Party Crisis Research Articles

The decline of populism? Crisis of trust and parties of political alternative in modern Italy

The decline of populism? Crisis of trust and parties of political alternative in modern Italy

Democratic Party Crisis as Result of the Middle East Conflict-2023

The unprecedented October 7, 2023, attack by the paramilitary wing of Hamas against Israeli civilians and peaceful targets has thoroughly shaken up social and political forces in the United States, Israel's main traditional ally. The ideological outbreak of pro-Palestinian Americans, many of whom constituted the core constituency of the Democratic Party candidate in the last presidential election, briefly weakened the cohesion of Biden's supporters in the 2024 election. Whether the Democratic Party will be able to hold on to its supporters under the pressure of ideological differences over the Middle East conflict is an open question.

K slovenským národně‑emancipačním snahám na půdě Československé strany národně socialistické

This study investigates the establishment of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party in Slovakia during the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic from 1918 to 1938. It examines the centralist approach employed by the party to manage the Slovak provincial organization, which eventually clashed with the predominantly nationalist-driven efforts of the Slovak party leadership. The tensions between the Czech and Slovak parts of the party arose due to the absence of a provincial party executive committee, a lack of programmatic theses that considered the specific needs of the region, unresolved issues of financing the party’s activities, and differing views on the political competences of the central and provincial party centres. These issues led to an internal party crisis in Slovakia in the mid-1930s, which was resolved by loosening the Slovak party organization’s ties to Prague

Multi-level political change: Assessing electoral volatility in 58 European regions (1993-2022)

In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to electoral turmoil associated with the emergence of new political actors or the crisis of established parties at national level. However, in multi-level systems, transformations have also affected sub-national politics. This article seeks to understand some hitherto unexplored aspects of political change in regional party systems. Change is linked to the concept of instability and operationalized in terms of electoral volatility. To account for the fact that instability may be driven by distinct regional and national pressures coexisting in regional elections, a new measure of volatility has been developed. It is disaggregated into two territorial components: ‘Region-specific volatility’ (RSV) and ‘Region-transcending volatility’ (RTV). RSV refers to changes in electoral support for political parties competing exclusively in one region, while RTV is calculated for parties that ‘transcend’ regional boundaries – i.e. they are electorally active in several/all regions of a country or are part of institutionalized inter-regional networks. By applying this new measure to 385 elections in 58 European regions, this article shows that levels and types of instability have varied significantly over time, across regions and across countries. This may also account for different developments in territorial politics observed in Western Europe.

The party «Citizens» during the crisis of executive power in Spain (2015-2019)

The paper explores the activities of the party «Citizens» with a focus on its role in the development of the protracted crisis of executive power in Spain. For four years, the country has faced the problem of forming a government: during that period, early national elections were held four times, Spain lived without a government twice. The author studies the peculiarities of ideological image, social support and organizational principles; examines their evolution in connection with the development of crisis phenomena in the social and political life of Spain. Special emphasis is given to analysis of the maneuvers of the «Citizens» at the national and regional levels. It is concluded that the «Citizens» sought to realize their political potential: the party largely determined the process of forming government coalitions. Until 2019, «Citizens» successfully collaborated with two leading forces – socialists and conservatives. The lack of a clear self-identification of «Citizens» contributed to the maneuvering of the party and attracting the attention of the electorate with different political views. The partnership of «Citizens» with opposing forces led to a serious internal party crisis, as a result of which the party lost its political weight at the national level. In the period of the crisis the «Citizens» managed to become an integral part of the political system and determine the general direction of the transformation of the spanish bipartism towards confrontation between the conditionally left and right coalition.

