strategy is to have party decisions (e.g. the naming of the party’s leader or the adoption of its election manifesto) made by direct postal vote of the full membership, rather than allowing them to be made by the party congress. More generally, compilation of full membership lists at the center not only allows this kind of plebiscitarian decision-taking, but also allows the central leadership to communicate directly with the membership base, while cutting out the intermediary role (and power) of the local activists.
Candidate Selection in the Cartel Party: Hypotheses and Research Questions These general strategies vis-à-vis the party on the ground have particular resonance in the problem of candidate selection. Again, one possibility would be to centralize control, thus marginalizing the party on the ground. 290
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Certainly there is some evidence of this both in Tony Blair’s decisions first not to announce the list format or method of candidate selection for the 1999 election of the European Parliament until very late in the day, and then to adopt a closed list system, and in the transfer of district allocation decisions in Italy from the regional to the national level between 1994 and 1996 (di Virgilio, 1998). Suggestions of increased central ‘interference’ in candidate selection also have been prominent in Ireland. Nonetheless, the right of each local party organization to select its own candidates tends to be so firmly entrenched (again sometimes in law) that this is not likely to be a productive strategy. In this regard it is worth noting that both the British and Italian examples represent attempted manipulation of new electoral systems rather than the reduction of established local prerogatives within a stable system, while the Irish interventions have been both limited and of limited effectiveness. As with such questions as national leadership or manifesto choice or ratification, the alternative strategy would be to leave the selection of candidates nominally in local hands, but to limit the range of options from which they may choose and the possibilities for local organization to mobilize in opposition to the preferences of the central party. Again, direct democracy, which ‘benefits’ from the fact that the ‘vocabulary’ afforded to the voter is far more limited than that available to the meeting attender (Schattschneider, 1942: 52) is a possibility. In this sense, the format of the decision (postal ballot versus meeting) may be as significant as the locus of decision. With a decision like candidate selection that is by its nature local, it may be harder for the central party simply to set the alternatives upon which the local members will vote. But there is a second strategy that both may give the central party greater leverage and will further dilute the influence of ideologically motivated and organizationally entrenched local activists. This is to expand the selectorate beyond regular party members to include sympathizers or even ordinary voters. The rationale would be that the less consistently and intensively involved the participant in the candidate selection process, the more he or she will be swayed by name recognition and the more likely he or she is to take cues from the highly visible central leadership. There is, of course, an accompanying danger to broadening the selectorate beyond regular members, as has been observed in Canada – that local politicians will enroll large numbers of personal supporters immediately before the candidate selection process for the sole purpose of having themselves chosen as candidates. In this case, while local activists in the party on the ground may be disempowered, so too is the central party. Even more in the United States the use of the direct primary has the twin effects of disempowering the local party organization (indeed, in most cases one would be hard pressed to find a local party organization as distinct from the personal organizations of the various local office-holders, candidates, and aspiring candidates, and in some cases such organization as there is is forbidden by 291
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law from taking sides in ‘its own’ candidate selection process), but also the national party. Nonetheless, this leads to two hypotheses, each of which can be expressed in terms either as a comparison between cartel parties and non-cartel parties, or (recognizing that the cartel party is an emerging rather than a fully developed type) as a comparison of cartel parties over time: 1 There will be increased involvement by the central party in candidate recruitment and in setting and limiting the options among which local selectorates will choose, at the same time broadening the range of groups from which candidates may be recruited (greater categoric inclusiveness) and limiting the choice of particular individuals from those categories (what might be termed ‘personal exclusivity’). 2 There will be a movement of local candidate selection procedures and selectorates toward greater inclusiveness, in particular away from choice by local party officials and formal party meetings and toward selection by broad-based ballots, and toward procedures that are increasingly open to direct participation by party sympathizers rather than being restricted to formal members. In the terms employed by Rahat and Hazan in this issue, the second hypothesis implies a democratization of the selection process by leading to more inclusive selectorates, while the first might be seen as implying increased democratization through a more categorically inclusive recruitment pool. Whether this democratization also means substantial empowerment of the base is another matter. This process also suggests, and indeed I have argued above is intended to produce, a reorientation on the part of elected members. The danger of excessive local autonomy in the selection of candidates (from the perspective of the party in public office) is that MPs will force strategies on their leaders that are electorally costly while at the same time undermining the leadership’s ability to participate in a cartel-like arrangement to contain the personal and organizational repercussions of those electoral costs. Whether this arises because autonomous local parties select candidates whose personal views disincline them to play the cartel game, or because the threat of deselection is adequate to force MPs who otherwise would play the cartel game not to do so, the experience of the British Labour Party in the 1970s and early 1980s and the disputes between fundis and realos in the German Green Party illustrate the problem. The objective of the processes just hypothesized would be to reorient MPs away from the local party on the ground and toward the party in public office. In particular, the expectation would be a kind of schizophrenia among MPs, mirroring the schizophrenic character of a cartel party in general. In the local arena, one would expect MPs to present a public face that contributed to the spectacle of party competition, but in the governmental arena one would expect them to support their leaders in playing the cartel game. Thus, there would be an increasing 292
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separation between the appearance and the substance of politics, with for example an increase in the kind of activity that Mayhew (1974) describes as ‘position taking’. While it is difficult to see exactly how the relevant concepts might be operationalized, this can be expressed as a further hypothesis: 3 There will be an increasing divergence between the rhetorical and the substantive behavior of MPs.
