Radical or Redundant? E-Book

Liam Weeks

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

While the type of small political party In Ireland has varied, their fate, it seems, has not. Although some enjoy a brief time in the sun, termination is the long-term prospects for all minor parties. The usual pattern is a speedy ascent, an impact on the political system including a time in government, followed by a prolonged termination. This book examines this pattern of evolution for minor, or small, parties in Irish politics. As the Irish state has changed, so too have the types of parties that have emerged. With the first-time entry of the Greens into government in 2007, their wipeout in 2011, the termination of the Progressive Democrats in 2009, and the failure of a new party to emerge despite the on-going financial crisis, the time is ripe for this analysis.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

This book has its origins in a special issue of Irish Political Studies, following which we felt there was a lot more to be said about the topic of minor parties, particularly given the ongoing political turmoil at home and abroad.

We are extremely grateful to The History Press Ireland for the opportunity to express our thoughts on this matter. In particular, we would like to thank the enthusiasm of Ronan Colgan to our initial proposal and the work of Beth Amphlett in the production process.

Although our names adorn the cover, this book is a joint effort by all involved and we thank the input of all the contributors, who responded to our many demands with patience and efficiency.

We thank the Political Studies Association of Ireland for sponsoring a collaborative workshop of the authors and supporting the development of this book project.

Liam thanks the Irish Research Council for its support during the time he served on its CARA postdoctoral fellowship scheme, which was co-funded by the European Commission.

Finally, we thank the support, as always, of our loved ones. They know who they are.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

1. The Dog that Failed to Bark: Why Did No New Party Emerge in 2011?

Liam Weeks

2. From Cradle to Grave: The Impact and Evolution of Minor Parties

Liam Weeks

3. The Rise and Fall of Minor Parties in Ireland, 1922-2011

John Coakley

4. Life in a Minor Party

Desmond O’Malley, Catherine Murphy and Dan Boyle

5. Wipeout! Does Governing Kill Small Parties in Ireland?

Eoin O’Malley

6. The Rise and Decline of the Green Party

Nicole Bolleyer

7. The Party that Ran Out of Lives: The Progressive Democrats

Séin Ó Muineacháin

8. Seeking the Fianna Fáil Vote: Why do Interest Groups Run for Office in Ireland?

Gary Murphy

9. Irish Farmers’ Parties, Nationalism and Class Politics in the Twentieth Century

Tony Varley

10. To the Left of Labour: The Workers’ Party and Democratic Left, 1982-97

Kevin Rafter

11. Major Breakthrough or ‘Temporary Little Arrangement’?

The Labour Party’s 2011 Electoral Success in Historical Perspective

Shaun McDaid and Kacper Rekawek

12. The Slow Growth of Sinn Féin: From Minor Player to Centre Stage?

Dawn Walsh and Eoin O’Malley

13. Voting in Dáil Éireann: The Changing Roles of Minor Parties and Independents, 1937-2011

Martin Ejnar Hansen

14. Radical, Redundant or Relevant? Minor Parties in Comparative and Systemic Perspective

Alistair Clark

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Copyright

1

The Dog that Failed to Bark: Why Did No New Party Emerge in 2011?

Liam Weeks

Prologue

As the Irish state has changed, so too have the types of minor, or small, parties that have emerged in the political arena. Where once were the farmers of Clann na Talmhan, the liberals of the Progressive Democrats (PDs) and the environmentalists of the Greens, there now sits in the Dáil a range of former left-wing revolutionaries in the guise of Sinn Féin and within the broad unmbrella group, the United Left Alliance. This book looks at this evolution of minor parties in Ireland, in particular their rise and fall and their lasting political impact. Drawing on a range of sources, including interviews with many of the leading protagonists, we detail the fortunes of minor parties, examine the consequences of participation in government and look at why they fail to persist. We assess the reasons for minor parties emerging, their impact on the political system and why voters fall in and out of love so easily with them. One over-riding theme is the reasons for such parties remaining minor, about which this book offers a fresh insight.

Bringing together some of the leading academic authorities on Irish politics, this volume is a combination of comparative and case studies, which also places the Irish experience of minor parties in the international context. With the first-time entry of the Greens into government in 2007, their wipeout in 2011, the termination of the Progressive Democrats in 2009, and the failure of a new party to emerge despite the ongoing financial crisis, the time is ripe for an analysis of minor parties. For anyone interested in Irish politics and political parties, whether it is those looking to form a new party, to vote for such a party, or just to read about them, this work should be of significance. Readers will be able to evaluate the merits of the claim of Michael McDowell, one of the original founders and later leader of the Progressive Democrats, that minor parties need to be radical to avoid redundancy.

Introduction

For some, the 2011 general election was Ireland’s ‘earthquake’ election.1 However, although the dominant party of Irish politics, Fianna Fáil, experienced losses of seismic proportions, when the dust settled the three pillars of Irish party politics remained standing. No new party emerged to take their place, and between them Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil won 133 of the Dáil’s 166 seats, the same total won by these parties at the 2002 election.

One to two years before the 2011 election such an outcome might have come as a surprise to some. An increasing level of disillusionment with the political establishment’s failure to deal with the economic crisis, and the apparent lack of an alternative choice had motivated talk of a new political party. In many ways the circumstances were similar to that of the mid-1980s, when the Progressive Democrats had emerged in a recession, offering a new political platform and threatening to ‘break the mould’ of Irish politics. Indeed, an opinion poll in the Sunday Independent in June 2010 detected a desire for a new mould-breaker, with a majority of voters agreeing that a new political party was needed.2 A new political movement, ‘Democracy Now’, was resultantly established to tap into this sentiment. Its intention was to run a list of high-profile non-political candidates, including media commentators such as soccer pundit and journalist Eamon Dunphy, The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, and economist David McWilliams. With as much as €400,000 pledged to the group in one day and a significant number of voluntary staff and even free campaign offices provided,3 it seemed as if the group’s aim of twenty seats in the new Dáil might not be unrealistic. In the end, however, the aspirations of this movement came to naught, as it decided not to contest the election in the absence of one resource it could not acquire: time.

