Programmatic Parties
December 2011
Lead Consultant: Nic Cheeseman
Project Manager: Dan Paget
Research and writing by: Adi Dasgupta, Daniel Epstein, Oleh Protsyk and
Dan Paget.
© International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), 20 12
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2
Table of Contents
List of Tables ........................................................................................................................ 5
List of Acronyms.................................................................................................................. 6
1
Programmatic Politics in Comparative Perspective ...................................... 7
1.1
Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 7
1.2
Defining and operationalizing programmaticity ................................................ 9
1.3
Foundations of programmatic politics ..................................................................14
1.3.1
The role of the state ......................................................................................................... 14
1.3.2
The structure of society ................................................................................................. 15
1.3.3
Institutional design .......................................................................................................... 17
1.3.4
Party system institutionalization ............................................................................... 17
1.4
Pathways to programmatic politics .......................................................................19
1.4.1
Party genesis and development .................................................................................. 20
1.4.2
Party institutionalization and the sustainability of
programmatic politics..................................................................................................... 28
1.4.3
1.5
The impact of programmatic politics ....................................................................36
1.5.1
Representation and accountability ........................................................................... 36
1.5.2
Governance.......................................................................................................................... 38
1.5.3
Political dynamics............................................................................................................. 38
1.6
Policy recommendations............................................................................................40
1.6.1
Structural determinants of programmatic development ................................. 41
1.6.2
Party genesis....................................................................................................................... 42
1.6.3
Programmatic party building ...................................................................................... 43
1.7
2
From parties to party systems .................................................................................... 31
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................44
Brazil ............................................................................................................................ 47
2.1
Introduction ....................................................................................................................47
2.2
History of Programmatic Politics in Brazil ..........................................................48
2.3
Categorization and Description of Programmatic Parties .............................50
2.4
Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics ....................................53
2.5
Effects of Programmatic Politics .............................................................................58
2.6
Lessons and Policy Implications from the Brazilian Case ..............................59
2.7
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................60
3
3
4
5
India.............................................................................................................................. 63
3.1
Introduction ....................................................................................................................63
3.2
History of Programmatic Politics in India ...........................................................64
3.3
Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties ......................66
3.4
Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics ....................................73
3.5
Effects of Programmatic Politics .............................................................................78
3.6
Lessons and Policy Implications from the Indian Case ...................................79
3.7
Bibliography ...................................................................................................................80
Ukraine ........................................................................................................................ 83
4.1
Introduction ....................................................................................................................83
4.2
History of Programmatic Politics in Ukraine......................................................84
4.3
Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties ......................87
4.4
Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics ....................................90
4.5
Effects of Programmatic Politics .............................................................................99
4.6
Lessons and Policy Implications from the Ukrainian Case ......................... 101
4.7
Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 103
Zambia .......................................................................................................................105
5.1
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 105
5.2
History of Programmatic Politics in Zambia .................................................... 106
5.3
Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties ................... 109
5.4
Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics ................................. 112
5.5
Effects of Programmatic Politics .......................................................................... 119
5.6
Lessons and Policy Implications from the Zambian Case............................ 120
5.7
Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 122
4
List of Tables
TABLE 1: THE MOST COMMON TYPES OF PROGRAMMATIC PARTY ............................................................. 11
TABLE 2: DISTINCTION BETWEEN ETHNIC AND CIVIC-PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES................................... 13
TABLE 3: DRIVERS AND RETARDANTS OF PROGRAMMATIC POLITICS...................................................... 18
TABLE 4: SUMMARY OF PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES IN BRAZIL, INDIA, UKRAINE AND ZAMBIA ............. 28
TABLE 5: BRAZILIAN PARTY PROFILES .......................................................................................................... 50
TABLE 6: INDIAN PARTY PROFILES ................................................................................................................ 70
TABLE 7: SELECTED RESULTS OF PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE (%)................................ 85
TABLE 8: UKRAINIAN PARTY PROFILES ......................................................................................................... 87
TABLE 9: ZAMBIAN PARTY PROFILES........................................................................................................... 112
List of Figures
FIGURE 1: TYPOLOGY OF PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES .................................................................................... 31
FIGURE 2: FIRST-ROUND PRESIDENTIAL VOTES IN BRAZIL, 1994–2010.............................................. 49
FIGURE 3: PARTY SEAT SHARES IN THE LOK SABHA, 1951–2009.......................................................... 65
FIGURE 4: SHARE OF PARTISAN AND NON-PARTISAN CABINET MEMBERS
IN ROMANIA AND UKRAINE ......................................................................................................... 100
FIGURE 5: ZAMBIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RESULTS, 2001–2011................................................ 108
5
List of Acronyms
ARENA
BIMARU
BJP
BSP
DEM
ENP
FDD
HP
IDEA
JDU
MDB
MMD
PF
PDS
PFL
PL
PSDB
PT
RJD
RPG
SDPU
SMD
SPU
TDP
UDA
UNIP
UPND
UPP
ZCTU
ZRP
National Renovating Alliance
Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh
Bharatiya Janata Party
Bahujan Samaj Party
Democratas
Effective Number of Parties
Foundation for Democracy and Development
Heritage Party
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
Janata Dal (United)
Brazilian Democratic Movement
Movement for Multiparty Democracy
Patriotic Front
Social Democratic Party
Party of the Liberal Front
Liberal Party
Brazilian Social Democratic Party
Workers’ Party
Rashtriya Janata Dal
Responsible Party Government
Social-Democratic Party of Ukraine
Single member district system
Socialist Party of Ukraine
Telugu Desam Party
United Democratic Alliance
United National Independence Party
United Party for National Development
United Progressive Party
Zambian Congress of Trade Unions
Zambian Republican Party
6
1 Programmatic Politics in Comparative Perspective
1.1 Introduction
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. In other words, programmatic politics is the antithesis of
clientelistic politics, in which parties seek to mobilize support through patron–client
networks and seek power in order to gain control over state resources. The
development of programmatic politics is important for a number of reasons. In party
systems in which clientelistic or ethnic parties are the order of the day, elections do not
generate debate over important issues such as economic policy and may not even focus
on the performance of the last government. In clientelistic parties, for example, leaders
gain support if they provide sufficient private benefits to their supporters—the question
of how well they handle education and health policy is of little import. Thus the classic
Downsian assumption that repeated political competition will result in parties more
closely representing the favoured policy position of the median voter does not hold
(Downs 1957).
This is not to say that programmatic politics always results in more responsible
government, or that the emergence of more programmatic party systems always
translates into higher levels of representation for previously marginalized
constituencies. But our study of programmatic development in a number of new
democracies finds that the emergence of more policy-based political competition creates
a context in which policy and competency become the deciding factors in how people
vote, and in which leaders are far more likely to be held accountable if they fail to
implement their platforms. Moreover, across our cases the rise of more programmatic
parties appears to have encouraged economic innovation, reduced corruption, and
focused policymaking on the needs of the very poor. Given this, it is all the more
important to understand the factors that promote programmatic politics.
In order to test some of the main hypotheses put forward by the literature and in the
Desk Review (Luna 2012)—for example, that programmaticity often occurs as a byproduct of the emergence of left-wing parties and that the institutionalization of parties
and party systems is critical to the emergence of sustainable programmatic politics—we
began by conducting in-depth case studies of four recent examples of programmatic
development. Our cases of Brazil, India, the Ukraine and Zambia were chosen because
they represent very different contexts in terms of their history, socio-economic
composition, experience with democracy and level of economic development. By
drawing comparisons between the four cases in our sample, and also over time within
each case, we are able to identify the range of very different processes through which
programmatic development may occur. Significantly, Brazil, India, the Ukraine and
Zambia are all countries in which the emergence of policy-based parties was remarkable
given the historic depth of clientelistic or ethnic ties; they are therefore emblematic
examples of how political change can occur even in the most unlikely of cases.
Based on the main lessons from our four cases, we develop a comparative framework in
order to explain the key drivers, and retardants, of programmatic politics. This
comparative chapter makes three important contributions to our understanding of
programmatic development. First, we argue that previous work in this area has failed to
recognize that parties have an ‘ethnic’ (or linguistic, religious and regional) and a
‘programmatic’ component. This is because in cases in which historical patterns of
discrimination have created an overlap between ethnic and socio-economic groups, or
7
the politicization of some ethnic communities has served to render them more
responsive to certain policy platforms, parties can develop an agenda that is highly
programmatic but also appeals overwhelmingly to a particular ethnic group. This is
important because the policy-based nature of these parties, and their potential to
support programmatic development, has often been ignored by commentators.
However, this potential notwithstanding, we also find that ethnic–programmatic parties
are more likely to heighten inter-communal tensions than their more ‘civic’
counterparts, and so may contribute to political instability in new democracies. We
therefore distinguish between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ parties and explore the impact of each
type of party on the evolution policy-based politics.
Our second contribution is that we highlight the need to separate out programmatic
development at the party and party-system level. All too often, discussions of
programmatization assume that more programmatic parties will necessarily translate
into a programmatic party system. Our cases demonstrate that this is incorrect.
Although programmatic parties may have certain advantages over their rivals, for
example because they find it cheaper to contest elections if they can run on the basis of
policies rather than the distribution of patronage, one or two policy-based parties may
have little impact if they have to compete against established ethnic and clientelistic
parties that have access to resources.
Instead, we find that it is only when most or all of the main political parties have strong
programmatic elements that policy-based politics comes to be entrenched as the main
dynamic of political competition between parties. Even when this tipping point is
reached, we identify a number of factors that can undermine the evolution of a fully
programmatic party system. It is therefore important to understand the actual
processes through which changes at the level of individual parties do or don’t transform
the wider political system.
We build on the extant literature by focusing greater attention on the origins and
genesis of programmatic political parties—topics that have tended to receive less
coverage thus far. In none of our four cases did programmatic development occur as a
result of the transformation of an established ethnic or clientelistic party. Rather, in
Brazil, India, the Ukraine and Zambia we find that issue-based politics emerged when a
new party was born programmatic, or became programmatic when it was young. Often,
such parties emerged to represent groups that had long been marginalized or developed
out of pre-existing civil society organizations. We argue that the varied origins of parties
are particularly important, because the organizational structure they develop and the
support base they cultivate shape their future paths of programmatic development.
In order to provide a parsimonious account of some of these processes we develop a
typological theory that bridges the gap between these two levels of analysis by
explaining which types of programmatic party are more likely to inspire the
transformation of the party system. Typological theories focus on identifying key sets of
factors that make certain outcomes more or less likely. In this case, we focus on
explaining the sustainability of programmaticity at the party level with reference to two
key factors: the types of linkages that parties construct to voters and whether or not
they build strong ties to civil society groups. We argue that parties that integrate ethnic
groups into their support base during their early years, and fail to build strong ties to
civil society actors, are more likely to experience programmatic backsliding. By contrast,
parties that maintain a more ‘civic’ support base and incorporate civil society groups
into their internal organization are the most likely to stay true to their programmatic
commitments during the crucial period when programmatic politics has yet to be
entrenched in the rest of the party system. Other things being equal, it is therefore the
8
latter set of parties that are the most likely to drive the programmatic development of
the party system.
1.2 Defining and operationalizing programmaticity
Programmatization is a complex notion. For one thing, parties are not simply
programmatic or non-programmatic. Rather, the parties identified in our four case
studies are distributed across a broad spectrum, from largely clientelistic parties with
little programmatic content, such as the Movement for Multi-party Democracy in
Zambia, to parties that rely on patron–client relations to mobilize support but actually
pursue coherent policy-based agendas, such as the Congress Party in India, to parties
that mobilize support along programmatic lines, feature internal structures designed to
promote programmatic policy formation, and pursue a stable set of ideological goals
when in office, such as the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil. Second, as these examples
demonstrate, parties may be more or less programmatic on a number of different
dimensions. Because parties may be highly programmatic in some areas while being
relatively unprogrammatic in others, it can be very difficult to rank them. For example,
should the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), which has a party structure
directed toward the pursuit of programmatic goals and attempts to implement them
while in office, but relies more on clientelistic method to mobilize voters than
programmatic ones, be considered more, less, or equally as programmatic as Zambia’s
Patriotic Front, which has programmatic linkages with voters and is genuinely
committed to programmatic policies, but has yet to consolidate its programmatic
credentials in terms of the way that the party is organized and makes policy? One cannot
answer this question without first deciding which dimension of programmaticity is the
most important.
Third, there is the question of whether all forms of programmaticity are equally
normatively desirable. Parties may develop ‘stable ideological commitments’ to public
goods within an inclusive civic framework, but they may also build a coherent and
institutionalized policy position that effectively advances the interests of one specific
ethnic, religious, regional or linguistic, community. Such ‘ethnic–programmatic’ parties
evolve in a different way to ‘civic–programmatic’ parties and their presence has
different consequences for the wider political system: most obviously, they are more
likely to exacerbate inter-communal tensions and so have a detrimental impact on
national unity. Finally, there is an important difference between the programmatic
development of individual parties and the programmatic development of the party
system, because individual parties may become more programmatic without this
transforming the rest of the party system within which they operate. We therefore need
to consider the relationship between party programmatization and party system
programmatization—and the fact that because the ‘party system’ refers the product of
the continual interaction of numerous parties, rather than the activity of a single party,
we may need to employ different measures to capture the extent of programmatization
in each case.
The dimensions of programmaticity
We follow the desk study in defining a programmatic party as one in which well
structured and stable ideological commitments constitute the basis for:
1) The link between the party and its constituents
2) The internal organization of the party
3) The policy making process and the platform that results (Luna 2012: pp. 4)
9
A fully programmatic party would fulfil all three of these conditions. In other words, a
true programmatic party would not mobilize support using patron–client linkages (the
strategy of clientelistic parties), nor make appeals and advocate policies that are
explicitly designed to advance the interests of just one group (the behaviour of an ethnic
party). However, many parties in the real world do not conform to this ideal type.
Based on the three main components of an ideal-type programmatic party set out by
Luna, Table 1 summarizes the most common combinations we identify in Brazil, India,
Ukraine and Zambia. Of the parties covered by our case studies, only the PT in Brazil can
be categorized as a fully programmatic party. Most of the remaining parties fail to fulfil
at least one of the criteria. The most common programmatic limitation is that parties do
not meet the second criteria: instead of being organized in a way that reflects and
contributes to the party’s ideological goals, many parties are undemocratic and policy
decisions do not reflect the way that the party links to voters or its stated aspirations
but are rather taken by the small number of senior figures, in some cases the party’s
elected representatives, and in others a small coterie around the leader. This is as true of
many parties in advanced democracies as it is of developing countries and new
democracies. The Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, for example, has
consistently been wedded to a right or centre-right political agenda that emphasized the
right of individuals to control their own destinies and has used this to mobilize support.
Yet until internal party reform in 1998, the selection of the party leader was done
exclusively by members of Parliament, with no reference to party activists or members.
Similarly, the Patriotic Front party in Zambia espouses a clear economic message that it
uses to mobilize support. Yet the lack of an effective internal organization means that
the PF is hopelessly dependent on the party’s leader, Michael Sata, such that the poor
and unemployed people that the party is committed to defending have no role to play in
the way the party makes decisions. Such parties have all of the trappings of
programmatic parties but this has not been entrenched in the party’s own rules. In these
weak programmatic parties, the focus on public policy is susceptible to reversal in
favour of clientelistic, charismatic or ethnic appeals. However, because these parties
primarily mobilize support through programmatic linkages to the electorate, moving
away from a programmatic position is likely to be costly. As a result, party elites are
unlikely to embark on this strategy lightly.
But programmaticity is not always driven from below. A small number of parties such as
the BSDP in Brazil have developed programmatic organizations, and through them
programmatic policies, without actually establishing programmatic linkages to their
main constituencies. The desk study refers to these parties as elite–programmatic
parties to signify the absence of a mass constituency for the policy-based politics that
they advocate. We also find that some parties develop programmatic platforms even
though they lack ideological links to voters and a programmatic organization. In such
cadre–programmatic parties, we find that leaders focus on pursuing stable policy goals
for two main reasons. First, because they believe that this is the best thing for the
national good. Second, because their parties have developed as inclusive ‘catch-all’
organizations and so sectional appeals to certain communities would risk splitting the
party’s diverse support base. The Congress Party in India, for example, restricted policy
making authority to a small elite and mobilized support at the local level along ethnic or
clientelistic lines, but embraced programmatic policies in order to maintain its broad
ruling alliance. The programmatic policies adopted by cadre and elite parties may be
vulnerable to reversal in the medium to long-term because such parties do not rely on
programmatic appeals to mobilize support and so are unlikely to receive direct electoral
punishment for a change of policy; this is particularly likely in the case of elite parties,
because such parties lack an internal structure designed to promote programmatic ideas
10
and have therefore failed to institutionalize their commitment to a policy-based
approach.
