Political Entrepreneurs

The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe

Catherine E. De Vries, Sara B. Hobolt

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691206547
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How challenger parties, acting as political entrepreneurs, are changing European democracies Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe, exemplified by the likes of Podemos in Spain, the National Rally in France, the Alternative for Germany, or the Brexit Party in Great Britain. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. In this book, Catherine De Vries and Sara Hobolt explore why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs.Drawing analogies with how firms compete, De Vries and Hobolt demonstrate that political change is as much about the ability of challenger parties to innovate as it is about the inability of dominant parties to respond. Challenger parties employ two types of innovation to break established party dominance: they mobilize new issues, such as immigration, the environment, and Euroscepticism, and they employ antiestablishment rhetoric to undermine mainstream party appeal. Unencumbered by government experience, challenger parties adapt more quickly to shifting voter tastes and harness voter disenchantment. Delving into strategies of dominance versus innovation, the authors explain why European party systems have remained stable for decades, but also why they are now increasingly under strain.As challenger parties continue to seek to disrupt the existing order, Political Entrepreneurs shows that their ascendency fundamentally alters government stability and democratic politics.

PART I

Political Change in Europe

1

The Rise of Challenger Parties

This is the art of politics: to find some alternative that beats the current winner.

—WILLIAM RIKER, AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENTIST¹

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

—STEVE JOBS, COFOUNDER, CHAIRMAN, AND CEO OF APPLE²

Politics in Western Europe has become more unpredictable and volatile in recent years. The electoral successes of populist parties across the continent have led commentators to proclaim the end of politics as we know it and the collapse of the political mainstream. Populist parties are tearing up the conventional rule book of left–right politics by mobilizing identity politics and taking aim at the political establishment as a whole. Yet, this is not the first time we have witnessed the breakthrough of political challengers in European party competition and the exploitation of new political cleavages and issues. Indeed, the most mainstream of party families, the social democrats, were challengers when they first emerged in the late nineteenth century across Western Europe. They campaigned on a radical platform of universal suffrage for the working classes and a promise of a brighter socialist future, and it was only later, once they had achieved widespread electoral success, that they became the catchall parties of parliamentary and executive dominance. The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of a different kind of challenger in the form of the green, left-libertarian parties. These were movements that rebelled against the classic left–right politics of economic growth and centralized decision making. They mobilized new issues of green politics and criticized the established political elite for restricting democratic participation to the bargaining that took place between centralized interest groups and party leaders, emphasizing instead individual autonomy and popular participation.

We have witnessed parties seeking to disrupt the established ways of doing politics before. Some were very successful, others less so. But why does it feel so different this time? One reason for this is that change always feels more significant when you are living through it. Also, there is a temptation to focus on the developments that break with the past rather than those that remain the same. In this book, we adopt a long-term perspective to understand the magnitude and nature of current changes to party politics in Europe and to place them in the context of the overall evolution of European party systems in the postwar period. This long-term perspective allows us to develop a theoretical framework for understanding when, why, and to what extent challengers are reshaping European politics.

In this chapter, we first discuss how to define challenger parties, focusing on their lack of experience in office. We then give three examples of “waves” of challenger parties over the past century (social democratic parties, green parties, and populist radical right parties) and explore the commonalities in the strategies these parties have pursued, despite their very different ideological outlooks. Finally, we consider the evolution of party competition in postwar Western Europe, demonstrating both the remarkable degree of stability the established party families enjoyed for much of the postwar period and then the increasing fragmentation resulting from the strengthening of challengers on both the right and the left.

Who Are the Challengers?