There were other attempts to create parties in 2010 and 2011, some via the letters column of The Irish Times,4 but most of these did not come to fruition. The new movements that did emerge were more akin to loose umbrella groups than political parties,5 and in any case none had a notable electoral impact in the 2011 general election. What adds to the puzzle of new party failure is the relative success achieved by independents. Although Ireland has always been exceptional for its number of independent parliamentarians,6 in 2011 one in three candidates was independent and their combined vote, at 12 per cent, was the highest achieved since June 1927. Including the loose group United Left Alliance, there were nineteen independents and ‘others’ elected, just one fewer than Fianna Fáil’s total. This group of parliamentarians is quite a diverse collection, ranging from building developers-cum-soccer coaches to Harvard-educated management consultants and from former campaigners for the legalisation of cannabis to a range of left-wing TDs, including former members of Militant Labour, the Socialist Workers’ Party, Sinn Féin and Democratic Left. The wide spectrum of ideological flavours (which did not stop a majority of them from banding together to form a post-election technical group in parliament) provided by these independents is suggestive of a mood for change amongst a broad section of society. It also suggests that had a new party with a proper organisational structure in place evolved in time for the election, it might have had a successful breakthrough.

In part, this failure to launch a new political party was the motivation for this work. We wanted to examine this non-event in detail, consider what happened in previous crises, both home and abroad, and assess what a new party could hope to achieve. We wanted to look at the experience of other minor parties: when did they emerge; what are the ingredients for a successful new party? As the title suggests, this book is about minor parties in Irish politics. As well as drawing on the analysis of political scientists, this volume also has a number of contributions from TDs from minor parties, both past and present, who provide a unique insight into their lives within such parties. While such a book seems pressing in the absence of a new party on the contemporary political scene, from a historical perspective a study of this area enables a greater understanding of contemporary political events and might prove useful to those taking a keen interest in the evolution of the Irish party system. Such a study also places the events of 2009-12 in context, next to other economic crises. Do they always spawn new parties, or are the latter more likely to be the product of political circumstances? Are we right to link economic change to political change?

Another factor inspiring this volume is the limited scholarly activity on minor parties in the Irish context. This was not the outcome of an apartheid policy on the part of political scientists and historians, but reflected the dominance (and permanence) of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, which together received on average almost nine out of every ten first preference votes cast at general elections between September 1927 and November 1982. However, the challenge to this dominance in recent decades, with minor party and independent candidates now attracting almost one in four votes and being a regular participant in government, demands greater attention. The purpose of this book is to tackle some of the questions about minor parties that have been raised, but gone unanswered, in the Irish context. The dismay of some commentators over the lack of new political parties through which to channel discontent in the economic downturn indicates the valuable, and sometimes underappreciated, role that minor parties can play in the political system. They can act as a safety-valve to release tension, enabling the bodypolitik to vent their frustration within the system, the best opportunity that exists of achieving change. It is in this context that the founder of the Progressive Democrats, Desmond O’Malley, says in his contribution to this book that the emergence of new (which by implication usually means minor) parties is a vital part of an effective political system; without them democracy will suffer and perhaps even die.

The aim of this introductory chapter is twofold: first, to resolve some definitional issues concerning minor parties, and second, to assess why no new party, whether minor or major, has successfully emerged in Ireland in recent years. The first issue concerns what we mean by minor, or perhaps why we call these parties minor. As Coakley notes in his chapter, this concerns identifying two boundaries: the upper boundary separates minor from major while the lower differentiates genuine minor parties from independent candidates. He provides a general discussion on the ambiguity concerning a definition of minor parties, although there is a broader discussion concerning size that is referred to by Clark and McDaid and Rekawek, namely whether minor necessarily implies small. A major party used to attracting a sizeable share of votes and seats might have a poor election, losing the majority of its representation, à la Fianna Fáil in 2011 or the Progressive Conservatives in Canada in 1993. Such a party is then small in composition, but is it necessarily a minor actor? In addition, how are we to differentiate between a party on the way up and one on the way down? At the same election in Canada, Bloc Québécois (BQ) won over 13 per cent of the national vote, Reform almost 19 per cent and the Progressive Conservatives (PC) 16 per cent. This was the first election for the BQ, but it constituted a gain of 17 per cent for Reform and a loss of 27 per cent for the Conservatives. Are we to consider all these parties equally? Both BQ and the PC (who won just two federal seats) were small parties, but do their rise and fall constitute the same phenomenon? To resolve this conundrum, both Weeks and Clark in their comparative chapters employ Mair’s definition of minor parties7 that includes those winning between 1.5 and 15 per cent of the national vote on average at more than three elections. For reasons of inclusivity, the lower boundary of this definition is loosened for cases of analysis within the Irish political system. Thus, Coakley, for example, includes all minor parties (and even some groups that have an ambiguous party status) that fall below the 1.5 per cent threshold. To warrant consideration for inclusion in this volume, Weeks ultimately defines the boundaries of interest as the non-permanent (or ‘ephemeral’) members of the Irish party system, or what Coakley more specifically labels the, ‘non-traditional, non-established, and non-mainstream’. This boundary is expanded to include non-party members of the non-establishment, that is, independent candidates. The latter’s inclusion reflects the significant role they play as part of the ‘others’ category outside of the three mainstream parties; it also reflects an ambiguity that can exist between some minor parties and independents.8

Of course, it might seem strange to label Labour a ‘major’ party, as it has only recently become the second largest party in the Dáil, and even then both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin have been challenging this position in opinion polls. Consequently, McDaid and Rekawek explore this very issue for Labour, as they examine its fluctuations between major- and minor-party status. The issue of where Labour fits within this work on minor parties was at times troubling. On the one hand, it is obvious that Labour is different to minor parties when we examine its lifespan. All minor parties, with the obvious exceptions of the surviving contemporary examples, have faded into extinction. Labour, in contrast, is the oldest all of Irish parties, in operation since 1912. On the other hand, the electoral performance of Labour pales in significance compared to its social democrat counterparts elsewhere in Europe.9 At times Labour has occupied a relatively weak position within the party system and seemed on the verge of being relegated to fourth or even fifth place behind other minor challengers. In this context, rather than laying out a diktat for contributors, we encouraged them to provide their own discussion of this issue where necessary. Some, like Clark, have used a comparative measure, borrowed from Mair,10 to determine whether Labour warrants inclusion (it does for both of them). O’Malley uses his own arbitrary measure, which results in his inclusion of Labour for some elections, but not all. Both Clark and O’Malley interpret ‘minor’ in terms of size, that is minor parties are small parties. Aside from the relativity of such a definition, we also need to bear in mind that minor captures more than just size. It is related to a mentality both within the party and in terms of attitudes towards it; it is also affected by the nature of party competition. This is why McDaid and Rekawek’s chapter is particularly important in understanding how one party can be at times minor, major, or even neither of these statuses.