Finally, we also identify parties in which the party organization is representative of
activists seeking to promote a more programmatic approach to politics, who
nonetheless initially pursue alternative forms of political mobilization because these are
the dominant forms of electoral competition. This sort of programmatic party is often
unstable because there is a tension between the types of appeals it is likely to generate
and the promises that leaders make to voters. Such unstable programmatic parties often
experience this form of transformation as a result of the ability of more
programmatically minded leaders to use their influence within the party to push a new
approach. For example, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began life, and initially
mobilized support, along ethnic and clientelistic lines, but later developed more
programmatic ties in line with the attitudes of influential programmatically minded
activists.
Because two parties may be equally programmatic in terms of the number of
dimensions they fulfil, but may vary in terms of exactly which criteria they meet, it is
often unclear whether a given party is more or less programmatic than another. For
example, weak and elite parties are both programmatic on two of the three dimensions,
but while weak parties fulfil the criteria of programmatic linkage and policy, elite parties
fulfil the criteria of organization and policy. In order to fully rank parties we would
therefore need to make a normative argument about which dimensions of
programmaticity are more important than others. Instead, we suggest that it is more
important to recognize that we can infer certain tendencies of what combination of the
three dimensions of programmaticity that a given party fulfils. For example, parties that
advocate programmatic policies as a result of elite consensus, such as the Congress
Party in India, face little incentive to develop more meaningful programmatic ties to
voters or more programmatic decision making processes. As a result, they are less likely
to witness programmatic development over time.
Table 1: The most common types of programmatic party
Programmatic
linkage
Programmatic
organization
Programmatic
Policy
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
Programmatic
party type
Examples
Ideal type
programmatic
party
Weak
programmatic
party
Elite
programmatic
party
Cadre
programmatic
party
Unstable
programmatic
party
Unprogrammatic
party
PT (Brazil)
PF (Zambia), Party
of Regions
(Ukraine)
BSDP (Brazil)
Congress (India)
Early years of the
BJP (India)
MMD (Zambia)
11
By contrast, parties that mobilize support on the basis of programmatic links, such as
the PF in Zambia, have strong incentives to strengthen their programmatic ties to voters
and to keep their supporters happy by espousing policy-based agendas. Other things
being equal, weak programmatic parties are therefore less likely to abandon
programmatic appeals in favour of clientelistic or ethnic approaches. This becomes even
more likely when programmatic linkages are combined with programmatic forms of
organization, so that party leaders face both a constituency demanding programmatic
policies and a cadre of leaders keen to supply them; it is under these conditions that
parties are most likely to move toward the programmatic ideal type. This point is taken
up in greater depth in section 1.4.
Programmatic parties: ethnic or civic?
It is often assumed that, because programmatic parties have stable ideological
commitments, by definition they must exist of a left–right spectrum and be inherently
civic—in other words, that they are the very antithesis of ethnic parties (where ‘ethnic’
stands as shorthand for linguistic, ethnic, regional and religious parties). However, in
many countries historical patterns of unequal resource distribution mean that some
communities are systematically worse off than others in terms of their standard of
living, access to the state and life expectancy. This phenomenon can be seen in a number
of advanced democracies, perhaps most notably in the case of the native Indian and
black communities of the United States, but it is most common in new democracies in
which there has been little time to overcome the iniquities of authoritarian rule. Where
such horizontal inequalities exist—in other words, where members of a particular
ethnic group are consistently discriminated against simply because they are members of
that group—ethnicity starts to operate in a similar way to class. Consequently, when
political parties attempt to represent these groups, they often feature both an ethnic and
programmatic component. Ethnic because they are predominantly focused on the
advancement of one community and programmatic because the advancement of that
community depends on the same kind of pro-poor redistribute policies traditionally
advocated by left-wing European parties.
In three of the four case studies covered in this project—India, Ukraine, and Zambia—
we identify political parties that advance programmatic appeals and seek to construct
programmatic linkages, but whose policy platforms are clearly designed to offer greaterthan-average benefit to a specific ethnic group. The overlap between ethnicity and class
is clearly the closest in India, where parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) have
developed specifically to represent certain ‘castes’, ‘tribes’ and ‘religious minorities’. In
Ukraine and Zambia the overlap between ethnicity and class is nowhere near as close as
it is in India, but the historical politicization of identify groups by different leaders
nonetheless had the effect of encouraging the diffusion of certain policy attitudes to
specific communities. In Ukraine, for example, the historical politicization of regional
identities has resulted in different parts of the country having very different attitudes
toward Russia and how foreign policy should be conducted.
It is important to distinguish ethnic–programmatic parties from civic–programmatic
parties, because the former introduce communal politics into the party system and so
although the growth and institutionalization of these parties may promote
programmaticity, it often does so at the cost of further politicizing communal identities.
We distinguish between ethnic– and civic–programmatic parties on the following basis:

Similarities. Neither ethnic– nor civic–programmatic parties employ justifying
discourses that solely privilege the role or entitlements of particular ethnic
groups, so they are not ethnic parties. At the same time, their programme is not
12

dependent on the delivery of goods to supporters that are contingent or direct,
and so non-supporters cannot be deliberately excluded from the benefits of
office. As a result, they are not predominantly clientelistic parties (Kitschelt and
Wilkinson 2007).
Differences. Ethnic–programmatic parties receive disproportionate support
from voters of one ethnic group. Moreover, their policy programme includes
measures that, although framed in a ‘national’ way, will inevitably benefit the
same ethnic group more than others (for example, through poverty reduction
programmes that benefit an ethnic group that is poor). In contrast, civic parties
typically do not receive disproportionate support from certain ethnic groups
(although this is not impossible) and their policy programmes do not
disproportionately benefit those groups.
Table 2: Distinction between ethnic– and civic–programmatic parties
Programmatic
party type
Policy-based
programme at the
heart of
organization and
linkages
Receive
disproportionate
support from
certain ethnic
groups
Policy programme
benefits certain
ethnic groups
disproportionately
Employ discourses
that privilege
certain ethnic
groups
Ethnic
Yes
Yes
Yes
Civic
Yes
Possibly, but usually
not
No
Possibly, but not
exclusively
No
Parties and party systems
The programmatic development of a political party may promote the programmatic
development of the party system, but this is not always the case. In some countries, such
as Zambia, the emergence of a single programmatic party has yet to influence other
parties to adopt a more policy-based approach. Given this, it is important to distinguish
between the programmatic development of one party and the programmatic
development of the party system.
Following the Desk Review, we define a party system as programmatic when most or all
political parties have well structured and stable ideological commitments that constitute
the basis for:
a) The link between parties and their constituencies
b) The electoral competition between parties
c) The policymaking process
‘Most or all parties’ may seem like a high threshold, but this is because the important
thing when one looks at party systems is the nature of the parties’ interactions with one
another. A party system is not programmatic if it features just one programmatic party,
because if all other parties mobilize support on the basis of ethnic or clientelistic ties
elections will not be decided by debates over policy issues, but by which of the range of
mobilization strategies on show proves to be the most effective. Party systems only
become programmatic when most or all of the parties fulfil at least some of the
dimensions of programmaticity set out above—at this tipping point policy issues
become the very stuff of political competition; as a result, party leaders become
increasingly focused on the need to generate a more effective programmatic platform
than rival parties. They therefore begin to invest in developing stronger policymaking
13
capacity and more effective programmatic linkages to voters, which in turn promotes
programmatic development at the party level. Exactly what conditions lead to this
virtuous circle is the subject of section 1.4.
1.3 Foundations of programmatic politics
While the discussion above underlines the variety of forms that programmatic parties
can take, the cases of Brazil, India, Ukraine and Zambia also suggest a common set of
factors that drive and retard programmatic development. Political economies shape the
incentives and opportunities to employ programmatic methods of mobilization. Socioeconomic factors affect the receptiveness of constituencies to programmatic
mobilization and the relative cost of employing different strategies. Beyond these
conditioning factors, a society’s associational life can facilitate the evolution of stronger
political organizations while the degree of institutionalization of the party system
mediates the probability that the programmatic approach of one or two parties will be
taken up by others. These key factors are important because they reveal the contexts
within which programmatic politics is most, and least, likely to take root.
1.3.1
The role of the state
Characteristics of states affect programmatic politics because they shape the availability
of clientelistic resources and the demand for public goods from voters. Keefer (2005)
finds that states that industrialize before they democratize, and so develop strong
Weberian states separated from society, are more likely to become programmatic. There
are two main explanations for this pattern. First, industrialization encouraged the
formation of class identities, which in turn encouraged parties to align themselves to the
favoured set of economic policies of one class or another. Second, the construction of
modern rule-bound bureaucracies and institutions required parties to play by the
rules—or at least to play more by the rules. As a result, it became less feasible to misuse
state resources in order to maintain clientelistic networks. Taken together, these two
processes provided political entrepreneurs with strong incentives to eschew ethnic and
patronage based strategies in favour of programmatic ones.
By contrast, states that have never been ‘emancipated from society’ and have therefore
failed to construct meritocratic and rule-bound bureaucracies have tended to foster the
consolidation of ethnic and clientelistic forms of politics. This is because the functioning
of formal institutions in such states is undermined by patrimonial networks such that
incumbent leaders face few checks and balances. Thus the African state has typically
been characterized as a ‘neo-patrimonial’ edifice in which leaders enjoy almost
unlimited power and what matters is not the formal rules of the game as documented in
the constitution, but the network of personal relations that descends from the president
(Chabal and Daloz: 2004).
Neo-patrimonial politics is associated with the blurring of the line between private and
public authority, the distribution of state resources to sustain multi-tiered patron–client
networks, and political mobilization along ‘traditional’ (for example, ethnic, linguistic, or
religious) lines. But neo-patrimonialism is only one form of clientelistic system; in
others, formal institutions are similarly weak but political competition is not as strongly
structured by ‘ethnic’ considerations. What is common to all cases of clientelism is that
the link between voters and parties is based on the exchange of resources and favours,
rather than the ability of parties to develop policy platforms that capture the public
imagination. Clientelism therefore undermines the need for established parties to
develop programmatic manifestos and cultivates an expectation among voters that they
14
should be directly rewarded for the support they provide to a given candidate; as a
result, it represents a major barrier to the development of programmatic politics.
In the African context, a number of scholars have documented how neo-patrimonial
practices embed social structures and conceptions of politics, and create expectations of
politicians that reinforce those forms of politics (Bayart 1992; Chabal and Daloz 1999).
In cases in which clientelism leads to a winner-takes-all dynamic, such that leaders only
extend government services and favours to those groups that supported them, voters
know that because governments refuse to provide public goods they will almost
certainly be excluded from access to resources if, by taking a principled stand and not
voting for their ‘ethnic’ party, they open the door for a rival ethnic leader to secure
power. Consequently, individuals may feel forced to behave ‘ethnically’ or
‘clientelistically’ even if they believe that this form of politics is bad for the country. For
example, in Kenya, where there has been a long history of neo-patrimonial politics
(Cheeseman et al 2010), survey data reveals that voters are more likely to support
ethnic parties if they believe that others Kenyans are likely to do the same (Bratton and
Kimenyi 2008).
Moreover, beneficiaries of such systems have a strong incentive to preserve and
perpetuate them. As a result, incumbents tend to deliberately keep institutions weak,
which in turn undermines the prospects for reform. In Brazil, the form of clientelism
that took hold was not neo-patrimonial; rather, it was based on strong and highly
personalized patron–client networks that connected national political leaders to local
interest groups. During the transition to multipartyism, clientelistic politicians
successfully pushed for the introduction of an open-list congressional electoral system
and a strong presidency. This institutional configuration focused national policymaking
on the president, leaving congressmen to spend their time strengthening their control
over their constituencies in order to be able to sell their support base to the presidential
candidate willing to offer the most attractive deal (Hagopian 1996; Shugart 1998). As a
result, patron–client politics was institutionalized under the new political dispensation.
All four of our cases featured entrenched clientelistic practices which retarded the
development of programmatic politics. But the sustainability of clientelism as a mode of
governance depends on parties being able to maintain their access to resources. In
countries such as Brazil and India the contraction of state budgets following periods of
economic mismanagement created a clientelistic crisis that reduced the access of parties
to resources (Van de Walle 2001; Hagopian 2009). As established parties are forced to
reduce the scope of their patronage networks, and so the breadth of their support base,
they become increasingly vulnerable to challenges from programmatic parties. Public
financial management reform can have a similar effect by making it harder for
clientelistic parties to fund their activities through access to states resources, and
thereby facilitating the entry of new parties into the party system.
1.3.2
The structure of society
The size and characteristics of particular social groups shape whether programmatic
parties can form strong linkages to voters, and the type of programmatic linkages that
they build. Large urban populations provide a strong foundation for programmatic
politics for three reasons. First, urban areas tend to be more cosmopolitan and better
educated and informed. They are therefore more likely to reject clientelistic and ethnic
forms of political mobilization. Second, in cases where towns developed around hubs of
manual labour, for example around mines, urban areas are characterized by the
presence of unionized workers and a history of economic protest. Consequently, urban
dwellers tend to be more sympathetic to programmatic appeals, especially when it
15
comes to economic policy. Finally, high population density makes it easier to mobilize
support on a non-ethnic basis. As a result, urban areas have typically been at the heart of
programmatic politics (Resnick 2009).
By contrast, large rural populations present challenging environments for programmatic
politics. In rural areas, population dispersion, logistical campaign challenges and weak
access to mass media frustrate programmatic linkages (Schramm 1964). This does not
mean that parties based in rural areas have never set out programmatic agendas. In
some cases, rural parties have set out clear policy-based platforms to defend the
agricultural sector. However, often the programmatic character of these parties was
limited to aristocratic cadres, who primarily acted to defend their own interests, and
tended to mobilize support using clientelistic methods. Such parties were common in
early twentieth century Latin American democracies (Bakewell 2004). Thus, while some
parties with programmatic platforms have emerged from rural areas, they have rarely
established programmatic linkages to voters.
Of course, the social structure in a given country mediates this general pattern. In cases
in which the position of regional ‘big men’ has been entrenched within local social
structures, rural areas are likely to be particularly responsive to clientelistic
mobilization (Heller 2002; Chabal and Daloz 1999), as seen in India (Wilkinson 2007).
But these structures can develop in some urban conditions. In countries such as Brazil
(Dew Wit and Berner 2009), urban slums developed extremely hierarchical social
structures that were particularly conducive to clientelistic exchanges (Davis 2006).
Equally, in countries such as Bolivia (Shih 2009) and Thailand (Phongpaichit 2008) poor
rural constituencies have become more receptive to the provision of public goods as a
result of more equal social structures and distinctive histories of political mobilization;
under these circumstances, rural areas have formed effective bases for programmatic
parties.
Civil society organizations also play an important role in transmitting—and shaping—
public preferences. When such organizations are strong and highly politicized, they offer
ready-made programmes and structures that new programmatic parties can
incorporate into their own. They therefore promote programmatic development, but
also influence the content of policy debate in ways that privilege some constituencies
over others. Civil society groups become politicized when extraordinary circumstances
draw them into politics, and when they are incorporated into state–society relations in
ways that empower them. For example, in Zambia trade unions gained a foothold in the
national political economy when they were made central institutions in corporatist
labour relations during the one-party state, and subsequently played a key role in the
rise to power of first the MMD and later the PF. By contrast, in Brazil, trade unions were
politicized as a result of the key role that they played in the democratization struggle
(Foweraker 1996). Likewise, civil society organizations joined forces in Zimbabwe to
form the Movement for Democratic Change in response to a recalcitrant and
unresponsive government (LeBas 2011).
