This publication is about programmatic political parties: parties that provide citizens with meaningful choice over policies by reaching out to them through coherent political programmes. It explains what programmatic parties are, in which environments they are likely to emerge and how they come about.
A Survey of Dimensions and Explanations in the Literature
- Significantly more comparative research on this topic is needed. For example, conceptual and theoretical pieces on how to more precisely characterize and empirically operationalize the notion of programmatic parties and party systems—in particular the pursuit of new comparative data-gathering projects (especially if sustained over time). Such data could serve as a potential breakthrough in the analysis of the nature, evolution and causal dynamics of the creation of programmatic party systems and their possible effects on democratic governance.
- Substantively, research is needed that engages with multiple dimensions of RPG simultaneously. Indeed, the most conspicuous limitation of current approaches is the lack of a multidimensional understanding of RPG. Therefore, synergies—and tensions—in the simultaneous pursuit of programmatic strategies in the organizational, electoral and policy arenas remain obscure.
Opportunities and Constraints
Parties focus on programmatic policies if certain conditions are present, and will tend toward clientelistic or personalistic politics if they are not. Programmatic parties seem to follow different paths of creation and consolidation, and different incentives shape such trajectories. Few factors are found across all instances of programmatic party formation in the case studies, but correlations can be observed and nine tentative mechanisms that have some causal influence on parties’ programmatic appeals can be identified:
- Economic development shapes a favourable environment for programmatic politics. The overriding hard condition for programmatic party appeals is economic development.
- Periods of economic crisis offer windows of opportunity to raise the programmatic content of party competition. When the status quo becomes painful, both voters and politicians are willing to consider policy programmes that affect the benefits and costs of large voter groups.
- The more intense the competitiveness of democratic elections, the more likely parties are to invest in programmatic appeals, at least in more affluent countries. If the stakes are high for partisan politicians, they will make more effort to attract voters.
- A level democratic playing field that offers equal chances and equal protection of civil and political liberties for rival contenders in an electoral contest may be a desirable normative goal for designing political systems, but it does not empirically coincide with more programmatic parties.
Programmatic Politics in Comparative Perspective
- A political system is programmatic when the parties within it predominantly generate policy, mobilize support and govern on the basis of a consistent and coherent ideological position. For parties to be programmatic, they must mobilize support on the basis of their policies, have internal structures that maintain the commitment of party leaders to those policies, and pursue those policies in office.
- A number of underlying factors promote the emergence of policy-based parties. A programmatic party is more likely to develop in an industrialized country with a large urban population, a merit-based bureaucracy and a flourishing civil society. The party is more likely to stay programmatic if it enjoys a structure that institutionalizes the participation of civil society groups and includes active members with established internal democratic mechanisms.
- If programmatic parties are successful, it can lead to the transformation of the entire political system to a programmatic system. Once in power, these parties (if they are capable of governing adequately) will exert great pressure on clientelistic parties to transform into programmatic parties because clientelistic parties typically struggle in opposition because they have no access to the resources their voters have come to expect.
