Democracy and Party Systems in Developing Countries

A comparative study of India and South Africa

Clemens Spiess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415468091
• eBook ISBN: 9781134033492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines and compares the emergence, development and impact of the party systems in post-colonial India and post-apartheid South Africa. It sheds light on the crucial role and function of party systems in democratising developing countries.

Although often described as political miracles or empirical anomalies, both countries actually figure prominently in party system and democratic theory due to their regional importance and the important role the party system plays in their political trajectory. The author employs a diachronic comparison of the two party systems, with a distinct focus on the role of party agency in the shaping and maintenance of one-party-dominance and on the role of the two party systems as independent variables. Highlighting the similarities and differences between the two systems, he examines whether the lessons learned from the Indian experience in terms of the function and effects of the country's post-independent party system and the role of party agency therein are applicable to South Africa.

This book will be of interest to academics working in the field of democracy, comparative politics and development in general, and South Africa and South Asia in particular.

1 One-party-dominance in changing societies

Conceptual, methodological and theoretical aspects of the study

Political scientists have often used the number of parties in the system as an indicator of the patterns expected to be found. Political sociologists have often stressed societal variables such as social and ideological cleavages in order to explain party systems. Scholars with a more psychological bent have relied heavily on learning models for explaining party identification and perceived spatial distances in the party universe. We suggest that the dominant party system is a political rather than sociological or psychological model. Because of its structural characteristics and the importance of strategic decisions as well as the impact it has on the competition, the mass public, and the organs of power, the dominant party model provides an alternative way of understanding the emergence of competitive democracies in multiparty systems.

(Arian and Barnes 1974: 613)

Based on an investigation into the party systems of post-war Italy and independent Israel, once treated as prototypes of dominant party systems in Western democracies, Arian and Barnes’ portrayal of the distinctiveness of one-party-dominant systems is a convenient starting point for this study. The fact that both the party systems under examination, as well as systems of one-party-dominance more generally, have defied conventional wisdom vis-à-vis the emergence and working of party systems implies a need for alternative political explanatory factors. This is not to deny that more conventional explanatory factors, such as the cleavage structure in a given society or the institutional arrangement in a given polity, have a crucial impact on the unfolding of a party system but, rather, to redirect attention to the role of strictly political factors in the emergence and working of party systems.

Political factors have often been mentioned as important determinants of party system development, but this contention has never been followed up systematically. This is largely due to the fact that a number of political factors are less quantifiable and are more process-based. However, systems of one-party-dominance in changing societies offer a fertile ground for an investigation into these very factors and aspects for reasons elaborated below. In addition, democratic practice in one-party-dominant systems is still a controversial issue in academic debate, exemplified by the catchy book titles that hint at their scholarly subject as Uncommon Democracies (Pempel 1990) or The Awkward Embrace: One-Party Domination and Democracy (Giliomee and Simkins 1999). Hence, an additional rationale of this study is to look at the two party systems and their characteristics as independent variables and to examine their effects with regard to the most crucial functions that party systems in changing societies have to perform in order to engineer a successful process of simultaneous democratic consolidation, national integration and development.

Before delving deeper into a discussion of these two main threads, it is necessary to outline the conceptual, methodological and theoretical aspects involved in the comparison. This chapter aims to define the concept of one-party-dominance, discuss the relevance and specifics of party systems and one-party-dominance in the context of changing societies, outline the rationale, problems and advantages of the envisaged comparison, delineate the theoretical perspective chosen, pave the way for the argument that conceives of a system of one-party-dominance as the appropriate ‘institutional container’ for a process of democratic consolidation, development and national integration to gain momentum, and mention the methodological challenges involved in the comparison. In the final section, the chapter outlines the conclusion that common explanatory approaches to the emergence and working of party systems have not been able to catch the logic of systems of one-party-dominance in changing societies, as they do not take into account party agency as the crucial explanatory variable.