Deliberative democracy in contemporary political parties: Longitudinal evidence from Norway

Parties lose members, and organizational measures adopted to counter the alleged “crisis of parties” have often turned out to be counterproductive. In response to this development, scholars have argued that parties need to strengthen their deliberative capacity. Despite this (normative) claim, we know very little about levels of deliberation in contemporary parties. Based on unique longitudinal surveys among Norwegian party members between 1991 and 2017, the article analyzes levels of deliberative capacity across time and parties. The study finds a substantial level of deliberative capacity and that this capacity has been strengthened in recent decades. There is some inter-party variation, but it reflects the organizational origin of the parties only to a limited degree. The findings suggest that the deliberative capacity of political parties is far better than often assumed in the literature. Therefore, the study argues that “crisis” is a term unfit to describe recent developments in contemporary parties in Norway, and that membership figures alone are an insufficient indicator to measure the linkage potential of party organizations in democracies.

Increasing the Popularity of Antisystem (Non-Traditional) Parties in the Czech Republic

The article examines the course of the elections to the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, their role and place in the political process of the country. The author argues that pluralism of opinion and multiparty system in the Czech Republic practically confirm their real strength, as evidenced by the participation of many parties in parliamentary elections and the fact, that that nine of them managed to overcome the 5% barrier and to obtain a certain number of deputy mandates. The programs of parliamentary parties are analyzed, their main election slogans and the results they achieved in the elections. Much attention in the article is paid to the winner of this election – the centrist political force – movement "Action of dissatisfied citizens", whose leader was appointed Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. Emphasis is placed on new trends in the political process, which were confirmed during the will of the people. Among them, the author highlights the growing popularity of anti-system (non-traditional) parties. In their election statements, these parties set out to protest the change in the political system of society. Along with this process, the crisis of traditional parties deepened, who were previously members of the governing bodies of the state, but they failed to demonstrate their compliance with voter inquiries, who sought solutions to pressing issues. This is confirmed by the results of traditional Czech parties – Communist Party of the Czech Republic and Moravia, which managed to get only 7.76% of the vote of the voters and the leader of the previous elections – the Czech Social Democratic Party, which won the support of only 7.27% of voters, having lost almost 13% of the vote in four years.

Günther Pallaver, Michael Gehler, and Maurizio Cau, eds. Populism, Populists, and the Crisis of Political Parties: A Comparison of Italy, Austria, and Germany 1990–2015. Bologna: Societá editrice il Mulino, 2018. Pp. 338.

Günther Pallaver, Michael Gehler, and Maurizio Cau, eds. Populism, Populists, and the Crisis of Political Parties: A Comparison of Italy, Austria, and Germany 1990–2015. Bologna: Societá editrice il Mulino, 2018. Pp. 338.

The fourth stage of social democracy

This article examines the political crisis of social-democratic parties in Western Europe in light of its impact on the social-democratic emancipatory project, and asks whether the first calls the second into question. It begins by defining social democracy as an emancipatory project, and identifies three major historical phases that correspond to three distinct conceptions of the project. “Social-democratic dilemmas” section examines recent literature in comparative welfare state economics, political sociology, and studies of populism and authoritarianism, to show how the socio-economic transformations of the last five decades have enlarged and fragmented the constituency of social-democratic parties, and contends that this situation has generated powerful tensions between the normative and the mundane dimensions of the social-democratic project. Three major dilemmas—economic, cultural, and political—leading to three deep conflicts internal to the social-democratic constituency are identified and discussed. Combining these empirical findings with the three rival interpretations of the social-democratic project introduced in “Social democracy as an ideational and a mundane project” section, “Three scenarios” section develops three possible scenarios for the evolution of this project in the near future: decline, drift, and renewal. “Implications for policy and politics” section assesses the likelihood and political meaning of each scenario for the pursuit of the social-democratic project, taking into consideration the recent upsurge of left-wing populism.

