Dominant Political Parties and Democracy by Matthijs Bogaards & Françoise Boucek

Author:Matthijs Bogaards & Françoise Boucek [Bogaards, Matthijs & Boucek, Françoise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9780415485821
Google: rluKAT7njlcC
Amazon: B003PJ7B3W
Barnesnoble: B003PJ7B3W
Goodreads: 19780445
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-15T08:17:17+00:00

How ideological sub-groups morph into instrumental factions

‘Like a party, each of the factions engages in the business of nominating its candidates, campaigning in elections, dispensing patronage, and competing to acquire political power in ways otherwise quite like political parties.’

(Belloni and Beller 1978: 89)

It is important to note that, like many other dominant parties, the DC and LDP started out as compound organisations made up of disparate sub-groups and political movements that eventually became embedded in the LDP and DC organisations because of institutional incentives. Indeed, factionalism is often linked to a country’s political development, societal structure and cultural characteristics. Japan and Italy are no exceptions and many anthropological and sociological explanations exist to account for the presence of factions inside the DC and LDP. Taking the LDP as an example, early scholarly accounts tended to point to specific features of Japanese society that created a favourable environment for factionalism to emerge inside the dominant party (Thayer 1969; Nakane 1967; Ishida 1971; Ike 1978; Baerwald 1986; Pempel 1990; Curtis 1988). However, more recent research has tended to focus more on institutional and party-specific incentives to study the effect of electoral systems, electoral reform and bicameralism on the career motivations and strategic behaviour of LDP politicians (notably Cox and Rosenbluth 1993, 1995; Cox et al. 2000; Kohno 1992, 1997).

LDP factionalism finds its roots in the major post-war party realignment triggered by the merger between the Liberals and the Democrats in 1955, which brought together eight different leadership groups with clearly separate memberships. This party realignment followed a protracted process of interparty bargaining between all the post-war Japanese political parties after the Liberals lost their parliamentary majority in 1953 and the bargaining context was suddenly transformed when the left-wing and right-wing Socialists decided to reunite (Cox and Rosenbluth 1995; Kohno 1992, 1997). This merger had a strong reductive effect on the number of parties and skewed party competition strongly in favour of the Liberal Democrats, who established themselves as the ruling national party in Japan. As in Italy, a factional structure was no impediment to party integration and dominance. On the contrary, factions were instrumental to the LDP in dealing with competitive leadership claims and blurring the lines between pre-merger cleavages. Hence, existing factions provided ready-made structures for electoral coordination under SNTV and for elite circulation inside the LDP.

In post-war Italy, early DC factions reflected the many different ideological strands and political groups that aligned behind de Gasperi3 in 1946 to form a centrist mass Catholic party able to counteract the perceived Communist threat. However, by the mid-1950s, DC politics became polarised by a leadership’s decision to include the Socialists (PSI) in DC-led government coalitions. This strategy prevented a potential alliance between the Communists and Socialists, whose combined forces would have been strong enough to displace the Christian Democrats from office. But the DC’s so-called ‘opening to the left’ enacted by de Gasperi’s successor Fanfani in 1964 divided Christian Democrats and shaped the internal politics of the DC in major ways. It mobilised the factions.

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