The Intelligentsia’s New Clothes

This chapter concerns how the main political traditions have prescribed the role of the state and how they have shaped it when in government since the late 1970s. It examines the major political families and party groupings rather than individual parties. The chapter concentrates on the communalities and similarities of the parties of each major ideological strand rather than focusing on those aspects which make each party distinctive. It covers six countries, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Austria. The chapter deals with the development of the conservative and Christian democratic parties. In the 1970s and 1980s Christian democratic and conservative parties adopted or 'rediscovered' neo-liberal economic ideas and since then have departed from the 'social democratic consensus'. The chapter analyses the changes in the perception of the proper role of the state that social democratic parties went through. The programmatic innovation can be summarised under three headings: review of state activities, marketisation and Europeanisation.

Authors’ Response

For the first time, this book reveals the actual roles of the Christian Democratic (CD) parties in postwar Europe from a pan-European perspective. It shows how Christian Democratic parties became the dominant political force in postwar Western Europe, and how the European People's Party is currently the largest group in the European Parliament. CD parties and political leaders like Adenauer, Schuman and De Gasperi played a particularly important role in the evolution of the 'core Europe' of the EEC/EC after 1945. Key chapters address the same questions about the parties' membership and social organization; their economic and social policies; and their European and international policies during the Cold War. The book also includes two survey chapters setting out the international political context for CD parties and comparing their postwar development, and two chapters on their transnational party cooperation after 1945. This is the companion volume to Political Catholicism in Europe 1918-1945.

After the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 and its protections were broadened ten years later to include “language minorities,” the law made the ballot more accessible to Black and Brown voters. Oliver Richomme explains that they would not merely participate in elections but became integrally involved in California's redistricting process, further complicating an already convoluted practice. Additional factors in the second half of the twentieth century made the drawing of lines on a map increasingly contentious.In Race and Partisanship in California Redistricting, Richomme argues that race and partisanship are closely linked to redistricting and that the political forces and events within a decade influence the subsequent decades’ redistricting process. To study the connection between race and partisanship and how redistricting changes over time, Richomme studies fifty years of California's history of redistricting. He claims that as the state's racial diversity continues to grow along with their demand for equitable representation (largely within the Democratic Party), redistricting reform will generate racial and partisan polarization. With no alternative to achieve racial fairness in electoral politics, the author insists that redistricting will persist as a “conundrum of American society” (p. 373).Race and Partisanship in California Redistricting starts to chart the evolution of redistricting in the 1960s. Chapter 1 explains how the courts in the sixties ended malapportionment in California, giving Black and Brown people in urban centers a stronger political voice. As these voters entered the political arena, they increasingly sought representation from candidates of their own background and so, instead of incumbent protection being a priority in the redistricting process, race rose to the top and became entangled with this political exercise. The second chapter describes how the California Supreme Court entered the redistricting process in 1971, adding another element to influence how boundaries were drawn. As California's Latino population grew between 1970 and 1980, both the Democratic and Republican Parties courted the Latino vote. With much at stake, chapter 3 shows how the Democrats strategically selected Black and Brown politicians to advance a redistricting model that increased the number of people of color elected within the party.By the late 1980s, Latino voters mobilized to advance their political gains and turned to the federal courts to redraw election districts while the Republican Party, in the 1990s, attempted to use direct democracy. Chapter 4 shows how Latinos successfully argued before the US District Court that Los Angeles County intentionally diluted Latino's voting power, leading to the creation of a majority district. The fifth chapter covers California's Republican Party, which spent millions of dollars, after losing political ground, to pass initiatives to make the redistricting process favorable to their party. The propositions failed and instead of appealing to Latino voters, Republican Governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigrant measures pushed the Latino community away and toward the Democratic Party. These chapters clearly demonstrate the significant role the federal courts and direct democracy had on redistricting negotiations.In the last four chapters, Richomme demonstrates how divisions within the Democratic Party, passage of the California Voting Rights Act in 2001, and creation of the California Redistricting Commission in 2008 contributed to shifting the redistricting process away from the legislature to an independent citizens commission. The evolution of the state's drawing of election maps has mitigated partisan gerrymandering, but an independent redistricting commission still “needs to find the right balance between race and politics” (p. 371) writes Richomme.Race and Partisanship in California Redistricting succeeds in tracing California's history of redistricting. Richomme identifies key political events that moved both the Democratic and Republican Parties to continuously alter their approach to redistricting. And after the 1960s, using race to engineer majority-minority districts to achieve fair and equal representation seemed unavoidable. What is not fully explored is how the redistricting process has undermined the nation's supposed belief in color blindness. While both parties embraced the rhetoric of fair and equal elections, they remain grounded on a winner-take-all philosophy that is willing to use race as they see fit to win elections.This text builds on the growing scholarship that traces the total effects of the Voting Rights Act and its impact on redistricting process, particularly in California. As discussions about race and politics continue to dominate headlines, this important work can help people understand how these conversations will potentially shape the creation of new election districts.

