In liberal democracies, the relationship between politics and business, between the political and economic powers, has been and remains exceptionally close. The state is understood as an agent of economic development, as a regulator, as an owner of strategic commodities and enterprises, and as an instrument for redistributing the profits of economic processes (Majone 1994). All of these roles of the state, evident to a limited degree during the nineteenth century, were strengthened in the twentieth, due to the wartime management of the economy during both world wars and especially the welfare state expansion after World War II (Pierson 2001).
Yet we can also see the relationship between politics and the economy from another point of view, through the lens of the role economic factors play in political party activities. This is not so much about the fact that, due to the liberalisation and democratisation of European politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mechanisms of party control over the legislative and executive powers gradually became established (Daalder 2011: 15ff; Rokkan 2009), as about the interlocking of political activities and business interests. Elite parties (Duverger 1954) from the distant past ultimately cleaved according to the different economic priorities of the typically rural conservatives and the typically urban liberals. During the era of mass parties of social integration, party systems were largely—though not exclusively—formed according to the distinctions between left-wing and right-wing policies, which themselves were grounded in the economic preferences of the various segments of European societies. The era of catch-all parties (Kirchheimer 1966) that followed was a period when the socio-economic cleavage dominated in most countries of Western Europe, and thus parties continued to represent the specific economic interests of their members.
From the closing decades of the twentieth century, cartel parties (Katz and Mair 1995) started to abandon the logic just outlined to the benefit of new trends, of which two need emphasising. First, the inflow of state subsidies for parties became crucial for them. Second, they sometimes compensated for the loss of an electoral core defined strictly in socio-economic terms by embracing a strategy of defending a colourful spectrum of various interests, including those of big business. The links between Silvio Berlusconi’s financial and media empire and the Italian Socialist Party led in the 1980s by Bettino Craxi provide a perfect example (Anderson 2011: 321). But even in this case, we can still speak of the spheres of business and politics as closely cooperating but still separate in organisational terms.1
This book is focused on what could be termed a revolutionary trend: the rise of political entrepreneurs and their parties. Entrepreneurial parties represent a new form of the relationship between business and politics in two major ways. First, tycoons often build their own political party much as if they were merely establishing a branch of their business empire. Second, they present the hierarchical, quasi-commercial-firm organisation of their political party as more efficient, or even more progressive, than traditional forms of political party reliant on internal democracy. We will see that the latter relationship is actually more important for some entrepreneurial parties than the former. Not all political entrepreneurs are business tycoons who can simply create a party as a special subsidiary of their business empire. But all of them are entrepreneurial in the way that they view voters as consumers in an electoral market who can be targeted by professional campaigning. This also implies that ideology is not so much important for entrepreneurial parties. They simply analyse the market and implement a strategy that is attractive enough for enough voters to break through among the incumbents.2
Thus, a new form of party, characterised by its hierarchical and centralised organisation, at whose central point and peak is a political entrepreneur commanding other politicians who carry out executive duties, is becoming increasingly common. To put it radically: entrepreneurial parties’ economic logic and forms of organisation and activity penetrate, or in some cases even try to colonise, the sphere of democratic politics. It needs adding that many political entrepreneurs command truly exceptional financial, media and managerial resources, which they can use to launch their political enterprises quickly and efficiently, thus winning a comparative advantage over their political competitors.
The definition of an entrepreneurial party we offer is thus the following: an entrepreneurial party is a project of a political entrepreneur who connects his economic and political interests, who commands and organises the party in a hierarchical and centralised way using business logic and approaches both in organisation and in political campaigning.
The entrepreneurial party concept therefore comes at least potentially into serious conflict with the liberal-democratic notion of the party as a collective entity, democratic on the inside, which serves the important function of mediating collective interests. In a seemingly unusual but, as this book shows, widespread model, an entrepreneurial party is formed around one man,3 defending and promoting his economic interests in particular, and fishing for voters not on the basis of a coherent ideology and programme, but by using marketing strategies adopted from the business world. That is certainly a very good reason to study entrepreneurial parties in detail. But it is also a topical issue, as the organisational model of the entrepreneurial party is booming in today’s Western Europe, and even more so in East-Central Europe. Since the 1990s, when parties of this type first emerged in numbers, the trend of their incidence is evidently growing. In our book, we will analyse the following examples of entrepreneurial parties from both Western and East-Central Europe: ANO (Andrej Babiš, Czechia), Dawn of Direct Democracy (Tomio Okamura, Czechia), Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi, Freedom and Direct Democracy (Tomio Okamura, Czechia), Kukiz’15 (Pawel Kukiz, Poland), Labour Party (Viktor Uspaskich, Lithuania), OLʼANO (Igor Matovič, Slovakia), Palikot’s Movement (Janusz Palikot, Poland), Party for Freedom (Geert Wilders, the Netherlands), Progress Party (Carl I. Hagen, Norway), Public Affairs (Vít Bárta, Czechia), and Team Stronach (Frank Stronach, Austria).
We set off in the steps of Jonathan Hopkin and Caterina Paolucci, whose 1999 work is the classic text on business-firm parties, of which Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia during the 1990s provides a prototype. Yet our scope is much wider, and encompasses the differences between political entrepreneurs and their parties. Despite a growing number of cases and a rich conceptual discussion, which we present in Chap. 2, systematic analysis is still lacking of the processes of emergence and development, the organisational strategies and the modi operandi of entrepreneurial parties across Europe. Berlusconi found a number of followers, especially in East-Central Europe, where the quick rise of economic empires after 1989 was accompanied over time by the growing political aspirations of some tycoons. Yet in other East-Central European cases as well as in the Netherlands, Austria and Scandinavia, remarkable differences can be identified and distinct traditions of political entrepreneurship have sometimes emerged. These differences are strongly influenced by the opportunity structure and constraints that various political entrepreneurs face in their own countries, and also by their unequal financial and other resources. The ambition of this book, therefore, is to describe and analyse this political phenomenon, to compare its various manifestations and to provide a typology. Further, we offer an explanation of why entrepreneurial parties emerge, why they function in the way they do and why some of them face the challenge of party institutionalisation better than others.
The book deliberately spans the old divide between the West and the East, which has substantially informed the historical differences of political partisanship in Europe. We consider entrepreneurial parties to be the most recent political party model, which in some respects continues the trend linked with cartel parties, while also providing a proof of convergence of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ democracies. The post-communist democratic transition that occurred east of the Elbe River does not prevent a comparison of these parties across Europe. On the contrary, the three decades that followed the end of the communist regimes in East-Central Europe and the fifteen years that have passed since many of these countries entered the EU add up to a period long enough for the specificities of the post-communist context to fade and the common features caused by Europeanisation to have their effect. One of the main contributions that this book makes is to bring into focus many empirically important or interesting entrepreneurial parties of East-Central Europe—in Czechia, Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia—that have hitherto been given little attention, and assess them in a broader European context. In order also to analyse the lesser known examples, we take a detailed look at the various parties.
For each party, the starting point is the political entrepreneur, that is, its founding father and leader. In the context of his resources, financial or otherwise, and the strategy he chose when founding his party and during its subsequent evolution, we observe the ways in which the party courted the electorate and built its organisation. Our ambition is not to cover every entrepreneurial party in Europe. Bearing in mind how many there are, the selection criteria were to include examples of all four defined types, and for e...