The universe of non-permanent actors in or on the Irish political landscape is not limited to political parties, but also includes interest groups and independent candidates. As Murphy indicates for the former, and both Hansen and Weeks11 for the latter, the impact of these actors has been at times considerable. This ranges from independent parliamentarians being the kingmakers in the Dáil to interest groups having an effect on referendum campaigns. The major difficulty for academics concerning these various actors is identifying a clear boundary between all three. When does an interest group become a party? When does an independent become a party? These definitional issues are addressed by Coakley and Murphy. While the differences between a ‘major minor’ party such as the Progressive Democrats, an interest group (such as the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) and an independent candidate are quite considerable, this does not warrant the exclusion of the latter two categories from our analysis. As Murphy indicates, interest groups can constitute a transitory phase for would-be parties and it is important to consider why some morph into political parties. Similarly, an independent position can also constitute a ford-like status for those wishing to cross a river to the opposite bank that is a political party.12

When attempting to understand the experience of political parties, sometimes academics can be overly guilty of focusing on esoteric external factors. Those working within parties usually place more emphasis on organisation and strategy. Indeed, most of the contributors in this book refer to the importance of organisation, but Bolleyer, O’Malley and Varley in particular focus on the strategies of minor parties. Bolleyer analyses the transformation of the Greens from an umbrella protest movement to a normal political party, one that became part of the establishment when entering government in 2007. In this light, O’Malley considers what happens to minor parties when they take the ultimate decision to cross the Rubicon and enter government. This is a particularly relevant issue given what happened to the two minor parties in the Fianna Fáil-led government formed in 2007. O’Malley also looks at the actions of the other parties, in particular the manner in which they ‘smother’ their minor partners in office. Indeed, Walsh and O’Malley in another chapter suggest that this is why Sinn Féin has not suffered a decline comparable to other minor parties – it has never been in government in the south. Varley considers the fortunes of farmers’ parties, which were an ever-present up to the 1960s, but disappeared with the emergence of the Irish Farmers’ Association and the decline of the agricultural industry. That being said, agriculture is still an important player in Ireland, and if one wonders why this is not reflected in the party system, Varley indicates how the strategies of the various farmers’ parties were also culpable for their decline.

What happens within a party might be considered the secret garden of politics, and for this reason the contributions by three past and present minor party politicians are extremely insightful. Desmond O’Malley indicates that the internal struggles within Fianna Fáil could not be kept silent, and from his account it seems that, with hindsight, it was inevitable that some type of breakaway movement would have emerged as a reaction to Haughey’s style of leadership. Dan Boyle’s account of the internal struggles within the Greens, from its evolution to party status, to the appointment of a leader, to entry into government, indicates the tension between intra-party democracy and centralising efficiencies within minor parties. Catherine Murphy, formerly of the Workers’ Party, and later Democratic Left, writes that sometimes such efficiences can result in an over-emphasis on electoral politics, which can distance the party’s ideological strands. This theme is also explored by Walsh and O’Malley and Rafter in their respective accounts of the evolution of Sinn Féin and the Workers’ Party. Rafter’s analysis of the Workers’ Party and Democratic Left is a detailed examination of how a party can split and then merge with another.

As Ó Muineacháin discusses, the disappearance of the Progressive Democrats in an economic situation similar to their formation begs the question whether new parties need to be radical to avoid being redundant. While Michael McDowell suggested changing the name of the PDs to the Radical Party in 2000,13 it is difficult to support the claim that the Irish electorate necessarily want something radical. Certainly they want something different, but the relative weakness of the more ideologically-driven parties suggests that being radical may not be the most rational path for minor parties to follow. The debate over being radical or redundant was not confined to the PDs, as all the minor parties in Ireland inevitably (because almost all of them folded) faced this question. This is a theme that is re-iterated in many of this book’s chapters, where it is shown that this is one of the key debating points for minor parties.

So why did no new PDs emerge in 2011? The failure of a new political party to launch in spite of a public appetite for one, not to mention the availability of prospective candidates and campaign resources, indicates the difficulty in getting such a project off the ground. This explains why almost all the new parties that have appeared in the Dáil since 1945 have been related to existing or former parties – they can capitalise on pre-existing structures. Clann na Poblachta and the Green Party are the only genuinely ‘new’ parties of which we can speak. Why is this the case? With the pre-election period of 2010-11 as the context, the rest of this chapter assesses from a comparative setting why no new party, whether minor or major, successfully emerged in Ireland. Examining the gestation of minor parties is a natural way to begin this book. We examine the various social and political factors that can inhibit would-be parties, as well as the historical reasons for the emergence of new parties in Ireland and its European neighbours. Ireland is not the only country to experience economic and political change in recent years, and placing the country in a comparative context enables an understanding of what really affects new party emergence.

What is a new party?

Although this book is about minor parties, most new parties begin their political life with a minor status. While there have been exceptions, such as de Valera’s Fianna Fáil in 1920s Ireland or Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in 1990s Italy, such new major parties tend to be the product of organisational changes in an existing party or a collapse in the old political order.

The ambiguity of concern here, however, is not between that of minor and major parties, but rather between new and old parties. At this point, a classification is usually the preferred technique to distinguish between the various types of minor parties. As Coakley discusses in greater depth elsewhere in this book, the manner of party emergence is one such classification that can be employed. He examines three other dimensions, including electoral, strategic and ideological. Given the thoroughness of Coakley’s analysis, there is little need to go into this in more detail; instead the focus here is on the newness of a party and its indicators.

