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1
The Theory of One-Party
Dominance
Why do voters in mature democracies such as Japan, Canada, Italy,
Sweden, the United Kingdom and Australia keep re-electing the same
party, even though there are reasonable alternatives on offer? It’s under-
standable that black South Africans give the African National Congress
(ANC) landslide win after landslide win since the alternatives are min-
now parties or those connected with the old white regime. But what
enables national parties in many mature democracies to dominate
politics and government while retaining the consent of the losers?
This chapter identifies the conditions causing dominant parties to
endure and, by implication, to lose office when these conditions cease to
prevail. A theoretical and empirical analysis of single-party dominance
identifies the factors leading governing parties in competitive democra-
cies to become dominant. The arguments are from a party competition
perspective, but the main premise questions the unitary actor assump-
tion of this approach by arguing that party unity is a necessary but not
sufficient condition for party dominance.
A brief review of the scholarly literature on dominant parties and
dominant party systems is followed by the argument that dominance
should be viewed as a temporal and spatial phenomenon. Longevity
in office is a conventional device for identifying dominant parties.
However, a spatial concept involves separate albeit linked arenas of com-
petition or location. The chapter focuses on the competitive strategies of
dominant parties in the electoral, legislative and executive arenas which
involve a positive feedback process that creates cyclical dominance (see
also Boucek, 1998).
No single theory can explain party dominance completely. This book’s
analysis represents a synthesis of different theoretical approaches draw-
ing on institutional and agential factors to identify, describe and explain
6
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 7
the different dimensions of dominance. The theoretical claims are sup-
ported by empirical evidence drawn from the book’s four case studies –
British Conservatives, Canadian Liberals, Italian Christian Democrats
and Japanese Liberal Democrats – and other relevant cases in established
democracies. This analysis is also relevant to less democratic regimes and
is intertwined with the theory of intraparty competition developed in
Chapter 2.
The first two sections of this chapter deal with issues of definition and
conceptualisation. Section 1.1 examines old and new ways of under-
standing party dominance in political science while Section 1.2 looks at
how dominant parties skew party competition to entrench themselves
in power. The rest of the chapter studies the configuration of dominant
parties’ competitive strategies through demand and supply theories.
On the demand side, Section 1.3 focuses empirically on the elec-
toral dimension of dominance by looking at societal and institutional
factors to explain how dominant parties in different competitive democ-
racies create asymmetric competition in the market for votes. On the
supply side, Section 1.4 focuses on strategic or political factors draw-
ing on median voter and coalition theories, using Italy’s Christian
Democrats to demonstrate the bargaining advantages of dominant
parties in multiparty coalitions which are calculated with a power
index.
Finally Section 1.5 looks at executive dominance to explain how dom-
inant parties embed themselves in office by transforming the benefits of
incumbency into partisan resources.
1.1 Old and new ways of understanding dominant
party systems
Interest in dominant parties emerged as an offshoot of early party
system typologies based on the number of parties in competition
(Duverger, 1964) and sometimes on their relative size (Blondel, 1968).
These typologies identified a distinctive type of party system called a pre-
dominant party system (Sartori, 1976, 1990; Ware, 1996), a multiparty
system with a dominant party (Blondel, 1968) or a system of ‘one hege-
monial party in polarised pluralism’ (Von Beyme, 1985: 263–5). The
study of dominant parties and dominant party systems has moved on
since then but it remains a contested field. A recent collaborative project
shows a growing consistency and coherence in conceptualising, mea-
suring and explaining party dominance at national, sub-national and
intraparty levels (Bogaards and Boucek, 2010).
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8Factional Politics
The main criticism of party system categories is that they set arbitrary
cut-off points, providing only a simplified snapshot of the format of
a party system at a specific point in time. Hence they aren’t useful to
examine dominant parties as discrete empirical objects since dominant
parties exist in different types of party systems with different configura-
tions, patterns of competition and dynamics as Sartori discovered when
he tried to differentiate dominant parties from dominant party systems
(Sartori, 1976). Italy’s party system offered the quintessential example of
Sartori’s theory of ‘polarised pluralism’1and was also the prototype of a
dominant party system with a strong centre party.
It is unfeasible to view dominant parties and dominant party systems
as separable objects of study. Typologies and categories can be valuable
research tools for exploring concepts and delineating their properties
but they are less helpful for studying dynamics and explaining change.
They cannot explain the causes and consequences of single-party dom-
inance and the persistence and downfall of dominant parties. For this
we need methods to analyse behaviour and explain group dynamics.
Most party scholars view party dominance as a retrospective phe-
nomenon. But for Duverger dominance was ‘a question of influence
rather than of strength’, and a dominant party became ‘identified with
an epoch when its doctrines, ideas, methods, its style, so to speak,
coincide with those of the epoch’ (Duverger, 1964: 308). Undoubtedly
Duverger’s understanding was influenced by his chosen prototype –
the Radicals under France’s Third Republic – a very unstable and frag-
mented multiparty system where no single majority party government
could emerge. Duverger also stressed the role of public perceptions by
claiming that a dominant party is that which public opinion believes to
be dominant. He suggested that a party’s long-term rule is inevitably
self-destructing, implying the potential destructive aspect of internal
forces.
Party longevity in office and the size of a party’s legislative majority
(or a combination of both) is the way most scholars identify dominant
parties. These variables are easily quantifiable although opinion varies
about the size-of-the-majority criterion and the required length of office
tenure before a party can be characterised as dominant.2
However, dominance can also be viewed in non-temporal terms as a
multilevel concept, for instance, in reference to parties holding concur-
rent majorities in separate competitive arenas at a specific point in time:
in the presidency and separate legislative chambers of a national polity,
say, or in separate tiers of government (national and sub-national), sep-
arate spheres of influence (such as the electoral, parliamentary and
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 9
executive arenas) and separate districts or constituencies within a sin-
gle territory, as in the case of the French Socialist Party in 2012,3United
Russia in 2003–084and the United States in 2002–06.5In the United
States identifying multilevel dominance would involve observing the
frequency of concurrent partisan majorities in inter alia the US pres-
idency, the Congress and the state legislatures. Hence a given party
would be described as strongly dominant at a specific point in time if
it had controlling majorities in all of these competitive arenas.
District-level dominance was first examined by V.O. Key in his analy-
sis of democratic partisan voting in the Southern American states (Key,
1949). This disaggregated approach linked to the concept of safe and AQ1
marginal seats has been replicated in a recent study of district-level dom-
inance in France, where the author argues that durability should not
be interpreted as a mere measure of time span but prospectively as the
probability of incumbent office holders staying in office (Sauger, 2010).6
One critic went so far as to claim that ‘longitudinal’ versions of dom-
inance are ‘tautological and re-descriptive’, since they can only say that
a party is dominant when it has continuously been in government for
a specified period (Dunleavy, 2010). Rejecting the post facto view of
dominance, Dunleavy argues that ‘parties do not become dominant by
holding government incumbency for prolonged or unbroken periods,
but by possessing a relatively long-lasting efficacy advantage over all
opponents’. Dunleavy develops an approach built around the notion
of an ‘effectiveness advantage’ (Kang, 2004) and a ‘protected core’ for
dominant parties drawing on my empirical research (Boucek, 2001).