Politicized civil society groups tend to be stronger in urban areas for the same reasons
that programmatic constituencies are more likely to emerge in towns and cities, but also
because religious organizations—which usually have the most effective national
networks in developing countries—tend to avoid explicitly campaigning on political
issues. As a result, vibrant civil societies tend to reinforce, rather than ameliorate, the
‘urban bias’ of programmatic politics. But here too there are exceptions. Land
movements in Southern Africa and South America developed significant capacity in
rural areas, in large part because the issues of concern to these constituencies were
consistently overlooked by established political parties (Hammond 2009). In turn, the
16
growing influence of these movements encouraged political entrepreneurs to
incorporate these communities into their support base and to speak to their issues. By
contrast, in cases in which civil society is weak and depoliticized, political parties have
to do all the work of identifying and mobilizing programmatic constituencies
themselves.
1.3.3
Institutional design
Party organizational capacity and internal governance are strongly connected to the
evolution of issue-based politics because they are necessary if political organizations are
to perform the core functions that constitute programmatic parties: to mobilize voters
on a coherent policy programme; to orientate party organization to the realization of
that programme; and to pursue that programme in office. Moreover, parties require
skilled and committed workers to formulate distinctive and coherent policy, and must
have effective internal structures so that they can discipline members that deviate from
the party line (Cox and McCubbins 2007). Consequently, a degree of infrastructural
strength is required to support programmatic development.
Internal party organization is also important because, as we saw in section 1.2, if parties
do not have structures that communicate the views of party members and activists to
party leaders, and if parties are not internally democratic and do not render party
leaders accountable, they are more likely to deviate from their programmatic
commitments. As a result, the institutionalization of internal structures that facilitate
the representation of a programmatic constituency represents an important
development, not least because it significantly increases the chances that the party’s
programmatic stance will be sustained. It is important to note that party
institutionalization is different to party system institutionalization, and refers to the
extent to which internal party procedures and structures are codified and seen to be
legitimate. It is when all actors accept a set of internal party rules that facilitate the
formulation of issue-based strategies that programmatic politics becomes the ‘only
game in town’.
The balance of power within parties is shaped by the way in which political systems are
designed. The choice of electoral system can empower leaders or undermine their
position. A closed list proportional representation electoral system strengthens the
appointment powers of the party leadership, which may empower party leaders to instil
programmatic discipline. By contrast, Westminster style single-member-district
elections create incentives for candidates to develop individual profiles and local
linkages to their constituency that are independent of the party. Unless individual
constituencies hold strong programmatic attitudes, this is likely to dilute the coherence
and unity of potentially programmatic parties.
Parliamentary rules also have an important role to play here, because they may impose
high costs on MPs seeking to cross the floor, and so encourage party unity, or they may
be permissive, and so facilitate ‘floor crossing’, which can empower clientelistic parties
to disrupt their programmatic rivals. In Ukraine, the introduction of tougher rules
strengthened parties and empowered them to discipline their members and manage the
development and pursuit of a more coherent policy programme.
17
1.3.4
Party system institutionalization
Luna (2012) claims that party system institutionalization is necessary for
programmaticity. An institutionalized party system is one that displays stable interparty competition and features parties with roots in society (Mainwaring and Torcal
2005). In institutionalized party systems, party competition is stable (Mainwaring and
Scully 1995). Other things being equal, stable party competition means that voters are
better able to predict the positions that parties hold on different issues. Moreover,
because parties have consistent platforms over time, they become more credible (Keefer
2005). This combination of predictability and credibility generates valuable symbolic
resources for parties seeking to connect to voters, and useful informational shortcuts for
voters seeking to work out which party to support. Because the ability to clearly
communicate policy preferences is particularly important to the successful operation of
a programmatic party (Luna 2012), party system institutionalization plays an important
role in solidifying programmatic linkages.
Party system institutionalization also refers to the extent to which parties penetrate
society (Mainwaring and Scully 1995). Of course, the presence of parties with stronger
linkages only promotes programmatic politics if those linkages are themselves
programmatic. Otherwise, institutionalization simply consolidates alternative forms of
political competition such as neo-patrimonial ethnic politics in Kenya and Nigeria, or
clientelism in Chile and Argentina. However, when most or all parties are programmatic,
party system institutionalization enables leaders to both fine-tune their stance in light of
the preferences of their support base (Mainwaring and Scully 1995), and to shape and
lead their supporters’ attitudes in programmatic ways (LeBas 2011). Significantly, such
two-way connections between voters and parties generate channels that align the policy
preferences of both. Without such ties, exogenous changes in voters’ policy preferences
or party policy programmes can lead to a disconnection between what voters want and
what parties provide. In contrast, where parties have roots in society, they are better
able to continuously respond to changes in public attitudes (Mainwaring and Scully
1995).
Table 3: Drivers and Retardants of Programmatic Politics
Type of factor
The role of the state
The structure of society
Institutional design
Party system
institutionalization
Drivers of programmatic
politics
Public finance reform;
Weberian states;
contraction of state
resources.
Large urban
constituencies; strong and
politicized civil society
groups, deep media
penetration.
Closed-PR system; strict
floor-crossing rules; party
funding; strong state-level
government.
Stable party competition;
stable party positions;
party links to constituents;
party coalition blocs.
Retardants of
programmatic politics
Clientelism; social
structures that empower
local patrons; dominant
party systems.
Large rural constituencies;
weak and depoliticized
civil society groups, low
media penetration.
Candidate-focused
electoral system;
permissive floor-crossing
rules.
Instability of party
positions; voter distrust of
parties.
18
In fragmented party systems in which leaders must build coalitions to secure legislative
majorities, the formation of alliances involving both programmatic and clientelistic
parties can spread and institutionalize programmatic politics. Collaboration with a
programmatic party imbues a clientelistic party with something of the programmatic
party’s reputation and policy record, which in turn eases the challenge of building a
credible programmatic platform. This appears to have taken place in Brazil, where
broad ‘left’ and ‘right’ coalitions have formed around two programmatic parties, the PT
and the PSDB, which in turn has encouraged smaller parties to formalize their stance on
economic policy. Again, the relationship between the institutionalization of party blocs
and programmatic development is contingent upon the number and strength of
programmatic parties. Coalition politics tends to entrench the dominant mode of
politics. If all or most parties are ethnic or clientelistic, the need for form coalitions is
likely to spread these practices and so undermine the programmatic development of
new parties. But when most or all parties are programmatic, coalition formation
supports the further diffusion and consolidation of programmatic approaches.
1.4 Pathways to programmatic politics
The development of programmatic polities involves a series of stages, from the genesis
of a programmatic party, through its early development and institutionalization, to a
final stage in which programmatic concerns are diffused throughout the party system.
The experience of programmatic parties varies significantly across each of these stages,
as summarized in Table 4.
Thinking about the genesis and development of programmatic parties, each of our cases
features some—but rarely all—of the factors that are generally thought to be conducive
to programmatic advances, such as urbanization and trade union politics in Brazil and
Zambia, institutional reform in Ukraine, and a reduction of clientelistic resources in
India. The particular combination of factors present in a given case is significant,
because it shapes the sort of parties that emerge, which in turn shapes the prospects for
the programmatic development and the institutionalization of the party system. In other
words, there are many different pathways to programmaticity and some of them are
more robust than others. Here we focus on explaining two key variants of programmatic
development: whether parties are institutionalized or non-institutionalized and
whether parties are ethnic or civic. We do this by presenting a parsimonious model that
focuses on the initial support base of the party and the nature of its relationship to civil
society actors.
But it is also important to recognize that intuitional and socio-economic factors can only
take us so far. Some of the ‘pre-conditions’ for stable programmatic politics hold in
countries in which we have not yet seen the emergence of serious policy-based parties.
For example, most of sub-Saharan Africa saw a rapid decline in government revenue
during the 1980s, which reduced the clientelistic resources available to incumbents but
did little to reduce levels of corruption or to ameliorate the historical salience of
ethnicity. And many Latin American countries feature powerful trade union lobbies but
have not made anything like the programmatic progress seen in Brazil. Thus, structural
factors should only be thought of as background conditions that facilitate programmatic
development: they may be necessary for the evolution of long-term stable policy-based
politics, but they are far from sufficient.
19
To provide a complete picture of the pathway through which different parties become
more programmatic it is therefore necessary to consider the role for contingency and
political leadership. Potential programmatic constituencies may only become available
to programmatic parties once dominant parties collapse or ruling parties cease to
effectively represent them. When such conditions occur, political leaders have a real, but
fleeing, opportunity to engage in a new form of political competition; but taking
advantage of this requires real political insight, timing, and not an insignificant amount
of courage. Indeed, even when clear constituencies that are responsive to programmatic
appeals lie dormant for decades it requires a political leader to make an—often brave—
decision to try to construct a different kind of linkage with voters.
Thinking about whether or not programmatic development at the party level has an
impact on the wider party system requires us to think about how the diffusion of
programmatic practices may take hold as a result of competition and transmission.
Many programmatic parties drive programmatization at the party system level because
they can mobilize voters more cheaply than other parties and so, over time, their rivals
have a strong incentive to copy their model. Parties can also learn from the experience
of other parties in the same country or in other countries and choose to become more
programmatic in order to increase their chances of electoral success. But these
processes can be easily derailed in three ways. First, less institutionalized and civic
parties are more vulnerable to programmatic backsliding, which threatens to limit their
transformative effect. Second, a poorly institutionalized party system may not feature
parties that are stable enough for programmatic gains lessons to be learnt. Third, in
cases in which the constituency for programmatic politics is limited, or where rival
parties enjoy high external sources of funding/strong ethnic ties to distinct communities
and so can continue to utilize clientelistic/ethnic methods of political mobilization
regardless, rival parties face fewer incentives to adapt and so competition may not act as
the motor of programmatic development.
1.4.1
Party genesis and development
Although there are many commonalities between the instances of party genesis and
development that occurred in Brazil, India, Ukraine and Zambia, each process has its
own distinctive features. This section seeks to map out points of similarities and areas of
discord in order to demonstrate the high degree of equifinality that we observe.
It tells us much about the process of programmatic development that the main similarity
that we identify is that programmatization is rarely, if ever, driven by an established
clientelistic or ethnic party deciding to adopt a more coherent policy base. Instead,
programmatic development was driven by the emergence of new political parties
(although not always new leaders), or by the rapid growth of previously weak parties. In
part, the factors that promoted programmatization are therefore the factors that
empowered new opposition parties to overcome non-programmatic ruling parties.
Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that in all four cases we find that the genesis of
programmatic parties resulted from the combination of three key factors: major changes
to the political environment that empowered opposition parties, the existence of
available programmatic constituencies, and the ability and willingness of political
entrepreneurs to experiment with new forms of political mobilization.
1.4.1.1 Changing political environment
A number of different changes to the wider political environment facilitated the
emergence of new programmatic parties. Most obviously, in Brazil and India the ability
20
of incumbent parties to use clientelistic strategies to retain power and restrict the
growth of opposition parties was undermined by declining resources. As a result,
incumbent parties that had previously relied on patron–client networks to mobilize
support were forced to contract the reach of their political machines. In turn, this
created opportunities for new political entrepreneurs to step in and establish linkages
to groups that would previously have been thought of as part of the ruling alliance but
now found themselves excluded from the distribution of state largesse.
This is perhaps most clearly the case in India in the 1980s, where the country’s
economic predicament empowered the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund to demand reforms in return for financial support. A series of reforms
implemented by the congress government from 1991 onward were designed to promote
economic growth by opening up markets and limiting government intervention in the
economy. But they also had a profound impact on the practice of politics.
The process of economic liberalization, and the corresponding devolution of greater
economic authority to the state level, constrained the ability of central government to
determine political outcomes at both the national and local level. At the national level,
falling revenue undermined the clientelistic networks of the once dominant Congress
Party. Significantly, Congress was poorly placed to replace clientelistic appeals with
ethnic ones, because its very success had derived from the construction of an inclusive
dominant-party model; as a result, it could not explicitly appeal to ethnic interests
without undermining the unity of its support base. This meant that Congress was
particularly vulnerable to challenges from sectional parties such as the BJP, which
effectively mobilized Hindu nationalism, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which
rallied support among Dalits—a group of castes often referred to as the ‘untouchables’.
Consequently, the share of the parliament controlled by Congress fell, from 50–70 per
cent in the 1950s–1980s to 30–45 per cent thereafter. As the BSP and the BJP grew, they
increasingly came to package identity based appeals a stable set of ideological
commitments, and parties with programmatic elements began to take root within the
party system.
At the same time, the decision to allow state level governments to engage directly with
private investors, and so empower them to bypass central government, created
incentives for state level politicians to focus on economic policy for the first time.
Significantly, the new opportunity to kick-start development at the local level
encouraged opposition leaders to campaign against established clientelistic parties on
platforms that stressed economic reforms and clean politics. In the 1990s, these changes
enabled Chandrabababu Naidu and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) to take power in
Andhra Pradesh and to govern on the basis of a ‘good governance’ agenda. The success
of this more programmatic form of mobilization and governance inspired imitators, as
discussed at greater length below. Most famously, over a decade later Nitish Kumar won
power in Bihar and transformed a state known for its clientelistic politics and economic
stagnation, generating annual growth of over 11 per cent.
Another factor that can strengthen the hand of opposition political parties is
parliamentary rules and the electoral system. Changes in such rules occur rarely, but
proved to be central to the development of more programmatic parties in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s first set of post-communist elections in 1994 were held under a single
member district system with unrestrictive nomination rules which meant that
candidates could easily ignore party labels in order to run as independents. As a result,
individuals with strong local clientelistic networks but no base in a political party—such
as local officials, heads of local councils, and businessmen—found it relatively easy to
get elected: the successful presidential candidate in 1994 did not have a party affiliation
21
and neither did 243 of the deputies that secured seats in the legislature (more than half
of the total 450).
While some new parties argued in favour of a system of proportional representation,
MPs who were advantaged under the old system rejected the reforms, which threatened
to undermine their clientelistic networks. The same MPs supported parliamentary rules
that allowed deputies to form ‘parliamentary groups’ in groups of 14 or more. The low
threshold, combined with the fact that parties had no control over such groups, meant
that even when parties gained representation within parliament, they were poorly
placed to enforce policy consistency on legislators. As a result, old political logics were
protected at the expense of viable political parties—which effectively undermined the
prospects for programmatic politics.
This system was revised following the Orange Revolution, a series of protests against
the outcome of a controversial presidential election in 2004 that critics claimed was
marred by widespread electoral irregularities. In the wake of the protests, a period of
intra-elite bargaining resulted in the adoption of a number of reforms that radically
enhanced the importance of political parties. First, the weakening of the legislative and
non-legislative powers of the president conferred new authority on the parliament.
Second, elections were to be held on a system of proportional representation, which
effectively ended the ability of individuals to gain election to the legislature as
independents. Finally, the use of a closed list system, in which MPs were elected from
lists drawn up by party leaders on the basis of the share of the vote received by the
party, empowered leaders to increase (or reduce) an MP’s chances of gaining election by
placing them higher (or lower) on the list. As a result, aspiring candidates had a good
reason to toe the party line for the first time.
The collective impact of these reforms returned political parties to a central role in the
Ukrainian political system and led to a steady process of party system
institutionalization. This process, in addition to the breakdown of local clientelistic
networks as a result of the scrapping of single member district elections, encouraged
parties to invest more resources in developing more attractive programmatic positions
and strengthening their programmatic linkages to voters.
Consider the example of the Party of Regions, which was the largest party in the
legislature in 2006 and whose leader, Victor Yanukovych, won the presidential elections
in 2010. The Party of the Regions was established in the late 1990s in order to serve the
political interests of provincial elites. At first, it operated as a clientelistic political
machine that lacked a coherent programmatic agenda. However, from 2004 onwards,
when Yanukovych was effectively selected as the presidential candidate to represent the
interests of the national political establishment, party elites recognized that they needed
to develop a more effective set of policies and party structures in order to build a more
effective national organization.
In doing so, Yanukovych and his colleagues focused increasingly on the party’s claim to
defend and uphold the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a message that played
particularly well in the east and south-east of the country. This move saw the Party of
Regions simultaneously engage in ethnic and programmatic appeals. On the one hand,
the party set out to emphasize its regional roots. Conversely, it started to develop a
more stable set of ideological commitments that directly represented the policy
positions that were most popular among this set of communities. Most notably, it
espoused a heavily pro-Russian foreign policy and in 2005 signed an agreement to
collaborate with the ruling party in Russia, United Russia. In this way, the party
underwent a process of programmatic development without reneging on its
22
commitment to its ethnic base. In other words, the Party of Regions moved away from
being a clientelistic/ethnic party and toward being an ethnic-programmatic party—the
implications of which are discussed in greater depth below.
