Democratic Politics and Party Competition

Judith Bara, Albert Weale, Judith Bara, Albert Weale

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415599474
• eBook ISBN: 9781134173426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new book introduces innovative research on democracy from the leading Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP).

It details the key achievements of the project to date, illustrates how its findings may be applied, lays out the future challenges it faces and examines how the field as a whole can advance. It also presents a special assessment of the dimensionality of party competition, presenting ways in which research can be extended and related to broader approaches in Political Science and Theory.

Although CMP research is widely used and constitutes the major comparative data set on party positions and ideological location, it is also subject to challenge. The volume therefore provides the reader with a clear sense of the key debates and questions surrounding its work.

This volume also honours the life-time achievement of Professor Ian Budge, who has provided distinguished intellectual leadership for the CMP over the last twenty-five years.

This is an essential point of reference for all comparative research on the functioning of democracies. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of politics and of democracy in particular.

1 Ian Budge
A life of writing and organising, walking and talking

Ken Newton

Introduction

How can we best celebrate the professional life and times of the man who has been (almost) everywhere and done (almost) everything? In one way, his career is a dead straight line from school and first degree in Edinburgh to a stretch of no less than 40 years in the Government Department at the University of Essex. In that time he only ever lived in two houses in Colchester. Simple and boring, you might say. Seen another way, his career takes in many of the most illustrious centres of political science in the north, south, east and west, covers the founding years of some of the most important professional organisations in European political science, a clutch of path-breaking research projects, and no less than 19 books, plus seventy articles and chapters in prestigious books and journals on both sides of the Atlantic.

It is difficult to know how to do justice to such prodigious energy and achievement in the space of a few thousand words. But since the man himself would have done it – no doubt by knocking off a delightful little essay one Saturday morning when it was too wet to work in the garden in Colchester – I must do my best.

On writing

Ian Budge was born in 1936 in Leeds, but spent his youth from the age of five in Edinburgh, going on to take an MA in history (first class, of course) at its university in 1959. This was followed by a Masters in Political Science (with distinction, of course) at Yale. The first trip to Yale was in the best traditions of young intellectuals who travel and study abroad to avoid conscription into the army, and because universities are prepared to pay the best and brightest to hang around libraries and coffee shops reading, writing and arguing. This they rightly call ‘education’. Yale paid the most, so he went there. The British army’s loss (Ian would surely have risen to the rank of Private – first class, of course) is political science’s gain.

He intended to stay in New Haven for only a year, but it had the best politics department in the USA (the world?) at the time, and the young, ex-historian was hooked by Harold Lasswell and Robert Dahl. He had given up on history because, he says, it failed to complete explanations and left things hanging in the air. Yale did the real science of politics, so he returned to do a PhD with Robert Dahl, interviewing Members of Parliament and electors in London to test Dahl’s theory that democratic stability rests on a consensus among competing elites about the rules of the democratic game.

Here is what Robert Dahl has to say about his graduate student at Yale:

You were an ideal student: ready, even eager, to discuss the subject with a thoughtfulness, originality, and firmness tempered by a ready wit and a capacity to learn from the views of others.

From a student you moved on to become a colleague in political science, one whose extraordinary scholarly contributions allowed your previous teachers like me to take pride, in the largely unwarranted fashion as we all do, in having in some small way contributed to your development as a scholar.

Perhaps it would have been the end of his lifelong interest in democracy and democratic stability if Ian had found that Dahl’s theory fitted the facts. But it did not do so particularly well, as we can see in the book of his PhD, Agreement and the Stability of Democracy, 1970. So he persisted with his attempt to uncover the origins of democratic stability with a comparison of Glasgow and Belfast (Political Stratification and Democracy, 1972 and Belfast: Approach to Crisis, 1973). The two cities were similar in many ways, except in respect of democratic stability. Once again general theory did not fare too well. There were no more cross-cutting cleavages in Glasgow than Belfast, and politics in Glasgow happened to owe a lot to the particular circumstances of how the Progressive Party responded to the destabilising influence of the Protestant Action party back in the 1930s.