One advantage of the non-temporal approach is that it addresses the
post hoc dilemma typical of the current literature plagued by a lack of
consensus about how long a party needs to be in power before it can be
described as dominant (for a review, see introduction and conclusion
in Bogaards and Boucek, 2010). It also avoids the inconsistency and
arbitrariness of categorisation which forced Sartori to relax his thresh-
old of three consecutive victories in order to accommodate the socialist
dominance in Sweden and Norway (Sartori, 1976 [2005]: 177).
However, a purely spatial conceptualisation is problematic. First,
despite its elegant modelling, it isn’t clear what the ‘effectiveness advan-
tage’ really means in terms of parties becoming dominant by delivering
‘utility’ to individual voters. Second, the model based on proximity anal-
ysis makes bold assumptions about voters’ knowledge of their ‘personal
optima’ and about their compound utility and aggregate preferences.
Third, the model’s capacity to identify dominant parties still needs to
be demonstrated empirically. This is a big challenge because it would
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10 Factional Politics
require developing methods for measuring ‘effectiveness’ in the aggre-
gate and integrating the results into a cumulative profile that would
allow prediction of the success of any party in becoming dominant and
losing its dominance (see conclusion in Bogaards and Boucek (2010)).
Finally, this view may not be as atemporal as implied by Dunleavy,
who talks about a ‘relatively long-lasting efficacy advantage’ (my italics).
How long does the efficacy advantage have to last before a party can be
characterised as dominant?
Single-party dominance cannot be reduced to mere categories in the
classification of party systems or political regimes, but this doesn’t mean
that parties’ longevity in office and the size of their governing majori-
ties should be discarded as indicators of dominance. On the contrary, to
ignore these variables would strip the concept of a dominant party of
any substantive meaning which is why empirical studies of party domi-
nance use length-of-tenure and majority criteria as starting points, and
include one of the few formalised theories of single-party dominance
(Greene, 2007).7
The conventional temporal approach is used because the time ele-
ment is crucial to discovering to what extent and why internal disunity
increases with the time in power. A party’s duration in office is a mean-
ingful variable and a good indicator of dominance. Indeed the number
of successive re-elections and the closeness of particular electoral results
(at the aggregate and district levels) reflect the degree and fluctuation of
a party’s electoral dominance and affect the cost of exit for dissidents.
A government party winning large majorities in consecutive national
elections is obviously strongly dominant while a party gaining a nar-
row victory after several large majorities is obviously vulnerable, as in
the case of the British Conservatives under John Major in 1992. In par-
allel, declining dominance and vulnerability may apply to a long-term
incumbent whose aggregate vote at the national level may disguise loss
of support in traditional regional strongholds or in sub-national elec-
tions, as in the case of the Christian Democrats in Italy in the early
1990s and the Liberals in Quebec in 1984. In sum, dominance is a
relative term.
1.2 Party dominance and skewed competition
Dominant parties are found in different types of party systems, so the
basic units of analysis must be parties (and sub-party groups) and not
party systems. What needs explaining is the capacity for a single party to
skew competition in any form of party system. This capacity is observed
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 11
in the electoral, parliamentary and executive arenas of competition
and involves a positive feedback process whereby repeated incumben-
cies allow ruling parties to capitalise on the advantages of office to
entrench themselves in power (Boucek, 1998: figure 6.1). Once the
conditions enabling government parties to create asymmetric competi-
tion are identified it becomes possible to explain why dominant parties
emerge and persist and to predict with relative certainty their decline
and breakdown.
The most useful interpretations of party dominance focus on the
structure of party competition and particularly on the concentration
or fragmentation of opposition forces (Dahl, 1966; Blondel, 1968; Arian
and Barnes, 1974; Riker, 1976; Levite and Tarrow, 1983; Smith, 1989;
Laver and Schofield, 1990; Pempel, 1990; Ware, 1996; Cox, 1997;
Greene, 2007). These approaches allow the examination of coalition
possibilities and the prediction of the capacity for opposition forces to
coordinate action against the incumbent.
However, it is important to specify which variables make the patterns
of interaction between the component parties unique and to con-
sider intraparty dynamics given that internal dissidence and factional
defection can be the decisive factors in making opposition forces more
competitive.
A compelling study of Mexico’s transition from an authoritarian
regime under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Spanish: Partido
Revolucionario Institucional, PIR) dominance to a fully competitive
democracy argues that dominant parties bias electoral competition in
their favour. They win elections before election day without resorting
to electoral fraud or repression by turning public resources into patron-
age goods under two conditions: a large public sector and a politically
quiescent bureaucracy (Greene, 2007). The resource disadvantages of
opposition parties explain why they fail to become competitors who
can threaten the dominant party.
Theoretical parsimony requires abstracting out variables and simpli-
fying complex linkages. However, the search for monocausality risks
eliminating relevant explanatory variables. The resource theory of party
dominance (Greene, 2007) limits its own potential for comparative
enquiry by tying the durability and breakdown of dominant party rule
to a country’s macroeconomic fortunes on the assumption that the state
plays a central role in the economy and that the bureaucracy is the cap-
tive of its political masters. Consequently, Greene’s attempt to apply his
theory in competitive democracies (including Italy and Japan) is less
persuasive than in authoritarian regimes. It would fail to explain the
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12 Factional Politics
dominance of the Swedish Social Democrats (SAP) in twentieth-century
Sweden and that of the ANC in South Africa.
Greene rejects standard demand-side, supply-side and institutional
theories which he claims don’t meet the ‘sufficient condition’ criterion
although his evidence to support this is sketchy (Greene, 2007: 18–27).
He rejects cleavage theory (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) because of its poor
closeness of fit with party system fragmentation (Greene, 2007: 18).
Yet cleavage theory offers a powerful and parsimonious explanation of
single-party dominance in post-apartheid South Africa, where the over-
whelming dominance of the ANC rests solely on the political saliency
of the racial cleavage providing a strong example of ‘hard dominance’
(Smith, 2010).
In the end, the choice of theories and methods of enquiry to explain
equilibrium dominance and its breakdown is a matter of research
trade-offs which the analyst has to weigh in the pursuit of particular
objectives. The accuracy of descriptive accounts is often achieved at the
price of theoretical complexity and parsimony and vice versa.
The objective of this book isn’t to develop a cast-iron and regime-
neutral theory of single-party dominance but rather to examine the
internal politics of dominant parties. Hence this chapter draws on dif-
ferent perspectives to identify the determinants of dominance, building
on previous work where dominance was dimensionalised in reference
to separate, albeit connected, arenas of party competition: electoral,
parliamentary and executive (Boucek, 1998).
In each arena, the salient features of dominant parties’ strategies
(vote-seeking, seat-seeking and portfolio-winning) are analysed from dif-
ferent theoretical perspectives (sociological, strategic and institutional)
and assessed with appropriate qualitative and quantitative indicators,
which include the number of electoral and legislative parties, to mea-
sure the reductive effect of electoral systems on electoral and parlia-
mentary competition (Boucek, 1998); the pivotal power of individual
parties in multiparty coalitions to measure parties’ bargaining power
and the capacity to maximise office pay-offs; the concentration of gov-
ernmental power to explain executive dominance in majoritarian and
non-majoritarian systems; and so on.
