Anti-Political Establishment Parties

Amir Abedi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134363681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Recent electoral success of the Freedom Party in Austria, List Pim Fortuyn in The Netherlands, the People's Party in Denmark and the National Front in France have demonstrated the appeal of parties that challenge the political establishment. This book seeks to explain why these parties have achieved a political breakthrough, but unlike other studies in the area does not concentrate on only one type of party. Instead it attempts to determine preconditions for the success of anti-political establishment parties in general, avoiding any time specific or ideology specific explanations.

1 Introduction

In the 1956 election to the French National Assembly, Pierre Poujade’s right-wingpopulist Union for the Defense of Traders and Artisans (UDCA) unexpectedly won 11.7 percent of the votes. It was one of several signs that the Fourth Republic was coming to an end. In 1966 a party named Democrats ’66 was founded in the Netherlands with the explicit goal to explode the, then extremely structured, Dutch party system and push for institutional reforms. It gained 4.5 percent of the votes in the 1967 election to the Second Chamber of the Dutch parliament. Six years later Denmark experienced a political earthquake, when the entry of new parties into the party system was accompanied by a sharp rise in electoral volatility. Most spectacular was the sudden rise of an anti-tax protest party, the Progress Party, founded in 1972, which emerged from the election as Denmark’s second strongest party. It secured 15.9 percent of the votes.

In 1977 the newly formed Australian Democrats obtained 9.4 percent of the first preference votes in the election to the House of Representatives by promising to keep the “bastards,” i.e. the establishment parties, honest. In 1983 Germany’s stable two-and-a-half party system was shaken up when the Greens polled 5.6 percent and thus overcame the 5 percent hurdle to win seats in the Bundestag, making them the first environmentalist party in a major Western country to gain representation in the lower house of a national legislature. In that same year the Women’s Alliance obtained 5.5 percent of the votes and gained seats in the Icelandic parliament.

The biggest winner of the 1992 Italian parliamentary election was the separatist Northern League, whose support increased from 0.5 percent in 1987 to 8.7 percent in 1992. It was the last election before the collapse of the post-war Italian party system. One year later Canada experienced its own earthquake election. Support for the governing Progressive Conservatives collapsed and two new parties emerged on the political scene, the right-wing populist Reform Party, based in the western half of the country, which gained 18.7 percent of the votes, and the separatist Bloc Québécois, which took 13.5 percent of the votes. Canada’s political landscape had changed from one day to the next. Finally, in the 1999 Nationalrat election the far-right populist Freedom Party of Austria scored 26.9 percent of the votes, making it by far the most successful party of its kind in the Western world.

At first glance all of these parties do not seem to have too much in common. Some of the parties are located on the right of the political spectrum (e.g. the Freedom Party), others are located on the left of the political spectrum (e.g. the Greens) and some are located in the center (e.g. Democrats ’66). Several parties can be categorized as right-wing populist parties (e.g. the Reform Party), some can be labelled “new left” parties (e.g. the Women’s Alliance) and others are regionalist parties (e.g. the Northern League). While some of the parties have quickly disappeared from the political scene (e.g. the UDCA) others have managed to survive long term (e.g. the Progress Party). The parties differ with regard to their ideology, their size and their organizational structure, but in spite of all these differences there is one very important feature that they all have in common. They all see themselves as challengers to the political establishment. They are “antipolitical-establishment parties.”¹

Anti-political establishment (APE) parties deserve more attention than has previously been accorded to them. The interest of political scientists in these parties has risen considerably since the late 1970s, especially since the emergence of various Green parties as well as the success of several right-wing populist parties in Western Europe. More recently, the headlines made by the electoral successes of, for example, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party, in the 2002 French presidential elections as well as the sudden rise and fall of the List Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands sparked renewed interest in parties that challenge the political establishment. This led to a number of studies that either examined particular countries in which these parties were successful or looked at certain types of APE parties, such as Greens or right-wing extremist parties.² However, most scholars have treated protest or populist parties merely as a residual category, i.e., parties that do not fit their particular theoretical model of political party types, and have lacked a clear and operational definition of the phenomenon. There are a few studies that look at APE parties as a phenomenon that encompasses parties with more than one ideological orientation. However, they see this either as a recent development, which has been the result of socio-economic changes that went along with the transition from industrial to post-industrial society, or as a result of the established parties’failure in representing new issues that came up with the rise of a new value system in the late 1960s.³