Seeing the recent electoral successes of challenger parties, many political scientists and sociologists have tried to define them. Numerous labels have been used in the literature, such as niche parties,³ populist parties,⁴ “new politics” parties,⁵ and challenger parties.⁶ In this book, we conceive of political change as the result of a struggle between the innovation of the challenger parties and the power of the dominant parties. Challenger parties are therefore those parties that have not yet held the reins of power: the parties without government experience. To distinguish between parties, we focus on each party’s position within the political marketplace, as either dominant or challenger. But how does that relate to other ways of classifying party types? There are three main ways of distinguishing between challengers and mainstream parties in the existing literature. One focuses on the historical origins of the parties, another focuses on the specific issues they mobilize, and the third focuses specifically on populism as a distinguishing feature.⁷

The first approach takes as its starting point the concept of a party family and argues that parties originating in the traditional party families are “dominant” whereas those that do not are “challengers.” The notion of a party family was already evident in the classic work on party systems by American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset and Norwegian sociologist Stein Rokkan.⁸ They argued that macro developments—such as national revolutions, the Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution—produced enduring lines of conflict that continue to shape political structure, political organization, and the substantive character of conflict. These ongoing lines of conflict are called “cleavages” and arise out of structural social characteristics such as class, religion, and geographical location. People’s class status, religious affiliation, or place of residence determines their political preferences and partisan allegiances. Cleavages produced the major party families that have dominated West European politics for decades: the conservative, liberal, Christian democratic, socialist, and communist party families. These “traditional” party families are classified as mainstream parties. New party families arise as a result of changes in the electorate’s composition and preferences. Citizens respond to rapidly changing social and economic conditions by demanding new political offerings. The relative prosperity and security of the postwar period encouraged individuals coming of age during those years to care more about values such as sustainability, equal rights, and democratic engagement. As a result, new value-related cleavages emerged in voting behavior that crosscut or superseded older cleavages and gave rise to new types of party family—the green and new left parties.⁹ Socioeconomic changes in the last few decades, associated with changing class structure and increasing globalization, have created new sets of “winners” and “losers,” which in turn are closely tied to the rise and success of radical right parties.¹⁰ Parties that emerged in response to this realignment, and that of the 1970s, are described as niche parties.¹¹ Education has been shown to be an important driver of the vote for such parties, as the highly educated are more likely to vote for green and new left parties, and the less educated more likely to vote for the radical right.¹²

Party families are a useful way of classifying political parties.¹³ Yet, there are problems when using the party family typology to classify challenger parties. One issue is that it is a static definition that does not take into account the fact that, for example, while green parties may have been conceived of as “challengers” in the 1970s and 1980s, most of them have now become part of what we would consider the mainstream. Any cutoff point to divide “new” parties from “old”—for example, prewar or postwar origin—is inevitably arbitrary.¹⁴ Even the social democratic parties that are now classified as mainstream were once “challengers” to the bourgeois order after the extension of the franchise to the working class.¹⁵ Also, there is no agreement as to which party families are “mainstream” and which party families are “niche.”¹⁶

This leads us to the second approach to classifying challenger parties, which focuses on their programmatic strategies—that is to say, the types of issues they mobilize. Challenger parties are those that address “noncentrist” or “new” issues. The most systematic attempt at classifying parties into “mainstream” and “niche” using this approach was developed by American political scientist Bonnie Meguid.¹⁷ She classifies niche parties as those that reject the traditional class-based orientation of politics, mobilize issues that do not coincide with existing lines of political division, and focus on a limited set of issues. On the basis of this classification, “niche parties” are mostly green and radical right parties, as well as some single-issue parties. This rigorous classification, based on the appeal of non-class-based (economic) issues, such as green or regional issues, has many advantages and has been applied and extended by other scholars.¹⁸ The focus on the issues that parties strategically choose to campaign on, rather than their historical origins, has several advantages, not least in that it allows greater precision and flexibility when classifying parties. However, if one of the aims of a research endeavor is to explain the strategies adopted by challengers to upset the political mainstream, it becomes somewhat circular to also define the parties by those same programmatic strategies. Given that in this book we are interested in examining what strategies challenger parties use to disrupt the dominance of mainstream parties, the programmatic strategies of these parties cannot also form the basis of their classification.