While political reforms have the potential to promote party system institutionalization
and associated processes of programmatic development, they are prone to reversal in
new democracies. Having won power in 2010, Yanukovych used the remaining powers
of the presidency to persuade the Constitutional Court to reinstate many of the powers
the president had enjoyed in the old constitution. Although he now faces a far more
institutionalized party system that is better placed to resist pressure from an allpowerful presidency, it seems unlikely that Yanukovych’s power-grab will not reduce
the role that parties play within the political system. Moreover, because it was
institutional reforms that promoted programmatic development in the Ukraine, rather
than a decline in clientelistic resources, many of the conditions for the return of old
political practices remain. In this sense, the Ukraine followed a particularly unstable
pathway toward programmaticity.
1.4.1.2 Pre-existing programmatic constituencies
In all four countries, the new parties that made rapid gains at the national level did so by
developing strong programmatic linkages with untapped constituencies. This is perhaps
clearest in the case of Brazil, where the PT built a reputation as an effective
programmatic party by mobilizing workers and highly educated voters with progressive
attitudes. During the tenure of Getúlio Dornelles Vargas in the 1940s and 1950s,
government-incorporated unions had served to co-opt, rather than to express, the
concerns of ordinary workers. In the 1970s, this situation was challenged by the New
Unionism movement, led by the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT). In turn, CUT
structures and supporters in the industrial south-east of the country became the
foundation of the PT. This, and the fact that the party was led by committed Marxists,
some of whom took up arms against the military regime—such as current party leader
and President Dilma Rousseff—conferred credibility on the party’s left-wing stance.
As the party expanded under the popular leadership of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
(popularly known as Lula), it moved beyond this base by developing a strong classbased political agenda. This naturally took the party away from a discussion of ethnic or
racial issues and toward a programmatic platform that addressed issues of economic
fairness and promoted redistributive fiscal and welfare policies. The combination of the
support of the CUT and the broad appeal of the party’s message in a country where
many still lived in poverty enabled the PT to capture much of the urban poor and the
informal sector, especially in the north-east. At the same time, the party’s emphasis on
redistribution and welfare policies proved attractive to other economically marginalized
communities such as the Afro-Brazilian community, which, in a different context, might
have been mobilized on the basis of ethnicity.
In other words, the PT grew by persuading various groups of the merits of its policy
platform. But while this was an easy sell to CUT members in the party’s heartlands, it
was harder to achieve in other parts of the country. As a result, the PT consistently
adjusted its message, moving toward the centre ground of Brazilian politics and
shedding its image as an extreme or Marxist party. Despite this process of gradual
moderation in response to electoral competition, the PT maintained both a core set of
values and a programmatic approach. According to a survey conducted by Datafolha in
May 2010, while 35 per cent of ‘non-partisan’ voters reported that they were unable to
identify their own ideology or did not have one, this was only true of 17 per cent of PT
supporters.
23
In the case of India, Ukraine, and Zambia, programmatic constituencies were somewhat
more complicated because they were also ethnic constituencies. As previewed above, in
India the programmatic bent of the BJP and BSP owed much to the fact that their natural
‘ethnic’ support base also had clear class interests as a result of historical inequalities in
the distribution of national resources. Let us start with the case of the BSP, which
emerged as a significant political force in large part because of the ability of a social
activist, Kanshi Ram, to mobilize support among economically disadvantaged
communities. Founded in 1984 as a mainly Dalit party, the BSP now represents over 450
lower-caste groups known as ‘scheduled castes’ and religious minorities such as
Muslims and Christians. Many of these groups support the BSP because it directly
represents their economic interests through the promotion of affirmative action
policies, which is reflected in the party’s claim to be the party of the Bahujans (the
deprived majority). In many ways the party’s platform is therefore classically
programmatic.
But because many of the BSP’s supporters are predominantly recruited along sectional
lines as members of certain castes or religions—and not simply because individuals
come to hear about the BSP’s policies through the media—the party’s base has an
inevitable ethnic dimension, even if this is complicated by the high number of groups
that it hopes to represent. This is reflected in the party’s struggle to expand beyond its
original base in Uttar Pradesh. Although the BSP has done well to increase the number
of parliamentary seats that it controls from three in the 1991 elections to 21 in the 2009
polls, it remains one of the smaller parties in the legislature, in large part because its
ethno-religious orientation means that it cannot make inroads into the Hindu
community that comprises around 80 per cent of the population. So although the
overlap between class and ethnicity means that the BSP’s status as an ethnic–
programmatic party has not undermined its policy platform, it has restricted the party’s
expansion.
The BJP followed a somewhat different tack, appealing to India’s northern upper-caste
Hindu voters. In order to do this the party committed itself to hindutva, Hindu
nationalism, and supported explicitly religious legislation such as bans on religious
conversion. Because upper-caste Hindus tend to favour social policies that protect their
religious concerns, economic policies that fail to redistribute wealth, and an aggressive
foreign policy, the BJP was able to pursue a platform that was at one and the same time
‘ethnic’ and ‘programmatic’. Despite this, the ‘ethnic’ side of the party has often
overshadowed the ‘programmatic’ side because BJP leaders have often employed
aggressive language against other communities. For example, in Gujarat the party stands
accused of tacitly encouraging anti-Muslim riots, while critics claim that in other areas it
has inspired violence against Christians. Although official figures are problematic, it is
widely believed that the level of anti-Christian attacks increased after the party took
power in 1998.
While this is deeply disturbing and demonstrates the potential dangers posed by ethnic–
programmatic parties, it is important to note that, like the PT in Brazil, the BJP has
moderated its position over time. Recognizing that they could not win power by
appealing solely to upper caste Hindus, party leaders adopted nationalistic rhetoric and
argued that their aim was to develop a strong India for all Indians. At the same time, the
party softened its economic policy so that it could better appeal to potential supporters
from a range of economic backgrounds. As part of this process, senior BJP figures sought
to distance themselves from the party’s more extreme fringes. This process of
moderation, in addition to the party’s capacity to mobilize its base, enabled the BJP to
establish itself as a mainstream party and to make consistent gains in terms of its
24
representation in the Lok Sabha (Parliament), from seven per cent of the seats in 1984
to 11 per cent in 1989, 20 per cent in 1991, and 37 per cent in 1998, when it became the
largest party and formed a coalition government for the first time.
A summary of the policies that the BJP implemented while in power is instructive.
Although it has supported religious legislation such as bans on the slaughter of cows, it
has cleverly used foreign policy to gain credibility and to broadcast its nationalist
credentials. Most obviously, it was under the BJP that India carried out controversial
nuclear weapons tests, adopted an aggressive foreign policy stance vis-à-vis Pakistan,
and led India to victory against its great rival in the Kargil War in 1999. At the same
time, the party has demonstrated the capacity to develop more subtle and complex
legislation, which is the cornerstone of Responsible Party Government. While in office,
the party passed complex policy reforms such as the Fiscal Responsibility and
Budgetary Management Act and the Special Economic Zones Act. These policies are
powerful evidence that the BJP has moderated its position over the years; for all of the
party’s rhetorical commitment to economic nationalism, it actually introduced a set of
liberal economic reforms that were in line with those promulgated by the Congress
Party in the early 1990s.
In the Ukraine and Zambia, ethnic identities also mapped onto particular sets of
programmatic attitudes. In Zambia, for example, two historical processes rendered
Bemba speakers more responsive to programmatic appeals than other ethnic
communities. First, because of their geographical location Bembas were the group most
likely to be employed in copper mining, and thus were especially likely to be members
of trade unions and to take part in strikes and urban protest. The Bemba community
also played a leading role in the nationalist struggle because the United Nationalist
Independence Party (UNIP), the most powerful party within the nationalist movement,
was at its strongest in urban areas along the line of rail—towns in which Bemba
speakers were heavily represented. After independence, when trade unions led the
protests against the economic failings of UNIP’s one-party state, Bemba speakers were
once again at the heart of the political action. As a result, members of the Bemba
community have historically been more responsive to programmatic messages and
economic policies than members of other communities.
Significantly, this applied to both urban and rural Bemba—to an extent. Because many
individuals left rural areas in search of work and returned during periods of high
unemployment, Zambia was characterized by cycles of urban-rural migration which
created strong networks between Bembas living in urban and rural areas. In turn, this
meant that news and ideas from the town were quickly communicated back to the
village and vice versa. At the same time, the importance of remittances to the success of
rural economies meant that policies which impacted on urban Bembas also affected
rural Bembas. Taken together, these deep connections across space meant that rural
Bembas became more sensitized to programmatic concerns than other rural
communities. However, because people who live in rural areas tend to be less likely to
marry into other ethnic groups, to be highly educated, and to receive government
services, rural Bembas are more likely to view politics through an ‘ethnic’ lens than
urban Bembas and other urban groups that have come to see politics in more ‘civic’
terms. Consequently, it was far from straightforward for Zambia’s new programmatic
party, the Patriotic Front, to simultaneously mobilize rural Bemba and urban
programmatic voters, as we shall see below.
The pathway to programmatic politics was thus very different in India, Ukraine and
Zambia than it was in Brazil. This is important, because the variation in whether or not
countries developed programmatic politics through an ethnic constituency—in other
25
words, whether a ‘civic’ or ‘ethnic’ programmatic party emerged—had significant
implications for the sustainability of programmatic politics. The case of the BJP and the
PF are particularly instructive on this point because they demonstrate two features
common to many ethnic–programmatic parties. First, the potential to generate intercommunal tension, which means that ethnic–programmatic parties may not be as
normatively desirable as civic–programmatic parties. Second, the tendency to moderate
ethnic appeals and to build stronger programmatic platforms in order to expand
support and win office, which means that the potential threat of such parties to national
unity is lower than it might first appear.
1.4.1.3 Contingency and leadership
Although they are critical to a complete understanding of programmatic development,
the structural factors that we have so far considered—political institutions, socioeconomic context, and so on—can only take us so far. In each of our cases, the presence
of programmatic constituencies and changes to the wider political economy were
necessary for the rise of programmatic parties, but they were not sufficient. To take
advantage of more favourable conditions, parties needed leaders capable of identifying
new opportunities and persuading their colleagues to follow them into uncharted
waters. This is clear in the Indian case, where Naidu sparked a transformation of state
level politics by recognizing that following the economic reforms of the early 1990s
‘good governance’ campaigns could be successful in both economic and electoral terms.
The import of leadership is also apparent in Brazil, where the PSDB and the PT were
fortunate to be led by Cardoso and Lula respectively, two individuals who were
committed to programmatic goals and had the skills and the determination to
implement their agendas when in office. But the role of contingency and leadership is
best illustrated by the case of Zambia.
As in India, the rise of programmatic politics in Zambia owed much to the breakdown of
a once-dominant government. But in the Zambian case, shrinking clientelistic resources
proved less significant than the changing composition of the ruling coalition. During the
campaign against the one-party state and the government of Kenneth Kaunda, Bembaspeaking leaders such as Michael Sata and trade union representatives such as Frederick
Chiluba had rallied programmatic constituencies to the cause of the opposition
Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). Indeed, it was precisely Chiluba’s ability
to draw on trade union structures and resources that led to him being proposed and
accepted as the MMD’s leader. But after the MMD had secured a landslide victory in
2001 the party did little to deliver on its electoral promises. Most notably, Chiluba
enacted a number of reforms that undermined the economic (and hence political)
significance of the trade unions while engaging in a range of undemocratic practices
such as electoral manipulation and corruption. Thereafter, the MMD became
increasingly reliant on the rural vote to maintain power.
A further transformation occurred after Chiluba stepped down having served two terms
in office and selected Levy Mwanawasa as his successor as MMD leader. A number of
senior Bemba-speaking figures such as Michael Sata left the party in protest at
Mwanawasa’s appointment, causing Bemba voters to question whether the party
represented their interests. At the same time, Mwanawasa quickly appointed a number
of individuals from his Lenje group to influential positions. When the new
administration announced plans to pursue corruption charges against Chiluba—himself
a Bemba speaker—it appeared that a wholesale shift had taken place in both the ethnic
composition and the loyalties of the party’s leadership. As a result, the composition of
the MMD’s support base changed dramatically during its second decade in power: it lost
26
support among programmatic urban voters and provinces populated by Bemba
speakers, and gained support from a number of smaller ethnic groups in rural areas.
Significantly, neither of the two main opposition parties of the 1990s was well placed to
benefit from this process. Like the MMD, the United Party for National Development
(UPDN) and the United National Independent Party (UNIP) secured the majority of their
vote from certain ethnic communities in limited parts of the country (the south in the
case of the UPND; the east in the case of the UNIP). Thus the two constituencies most
sympathetic to a programmatic approach to politics—the Bemba and urban workers—
found themselves unrepresented within the party system. It was this accident of
Zambian politics that made the rise of Michael Sata and the Patriotic Front (PF) possible.
After quitting the MMD in 2001, Sata found that the easiest way to drum up support was
to appeal to his own Bemba-speaking community, and under intense time pressure he
put together a presidential campaign that concentrated on his ethnic heartlands. This
met with some success, but having only secured 3.35 per cent of the vote Sata
recognized the need to reach out to a broader constituency. In contrast to his main rivals
who almost exclusively relied upon ethnic and clientelistic strategies, Sata adopted a
dual approach. First, he consolidated his base in rural Bemba-speaking areas,
addressing the issues of local development most keenly felt by these communities.
Second, he began to hold mass rallies in order to establish a support base in major urban
areas. Having previously been governor of the capital city, Lusaka, during the one-party
era, Sata understood that urbanites of various ethnic backgrounds could be mobilized by
talking about their working conditions and government service delivery.
The genius of Sata’s campaign was his realization that these two constituencies lacked
representation within the party system, that they could be simultaneously mobilized
under a common populist banner that promised state intervention to improve the
economy, and that this represented his best chance of winning power. By adopting a
non-ethnic message, Sata opened up the possibility of expanding his reach into periurban areas, which enabled him to make inroads into the MMD’s support base that
would not have been possible if he had positioned himself as a Bemba nationalist.
Having decided on this course of action, Sata skilfully identified a set of policy areas that
had mass appeal and would allow him to differentiate the PF from the MMD. He pledged
to put more money in people’s pockets while also providing better services. He
promised to attack corruption and to make the government work for the people, rather
than the other way around. And he accused the MMD and Chinese businesses of
colluding to maintain the status quo, depicting himself as the protector of ‘ordinary’
Zambians—the only man capable of fighting for justice against powerful enemies both
outside and inside the country. Underpinned by the credibility that he had earned as one
of the more effective officials in both the one-party state and multi-party eras, this
strategy proved to be highly effective. From 2001 onward, Sata increased his share of
the vote to 29 per cent in 2006 and 39 per cent in the 2008 presidential by-elections
that followed the unexpected death of Mwanawasa. During the same period, the PF
increased the number of seats it held in the legislature and gained a stranglehold over
local government in some urban areas.
It was Sata’s leadership, most notably his deep understanding of Zambian politics and
willingness to experiment with new forms of mobilization, which enabled the PF—
rather than any of the more established parties that had secured more votes in 2001—
to take advantage of the decline in support for the MMD that occurred from 2008
onward. The deterioration of the ruling party’s fortunes owed much to the way that it
handled the succession battle following Mwanawasa’s death. The decision to appoint as
27
party leader Rupiah Banda, former Vice President to Mwanwasa, undermined public
confidence in the government because Banda was widely believed to have been
managed and funded by figures such as Chiluba and Vernon Mwaanga, whose
reputations had been tainted by accusations of corruption and other criminal activities
while in office.
The resurgence of this grouping within the MMD turned influential civil society and
media actors against the government, and lent credibility to Sata’s claim that the MMD
was colluding with Chinese investors. As a result, although the MMD significantly
outspent the PF in the general election campaign of 2011 it was unable to prevent Sata
from mobilizing hundreds of thousands of new voters and increasing his share of the
vote to 43 per cent—enough to propel his populist platform into State House. In Zambia,
then, as in our other cases, it was not simply changes to the political environment and
the existence of programmatic constituencies that led to programmatic development;
leadership and contingent factors were also important.
Table 4: Summary of programmatic parties in Brazil, India, Ukraine and Zambia
Country
(Parties)
Genesis
Party
development
Party institutionalization
Party system
development
Brazil
(PT)
Clientelistic
inchoate system.
Labour
movement.
Support and
infrastructure
gradually
increased.