Such indicators are discussed by Barnea and Rahat,14 who use Key’s tripartite conceptualisation of parties15 – party-in-the-electorate, party-as-organisation, and party-in-government – to distinguish eight criteria of newness, which include party label, ideology, the party’s electorate, its formal status on the party register, the party’s institutions, its activists, representatives and policies. The reason why so many definitional criteria may be desired is due to the sometimes ambiguous nature of new parties.

Examining this ambiguity in greater detail, the launch of a new organisation at a public event, such as Fianna Fáil at the La Scala theatre in 1926 or the Progressive Democrats at a press conference in 1985, might seem one obvious indicator of new party emergence. However, the line of demarcation between new and old is not necessarily this clear-cut. In these two cases, both parties were breakaway movements, with most of their elite comprising TDs elected for pre-existing parties. To what extent was Fianna Fáil a new party, offering new ideas and new faces? Was it just a re-hash of an increasingly stale brand (that of the anti-Treaty Republicans, who persisted with their refusal to recognise the new state)? Were the Progressive Democrats simply a liberal wing of Fianna Fáil? Was its formation a type of market segmentation, in that it enabled Fianna Fáil to offer an additional product to the electorate?

While these questions are designed to be of a challenging nature, their intention is to indicate that a new name on the market need not necessarily imply a new party. There are numerous examples from the business world of ‘new’ products, which were simply a redesign, or renaming of pre-existing products. This rebranding is often motivated by a desire to discard a negative image, such as the tobacco company Philip Morris changing its name to Altria in 2003, or closer to home, Anglo Irish Bank being renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation Ltd in 2011. This also explains why Fianna Fáil reportedly considered changing its name, and why in the UK in recent years, the Conservatives changed their logo, and Tony Blair repackaged the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’.

It may also be the case that in some instances products change in all but name. The Freedom Party in Austria, which in the 1980s under Norbert Steger had moved to the centre, espousing a liberal position similar to that of the Free Democrats in Germany, swung radically to the right in the 1990s under the leadership of Jorg Haider. Although there was not a total transformation in the party’s politics, the populism of Haider was markedly different to the centrism pursued by Steger. Similarly, in 2011 Fianna Fáil’s new leader, Micheál Martin, talked about new politics. Although this desired level of newness seems to be primarily organisational, what if, to prevent further meltdown, the party had a radical shift in policy, promoting a new message and new people, but retained its party name? Would it be a new party? Or would it simply be, to paraphrase Tony Blair, ‘New Fianna Fáil’?

In order to discuss the absence of a new party we need to be clear of its distinguishing features. Further, since the decline and rise of parties is often treated as a measure of party system change, a conceptualisation of party newness is required for any analysis of change.16 Coakley discusses in more detail the various boundaries between new, major, minor and micro parties. As he indicates, some have employed particularly strict terms, excluding all parties that are related to existing or former parties (Hug, for example, distinguishes between ‘genuinely’ new and splinter parties)17. Rather than an exclusion, Coakley, along with Bochel and Denver18 and Tavits19, suggests a division between ‘breakaway’ and new parties. Others have focused on timelines for definitional purposes, including all parties formed since 1960.20 While the latter definition is more open and allows for the inclusion of more parties, thus increasing the number of cases for analysis, it begs the question, when does a new party become old? Indeed, for Barnea and Rahat,21 this is the crucial distinguishing feature of newness, which they see as a relative term; the newness of a party depends on how different it is from old or existing parties. For reasons of inclusivity a liberal approach to such differences is adopted here, as the emergence of new parties is identified by the appearance of organisations that have not contested any previous general elections. This means there is no discrimination against those with previous party ties or incarnations. The only discrimination is against those that do not register the existence of a new party organisation.22 In other words, any party that changes all but its name (or continues to be registered as an ‘old’ party) is not treated as a new party.

What affects new party emergence?

Pedersen proposed that parties pass through four thresholds in their political life. We are here primarily interested in the first three: declaration, authorisation, and representation. The fourth, relevance, refers to the impact such parties can wield, the nature of which is discussed in most of the chapters in this volume. To understand the absence of new parties in Ireland we need to assess the comparative factors that explain their emergence in other contexts. In terms of party emergence, we are dealing with groups that have crossed the first two thresholds and are seeking to cross the third. An analysis of party emergence then really concerns two questions: what is the nature of party formation, and what are the factors that affect its occurrence. Beginning with the first question, as Hug,23 Keman and Krouwel,24 and Coakley indicate, there are four processes by which a new party is born: birth – when an entirely new organisation emerges; re(birth) – when a pre-existing party undergoes a radical transformation; marriage – when parties merge; and divorce – when a fission occurs. These processes are analysed in more detail later in this chapter, but for now we are more interested in the second question: the root causes of these developments.

While the circumstances surrounding the emergence of individual parties might initially seem quite particular and idiosyncratic, closer observation reveals some comparative patterns. Although much of the earlier literature on new parties suggests they are a product of new issues neglected by existing parties,25 more recent work has pointed to a wider set of determinants.26 Some, such as Hug27 and Tavits,28 have suggested new party entry is a strategic decision, whereby potential party entrepreneurs weigh up the costs and benefits of forming a party, and the probability of their having an impact. In general, however, there appear to be five key factors that affect new party emergence: social, political, institutional, events and personalities. In a wide-ranging work, Harmel and Robertson stress the importance of the first three on the formation and success of new parties.29 They test twelve hypotheses stemming from these factors, which to sum, stated that there should be more new parties in large countries, in plural and heterogeneous societies, where there is more extreme sectionalism, and higher levels of inequality and post-materialism. The political features of such countries more prone to new party emergence include two-party systems, with few cleavage dimensions, a parliamentary system using a proportional representation electoral system with multi-member districts, liberal ballot access laws, and a decentralised form of government.30

While Harmel and Robertson rejected a lot of their hypotheses,31 it is still worth assessing the influence of each for potential new party entrepreneurs. Beginning with social factors, these include the rise of new issues, a conducive political culture, and a heterogeneous society. The rise of new issues can often give rise to new parties, but such issues are more likely to crop up in heterogeneous and diverse societies that have a more tolerant and open political culture.32 Examples of new issues include post-materialism and environmentalism, which, as discussed later, emerged amidst the social liberalisation of the 1960s, and in part spawned the Green parties of the 1980s. Similarly, the new waves of immigration into Europe in the 1990s resulted in an emergence (or re-emergence in some cases) of new radical right parties.