Is the welfare state in Italy, a quintessentially Christian Democratic polity, a ‘Christian Democratic welfare state (CDWS)?’ The Italian welfare state has most, if not all, of the hallmarks of what is often referred to in the comparative welfare state literature as a CDWS: contributory social insurance programs linked to occupation that reproduce status differentials, a predominance of transfers over services, low female force participation, and low employment rates among others. The key explanation in the comparative literature for the emergence of these features in a number of countries has been Christian Democratic party strength, usually measured as ‘government participation of Christian Democratic parties’ (Huber et al. 1993; Huber and Stephens 2001). In Italy, both the institutional features and the political strength of Democrazia Cristiana ([DC], i.e., the Christian Democratic party) are undeniably present, lending plausibility to the argument that Christian Democracy built the Italian welfare state. Yet, this view of the Italian welfare state as organically related to the political strength of a Christian Democratic party does not, I argue, concern itself adequately with the mechanisms by which Christian Democracy as a political phenomenon becomes translated into welfare state structures. Indeed, it tells us little about how Christian Democratic parties may have created homologous welfare states, as distinct from the welfare states constructed in polities dominated by social democratic or liberal parties. A second strain of thought in the comparative literature has done more to uncover the causal mechanisms at work (Becker and van Kersbergen 1988; Esping-Andersen 1990, 1998; van Kersbergen 1995).

This essay is a theoretical and historical analysis of how and why Chile’s political Catholicism followed a unique course of development during the first half of the twentieth century. For most part of modern history, Catholicism and democratic Liberalism were antithetical worldviews; however, during the first decades of the twentieth century, political Catholicism in Chile followed a political path that embraced the basic tenet of Liberalism, postponing political polarization, violence, and authoritarianism which had engulfed other Catholic societies. In the earliest phase of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party, from 1934 to1941, two groups of individuals fought an ideological battle over opposing conceptions of society. The democratic faction of the young Catholic party, led by Eduardo Frei Montalva, prevailed against the Fascism-inspired group. That was the beginning of the first successful Catholic Democratic party in modern history. The principal purpose of this essay is to explain why Chile’s pol...

Democratic Parties in Europe since the End of the Cold War. Edited by Steven Van Hecke and Emmanuel Gerard. [KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society, Volume 1.] (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press. 2004. Pp. 343. euro29 paperback.) Among the most important phenomena of the postwar period, Democracy continues to remain relatively under-researched. Perhaps that is the price of its prosaic success. A pillar of European integration, political moderation, and democratic stability, the movement has seldom been flashy; and the diverse national fortunes and profiles of Democratic parties defy easy categorization. Even defining what parties ought to count as Democratic causes dispute. This volume grew out of a conference held in Belgium in 2003 on Democracy in Europe since the end of the Cold War. National case studies are augmented here by papers that evaluate transnational trends. The case studies focus on Democracy -where it has historically been strongest-Germany, Austria, Italy, and the Benelux countries-but also where its fortunes have been more mixed, including France, Spain, and Scandinavia. For the stronger Democratic parties, this period has been marked by electoral crisis. Yet, most of these parties have recently bounced back, while some of the weaker parties have actually become more prominent than in the past. Two salient features contexualize the period: a softening in the anticommunist electoral solidarity that had underpinned Democracy's earlier success; and a postindustrial, media-aided reconfiguration of the social landscape. By weakening the coherence and institutional loyalties of formerly reliable Democratic voting blocks, the latter phenomenon has led to the depillarization(pp. 160-161 and elsewhere) of Democratic parties. In the volatile post-Cold War electoral climate, depillarization has represented both a crisis and an opportunity for reform. While the stronger parties have lost institutional allies that formerly delivered the voters, this loosening has also opened spaces for discourse between realists and purists (p. 292) about the philosophical meaning of Christian Democracy. Both postcommunist neoliberalism and a version of postmaterial critique have figured in that discourse. While the Austrian party (for example) has effectively employed the former in order to win back support, it is the latter that has helped some weaker Democratic parties to profile themselves. It has also allowed some remnants of the crisis-torn Italian movement to begin to overcome the legacy of identification with horse-trading and corruption. The varying fortunes of Democratic parties since 1989 reflect both local structural peculiarities and differing degrees of astuteness among party leaders from country to country as they tried to gauge how the new challenge meshed with the new opportunities. …