A third approach is one that focuses on the distinction between “populist” and “nonpopulist” parties. The literature on populism has burgeoned over the last two decades, as populist parties have gained in electoral strength. No firm consensus has emerged on how to define populist parties, but the most influential conceptualization of populist parties was put forward by the British political theorist Margaret Canovan and Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, and rests on the understanding of populism as what is known as a “thin-centered” ideology. Populism separates society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, these authors say, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” and holds that politics should be an expression of “the general will” of the people.¹⁹ Since populism is a thin-centered ideology based around a binary distinction, it is extremely malleable and can easily be integrated into another more complex host ideology, such as socialism or liberalism. This means that populist parties can be found on both the left and the right, or indeed in the center, of the political spectrum. Much of the literature on populist parties in Europe, however, has focused on those on the right and has included nativism as a key element of populism.²⁰ Such definitions of populist parties include an emphasis on expressions of nativism and xenophobic nationalism. When nativism is included as a core element of populism, the parties classified as populist are often more narrowly confined to the “populist radical right.” Both the narrow and the broader definitions of populist parties take as their starting point the ideology of these parties, while our approach, as stated above, is different. By focusing on the position of parties within the system, as either challenger or dominant parties, we are trying to understand what types of party are more likely to employ strategies such as adopting anti-elitist rhetoric (see chapter 6) or anti-immigration positions (see chapter 5). Hence, our argument about challenger and dominant parties enriches the debate on populism by explaining why a certain type of party employs populist messages, and places the recent wave of populist parties in a much broader perspective.

Our book therefore presents a new approach to the conceptualization of challenger parties that focuses on their lack of dominance within the political system. Building on the industrial organization literature, we conceive political change to be the result of a struggle between dominant market forces, or parties, who wish to maintain their market power, and disruptive political entrepreneurs or challenger parties who want to unseat the dominant players through innovation. Dominant parties are those that control the political marketplace, while challenger parties are those parties that do not (yet) have dominance within the political system. Given the nature of the political marketplace, the delivery of the product (bundle of policies) is restricted to those parties that control the provision of public policy—that is, those that are in office. Parties in opposition may have some influence over the design of public policy through the legislative process, but ultimately parties in government and the executive branch control the provision of public policy. As a consequence, the dominant players in the marketplace are not only those who have a large market share—that is, a large share of the vote—but also those with a good chance of controlling government, and thus being able to implement their policies. Hence, in our conceptualization of market power we focus on the parties that have government experience, since these are the parties that control the provision of policies.²¹ We label these the dominant parties in the party system. In contrast, the challenger parties are those that have not had the opportunity to control policy or government. There may be several reasons why parties have not had a controlling role in office. They may be newly formed or too small to enter into a government, or they may be unwilling to make the necessary compromises to join a coalition government, or be seen as too extreme to be part of government by mainstream parties. Such challenger parties have every incentive to challenge the dominance of existing players through political innovation.

In our empirical analysis, we thus operationalize challenger parties on the basis of their office-holding experience. Parties that have not held office in the postwar period are classified as challengers.²² This is a flexible and dynamic conceptualization of challenger parties, rather than a static, inflexible one. Challengers that have risen to power, such as France’s En Marche! (On the move!) party, Greece’s Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), or Italy’s League (previously the Northern League), can become dominant parties. They need not remain challenger parties forever. By focusing on the position of a party and its dominance or otherwise within the system, rather than on its ideology and programmatic strategies, we are also able to study what strategies challenger parties employ to appeal to a broader voter base and acquire a larger market share.

A binary classification can of course conceal important nuances within each of the broad party types that we have identified. It raises questions about whether parties that only enter coalition government for a short period of time, such as the radical right-wing Austrian Freedom Party, should be classified as dominant parties. And if one does set a minimum time in government to be considered dominant, how long should that be? Equally, questions may be asked about whether parties that never form...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I. POLITICAL CHANGE IN EUROPE
• PART II. DOMINANCE
• PART III. INNOVATION
• PART IV. TRANSFORMATION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index