Politics, it is said, is not what it used to be. Recent earthquake elections including that of Donald Trump, the triumphant leave campaign in the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum and successful insurgent campaigns by recently formed parties such as the Five Star Movement have been the cause of much navel gazing amongst politicians, political commentators and, indeed, political scientists. This was highlighted at the end of 2016, when a widely publicised paper in the Journal of Democracy found that ‘citizens today express less of an attachment to liberal democracy, interpret the nature of democracy in a less liberal way, and have less hope of affecting public policy through active participation’ (Foa and Mounk 2016: 11; see also Mounk 2018). Furthermore, citizens have ‘become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system’ and are ‘more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives’ (ibid.: 7). This seeming anti-political malaise should serve as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for democratic politics and its surrounding institutions, the authors warned.
Of course, even a tremor feels like an earthquake at the time, and findings such as these are not uncontested. Erik Voeten suggests that in actuality there is very little evidence that those in consolidated democracies have soured on the idea of it and, furthermore, it is not the young but the elderly whose trust in democratic institutions has declined (Voeten 2017). Scarrow and Webb suggest that ‘publics have remained committed to democracy as a concept’; it is just that they are increasingly ‘wary of the political parties that seem central to the operation of electoral democracies’ (Scarrow and Webb 2017: 2). If these earthquakes, then, did highlight something deeper, it was more a slow shifting of the tectonic plates than a sudden shock. The electorate, and the way we understand how and why people vote the way they do, may have changed.
Initial work attempting to understand how to interpret the apparent rise in unexpected electoral outcomes—and more explicitly the rise of populist-authoritarian parties—has found that the primary issue may well be one of cultural insecurity rather than just economics or a general disdain for liberal democracy (Norris and Inglehart 2019).1 These voters have been described as those feeling ‘left-behind’ not just on issues such as race, sex and gender but also on order, stability and tradition (see Ford and Goodwin 2014). In contextualising the 2016 vote leave campaign, the same authors concluded that across Western democracies we are increasingly seeing that ‘divides between nationalists and cosmopolitans, liberals and conservatives, and cultural traditionalists and multiculturalists cut across old divisions and present established parties with new and difficult challenges’ (Ford and Goodwin 2017: 29).
This challenge to established political parties—and established democratic institutions—strikes at the heart of another discussion of what political parties are for, and what their place in a democracy is. These contemporary debates and (seeming) upheavals have been the unavoidable mood music surrounding the writing of this book. The broad themes of disenchantment, cultural shifts and public perceptions of the way in which democracy ought to work are weaved implicitly throughout. Democracy costs, and political parties need money. Therefore, any discussion of the way in which political parties are funded and the types of corruption that might flow from this, are intrinsically linked with these more fundamental considerations about attitudes towards democracy.
1.1 Why Parties?
Understanding public dissatisfaction with political parties is by no means a recent branch of academic study. There have been many reflections on how political parties should exist, in what form, and their value within the general confines of representative democracy. In the introduction to their article in West European Politics, Russell Dalton and Steven Weldon (2005) present a roll-call of well-trodden interpretations of the necessity of political parties. They cover the work of James Bryce who wrote that ‘parties are inevitable’ as ‘no one has shown how representative government could be worked without them’ (Bryce 1921: 11). They describe how Giovanni Sartori wrote that ‘citizens in Western democracies are represented through and by parties’ and that ‘this is inevitable’ (Sartori 1968: 471). They begin, however, with the most cited of all in the study of political parties—‘democracy is unthinkable save in terms of political parties’ (Schattschneider 1942: 1).
That is not to say, however, that there are those that have not envisioned what democracy would look like without political parties or, at the very least, in a radically reformulated fashion (see Warren 2002; Steiner 2012; Kölln 2015). Indeed, people have also investigated those states in which democracy does seem to be functioning without an established party system (see Veenendaal 2016). Furthermore, to the general public political parties and democracy may not go hand in hand. Scarrow and Webb (2017: 3) highlight figures from the World Values Survey which show that in 21 democratic countries from Europe, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, 81% of respondents agreed that having a democratic system was a very good or fairly good thing. However, in the same survey, only 19.8% expressed quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in political parties. Moreover, a 1995 poll in France showed a striking 40% of respondents declaring that ‘it would not be very serious’ if political parties were abolished altogether (Le Gall 1996; quoted in Knapp 2002: 115).
If we look at perceptions of corruption in Western Europe, we see a similar picture. Political parties, politicians and the institutions of government are mistrusted by much of the population. The 2017 Eurobarometer Corruption Report found that when aggregated across the (then) 28 European Union (EU) member states, 56% of respondents believed the ‘giving and taking of bribes and the abuse of power for private gain was widespread’ among political parties and 53% of respondents believed the same of politicians at the national, regional or local level. As Table 1.1 shows, this aggregate figure is not merely representative of newer member states or what might be considered non-advanced industrial democracies but also of consolidated democracies (Eurobarometer 2017).
Table 1.1
Do you think that the giving and taking of bribes and the abuse of power for personal gain are widespread among the following?
Country | Political parties (%) | Politicians at national, regional or local level (%) |
|---|---|---|
Austria | 49 | 46 |
Belgium | 63 | 59 |
Bulgaria | 51 | 53 |
Croatia | 61 | 59 |
Cyprus | 65 | 46 |
Czech Republic | 59 | 58 |
Denmark | 40 | 34 |
Estonia | 59 | 56 |
Finland | 39 | 42 |
France | 76 | 68 |
Germany | 43 | 44 |
Greece | 68 | 57 |
Hungary | 56 | 56 |
Ireland | 53 | 47 |
Italy | 66 | 60 |
Latvia | 58 | 49 |
Lithuania | 64 | 59 |
Luxembourg | 49 | 41 |
Malta | 57 | 47 |
Netherlands | 41 | 50 |
Poland | 34 | 33 |
Portugal | 72 | 72 |
Romania | 58 | 55 |
Slovakia | 50 | 45 |
Slovenia | 58 | 56 |
Spain | 80 | 74 |
Sweden | 36 | 42 |
UK | 44 | 42 |
EU28 | 59 | 56 |
The question, when faced with this degree of cynicism, therefore, is why do parties persist? Whilst much has been said regarding partisan dealignment (see Dalton and Wattenberg 2002), we might also consider that partisanship itself can be extremely robust. This has been demonstrated in experimental research which shows that pre-existing political beliefs affect your opinion of the cat that resides in Downing Street (Ford 2014) and whether we approve or disapprove of the potential partner of a loved one (Ford 2016). If we consider the less trivial, although the factors that led to the victory of Donald Trump are numerous and complex, the resilience of partisan alignment in a supposedly abnormal election was remarkable. If strong and weak partisans are combined, the 2016 exit polls reported the same 90% level of partisan support in 2016, as in previous elections (Dalton 2017; see also Jacobson 2017).2
It appears, then, that political parties, whilst somewhat mistrusted by a significant portion of the population, hold a peculiar sway. Democracy, whilst perhaps not unthinkable, does seem rather improbable withou...