PT wins office and
institutionalizes,
moving towards the
centre.
Institutionalization
of left and right
coalitions.
Zambia
(PF)
Weakening
governing party.
Old labour
networks, ethnic
base.
Rapid growth in
urban and rural
support.
PF wins office but
weakly organized;
programmatic
approach remains
uninstitutionalized.
Slow and very
limited contagion
and
institutionalization.
India (BJP,
BSP)
Weakening
governing party.
Strong grassroots
movements,
ethnic/caste
base.
Gradual rise in
support from
Northern state
movement.
BJP moderates
policies to win office
and gradually
institutionalizes.
Transmission to
other regional
movements but not
Congress;
institutionalization
of a variety of
linkages.
Ukraine
Inchoate,
clientelistic
party system,
institutional
reforms,
business links.
Rapid emergence
of a West–East/
Ukraine–Russia
cleavage.
Party leaders
become increasingly
able to impose
coherent policies,
moderate
institutionalization.
Parties increasingly
institutionalized
until institutional
reforms reversed.
1.4.2
Party institutionalization and the sustainability of programmatic politics
Our four cases suggest that, following the genesis of a programmatic party, the
trajectory that the party is likely to take is strongly shaped by whether it
institutionalizes its programmatic commitments and whether it develops with a civic (or
an ethnic) focus. Section 1.3 has already suggested that, as indicated by the Desk Review,
the institutionalization of a party is important to the sustainability and consolidation of
its programmatic agenda. In other words, whether or not a party fulfils the second
dimension of programmaticity—the extent to which the party is organized along
28
programmatic lines—shapes how likely the party is to stay true to its programmatic
origins. Whether or not a party is a civic–programmatic party is also important, because
ethnic–programmatic parties often increase the salience of communal cleavages.
Combining these two powerful predictors into a comparative framework can tell us
much about the prospects for programmatic development at both the party, and the
party system, levels.
In order to present a parsimonious theory that accounts for the prevalence of these two
factors, we abstract away from the thick historically grounded narratives presented in
the case studies in order to develop a typological theory of party development.
Typological theories identify ‘both actual and potential conjunctions of variables or
sequences of events and linkages between causes and effects that may recur’ and
represent a middle ground between historical case studies and large-N quantitative
analysis (George and Bennett: 233). In other words, the typological approach seeks to
identify key factors that make a certain outcome more or less likely. It is appropriate for
dealing with a complex set of processes such as programmatic development because it
deals in likelihoods rather than strict causal processes.
In the four cases we identify here, we find that the most important drivers of
institutionalization and ‘civicness’ are the composition of the initial support base of the
party and the extent to which the party emerges out of pre-existing civil society
organizations. In countries in which ethnic identities have historically been politicized,
as in India and Zambia, new parties typically begin life by representing distinct ethnic
communities, even if they simultaneously embrace a programmatic position. This has
two major consequences. First, because the party has mixed linkages it often faces a real
struggle to maintain harmony between its ‘ethnic’ and ‘programmatic’ base, which is
likely to retard the evolution of more coherent policy platforms. Second, the ethnic
dimension of the party maintains, and in some cases can intensify, the politicization of
ethnic identities. By contrast, where parties do not construct ethnic linkages, it is far
easier for party leaders to focus on programmatic goals, such as the provision of public
goods.
The relationship of the party to civil society actors is also important because, in cases in
which parties emerge out of civil society protests or from particular organizations, they
are more likely to develop effective organizational structures for two reasons. First,
parties that emerge directly from civil society groups typically take on something of
their form, which gives the party a ready-made—if often limited—internal party
organization. Second, when the relevant civil society group has developed
organizational resources such as trained personnel, cash reserves, and offices and
vehicles—which is especially the case with trade unions—the party is able to draw on a
pre-existing infrastructure. The combination of these two factors means that parties that
develop with close ties to civil society groups are significantly more likely to establish
policy making processes that give a voice to activists and supporters, and to be able to
withstand attempts by party leaders to draw back from programmatic commitments.
Considering the interaction of these two factors suggests four main variants of
programmatic party development. When fledgling programmatic parties don’t establish
links to ethnic communities and do form strong ties to civil society groups, they are
most likely to emerge as institutionalized civic–programmatic parties. Such parties face
few internal barriers to the identification and pursuit of programmatic agendas and so
are the most likely to maintain their policy-based approach and thus to transmit it to the
party system. The PT in Brazil represents a classic example of this kind of party. Not
only did the PT benefit greatly from its links to organized labour, the party emerged in a
context in which cleavages such as ethnicity and race had not historically been
29
represented within the party system. It is no coincidence that the PT is the most clearly
programmatic and stable party in our sample.
When programmatic parties do integrate the support of an ethnic group but also emerge
with strong ties to civil society, they are most likely to emerge as institutionalized
ethnic–programmatic parties. Like institutionalized civic–programmatic parties, these
organizations are likely to have a more developed infrastructure both within and
without the party, but their diverse set of linkages nonetheless renders it more difficult
to maintain policy cohesion.
This was the case with the BJP in India, which emerged out of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu social movement that was founded in 1925. The
backing of the RSS gave the party a set of committed activists, an organizational
template, and a clear ethnic community. The BJP’s advocacy of Hindu-nationalist views
both encouraged its supporters to mobilize along ethnic lines, and provided an example
of the potential success of ethnic mobilization that rival parties quickly copied. However,
although the significance of ethnic linkages slowed down the BJP’s programmatic
evolution, the party has not suffered as much policy confusion as one might have
expected give its mixed mandate because it has managed to develop a set of policies—
such as an aggressive foreign policy—that appeal to more programmatic voters and
which also reflect the views of the party’s ethnic base.
When programmatic parties don’t initially integrate particular ethnic groups but also
fail to form strong ties to civil society groups, they will probably become noninstitutionalized civic programmatic parties. These parties do not face the contradictory
pressures experienced by the BJP, but have not developed the kind of participatory and
consolidated structures that would ensure they stay true to their programmatic
concerns. The leaders of such parties, which fall into the category of the elite or cadre
parties discussed in section 1.2, face fewer incentives to abandon a policy-based
approach, but are also less likely to come under pressure to deepen their programmatic
commitments. Brazil’s BSDP, and to a certain extent the Congress Party of India,
represent examples of this kind of party: they campaign on clearly articulated policy
platforms, but they lack the linkages to programmatic activists and supporters that
would encourage them to further strengthen their programmatic credentials. As a result,
such parties have rarely been the drivers of programmatic development at the party
system level.
Finally, when programmatic parties do build strong linkages to an ethnic group and only
develop a limited relationship to civil society organizations, the most likely outcome is a
non-institutionalized ethnic–programmatic party. Because such parties lack an effective
infrastructure they are less likely to develop internal structures that channel pressure
from programmatic constituencies to the party leadership. At the same time, because
such parties represent a distinct ethnic group that is likely to claim that it should be the
primary beneficiary of party policies—and from access to state resources should the
party come to power—they are more likely to fall back on ethnic or clientelistic
practices. For this reason non-institutionalized ethnic programmatic parties are the
least likely to consolidate a programmatic organization and policy-based approach.
Zambia’s PF is one such party. Michael Sata initially set out to mobilize his Bembaspeaking ethnic group, but later sought to marry this base to an urban consistency
following a disastrous electoral showing in 2001. As with the BJP, the greater
susceptibility of the PF’s ethnic constituency to programmatic messages meant that the
policy dissonance forced on the party was not as severe as it might have been, but it has
nonetheless left Sata with an impossible task following his electoral victory in 2011. On
30
the one hand, rural Bemba voters are expecting higher prices for agricultural products
and greater development spending. On the other, urban workers are expecting lower
taxes and cheaper food. It will be incredibly difficult for Sata to satisfy both demands
within the context of Zambia’s fragile economy.
Moreover, the PF’s commitment to its economic policies has yet to be consolidated in
the party’s structures because while Sata drew on a culture of radical urban protest and
trade union networks, the party did not directly integrate these into its own
organization. Instead, Sata only began to develop strong links to these organizations
once it had emerged as a major player in the Zambian political scene. As a result, while
the PF can effectively mobilize urban workers, its party structure contains few
mechanisms to ensure that they will continue to be represented. The combination of
tension between the expectations of different constituencies and low levels of party
institutionalization mean that the prospects for programmatic backsliding are
particularly high. This is significant, because if programmatic parties emerge in subSaharan Africa they are likely to be uninstitutionalized ethnic–programmatic parties as
a result of the salience of ethnic identities and the relative lack of strong civil society
organizations.
Figure 1: Typology of Programmatic Parties
Initial support
base
1.4.3
Relationship
to civil society
Programmatic
party type
From parties to party systems
There are good reasons to think that the programmatic development of a party will
promote the programmatic development of the party system, most obviously because
the balance of programmatic to non-programmatic parties shifts in favour of the former.
Less obviously, programmatic parties have clear comparative advantages compared to
clientelistic parties. When rival parties come to understand these advantages, either
31
because they lose out to programmatic parties in political competition or because they
learn about the success of programmatic strategies via the media and word of mouth,
they face strong incentives to adopt a more programmatic approach themselves.
To understand why this is so, consider the costs that clientelistic parties have to bear
when mobilizing support. The very logic of the linkages established between clientelistic
parties and their base means that individuals are unlikely to turn out to vote unless they
are directly rewarded for doing so via the provision of resources, jobs, or some other
form of personal benefit. Election campaigns thus come to focus on the distribution of
resources to the party faithful—an expensive and time-consuming activity that is also
susceptible to detection and censure by the Electoral Commission, should it be
independent, and the international community, should election monitors be in place.
By contrast, although programmatic parties may engage in some form of clientelistic
activities, they predominantly mobilize support by persuading voters to commit to a set
of policy goals. Of course, programmatic parties must fulfil their promises to their
support base, but they can do this by changing government policy after they win office—
not by handing out patronage before the polls. Other things being equal, programmatic
parties therefore find it far cheaper to contest an election, which in turn gives them real
advantages over their non-programmatic rivals—especially in vast countries in which
the cost of constructing a national alliance based on clientelism is exaggerated, as in
India. In other words, just as economic competition forces inefficient firms to adapt or
go out of business, promoting innovation and hence long-term growth, political
competition forces parties to respond to more efficient organizations or risk losing
ground in the battle for votes.
Of course, while in office clientelistic parties may be able to meet their patronage
burdens via the misuse of state resources, in which case they may be able to withstand
the challenge from more efficient programmatic parties. But this is only possible when
the economy is doing well and parties can afford to meet their clientelistic duties; as a
result, during a period of economic decline clientelistic parties are particularly
vulnerable to defeat by policy-based rivals.
When programmatic parties take office the advantages of their form of mobilization
become even more apparent. This is because, starved of state resources, clientelistic
parties are poorly placed to compete for office when they are in opposition—unless they
enjoy access to vast private funds. For clientelistic parties that are not supported by
wealthy donors and cannot raise funds from their members—which is common in
developing countries where many voters live in poverty—the most feasible route back
to power is to develop a more programmatic platform. Thus, programmatic politics can
be diffused throughout the party system via political competition, and in particular the
transfer of power to programmatic parties
This is best illustrated by the case of Brazil, where the rise of the PT resulted in a steady
process of programmatic development as a result of regular bouts of political
competition. Significantly, Brazil witnessed the emergence of two programmatic parties
at the same time: the PT and the PSDB. Both parties began life as leftist political
organizations keen to push policy-based solutions to the country’s economic difficulties,
but the PSDB later dropped its socialist rhetoric and instead adopted a centre-right
agenda. In 1994, the PSDB was the first of the two to secure power, in large part because
Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s track record of fighting inflation conferred credibility on
his party’s proposals for getting the economy back on track. For its part, the PT’s Lula
finally secured the presidency in 2002 having narrowly missed out in 1994 and 1998.
32
The emergence of two highly competitive programmatic parties crowded out the many
clientelistic parties that had previously dominated Brazilian politics. Old political
machines based on patron–client ties were rendered comparatively inefficient by the
presence of two parties capable of mobilizing support on the basis of their policy
commitments. The impact of this was particularly pronounced in Brazil because of the
size of the country and the significance of state-level politics for the battle for national
power. The ability of state-level political leaders to direct their supporters to vote for
one party or another meant that the success of a presidential campaign depended on the
ability of a candidate to integrate a range of local power brokers into their political
machine. This conferred considerable leverage on state-level political leaders, who were
therefore able to demand a high price in return for their loyalty. Building a viable
national coalition could therefore be exceptionally expensive; as a result, clientelistic
parties were particularly vulnerable to challenges from effective programmatic parties.
Especially once the PSDB and the PT gained power at the state and national level,
forcing rivals into a prolonged period of opposition without access to resources,
clientelistic parties were faced with a simple choice: adapt or die.
The potential benefits of programmatic parties are not only diffused as a result of direct
competition—they can also be transmitted through demonstration effects. In India, for
example, the success of some state-level programmatic parties inspired others to follow
their lead. Chandrababu Naidu was one of the first politicians to win a state election on
the basis of a good governance agenda. Having secured power in Andhra Pradesh, Naidu
was able to take advantage of the decentralization of economic decision-making
authority to negotiate a loan worth more than $1 billion from the World Bank. This deal,
and the high levels of economic growth that resulted from his pro-investment industrial
policy, enabled Naidu to win a landslide re-election. Thereafter, a number of aspiring
political entrepreneurs in other states such as Gujurat drew on Naidu’s model to design
their own good governance campaigns, resulting in what Rudolph and Rudolph have
referred to as the ‘iconization’ of Naidu (2001).
It is worth noting that many of those who have followed in Naidu’s footsteps lacked a
genuine commitment to the implementation of policy reforms and have simply
borrowed his rhetoric because they see it as a cheap strategy to mobilize support. But
even in these cases, the success of Naidu, and others like him, changed the nature of the
political debate. Non-programmatic leaders quickly realized that it is no longer wise to
run wholly unprogrammatic campaigns. And by publicly committing themselves to a
good governance agenda, they must now face the fact that they may be punished by
voters if they fail to deliver on their promises.
Of course, many contingent factors may derail these processes of programmatization
through competition and transmission. Programmatic parties may perform poorly in
office, creating sufficient public antipathy to open the door for clientelistic rivals. At the
same time, unexpected economic collapse, scandals and foreign policy disasters may
undermine public confidence, even in a policy-based party that is otherwise performing
well. More importantly, there are a number of important structural factors that shape
whether the logic outlined above is likely to play out in a given case. In particular, low
levels of party and party system institutionalization, along with entrenched ethnic or
clientelistic constituencies, undermine the prospects for programmatic development at
the party system level.
Low levels of party institutionalization matter because if programmatic parties give up
on their policy-based commitments no transformation of the party system will occur.
Successful programmatic parties are less likely to engage in programmatic backsliding,
because party leaders well understand the advantages that programmatic parties have
33
over their rivals in terms of the cost of campaigning. Despite this, within the universe of
programmatic parties some sub-types are more vulnerable to backsliding than others.
As we saw above, non-institutionalized ethnic parties lack the programmatic party
structure that would ensure the continuity of a policy-based approach and, because they
enjoy the support of a particular community, are also better placed to resort to groupbased forms of political linkage. When such parties win power and can access state
resources, so that clientelistic strategies become more viable, the case for maintaining a
programmatic stance may become less compelling.
Ethnic–programmatic parties are also problematic because their overt representation of
a particular ethnic group may create the perception among other communities that they
are not represented within the party. In turn, this can enable rival parties to rally
‘marginalized’ communities, and in the process increase the political salience of
communal identities. Consider the rise of the programmatic parties in the Ukraine. Some
of the main political parties have become more programmatic over time, with the Party
of Regions and the electoral coalition Our Ukraine developing more structured
ideological profiles. However, the very issues around which these parties were
constructed has exacerbated divisions. In particular, the distinctive foreign policy
orientations of different communities meant that the intensification of a ‘pro-West’ vs.
‘pro-Russia’ cleavage within the party system mapped onto pre-existing ethnocultural
cleavages between the Russian-speaking East and the Ukrainian-speaking West, which
further entrenched sub-national identities and in the process threatened to undermine
national unity.