The political factors include the convergence of parties, the emergence of new voters, and declining party attachment. One reason why the number of new parties in Europe doubled in the 1990s,33 for example, was because of the available space in terms of electoral competition. As the established parties converged even more on the median voter, they left a vacuum for parties (both old and new) closer to the extremes to exploit. From a historical perspective, the emergence of new voters has had a significant impact on party systems, particularly following the onset of mass suffrage after the First World War, when it resulted in significant electoral breakthroughs for left-wing parties. Similarly, new waves of immigration into a country could over time result in the emergence of a party to represent these communities, à la the presence of ethnic-minority parties, such as the Swedish People’s Party in Finland or the South Tyrolean People’s Party in Italy. A pool of new voters can also materialise from within the party system, by which we mean the increasing number detaching themselves from the existing parties. This can mean that voters are less likely to maintain a more concrete attachment to their preferred party, but also that they are disillusioned with parties as a whole. Coakley34 discusses this further, noting the findings from across the literature on the positive impact of declining partisanship on minor party fortunes.

The question of why new parties are established feeds into a wider question on the formation of parties.35 The two general approaches used to explain the presence of particular parties are the historical-sociological and the institutional.36 Elsewhere in this book, Coakley discusses many aspects of these approaches, but it is difficult to over-emphasise the importance of institutional factors, or what Lucardie calls ‘political opportunity structure’.37 These are primarily electoral regulations, including ease of party registration and ballot access. As Weeks shows, onerous deposit and signature requirements and limited access to state subsidies are some of the hurdles that put off would-be parties. The nature of the electoral system can also have a considerable influence on parties’ estimations of their electoral prospects. While major parties can play around with electoral rules to gain bonus representation, for minor parties (who typically lack the power to do so in any case) it is a different story. As both Duverger38 and Rae39 asserted, while electoral systems can act as brakes to halt the development of minor parties, none can accelerate their development. In particular, district magnitude, threshold and ballot structure can all play a role in affecting party emergence. For example, we might imagine that parties are more likely to emerge in the Netherlands or Israel, where the electoral threshold is less than one per cent, than in plurality systems such as in the UK or France, where a party needs to defeat all others in a constituency to win a seat.

The two other factors affecting new party emergence are not as predictable, but no less important. They are events, or ‘political conjuncture’, and personalities.40 While some parties are the product of years of planning or are part of developments that form a natural order of evolution,41 others are spawned by unpredictable events, or crises. Would a new party have been formed in 1980s Ireland had Desmond O’Malley not been expelled from Fianna Fáil? Would all four of the Progress Party’s MPs in Denmark have quit the party to form Freedom 2000 had the controversial party founder, Mogens Glistrup, not been re-admitted into the party fold in 1999? Given the stable nature of many political systems, it often takes such crises to bump things off kilter and allow for the arrival of new parties on the scene.

Finally, parties are not unitary actors and some of their actions can best be understood by an analysis of the motivations and incentives of their components, that is the individual politicians within the party. Some new parties are personal vehicle movements, which although not necessarily designed purely to further the interests of one person, are usually dominated by this individual. The Monetary Reform Party of the 1940s had one elected TD, Oliver J. Flanagan, who was the party’s central mouthpiece, and it wound up on his decision to join Fine Gael in 1952. Similarly, the Libertas Institute, which played a pivotal role in the defeat of the first referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, was the brainchild of Declan Ganley, the party’s central backer. Following his failure to win a seat at the 2009 European Parliament elections, Ganley announced his departure from Irish politics, and with him, his Libertas Ireland party, which had a brief lifespan of just over six months (although this could be subject to change). Likewise, from a European perspective, we cannot explain the perhaps surprising emergence in the Netherlands of the right-wing populist parties the Pim Fortuyn List (in 2001) and the Party of Freedom (in 2004) without understanding the motives of the parties’ respective founders, Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders.

A surfeit of parties?

Of the five factors that breed new party emergence, some have been evident in Irish political life for the past few years. An economic crisis that has undermined the country’s sovereignty is obviously the most significant. New issues related to this crisis appeared, including the banking system and the EU/IMF bailout, but also some non-economic matters, such as political reform. The institutional structures are also favourable to minor parties, as it is not terribly difficult to form a party (details of which are outlined by Coakley in his chapter), and a form of proportional representation is used for elections.42 Indeed, taking these factors into account, Abedi’s study of nineteen western democracies found Ireland to be the third least cartelised system, which suggests it offers reasonable access to would-be party entrepreneurs.43 So, seeing as new parties emerged during previous crises, including Sinn Féin in 1917, Clann na Talmhan and Clann na Poblachta in the 1940s, and the Progressive Democrats in the 1980s, what makes the 2010-11 period any different? The absence of individuals willing to cross the Rubicon into political life is one answer, but we also need to consider the political factors. While there has been some convergence by the political parties in Ireland, it may be that there has not been enough to trigger the emergence of a new competitor. It could simply be the case that, in spite of the disappearance of the Progressive Democrats, there is no room for a new party. New party emergence (or lack of it) cannot be assessed without considering the context of the actors already present in the game and its level of intra-party competitiveness. To do so, we need to compare the Irish party system with other European states, which in part allows us to assess the ‘typical’ number of parties in a political system.

