I am keeping my promise from yesterday’s post by writing day 17. I want to be able to catch up to day 21 (which is today) before Monday.
So this is still about chapter 6 which wont be completed until day 18, so its hella boring. This lecture focused on political parties and party systems. Party Systems (PSs) are defined as the number of parties and their relative institutional strength; dominant-party systems have multiple parties competing with only one prevailing, this was the system in South Africa since 1994 and is Sweden’s as well. Socialist states have a party state regime.
Two-party systems have only two parties are able to garner enough votes to win an election; multiparty systems are where more than two parties could potentially win a national election and govern. I guess technically Canada is a multiparty system but lets be honest, only two parties ever get enough votes to matter (the Conservatives and the Liberals).
Party systems have two origins: institutional and sociological. According to institutionalists believe PSs are shaped by electoral systems. Duverger’s Law: 1st law, SMD linked with two-party systems; 2nd law, PR with multiparty systems. Please don’t ask what the hell this means because I’m not very sure, all I know is that these laws aren’t actually laws. I guess the whole deal is that systems effect outcomes, so the system in place effects the party formations. Sociologists believe that PSs are shared by industrial or religious changes (party cleavages):
(Both these from the textbook, I wasn’t about to write all of that down here)
Political parties have big three components: members, strength, and ideology which, I guess, define political mobilization. In this class we looked at three forms of political mobilization: programmatic, patronage-based, and populist. Programmatic mobilization is based on economic or cultural appeals or a set of ideas and is most common in wealthy countries. Its closely related to rational choice theory and its internal organization is crucial for candidate selection and strength.
Patronage-based mobilization is the exchange of material benefits for political support. Internal organization is the relationship between the parties’ central leaders and patronage “brokers” lower in he system. According to political scientists this version of democracy is more common in poor or new democracies as parties have less leverage with the people and the people will go to those who will address their needs directly.
Populist mobilization is based on the idea of the corrupt elite vs the pure people. It emerges when the previous two mobilizations break down. It “involves a personalist leader appealing to voters directly, often threatening established institutions, parties, and elites. Populist leaders emphasize a united and morally superior “people” battling corrupt elites; engage in “bad manners” (behavior previously considered unacceptable for political elites); and focus their rhetoric around a sense of “crisis” that threatens “the people” (Moffitt 2016). Populist mobilization often arises when programmatic or patronage-based mobilization breaks down and at least some citizens no longer feel they are adequately represented by mainstream parties (Kenny 2017).” This was taken directly from the textbook. Internal logistics do not matter, mobilization is crucial. In recent times we have seen a sharp increase in populist parties and leaders.
In recent years there has been a decline in partisan loyalty to traditional parties, lower voter turnout, a dramatic drop in traditional party membership, increase in single-issue voting (e.g. abortion), a greater focus on the personality of individual candidates, etc. A right wing party in France used t only claim around 10% of the working class vote back in the day but now has around 40%. Theres competition between individuals rather than between parties. Why is this happening? The party itself could be the problem; new extreme parties emerging, not with the left but with the right, their focus on “anti-woke” attitudes and economic issues with xenophobic, anti-immigrant, white working class. These far right parties combine populism and nativism to garner support. These trends could also be explained by economic changes, social changes, and/or changes in political parties: traditional left/right parties evolving into catch-all party evolving into cartel party.
That’s why this day ended, Honestly, now that I’m rereading the notes and lecture slide, this part wasn’t nearly as boring as I remember. Anyway, I will either double post today or post day 18 tomorrow.
This is just my hot take so don’t afford it too much creedence.
I think that what we’re seeing in the WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, [post-]Industrialised, Rich, and “Democratic”) is essentially the breakdown of liberalism.
Part of this is due to the nature of the spectacle (see: Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [but don’t take it too seriously - it’s not something I’d recommend crafting an entire ideological position around]); we live in a world where PR has been refined over the last century or so into a science. We live in a society where images and representation of things takes precedence over the material reality. We live in a hot-take world.
Part of this is because the traditional parties no longer even throw scraps to their proletarian voterbases, except in marginal cases where it directly serves the interests of the party, like they used to do. (Which is essentially a consequence of the falling rate of profit in a broad sense.)
Part of this is a greater systemic issue of liberalism being fundamentally incapable of resolving its inherent contradictions, or of resolving anything really.
This sort of moment has occurred before, during the Great Depression and of course in the lead-up to WWII in certain countries. However this time around it’s exceedingly unlikely that we will see a grand recuperation effort like with the New Deal era policies; there are structural factors at play such as being in a so-called “service economy” (which is totally different from a Soviet “bureaucratic state” like the libs often accuse it of being, promise!) making it essentially impossible to use (non-existent) domestic industry to kick-start liberal democracy again, the situation caused by decades of neoliberal policy which is exceedingly unlikely to undergo a reversal, and the fact that worker’s power is relatively weak compared to the circa-New Deal era.
I’d argue that if we did see a Bernie presidency that he would have either been brought to heel (most likely, given his willingness to act as sheepdog) or, if he did pursue economic policy that he campaigned on, he would have been deposed one way or another. I guess this is where I go off the deep end into parapolitics so all due caveats apply, especially since I’m supposed to be a materialist, but I would absolutely believe that a second Business Plot would have taken place or that the three-letter agencies would have taken him out if they were unable to create a counter-movement of strikes and uprisings to bring the country and a Bernie presidency to a standstill. Basically, what happened to Chile under Allende (or any other similar example, e.g. Arbenz)
I think that implicitly most voters recognise that so-called representatives do not represent them or their interests, which would explain the outsider parties gaining traction and the rise of the single-issue voter.
There’s a whole lot to this and I’ve barely managed to skim the surface but ultimately I see us living in the era of decay of liberal democracy or late stage liberal democracy.
We live in interesting times.