So while successful ethnic–programmatic parties demonstrate the advantages of a nonclientelistic model and so may promote a general process of programmatic
development, they may also inspire other parties to strengthen their ethnic appeals,
generating a party system characterized by a complex mixture of organizations that are
as ethnic as they are programmatic. As a result, parties such as Our Ukraine, India’s BJP
and Zambia’s PF are the least likely to generate long-term programmatic change in other
parties. Conversely, institutionalized civic–programmatic parties, such as the PT, are the
type of party least likely to give up on their programmatic roots or to trigger a fresh
wave of ethnic politics; they therefore represent the best hope for the long–term
programmatic development of party systems.
As Luna argues in the Desk Review (2012), party system institutionalization is
important because parties cannot develop consistent policies, communicate these
policies to voters, and be evaluated on how well they implemented their policies while
in office, if the party system is inchoate and volatile. For example, in countries like Kenya
where every election is preceded by the breakdown of old parties and the creation of
new ones, voters are confronted with a new party system every five years. Under these
circumstances, it is very difficult for voters to hold parties to account and so party
leaders face fewer incentives to make good on their policies. At the same time, parties
become known not for their policy positions but for the personalities they contain,
which leads campaigns away from a focus on programmatic debate.
Evidence for this proposition comes from across our cases. The programmatic
development of the party system in Brazil began in earnest during a period in which the
party system was also institutionalizing. The presence of the PT on the left, and the
PDSB on the right, created two major political blocks around which other parties
positioned themselves, resulting in two relatively stable ‘left’ and ‘right’ coalitions. The
relative durability of these coalitions both supported the stabilization of the party
system and encouraged parties to develop coherent ‘right of centre’ and ‘left of centre’
34
platforms. In this example, programmatization and institutionalization were two
intertwined processes that supported each other.
An even more striking example of the importance of party system institutionalization
comes from the Ukraine. In the 1990s political parties played a marginal role in the
political system as discussed above. As a result, both the programmatic development
and the institutionalization of parties and party systems were held back. It was only
when parliamentary and electoral rules transformed this picture, rendering party labels
more valuable and empowering party leaders to discipline their deputies, that the party
system became more prominent and stable. This development, in turn, represented a
critical first step in the slow and partial process of programmatization described above.
Finally, when countries feature limited programmatic constituencies the potential for
programmatic development is undermined because when non-programmatic parties
have no hope of mobilizing support using policy-based platforms they may choose to
ignore, rather than respond to, the success of programmatic parties. This is significant
because in some of our cases specific communities were found to be particularly
responsive to programmatic appeals, while the rest of the electorate remained more
responsive to ethnic or clientelistic forms of mobilization. As a result, once
programmatic communities had been effectively captured by new programmatic
movements, other parties found it hard to win new supporters via the adoption of a
more policy-based approach.
Even if other pools of programmatic voters do exist, parties that have historically
mobilized support using more ethnic or clientelistic strategies may find that they lack
the credibility to reach out to these consistencies. At the same time, the traditional
supporters of these parties, who have become used to being mobilized along ethnic or
clientelistic lines, tend to feel that they have been abandoned if parties cease to appeal
to their community or to provide patronage, and are therefore unlikely to turn out at
election time. Non-programmatic parties may therefore have little to gain and much to
lose from changing strategies if they compete in countries in which large constituencies
are unresponsive to programmatic appeals.
This is well illustrated by the case of Zambia, where the emergence of the PF has done
little to encourage other parties to adopt a more programmatic approach. In large part
this was because by the time that the PF had risen to prominence (during the 2006
election campaign) it had already captured the country’s two main programmatic
constituencies: rural Bemba and urban dwellers. Consequently, the ruling Movement for
Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and the opposition United Party of National Development
(UPND) faced little incentive to develop more policy-based appeals.
Let us begin by looking at the options available to the leaders of the MMD. First, MMD
leaders recognized that their supporters had voted for the party in previous elections
because they were included in the share of government spoils, not because of any
ideological commitment. When the party came to power in 1991 it carried with it the
hopes of trade unions and business elites alike, but by the mid-2000s the MMD’s
support base had shrunk and was mainly based in rural areas in which the ruling party
could influence the campaign through its control of traditional leaders. MMD strategists
were therefore reluctant to turn their back on clientelistic strategies while the party was
in power (until 2011). At the same time, the attacks on the character of senior MMD
leaders by civil society groups and The Post, Zambia’s only independent newspaper,
meant that new policy-based initiatives were unlikely to be taken seriously—at least by
those in urban areas with access to a variety of news sources. Significantly, this group
comprises one of Zambia’s strongest programmatic constituencies.
35
Similarly, UPND leaders also saw little value in competing with the PF for the
‘programmatic vote’. By 2006, the party’s support base had dwindled and was mainly
among the Tonga-speaking people who mainly live in Southern Province. Although the
pressure to reverse the UPND’s fortunes was great, there were few inviting options
available to the party’s leader, Hakainde Hichilema. The party’s core supporters were
unlikely to be impressed if the UPND abandoned its commitment to its Tonga base in
order to look for support outside of Southern Province. At the same time, Hichilema’s
reputation as a Tonga nationalist made it unlikely that other groups would take him
seriously if he suddenly presented himself as a civically minded programmatic leader.
As a result, the UPND stuck to its tried and tested strategies, and the consistent
expansion of PF support between 2001 and 2011 did little to trigger wider processes of
programmatic development.
1.5 The impact of programmatic politics
As the level and nature of programmatic politics changed in the four cases considered in
this project, so did the character of each country’s politics and governance.
Programmatic parties tend to focus on substantial policy debate, on the capacities of
leaders and the record of the government. Other things being equal, this is likely to
improve the quality of the government’s performance on economic and other issues
over time. In Brazil, India and Zambia, the rise of programmatic parties resulted in a
great voice for previously marginalized groups and the adoption of pro-poor policies by
governments. In India, programmatic politics precipitated the pursuit of good
governance agendas at the state level, although deeper political realities often limited
what progress could be made.
In cases in which programmatic party systems developed, such as Brazil, they imposed
order and regularity on party politics and on policy formation, which stabilized political
systems and made it easier for voters to hold their representatives to account. However,
when programmatic politics emerged they typically generated further political
polarization because the emergence of clear ideological cleavages between different
constituencies focuses attention on what separates, rather than unites, the population.
1.5.1
Representation and accountability
Voters’ policy preferences are represented when political candidates bearing policies
are elected to public office, are thereby mandated to pursue those policies, and
consequently pursue those policies in office (Manin, Przeworkski and Stokes 1999). Of
all the linkage types that connect parties and voters, programmatic ones alone secure
the political representation of policy preferences (Luna 2012: pp. 4). Other linkage types
do not include the development of coherent policy programmes and so do not give
voters a clear set of platforms to choose between.
In each of the cases studied, the development of programmatic politics gave voice to the
policy choices of previously underrepresented communities. In Zambia, neo-liberal
policy agendas, rooted in the strong influence of international financial institutions,
were out of step with popular policy attitudes. By 2010, an overwhelming popular
consensus had emerged about the failure of the ruling party’s economic governance, and
the need for greater state intervention in the economy. However, until the rise of the PF
no political party sought to represent these views. Instead, the main parties effectively
divided the opposition to the status quo by mobilizing support on the basis of ethnicity
and the distribution of patronage. It was only after Michael Sata set about building a
36
populist movement that brought together discontented members of various ethnic
communities that Zambians were able to vent their disapproval of the economic policies
of the MMD government.
In India, the emergence of different programmatic parties increased the representation
of two very different constituencies within the party system. The needs of the very
poorest in society, which had been marginalized by the domination of the Congress
party, were given more prominent representation within the party system by the
emergence of the BSP. At the same time, the rise of the BJP brought to the table the
policy concerns of Hindu nationalists, such as the desire to see the government adopt a
more aggressive foreign policy, to defend the country’s cultural characteristics and to
stress India’s independence from other international and transnational players.
Representation is undermined in the absence of accountability. A political party is held
accountable prospectively when voters choose parties to govern on the basis of their
policy programme, and retrospectively when voters punish or reward parties for their
performance in office (Muller et al 2000). Significantly, programmatic development also
promotes a form of politics in which parties are more likely to be held to account for
their performance in areas such as good governance and the performance of the
economy. In ethnic or clientelistic party systems, voters do hold leaders account, but
they do this on the basis of how well the ruling party has taken care of their community,
or how well party leaders delivered on their duties as patrons—not on the basis of
whether or not they have provided public goods. As a result, governments often go
unpunished for major failings, such as presiding over corruption, economic stagnation
and inefficient bureaucracies.
Because programmatic parties mobilize support on the basis of their policy positions,
they are much more likely to face censure for poor performance or for failing to deliver
on their promises. In Ukraine, the vote share of the Socialist Party of Ukraine fell after it
entered a coalition government of which its supporters disapproved in 2006. Likewise,
in India, the programmatic BJP lost general elections in 2004 when it ran on an overoptimistic ‘India Shining’ slogan that did not reflect the country’s continued economic
problems. As a result, programmatic parties are more likely both to encourage a policy
debate and to implement their stated policies.
Programmatic politics also promotes accountability and representation within political
parties when they fulfil the second dimension of programmaticity (programmatic forms
of internal organization). In other words, programmatic parties will be internally
accountable and representative if party organizations tie them to their policy goals. In
Brazil, strong party organizations anchor the policy platforms on which parties run for
office. Partisan party members exert internal accountability over party leaderships, and
ensure that they align their policy priorities with those of party programmes. Equally,
methods of recruitment and value diffusion ensure that party members and leaders are
personally dedicated to the party’s goals. In Brazil, the PT has remained responsive to
party supporters and activists. Although the party moved towards the centre in the
1990s to broaden its electoral base, this shift was not simply imposed from above;
rather, it reflected the views of a new political generation that was slowly rising through
the party’s ranks. Thus institutionalized programmatic parties continue to represent
their supporters, even in party systems that otherwise provide weak channels for
accountability.
37
1.5.2
Governance
In the cases included in this report, almost all programmatic parties have focused on
poverty reduction and development. In government and opposition, they have won
widespread support by building linkages with low-income constituencies and developed
strategies aimed at promoting pro-poor growth. In Brazil, the PT rolled out programmes
such as Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero (Zero Hunger)—groundbreaking policies that have
had a dramatic effect on income and development (Rocha 2008). In India, the appeal of
the BSP drove the Congress-led government to introduce the National Rural
Employment Guarantee Act, which guaranteed every rural household 100 days of
government work per year. With the exception of the Ukraine, we find that
programmatic parties in countries with high levels of inequality have championed the
needs of the poor.
A number of the parties have also run on explicitly good governance campaigns and
subsequently delivered on their promises to clean up corrupt practices and provide
efficacious government. Most notably, in India, good governance candidates have made
a significant impact in office at the state level. In Gujurat, Narendra Damodardas Modi
has been credited with creating a business-friendly environment within an efficient,
transparent state (Sinha 2005). In Bihar, Nitish Kumar made notable improvements to a
range of public organizations and line departments, while also initiating schemes that
provided bicycles to girls that stayed at school and loan schemes for farmers (Chand
2010). In both states, effective economic reforms attracted significant FDI, provided new
jobs and resulted in higher economic growth.
Programmatic linkages yield two strong mechanisms that make it less likely that leaders
will engage in corruption. First, by mobilizing support around valence issues and the
importance of good governance, parties become particularly vulnerable to corruption
scandals that could erode their electoral support. Second, programmatic parties have
less need to misuse state resources because their electoral success is not dependent on
their ability to distribute patronage to their supporters. This is especially true in
programmatic party systems, in which policy-based parties do not have to compete with
clientelistic parties and so are less likely to lose an election because they have been
outspent. Thus, although all parties in developing countries face funding challenges
because their supporters are typically poorly placed to fund the party organization, the
incentives to engage in corrupt activities are not as strong as they are for clientelistic
parties.
However, when parties have little reason to fear that corruption will be exposed, the
incentives to undertake good governance reforms remain weak. In 2005—long after the
emergence of a competitive programmatic party system in Brazil—the PT was wracked
by the ‘mensalão’ scandal in which José Dirceu, President Lula’s chief of staff, was
accused of being involved in a scheme in which small parties and deputies were paid to
support the PT in Congress. Likewise, in India, corruption remains an everyday part of
politics (Wilkinson 2007). Where states remain porous, or the influence of certain
businesses in politics has become entrenched, as in the Ukraine, corruption is likely to
persist. Programmatic politics may reduce the extent of corruption, then, but it is no
panacea.
1.5.3
Political dynamics
Beyond direct governance performance, programmatic politics changes patterns of
political behaviour. Programmaticity can provide the linkages and constellations of
shared interests that are necessary to support processes of party system
38
institutionalization. Section 1.3 described the ways in which party system
institutionalization promotes programmatic politics. Equally, programmatic politics
promotes party system institutionalization. In Brazil, both processes developed
symbiotically. The programmatic agendas of the PT and PSDB projected an order over
the party system that regularized competition between ‘left’ and ‘right’ blocks—even
though the party system remains highly fragmented. In turn, the stability of party
competition encouraged parties to strengthen their programmatic linkages between
parties and their supporters.
As in Brazil, programmatic politics may also result in a process of polarization in which
the gap between the views of different communities, and the positions taken up by
parties, widens. LeBas argues that this is because parties often get most traction with
voters over divisive issues precisely because voters care so much about them. Indeed,
LeBas suggests that in some cases parties actually seek to play on divisive issues
because widening the gap between parties and constituencies strengthens the barriers
between parties and so makes it easier for party leaders to prevent their supporters
from defecting (LeBas 2011).
Polarization is more likely to take place when two issue-based parties emerge with
directly opposing policy platforms. In Brazil, the rise of the PSDB and the PT both gave
the party system new structure and emphasized the ideological difference between the
left and right of the political spectrum. In India, the emergence of the BJP and BSP
polarized the positions of the poor relative to the wealthy, and the Hindu majority
relative to the country’s numerous minorities. In Ukraine, existing ethno-regional
cleavages were reinforced when political parties developed stronger programmatic
platforms based on ‘pro-Western’ and ‘pro-Russian’ stances. It is programmatic divides
that produce polarization, not just the presence of a programmatic party.
As previewed above, polarization is particularly problematic in the case of ethnic–
programmatic parties, because competition may encourage the relevant parties to
strengthen their ethnic, as well as their programmatic, linkages. In both India and the
Ukraine, polarization took on an ethnic dimension which reinforced the differences
between communities. Most alarmingly, in India the BJP’s Hindu-nationalist ideology
focused attention on Hindu/Muslim and Hindu/Christian tensions, and party members
have been accused of complicit inter-communal violence such as the riots in which
1,000 Muslims were killed in 2002 (Hindu 2011). In this way ethnic–programmatic
parties can generate some of the same externalities that we would normally associate
with ethnic parties.
Yet although the relationship between programmaticity and polarization is a cause for
concern, our case studies suggest that this need not cancel out the positive changes that
programmatic development promotes. First, as noted above, polarization mainly occurs
when two parties emerge with directly opposing positions. Second, even when the
conditions for polarization exist, parties face strong incentives to avoid excessive
polarization because they have the best chance of winning elections if they broaden
their appeal to voters, which usually requires party leaders to modify their stance. In
Brazil, India and Zambia, programmatic parties did inspire greater controversy around
the issues they raised, but also moved quickly toward the centre ground so that by the
time they secured power they had become more acceptable to a range of constituencies.
Finally, it is important to remember that the impact of programmatic development on
representation, governance and wider political dynamics depends on the extent to
which policy-based politics takes root. When programmatic politics becomes
entrenched in competitive party systems, it tends to support cleaner and more
39
responsive parties, stable party systems and more effective governments. However,
when programmatic parties compete in partially programmatic systems the structural
drivers of accountability and representation are weakened. This is because the presence
of established ethnic and clientelistic parties, which have no interest in engaging in
policy-based debate and instead encourage voters to focus on their responsibilities to
their patrons or their communal identities, means that attention is diverted away from
programmatic concerns.
In Zambia, for example, the emergence of the PF within a heavily ethnic and clientelistic
party system did little to change the way that politics was conducted. This may change
following the party’s election in 2011, but the Zambian case is nonetheless an important
reminder that the most positive effects of programmaticity occur once most or all of the
main parties are programmatic. When countries move beyond this tipping point, the
effects of programmaticity are likely to be of a higher magnitude.
1.6 Policy recommendations
Section 1.5 detailed how programmatic politics may improve governance, support stable
policy-making and contribute to pro-poor development. Based on the empirical
evidence presented above, this section draws out a number of policy recommendations
for party assistance providers seeking to galvanize and facilitate the development of
programmatic politics. The selection of lessons is motivated by three main
considerations: the feasibility of interventions for organizations such as International
IDEA, existing party assistance methodology, and best practice.