Counting the raw number of competitive or parliamentary parties is a flawed methodology because it does not take into account the relative size of parties and how they affect party competition. For example, although ten parties were elected to the British House of Commons in 2010, few have described Britain as a true multi-party system. Two parties won almost 90 per cent of seats, while seven others between them won just 4 per cent of seats. To overcome this issue, Laakso and Taagepera devised a measure of the ‘effective’ number of parties, which takes into account their relative size.44 Using this methodology, Gallagher, Laver and Mair count the existing number of effective parties in Europe at the elective (for elections) and legislative (in parliament) levels.45 Using a three-election average (1997-2010), the mean number of elective parties in Europe is almost five; the mean number of legislative parties is four. This figure varies from a low of two legislative parties in Malta to almost eight in Belgium and six in the Netherlands. Ireland is below the European mean, with four elective parties and three at the legislative level. Indeed, of the other European states using PR electoral systems to elect their lower houses of parliament (all bar the United Kingdom and France), only Hungary and the Mediterranean democracies of Greece, Malta, Portugal and Spain have fewer parties than Ireland.

Rather than rushing to conclude that this confirms that Ireland has a low number of parties, we need to consider other explanatory factors. The first is size. Being a small country, perhaps three legislative parties is more than ample. However, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Slovakia, all with populations not much larger than Ireland, have on average two more parties in parliament. Indeed, states with smaller populations than Ireland, such as Estonia, Lithuania and Slovenia, have two more parties in parliament. Of the other small states in Europe (with considerably smaller populations), Cyprus, Iceland and Luxembourg all have more parties than Ireland; Malta is the exception. So it seems that size of population is not a barrier to the emergence of parties. Remaining on the theme of size, perhaps the capacity of parliament is a factor. The smaller the assembly, the fewer parties we should be likely to see, simply because there are fewer seats to go around. If we consider the states in Europe with lower houses of fewer than 300 members46, the ratio of MPs to legislative parties is 35 to 1; in other words, there is one party per thirty-five MPs. The comparative figure in Western Europe is even lower, at one per twenty-two MPs. In contrast, the ratio in the Dáil is one party per fifty-three TDs, a significant difference from the European average. Size of parliament should therefore not act as a barrier to the emergence of new parties.

It seems that Ireland has too few parties, a level of under-representation that is not the product of a small population or parliament. While this suggests that the Irish political system is due a new party, this question assumes that there is an optimum number of parties for a parliamentary democracy, which ignores the level of fragmentation in society and the number of social cleavages.47 The reality is that, as already discussed, the more divided and heterogeneous a society, the more parties we are likely to see, and voters are likely to desire, to represent the various interests. In the Irish context, despite the high level of immigration during the years of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland remains a relatively homogenous society, with no real evident social cleavages. In other words, Whyte’s description of the party system forty years ago as ‘politics without social bases’ remains true.48 This level of homogeneity means that few political parties may be required in Ireland, as is the case in Malta, another homogenous, Catholic island society, where just two parties predominate.

When do new parties emerge?

Having considered the reasons why parties do not emerge, what are the positive reasons? Under what circumstances do new parties appear? Harmel and Robertson’s study of the formation and success of new parties in nineteen industrial democracies between 1960 and 1980 identified ‘natural’ formation as the most common reason (48 per cent), followed by a split (37 per cent) and merger (12 per cent).49 Just 3 per cent of cases of new parties they examined comprised the reorganisation of former parties. They also analysed the purpose of party formation, and perhaps surprisingly, found that just one in ten new parties was mobilised on a new issue (half of these were green parties). The most common purpose was to offer an alternative on an old or pre-existing issue, this being the aim of almost half of new parties. With this study as a template, we examine all cases of new party emergence in post-war Western Europe up to 2010. The degrees of party newness were already discussed in an earlier section, following on from which an inclusive definition of a new party is preferable. This includes any party elected to national parliament post-1955 (to allow time for the settling of party systems) or, in the case of late blooming democracies, following two successive democratic elections. The data was sourced from Nohlen and Stöver’s Elections in Europe and information on the formation of new parties was sourced from the general secondary literature.50 A post-hoc taxonomy of party emergence was devised and it indicates a number of patterns, which are summarised in Table 1. Confirming the earlier findings of Harmel and Robertson, there are two dominant reasons for the emergence of new parties.51 The first is organisational: new parties are the product of either a split from an existing party, a merger of parties, or inherit the mantle of a dying or defunct party. The second factor is ideological: new parties are the product of new politics, both on the left and right of the political spectrum. Those on the left have comprised the new left, and more recently, green parties. Those on the right have been the populist and new radical right parties. The new politics represented by these parties revolve around issues that have arisen in European politics since the late 1970s and early 1980s, primarily, but not exclusively, environmentalism and immigration.

To first consider the organisational factors: the most common cause of the emergence of new political parties in Europe is a split in an existing party (26 per cent of all cases). Whether for ideological, personality-driven, or other reasons, splinter parties have formed in most west European states. For example, the previously discussed move to the right of the Austrian Freedom Party under Jörg Haider resulted in the secession in 1993 of five of the party’s Nationalrat members (MPs) to found a more classically liberal party, the Liberal Forum. Twelve years later, Haider himself broke away from the party he no longer led to form the Alliance for the Future of Austria. Other examples of party splinters include the Norwegian Liberal People’s Party, formed when the Liberal Party split over attitudes to membership of the European Economic Community; and the Centre Democrats in the Netherlands, a moderate faction that broke away from the more extreme Centre Party in 1984.

Table 1: Circumstances of new party emergence in Western Europe, 1950-2010

Organisational

Per cent

N

Split

26

46

Merger

14

24

Replacement

11

19

Personal Vehicles

4

7

Ideological

New Issue

16

28

Regional

6

9

New Politics

9

15

Sectional

5

8

Others

10

18

Total

100

175

Note: This includes all cases of new party emergence in seventeen west-European states (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) between 1950 and 2010, or in the case of late democracies, ten years after the first democratic elections.