1.3 Electoral dominance
The primary indicator of political dominance is, naturally, electoral
strength. It is difficult to envisage a single party becoming dominant
without regularly gaining more popular support than its competitors.8
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 13
The capacity of a single party to repeatedly skew competition for votes
requires an analysis of voters’ preference formation and its structural
factors (societal and institutional).
Many cases of one-party dominance can be traced back to country-
specific historical, political and economic conditions often associated
with nation-building or regime change, including the formation of a
movement for national unity or independence, a new constitutional set-
tlement, a party system realignment following a watershed election and
so on. However, for dominance to persist, ruling parties must be able to
win a plurality of votes on a regular basis by mobilising large groups of
voters from diverse socio-economic and geographic areas.
Sociological explanations
Mobilising voters may involve activating social divisions (cleavage the-
ory), relying on party identification to give partisan cues to core voters
(less relevant in Europe than in the United States), making ‘catch-
all’ appeals to voters under multiparty competition or ‘median’ voter
appeals under two-party dynamics (the latter also more relevant in the
United States than in European multiparty systems with polymodal
preference distributions), shaping and reshaping voters’ preferences
(including changing voters’ societal status), making targeted appeals to
swing groups of voters (risky and hard to sustain), campaigning on a
party’s record in government to encourage retrospective voting and so
on. Given incumbents’ multiple electoral strategies, it’s no surprise that
theorists of single-party dominance focus on the competitive failures of
opposition parties (Cox, 1997; Greene, 2007).
The socio-economic structure of a given electorate and the saliency
of specific societal cleavages determine whether parties appeal to voters
on the basis of class, religion, language or race. These cleavages often
have a regional base: the German Christian Social Union in Catholic
Bavaria, the Liberal Party of Canada in French-speaking Quebec and the
ANC in black South Africa, to name a few. Parties may act as brokers in
mediating the interests of these different societal groups.
In post-industrial democracies, the declining correspondence between
social cleavages and voting has driven parties to adopt ‘catch-all’ strate-
gies. In Canada during the second half of the twentieth century, voter
de-alignment and the growth of regional parties forced the dominant
Liberals to abandon a style of localised ‘brokerage politics’ in favour
of a nationwide appeal through pan-Canadian campaigns.9Issue cleav-
ages can help target swing groups of voters on the basis of salient
(albeit sometimes narrow) issues, as in the case of the Republicans
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14 Factional Politics
under President George W. Bush. His 2004 re-election campaign directed
family-value appeals to the Christian Right. However, such instrumental
strategies can be counterproductive if they alienate moderate supporters.
If social location is a significant determinant of voting behaviour, par-
ties may engage in social engineering by seeking to change the social
structure as in the case of British Conservatives under Thatcher in the
1980s. By encouraging local authorities to sell their stock of public
housing to tenants, Thatcher effectively transformed traditional Labour
supporters into property owners and Conservative voters (Dunleavy,
1991: 120–1), albeit with consequences for the British economy two
decades later.10 The creation of a new working class in Thatcher’s Britain
was bolstered by the sale of public shares in newly privatised utilities
which transformed thousands of voters into small stockholders.11 This
partisan social engineering swelled the ranks of Conservative supporters
associated with private-sector employment, business and home own-
ership (Sanders, 1992: 188–9). In contrast, the strategy of New Labour
seemed to be about turning as many voters as possible into clients of
the state.
Cultivating links with specific sectional interests helps consolidate
a party’s core vote. For example, Japanese farmers in over-represented
rural districts and businesses in the construction industry provided
bedrock support for the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) well
into the 1980s. In Italy the Christian Democrats built their mass
appeal by garnering the support of occupational groups and trade
union organisations, including the Confederation of Small Farmers
(Coltivatori Diretti), the Italian Confederation of Labour Movement
(CISL), ACLI (Italian Christian Workers’ Association), the Movimento
Laureati (the Movement of Catholic University Graduates), the Church
and the construction industry. In Sweden the SAP owed much of
its pre-war electoral support to the agrarian movement within the
red–green alliance and its post-war support of the labour move-
ment, notably the Landsorganisationen federation and the white-collar
union federation the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees
(Swedish: Tjänstemännens Centralorganisation, TCO) (Esping-Andersen,
1990). In Britain the Labour Party relies on the trade unions for much
of its funding and its leadership selection when the party is in opposi-
tion, as demonstrated by the election of Ed Miliband in 2010 against his
brother David who had much more cabinet experience.
Institutional explanations
From an institutional perspective dominance is explained primarily
through the role of electoral systems. Reductive voting systems such as
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 15
single-member plurality (SMP) have the capacity to skew party compe-
tition by exaggerating parties’ wins and losses giving the party with the
plurality of votes a commanding majority.
According to the Duvergerian logic SMP concentrates party systems,
squeezes out third parties whose support isn’t geographically con-
centrated and generates single-party majority governments (Duverger,
1964; Cox, 1997; Lijphart, 1999). It is now a canon that this hypothesis
applies only at the district level, but it encompasses both the mechani-
cal effects of voting systems (generated by the formulae used to translate
votes into seats, the thresholds of representation, the magnitude and
boundaries of electoral districts and so on) and the psychological effects
which encourage voters to cast strategic votes when their preferred party
stands no chance of winning.
Through their reductive effect on the number of parties restric-
tive electoral systems give dominant parties comparative advantages,
as shown in a longitudinal survey of seven dominant party systems
using different voting systems12 (Boucek, 1998, 2001: Chapter 1; see
also Dunleavy and Boucek, 2003). In contrast permissive electoral sys-
tems that translate votes into seats in a more proportional way are less
biased towards dominant parties and less penalising towards minority
parties.
SMP narrows competition by exaggerating the electoral strength of
the winning party whose share of the popular vote translates into a dis-
proportional share of the seats and by penalising third parties as long
as their votes aren’t geographically concentrated. In Britain this bias
has benefited each of the major parties at different times (the Labour
Party recently and the Conservatives before 1979)13 at the expense of
the third party: the Liberal Democrats, who have accumulated ‘wasted
votes’ across the country since the 1970s which have marked the end of
the British two-party system. From the 1930s to the 1970s the combined
vote share of the two main parties stood at over 90 per cent but dropped
sharply to 75 per cent in 1974 and to just 65.5 per cent in 2010.14
Such artificial majority victories motivated Labour and Conservatives
to act as if they enjoyed dominant status and as if opposition parties
were completely irrelevant. However, the disproportional character of
Labour’s landslide victories in 1997 and 2001 put electoral reform on the
agenda. In 1997, energetic Labour leader Tony Blair won 44.4 per cent
of the popular vote but 63.6 per cent of the seats giving the party a
total of 418 seats and a majority of 179 seats over all other parties.
