On political parties.
What is the role of a political party? Like any institution, discerning its role and purpose can be difficult. Parties are not singular entities, and they rarely behave as such. Parties also exist, as we all do, along a continuum or life cycle. They spring up, win power, lose power, lose members, win over voters, split into new parties, sit in coalition government, sit in opposition, and crumble into obscurity. No political party is guaranteed to experience all facets of partyhood, yet those with staying power tend to experience the wide breadth of those experiences.
Is a party built for ideology or is it built to further careers? Can it do both? At its most fundamental level, a party is an organization built for the sole purpose of gaining votes for its members. Parties raise campaign funds, hold events to familiarize constituents with candidates, produce advertisements for their candidates or against other party candidates, select candidates for office, and strategize for future elections among many other activities.
What role does ideology play for a political party? Many political parties have some level of underlying ideology or guiding principles. A party on the center-right positions themselves there by their own internal decision making. A coherent party identity can be important in attracting potential candidates and voters. However, an overly coherent party identity can also drive voters away from candidates they may have otherwise supported if that ideology is viewed as too extreme or toxic.
Parties can also change ideological positions overtime. Sometimes this is the product of decisions made for votes, like the realigning of the Democratic and Republican party in the 20th century. Sometimes it is the result of a realignment in political sentiments in a country. In both Norway and Denmark parties which nominally call themselves “The Left,” and were established in the 1800s, are today center-right agrarian parties. Parties with staying power also have some level of flexibility for obvious reasons. The societal problems of the late 19th century are different than those of the early 21st.
Parties in practice
Parties often fall under scorn from voters and political commentators. Because parties are the vehicle through which policy is crafted and made into law, they hold a central position in the minds of societal or policy critics. In the United States, leftist critics have long lobbed angry missives and deep critiques at the Democratic party. Not because they wish to see the party fail, necessarily, but because it is the only party through which leftist policy seems feasible. A notable example was the 2018 election of representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14). Ocasio-Cortez was elected as a Democrat but with a reformist internal and progressive external agenda. During her first term, Ocasio-Cortez would often threaten to support progressive primary challenges to older more centrist Democrats. This gave her praise among the Democrat-sceptic leftist coalition, but more recently she has come under scorn from those same sceptics for seeming to be overly deferential to party politics.
The subtle transformation of Ocasio-Cortez from ideologically secure bomb thrower to institutionally deferential law-maker is illustrative of a couple of things. The first is the general need to pivot towards a less radical position in order to garner more votes. Ocasio-Cortez comes from an incredibly safe Democratic congressional district. She won her reelection in 2020 by almost a three to one margin. If she has ambitions for higher office, statewide in New York or even a Presidential run, pivoting towards congeniality and cooperation could help bring future voters to the table. The second is that Ocasio-Cortez may have learned the lesson of party. While she began her political career as a critic of mainstream Democratic politics she now realizes that a certain level of unity can be useful, particularly with the party holding a tenuous grasp on all three levers of power in Washington for the first time since 2010.
Choosing to damage the party with which you most align is rarely a good strategy at accomplishing your policy goals. Many on the left have argued that congresspeople like Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives like Ilhan Omar (MN-5), Ayanna Pressley (MA-7), and Rashida Tliab (MI-13) should behave more like the Freedom caucus on the Republican side. The House Freedom caucus sprung out the right-wing Tea Party Movement of the early 2010s and used aggressive tactics to remove their own party’s Speaker of the House, torpedo legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and their senatorial adjacent shut down the government as a form of political coercion. Not only did these actions lead to disarray in the Republican party, they were also deeply unpopular. Had the Freedom caucus and it’s senate allies chosen a more convivial path they may have seen less chaos and more policy towards their liking.
Leftist critics of Ocasio-Cortez, and others like her, view the continued election of Freedom caucus congresspeople as some sort of political success worthy of emulation in the Democratic party. What they often neglect to account for are the deep structural advantages promoting Republicans and the deep structural disadvantages hampering Democrats. Bomb throwing and obstruction work for a segment of the Republican voting base which is more likely to view politics as a fight for survival than their Democratic counterparts do.
Parties broadly abroad
Analyzing political parties from an American lens can be as fraught as it is useful. The political parties of American Politics (Democrats and Republicans) have both exhibited the wide range of roles and experiences that political parties can have befall them. Yet both parties are also too old for any living American to remember their formation. They are institutional bodies, by themselves and together. Existing as the only credible options in almost every election and in any representative body. This is why the politicians like Ocasio-Cortez come under scorn from both mainstream Democrats and left-wing activists. In a more representative democratic system, Ocasio-Cortez would probably be in a different party altogether, but because of the two-party system, she is in the party that most closely fits her political viewpoints and aspirations.
Looking outside of the American context gives us a better picture of parties as precarious entities. Most parliamentary systems use a more representative democratic system to elect members making for more competition among parties. This allows for not only more parties to enter into representative bodies (parliaments, congresses, ect.) but also forces parties to compete for attention in order to win seats and subsequently keep them. Whereas first-past-the-post systems like the UK and the US have two dominant parties which can campaign using the opposite party as a foil, more representative systems require parties to campaign about themselves and not just their opponents. It also allows for parties to live out full life cycles.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, two parties have dominated the political scene for well over a century. Once in place, a smart and adaptable political party in a first-past-the-post system is much more likely to keep their place in a democratic system. Several bad election cycles lead to a reorientation of plans and new policy agendas. The “third way” prime ministership of Tony Blair and presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s both typified a substantial policy pivot in order to gain voters and win back power. And both came after incredibly successful periods for the Conservative party and the Republican party respectively.