Although party assistance stretches back to at least the 1970s (Erdmann 2010),
systematic assessments of the impact of party assistance have only been conducted in
the last decade. According to Carothers (2006), party assistance efforts have performed
poorly, a view shared by other scholars (Erdmann 2010; Domingo 2010; Domingo et al
2011). Early party assistance work consisted, for the most part, of a combination of
technical assistance, knowledge transfers and the facilitation of inter-party dialogue. It
was characterized by unrealistic, transformative goals and relied on the idea of a
‘mythological’ ideal party to which parties in developing countries were unfairly—and
unhelpfully—compared (Carothers 2006). Likewise, context-specific interventions have
only recently become standard practice, resulting in a tendency to promote a one-sizefits-all approach. Other evaluations in this field have noted that party assistance did not
operate with well-defined goals, or substantiated theories of change (Erdmann 2010).
For example, political economy analyses, long since applied to other areas of donor
development policy, were only applied to party assistance in the late 2000s (Domingo
2010). As a result, all too often democracy promotion agencies failed to recognize that
for reforms to be ‘owned’ by local actors, they needed to be aligned with the interests of
party leaders.
Current best practice in the field has taken on board these lessons and suggests that
party assistance should:





Be tailored to context.
Be aligned with parties’ incentives.
Take advantage of donor core competencies and take account of the limitations
of what can be achieved through party assistance.
Be rooted in a clear theory of change.
Have clear and measurable outputs.
40
This study has demonstrated a number of key drivers of programmaticity around which
donors could implement best practice programmes. The discussion of factors that drive
and retard programmatic politics presents an empirical base for assessing which tools
and interventions are most appropriate for democracy assistance providers. Moreover,
the synthesis of how these factors fit together and form different pathways of
programmatic development sheds light on the sort of donor interventions that would be
most appropriate in each context. Equally, it enables us to identify temporal- and
context-specific challenges for programmatic development.
However, many of the most important drivers of programmaticity are deep structural
factors, such as the make-up of society and the structural base of the economy; factors
over which democracy promotion organizations have minimal influence. This section
highlights potential interventions in areas that NGOs, donors and other international
organizations have historically achieved greater traction. In doing so it provides
practical examples of how policymakers can constructively engage to promote
programmatic development in four key areas: the structural determinants of
programmatic politics; the genesis of programmatic parties; programmatic party
building; and the evolution of programmatic party systems.
1.6.1
Structural determinants of programmatic development
Structural determinants such as socioeconomic conditions affect the receptiveness of
voters to programmatic appeals, and hence the efficacy of policy-based strategies for
political entrepreneurs. When such conditions work to retard the development of
programmatic linkages, for example where levels of education are low, formal
employment is low, and patron–client ties predominate, it stunts the development of a
programmatic party system. In India and Zambia, these background conditions meant
that while some communities were receptive to programmatic appeals, others were
not—especially in areas where clientelism was entrenched and access to sources of
political information was limited. As a result, lopsided party systems evolved which
featured a combination of programmatic and non-programmatic linkages.
Though these sorts of demographic and economic factors take decades to change, this
does not mean that party assistance programmes can do nothing to render communities
more responsive to programmatic appeals. For example, greater media access may help
to overcome some of the barriers to policy-based politics that are often said to derive
from structural factors. Other things being equal, rural voters are less likely to act
programmatically than their urban counterparts because they tend to operate in more
ethnic and clientelistic environments, which is partly because such communities are
often less well educated, live in more culturally homogenous areas, and are more
vulnerable to exclusion from public goods. The significance of these factors is
compounded by the way in which limited access to mass media deprives poor and rural
voters of crucial information about political party performance and political debates. In
Zambia, the Afrobarometer survey finds that there is a 19 per cent gap between the
proportion of rural and urban dwellers that listen to the news on the radio at least
several times per week, and a 51 per cent gap in the number of rural and urban dwellers
that watch the news on television at least several times per week, with urban
respondents listening and watching more in each case (Afrobarometer 2010).
By implementing programmes that improve and equalize media access, party assistance
providers can begin to ameliorate some of the reasons that rural areas tend to feature
less policy-based politics. Donors should commission scoping studies to identify which
constituencies lack access to public media, and to assess variation in the quality and
neutrality of political debate nationwide. Such studies would enable donors to carefully
41
target programmes to reduce gaps between different communities in their access to
information, for example by funding media outlets or by sponsoring programmes that
transfer political information and promote political debate. Moreover, party assistance
providers might work with government to ensure harmonized access to mass media. In
Brazil, television channels are forced by law to provide slots for political programmes
every day during election campaigns, which are allocated to parties in proportion to
their share of the vote in the previous Congress. The Brazil case study reveals that these
party broadcast slots have encouraged weak, non-programmatic party leaders to
develop their policy platforms in order to have something to say.
1.6.2
Party genesis
In each of the cases studied, programmatic politics began with parties that were born
programmatic or developed programmatic elements in their early years. In the absence
of such parties, programmatic platforms would not have been developed by existing
parties. The early development of new parties therefore constitutes a critical moment in
which the development of programmatic politics can be supported; working with new
parties should therefore be prioritized. Conversely, our analysis suggests that donor
engagement with established parties—which has been the main focus of party
assistance thus far—is unlikely, on its own, to have a significant effect on programmatic
development.
In both India and Zambia, programmatic parties rapidly gained ground by speaking to
the grievances of citizens that existing parties had long neglected. Each tapped into
widespread popular sentiment about policy issues that had been either ignored, or
marginalized by the existing political order. Other parties have found success using
similar methods, as in Thailand, where the Thai Rak Thai party mobilized a longneglected rural base, and in Bolivia, where the Movement for Socialism party mobilized
an indigenous rural and lower class base. In each case, coherent constituencies lay
neglected for years before they were mobilized by political entrepreneurs. In each case,
feats of programmatic innovation enabled young parties to find new ways of connecting
to voters, often in the absence of any precedent of programmatic politics.
It is likely that there are many more potentially programmatic constituencies that have
been overlooked, especially in countries marked by extensive clientelism. Party
assistance programmes could help to stimulate the development of programmatic
politics by commissioning a scoping study to identify representation gaps in developing
democracies. Such a study would draw on survey data and manifesto analyses to chart
the distribution of policy preferences and party platforms in order to test for
disconnects between the two. Where clear programmatic gaps exist, parties can hope to
make rapid electoral gains by adopting more policy-based approaches—and so donor
and party incentives will be aligned.
The findings of the proposed scoping study could be communicated to political leaders
and party activists by making it publicly available and via a broader party support
outreach schemes. Where the potential for programmatic innovation is found to be high,
party assistance providers could run Political Innovation Programmes that would
include the provision of training to political parties to enable them to develop political
platforms that meet particular constituencies’ needs and to support to CSOs that
articulate and campaign on behalf of those constituencies. At the same time, donors
could convene forums between key stakeholders and local political leaders to
strengthen the linkages between them. In doing so, such a programme would unlock the
potential for policy-based political competition by fostering greater programmatic
linkages at the grass roots.
42
Building strong connections between civil society organizations and political parties is
particularly important because, as discussed in Section 1.3, such connections often
galvanize programmatic development. CSOs that support the development of political
parties, such as Hindu nationalist organizations in India and trade unions in Brazil, often
become key stakeholders in formidable electoral machines. Moreover, as discussed in
Section 1.3, when parties develop by building links to established civil society groups
they are more likely to establish programmatic structures and to institutionalize
programmatic goals. Significantly, donors are well placed to act as neutral convenors to
facilitate the development of collaborative working relationships between CSOs, existing
or new parties, and representatives of coherent programmatic constituencies. For
example, such an intervention would fit neatly into the sorts of party assistance
programmes that are already running.
1.6.3
Programmatic party building
Section 1.3 detailed how effective party organization aids programmatic development.
Institutionalization is necessary to coordinate and disseminate a consistent party
message and maintain a party reputation. A party that is internally organized to
facilitate the adoption of a policy-based approach is likely to be less prone to
programmatic backsliding. However, a number of factors mitigate the emergence of
strong party organizations—especially when funding is scarce, parties develop rapidly,
or there are political economic factors that undermine party cohesion. Moreover, as
shown in Section 1.4, some paths of programmatic development are more likely to
deliver weak parties than others. Parties that arise without strong roots in civil society,
and those that are led by populist leaders, are more likely to develop programmatic
linkages without programmatic structures. Such parties are prone to policy drift and
often struggle to maintain the cohesion of their platforms.
Party funding can address some of these organizational challenges. In both Ukraine and
Zambia, we identify a lack of funding as a key driver of weak party organizations. In
Zambia, the PF claim that they delayed holding internal party elections until ten years
after they were founded due to a shortfall in funding. Of course, party funding may also
be diverted from its intended purpose by leaders seeking personal gain, or who fear that
a more effective party organization would be more difficult to control. But by providing
carefully targeted party assistance for parties to strengthen their core functions in cases
where leaders appear to genuinely aspire to develop a stronger infrastructure, donors
can intervene to support the all-important process of institutionalization.
A number of political institutions and electoral system choices may also strengthen or
weaken programmatic parties. The introduction of parliamentary and electoral rules
that created barriers to floor-crossing reversed the erosion of party authority in
Ukraine. Likewise, the move from a strong presidency and single-member constituency
elections to a weak presidency and a closed system of proportional representation
empowered Ukrainian parties over independent candidates, and so enabled parties to
maintain their values, reputation and policy agenda. In turn, this supported the
emergence of a more policy-oriented party system. In other words, party and party
system institutionalization can be promoted through legislative and electoral rules that
empower party leaders. Of course, choices of political rules and electoral system will be
shaped by a range of other factors and fully proportional systems are often thought to
hamper the evolution of strong ties between parties and voters because they lack
constituency MPs. Given this, a mixed-member proportional system which includes both
first-past-the-post MPs and party list MPs may be the best way to promote
programmaticity through institutional change.
43
Although changes to electoral systems are rare, contrary to received wisdom this is an
area in which donors have often played an important role. For example, in post-conflict
cases such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, donors
helped to select and construct electoral systems. Indeed, further opportunities to engage
in this area regularly present themselves. Zambia, for example, is likely to undergo a
thorough period of constitutional review following the victory of Michael Sata in 2011.
Moreover, in cases in which donors find it harder to gain traction on these issues they
can still affect useful interventions by supporting civil society organizations that
advocate institutional reform.
Of course, there is a danger that by strengthening the position of party leaders such
interventions would promote institutionalization at the expense of internal democracy,
and in doing so would render the maintenance of a party’s programmatic identity
dependent on the will of the party leader. It is therefore imperative that the goal of
generating more stable and effective parties is balanced against the need to encourage
parties to make their leaders accountable to party members and activists. In some cases,
internal party democracy is mostly characterized by factionalism (Boucek 2010) and
clientelistic internal politics. However, when parties have established strong
programmatic linkages, more representative and accountable structures are likely to
strengthen party cohesion and root a party to its ideological commitments. When faced
with such cases, party assistance providers should seek to make their support
conditional upon the promotion of internal party democracy.
1.7 Bibliography
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Bayart, Jean-Francois. The State in Africa: Politics of the Belly. Harlow, 1992.
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Boucek, François. ‘The intra-party dimension of dominance’, in Bogaards, M. and
Boucek, François, eds. Dominant Political Parties and Democracy, 2010.
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Perspective’, Journal of East African Studies, (2008) 2, No. 2: pp. 273–290.
Carothers, Thomas. Confronting the weakest link: aiding political parties in new
democracies. Washington: DC, 2006. Carnegie Endowment for International
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Chabal, Patrick and Jean-Pascal Daloz. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument,
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Chandra, Kanchan. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed. Cambridge: CUP, 2004.
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Cooper, Ian. Party Fragmentation in an Emerging Democracy: The Case of Post-Apartheid
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Series at University of Oxford, 9 May 2010.
Coppedge, Michael. ‘The Dynamic Diversity of Latin American Party Systems’, Party
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Cox, Gary and McCubbins, Matthew. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the
House. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums, London, 2006.
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De Wit, Joop and Berner, Erhard. ‘Progressive Patronage? Municipalities, NGOs, CBOs
and the Limits to Slum Dwellers’ Empowerment’, Journal (2009) 40, Issue 5: pp.
927–947.
Domingo, Pilar. Review of international assistance to political party and party system
development. Case Study Report: Latin America. Overseas Development Institute
2010
Domingo, Pilar; Foresti, Marta and Wild, Leni; Review of international assistance to
political party and party system development. Synthesis Report. 2011
Ellner, Steve. ‘The Contrasting Variants of Populism of Hugo Chavex and Alberto
Fujimori’, Journal of Latin American Studies (2003) 35: pp. 139–162.
Erdmann, Gero. Lessons to Be Learned: Political Party Assistance and Political Party
Research. GIGA Working Papers: Research Programme: Legitimacy and Efficiency
of Political Systems, 2010.
Hagopian, Frances. Traditional politics and regime change in Brazil. Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Hagopian, Frances; Gervasoni, Carlos and Moraes, Juan Andres. ‘From Patronage to
Program: The Emergence of Party-Orientated Legislators in Brazil’, Comparative
Political Studies (2009) 42: 360–392.
Hammond, J. ‘Land Occupations, Violence and the Politics of Agrarian Reform in Brazil’,
Latin American Perspective (2008) 34, No. 4.
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Asia Development Review (2005), 28, No. 1: pp. 94–118.
Lebas, Adrienne. ‘Polarization as Craft: Party formation and state violence in Zimbabwe’,
Comparative Politics, (2006) 38, No. 4, 419–438.
Lebas, Adrienne. From Protest to Parties: Party-Building & Democratization in Africa,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Levine, Daniel. ‘The Decline and Fall of Democracy in Venezuela: Ten Theses’, Bulletin of
Latin American Research (2002) 21, No. 2: pp. 248–269.
Mainwaring, Scott, and Scully, Timothy. Introduction, in Building Democratic Institutions:
Party Systems in Latin America, eds. Scott Mainwaring, Timothy Scully, pp. 1–34.
Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 1995.
Mainwaring, Scott, and Torcal, Mariano. ‘Party system institutionalization and party
system theory after the third wave of democratization’, in the Handbook of Party
Politics, eds. Richard S. Katz, William Crotty, pp. 204–227. London, 2006;
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.
Manin, Bernard; Przeworkski, Adam and Stokes, Susan eds. Democracy, Accountability
and Representation, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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Journalism Studies (2009) 30, Issue 1: pp. 1–23.
Molomo, MG. ‘Understanding government and opposition parties in Botswana’, Journal
of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics (2000).
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Military and Democracy’, Journal of Contemporary Asia (2008) 38, Issue 1: pp.
62–83.
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Democracy, 20, No. 3, July 2009: pp. 108–121.
Resnick, Danielle. ‘Party Linkages to the Urban Poor in African Democracies’, APSA 2009
Toronto Meeting Paper (2009), International Food Policy and Research Institute.
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Brazil’, Development Policy Review, (2011) 27, Issue 1: pp. 51–66.
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(2009) 56, No. 4: pp. 833–739.
45
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Strength: A Theory of Politicians’ Constitutional Choices’, British Journal of
Political Science (1998) 28: pp. 1–29.
Tavits, Margit. ‘Party Systems in the Making: The Emergence and Success of New Parties
in New Democracies’, British Journal of Political Science 38 (2007): 113–133
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1999. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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systems’, Journal of Modern African Studies (2003) 41: pp. 297–321.
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Patrons, Clients and Policies. eds. Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson,
Cambridge: CUP, 2007.
Newspapers
The Economist. ‘A Triumph in Bihar’, November 25, 2010.
The Hindu. ‘Gujarat Police Officer Implicates Modi in Riots’, April 22, 2011.
46
2 Brazil
2.1 Introduction
The Brazilian party system is both quite complicated and crowded. Twenty-two parties
won seats in the lower house of the Brazilian congress (the Chamber of Deputies) in the
2010 congressional elections, the largest with less than 17 per cent of the national vote.