This chapter discusses the political history of the advanced Western world and what is usually referred to as “new social democracy,” or the “New Democratic Party,” may deserve the attention of political theorists and commentators. The notion of new social democracy is a broad concept, which often includes very different policies. Schroder’s party is not the same as the New Democratic Party, and of course the French socialists, if they deserve the label “new social democracy” at all, are very different from the American, English, and German version of the movements. The Christian Democratic and conservative parties lost the elections to “new social democrats” while in postcommunist Central Europe the last years of the century represented a crisis of the political Left. Under the circumstances traditional social democracy can perform useful functions in transitional societies. New social democracy is a response to neoliberal excesses in the scaling back of the traditional social-democratic welfare state.

* Francis Sejersted. The Age of Social Democracy; Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century. Trans. Richard Daly. Ed. Madeline B. Adams. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. 560. Thanks to Princeton University Press and the hard work of its translator and editor, this ambitious and comprehensive work by one of Scandinavia's senior contemporary historians is available to a wider readership than the Norwegian version published in 2005. This is a thorough, thoughtful and comparative history of how the social democratic vision was applied in its two paragons. Although the social democratic ideology and its have been significant in almost every western democracy during the past century (with the United States the notable exception), its hegemony has been greatest and most sustained in Scandinavia and in Norway and Sweden in particular. For most of the period between the 1930s and the 1970s Social Democratic or Labor parties governed in Stockholm and Oslo (and Copenhagen too). The World War II years were, of course, exceptions. Indeed they remain either the governing or principal opposition parties to this day. Their hegemony is gone and their future cloudy, but modern Scandinavia and indeed modem Western Europe reflect the social democratic project. While American conservatives (e.g. Republicans) have long railed at the perils of European socialism their sister parties (i.e. Euro-conservative and Christian Democratic parties) have largely adopted and adapted to the social democratic model and surprisingly even contributed to it. Sejersted has accomplished three main tasks with this work. First he relates the culmination of the modern Swedish and Norwegian states based on constitutional parliamentary democracy. Although both countries have ancient roots, their modem political institutions belong primarily to the twentieth century. With the break-up of the Swedish-Norwegian Union (dual monarchy) in 1905 and the attainment of full parliamentary democracy in Sweden in 1918 (Norway having achieved it in 1884), their political focus would be on coping with industrial society and achieving social and economic democracy. Secondly, the Social Democratic (Labor) parties would rise from minority status to become the largest (although rarely absolute majority). They would govern for most of the century and cope with domestic and foreign crises far more severe than those of the nineteenth century. Part of the great bargain that achieved full political democracy was proportional representation of ali but the tiniest parties. In most parliamentary systems this often doomed to continuing instability with at worst the collapse of constitutional democracy (Italy and Germany during the interwar period). While political stability was initially wobbly in Norway and Sweden, it would crystallize into strong governments and the politics of compromise (Dan Rustow's felicitous phrase) during the crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Thirdly, Sejersted records the dissatisfaction of increasing expectations (in Tage Erlander's ironic words, p. 491) that ended the social democratic hegemony in both countries after 1975. Norway had alternating social democratic and non-socialist governments from 1965, and Sweden followed this pattern a decade later. The change was not just electoral outcomes but in the discourse of contemporary politics. The path is not linear; Sejersted discusses the widening swing of the political pendulum: the rise and fall of neo-Marxism and the New Left, student and youth movements, feminism in its various forms, multiculturalism and the anti-immigration populism, globalization, neo-liberalism, and a host of other new currents. The basic outline of the book is chronological and comparative. …

The article is a reconstruction of the most important strands in the historiography devoted to the political activity of the laity after 1945, especially the period between 1945 and 1948. The author first discusses pre-1989 literature and then the most recent studies devoted to political Catholicism in Poland. In the main part of the article he presents three strands in historiography: research into the Labour Party, research into groups associated with Catholic socio-political weeklies, and biographies and syntheses of the history of the Catholics and the Church.

The Turkish military launched a coup d'état on May 27, 1960. The leaders of the Democratic Party (DP), Adnan Menderes, Hasan Polatkan, and Fatin Rüstü Zorlu, were executed after trial. Although this coup had many causes, including repression of the regime, allegations of corruption against the rulers, dependency on foreign powers, and attacks on Kemalist principles in general and secularism in particular were important factors. May 1960 was the first time the military intervened in Turkish civilian politics. Since Ottoman times the army has played a major role in the political life of the country. The DP's policy of de‐bureaucratizing meant official elites lost not only their representation in parliament and their close links with political elites, but also much of their economic power, prestige, and influence. There is agreement among many researchers that the 1960 coup demonstrated the quest of the military‐bureaucratic elite to return to the center, to revive its diminishing role in the nation's politics.