Their re-election landslide in June 2001 was even more disproportional:
a 62.5 per cent seat share in return for a 40.7 per cent share of the
nationwide vote. This was a seat/vote ratio of 1.53 to 1, even bigger
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16 Factional Politics
than the previous record of 1.44 to 1 in 1983 when the Conservatives’
42.4 per cent of the vote translated into 61.1 per cent of the seats.15
In 1964, when Britain was still a two-party democracy, Labour won
nearly the same percentage of the popular vote as in 1997 (44.1 per cent
versus 44.4 per cent), under another energetic leader, Harold Wilson,
but ended up with 317 seats (just half the seats in the chamber), giving
them a bare majority of only four seats. In 1970, Labour lost the gen-
eral election with only 1 percentage point less of the popular vote than
in 1964.
The growth in the number of third-party members of parliament
(MPs) and the fractured state of the British electorate mean that Britain
is no longer a classic two-party democracy characterised by alternating
periods of single-party dominance between Labour and the Conserva-
tives. The general election in May 2010 produced a ‘hung’ parliament
and a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition. Despite the Labour-to-
Conservative 5 per cent swing (the largest since Thatcher came to power
in 1979) and the fact that the Conservatives won more seats than at any
time since 1931, they were 19 seats short of a majority although they
were still the dominant party in England.16
In Canada the persistence of single-party government under
multiparty competition confirms that Duverger’s hypothesis isn’t appli-
cable at the national level and that the presence of regional parties with
geographically concentrated electorates can mitigate the reductive effect
of SMP on national party systems. Despite a nearly 50 per cent failure
rate of the two major Canadian parties to gain absolute majorities since
World War II, single-party government remains the norm in Canada.
Pressures to reform the voting system are weak because the regularity of
landslide elections suggests SMP isn’t dysfunctional, as it can produce
government with absolute majorities. Moreover, the need for partisan
coordination across geographical regions is weaker in Canada’s federal
system than in unitary systems such as Britain’s due to the decoupling
of provincial politics from national politics (Johnston, 2008).
In Canada SMP produces occasional explosions in the national party
system, as in 1984, 1993 and 2011 (Chapter 5), indicating a notoriously
volatile electorate but also a regionalised party system that produces
some quirky election outcomes. For example in the 1993 watershed
election, the Progressive Conservatives collapsed from being a major-
ity governing party to winning just two seats in the Canadian House
of Commons. This left the Bloc Québécois – a new separatist party advo-
cating the country’s break-up – as the official opposition. The Bloc had
only the fourth-largest share of the popular vote but the second-largest
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 17
share of federal seats, all in Quebec. This permitted the Liberals’ sweep
back into power after almost a decade in opposition with a 60 per cent
seat majority but only 41.6 per cent of the popular vote.
However, another shocking election in 2011 nearly wiped out the
Bloc, leaving it with only four federal seats, while the left-leaning New
Democratic Party (NDP) was transformed into the official opposition
as it grabbed a large majority of Quebec seats. This redrawing of the
Canadian political map enabled Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to be
re-elected with a majority after running two minority governments and
left the Liberals in third place, their lowest seat share ever.
Historically the Canadian Liberals have been direct beneficiaries of the
Conservatives’ boom and bust performances (Johnston, 2008), thanks
to the reductive effect of SMP. An aggregate time-series analysis of the
relative reduction in the effective number of parties (RRP) shows that
the Liberals’ periods of dominance (1935–57, 1963–84 and 1993–06) are
marked by wide divergences between the effective number of electoral
parties (Nv) and the effective number of legislative parties (Ns) (Boucek,
1998, 2001). The biggest gaps were found in elections when the Lib-
erals seized power back from the Progressive Conservatives (in 1935,
1963 and 1993, when the RRP stood at 41 per cent, 19 per cent and
38 per cent, respectively). When the then Progressive Conservatives won
big (in 1958 and 1984) the RRP was also very high (around 38 per cent)
but, importantly, these were also majorities of the popular vote, a feat
never achieved by the Liberals.
Earlier Liberal dominance had rested on concentrated support in at
least one of the two most populous Canadian provinces – Quebec and
Ontario, which together account for approximately 60 per cent of the
seats in the federal parliament. So as long as the Liberals won big in
one of those two provinces, their dominance was assured.17 However,
the 2011 election appears to have broken this pattern primarily due
to the loss of saliency of the national unity question for Canadian
voters.
Permissive electoral systems are less instrumental in propping up
dominant parties, because they erect fewer barriers to entry. In Italy the
Christian Democrats derived virtually no advantage from the mechani-
cal effects of the list preference voting system due to the large district
magnitudes18 and no minimum threshold of entry. In Japan, how-
ever, the single non-transferable vote in multimember constituencies
(SNTV) – not a true proportional system – gave the LDP a comparative
advantage by skewing party competition through its 1955 multiparty
merger (Boucek, 1998, 2001). Having gained 58 per cent of the vote
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18 Factional Politics
and 61.5 per cent of the seats in the Lower House of the Diet in 1958,
the new LDP cut the number of competing parties by half and estab-
lished its dominance. Electoral competition became two-way contests
between two unequal parties – the conservative LDP and the much
smaller Socialists, Socialist Party of Japan (JSP).
Moreover, as Chapter 6 explains, in both Italy and Japan before
electoral reform in the mid-1990s, these voting systems generated com-
petitive advantages for the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and LDP
through the factional management of the personal vote. The factions
regulated the internal competition for electoral stakes by controlling list
placement (DC) and the distribution of campaign resources and by coor-
dinating local party nomination and vote division (LDP) – a strategy that
Japan’s opposition parties were slow to emulate (Cox, 1997; Christensen,
2000). In Italy and Japan the new mixed-member majoritarian systems
have introduced a more bipolar logic to party competition, including
landslide elections in Japan in 2005 and 2009.
In general there are more opportunities for incumbents to compro-
mise the outcomes of competitive elections in countries with weak
political institutions than in fully fledged competitive democracies. But
since institutions can be manipulated, it is possible for dominant parties
even in competitive democracies to boost their advantage through vari-
ous strategies. These include constant re-districting or ‘gerrymandering’
in the United States, malapportionment in Ireland (under Fianna Fáil’s
dominance before 1979), blocking demands for electoral reform (as in
Japan and Italy in the 1980s and 1990s) and interference in the running
of elections (as in Mexico under PRI dominance).
Strategic and spatial explanations
Dominant parties are notorious for being pragmatic and ‘catch-all’
(Kirchheimer, 1966). Orientated towards power rather than ideology,
catch-all parties adapt to changing electoral market conditions in a prag-
matic way to maximise support and capture the ‘median’ voter. There is
ample evidence of long-lived government parties de-emphasising doc-
trine in order to broaden voter appeal. The SAP went so far as to declare
in a manifesto that their party had ‘never been especially interested in
theoretical discussions’ (Misgeld, Molin, and Åmark, 1992: 152). This
was a rational strategy under Sweden’s one-dimensional welfare politics
which allowed the SAP to regain office in the midst of a home-grown
economic crisis in 1994 related to a programme of tax rises and public
spending cuts not normally associated with social democratic parties.
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 19
British Conservatives and Canadian Liberals have at different times
embraced opposite sides of the same issue, for instance protectionism
and free trade, state interventionism and laissez-faire economics as well
as foreign engagement and appeasement. Conservative dominance in
twentieth-century Britain has been explained through the party’s prag-
matism and selective use of ideology to bolster its status as the ‘natural
party of government’ (Seldon, 1994).