‘Grappling with the concept’: definition of one-party-dominance

The concepts of ‘one-party-dominance’ or ‘Congress system’ and the related terminology was introduced to academic debate in 1961 by the Indian political scientist Rajni Kothari and later given fuller form by him in 1964 (Kothari 1961, 1964).¹ Meant to describe the specific nature of the Indian party system, Kothari’s postulation of a compatibility of dominance and competition in a given party system touched an aspect which had hitherto been largely neglected. Although Duverger (1954: 279–80) had alerted in 1951 to the many shades and nuances in what is conventionally conceived of as a one-party or single-party system, alternation in government was commonly regarded as a necessary condition of a competitive party system. Not until the understanding that mere numerical classifications do not suffice to grasp the nature and working of party systems did the phenomenon of the long-term rule of one party in a competitive environment attract substantive scholarly attention. The degree of competitiveness of a given party system was no longer attached solely to the relative electoral size of parties prevailing in a system, but was increasingly differentiated along qualitative criteria. The function and position of a party in a certain system, as well as the power configuration, became as decisive as its mere existence and the electoral strength of minor parties. As a result, the long-term dominance of one party was not necessarily associated with legally enforced restrictions of political competition or with electoral fraud. Consequently, those party systems characterised by ‘(…) dominance coexisting with competition but without a trace of alternation’ (Morris-Jones 1978: 217) could be subsumed under the category of competitive party systems. This is the first and foremost criterion of one-party-dominance: party systems thus labelled are democratic (in the procedural sense at least) and competitive, which means that political dissent can and does find expression in the party system, that there are mechanisms available to protect the competitiveness of the party system (e.g. a latent threat from the opposition parties or a network of factions within the dominant party) and that democratic rules and minority parties are a matter of fact, which ‘(…) the dominant party cannot ignore in its political calculations’ (Chan 1967: 4).

This development brought greater attention to systems of one-party-dominance and led to a refinement of typologies and classifications in order to incorporate this apparently rather anomalous subtype of a party system. But scholarly accounts of party dominance have most often been vague on definitions and contradictory in terms of what cases should be counted as systems of one-party-dominance. This is hardly surprising given that the foremost challenge to the study of one-party-dominance arises out of the conceptual boundaries between a party system with a dominant party and a system of one-party dominance (Sartori 1976: 192–5). From the angle of electoral dominance, and taking the view that one-party-dominant systems are essentially democracies, one-party-dominance is a fluid category. Sooner or later, it gives way to two- or multi-party competition or an authori tarian one-party state. Therefore, it would be extremely difficult to decide after how many consecutive majorities a party system could be labelled as one-party-dominant. The challenge of making a distinction between a party system wherein one party is significantly stronger than the other(s) electorally and a veritable system of one-party-dominance has led Sartori, in what remains to date the most sophisticated typology of party systems, to conclude that ‘[d]ominant party is a category that confuses party (in isolation) with party system’ (ibid. 195). His point is that the question of whether the existence of a dominant party characterises a distinct category of a party system ‘(…) is bound to remain unanswered’ (ibid.). This is, of course, not of much help for a study dealing with the phenomenon of one-party-dominance. However, Sartori rightly argues that the ‘predominant-party system’ – the ‘rough’ equivalent to the one-party-dominant system referred to here² – ‘(…) is a type, not a class. This is to recall that the criterion here is not the number of parties but a particular distribution of power among them.’ (ibid. 199). Consequently, Thackrah (2000: 3), following Sartori, noted: ‘[i]ndeed, the “outdistancing” phenomenon [a party system wherein one party outdistances all the others] could potentially occur in all three systems [Sartori’s categories of two-party competition, polarised and moderate pluralism] (…). This suggests that predominance must also be accounted for on a different dimension, namely the existence of systems through time.’ Thus, the second criterion for a party system to be labelled as one-party-dominant involves a chronological dimension and a notion of its interactive aspects. Here, ‘party system’ refers not only to the horizontal dimension of the entirety and interaction of political parties as such, but also to the vertical dimension, the relationship of parties and the party system to the political system and the social system, to state structures and societal interests and forces. Dominance is consequently conceived of as comprising not only a notion of domination of political competition, but also a domination of the electorate, government and policy-making.

In that regard, the definition we get from Pempel (1990: 3–4) is still very useful. According to him, there are four crucial dimensions when dealing with party dominance in a competitive environment. To be considered dominant, a party must be:

1. dominant in number, securing at least a plurality of votes and seats; but this only counts if the party is
2. electorally dominant for an uninterrupted and prolonged period; it must enjoy
3. a dominant bargaining position, always setting the tone when it comes to government formation, and,
4. it must be dominant governmentally to determine the public policy agenda.