As yet there has been no comprehensive cross-temporal and cross-sectional empirical study that provides an operational definition of the phenomenon, and tries to explore possible reasons that lie behind the level of support for APE parties. This book attempts to close this gap. It tries to answer the question why these parties seem to be more successful in some countries as opposed to others and at some points in time as compared to others by examining nineteen advanced industrial democracies over the entire 1945– 99 time period. The study shows that while there might be specific factors that help to explain the level of support for particular subtypes of APE parties (Greens, right-wing populist parties, etc.), there are several underlying factors that explain the level of support for APE parties more generally. This book will help identify preconditions for their electoral success. It will also serve as a basis and stimulus for further, more in-depth research into specific APE parties.

The next chapter provides an operational definition of the APE party and reviews the existing literature. In addition, it provides an overview of the explanations that previous research has put forward in order to account for the variations in the level of electoral support for APE parties in various countries and at different points in time. It then introduces the six hypotheses that are tested in this study and the methodology used for that purpose. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the main APE parties in each of the nineteen countries that serve as the cases for this study. In Chapter 4 each hypothesis is examined individually. The results of these analyses form the basis for Chapter 5, where multivariate models that combine the hypotheses that were proven to have significant explanatory power are tested. Finally, the concluding chapter brings together the main findings of this study and points out the areas that future research will have to address.

2 Theoretical background and methodology

Why examine anti-political establishment parties?

In recent years much has been written about the rising public disenchantment with established political parties.¹ Some studies have even found evidence that suggests that more and more people in the advanced industrial democraciesare unhappy with the workings of their respective political systems.² One indication of the electorate’s level of dissatisfaction with the political process and with the main actors in that process, i.e. the established parties, is the amount of support that parties receive who present themselves as challengers to the political establishment.³

However, less research has been done on challenger parties. This is surprising as the level of support for these anti-political establishment parties not only indicates the amount of voters’discontent with the establishment parties but also can affect the dynamics of a country’s party system and “set in motion a set of responses from other parties that [transform a] country’s competitive politics.”⁴ For example, the presence of APE parties in a country’s legislature can have an impact on government formation in general, and on coalition formation in particular, by narrowing the options that are available to the established parties. The presence of APE parties will also have an effect on the debates that take place inside and outside of the legislature not only in terms of the issues that are discussed (APE parties often champion previously disregarded issues, such as taxation, immigration or environmental protection, etc.) but also in terms of the tone of the debates (APE parties often choose unconventional methods to get their message across).⁵

There is thus a need for more research on APE parties. Of particular importance is the question why these parties are more successful in some countries as opposed to others. In order to better understand the APE party phenomenon it is necessary to first identify the preconditions that make their electoral success possible. Effectively answering this question requires the use of a cross-national and cross-temporal approach. Only after the factors that affect the electoral fortunes of APE parties have been identified is it useful to proceed to an exploration of possible additional factors that might explain the electoral success of particular subtypes of the APE party.

the electoral success of particular subtypes of the APE party. Most of the existing literature on APE parties concentrates either on the parties of the far right or on the parties that make up the so-called libertarian left. Underlying these studies is the belief that APE parties of the right and of the left constitute two separate entities or party types. Pointing to the differences in the two party types’support bases, their organizational makeupand their policy platforms these studies imply that it would be foolish if not wrong to put both of these party types into the same category.

However, in this study, we shall take a step back and look at the broader picture. We should view, for example, the diverse group of parties that were introduced at the beginning of Chapter 1 as different manifestations of the same phenomenon, the APE party. Thus, rather than examining only right-wing populist parties or left-libertarian parties, it is preferable to include all parties for which challenging the political establishment lies at the heart of their agenda. That reflects the true range of alternatives available to a voter who wants to cast his or her vote against the political establishment.

