Never frozen politics? Persistence and change in party systems and individual parties in redemocratizing countries.

Abstract

Political parties are central actors in modern democracies. Whether, and how, parties and party systems change are important questions in understanding how democracies function. Assertions of earlier freezing in western European party systems are puzzling in light of recent models explaining party system transformation since at least some of the factors in the model should have been affected by regime changes and economic changes in western Europe earlier this century. Either party systems have changed more than has been recognized, or our understanding of transformation needs to be rethought. I examine the consequences of interruptions in democracy for party systems and present hypotheses regarding the conditions under which we should see change in the effective number of parties, social orientation, and bloc volatility. Data from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Greece, and Spain are used to test the hypotheses. Because system level components may not capture all changes, at the individual party level I again look at the cause and process of change in general and consider how variables associated with redemocratization should affect a party's organizational structure, issue basis, and social structure. A case study of party level developments in Austria applies and tests this model. The results demonstrate that freezing is an exceptional outcome, but there is a legacy of the past at both the system and individual party level. One of the key findings of this dissertation is the decline in the effective number of parties. Another important finding is the variation in the breadth and depth of change at the system level. While some countries (e.g. Denmark) showed high persistence on all three components, others (e.g. Spain) showed high change on all three components. Most countries fell somewhere in between, with moderate to high change on one or two components and moderate to high persistence on the other component(s). The case study of Austria demonstrates that even in a country which did not exhibit many system level changes modifications by the two major parties go a long way toward explaining why the regime and the grand coalition in the Second Republic was both possible and successful.