So too in Ireland, a party split is the most common causal factor in the emergence of new parties. The two main parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, are the inheritors of a split in the briefly-dominant Sinn Féin over acceptance of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Fianna Fáil is the result of another split in 1926, this time within the group that had originally opposed the aforementioned treaty. We have already discussed the case of the Progressive Democrats, which was led by a number of TDs who split from Fianna Fáil. There are a number of other examples of splinter parties in Ireland. National Labour was founded in 1944 after the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union broke away from the Labour Party in protest over what it perceived to be the increasing power of the left within the organisation.52 Likewise, as Rafter describes in more detail, the Workers’ Party came about following a split in Sinn Féin in 1970, which itself split in 1992 when most of the parliamentary party left to form New Agenda (see also the contribution of Catherine Murphy in chapter 4), which was later renamed Democratic Left. Most of the splits in Ireland have occurred within the left, which is further validated by the presence of the Socialist Party, founded in 1996 by a group of militant Trotskyites who had been expelled from Labour in 1989.

The second organisational cause of new party emergence is a merger (14 per cent of cases). The Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom is the product of a merger in 1988 of the Liberal and Social Democratic Parties, who for the previous seven years (since the foundation of the Social Democrats, a breakaway party from Labour, in 1981) had worked together in an electoral alliance. Likewise, the People of Freedom Party in Italy, founded by Silvio Berlusconi in 2009, is a merger of his Forza Italia with the National Alliance and other minor parties. The National Alliance itself was the product of a merger in 1995 of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement and parts of the disgraced Christian Democracy. Although there are fewer mergers in Ireland, there are a couple of notable examples, both involving two established parties. The now largest party, Fine Gael, is the product of a merger in 1933 of Cumann na nGaedheal, the National Centre Party and the Army Comrades Association. Although not originally the product of a merger, Labour has merged with several other parties in its 100-year existence, including the National Progressive Democrats in 1963, the Democratic Socialist Party in 1990, and Democratic Left in 1999. Its reunion with National Labour in 1950 may also be considered a merger of sorts. As is the case elsewhere in Europe, it is rare (if not, as Coakley indicates, non-existent) in Ireland that mergers are the product of solely minor parties. They tend to involve one major party, as is the case in Switzerland, with the example of the FDP.The Liberals, in 2009, merged with the Free Democratic Party, one of the major establishment parties of Swiss politics, with its much smaller rival Liberal Party.

The final organisational factor is where new parties fill a vacuum left by a departing, or departed, party. Almost all the examples of this phenomenon in Europe are limited to Belgium, France and Italy. In the latter two cases, this is a reflection of the fluid nature of the party systems in these countries. They include the Italian People’s Party, which replaced the discredited Christian Democrats in the mid-1990s, the Democrats of the Left, who in 1998 replaced the old Party of Democratic Socialists, and in the case of France, Liberal Democracy, which replaced the Republican Party in 1997, and the Democratic Movement, which replaced the Union of French Democracy ten years later. Although there are no examples in the modern Irish party system of successor parties, Garvin has traced an organisational link between Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) of the 1880s and the early Fianna Fáil of the late 1920s.53 Further, such was the dominance of O’Connell’s nationalist movement in the 1820s and 1830s, Parnell’s IPP, the Home Rule Party in the early twentieth century, and later Sinn Féin, it is not unfeasible to claim that each of these movements filled a vacuum left by their departing predecessor.

The ideological reasons for the emergence of new parties primarily comprise the promotion of new issues or old issues in a new manner. One in four new parties are concerned with ‘new politics’. The most prevalent new issue in the 1970s and 1980s was environmentalism, which spawned Green parties in most European states. In more recent times, the spectrum of emergence has swung to the right as populist parties, concerned with immigration, and often quite Eurosceptic, have made significant inroads in some systems. Although the newness of this message may be debatable (particularly the appeal of these parties to nationalistic sentiment), they claim to represent new politics in that many of them are, paradoxically, anti-political.54 There are also new parties that have a more restrictive focus, often initially mobilised on one key issue, a position that can evolve the longer such parties remain politically competitive. Examples include United Left in Spain, a left-wing coalition formed in 1986 in opposition to Spanish membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and the Party of the Animals in the Netherlands, formed in 2002 to promote animal rights.

Not all new parties are necessarily concerned with new politics; some form to promote regional issues and sectional interests. Both groups comprise approximately 5 per cent of cases of new party emergence. Not surprisingly, the former are confined to states with regional conflicts, which include Belgium, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. The most common purpose for the formation of those pursuing sectional interests has been primarily related to rural, agricultural issues. Such parties include Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Tradition in France in 1989, the Coastal Party in Norway in 1999, and the Farmers’ Party in the Netherlands in 1959. A different type of sectional party, representing a generational divide, is the recent phenomenon of pensioners’ parties. Examples include Union 55+ and the General Elderly Alliance in the Netherlands, the Gil Party in Israel, the National Party of Retirees and Pensioners in Poland, the Croatian Party of Pensioners and the Pensioners’ Party in Italy, although not all of these have secured parliamentary representation.

There are some similarities when comparing these patterns to the Irish experience. As Dan Boyle describes in more detail in his contribution, the Green Party somewhat reluctantly emerged from the various environmental organisations that had cropped up in the 1970s. As of yet, no populist party has sprung up as a counter to the Greens.55 Although an Immigration Control Platform did run candidates at the 2002 and 2007 general election, it made no electoral impact and did not register as a political party. A Eurosceptic streak in the electorate was evident in the impact made by groups such as Libertas at the referendums on the European Treaties of Nice and Lisbon. However, the depth of this streak is questionable given the negligible impact of these parties at parliamentary elections.

Other parties to promote new issues include Oliver Flanagan’s Monetary Reform, a reactionary movement in the 1940s against moneyed influences, which took a populist line that at times bordered on anti-Semitism. Given the importance of Catholicism in the country, it is not surprising that new parties formed to pursue a Christian agenda, particularly in the absence of any genuine Christian Democratic party, although surprising perhaps that such parties have been few and their impact negligible. These parties, which include Seán Loftus’ Christian Democratic Party of the 1960s, the Christian Democrats (founded as the National Party in 1996), and the Christian Solidarity Party (founded as the Christian Principles Party in 1991), pursued an old issue in a new manner, in that they campaigned for a greater reflection of a Catholic ethos in government policies. Although their electoral appeal has been minimal, as Murphy outlines, some of these groups did have a role to play in the referendums on divorce and abortion.