Taggart, for example, points to the fact that both the “New Populists” on the right as well as the “New Politics” parties on the left “define themselves in opposition to the prevailing ideological and organisational structures . . . Together they represent what will be here termed the ‘New’ Protest parties.”⁶ Taggart suggests that these parties are not as far apart as a first inspection might suggest. He claims that they not only are united in what they are against but also display a “symmetrical pattern” in their “ideological, organisational and electoral features,”⁷ which are specifically designed to set them apart from the established parties. According to Taggart, they “seem to be mirror images of each other, taking divergent paths from the same place.They represent two sides of the same coin: the New Politics is the ‘New’ Protest of the left while the New Populism is the ‘New’ Protest of the right.”⁸ Moreover, they both “derive from the same broad sources, from the crises of the post-war settlement that came about as a result of the economic and political crises of the 1970s.”⁹

Ignazi explains the simultaneous emergence of Green parties and postindustrialextreme right parties, which have provided an important challenge to the traditional parties since the early 1980s, with “value change and the related incapacity of traditional parties to represent new issues.”¹⁰ More specifically, both of these types of parties are seen as resulting from the “structural transformations which led to the [rise of a] postmaterial value system.”¹¹ While the Green parties represent the post-material “progressive” agenda, the new parties of the extreme right promote a post-material “authoritarian” one.

Mackie, too, views the “new populist parties” as mirror images of the parties of the “libertarian left.” Moreover, by briefly examining the “best electoral performance of green/left-libertarian and neo-fascist/new populist parties in Western Europe since 1980,” he concludes that both of these party types do well and fare badly in the same countries.¹² This, according to Mackie, suggests that the same phenomenon, namely disaffection with the status quo, must lie behind the success of both of these party types.¹³

This book argues that it is worthwhile to first look at what all these parties have in common before moving on to a closer examination of their differences.Rather than starting out by classifying parties as (neo-)populist or New Politics parties, one should take a step back and concentrate on the one feature that all these parties have in common, namely their anti-political establishment stance. This makes it possible to view them as different manifestations of the same phenomenon.

Definitional problems in the literature

In order to conduct an empirical investigation of the reasons behind the success of APE parties it is necessary to provide a clear and operational definition of that phenomenon. However, a look at previous research into different APE parties reveals that there is no consensus on a definition: one group of political scientists stresses differences between opposition parties in order to distinguish anti-establishment opposition forces from opposition parties that belong to the political establishment. For example, Kirchheimer has emphasized the notion of a dichotomy between parties that are loyal to the political system and those that are not.¹⁴ He distinguishes between the “loyal opposition,” which disagrees with the incumbent party (or parties) over policy goals and accepts the constitutional order of a country, and the “opposition of principle,” which does not accept the rules of the game as laid down in a country’s constitution. Sartori has used the term “anti-system party” to classify and identify all those parties that not only do not accept the legitimacy of the political order in their respective country but also actively engage in undermining it.¹⁵

Capoccia builds on Sartori’s definition and distinguishes between “ideologicalanti-systemness,” which refers to a party’s ideological opposition to the democratic system as a whole and “relational anti-systemness,” which indicates a party’s position vis-à-vis the “fundamental values of the specific regime in which it operates,” regardless of that party’s ideological stance regarding democracy.¹⁶ Capoccia then uses these two forms of anti-systemness to develop a four-fold typology according to which a party is assessed based on whether it is relationally anti-system, or not, and ideologically anti-system, or not.¹⁷ While ideological anti-systemness of political parties can affect the “stability, legitimacy, or consolidation” of a country’s democratic system, relational anti-systemness of political parties can impact on the functioning of a country’s party system by “pushing it towards increased polarization and centrifugality.”¹⁸

Smith, finally, develops a typology that is based on two questions.¹⁹ First, are a party’s goals “compatible with the existing regime and its attendant structures?” Second, “do its adherents pursue a course of action that is acceptable to others, most importantly including the political authorities? ” This leads to four types of opposition that differ from each other in that their policy goals are either “transformative” or “accommodative” and their strategies are either “unacceptable” or “acceptable.”²⁰

These definitions that str...