One-party-dominance, implicit in Pempel’s definition, comprises more than just the continued dominance of the electoral and governmental process. Duverger (1954: 308) took this into account in his famous formulation in which, ‘[a] party is dominant when it is identified with an epoch; when its doctrines, ideas methods, its style, so to speak, coincide with those of the epoch (…) Domination is a question of influence rather than of strength: it is also linked with belief.’ Indeed, without a consideration of the distinct quality of dominance not much is achieved. In particular, the ‘achievement’ and effects of the party system require a reflection on the qualitative aspects of a party’s dominance, especially in terms of its domination of public opinion and the consequences for state and society. This leads to the third criterion, that the preponderance of a certain zeitgeist favours the image of the dominant party as the ‘natural party of governance’ and affects the determination of the country’s political trajectory.

Taken together, these three criteria then give rise to the following definition of one-party-dominance: One-party-dominance is a competitive (multi)party system wherein one party dominates government, the policy agenda, political competition and discourse, and determines public opinion for a considerable amount of time and without any use of governmental repression, but, wherein opposition parties and societal forces do have a vital function as concerns the shaping of patterns of interaction within the party system.³

In addition, this means that in order to clarify the concept of one-party-dominance as a distinct political phenomenon, Sartori’s caveat about the confusion of party and party system notwithstanding, one has to look in detail at both, the nature of the dominant party and the nature of a party system characterised by the predominance of one party. However, the problem remains that any further judgement of a party’s dominance has to be concretised as well as abstracted in such a way as makes comparisons and generalisations possible. This becomes even more challenging when one is dealing with the level of party system. Apart from the numerical domination of the electoral process and the predominance over a certain zeitgeist, the interactive aspects of systemic relations have to be accounted for. Conceptual boundaries have to be drawn around the dominant party’s relationship to other parties, societal interests, the electorate, state apparatus and changing socio-political conditions. How to account for the role of opposition parties within a system of one-party-dominance? How to grasp the logic of a dominant party’s interaction with predominant social forces? To what extent is the collusion of power between the dominant party and the state an essential feature of a system of one-party-dominance? These questions have been partially addressed by regional experts but never in a systematic, comparative manner. One-party-dominance so far has been mainly perceived as an individual and extremely context-sensitive phenomenon, to the extent that comparative analyses have rarely gone beyond a mere typological and quantitative account or presented their comparison in the form of a sequence of case-studies. This study has therefore singled out patterns of party agency relevant to achieve and maintain dominance, features of one-party-dominance that are presumably indispensable to the working of a system of one-party dominance and areas of a party system’s impact, and attempts to contrast the two regional contexts in terms of these patterns, features and areas.

Party systems and one-party-dominance in changing societies: relevance and specifics

Although the general definition of one-party-dominance put forward above is applicable analytically to any representative democracy, a conceptual division needs to be drawn between one-party-dominance as a political phenomenon in long-term, industrialised democracies (primarily of Western origin) and in the context of changing societies. In the former, high economic levels and living standards, ethnic homogeneity, clearly defined and less numerous societal interests and social cleavages, well-established democratic institutions, a politically more assertive citizenry and a vibrant civil society pose a particular set of challenges to the dominant party’s attempt to uphold its grip on state and society. The strategies adopted by the dominant party in changing societies must necessarily differ – given that the dominant party almost always presides over the polity’s creation and stems from a year-long revolutionary struggle or liberation movement. Having to interact with nascent state structures and an almost always more heterogeneous and politically less mobilised society presents the dominant party with different and more difficult challenges to its performance. ‘Changing societies’ is used here as a generic term denoting those countries wherein democratic transition or consolidation is still taking place and the pressures of social change are the most important determinants of societal interests and the political system. This is the case in most of the world’s post-colonial states or developing countries. Often, these countries also share the socio-structural characteristics of socio-culturally divided societies.⁴

