- 社会裂隙、政党与利益群体：基于美、德、日三国的研究（英文版）
- (比)费边·鲍文斯
- 2736字
- 2025-04-03 19:06:09
Introduction
1 The End of Catch-all Parties
2016 was the year in which the political establishment in the U.S. was shaken to its core. A DC outsider managed to outmaneuver all of the Republican establishment candidates, in a GOP that was already heavily transformed by a gradual tea-party take over. What Trump was for the Republican establishment, Bernie Sanders was to the Democratic establishment. Only a heavily biased anti-Sanders effort by certain media and the use of a questionable set of procedures and practices during the Democratic primary race seem to have prevented the latter and his grassroots supporters to have taken over the party. The populist outsider did what most analysts considered to be impossible just a few days earlier: win the U.S. presidency. While somewhat less dramatic similar shocks to the system are increasingly abundant in Europe as well. The unexpected success of the Brexit vote, the unusual French presidential election of 2017, or the very high possibility in 2017 of an extreme right party, AfD (Alternative für Deutschland—Alternative for Germany) gaining seats in Germany’s national legislative for the first time since 1945, are but a few of many recent examples. The forces gathering this populist storm have been gathering for decades, but it appears now they have reached a momentum strong enough to threaten governance by the established political elites in several liberal democracies.
The type of political parties that have been leading governments in the majority of Western liberal democracies after 1945, can be defined as catch-all parties. (Kirchheimer 1965) In essence they intentionally do not cater to a specific class or group interest. In particular many European parties used to do just that, serve the interests of a specific class, ethnic, linguistic, or confessional group. Catch-all parties instead approach the individual voter as a consumer of politics, by advertising their political program or manifesto as a product. However, the evolution from group interest catering party to individual targeted catch-all party, also created an increasing distance between politicians on one hand, and the electorate on the other. Social Democratic leaders are not necessarily moving up in the ranks anymore as they used to, instead they’re often outside technocrats picked by the party leadership, or relatives of the previous generation of leaders. The classic pathway of paying your dues and incrementally rising to the top have been severely eroded among the traditional working class parties. Christian Democrats’ proximity to the Christian church organizations has become abstract at best. In some cases the “C” or “K” within the party name has been up for debate or replaced with a catchier concept. Also in these cases, the logic of the catch-all party has increasingly watered down the core ideological consensus. Bill Clinton’s New Democratic neoliberal economic agenda, for example was a far cry from earlier more working class aligned platforms.
Ever since the coining of the concept “catch-all party” by Otto Kirchheimer in 1965, related research has predominantly focused on two major topics. On one hand, social cleavages, and in particular the possibility of cleavage realignment, cleavage evanescence, or cleavage generation have been investigated in order to explain the emergence of the catch-all party. On the other hand, new forms of political participation and the advent of new parties have been argued to take up the vacuum that originated after the advent of catch-all parties. The consensus in the literature is that traditional parties have increasingly distanced themselves from specific sociological strata, in particular from the working class. The idea underlying this is that many working class demands had been met by the mid-1960s. However, since the oil shocks and replacement of Keynesian with neoliberal economic recipes in the mid-1970s, the old class conflict reemerged, strengthened even further in importance by the forces of globalization in the 1990s. Empirical analysis of this phenomenon predominantly addressed shifts in voting behavior (increased voter volatility), voter surveys, and arguments on the evanescence of the working class to the benefit of a poorly defined middle class. But even in systems where parties never were as centered around one specific sociological group, as in the case of the two major U.S. parties, there were at least powerful factions that espoused the interests of such groups within the party, ensuring that competing groups’ interests were sufficiently served. However, what has been missing from the analysis so far, is a thorough examination of how the shift to catch-all parties has affected the content of party programs when compared to the programs of the largest mass-organizations specifically catering to working class interests, labor union federations.