After 18 years in opposition, Labour under Tony Blair learned the
value of non-ideological politics. It discarded its class doctrines in the
early 1990s (notably through the removal of Clause IV from the party’s
constitution19), and the Labour government adopted practical policies
to raise standards in public services which Blair defended as ‘what mat-
ters is what works’. In Japan weak partisanship facilitated the creation
of the LDP in 1955 from a broad multiparty merger and kept the party
relatively free of ideological divisions while in office for half a century.
‘Rather than being narrowly and ideologically fixated on particular con-
servative principles, it [the LDP] has been able to tack with the prevailing
strong winds and alter, even if belatedly, its previous policies when they
proved to be unpopular later on’ (Krauss and Pekkanen, 2011: 14).
In sum flexible politics enables parties to maintain centrist support
and to embrace new issues as they emerge. The trick is to endorse issues
that have wide public support and aren’t redistributive and divisive:
such as Thatcher’s ‘poll tax’ in Britain (Chapter 4) and federalism in
Canada (Chapter 5).
There are times when parties need to reposition policies to win new
tranches of voters at the risk of polarising politics and party opinion.
Downsian competition predicts that parties will compete to accommo-
date voters’ preferences by converging on the median voter’s position,
which under two-party dynamics is expected to be located somewhere
close to the centre of the political spectrum (Downs, 1957: 95–138).
In practice, however, parties may prefer to move away from the
political centre ground to accommodate changes in electoral tastes,
reshape voters’ preferences or reorient the political agenda, even under
two-party dynamics. For example, in the early 1980s, Thatcher’s Con-
servatives abandoned consensus politics by moving clearly to the right
with a radical programme to denationalise public services while reassert-
ing state authority (Gamble, 1988), leaving intact the National Health
Service (NHS).
By concentrating on floating voters, parties may damage their core
vote if this drives some supporters towards extreme parties. The UK Inde-
pendence Party (UKIP) and the British National Party (BNP) encroach
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20 Factional Politics
on the core votes of the two mainstream British parties. UKIP’s anti-
Europe rhetoric appeals to some Conservative supporters on the far right
and the BNP’s special brand of nationalism holds a particular appeal
for Labour’s traditional working-class supporters who feel threatened by
immigrant labour.
The Italian DC is another example of successful repositioning. After
World War II de Gasperi created a successful mass Catholic party by
transforming the wartime anti-fascist solidarity into Church-sponsored
anti-communism. This polarised Italian politics between left and right
on economic and social issues (Levite and Tarrow, 1983: 313–5) and
neutered the large Communist Party (PCI), which was portrayed as a
threat to democratic stability even though the two parties (DC and
PCI) shared the spoils of power through consociativismo (Burnett and
Mantovani, 1998). DC was described as ‘a party for all seasons’, thanks
to its ability to juggle issues to accommodate shifting electoral interests
(Pasquino, 1980a).
In short structural aspects of party competition can be ‘endogenised’
to enhance re-election prospects and prolong dominance. Parties have
the capacity to manipulate salient issues to safeguard or expand their
‘own’ policy spaces (Robertson, 1976; Budge and Farlie, 1977; Dunleavy
and Husbands, 1985: 67–70; Dunleavy, 1991, 2010: 112–44; Laver and
Hunt, 1992).
Control of public information enables ruling parties to endogenise
their information advantages. State broadcasting monopolies have been
abolished in most modern democracies (except for Italy20) but governing
parties can still shape public perceptions by putting their own ‘spin’
on political events, by initiating news leaks to selected media and by
restraining public access to government information.
In the United Kingdom political spinning has a long pedigree, most
recently associated with Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Director of Com-
munications and Strategy.21 Thatcher had exploited the media to win
Conservative elections in 1979 and 1983, as her press secretary Bernard
Ingham had cultivated close relationships with Fleet Street right-wing
editors and writers of powerful tabloids. For the 1982 war against
Argentina for the Falkland Islands British soldiers were portrayed as
being in danger for their lives, provoking a surge of public support in
favour of invasion, significantly boosting the Conservatives’ popular-
ity during their re-election campaign in 1983 (Dunleavy and Husbands,
1985: 67–70) and allowing Thatcher to reinvent herself as the warrior
queen.
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 21
Incumbent governments can also restrict public access to govern-
ment information by exploiting regulatory loopholes and restraining
freedom of information. In Britain newspapers and publishers covering
the House of Commons risk being in contempt of court if they publish
parliamentary questions, answers or debates on subjects classified under
‘super-injunctions’.
Finally campaign finance is another source of comparative advantage
for incumbents. In many European countries parties are subsidised by
the state, and campaign funding is apportioned on the basis of individ-
ual party shares of legislative seats. This gives dominant parties the lion’s
share of campaign finance at the expense of minority parties, who are
deprived of funding if their popular support falls below a set threshold.
Opposition parties’ capacities to compete is hampered not only by their
lack of public finance but also by limited private funding as individuals,
business groups and trade unions prefer to back election winners rather
than losers.
1.4 Legislative and coalition dominance
The capacity to form viable legislative and executive coalitions is a major
determinant of dominance. It depends on the degree of party system
fragmentation and the ideological distance between opposition parties.
These factors can prevent opposition parties from forming connected
winning coalitions to beat dominant centrist parties.
In most democracies the party with the largest share of the popular
vote forms the government on its own or as the senior member of a
coalition, which is often the case under permissive electoral systems.
Restrictive electoral systems lead to single-party governments, according
to the Duvergerian logic.
In multiparty systems breakdowns in single-party dominance are
often due to the success of opposition forces in forming viable coalitions
to unseat the ruling party. This may be due to asymmetric preference
distribution, factional defections from the dominant party and so on.
In Ireland in 1973 Fianna Fáil had been in power continuously since
1957, but was unseated by a coalition between Fine Gael and Labour.
To regain office Fianna Fáil had to form its own coalition with the
Progressive Democrats in 1989 and with Labour in 1992.
This logic also holds for non-centrist parties under asymmetric pref-
erence distribution. Laver and Schofield argue that, in theory, if parties
care only about policy and if politics really is one-dimensional, then the
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22 Factional Politics
party that controls the median legislators will be in a dominant bargain-
ing position and will always end up in government (Laver and Schofield,
1990: 80).
In Sweden the ‘bourgeois’ parties formed an electoral alliance for the
first time in 1976, producing the first non-SAP government in half a
century.22 Indeed the opposition parties’ coordination failures and dom-
inant parties’ cohesion explain why long-term political dominance has
been the rule in many West European countries during the twentieth
century, particularly in Scandinavia where the distribution of prefer-
ences on the main competitive dimension – welfare state policy – was
skewed to the right (McGann, 2002). This spatial configuration has
allowed cohesive Social Democratic parties to become dominant by
hampering the coalition strategies of opposition parties on the right,
who are stretched over a broad ideological space on this issue.
1.5 Coalition dominance in practice: Italy’s Christian
Democrats
Executive dominance is the by-product of a party’s success in building
durable coalitions at both intraparty and interparty levels. The spatial
positioning of a party (or faction) along the ideological spectrum and
the cohesion of the dominant player are the building blocks of coalition
dominance.
