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Article Excerpt
Introduction (1)
Success sells better than failure; hence new parties receive very little attention from political scientists as long as they remain marginal and fail to win seats in Parliament. Yet in the margins of the party system, they may maintain the pristine purity of political principles and ideas better than parties in Parliament, let alone parties in power. This is one reason why one might want to study new parties. However, there are other, perhaps more compelling reasons.
As traditional parties fragment in the era of "postmodern" politics, new parties have the potential to play a more significant role, in opposition or even in government. If established parties fail to integrate discontented groups--alternative or immigrant subcultures, for example--new parties may mobilize and socialize these groups. In trying to articulate latent interests and ideologies, new parties will show us the range of available political options in a system and throw fresh light on its political culture. Even if the new parties do not win power, their ideas may be borrowed by parties in government once those ideas have been tested in public debate and have gained some popular support. Finally, studying new parties can help us to understand the formation process and subsequent evolution of parties in general, and their relation to society. Too often, political scientists have neglected marginal political parties. Recently, Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein pointed out that "seemingly marginal politicians and groups can quickly catalyze powerful institutional changes once the global environment changes," the most extreme examples being Lenin's Bolsheviks and Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party. (2)
This article will concentrate on the period after 1972, when registration of parties became standard practice in Canada, required for reimbursement under the Election Expenses Act. Between 1972 and 2006, 48 new parties were registered by Elections Canada. (3) Quite a few never tried their luck in federal elections--the Nude Garden Party being a striking example. Out of the 20 new parties that did, only two succeeded in winning any seats. Why did the others fail? And why did they try, anyway? Before providing an answer to these questions, I will put forward a tentative framework for the analysis of new parties--inspired by the work of pioneers in this area such as the American political scientists Stephen Fisher and Thomas Rochon and the Canadian Maurice Pinard. (4)
A Framework for Analysis
New parties do not emerge in a vacuum. Their founders may see themselves as autonomous actors with original ideas, but they are, of course, the product of a political system with its particular traditions and values, socioeconomic interests, and cleavages. As soon as a new party appears on the scene, it will be assigned a position in the system. Intellectuals, interest groups, and politicians from other parties will venture an opinion about it: (rarely) approving, (often) criticizing, or ridiculing the newcomer. In extreme cases, the new party may even be banned or repressed by the authorities. At any rate, the established parties and the media will contribute to the "political opportunity structure" that conditions, to a large extent, the development of the new party.
The notion of the "political opportunity structure," invented to explain social movements but later applied to (new) political parties, contains at least four different aspects: (5)
1. It refers to the electoral system and the wider institutional context: a federal or unitary state, a presidential or parliamentary regime, but also rules of party registration, party financing, and other formal requirements. As the American political scientists Arend Lijphart and Matthew Shugart have demonstrated, a single-member plurality system or "first-past-the-post" electoral system (as exists in Canada) offers few political opportunities to new parties, unless those parties cater to particular regional interests. (6)
2. Additionally, it includes the political culture, ideological traditions, and patterns of political values, all of which may affect the chances of new parties. A new party may win more support if it appeals to existing or dormant traditions and values, while parties professing alien values and exotic ideologies may remain peripheral forever.
3. It encompasses support from available allies, such as social movements, trade unions, churches or other religious organizations, and independent media--support that enhances the chances of a new party. (7)
4. Finally, it may include the party system and, more specifically, the positions of established parties on relevant issues and the "issue space" they control, as well as their electoral strategies. This fourth element, which one might call "political conjuncture," is shaped (at least to some extent) by forces outside the political system, such as an economic recession that causes hardship for all voters but particularly for certain groups (for example, farmers or old-age pensioners). In order to have an impact on the political situation, however, these groups have to be mobilized through mass organizations or informal networks of political activists--resources I will discuss below. As Pinard showed, a new party may benefit from an economic crisis, if the established parties are either held responsible for the crisis or perceived as too weak to do anything about it. (8) In more general terms, new parties have to find a "niche" in the party system not yet or no longer occupied by established parties.
Without political opportunities, even parties with interesting projects and sufficient resources will remain peripheral--i.e., without seats in Parliament. In order to benefit from a favorable political opportunity structure, however, new parties cannot afford to wait for voters to discover them. They have to mobilize resources to "sell" their project to their potential voters. In modern liberal democracies, the most important resources for electoral success seem to be leadership, members, money, and mass media exposure.
In a sense, the project of the party--i.e., the way it defines and proposes to solve relevant political problems--might be considered a resource, too. Though an important factor in the electoral development of the party, theoretically it is of a different order.
Two Successful New Parties
In the early 1990s, the Canadian party system changed dramatically--the often abused term "crisis" seems appropriate here. In 1988, the Progressive Conservative Party (PC) had won 169 out of 295 seats (43 percent of the popular vote): an absolute majority in the House of Commons, albeit a smaller one than four years earlier. The Free Trade Agreement concluded with the United States had been the dominant issue in that election. (9) The two other parties in Parliament, the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP), had opposed the Agreement. Apart from that issue, ideological differences between Liberals and Conservatives were rarely very pronounced. Both adhered (in a pragmatic way) to liberal principles, in fact, even if the PC still added a touch of Toryism to its liberalism. (10) Partisan attachments were quite weak, and distrust in parties was growing. (11) In the next five years, the Conservative government led by Brian Mulroney suffered several serious setbacks: an economic recession, increasing unemployment as well as a soaring deficit, and constitutional problems. Mulroney's efforts to reconcile the lingering constitutional conflict between Quebec and the federal government through a compromise (drafted at Meech Lake, hence called the Meech Lake Accord) looked promising at first, but ratification of the agreement failed in 1990. The prime minister managed to negotiate another constitutional compromise with the provincial premiers in Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island) in 1992, but this time it was defeated by the Canadian voters, in a referendum held in October of the...
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