2 Social Cleavages Revisited
While this book primarily addresses the relationship between labor union federations and political parties, an additional relationship was included, in part to check the validity of the first relationship. In the vast majority of liberal democracies, ethnic, linguistic, racial, and religious minority group citizens have increasingly been mobilized by political parties. In many countries they have formed parties in their own right, but in many their numbers and their internal ideological cohesion remain too low for such a venture. In other cases, the electoral system or other institutional features render specific party representation extremely difficult, if not impossible. As a consequence, many catch-all parties have attempted to mobilize these voters for their party. Good examples of this are the appeal of the U.S. Democratic party to racial and religious minorities, or the appeals of various Western European Social-democratic parties to citizens with a migration background. Even parties on the right side of the spectrum will attempt to attract these voters, albeit it often with much less success. Obviously, this is exactly what one should expect of a catch-all party. The question is, whether this appeal to minorities is also reflected in party program content? To test this, this book also examines the programmatic relationship of major minority advocacy groups and political parties. While the interests of working class and minorities may to an extent overlap, one should expect that at least some will be significantly different, meaning that the inclusion of these interests into party programs will in part be competitive.
Because of the immense scope an analysis of all liberal democracies over the time frame under analysis here would take, this study is limited to three cases. Therefore it would be wrong to conclude that the findings here can be directly generalized to all other potential cases. However, the findings presented here will provide not only ironclad evidence for the cases under scrutiny, but they will also provide a direction for future research including other cases. This book focuses on the relationship between social cleavages, political parties, and interest groups in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Despite very different political and institutional characteristics—two-party, multi-party, and dominant-party systems; the German “neo-corporatist state”, the Japanese “developmental state,” and the U.S. “pluralist limited state”—all of them suffer increasingly from problems of disaffection of the electorate with political parties and elections.
Within established democracies across the globe, several divisions within society based on distinct group identities such as race, ethnicity, or class, dictate the shape in which politics become defined. In some countries such as Belgium or Canada, a linguistic divide can seem to be the most politically salient sociological division. In other societies, the division of the means of production becomes the most salient division, creating long-lasting, class-based group identities. The fierce competition between poor masses and wealthier upper classes in Latin-American politics is but one example of such a divide. And in yet other countries, politics may revolve around the involvement of religion in the state. Furthermore, combinations of these divides are possible as well, leading to divisions within divisions. These types of divisions are often referred to as social cleavages.
In many cases, these cleavages also tend to find their reflection in party politics. Some countries’ party systems will originate in part from the divisions between the poor masses and the wealthier elites that emerged in the industrial era. In other cases, linguistic or ethnic divides may become factors influencing the origins of parties. However, in some cases, the electoral system, or the moment in which parties were created—for example, the time prior to the industrial revolution—may result in the absence of such cleavages, which then actually may come into existence within society after the formation of a party system. Some electoral systems may appear to be more conducive to more accurately reflecting social cleavages, while other mechanisms may result in an imperfect reflection. A good example of an imperfect reflection of cleavages in a party system is the absence of something resembling an African-American or Latino party in U.S. politics despite the fact that race is historically one of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics, if not the most divisive issue. Obviously, while the U.S. is a relatively straightforward example of how important divisions within a society aren’t as visible in a party landscape; many other countries’ party and electoral systems will also have an effect of obfuscating these highly politicized divisions known as social cleavages. One consequence of the increasing invisibility of social cleavages in party politics may be that voters increasingly stay home during elections. The U.S. voter turnout during the 2014 midterm election, for example, was the lowest since World War II (McDonald/U.S. Election Project 2014). The turnout for U.S. presidential elections has been steadily declining since the 1960s, with a new low point in 2016 (IDEA). Even those countries with comparatively high election turnouts are faced with unprecedented drops, such as Japan’s 2014 election for the Lower House of the Diet, nearly as bad as the tumultuous mid 1990 burst-of-the-bubble turnout (IDEA). The same is true for most other established democracies.
Contrary to what much advocates of the catch-all party thesis argue, the absence of such cleavages in party politics thus doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of such cleavages in society. Instead, it is highly likely that such cleavages become visible through other, more dedicated to specific group interest forms of political organization. The most extreme cases would be attacks committed by terrorist organizations, as in the case of the Northern Ireland conflict, where the institutions of democratic governance, particularly the majoritarian party system, were ill-equipped to deal with the division. In most cases, however, social cleavages ignored by party politics or those that gradually become ignored by party politics will be visible through extra-electoral forms of political organizations, such as labor unions and minority advocacy groups.