Sartori explains DC’s long-term rule in terms of the presence of bipolar
oppositions under a model of ‘polarised pluralism’ (Sartori, 1976). Party
systems with large centre parties facing numerous competitors to the
left and right tend to perpetuate long-term rule by centrist parties. The
left and right can never agree on an alternative to the centrist govern-
ment party, as each is further from the other than from the government.
Hence, while centrist parties do not necessarily govern alone, they gov-
ern continuously because their competitors are unable to coordinate on
an alternative that excludes them.
Given these conditions, it is surprising that coalition governments in
post-war Italy were frequently surplus majority coalitions and minority
governments rather than the minimum winning coalitions (Laver and
Schofield, 1990: 71; Lijphart, 1999) predicted by coalition theories based
on rational choice (Riker, 1962).
Carrying extra passengers in a coalition may be a source of stability
because it provides insurance against coalition break-ups, factional exits
and uncertain legislative outcomes. In the first instance this enabled
Italy’s DC leaders to bind smaller coalition partners by making their
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 23
exit threats less credible. A coalition withdrawal after the investiture
vote would require a full-scale government resignation and thus the
formation of a new one, which would be costly (Laver and Schofield,
1990: 86). Second, the extra legislative slack from a surplus majority
removes leverage from factions whose policy positions on some issues
may be closer to those of other parties not in the coalition. Such fac-
tions will be disinclined to defect, knowing that they aren’t pivotal to
government survival. Third, surplus majorities can facilitate legislative
management and increase government efficiency. In Italy until 1988 the
secret ballot was used frequently in the Chamber of Deputies, making
party discipline difficult to enforce and legislative outcomes difficult to
predict. A surplus majority increased the likelihood that party leaders
could deliver enough votes on key measures.
The idea of bargaining leverage indicates how pivotal individual par-
ties and factions are in making and breaking interparty and intraparty
coalitions and consequently in maximising pay-offs. Coalition pivotal-
ity can be measured with power indices, such as the Shapley–Shubik
index or the Banzhaf index, which draw attention to the notion of
players who pivot, that is those who can convert losing coalitions into
winning coalitions. These indices estimate at specific points in time how
pivotal individual parties and factions are in forming winning coalitions
or in breaking existing ones.
The normalised Banzhaf index of power used here shows the num-
ber of times a player’s defection is pivotal in any winning coalition.
Given the legislative strength of a given party (or faction), the index
computes in how many of all the possible winning coalitions above
the 50 per cent threshold that party is a necessary partner. Despite the
fact that the index is policy-blind and thus assumes that all coalitions
are equally probable, it nevertheless shows that parties who are decisive
in many coalition alternatives have good chances of being included in
government. More importantly, by identifying the dominant player in
bargaining games the index goes a long way in explaining why poten-
tial minimum winning coalitions fail to materialise – precisely because
of problems of policy/ideological distance between parties or factions.
The Banzhaf index is used here to calculate the pivotal power of all
the parties in the Italian Chamber of Deputies over several periods and
is used in Chapters 7 and 8 to analyse the interfactional bargaining
structure of the DC and LDP. The results are normalised so that the
total bargaining power of all the parties (or factions) add up to 1.00.
The figures reported in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 show the proportion of seats
and the fractional share of pivots for each of the parties competing in
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24
Tab le 1 .1 Party parliamentary representation and pivotal power for a selection of government coalitions in Italy 1958–92
Centre-Right Coalitions
1958–63
Centre-Left Coalitions
1963–76
National Solidarity
1976–79
Pentapartito Coalitions
1979–92
1958 Election 1972 Election 1976 Election 1987 Election
%Seats Power∗%Seats Power∗%Seats Power∗%Seats Power∗
PCI 24 .06 28 .13 36 .19 28 .21
PSI 14 .06 10 .13 9 .19 15 .21
PSDI 4 .05 5 .03 3 .04 3 .03
PRI 1 .02 2 .01 2 .02 3 .03
DC 46 .69 42 .53 42 .42 37 .36
PLI 3 .02 3 .03 2 .02 2 .03
MSI 4 .05 10 .13 6 .12 6 .07
Radicals 2.02
Greens 2.02
∗The normalised Banzhaf index of power is calculated using the software programme designed by Thomas König and Thomas Bräuninger (Mannheim
Centre for European Social Research). Total scores might not add up to 1.00 due to rounding.
PCI: Communists; PSI: Socialists; PSDI: Social Democrats; PRI: Republicans; DC: Christian Democrats; PLI: Liberals; MSI: Social Movement.
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 25
Tab le 1 .2 Party parliamentary representation and pivotal power Italian coalition
governments, 1983–92
1983 Election 1987 Election 1992 Election
%Seats Power∗%Seats Power∗%Seats Power∗
PCI±31 .22 28 .22 17 .14
PSI§12 .19 15 .22 15 .14
PdUP 1 .02
PSDI 4 .04 3 .03 3 .03
PRI 5 .06 3 .03 4 .03
DC 36 .34 37 .36 33 .43
PLI 2 .03 2 .03 3 .03
MSI7 .08 6 .07 5 .04
Radicals 2 .03 2 .02 5 .04
Greens 2 .02 2 .02
Northern League 9 .09
La Rete 2 .02
Others 2 .02
∗The normalised Banzhaf index of power is calculated using the software programme
designed by Thomas König and Thomas Bräuninger (Mannheim Centre for European Social
Research). Because of rounding, the scores might not add up to 1.00.
±Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) after 1991.
§Socialist Unity Party (PSU) after 1990.
Renamed Destra Nazionale.
PCI: Communists; PSI: Socialists; PSDI: Social Democrats; PRI: Republicans; DC: Christian
Democrats; PLI: Liberals; MSI: Social Movement.
selected elections (Table 1.1: 1958, 1972, 1976 and 1987; Table 1.2: 1983,
1987 and 1992) corresponding to different types of DC-led government
coalitions involving different models of interparty bargaining as a result
of changes in the party system’s balance of power.
DC played a pivotal role in the formation of every multiparty gov-
ernment in Italy between 1945 and 1993 despite gaining an absolute
parliamentary majority only once. In 1948 Prime Minister De Gasperi
invited other parties to join the Christian Democrats in government
to consolidate Italy’s fragile democracy and to demonstrate to the
American government the country’s willingness to join the fight against
communism, an implicit condition for Italy’s receipt of Marshall Aid.
For the next quarter century Communist delegitimation became the
linchpin of DC’s coalition strategies based on the so-called conventio
ad excludendum – an unwritten agreement to exclude the anti-system
parties: the Communists (PCI) and the neo-fascist (Social Movement;
MSI) – from DC-led governments (Arian and Barnes, 1974: 597–9; Levite
August 23, 2012 11:54 MAC/FACT Page-26 9780230019935_03_cha01
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26 Factional Politics
and Tarrow, 1983; Hine, 1993: 96–107). Readers will note that there is
a ten-year overlap in the periods covered in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 which
focuses on the declining period of DC dominance from 1983 to 1992,
when the Socialists (PSI) played a prominent coalition role in keeping
the Communists out. This shows how increased competition (resulting
from the entry of new parties and the split of the Communists in the
early 1990s) affects the coalition power of individual parties and the
overall bargaining structure in the party system.