More representative systems have more flux to their parties. Much of the concern among continental Europeans over the success during the late 2010s of far-right nationalist parties was that those parties, or their ideas, could take over more traditional center-right parties. Furthermore, the continued weakening of traditional center-left, social democratic parties has led political observers to wonder about the future shape of continental politics. In the case of the Danish Social Democrats (Socialdemokratiet), they were able to win back government in 2019 by maintaining their tradition positions on social welfare, and calling for an earlier retirement age for labor careers, but also by pivoting to the hard-right on immigration issues thereby undercutting the nationalist Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti).
In France, Emmanuel Macron upturned the political status quo by creating his own party, En Marche, and proceeding to win both the presidency and a near majority in the National Assembly. However his politics are essentially a French “third way” appearing in the form of a new party, not in the reformation of the traditional center-left Socialist Party (Parti socialiste). Furthermore, Macron has adopted some cultural right wing positions in order to stave off his most significant threat in the newly re-minted far-right, Islamophobic National Rally party (Rassemblement national).
The crumbling of the traditional center-left continues elsewhere. In Italy, a failed attempt to amend the anemic and poorly designed senate by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in 2016 led to his resignation and the basementing of his Democratic Party (Partito Democratico). In 2018, the Austrian center-right joined with the far-right, nationalist Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) in forming a government until the latter was exposed for attempting to buy Russian electoral support before the election. In the Netherlands, the Labor party (Partij van de Arbeid) has gone from the primary center-left party to a near afterthought in the last decade.
These examples of parties going from the primary left-wing alternative to hangers-on is indicative of the fickle nature of politics and the danger for all political parties in a representative and competitive democracy. No position should be taken for granted which is why political hardliners tend to leave parties at the whim of the voters. When the migrant crisis struck Europe in the 2010s, it provided a golden opportunity for far-right, xenophobic parties to take center stage. Meanwhile, traditional center-left parties had little policy to offer that satisfied the emotions of the voters who had been whipped into a frenzy after breathless media coverage and images of thousands of people seeking help. Furthermore, the growth of climate change as a driving political force may lead to the further sidelining of social democratic and labor parties in favor of green parties who are built to directly face the problem.
Why a party? What’s the point?
So if parties live precarious lives and have little guarantee of sustained success, should they be built around distinct ideological positions or have the flexibility to adapt to the pressures of the day? From my perspective I think it’s clear that political parties should be built for flexibility, particularly in systems that have few legitimate choices like the US or the UK.
Parties like to publish platforms before each election in which they layout their policy goals and frame issues in a way that will get voters to vote for them. But they don’t necessarily have to do this. Famously, the Republican party decided to re-issue their 2016 platform in 2020 even after they had controlled the White House for four years and all of Congress for two. The move seemed callus and shallow, indicative of a party that was captured by Donald Trump, and to a certain extent it was. But it also showed just how clearly the goal of a party differs from its most ideologically centered supporters.
A party is built to get the most votes and amass the most power.
It may feel deeply unsatisfying as a voter to think of the party you are voting for as simply a vehicle for power accumulation, but at its most basic level and with its most basic reasoning, that is precisely what parties do.
Political parties don’t generally enact legislation because they think its great legislation, they do it because they think it can win them more votes! Part of the current Biden administration’s calculations are that passing large economic bills are popular among a large majority of Americans and that passing them will help Democrats in 2022. Part of the current GOP thinking in changing voter laws in state legislatures is that it will prevent some Democratic voters from getting to the polls allowing Republicans to receive more votes. While I think the latter is dangerous for a democratic system, both these techniques are indicative of the nature of parties: all actions are built to attract more votes and win elections.
What does this mean for political activists?
Political activism and political party participation are two different things. Activists tend to find parties frustrating because they don’t move as quickly or decisively as many activists would like towards what they think is the most politically important issue. As discussed, parties look for means to win more voters and gain more power. If a party is not convinced that the position of an activist is truly popular enough to win more votes, they will probably stay away. Likewise, if a party sees a candidate or politician as being overly devise, they will probably attempt to keep them from running for important offices.
Rightly or wrongly, the decision of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Pete Buttigieg to drop out of the race and endorse Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders (at the urging or many Democratic officials and former office holders) was indicative of this sort of calculus. While some Sanders supporters accused the party of acting unfairly towards their preferred candidate or even accused the party of defending its rich donors from a possible Sanders presidency, the reality was one of a party deciding to go with a candidate they thought would win more votes in the general election. No conspiracy is needed, parties are not internally democratic, they are democratic vehicles built to guild themselves to electoral victories.
So where does this leave political activism? For one, political activists should accept that the party that is currently closest to their desired policies view their job as getting votes. That means activists should find ways of convincing parties that their policy positions are in fact popular and would lead to greater electoral success down the line if enacted. Secondly, activists could approach their causes with more political strategy in mind. Just as a defense lawyer builds their arguments around the peculiarities of the law, so too should activists build their strategies around the peculiarities of electoral politics. Something can be both morally right and politically unpopular. Successful activism involves the changing of minds before the enactment of policy. Rarely does politics swim upstream of popular opinion.
This shouldn’t be interpreted as dismissive of activism or as some sort of call to end the criticisms of major political parties. Rather, this article is an attempt to reorient the viewpoint of those who wish to see actual policy enacted. Instead of expressing condemnation at the perceived missteps of a politician, we should view their decision making through the lens of electoral strategy. Making policy popular makes politics easier. Strategy that correctly identifies the incentive structures of a system is often effective. Strategy that creates a fantasy about the desirable over the real is dead on arrival.
