Among the collateral victims of the global crisis that began about ten years ago, political parties are not the least. A large-scale comparative essay offers a stimulating interpretation of these ongoing transformations.
In political science, many works have recently analyzed the electoral consequences of what the English-language literature calls the “Great Recession” of 2008. Initially, countering alarmist discourses, research has insisted on the fact that electoral movements – in particular the rise of populist radical right – had emerged well before the economic and financial crisis of 2008 and that while the latter may have amplified them, the political consequences of the crisis were more limited than one might expect. Then, gradually, studies have reassessed the impact not only of the economic crisis, but of other upheavals that are concomitant with it, whether linked to terrorism or refugee movements. They have focused attention on the short-term effects of the electoral sanction of the parties in power and which, given the regular alternations, can structurally weaken the major government parties. They also took into account the longer-term effects brought about by economic and social dynamics which lead to a profound reconfiguration of party systems.
Pierre Martin’s work takes its place in these debates. Research engineer at CNRS working at the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies, he is a recognized specialist in electoral systems and realignments. The first merit of his book lies in the breadth of the reflection it engages. Historical breadth first, since the analysis embraces the electoral developments that have affected, since 1945, the partisan systems of fifteen countries characterized by a high level of economic development and the continued practice of free elections. Breadth of interpretation also, since the author demonstrates a rare and commendable ability to give meaning to these electoral and partisan developments by mobilizing data that – as he recognizes from the outset – remain second-hand and even quite basic. In a field where we are more often confronted with statistical “gas factories” giving birth to theoretical mice, it is fortunately the opposite that he offers us. This ability to “make series of figures speak” must therefore be welcomed, as must the connection between very different scientific literatures, at a time when there is a tendency towards the fragmentation of knowledge.
P. Martin’s explanatory system is in line with Stein Rokkan’s work in macro-historical political sociology. In line with Stein Rokkan and Seymour Lipset’s theory of cleavages, he makes the link between the mutation of party systems and the profound economic, social and political transformations that have marked contemporary developed societies. The book begins by making a diagnosis of the forms of decline of party systems. He first notes, after others, that the weakening movement does not date from the economic and financial crisis of 2008, but began in the 1970s. It resulted in three concomitant developments: the decline in the ballot boxes of government parties, whether social democratic or moderate right-wing parties; the decline in electoral participation, particularly pronounced in large countries such as France, Great Britain, Italy and Germany, and the increase in voter volatility, in other words, voter transfers between two consecutive elections. All of these movements have generally been amplified by what Pierre Martin calls the “post-2008 polycrisis”, linked to the disruption of the capitalist system, the refugee crisis and the wave of terrorism. But far from being cyclical, the weakening of party systems draws on structural transformations that lead to an erosion of what he calls the “club of government parties”, a selective group to which parties gain access if they satisfy three conditions: wanting, being able and being capable of remaining in government. One of the notable recent phenomena is that this erosion is even evident in southern European countries, such as Spain and Greece, whose government parties had so far held up better than elsewhere, but which were hit hard by the 2008 recession.
Following in the footsteps of Hanspeter Kriesi – who also wrote the afterword to the book – Pierre Martin had already insisted in previous publications on the need to update the theory of divisions around the emergence of a “World Revolution”. The latter manifests itself at the institutional level (development of para-state institutions), economic-financial (acceleration of trade), human (migrations), cultural (diffusion of cultural standards), etc. It is based, still in the logic of the Rokkanian model, on the constitution of new elites, here described as “globalizers” who bring about change, who embody it and who then become the targets of resistance movements (in particular of the populist radical right).
Beyond this diagnosis and the updating of the theory of cleavages, the interest of the work also lies in the fact that Pierre Martin risks putting into discussion an ambitious framework of interpretation, associating two types of explanation, by supply and by demand. The destabilization of party systems is thus explained first by the evolution of the political offer: this would find itself doubly discredited by the reduction of its room for maneuver and by the accentuation of the closure of the political class. The installation of the major government parties after 1945 – in particular, but not exclusively, those from social democracy – was based on their capacity to redistribute the goods of economic growth, the recession therefore deprived them of this capacity and undermined their managerial credibility. Still on the supply side, Pierre Martin also insists on the phenomena of self-isolation of a political class fueled by the phenomena of professionalization, cartelization and globalization producing elites increasingly cut off from national populations.
But this change in political supply would not be enough to explain, according to him, the weakening of partisan systems without the symmetrical existence of a transformation of demand. This is characterized, on the one hand, by the rise of consumerist behaviors and expectations – and the frustrations that result from them – including in the public sphere and, on the other hand, by what he calls the “anti-bureaucratic revolt”, a consequence of the normative proliferation within both private and public bureaucracies, generated by the movement to supervise the behaviors specific to the neo-liberal system. These two changes testify to a deep crisis of capitalism that feeds a “loop” of social acceleration.
The reflection proves to be particularly suggestive, even if one can regret the disjointed form of the whole. The chapters are organized in a somewhat disorderly manner, between those devoted to chronological periods and those referring to geographical areas, which sometimes gives the impression of repetition. Some passages are similar to very general reflections, such as chapter 4 which summarizes, in a somewhat choppy manner, the major historical stages of the political structuring of political systems. Finally, the proposed explanatory framework is based on more or less elaborate elements. For example, if the idea of a spread of consumerism or that of a “bureaucratic revolt” appear entirely plausible, the argument here appears poorly documented. Thus, to support the idea of a proliferation of norms and standards, before Béatrice Hibou’s essay on the bureaucratization of the world, it would be necessary to mobilize the reference work of Brunsson and Jacobsson which is precisely interested in this diffusion of norms and standards. In short, the entire argument could have been worked on more. But these criticisms do not detract from the fact that the work feeds in a particularly stimulating way the central debate on partisan transformations. As proof, the discussion initiated by Hanspeter Kriesi in the afterword allows us to grasp the topicality of the debate around the structuring of partisan systems. If Pierre Martin and Hanspeter Kriesi both agree in considering the movement of globalization as the central dynamic of restructuring of contemporary partisan systems, they diverge as to the existence of a second-rank cleavage. A few years ago, Pierre Martin considered that this second Man/Nature divide was “directly linked to the global awareness of an ecological danger (pollution of the environment, exhaustion of natural resources, questioning of the ecological balance)”. Today, he returns to this analysis considering that environmental issues do not constitute a divide in the proper sense of the term insofar as this division is not anchored on a sociological basis, the ecological movements having failed in this area. However, he persists in the idea of a second divide: for him, to the divide concerning the very principle of globalization is added a new divide, relating to the modalities of this transformation and opposing alter-globalists and neo-liberals. He identifies its emergence in the rise of the radical left in countries such as Greece, Spain, Ireland or France.
For his part, Hanspeter Kriesi has never been convinced by the existence of a second divide. He has always thought that ecology was constitutive of the “identity/cosmopolitism” divide: environmentalists historically representing one of the structuring elements of the “second left” and remaining the pole most opposed to the radical right. That this second divide is today reclassified by Pierre Martin as “alter-globalist/neo-liberal” does not change his opinion. He insists on the fact that the transformations that allow the latter to hypothesize the emergence of this new divide concern, for the most part, Southern Europe, that they denote specificities specific to these systems and that they are primarily a form of “catching up” (p. 285).
Behind this debate of experts are emerging questions that are at the heart of current political events. Will the new party systems restructure themselves around a dual opposition between “cosmopolites” and “identitarians” or around a new configuration around three poles: a conservative-identitarian right, an eco-socialist democratic left and a globalizing liberal center?