Das tschechische Parlament in der Pandemie: Zum Krisenmanagement einer Minderheitsregierung

The pandemic crisis occurred while illiberal populist leaders governed in Central and East­ern Europe . The Czech Republic was faced with a simultaneous crisis of political parties and the transformation of its party system . The onset of these trends was triggered by the global financial crisis during which the established parties were weakened and the way to parliaments and governments was opened for populists parties . The fight against the pandemic brought changes to the functioning of parliaments and the need for parliamentary adaptations . The Czech case is the least likely of government dominance in a pandemic . Due to the weakness of the minority cabinet and the unprecedented fragmented Chamber of Deputies, the cabinet had to opt for temporary ad hoc alliances with different parties . Over the course of the pandemic, the political actors changed their political approach from cooperation to conflict, leading to government instability and the failure to effectively con­trol the spread of the pandemic, with the Czech Republic becoming one of the worst affect­ed countries in the world .

A Suggestion for Establishment of 'Party Crisis' Concept and Effective Measurement

본 연구는 ‘정당 위기’ 주장이 후발 민주주의 국가 사례에서 서구 정당과의 단순 비교, 저발전 및 혐오와의 혼용 등의 잘못을 범하고 있다는 판단하에 엄밀한 개념 정립과 평가 방식을 수립할 것을 제안하고 있다. 이를 위해 ‘정당 위기’ 상황을 정당 쇠퇴가 지속되어 ‘정당 실패’ 위험성이 가시적으로 커진 국면에 제한적으로 사용하고 있다. 이때 정당 쇠퇴는 ‘유권자 내 정당’과 ‘조직 수준 정당’과 관련되어 있고, 특히 정당 일체감의 약화, 선거 유동성의 증대, 투표율 감소, 당원 조직의 약화가 ‘지속’되는 경우로 보아 동태적 변화를 고려해야 한다고 주장한다. 정당 실패는 ‘정부 내 정당’에 해당하는 것으로 보고, 선거 결과 이 영역이 크게 축소되어 정치적 영향력이 현저하게 감소한 경우로 보았다. 이때 정치적 영향력은 분석 국가의 제도와 문화에 따라 기준을 세울 수 있다. 정당 위기는 이 쇠퇴와 실패의 분기점으로 보고 평가하는 것이 필요하다.This paper aims to define the theoretical meaning of party crisis and suggest how to measure it. This paper illuminates two main dimensions of ‘the crisis of political parties’: the decline and failure of political parties. The crisis of political parties occurs when political parties are in imminent danger of total failure with the consistent decline of people’s support for those parties. Specifically, the decline of political parties is mainly about people’s approval of parties whereas a certain party’s real influence on politics is a good measurement of party failure. With regard to ‘decline,’ this paper takes into account two dimensions of parties: ‘political party as organization’ and ‘party in the electorate.’ By the same token, number and influence of party figures in the cabinet were used to operationalize ‘party failure.’

Life After the Fight: Labor Trajectories and Emotional Stories of the Chilean Left in the Post-Dictatorship

This article analyzes the processes of social and political reconversion of the Chilean Left during the Post-Dictatorship period from a biographical perspective. By tracking professional and labor trajectories as well as emotional and family stories of thirty former militants of the parties that formed the Movimiento Democratico Popular (MDP 1983-1987), from 1990 until today, this study discusses the main changes in the forms of political participation in the last 30 years. Drawing on contributions from sociology of the individual as well as sociology of emotions, this paper interprets the dilemma of recomposing lives after anti dictatorship struggle: the exposure of contradictions in labor and economic reconversions, alongside the emotional costs of political participation. This findings allows to affirm that militants live painful processes and conflicting identity transformations which are not explained entirely by the end of political participation or the crisis of leftist parties during the nineties. This paper claims that these are highly complex processes of identity reconfiguration that arise from the way in which the interviewees elaborate the emotions associated with political commitment and reinterpret the political and collective meanings of their fighting experiences.

