Jonathan Hopkin

Bringing the Members Back in? Democratizing Candidate Selection in Britain and Spain

Primary elections and membership ballots are becoming more common as a means of selecting candidates in European parties. This article assesses the likely implications of these changes for party cohesion by examining the American experience of primaries and contrasting US candidate selection with the membership ballots and primaries recently adopted by parties in the UK and Spain. It is argued that, in the absence of state regulation of candidate selection in European parties, these changes are unlikely to undermine party organizations as primaries have in the US. Instead, the European experience suggests that party leaders have been able to retain ultimate control over candidate selection, and that the democratization of the process has been more formal than real.

The Problem with Party Finance Theoretical Perspectives on the Funding of Party Politics

This article presents some theoretical contours for the study of party finance and its consequences. Two broad issues are explored. First, the article develops an account of changes in patterns of party finance, and in particular the move away from the ‘mass party’ model of funding towards ‘elite party’ and ‘cartel party’ models. Party finance is conceptualized as a collective action problem, and four ‘post-mass party’ financial strategies are identified. Second, the article addresses normative issues, assessing how these four financial models perform in terms of ‘liberal’ and ‘populist’ theories of democracy. It is concluded that the mass party model remains closest to the ‘democratic’ ideal, while the state-financed (‘cartel’) model is a reasonable pragmatic response to the decline in party membership.

What can Okun teach Polanyi? Efficiency, regulation and equality in the OECD

ABSTRACT Arthur Okun famously argued that “effciency is bought at the cost of inequalities in income and wealth”. Okuns trade-off represents the antithesis to Karl Polanyis view of the relationship that the more embedded markets are in society, the better the social and economic outcomes they produce. This paper refines both these views. We argue that not all forms of market embeddedness are created equal, and that the relationship between equality and efficiency can be both positive and negative. We show this by examining how different ways of embedding economic activity in society through market regulation produce different combinations of efficiency and equality. We identify empirically three broad patterns: market liberal regulatory frameworks that promote competitive markets without decommodifying institutions; embedded liberal regulations that allow markets to work efficiently, but within the framework of decommodification and equality; and embedded illiberalism, where regulations hinder markets in favor of powerful social groups and where decommodification undermines both efficiency and equality. Okuns trade-off emerges as a special case limited to the English-speaking democracies: other OECD countries tend to exhibit either efficiency and equality together, or inefficiency and inequality together. These findings suggest a corrective to both nave market liberal views of the incompatibility of efficiency and equality, but also to the more sophisticated Varieties of Capitalism framework, which pays insufficient attention to the ways in which markets can be embedded in stable but apparently dysfunctional institutional arrangements.

A ‘southern model’ of electoral mobilisation? Clientelism and electoral politics in Spain

It is often argued that clientelism is a key feature of electoral mobilisation in southern European democracies. This article examines the evidence for clientelism in the Spanish case, assessing the recruitment, redistributive strategies and electoral performance of governing parties in the 1977–96 period. It finds little evidence of extensive clientelistic mobilisation; instead, political parties’ use of state resources is largely consistent with their programmatic and ideological positions. ‘Old’ clientelism from the pre‐democratic era mostly did not survive the change of regime, whilst ‘new’ clientelism based on the expansion of state employment contributed to the Socialist Partys organisational consolidation, but was not a significant feature of its strategy of electoral mobilisation.

Decentralization and State-Wide Parties: Introduction:

Most political parties are simultaneously active at multiple territorial levels of government. Besides the national level, which is typically most salient, most parties operate at one or more sub-national levels, and – within the European Union – at the European level.1 This straightforward, but largely ignored, observation raises important questions about how parties deal with their multi-level activities. For example, how do parties organize themselves across different levels? And how do they design and coordinate their electoral strategies across different – national, sub-national or supra-national – elections? The trend of political decentralization in recent decades has made these issues even more pertinent than before. As reflected in the focus of most of the contributions to this issue, this trend is especially clear in Western Europe. Countries such as Spain, France, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom have all, to varying degrees, decentralized powers to sub-national levels of government. Decentralization, however, has also occurred in other parts of the world, often in conjunction with processes of democratization. The result of this trend has been the emergence or increased importance of the subnational level as an arena of political decision-making and political competition, as was already the case in federal states such as the United States, Canada, Germany and India. Political parties, especially those operating across the whole territory of a state (‘state-wide parties’), are important actors in these dynamics, as they both shape processes of decentralization and federalism and need to respond to political imperatives induced by the territorial structure of a state. The existing literature on political parties and party systems has paid only limited attention to the territorial organization of parties and their activities in multi-level political systems. Territorial, or centre–periphery, cleavages have been acknowledged as important factors shaping the nature of party systems (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967), but the impact of such cleavages on the organization and strategies of state-wide parties has mostly been ignored. Duverger (1959: 52–60) identifies the degree of centralization as a crucial characteristic of party organizations, influenced mostly by the historical origins of a party (cf. Panebianco, 1988) and its financing method for election PA R T Y P O L I T I C S V O L 1 5 . N o . 2 pp. 131–135