These differences are likely to bring about a differentiation in form, including a stronger electoral hiatus between the dominant party and the contenders, reduced significance of interest groups and other societal organisations as intermediary alternatives to parties, a greater (interventionist) role assigned to the state and, generally, a larger number of parties contesting elections and different modes of electoral competition. Dealing with party systems in changing societies should therefore not primarily be concerned with common denominators of party system research and theory such as ‘fragmentation’ or ‘polarisation’, but with those distinct qualities of a party system that represent its mobilisational, organisational and process-related aspects, such as linkage strategies (clientelist versus programmatic, patronage-based versus transformative), intra-party organisation (factional accommodative versus. centralist), style of politics (consensual versus confrontational, delegitimative versus co-operative) or rhetorical strategy and policy options (ideological versus pragmatic). These aspects are far more telling indicators of a party system’s mode of operation in a changing society than the simple reference to a given party system’s fractionalisation or to the degree of ideological distance within the party system. They are better suited to grasp the logic of the transactional dimension of politics and to go into the specifics of the interaction between parties (as distinctively ‘modern’ institutions) and a(n) (often still largely) ‘traditional’ society; they are especially important in a setting where political leaders enjoy a maximum of freedom. And they gain special importance with regard to ‘(…) a competitive system in which electoral results are held constant (…) [because] [t]his situation highlights the bureaucratic and coalition aspects of politics and invites focus on the elites and their strategies in order to understand the system’ (Arian and Barnes 1974: 614).

Two important premises have to be taken into account when dealing with parties and party systems in changing societies. These are a reflection upon functional differences as well as the varying significance of party systems in such a context, and a consideration of the dynamic and procedural aspects of party system development in nascent, consolidating democracies. The specific and complex nature of demands on the political system is what distinguishes the systemic role of party systems in established, industrial democracies from their role in changing societies. In the latter, nascent party systems are confronted with the ‘demand load’ that is put on the political system in the course of modernisation, state- and nation-building, processes through which legitimacy for the political system is acquired, socio-economic development is initiated and national integration is advanced. In addition, these processes go on simultaneously. Of course, South Africa’s status as a semi-industrialised country and late ‘democratiser’ stands out in this regard. The tasks involved in overcoming the social legacies and economic distortions of apartheid, however, put it on par with a post-colonial changing society such as India after independence.

Whereas in Western industrial democracies the institutionalisation of parties and party systems usually took place during the course of industrialisation or in its aftermath, emerging from an endogenous tradition of (political) ideas and following the establishment of a nation-state, in changing societies the development of party systems is, from the beginning, subject to the aforementioned triad of transitional processes.

The institutionalisation of party systems in changing societies is therefore bound to take shape during a transitional period, characterised by specific challenges to the intermediary, performance-related and integrative capacity of the party system so typical of the early stages in political development. These include the need to provide incentives for political participation and the creation of partisanship, to organise political competition, to guarantee governmental stability as well as accountability, to provide policy innovation and to co-ordinate mass involvement with politics. Consequently, the party system gains in significance but is at the same time much more ‘fragile’ and prone to manipulation by political actors. The importance that is ascribed to parties and party systems in this context of democratic consolidation, integration and development clearly exceeds what is commonly ascribed to their functional role. It is in such a fluid context of often extreme social dynamics and political vagaries that the relevance and puzzling phenomenon of one-party-dominance has to be located. Of course, the combination of low levels of mobilisation, pervasive independence or liberation movements and, sometimes, charismatic leadership figures may account for the initial emergence of a dominant party. This cannot, however, explain how the party is able to translate its ‘symbolic capital’ into continued support at the ballot box, to engineer the painful but indispensable shift from movement to party and to remain dominant after taking up governmental responsibilities, especially against the backdrop of pressures brought to the fore by the transitional processes mentioned above.

Such a context also highlights the creative role of politics in the shaping of a national politico-ideological and economic agenda, in framing issues of political competition, in determining ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 One-party-dominance in changing societies: conceptual, methodological and theoretical aspects of the study
• 2 The regional context
• 3 The ‘achievement’ of one-party-dominance in India and South Africa: actors, structures and institutions
• 4 Maintenance of one-party-dominance in India and South Africa: mechanisms of control and competition
• 5 Effects and functions of one-party-dominance in India and South Africa
• 6 Comparison and conclusion: lessons and prospects
• Notes
• Bibliography