week 12 - Populism Flashcards
Westminster model (same as majoritarian model for Lijphart, let the winner push its agenda)
a) Single party governments - majority versus opposition, rotation in office with elections
b) cabinet dominance over legislature
c) made possible by the disciplined two party system
d) majoritarian electoral system - single-member district
Consensus model
a) executive power sharing - coalition governments, more continuity in office
b) balance in executive legislative relations
c) multiparty system
d) proportional representation electoral system - multi member districts
Lijphart- consensus best
Key to consensus performance:
a) High quality of democracy - participation incentives
b) greater tendency to share the wealth
c) appropriate regimes for deeply divided societies - coalition governments, cabinets integrate diversity
d) majoritarian sees less continuity in governments and policies - wild swings with fresh elections
Electoral system reform
Liberal party of Canada, 2015 campaign pledge:
- “We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last Canadian election conducted under the first past the post voting system”
- but institutionalism: electoral systems are path dependent, change is difficult and infrequent
Forces of change
Partisan interests: majority imposition:
- how strong is the desire of major parties for reform in UK or Canada?
- both partys still prefer alternating single party governments
- and recognize that PR could splinter parties
Minority bargain
- UK Liberal Democrats had leverage after 2010
- Coalition bargaining with conservatives lead to referendum - no won 68-32%
- Canada: no coalition government, and NDP lacks leverage with current minority government
Popular pressure: mass revolt:
- signs of outright system failure (Italy) or deeply unpopular economic change (new Zealand)
- UK - Brexit and pandemic failures, but labour party is renewed and both parties believe they can win
- Canada - few signs that simply replacing party in power is no longer enough for voters
Mass disillusionment:
- some signs in the UK and in Canadian provinces but this really brings change
Will change come to the UK in Canada?
- Forces of change not yet powerful enough
- referendum requirement: a powerful impediment to change:
a) failed in UK, Canadian provinces
b) low information voters a big problem
c) reform possible if resistance to change reduced - possible to just legislate electoral reform in majoritarian fashion
d) UK: referendum the norm
Populism - what’s the big idea?
- anti-elitism: casts elites as self interested and corrupt - necessary but not sufficient
- emphasis on the people - understood as:
a) victimized - stolen from, diminished in status
b) virtuous - pure, authentic, the salt of the earth
c) possessing common sense - wiser than the so-called experts
d) homogeneous - singular, speaking with one voice, a general will
e) sovereign - the final work, against elites and others
Muddle
A thin centred ideology
a) compatible with different ideologies
b) dependent on a host ideology
c) based on class, nationalism and so on
So populists tend to be:
a) left leaning in Latin America and Southern Europe - class
b) right leaning in northern Europe and North America - nation 
Is populism democratic?
- pushes controversial issues onto the political agenda: immigration, European integration, austerities impact
- giving voice to people who feel left behind by democratic institutions
Populism‘s pitfalls
- it’s in tension with liberal pluraism - holding that modern societies are necessarily divided into legitimate groups based on perspective and interest
- against pluralism, populism holds that:
a) The will of the people
b) as interpreted by the leader
c) should prevail over rival views - they betray the people
d) and liberal institutions - the courts, the civil service, the media
e) Muddle: an illegal democratic answer to problems created by an undemocratic liberalism - populists have often operated within the constraints of liberal democracy
- but this logic supports authoritarian tendencies as well:
a) undermining legitimate opposition - they don’t speak for the people
b) and reworking electoral systems to favour the party and power
Party effects
- democracy depends on strong parties and party systems - parties anchored in social groups; competition stabilized
- weyland: populism should generate a new, well organized cleavage - not class or ethnicity, but the populists against their rivals
- but populist leaders rely instead on personal charisma
- That is sustained by direct, uninstitutionalized connections to a heterogeneous, amorphous, and largely unorganized mass of followers
- which provides substantial freedom of maneuver
- and anti-populists are not a coherent group
- while Latin America populist voters are increasing from the hard to organize informal sector
Why populism now?
- economic factors:
a) disappearance of reliable high quality jobs
b) neoliberalism - growth, flat wages perceived unfairness - cultural factors:
a) nationalist resurgence- take back our country and way of life
b) status decline for traditionally privileged groups - political factors:
a) unresponsive governments and parties
b) desire for strengthened political authority - against disorder, corruption
From Marxism to the third way and beyond:
1) revolutionary communism - late 19th to early 20th centuries:
- socialist international and national socialist parties
- based on Orthodox Marxism: economic determinism and class struggle
2) evolutionary socialism - turn up the 20th century (Eduard Bernstein)
- due to: recognition of problems with revolutionary path
3) paper stones and political coalitions - interwar years
- due to: Recognition of lack of working class majority, varied voting preferences of workers, left parties begin to embrace caught cross class coalitions, to compete within democracy and to defend it
4) post war consensus- 1950s-70s
- moderation of social Democratic parties, e.g. bad godesberg, 1959: West German SPD promises to manage not subvert capitalism, with emphasis on social justice
5) postwar consensus- 1950s - 70s:
Key features:
- unprecedented prosperity
- Keynesianism - counter cyclical demand management
- welfare state - systemic risk reduction
- adaption by conservative parties
6) the third way - beginning 1990s:
- response to neoliberalism
- cross class emphasis - community, nation and its values
- responsibility and rights
- genuine equality of opportunity but not of outcome
Third way backlash?
- mirror image of postwar consensus
- left pulled too far to the centre? To the market? To culture and identity instead of capitalism?
- or is it no longer possible to appeal to increasingly complex and fragmented societies based on an economic message
- berman - return to class