This project was inspired by the literature addressing the increasing inability of catch-all parties in recent decades to adequately express the aforementioned divides, or social cleavages; not echoing the demands of the people causes increased levels of disaffection of the electorate. As previously mentioned, most modern democracies evolved from societies in which these social cleavages dictated the respective political divisions within a country, often before the general population was involved in the political process. With the advent of modern nation-states, the masses gradually became politically involved through the emergence of social mass movements. In many countries, political parties eventually became the main expression of social cleavages in politics. I assert that while political parties at some point and in some place may have been the most adequate organizational translation of the public’s demands as incarnated through social cleavages, as institutions, they may not have an enduring capacity to do so.
In particular, I address the failure of the literature, which applies the concept of social cleavages in a truncated way by identifying cleavages entirely with parties, to the exclusion of extra-electoral forms of political organization, particularly interest organizations. Parties, as opposed to other forms of political mass organizations, have a tendency to become deeply institutionalized into the state framework, thereby eroding their ability to adequately fulfill one of their most important functions: representation.
Furthermore, I contend that particular mass based interest groups—which I will define below as identity-interest groups—remain a much better repository of cleavage translation than parties, especially when parties are unresponsive to cleavages. Understanding how parties become or remain unresponsive is of utmost importance if liberal democracies are to remain viable and in line with ideals of representation. To keep liberal democracy functional, party programs should be more in line with the interests of the people it claims to represent. Even if I were to subscribe to the elitist view that parties should moderate more radical demands from the population attributed to ignorance or a mob mentality, parties still would be intended to serve the needs or interests of the people. A first step to accomplish that is to analyze parties’ unresponsiveness and what relationships look like between parties and extra-electoral political organizations.[1] To address the question of what is causing this dysfunctionality of representation; this project examines common trends between two categories of the most tractable social movement organization types: political parties and mass based interest groups. To do this, I will compare the programmatic content of party manifestos spanning several decades with programmatic documents of major interest groups representing large segments of the population; in other words, groups with cleavage-based identities. In particular, the largest national union federations and minority organizations in the United States, Germany, and Japan will be analyzed.
I explore the question in how far political parties actually represent the demands of cleavage-based constituencies as embodied by extra-electoral organized interests, how this relationship changed over time, and in how far institutional differences in government-interest group embeddedness may account for this. In particular, I am analyzing and comparing time-series data for political parties, union federations and minority organizations, by employing content analysis software in order to process data reaching back as far as five decades.
As a theoretical framework I reapply social cleavage theory in a way that both parties and extra-electoral forms of political participation are included. One of the elements that make this project unique, is this approach that permits a comparison of political parties and extra-electoral political organizations within the same theoretical and methodological framework. This framework enables me to explore the changing relationship between the programmatic language of party manifestos and organized interests’ programmatic texts.
In addition to case specific insights my project will not only provide a contribution to theory on the relationship between political cleavages, parties, and organized interests, but it will also yield a basis for recommendations on how to make political parties more responsive to the demands of cleavage-based organized interests. This project may be particularly useful for rethinking representation of the polity in the twenty first century, and studies focused on the interaction between political parties and interest group organizations.
In the first front, the central question and related topics will be elaborated upon. A first section will briefly review some of the concepts used. The next section will discuss the unresponsiveness of parties and the relevance of this project, followed by a section formulating the proposed hypotheses. The final section will elaborate on case selection. Chapter Two will provide an elaborated background of the cases under analysis, and Chapter Three will elaborate more on case-specific data selection and methodology issues. Chapters Four and Five, respectively, will present and discuss the data analysis results found for the first two and third hypotheses. The concluding front will provide a discussion of the main findings and a conclusion based on the research results, and will provide recommendations with regard to future research agenda items.
[1]Long term time-series data in the form of surveys addressed to individual members of sociological groups was an alternative method which was explored for this project. The advantage would be that such data could help control for the potential influence of elites, in both parties and identity-interest groups. The problem is that such data do not exist in a consistent uniform way, and no such data would be specific enough with regard to the topic explored by this project. While the possibility of creating new surveys was considered for this project and finalized to the phase of an IRB approval and completion of survey questionnaires, because of highly incomplete access to potential recipients, and the fact that these data would only be representative for the most recent period, this approach had to be abandoned.