States, markets and corruption: a review of some recent literature

Rose-Ackerman, S. (1999) Corruption and Government. Causes, Consequences and Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tanzi, V. (2000) Policies, Institutions and the Dark Side of Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Tanzi, V. and Schuknecht, L. (2000) Public Spending in the 20th Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. (ed.) The Politics of Corruption. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 4 vols: Williams, R. (2000) Explaining Corruption. Vol. 1. Williams, R. and Theobald, R. (2000) Corruption in the Developing World. Vol. 2. Williams, R., Moran, J. and Flanary, R. (2000) Corruption in the Developed World. Vol. 3. Williams, R. and Doig, A. (2000) Controlling Corruption. Vol. 4.

New Labour, Economic Reform and the European Social Model

The European debate on the challenges of globalisation often degenerates into a contest between a purportedly ‘Anglo-American’ model of liberalised markets lacking a social dimension, and an inflexible ‘European Social Model’ of generous welfare provision but slow growth and high unemployment. We argue in this article that this is a false choice. Data on the comparative performance of European states in implementing the ‘Lisbon Agenda’ show that countries which perform well in terms of economic efficiency and liberalisation also perform well socially. Although combining efficiency and equity may be easier for some political economies than for others, we question the notion that European states are irrevocably ‘locked in’ to particular welfare regime types, suggesting instead that they are generally ‘hybrids’, and that successful reforms may be achieved even in the most unlikely cases.

Political parties, political corruption, and the economic theory of democracy

Many prominent cases of political corruption in Western European democracies have involved political parties, yet the link between theories of political parties and theories of political corruption has not been explored. This article seeks to examine this link from the perspective of economic theories of democracy. It is argued that the economic model of party organisation is liable to encourage corrupt behaviour on the part of politicians, and that modern party organisations are coming to resemble this model, making political corruption more likely to emerge. It is suggested that this hypothesis finds some empirical support in the evidence of systematic corruption amongst Southern European socialist parties.

A Slow Fuse: Italy and the EU Debt Crisis

Italy is firmly in the grip of an austerity programme mandated by the European Union institutions, and executed by an unelected technocrat. This state of affairs is at once the result of the acute and unexpected crisis of the financial and economic integration of the eurozone, and an expression of the failures of the Italian political class. Although the euro crisis has been mishandled by European elites, Italys long-term economic decline, and the inability of Italian party politicians to generate a sustainable coalition to address Italys economic problems, hinders an exit from the crisis.

When Polanyi met Farage: Market fundamentalism, economic nationalism, and Britain’s exit from the European Union:

The vote for Brexit is not an isolated event, but part of a wave of populist, anti-elite revolts: a new ‘anti-system’ politics Western democracies are experiencing, shaking the existing consensus around economic integration, free markets and liberal values. This wave takes a variety of forms, but has in common a robust, even violent, rejection of the mainstream political elites and their values, and a demand for governments to act on the sources of social and economic distress and inequality. This article views Brexit as a part of this new anti-system politics, a reaction to the decline in ideological competition in democracies and the increasing impotence of politicians to address the upheavals wrought by global free market capitalism. This reaction has become particularly acute after the financial crisis of the late 2000s, which affected Britain disproportionately, and the failure of austerity policies to revive growth, crystallising the ineffectiveness of existing policies to deal with economic stagnation and cultural change. This policy failure is compounded by a perceived refusal of politicians to engage with the broader public and a lack of real choice between the mainstream political parties. The article will present evidence that a failed policy consensus, a rise in inequality and a decline in the representativeness of political elites, rather than a resurgence of intolerance or xenophobia, are the principal causes of the Brexit vote.