How parties can respond
The argument made so far has been that technological advances are revealing cultural changes which, coupled with the creation of a range of new online tools, will have an impact on political parties.
Is there a way in which today's key political parties could seek to limit the impact of these changes and maintain their existing levels of influence and their roles within the political system?
Such a party effectively has two options for responding to these challenges; what might be called the blocking response and the open response.
The first involves a series of negative measures, hindering the development of microparties with legal restrictions whilst providing themselves with access to public funds denied to smaller parties.
In effect, this would mirror the response of the music industry to illegal peer-to-peer sharing of songs, wanting to target the individual sharing the files rather than innovate with new models for making such content legally available. Most observers outside the music industry seem to believe such an approach is doomed to fail.
What suggests that parties might take this route? Well, recent behaviour would be one indication.
As Helen Margetts (2001) has written, activities over recent years suggest parties have significantly changed in character.
"Trends in party development have already pointed to the end of the era of the 'mass' party characterised by widespread and formal membership and the rise of the 'cartel' party." [i]
Parties which act in cartel to preserve the resources of the state for themselves may instinctively seek to address their problems through the seemingly easier route of hindering the growth of microparties.
This in turn raises another issue, which is that while they may be acting in the best interests of themselves, such policies would not be in the best interests of the state, which would increasingly face questions about its legitimacy in such circumstances. The state must retain the appearance of neutrality in the party political sphere, even though its rules may be drawn up by those same parties.
Therefore pressure to abandon any cartel-like actions might come not just from the public and microparties, but from state institutions too.
Alternatively, the state resources which major parties accrue to themselves, mostly in funding and policy advice, will need to be made available on an equal basis to microparties.
The second response option consists of a series of positive measures, with the established parties opening up to the public in ways which seek to capture some of the advantages of microparties.
This could involve greater involvement of the public in policy making, for example with citizens' panels, or giving voters more control over their political representatives through open primaries.
State funding could be made available to encourage these kinds of activities, although it would need to be made available to small parties too.
Parvin and McHugh (2005) argue that another issue is to ensure "that the chain of command between citizens, local and national institutions, and supranational institutions like the European Union is resilient and visible".
"This places a significant burden upon our institutions to improve the ways in which they communicate with citizens – both directly and through the media: it requires them to be accessible to citizens and responsive to their concerns; it suggests that formal institutions need to appear more relevant to the lives of individual citizens and not bound up in antiquated traditions and processes which serve to alienate people; and it suggests that different political institutions have a responsibility to work constructively together rather than in competition with, or ignorance to, one another." [ii]
What factors might prompt parties to move in this more open direction? One might be an enlightened view that they need to change, and one indication of this approach came from the 2009 House of Commons interim report from the Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation:
"Nearly all Members of Parliament are elected to the House of Commons on a party ticket. This makes the political parties, effectively, the gatekeepers to the House of Commons. It means that if the House of Commons is to become more representative the political parties will, in large part, have to be the agents of change." [iii]
While focused more on the diversity of representatives within parties which hold seats in the Commons, rather than the range of parties within it, this finding at least indicates a degree of formal recognition of the need for parties to change.
But if it is not enlightened self-interest that prompts a more open response to the rise of microparties, it might be that short-term competitive political advantage provides the same incentive. It is not hard to imagine how a pledge to be more responsive to voters can become a key political selling point, and in the UK the Conservative Party has already taken some steps towards this, holding open primaries in a number of constituencies to choose candidates for the 2010 general election.
There is something of a catch-22 for parties taking this route however, which is that as they seek to delay one problem – the rise of microparties – they create for themselves another problem.
It has been identified by Ben Rogers (2005), who has written:
"[A]s public engagement with political parties has declined, and with it the role that parties once played in connecting the public to the political system, new, compensating channels of representation and accountability have opened up. Campaigning organisations and pressure groups, petitions and demonstrations, TV debates and the letters pages of newspapers, polls and focus groups, and representatives' post-bags and increasingly e-mail boxes give citizens ways of bypassing parties. New or newly popular civic forums (like the London or Scottish Civic Forum), 'town meetings', 'open space events', citizens' juries and online consultations, provide spaces for the testing of beliefs, reflection on values, articulation of interests, and forging of agreement around policy platforms. One reason people no longer join parties or vote in the way they once did, is that they find that the parties are already fairly well attuned to their values and interests, and this is in no small part due to the development of these non-formal links connecting citizens and politicians." [iv]
So the larger parties – a victim of their own successes, perhaps – are attuned to a wide variety of views, but none of them with enough 'stickiness' to overcome the stronger attraction of microparties which appeal to the primary social identity of a voter. At the same time, the fact that they are attuned to these broad brush views means that citizens no longer feel strongly, positively or negatively, about them and their rivals.
In their defence of political parties, Parvin and McHugh (2005) argued that they remain crucial but should be reinvented to "more adequately embody the concerns and aspirations" [v] of the public now rather than as they were a century ago.
"But how can a party system rooted in another age survive in a Britain characterised by social change, the breakdown of traditional forms of association, and single-issue politics? The answer lies in reforming the party system – and the parties
themselves – to better embody the views and concerns of a diverse and consumerist electorate. People need to feel that their views are genuinely feeding into the political system and influencing the decisions made in their name, but they do not necessarily feel that they have to subscribe to the kind of rigid doctrines that their fathers and grandfathers subscribed to in order for that to happen. Parties must balance their need for consistency and uniformity with a flexibility that allows people to feel that their views are being heard. The iron discipline which characterises the main political parties does little to encourage wider support among a population whose opinions and concerns cannot always be encapsulated by a 'broad church' party or movement." [vi]
This suggested need for a party to be both uniform and flexible, disciplined and diverse, again hints at the conflicting demands that major parties now face, and the impossibility of achieving this balancing act in practice.
While Parvin and McHugh focused on the role of larger parties, it may be that microparties will provide the necessary reinvention of parties that they have argued is required.
And the difficulty of finding the right balance within parties is instead replaced by the easier task of finding the right balance between parties.
As Rogers (2005) concluded:
"Given the limited resources at the disposal of political parties, their tendencies to move to the centre, and declining engagement (especially working class engagement) in mass membership organisations, the era of the mass parties is almost certainly over." [vii]
So whether the political parties opt to meet the rise of microparties with a blocking response or an open response to the rise of microparties, the end result is still the same; their decline will continue. Choosing the blocking response might just make this process run faster than it otherwise would have.
Footnotes:
[i] Margetts, H. (2001), p. 2.
[ii] Parvin, P. and McHugh, D. (2005), pp. 654-655.
[iii] Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation (2009), second interim report, House of Commons. Available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/spconf/63/6303.htm [December 29, 2009].
[iv] Rogers, B. (2005), p. 604.
[v] Parvin, P. and McHugh, D. (2005), p. 652.
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