Although there have been regional parties such as the Donegal People’s Party, the South Kerry Independent Alliance, and the Cork Progressive Association, none of these groups are comparable to the Basque or Flemish separatist movements. These former parties happened to have a primarily local organisation or localised policy outlook; partition from the state was not part of their agenda. Of course, there is another regionalist party from a neighbouring jurisdiction, but Sinn Féin could not be called regionalist in the Irish context. Sectional parties have been more prominent; these have ranged from Clann na Talmhan in the 1940s, the Army Wives’ Group in the 1980s, to the Blind Men’s Party and Business Men’s Party of the 1920s.

In total, as Coakley outlines in more detail, since 1955 there have been nine new parties elected to the Dáil. If we extend our focus back to define a new party as any that emerged since 1932, that is, once the party system and state had found its roots, this leaves fourteen new parliamentary parties. These are, in chronological order: National Centre Party, Clann na Talmhan, Monetary Reform, National Labour, Clann na Poblachta, National Progressive Democrats, Socialist Labour Party, Sinn Féin, Democratic Socialist Party, Workers’ Party, Green Party, Progressive Democrats, Democratic Left, and the Socialist Party. Of these fourteen parties, three held representation for just one election, two for two elections, and two for three elections. Of these seven parties, six were subsumed into other parties, while the other disbanded. Four others remain in existence, two of whom retain parliamentary representation. The mean number of elections contested by these parties is almost 5 (4.57), although the median is 3.5. The Greens and Sinn Féin are the only parties of the fourteen that failed to win seats at their first election, and it may be no coincidence that these two parties are the longest in continuance as a single organisation. So for most new parties, the first election is their zenith, following which their electoral performance enters a period of steady decline. Of the fourteen, eleven won their highest number of seats at their first election. Only the Greens, Sinn Féin and the Workers’ Party broke this trend, again all of which are still in existence, although the latter is electorally competitive at only the local level. Perhaps this says something about the danger of starting with a big bang. Expectations can be set too high, following which the only way is down. It seems that it is far better to begin gradually and build up the organisation from the grass roots.

Conclusion

Despite the levels of anger and disillusionment with the Irish political system since the onset of the latest recession, at the time of writing no new party has emerged to tap into this sentiment. But perhaps it would be more surprising if a new party did suddenly make a breakthrough. After all, Ireland has consistently had one of the lowest levels of support for new parties. In a ranking of sixteen West European states by the mean aggregate vote for new parties, Ireland was placed fifteenth in the 1960s, twelfth in the 1970s and 1980s, and fourteenth in the 1990s and the 2000s.56 Only Malta and the United Kingdom have had consistently lower levels of support for new parties. In addition, the comparative experience of economic crises does not suggest that new parties are a political by-product. In the three other euro member states with genuinely suffering economies, no significant new party has emerged. Greece, Portugal and Spain all had elections in the middle of economic crises, with outcomes similar to that of the Dáil elections of 2011 – the governing party suffers considerable losses, with most of the gains made by the established opposition party. Even in the case of Iceland, whose banking system collapsed in 2008-9, no new party won seats at the 2009 elections. A Citizens’ Movement (which later evolved into a party) did win four seats, but in a parliament of sixty-three, this was not exactly a major electoral breakthrough.

In this chapter we discussed the issue of identifying new parties, what affects their emergence, and the context of party formation in Europe. Examining the comparative experience, it is possibly unrealistic to expect a wholly new party to emerge in Ireland. More than half of new parties elected to parliament across Europe have links with former or existing parties, be they a splinter, a re-organisation, or the product of a merger. In the Irish case, this pattern is more apparent, with the Greens the only genuinely new party to enter the Dáil in recent decades. If the likely source of a new party is therefore within the existing parties, from where could this materialise? There were rumours in the summer of 2010 about dissident TDs in both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael leaving to form a new party, with one TD stating, ‘What is motivating this is a generational mood, a generation shift. The idea is coming from those who believe that the electorate is sick and tired of the current tweedledum tweedledee politics’.57 At the same time, these same TDs put their prospects of forming such a party as low as between 5 and 20 per cent, which makes it hardly surprising that this new ‘Fianna Gael’ party never emerged. A more realistic possibility lies on the political left. Following a record number of seats won by the left in 2011 (approximately sixty-seven, including Labour, Sinn Féin, the United Left Alliance, and seven independents), there was some talk of the more disparate strands pooling their resources. The most obvious such case is the United Left Alliance of the People Before Profit Alliance, the Socialist Party and the Workers’ Unemployed and Action Group. However, at the time of writing, such developments remained a work in progress and the ULA has been described as ‘an alliance working within an alliance’.58

But could a new party come from a political source outside of the Dáil? In Latvia, which experienced a recession worse than most other global economies, former President Valdis Zatlers established Zatler’s Reform party in July 2011, winning twenty-two seats in the 100-seat Saeima just two months later. This came shortly after he had exercised a never before used power to call a referendum to dissolve parliament, and after he surprisingly failed to be re-elected to the presidency. Such a Zatler-like party is probably unlikely to emerge in Ireland given the party affiliations of the previous and current presidential incumbents. However, maybe some of the defeated candidates from the 2011 presidential election could replicate Zatler’s actions. Seán Gallagher, who came from nowhere to poll almost 30 per cent as an independent, is one example that springs to mind.

The individual contributions to this volume provide an important insight into the workings and fortunes of minor parties. They also constitute a significant analysis of the Irish political system and are an invaluable contribution to anyone interested in this area. The experience of minor parties that is outlined indicates that those that have been successful have had a distinctive message, which has not necessarily been radical (although it may have been so in the respective parties’ early days). Taking stock of the Irish party system in 2012, the relatively low number of parties means that any new arrival on the political scene would not be redundant. Whether they need a radical message to maintain immunity from redundancy is another matter. Whatever is the future for minor parties, the trend amongst the electorate is towards dealignment rather than realignment, which increases the likelihood of voters switching to new parties. Although this has not yet happened in Ireland, the increasing level of flux means that anything is possible.

Notes

1 It is described as such in the subtitle of the academic analysis of the 2011 election in Michael Gallagher and Michael Marsh (eds),