Party representation and pivotal power for a selection
of government coalitions in Italy 1958–92
1. Communist neutralisation under centre–right coalitions (1958–63)
During this period DC dominated the legislative party system and
formed centre–right coalitions with the PSDI, the Republicans (PRI)
and the Liberals (PLI). As Table 1.1 shows, DC was strongly piv-
otal. For instance, in 1958, its 46 per cent seat share translated into
a 70 per cent share of pivots. Of the six governments that were
formed during this period, four were minority single-party govern-
ments and two were DC-led multiparty coalitions that included the
small PSDI (July 1958–Feb 1959) and even smaller PRI (Feb 1962–June
1963).
2. Communist neutralisation in centre–left coalitions (1963–76)
This period is marked by centre–left coalitions initiated in 1963,
when DC dumped the PLI in favour of PSI. This was a pre-emptive
strike by Prime Minister Aldo Moro to deter the formation of a
Communist–Socialist alliance which would have been strong enough
to defeat DC. However, as the PCI vote and seat shares increased
and those of DC gradually declined, PSI became more and more
pivotal to government formation. Their participation would satisfy
the ‘minimum winning’ criterion, but DC continued to carry surplus
passengers (usually PSDI and/or PRI) as insurance against a PCI–PSI
alliance.
3. Communist co-optation (1976–79)
In the mid-1970s Italy went through a severe national crisis marked
by terrorist violence and economic recession. This prompted DC
to engineer a rapprochement with the Communists, culminating
in a ‘historic compromise’ and the formation of a single-party
(monocolore) government of national solidarity. In the 1976 gen-
eral election the Communists gained 34.4 per cent of the popular
vote (4.3 per cent behind DC) and 34 per cent of the seats in
the Chamber of Deputies. While not in cabinet the PCI received
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 27
parliamentary committee memberships in exchange for their ‘con-
structive abstention’ on key bills such as the introduction of income
policies.
However, the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro by the Red
Brigades in the spring of 1978 brought this DC–PCI cooperation to
an abrupt end. PCI was dumped in favour of PSI and PLI. As Table 1.1
demonstrates, by 1976 the bargaining structure had changed as the
centre of gravity shifted to the left, translating into a significant drop
in the pivotal power of DC (from .53 to .42), whose seat share stayed
the same as in 1972.
This shift in the balance of power was to the benefit of the Social-
ists and to the detriment of the Communists, whose share of pivots
remained very disproportional to their parliamentary representation.
With 227 seats in the Chamber of Deputies the Communists were no
more pivotal than the Socialists with their 35 seats. As Chapter 7
demonstrates, this new interparty configuration affected the balance
of power inside DC and made factions on the left of the party more
pivotal.
4. Renewed Communist exclusion and PSI inclusion (1979–92)
As DC reverted to forming surplus multiparty coalitions that
included the PSI, PLI, PSDI and PRI, the Socialists’ participation
became critical to government survival. DC’s bargaining leverage was
eroding in favour of PCI. Under Bettino Craxi it became a decisive
partner in DC-led coalition governments. Without the support of the
Communists and neo-fascist MSI (the old anti-system parties located
at each extreme of the ideological spectrum) no winning coalition
could be formed that didn’t include the Socialists. As Table 1.2
demonstrates, in 1983 and 1987 the Socialists (PSI) and the Com-
munists (PCI) were as pivotal in coalition terms even though in 1983
the Communists had 37 per cent more MPs than the Socialists and
53 per cent more MPs in 1987.
PSI used this bargaining leverage to extract substantive pay-offs
from coalition partners and to destabilise government. They gained
control of many important ministries, such as Finance, Public Sector
and Defense, and the top executive: the presidency in 1981 and the
prime ministership in 1983 (Craxi was prime minister until 198723).
To satisfy the lust for office of its junior coalition partner, DC created
new cabinet and non-cabinet posts with no particular policy respon-
sibilities. The Socialists used their blackmail potential to destabilise
governments and were responsible for four of five government crises
in the early 1980s.
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28 Factional Politics
Party system de-alignment at the end of the Cold War put an end to
these unstable DC-led coalitions by making anti-communism irrelevant.
Having already lost control of the ‘median’ voter to the small left-of-
centre Republican Party, DC faced intense competition resulting from
the split of PCI in 1991 and the entry of new parties, notably the North-
ern League and the anti-Mafia La Rete. In 1991 the government fell when
PRI withdrew from the five-party (pentapartito) coalition, triggering a
major realigning election in April 1992 in which DC’s share of the vote
fell below 30 per cent for the first time.
This was the tipping point in DC’s collapse. Their support disinte-
grated in a series of local and regional elections over the next 18 months.
Election defeats combined with factional disputes over constitutional
reform, and wide-ranging arrests of corrupt politicians in the ‘clean
hands’ judicial investigation brought down Italy’s post-war political
establishment and precipitated the implosion of the dominant Christian
Democrats during their last congress in January 1994.
Party representation and pivotal power: Italian coalition
governments 1983–92
Coalition dominance is also about agenda control. By controlling the
structural constraints of coalition bargaining, dominant parties can
use procedural devices and institutional arrangements to maximise
their own pay-offs. For example an incoming Italian government must
gain the approval of the legislature through an investiture vote before
taking office. Such investiture decision rules favour the ‘candidate gov-
ernment’, because abstentions effectively count in the government’s
favour.24
Implicit rules for selecting the prime minister are also biased in
favour of the candidate government. Conventions give the senior coali-
tion partner a leading role in the selection and distribution of cabinet
and non-cabinet appointments, the chairmanships and composition of
parliamentary committees and many other important political appoint-
ments that have the capacity to embed ruling parties in government.
Until 1992 Italy’s DC monopolised the chairmanships of all stand-
ing committees of both houses of parliament, managed their agendas
and organised their consultations with others. Hence, in the long run,
executive dominance gives incumbents agenda-setting powers and a
proprietary lock-in over the spoils of office, which can be transformed
into partisan resources to skew competition and maintain single-party
dominance.
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 29
1.6 Entrenched dominance: transforming incumbency
advantage into partisan resources
Executive dominance enables ruling parties to transform incumbency
advantages into partisan resources by giving them a command over
the levers of government and control of the public purse and polit-
ical patronage. In authoritarian regimes dominant parties generate
asymmetric resources by diverting funds from state-owned enterprises,
doling out many patronage jobs to supporters and extracting kickbacks
and sometimes illicit campaign contributions from domestic businesses
in exchange for economic protection or state contracts. By virtually
transforming public agencies into campaign headquarters, this capac-
ity depends on a large public sector and an acquiescent bureaucracy
(Greene, 2007).
In competitive democracies, especially in West Europe during the
second half of the twentieth century ruling parties monopolised state
resources through the expansion of the state sector. Post-war reconstruc-
tion required massive infrastructure projects under state control and led
to the nationalisation of many utilities, such as water, power, transport
and telephone. This extended to other industries such as steel and coal
in Britain. Overall this expansion of the state meant public bureaucra-
cies ballooned and became politicised while political elites tapped into
deep reservoirs of resources to purchase consent.
