Party Systems and Country Governance by Kenneth Janda & Jin-Young Kwak

Author:Kenneth Janda & Jin-Young Kwak [Janda, Kenneth & Kwak, Jin-Young]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317254751
Google: bhbvCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27890858
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Party System Properties: Cause or Effect?

To this point, our theory has assumed that party system properties affect country governance—and not that country governance affects party system properties. Is the reverse possible instead? As in the question raised in Chapter 3, is the party system the chicken or the egg?

Consider the governance indicator Rule of Law and the party system properties competitiveness and stability. Does a more competitive and stable party system contribute to a high score on Rule of Law, or does a competitive and stable party system merely reflect the extent to which countries enforce the rule of law? It is easy to argue that party system competitiveness and stability are simply the effects of rule of law. When countries observe the rule of law, opposition parties are freer to compete with governmental parties for political power in multiple elections. According to this argument, positive properties of the party system are the effect, not the cause, of the Rule of Law indicator.

Staying with P2 and P4, it is hard to argue the contrary case: that party system competitiveness and stability cause countries to promote the rule of law. Indeed, Carothers’s Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad reveals that even rule-of-law practitioners do not know what factors advance their objective. Primarily lawyers, they focus on revising specific laws or entire legal codes, training judges and paying better salaries, improving court records, reforming police and prosecutors, broadening access to courts, and so on. Carothers says, “Even when aid programs are able to facilitate fairly specific changes in relevant institutions, it is rarely clear what the longer-term effects of those changes are on the overall development of the rule of law in the country in question.”26 Reviewing ten analyses in his book, he finds, “Many of the chapter authors also urge aid organizations to be more political in their approach to promoting the rule of law. These authors’ broad command ‘to take politics more fully into account’ has many variations.”27 Authors of some chapters in Carothers’s volume contend that the authoritarian nature of regimes (e.g., in the Arab world) blocks progress in implementing the rule of law, while coalitions built across parties (e.g., in Africa) sometimes support reforms. Similarly, democratic winds of change in Latin America helped the criminal justice reform movement, while at least a period of political change temporarily advanced legal reforms in Russia.

Not all political parties see value in promoting the rule of law. Parties in uncompetitive systems manipulate the law to perpetuate their power.28 In contrast, promoting the rule of law serves the purposes of leading parties in a competitive and stable system. Because voters prefer government by rule of law in contrast to government by rulers, the rule of law meshes with parties’ strategic goals: to win votes and seats.29 Although we have couched our argument for treating party system as the cause and governance as the effect in terms of the specific variable Rule of Law, it can be made more general: A competitive party system tends to promote country governance, of which Rule of Law is just one indicator.

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