Candidate Selection, Party Types, and Democracy More than one strand of democratic theory (e.g. what have been identified [Katz, 1997] as socialist popular sovereignty, concurrent majorities, participationist democracy, and developmental communitarian democracy) stress the importance of democracy within parties, while others (especially other forms of popular sovereignty and liberal democracy) stress the importance of democratic competition between parties. On one side is the claim of John Stuart Mill (1876, 2: 569) that ‘a democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse’, while on the other is Giovanni Sartori’s (1965: 124) assertion that ‘democracy on a large scale is not the sum of many little democracies’. What would be the implications for this debate if these three hypotheses were to prove accurate? Most obviously, this would suggest that there is more to democracy than suffrage – in this case, that expanding the inclusiveness of the formal selectorate does not necessarily increase the real control exercised by followers over their leaders. To the contrary, expansion of the selectorate can be an elite strategy to defang the base. This then raises a further question. The process hypothesized above has much in common with Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’. Although it suggests that there will be less popular control than advertised, is it the case, as Michels (1962: 369) also suggests, that ‘the democratic principle carries with it, if not a cure, at least a palliative, for the disease of oligarchy’ and is likely to generate, ‘in virtue of the theoretical postulates it proclaims . . . a certain number of free spirits who . . . desire to revise the base upon which authority is established?’ In this case, the long run effect of empowering while decapitating the membership might contribute to the self-limiting nature of the cartel party model. At the same time, the argument advanced here suggests that, contrary to the ‘elitist’ models, one may not be able to rely on the desire of politicians to win elections to induce them to perform their democratic functions. If one could, then the additional constraints imposed on politicians by internal party democracy would be dysfunctional for the system as a whole. But if, as the cartel party model suggests, politicians attempt to secure their own 293
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welfare through ‘restraint of trade’ rather than through competition, then the constraints imposed by internal party democracy (such as limiting strategic and ideological flexibility and ability to respond to changing circumstances, but also forcing leaders to attend to salient issues and forcing closer correspondence between rhetoric in campaigns and behavior in office) may result in a ‘better’ democracy at the system level than any available alternative.
Notes 1 ‘Common harlots of the Treasury bench’ as British government MPs were once described. Or in W. S. Gilbert’s words in the operetta Iolanthe: When in that House, MPs divide If they’ve a brain and cerebellum too They have to leave that brain outside And vote just as their leaders tell ’em to. 2 ‘The political function of elections in a democracy, we assume, is to select a government. Therefore rational behavior in connection with elections is behavior oriented toward this end and no other. Let us assume a certain man prefers party A for political reasons, but his wife has a tantrum whenever he fails to vote for party B. It is perfectly rational personally for this man to vote for party B if preventing his wife’s tantrum is more important to him than having A win instead of B’ (Downs, 1957: 7). Although Downs’ theory depends heavily on this assumption about voters, the assumed use of policy by parties as an enticement to voters rather than as an end in itself suggests that this distinction between private and political rationality is not intended to apply to politicians. 3 As with the elite party, there is potential for oxymoron here, since the top parliamentary party leaders and the top extra-parliamentary party leaders frequently were the same people. This problem remains theoretically significant with the catch-all party as well. 4 An obvious example, at least at the rhetorical level, is the Belgian Flemish ecology party, Anders Gaan Leven, literally ‘another way of living’.
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RICHARD S. KATZ is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. He has published numerous books and articles on the subjects of political parties, elections, and democracy. ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218–2065, USA [email:
[email protected]] Paper submitted 4 December 1999; accepted for publication 23 June 2000.
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