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Week 10: Hegemonic Parties (Suttner: Criticising the value of the "…
Week 10: Hegemonic Parties
Sartori: Look at summary
Ziegfeld & Tudor: under certain circumstances, opposition parties cooperating together can defeat dominant parties
2 conditions
Non-PR, disproportional electoral system
Dominant party must often fail to achieve an absolute majority of votes
India case study
Tamil Nadu
Congress was strong here, but opposition parties created an alliance named the United Front, which managed to defeat Congress in 1967
Uttar Pradesh
Congress was weak here, but opposition parties never allied together --> Congress continued to dominate
Method of cooperation
Opposition parties can form pre-election alliances to coordinate the fielding of candidates, such that opposition candidates will not compete against each other for the same seat. Opposition parties can encourage their supporters to vote for the candidate fielded by the alliance.
This makes use of the highly disproportional electoral system to allow opposition parties to achieve the majority of the votes in a district and win the seat
Counter-arguments (Rebecca)
Assumes that people vote according to dominant vs opposition lines
Alliance for the sake of winning elections, not thinking about the interests of the voters
Pre-election alliance only, this is not a governing coalition --> makes it easy for Congress to apply a divide and conquer strategy after elections to get opposition candidates to defect and support Congress
Smyth et al
: Formal and informal institutional changes insulates the dominant party from internal and external challenges --> maintain dominance
2 Arenas of competition
Public
Factional: backroom politics where politicians try to undermine the formal competitive politics using coercive informal institutions
To ensure continued dominance, United Russia (UR) needed to reduce the reliance on Putin to unite the party --> need incentives to ensure members' loyalty
Formal Institutional changes
Parallel to PR system: exchanging seats for certainty
Change election rules: cannot register for elections unless fielded by a party, and party registration is controlled by the state which is controlled by UR --> limit opposition + prevent members from defecting and creating their own party
Informal methods
Cadre Party Regime: (the stag hunt game) increases party unity: when the elites cooperate and stay loyal to the party, they can achieve electoral dominance, but if they defect, they lose access to electoral resources and run the risk of damaging their political career
Suttner
: Criticising the value of the "dominant party theory"
The dominance of a party cannot be separated from the weaknesses of the opposition
The dominant party system is not uncompetitive: the party become dominant through competition! UNLESS it is an authoritarian dominant party that oppresses other opponents
No point having opposition for the sake of opposition --> just having an opposition doesn't make it demcratic
Ignoring the wider notion of pluralism
Pluralism doesn't just mean that there are a lot of political parties. There are many interests in society and parties cannot represent all of them --> critics forget to take into account bottom up interest groups.
No causal link between dominant party system and certain consequences. E.g patronage politics in Africa and elsewhere is not cause by having a dominant party. All parties there engage in patronage politics
Mistake to think that just because a party has parliamentary power, it has the power to do anything. Power is a set of relationships that have to be negotiated to achieve a certain objective --> and parliamentary seats are only a part of that power. There are other sources of power (eg interest groups)
Internal democracy: within some dominant parties there exists various factions that represent a wide range of society's interests. These factions engage in internal debate. --> but this depends on the party and across time