With three books published (in three years) on democratic theory and stability, but all of them leaving some important things ‘hanging in the air’, he turned to voting and elections, which are, as he puts it, ‘a more satisfactory field for general explanation’. This yielded another three volumes (Party Identification and Beyond, 1976, Voting and Party Competition, 1977 and Explaining and Predicting Elections, 1983). Anybody else would have been well satisfied with this output, not least because Voting and Party Competition was one of the most important books in its field. But Ian was still dissatisfied. He complains that he and his mathematician co-author, Dennis Fairlie had to run simulations rather than completely determinate theories, and that they were still dependent upon judgements about what were the main campaign issues. Hence he abandoned (for the time being) voting and elections and moved on to the next phase of his research in the form of the Manifestos Project.

This is not the place to go into the Manifestos Project, which is covered in other chapters in this book, but it should be said that it involved a huge amount of data gathering and coding, a great deal of coordination, and some serious international collaboration with many political scientists around the world. It was Ian’s idea and creation, and he organised and drove it on from its inception in 1979, until 1996, by which time it was no longer a research project but a global social movement that had created a whole sub-field of political science and produced a whole literature to go with it. It is an extraordinary intellectual and organisational achievement, and was awarded a prize by the Comparative Politics group of the American Political Science Association in 2003.

In terms of Ian’s intellectual career built around his interest in democratic processes and stability, the manifesto books produced a positive result for the saliency theory of party behaviour, which must have been very satisfying indeed, but less positive results for testing general coalition theories (Parties and Democracy: Coalition Formation and Government Functioning in 22 Democracies, 1990 and Party Policy and Government Coalitions, 1992. The measly 22 countries became 48 in Party Governments in 48 Democracies, 2000).

The Manifestos Project continues unabated (see Mapping Policy Preferences. Estimates for Parties, Governments and Electors 1945–1998, 2001), but with Ian as its godfather not its director after 1996. By then he had moved onto a new phase of work. The concern was still with the subject that fascinated the young research student at Yale 45 years ago, but it now took a more elaborate and comprehensive shape, involving a synthesis of much that has gone before and revolving around median mandate theory, voting, elections, parties and democracy. Such a comprehensive project produces a more complete explanation and leaves less hanging in the air. The first books in this latest phase of his work are Elections, Parties, Democracy: Conferring the Median Mandate (2005, with Michael McDonald) and Organising Democratic Choice: Theoretical Synthesis and Comparative Simulations (2006).

In between writing monographs, and editing research volumes, there have been occasional distractions in the way of general volumes and textbooks, but only half a dozen or so of these have appeared in print. The early textbook on British politics, The New British Political System (1983) transformed itself into The Changing British Political System (1987) and then into The Developing British Political System (1993). It took on a completely different all-singing, all-dancing, technicolour existence with The New British Politics in 1998, and is now going into its fourth edition. For good measure there was a textbook on European politics (The Politics of the New Europe, 1997) and a few other books on Scottish Politics, Democratic Government, Ideologies and Party Strategies, Direct Democracy, and an edited Festschrift for Jean Blondel.

Looking through Ian’s CV makes one thing clear: here is a man perfectly happy to write books and articles on his own, and perfectly happy to write books and articles with others. In fact he has written a lot with many others – Derek Urwin, Cornelius O’Leary, Dennis Fairlie, David McKay, David Robertson, Hans Keman, Jaap Woldendorp, Hans-Dieter Klinge-mann, Rick Hofferbert, Ivor Crewe, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and even Ken Newton. All of them, without a doubt, are struck by how metronomic he is about producing high quality material to deadlines. One of his Essex colleagues once observed ‘Isn’t it strange – X is always late to a meeting by varying amounts, but Ian is always late by two minutes and 14 seconds.’ Well, I can tell you, he might have been late for meetings, but he was never yet late for a deadline that I know of. No wonder we are all more than happy to collaborate with him.