Representative government in Venezuela is in its infancy. Experience with the techniques of political competition within a democratic framework has until recently been almost non-existent. Yet the vigor and determination with which strides toward economic development and political legitimation are being executed suggest that perhaps the nation may be able to accomplish the task of creating a stable and effective polity without the sacrifice of respect for human dignity that has been so commonplace elsewhere. Political parties have had a key role in this process; they have, in effect, been instruments of transition.This essay analyzes the evolution and growth of one of these parties — the Christian Democratic party — an organization which, ranking second in size only to Rómulo Betancourt's Acción Democrática, stands today in a pivotal position in the nation's distribution of political power.

Encuentros Con El Yanqui: Norteamericanización Y Cambio Cultural En Chile, 1898–1990

R. Naumann is a professor of Humboldt University in Berlin. His book analyzes the Western German economy, and the theory of neoliberalism which serves as a basis for Western German policy as well as the economic miracle of Western Germany, attributed to the free market economy. The Christian Democratic Party, the Free Democratic Party and the right wing of the Social Democratic Party are united on this basis. The Social Democratic Party proclaims freedom of private initiative as the basis and free competition as an important means of the free policy.

ITALIAN NEWSPAPERS__ AND THE MORO AFFAIR John L. Harper O'n the morning of March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democratic party (DC), and his plain-clothes escort were ambushed at the corner of via Mario Fani and via Stresa, near Moro's home in northwest Rome. In less than five minutes, a nine-member "commando" team blocked the Moro party's two automobiles, seized the party president, and sped him off to a secret "people's prison." The gunmen (and one woman) were members of the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), a clandestine organization whose aim was to overthrow the Italian state. Moro's five bodyguards were killed or mortally wounded on the spot. Only one managed to escape from his car and return a few shots before falling backward onto via Fani under pistol and submachine gun fire. So began the extraordinary "Moro affair," a drama that consumed the world's attention until, after fifty-five days of soul-searching, pathos, and suspense, it ended, as it began, in violent death. Moro's body, containing eleven bullets, was found on May 9 in the rear compartment of a red Renault-4. The Renault was parked in via Caetani, a small street in central Rome, near both Christian Democratic and Communist party headquarters. Aldo Moro was Italy's most important political leader. Today, ten years after his kidnapping and murder, these events can be seen as a turning point in Italian postwar history. Moro's disappearance marked the beginning of the end of collaboration between the DC and the Italian Communist party (PCI) that Moro himself had promoted. It also provided the shock that led the political system to mobilize its resources decisively against a left-wing terrorist assault. Finally, the Moro affair sparked an John L. Harper is associate professor of European studies and U.S. foreign policy at The Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, Bologna Center in Italy. 247 248 SAIS REVIEW inconclusive but fascinating and instructive debate about the behavior of the Italian information media during a serious terrorist incident. The Italian printed press played an active role during what was both a major national emergency and a compelling news event. Moro's importance arose from his ability to design alliances for a party that had long since lost its absolute majority but was determined to keep its preeminent political role. In the early 1960s Moro had coopted and domesticated the Italian Socialist party (PSI). In the mid-1970s he turned his attention to the Communists, whose own strategy after 1973 called for a "historic compromise," or coalition with the DC. Co-opting the Communists, however, was a riskier operation, as many feared that the powerful PCI, under its charismatic leader Enrico Berlinguer, would gain the upper hand in a power-sharing arrangement. Still, after the PCIs advance in the 1976 elections, even such conservative DC leaders as Giulio Andreotti realized that temporary cooperation with the Communists was unavoidable in order to guarantee a stable government majority and deal with a serious economic crisis. Arrangements including indirect PCI support for a government headed by Andreotti had broken down in late 1977, leading to a twomonth political crisis. On the morning of his kidnapping Moro was on his way to parliament for the vote of confidence that was to end the crisis on the basis of a compromise that Moro himself had designed. According to Moro's plan, the PCI would convert its abstention into active membership in the majority (along with the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Republicans, and the Social Democrats), something that had been strongly opposed by most Christian Democrats, as well as Italy's major allies. In return, the Communists were to receive far less (a greater voice in the government program) than they had initially demanded (several ministerial posts). Moro was the only man with sufficient persuasive power and political authority to arrange a deal that would avoid new elections and a breakdown in "national solidarity," as budding DC-PCI cooperation was called. It was only natural that the BR saw Moro as a master architect and manipulator of the Italian political system. By seizing him, they hoped to...