The Communicative Origins of Programmatic Parties

• In Event: Dominant Parties and Democracy: the Role of Party Organization

Abstract

Why do some mass-mobilizing parties develop, from the beginning, as programmatic rather than clientelistic organizations? Existing explanations for the emergence of programmatic parties focus on either (a) higher levels of economic development (and thus a decrease in voters’ marginal utility of exchanging their votes for private goods) (e.g., Kitschelt & Wilkinson 2007, Stokes et al. 2013); (b) the quality and longevity of democratic institutions (e.g., Keefer & Vlaicu 2008, Acemoglu & Robinson 2012,); (c) the reputation of political parties as effective public good providers when in office (e.g., Keefer & Khemani 2005, Keefer & Vlaicu 2008); (d) voters’ trust in the impartiality and capacity of state institutions (Shefter 1994, Bustikova and Corduneanu-Huci 2017); or (e) the influence of capitalist interests (Kuo 2018).

While most of these explanations capture contemporary variation in programmatic politics, they cannot explain why mass-mobilizing programmatic parties emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in many parts of Europe and the Americas. As the vehicles for popular incorporation, those parties mobilized constituencies with low levels of income for whom private goods still carried a high marginal utility. Those early programmatic parties developed under a wide array of authoritarian or oligarchical regimes and had never been in office, so they lacked a reputation as effective providers of public goods. Finally, programmatic parties emerged in many cases during intense political crises, with high levels of hostility towards capitalists and distrust toward the state.

This paper argues instead that programmatic parties emerged prior to the extension of universal male suffrage where the popular classes had access to robust deliberative systems to coordinate collective action. By deliberative systems, I mean spaces in which individuals engage in various forms of communication to acquire political information, clarify points of conflict, identify their shared interests, and—crucially—rearticulate those interests in terms of general principles that should govern the use of state resources (Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012).

Robust deliberative systems only developed in contexts that met two conditions. First, non-wage labor was largely absent, and consequently local and communal elites could not rely on non-communicative forms of social influence (such as coercion, patronage, or appeals to parochial identities) to mobilize the popular classes. Second, the popular classes had access to a dense communicative infrastructure in the form of a rich associational life, high literacy rates, and the early development of a mass press. These two factors together determined whether the popular classes were incorporated into the political arena through programmatic or clientelistic organizations.

This argument makes two theoretical contributions. First, it provides a new framework to explain alternative trajectories of popular incorporation. Second, it suggests that the quality and longevity of democratic institutions, the reputation of mass-mobilizing parties, and the level of state-supplied public goods are in fact endogenous to the early development of programmatic politics.

The empirical analysis is based on quantitative analyses and within-country process tracing of Argentina, Mexico, France and Sweden, around the time of popular incorporation (c.1870-1950). The analysis focuses on three types of evidence: (1) the resources that party founders used to mobilize supporters; (2) the organizational structure of mass-mobilizing parties before and after the extension of universal male suffrage; and (3) the spatial variation in the founding of local party organizations in each country. In the final section, the paper examines the generalizability of the argument through a statistical analysis of mass-mobilizing parties from Western Europe and the Americas during this period.

Author

• Agustin Alonso Goenaga Orrego, Lund University