Before we leave the subject of Ian Budge’s writing, I cannot resist a personal note. In 1977 he published an article with Dennis Fairlie in the British Journal of Political Science on my own modest contribution to our understanding of the world. It was titled ‘Newtonian mechanics and predictive election theory: a point by point comparison’.

On organising

Ian Budge’s first full-time job was at the University of Strathclyde (1963–66) where he took part in the development of the new Politics Department. He soon moved to Essex (1966) where he played an even bigger role in developing the fledgling Government Department, alongside Jean Blondel and Tony King. At Essex he also served as the Founder and Director of the Summer Schools in Quantitative Social Science Data Analysis (1968–73), as Chair of the Department, 1974–77 and Executive Director of the ECPR, 1979–83. Not surprisingly he rose from the lowly rank of Assistant Lecturer in 1963 to full Professor in 1976.

His time as Executive Director of the ECPR was crucial. Not only did he follow in the footsteps of Jean Blondel, no enviable task in itself, but he ensured that the rapid growth of the Consortium continued in terms of numbers and activities. He managed the Central Services with a sure hand, and the oligarchs of the Executive Committee with calm assurance. More than 25 years later, it is tempting to assume that the ECPR was set on its pre-ordained, path-dependent way to become the enormously successful and enterprising institution it now is, but that would be wrong. Though growing fast and building up its wide repertoire of innovative activities, the ECPR was still an infant organisation in 1979. It had 90 members, it is true, compared with 310 today, but its finances were still shaky, and it could easily have succumbed to some disabling disease of youth. Ian helped to nurture it and turn it into a stable and permanent institution, as he did the Summer School and Government Department.

I remember turning up at the ECPR’s Joint Sessions in Florence, which were taking place in a specially designed conference centre. With only a couple of hours or so to the opening event of the Sessions, the moveable interior walls of the high-tech building were still organised around the needs of the departing shoe exhibition. The electricians and scene shifters were hanging around in their blue overalls, talking, laughing and smoking, but there was not a seminar room in sight, nor anything that looked even vaguely like ever becoming one. There sat Ian calmly drinking coffee next to a frantic Valerie Stewart who was sick with worry. ‘Don’t worry, Valerie’, he said. ‘It’ll be fine.’ And it was, of course.

Some years later I, too, was worried sick about the impending disaster of a Joint Sessions whose local organisers did not seem to have anything under control. I turned to Ian for advice. ‘Don’t worry, Ken’, he said. ‘It’ll be fine.’ And it was, of course. I have learned many things from Ian, but perhaps the most important is the lesson ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.’ I tried to practise this calm assurance myself in the ECPR, and tried to pass it off as part of my own unflappable personality but, in truth, it was Ian’s example.

That experience of ‘just in time’ organisation at the Florence Joint Sessions may well have stood him in good stead because he returned to the city and to the European University Institute in 1982 as an ordinary spear-carrying professor, if there is such a thing. Perhaps he was trying to escape the heavy administrative load at Essex – a ‘greedy institution’ if ever there was one – but in Florence he was quickly drawn into the major administrative role of running the politics group and sorting out a few messy organisational, financial and personality tangles. He did so, and returned to Essex in 1985. Florence was lucky to have him.

Between 1968, when he propelled the Essex Summer School into existence, and 1985, when he finished at Florence, he carried one crushing organisational burden after the other, pretty much without pause for the entire 19 year period – the Summer School, the Department of Government, the ECPR and the EUI politics department. In the same years he was involved in the writing of eight books – one of which (the early British politics textbooks) went through three major revisions – plus 23 articles and chapters.

For those who don’t know the inside story, the Executive Director of the ECPR had a contract with the Essex Government Department in those days that divided his time into two equal parts. One involved teaching and administration in the Department and University, the other running the Central Services for the ECPR – a full-time job all on its own. It was assumed that the third half was to be given to research and publications of a quantity and quality expected of any professor at Essex.