Recensão a] Gunther Pallaver, Michael Gehler, Maurizio Cau, (eds.) (2018). Populism, populists, and the crisis of political parties. A comparison of Italy, Austria, and Germany 1990-2015

https://doi.org/10.14195/2183-8925_37_19

Defection and Party Crisis in Nigeria

Since the creation of political parties in Nigeria, it has been characterized by the issue of defection and party crisis. This had been accompanied by the role of democratic institutions in resolving the problems of defection and party crisis in Nigeria, having in mind that the structure of these democratic institutions could play a significant role in the consolidation of democracy. Hence, the study interrogates how weak democratic institution impacted on defection and party crisis which inversely affects democracy and also examined the link between defection and party crisis. The data was collected through documentary sources on the various indices of corruption, institutional quality, freedom and fragile state of different years from 2008-2017. The data was analyzed using the multi-regression analysis. The result shows that lack of peace, and security, corruption, and institutional quality had a negative impact on democracy. So the democratic institutions are weak to enforce the rule of law in the country that will guide the activities of politics in Nigeria. Thus, the study found out that the inter-party crisis leads to fractionalization and defection. We predicated our analysis on the structural-Marxism theoretical framework. Also, it recommends that the constitution should be re-written to ensure the proper definition of defection and ensure sanction and penalty for the bridge of these laws in society. Keywords: Defection, weak institution, party crisis, political institution, political business. DOI : 10.7176/JESD/10-8-06 Publication date : April 30 th 2019

El auge de los partidos populistas entre la tecnología, la e-democracia y el proceso de despolitización

En la última década, la crisis económica y la desconfianza en las instituciones democráticas han contribuido a una gran crisis de los partidos políticos en toda Europa. Estas son algunas de las causas que llevaron a la formación de movimientos políticos con características puramente populistas como reemplazo de los organismos intermediarios tradicionalmente deslegitimados. La crisis de la representación es la crisis de la idea de representación posterior a 1945 como una herramienta para aumentar la participación popular. Hemos notado una convergencia entre algunos llamamientos populistas a la democracia directa y los enfoques neoliberales más radicales que pretenden reducir la participación de la gente, incluso si apelamos a algunas formas de “representación sustituta”. Los antecedentes teóricos de este documento se basan en las relaciones entre la “representación sustituta” y la institucionalización de los movimientos neopopulistas, que se transformaron rápidamente en partidos neopopulistas. En otras palabras, podemos destacar la extraña unión de narraciones tecnológicas sobre democracia directa con mitos de tecnocracia y la superposición de tecnopopulismo con democracia directa y “democracia electrónica directa” (que es profundamente diferente de democracia electrónica participativa y deliberativa). El objetivo del documento es analizar las conexiones entre las formas emergentes de populismo (como el tecopopulismo), la retórica sobre la importancia de la comunicación digital para el mejoramiento de la democracia y los procesos de despolitización.

How Citizens View and Evaluate Political Parties and Why it Matters? The Case of Portugal (1985-2009)

This article reviwes the case of the often-claimed "crisis of parties" in Portugal, and argues that such controversy rests partly on "ambiguous" evidence. Our two main objectives are: 1) finding out the nature and extension of public support (or lack thereof) of parties, determining what are the consequences of the lack of public support for parties in citizens´ pressure to reform democrtic institutions. Based on data of four National Public Opinion Surveys, we show that attitudes regarding parties comprehend two conceptually and empirically distinct dimensions: diffuse support and specific support. Afterwards we saw, how a strong criticism of parties' performance coexists in Portugal with strong citizen pressure over political actors compelling them to implement democratic reforms. Lastly, through logistical regression models, we can conclude that both lack of specific support ("critical antipartysism") and lack of diffuse support ("delegitimizing antipartysism") are strong preditors of Portuguese citizen´ reformist orientations and calls.