In Italy, during the 1950s and early 1960s most utilities were nation-
alised into state-holding corporations. This gave DC politicians a deep
pool of resources to spread among their clients. Fanfani in particular set
up the so-called sottogoverno, a system of patronage distribution which
consolidated the power of DC and of his own personal faction, espe-
cially in the South where the bureaucracy was more receptive to political
influence and manipulation.
Unlike in Britain and in France,25 an Italian ‘constituency for bureau-
cratic autonomy did not emerge prior to the democratic era’ (Shefter,
1977: 443). This deprived the country of an autonomous, technocratic
and expert civil service to oversee the country’s modernisation. Bureau-
crats were recruited and promoted not on merit but on partisan grounds.
Civil servants became captives of their political masters – the Christian
Democrats – and were drawn into DC’s web of clientelism, deceit and
corruption.
Client–parent relationships were the major pattern of interaction
between ministries and their constituents (LaPalombara, 1964), and this
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30 Factional Politics
exacerbated factionalism (Allum, 1973: 107). A given ministry became
the client of the group dominating the activity under its jurisdic-
tion (for example Confindustria representing business, the Ministry of
Industry and Commerce, the Ministry of State Participation and many
public companies) or bureaucracies within certain departments became
colonised by a parent group controlling the ministry’s appointments
and patronage (for example the Ministry of Education, the Catholic
organisations or the Ministry of Labour and the unions).
Patronage was allocated through the lottizazione, based on the balance
of power between political parties and factions but giving the largest
party (DC) the lion’s share. Top personnel in the agencies of the paras-
tato, such as the savings banks, were appointed for their partisan and
factional affiliations.26 The largest pool of patronage was the Institute
for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), Italy’s biggest state-holding company
set up under Mussolini in 1933 and privatised in 1992.27 The IRI had
600 holding companies in iron and steel, shipbuilding, telecommuni-
cations and electronics, engineering, road and motorway construction,
city planning, the national airline Alitalia and national broadcasting,
and also held most of the shares of Italy’s three large banks. The IRI gave
DC vast opportunities to provide ‘jobs for the boys’ and draw powerful
elites into their web. But the cost was high – by 1992 IRI’s debts had
ballooned to 73 billion liras.
The exchange of private goods for votes became widespread during
the early years of DC dominance as state resources grew on the back of
the 1960s economic boom and the 1970 decentralisation programme,
which transformed the regions into large depositories of economic
power and lubricated the DC factional system at the grass-roots. In Italy
(and Japan) the building of infrastructural projects, such as post offices,
motorways and airports, offered rich rewards to partisan supporters
through jobs and public works contracts. The system was administered
by local barons and faction leaders inside the dominant parties. In Italy
road-building contracts were divided up among DC faction leaders. They
in turn took bribes in exchange for tenders in their particular regions
where segments of motorways were even personally associated with
individual faction leaders.28
In Japan LDP maintained a firm grip over policy and patronage
through its triangular links with business and the powerful Japanese
civil service described by American political scientist Chalmers Johnson
as the ‘capitalist developmental state’ – a description that also applied
to South Korea and Taiwan (Johnson, 1994). LDP feathered its own
nest by distributing ‘pork’ and other selective goods to its constituents:
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The Theory of One-Party Dominance 31
the goods given included licenses and contracts for the construction
industry controlled by the Ministry of Construction29 and various pro-
tectionist measures such as subsidies, price supports and tax breaks
(Curtis, 1988; van Wolferen, 1989; Pempel, 1990). Business lobbied the
government for public contracts by pouring money into LDP’s coffers
and the pockets of powerful mandarins. This badly dented the prestige
and pride of Japan’s public service that dated back to the samurai era of
the 17–19th centuries.
Japan’s patronage distribution was managed through the köenkai.
These candidate-support networks corresponding to electoral district
lines were vote-mobilising machines for individual politicians. Con-
stituents exchanged funding, votes and canvassing efforts for political
favours and services (van Wolferen, 1990: 109–43; Scheiner, 2006;
Krauss and Pekkanen, 2011). This enabled LDP to target and moni-
tor support among voters and interest groups in individual districts
and regions and was reinforced by the factions (Chapter 6). Some
have argued that in the long run such clientelist arrangements weak-
ened LDP’s capacity to expand its electoral appeal beyond its core vote
(Christensen, 2000: 185). However, Krauss and Pekkanen (2011) argue
that despite the decline in the memberships of the Köenkai years after
the 1994 electoral reform they remain vibrant organisations that haven’t
been substituted by LDP party branches.
In Canada vast reservoirs of political patronage and public funds are
provided by the Crown corporations30 and the federal procurement
system. Under the Liberals private corporations gained procurement
contracts in exchange for party funding. Contributions to the Liber-
als were made either without public bidding or in proportion to the
amount of government business received (Whitaker, 1992: 161). Pri-
vate appeals to national corporations enabled the Liberals to finance
their partisan activities during the 1940s and 1950s but created costly
kickback scandals.
With no regular alternation in office the essential mechanism of
accountability fails to function. The privatisation of incentives result-
ing from the abuse of patronage by self-serving politicians has led many
dominant parties, including DC, LDP and the Canadian Liberals, to
become embroiled in damaging corruption scandals. In Italy the ‘clean
hands’ investigation precipitated the collapse of DC in the mid-1990s
and in Canada the Liberals were thrown out of office in 2006 in the
midst of an enquiry into a federal sponsorship scandal (Chapter 6).31
Although the privatisation of public services in most countries puts
constraints on the partisan use of state resources, British academics have
August 23, 2012 11:54 MAC/FACT Page-32 9780230019935_03_cha01
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32 Factional Politics
argued that the emergence of quasi-governmental agencies represents a
new and less transparent way of distributing patronage to supporters
(Weir and Beetham, 1999: chapter 8).
Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated that dominant parties endure because
of the success of their vote-seeking, office-seeking and policy-seeking
strategies which have been explained from different theoretical perspec-
tives: sociological, institutional and strategic.
Long-lived government parties skew party competition by adapting
their ‘catch-all’ strategies to the structure of specific electorates and insti-
tutional regimes. Under multiparty competition generated by permis-
sive voting systems the ability to form durable government coalitions
is critical to long-lasting executive dominance. This was demonstrated
through snapshots of the Christian Democrats’ bargaining leverage in
multiparty coalition governments in post-war Italy.
Whether executive dominance is achieved under single-party rule or
multiparty government, its consolidation is likely to rest on a party’s
capacity to transform incumbency advantages into partisan resources.
This enables parties to expand their reach and build their organisational
strength and consequently entrench themselves in office. However, in
the long run this can be counterproductive, if the means used to achieve
this feedback lead to a privatisation of incentives. The waste of public
resources by self-serving politicians subtracts value from a party’s brand
and, in time, pushes voters and reform-minded politicians to abandon
long-term incumbents in favour of opposition parties, bringing about
breakdowns in single-party dominance.
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PROOF
QUERIES TO BE ANSWERED BY AUTHOR (SEE MARGINAL MARKS)
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mark your corrections and answer to these
queries directly onto the proof at the relevant place. Do NOT mark
your corrections on this query sheet.
Chapter 1
Query No. Page No. Query
AQ1 9 We have changed Key 1969 to 1949 as
provided in the reference list.