This would keep any ordinary mortal busy for 18 hours a day, but in his spare time in these years Ian also served on the Executive Committee of the Political Studies Association of the UK and as Academic Director of its 1978 Annual Conference, as founder and Director of the Manifestos Research Group, as Graduate Director of the Essex Department, as Director of the EUI Summer School on Parties, as Director of three ECPR workshops and participant in many others, and in various capacities on committees and boards of the British Social Science Research Council/Economic and Social Research Council (SSRC/ESRC). Rarely can any single person have delivered as many public goods for the political science profession.

All these jobs were (still are) important, time consuming, onerous and largely thankless chores that only people with initiative, diplomatic skill, energy, enthusiasm and too many other things to do, are asked to shoulder. The motto of the Executive Director of the ECPR is ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’, so naturally Ian was one of those in the early years at Essex who was asked to do the most important things. Here is what Jean Blondel writes about his role as the Founder and Director of the Essex Summer School.

You were the creator of the Summer School. It began in 1968 thanks to you, on the basis of the Unesco grant which Allen Potter succeeded in attracting to us: you got Michigan to help – I have to mention Lutz Erbring and his dedication in this respect – and you ran the operation. Yet the crunch was to be the following year. We then had no grant: everyone else would have given up. You did not. You had the courage and vision to agree to run the school on a shoestring and this was critical. That decision established the fact that the school was to be a permanent fixture

Jean fails to mention the attraction of the fabled Essex towers and the blinding beauty of the University’s neo-brutalist architecture as the main foundation of the Summer School’s success, but it is certainly true that Ian’s courage, vision, organising skills and sheer indomitable spirit helped as well. The Summer School is one of the truly important institutions of European political science, and if European political scientists in their hundreds look back on it with a strong mixture of pleasure and appreciation (as they do), it is thanks to Ian Budge. So also do a not much smaller number of Essex graduate students (there are about 70 MA and 80 PhD students registered in any one year), who owe a lot to Ian when he was three times Director of the Graduate School (1972–76, 1985–88, and 1992–94). So also do the approximately 20 PhD students he has supervised at Essex and Florence – enough to populate a decent sized department of politics with well trained and highly motivated professors. Like Robert Dahl, Ian can take largely warranted pride in having contributed in some crucial way to their development as scholars.

On walking and talking

PhD students, (and their supervisors) can learn a few lessons from Ian about how to turn out printed words to deadlines. Here’s how it’s done – Budge fashion. First avoid all machines. Not just computers and word processors, but things as advanced and complicated as typewriters, including the most primitive manual ones. If you are a proper scientist, who has relied all his life on computers to analyse large data sets covering voting, elections, manifestos, parties and government formation, and if you have written a book about electronic democracy into the bargain, then you have no need of writing machines or electronic gadgets. For productive efficiency take several large, lined writing pads and a quiet room in your house overlooking the garden. That way you’ll get through the work in double quick time, so that you can get down to the real business of gardening or walking later in the day.

Then, with laser-intense concentration, start to scrawl words on the pad, filling page after page with large and completely illegible handwriting. After a few hours of scribbling you will have a good part of a chapter or an article drafted, which can then be typed by one of the two people in the world who can read your writing. Of course, there will be a liberal sprinkling of typing errors in the transcript (Armenia appeared as America in one of our joint books, recondite as Aroldite and Parti Com-munista as Party Carouser) but this is of little account. But don’t worry. It’ll be fine. You can correct later – if you’ve a mind to.

One of my colleagues rightly says that you can judge a person by what secretaries say about them. You would have thought that secretaries would hate Ian for his endless supply of manuscripts in illegible scrawl. But none of it – they love him. He talks to them, treats them generously, tells them about the play he saw last night and brings them cuttings of plants from his garden. And they, for their part, convert the scrawl into o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Ian Budge a life of writing and organising, walking and talking
• Part I: Empirical developments and applications
• Part II: Methodological directions and challenges
• Part III: Democratic processes and values
• Bibliography of the works of ian budge