Lega and Five-star Movement voters: exploring the role of cultural, economic and political bewilderment

ABSTRACTWe explore the motivations behind the electoral success of the Lega and the Five-star Movement at the 2018 Italian general election. In most of the literature on populism, the success of the new European populist parties is interpreted as stemming from the process of globalisation, which has produced the so-called ‘modernisation losers’: ‘cultural losers’ (people who are disorientated by changes in values, by new waves of migration and by the loss of national sovereignty to the European Union) and ‘economic losers’ (those for whom the globalisation process has meant economic hardship, downward social mobility and occupational uncertainty). It is these ‘modernisation losers’ who are claimed to have voted for the populist parties. To this two-fold theoretical hypothesis, we added another: the rise in populism can be explained by the democratic malaise, and particularly by the crisis of mainstream parties, which have steadily lost their function as a link between the people and politics. We analyse the role of these three antecedents of populism – labelled as cultural, economic and political – drawing on 2018 Italian National Election Studies (ITANES: see www.itanes.org/en) data. Votes for the Lega were motivated by ‘cultural populism’, while those for the Five-star Movement could be ascribed to ‘political populism’, stemming from citizens’ growing mistrust – generalised and latent in Western democracies – of political institutions, activated in Italy by favourable structural conditions and external circumstances.

The sustainability of institutions: an unstable condition

This article uses the concept of institutional sustainability to examine how institutions survive in a context, such as the current one, in which a problematic economy (a decrease of resources), politics (e.g. a crisis of parties and decline in voter participation) and social environment (corruption, wastefulness and administrative malpractice) weaken their legitimacy. Specifically, the purpose of this article is to suggest a conceptual model of institutional sustainability different from the one generally used in the literature on sustainable development to analyse the capacity of institutions to strengthen their roles, tasks and functions with the limited (quantitative and qualitative) resources (e.g. human, economic and instrumental) that they may already have or are given. To this end, the article attempts to ‘operationalize’ the concept of institutional sustainability, starting with the technical-managerial and political nature of administrative action, and to suggest analytical factors that fall within the sphere of functional autonomy and legitimacy. Points for practitioners This article aims to make the concept of institutional sustainability smoother and more precise by focusing on the intrinsic value of a sustainable way of life for institutions. The specific focus is public administration, now increasingly burdened by the need to combine the political reorganization of public debt with development planning and the provision of services. I suggest some necessary requirements (functional autonomy and legitimacy) to guarantee and/or increase sustainability.

Spain and the European Union: topical issues of interaction

This article analyzes various aspects of interaction of Spain and European Union (EU) at the present stage. Due to the fact that the studied period is less than six months (including several events happened in a period less than a month) before presenting the paper, this research is topical and covers issues which were not examined before in academic literature. The aim of the study is to analyze major problems on which Spain has made suggestions for positive changes in the EU recently. The research was conducted with the help of such methods, as event-analysis, comparison and system approach. The article implies consistent and coherent analysis of important recent events, political and economic processes which actors were Spain and the European Union. In order to make the research comprehensive, materials of international media, official statements and papers of researchers from Spanish-speaking countries on associated topics were studied. The main conclusion on Spain’s participation in political and economic processes at the level of the EU is that Spain suggests different ways to strengthen economies of the Eurozone, accelerate integration in the framework of the EU, resolve migration crisis and fight against terrorism in Europe. Thanks to economic growth during this year and relative stabilization of political situation after the party crisis, Spain began to participate more actively in international projects within the EU, and it is engaged in a constructive dialogue on the most urgent European problems.

The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative

The much-discussed crisis of political parties poses a challenge to democratic theorists as institutional designers: how can the capacity of parties to mediate between society and state be resuscitated? In this article, we suggest that parties need to become more internally deliberative, allowing partisans to debate policy and more general visions for the polity. We outline a prescriptive model of deliberative intraparty democracy, drawing on the empirical literature on the changing structure of civic and political engagement. We argue that deliberative reforms are the most appropriate response to the demands of an increasingly more cognitively mobilized citizenry which seeks self-expression and nonhierarchical forms of political engagement. We highlight the model's distinctive strengths and defend it against several objections.