The fragmentation of the Chamber rose to a new high in these elections, with an
Effective Number of Parties (ENP)1 of over eleven by votes, and over ten by seats.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil's party system became notorious for its weakness,
clientelism, and generally inchoate quality—and its lack of programmaticity (see Ames
2001; Lamounier 1986, Mainwaring 1995 & 1999; Samuels 2000). However, over the
past two and a half decades, this chaotic party system characterized by mostly
unprogrammatic parties, very low party loyalty among both voters and politicians, and a
highly unstable set of major or ‘relevant’ parties has settled down. It now displays
patterns that increase the usefulness of party labels as informational shortcuts and thus
voters’ capacity to vote according to their broader policy interests, instead of merely on
the basis of short-term personal gain such as clientelism. Indeed, as of 2011, RPG seems
be consolidating and Brazil can plausibly be said to approach the programmaticity of the
older North American democracies, if not those of Western Europe (Hagopian,
Gervasoni and Moraes 2009). The central issues of programmatic competition in the
Brazilian context mostly relate to socioeconomic issues: taxes, spending (especially
transfers), deficits, trade, and monetary policy management.
Because of the profusion of parties in Brazil, it is important to consider the party system
overall as a unit of analysis; this case study will also include special focus on four of the
most important parties. Considering the party system is essential because programmatic
cleavages are most relevant at the level of the two principal party coalitions, which have
demonstrated their durability over the last decade: one left-wing coalition led by the
currently-ruling Workers’ Party (PT), and a second centre-right coalition led by the
Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). The second main ‘take home’ point about
Brazil’s distinctive pathway to becoming a programmatic party system is that it is
principally the story of these two parties, which were ‘born’ with programmatic party
elements, gradually crowding out much more clientelistic or personalistic parties. This
is in contrast to cases in which initially unprogrammatic parties became increasingly
programmatic, as in Zambia.
The Brazilian case highlights the importance of a number of important factors to the
emergence of responsible party government. Most notably, it strongly reaffirms one of
the main conclusions of the Desk Review: that in some cases the institutionalization of
the party system is a necessary condition for the emergence of programmatic politics. In
Brazil, programmaticity did not become the predominant mode of politics until the set
of relevant parties from which voters and politicians choose stabilized. Until repeated
iterations of choosing from an established set of parties became a ‘stable, valued,
recurring pattern of a behaviour’ (Huntington, 1968: 12), voters did not rely on party
platforms when deciding who to support. But three other processes were also of great
importance. First, the imposition of neo-liberal economic reforms constrained supplies
of the resources needed for clientelistic politics and thus undermined the longevity of
established unprogrammatic parties. Second, given the greater constraints on
clientelism it was easier for leftist parties to impose ideological order on the political
1
Based on the Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera technique (1979).
47
system by defeating clientelistic parties. Thus the old story of programmaticity
emerging as a result of ‘contagion from the left’ is of great relevance in the Brazilian
case.
Third, the relationship between federalism, the logic of electoral competition, and the
emergence of programmatic party organization and linkages is of great—and often
overlooked—importance. Most significantly, the decentralization of political power
ensures that state and local political operations—and the offices they compete over—
are critical building blocks that presidential candidates must harness if they are to be
successful. Programmatic appeals have been a key strategy that presidential hopefuls
have used to create a loyal chain of organizations and individuals at the state and
municipal level across Brazil’s vast territory.2 Of course, a good deal of causal weight
must also be attributed to contingent factors, such as the presence of two charismatic
leaders who were both committed to practicing programmatic politics, and did so
effectively.
2.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Brazil
Brazil's contemporary party system grew out of the enforced bipartidarismo
inaugurated by the 1964–1985 military regime in the third year of its rule, when it
created two parties, the National Renovating Alliance (ARENA) for it supporters, and the
Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB—PMDB after 1977) for opposition politicians to
have a legitimate vehicle of political activity. After the reform of party legislation in
1977, which was allegedly designed to buoy the regime's fortunes by splitting the
opposition (Mainwaring 1999: 87), multiple parties were allowed. This development
was of great significance for the Brazilian party system, for it led to nine gubernatorial
victories for the PMDB, the emergence of PT as a party, and a five-way competition in
the 1982 national elections which in turn contributed to an enormous electoral setback
for the government's party—renamed as the Social Democratic Party (PDS). In 1985, the
regime of the generals stepped down in a pacted transition and the National Congress
that had been elected in 1982 sat as an electoral college to select the first civilian
president in over two decades. This process generated a new party, the Party of the
Liberal Front (PFL), which split from the PDS to join with the PMDB in support of an
opposition president, Tancredo Neves. However, Neves died before taking office, leaving
José Sarney, backed by the PFL, as Brazil's first civilian president—although the PMDB,
which occupied nearly two thirds of ministerial posts, was the principal party that
supported his administration (Ferrerira 2002: 52).
The administrations of Sarney (1985–1989) and his successor Fernando Collor (who left
office early due to impeachment at the end of 1992) were politically and economically
tumultuous. Numerous politicians switched between a growing number of parties (15–
20 in recent years), some multiple times (Mainwaring and Liñan 1997). The PMDB
suffered electorally during this period, in part due to its support of the Cruzado Plan,
which proved economically untenable. Many politicians left the party, including a wing
of progressive intellectual politicians led by future president Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, who formed the PSDB in 1988. At the same time, many others, especially
former supporters of the military regime, joined it. Nonetheless, the PMDB has regularly
been the largest or second largest party in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, has
secured support from across the country, won many governorships, and provided
This account draws on the logic of John Aldrich (1995), but suggests that in a much more
crowded field of political contenders than 1820s America, ideology (or programme) is important
not just to win over established political machines, but to implant new ones, attracting new
young politicians to party loyalty with ideological appeals.
2
48
ministers for several governments—although it has never been successful at running its
own candidate for president.
The most successful party in the 1990s was the PSDB, which won the presidency in
1994 under Cardoso, whose Real Plan as Finance Minister was seen to have saved Brazil
from hyperinflation following the fall of Collor. The PSDB won again in 1998 after
securing a constitutional amendment allowing executive re-election. The PT, under Luis
Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, gradually emerged as the principal opposition party, slowly at first
(though Lula was runner-up in every presidential election from 1989 until he won in
2002), and offered a far-left alternative to the declaredly ‘centre-left’ PSDB. Despite this,
the ruling party dutifully, and relatively successfully, followed neo-liberal policy
prescriptions for liberalization, privatization, and tough monetary policy throughout
Cardoso’s tenure. The PFL and the new version of PDS—which has been renamed
several times and is today known as the Progressive Party (PP)—were dependable
supporters of the Cardoso administration, while myriad smaller parties on right, left and
centre engaged in ‘small-time’ politics, usually with ambitions that reached no higher
than local or perhaps state-wide office.
Figure 2: First-round Presidential Votes in Brazil, 1994–2010
By 2002, Lula had moderated his leftist rhetoric enough to be electable, and had secured
a right-wing coalition partner in the small but outspoken Liberal Party (PL) to back up
his moderate credentials (Samuels 2004). Meanwhile, Cardoso's chosen successor, José
Serra—a less skilled political operator—had lost the support of the PFL due to
squabbles with the powerful Sarney family. The combination of these two developments
enabled Lula to win the presidency, and he was re-elected four years later with a similar
coalition, this time facing off against the successful PSDB governor of São Paulo, Geraldo
Alckmin. In 2010, Lula's handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, won re-election with a
49
coalition much like Lula's but expanded to include the PMDB, as well as several other
small parties. She defeated the PSDB, which again ran Serra, backed by a coalition that
included the PFL (by this point renamed Democratas, DEM) and the left-centre People’s
Socialist Party, one of several small parties tracing their lineage to the original Brazilian
Communist party. Importantly, these party coalitions, which have evolved into two clear
camps, tend to vote together in congress, although they often recombine in unexpected
ways during state-level political competition.
2.3 Categorization and Description of Programmatic Parties
The two most important parties in the story of Brazil’s increasing programmatization
are the PT and PSDB, which together crowded out clientelistic parties and acted as the
bases for coalitions of the left and right. Although the degree of programmatic
development of the two main parties does not fulfil every aspect of the ‘programmatic
party’ ideal type, the success of their programmatic strategies has certainly shifted the
party system towards a programmatic party system. However, it is worth noting that the
nature of these coalitions has been somewhat problematic for programmaticity as there
are a few parties in each coalition that do not fit with the direction or degree of
programmaticity of the overall coalition.
Table 5: Brazilian Party Profiles
Party Name
Party organization
Party Linkages
Party type
Workers’
Party
Strong party organization
and policymaking capacity.
Moderate internal
democracy and strong grass
roots presence.
Programmatic linkages to
core constituencies in the
industrial South East.
Elements of charismatic
linkages.
Programmatic
party.
Brazilian
Social
Democratic
Party
Medium-strength party
organization and strong
policymaking capacity.
Mixture of clientelistic,
charismatic and
programmatic linkages.
Elite
programmatic
party.
Brazilian
Democratic
Movement
Party
Weak party organization,
low coherence and weak
ability to diffuse values.
Clientelistic linkages and
some programmatic
linkages segmented by
state and region.
Clientelistic
party, waning
programmatic
agenda.
Party of the
Liberal Front
Medium-strength party
organization and strong
policy cohesion in Congress.
Clientelistic linkages,
strong in rural North East,
and now South, South East.
Clientelistic
party, growing
programmatic
coherence.
The PT emerged as a party out of the New Unionism movement in Brazil, which in turn
emerged in the 1970s as a response to the government-incorporated unions of the
Vargas era (mid-century). The Central Única dos Trabalhadores emerged as the main
organization of the movement, and rapidly became the PT's electoral base, anchoring
the party strongly in the industrial southeast of Brazil. Through a leadership of
committed Marxists, including some who took up arms against the military regime, such
as Lula's successor, current president Dilma Rousseff, and a strong connection to the
CUT's well-organized unions, the PT quickly became known as a programmatic party.
Historically, its support has come from two groups: organized labour (especially the
50
bank workers, metalworkers and public sector unions) and from highly educated voters
who tend to take more progressive stances on a range of issues, including the party’s
redistributive policies that were often not to their own benefit.
Since Lula’s election, the ranks of PT voters have further swelled to include much of the
urban poor and informal sector, especially in the northeast of the country, including a
significant proportion of the Afro-Brazilian population which is concentrated in that
region. The party’s campaigns and literature invariably invoke issues of class and
economic fairness and equality, and its consistent, moderately redistributive fiscal and
welfare policies reflect these programmatic commitments. However, although the
party’s profile has remained programmatic throughout the period, the PT has moved
toward the centre of the political spectrum as it has become increasingly electorally
successful (Ibid). This has moved the party’s ideological position a bit, but hasn’t
changed its programmatic nature, and largely reflects its vigorous internal party
democracy, which saw power gradually shift away from far-leftist elements who were
seen as partly responsible for Lula’s electoral losses in the 1990s (Ibid: 1012–13).
One important aspect of all of Brazil’s parties that contributes towards general
programmatic party development is their internal organization, which is federally
regulated and includes committees at different sub-national levels that, by different
means, elect or select delegates to the parties’ upper level organs, such as the national
directorate or national executive committee. The PT is noteworthy among Brazil’s
parties in its particular mechanisms as it includes a direct secret-ballot election for the
party’s national presidency, which promotes a focus on party strategy closely linked to
the programmatic positions of party rank-and-file. In general, the PT comes closest to
qualifying as a fully programmatic party according to all three dimensions set out by the
Desk Review: electoral linkage, party organization, and government and legislative
action. However, one countervailing trend in the PT is worthy of note: some of its
success at ‘crowding out’ other more clientelistic or personalistic parties is due to its
ability to add unprogrammatic strains to its electoral and policy repertoire. These
include elements of segmented linkages and personalistic, charismatic leadership under
Lula—a metalworker missing one finger who only learned to read in his 20s. The PT’s
programmaticity is illuminated by surveys examining voters’ ideological positions.
Datafolha conducted a poll in May of 2010 asking voters to place themselves on an
ideological spectrum, and examining the crosstabs for party preferences reveals how
much more programmatic PT partisans are than non-partisans. This can be seen among
the respondents who failed to identify their own ideologies (unable or had none). 35 per
cent of non-partisans failed to do so, while only 17 per cent of PT sympathizers failed
(Datafolha 2010:10).
The PSDB was the ruling party from 1994–2002 under Cardoso and has served as the
leader of the opposition coalition in both electoral and legislative competition since
2002. Like the PT, the PSDB has shown programmatic elements from the start, made up
as it was of progressive politicians who split from the PMDB in the late 1980s,
displeased with its increasingly heterogeneous and unprogrammatic character (Power
2002). However, unlike the PT, its centre-left, social-democratic programme was
defined more by its progressive, academically-minded leadership, several of whom had
spent the years of the military regime in exile in foreign universities, or otherwise
removed from politics, than by linkages to any socioeconomic group whose interests
might moor it securely to a particular set of programmes. As a result, the PSDB moved
rightward in order to provide the macroeconomic stability seen as critical by Cardoso
and many Brazilians who were exhausted by multiple rounds of hyperinflation. The
party thus endorsed technocratic and even neo-liberal programmes, even if it rejected
51
that label, and by the late 1990s the party anchored the centre-right of Brazil’s political
spectrum (Ibid: 625–626).
As with the PT’s moderation, this was a considered and purposeful shift in ideology
based on frank assessments of economic theory and practice (Ibid: 628), rather than the
party spurning programmatic politics to try and win votes. Voters continue to associate
the PSDB with a centre-right agenda. Nonetheless, because the party has never exactly
embraced neo-liberal ideology in campaigns, even as it has become known for adhering
to such precepts in economic policy (Spanakos and Renno 2009: 15, 17–18), it falls more
under the Desk Review's category of ‘Programmatic Elite Party’. Furthermore, the PSDB
has also made use of personalized appeals, most notably through its reliance on
Cardoso, whose enormous popularity was due at least partly to non-programmatic
factors such as his charismatic authority and general ‘good governance’. Today, though,
the PSDB still displays high levels of programmaticity. In the same Datafolha poll
referenced above, respondents who preferred it failed at ideological self-placement at a
rate of only 13 per cent, compared to 35 per cent for those without a party preference,
and 25 per cent for the sample overall (Datafolha 2010:10).
Two other parties deserve some mention with regards to programmaticity. The first is
the PMDB, which was seen as highly programmatic in the years around the 1985
transition. However, its programmatic development was based on its opposition to the
military regime, which quickly became defunct as a programmatic cleavage in Brazilian
politics. Moreover, with the influx of former supporters of the military regime, led by
Sarney in 1990, the PMDB’s programmatic profile was undermined. In general, the party
is weakly coherent nationally, with geographically segmented linkages that include
leftist programmes in some states, rightist programmes in others, and a clientelistic
approach in most. Thus, the party has almost become less programmatic over the last
quarter century (at least until recently—see below), even while maintaining its position
as the first or second largest party in terms of votes and seats in the Congress. The PFL,
on the other hand, has gone from being known as a party of the more economically
backward northeast of Brazil with a penchant for fisiologismo (‘bossism’, a blanket term
referring to clientelism and nepotism) to a more programmatic organization, having
embraced liberal economic orthodoxy. To date, the party has demonstrated one of the
highest rates of party cohesion in the legislature (Desposato 2006: 1024).
In considering programmaticity of the party system overall, it is critical to consider the
role of the two great coalitions. The centre-right PSDB has depended on the rightist PFL
as its principal coalition partner in every presidential election 1994 to 2010, with the
exception of 2002. Opposed to this now-institutionalized PSDB–PFL coalition has been
the coalition of the PT with other smaller leftist parties. Both coalitions have proved to
be cohesive during parliamentary debate (Lyne 2005). Other parties, some
programmatic and some unprogrammatic, or even ‘partidos de aluguel’ (‘parties for
rent’) have tended to be subsumed into this main axis of electoral and legislative
competition. The less cohesive PMDB has shown a strong tendency to split
geographically in presidential elections and has not run its own candidate since 1994,
and small and medium-sized non-programmatic parties have typically also ended up
serving the electoral ends of one coalition leader or the other. There are a few instances
of ideological incoherence to be found in these two grand coalitions, such as the PL’s
presence in the left coalition and the PPS’s recent appearance in the PSDB–PFL coalition.
But on balance, the smaller parties, even though a few may be ideologically at odds with
the coalition leaders, or simply lack ideology, end up doing the bidding of the leading
parties, and as a result have not perceptibly reduced the programmatic structuration of
the coalition overall, in terms of the criteria set out in the Desk Review. The core of each
of these coalitions is quite well institutionalized, although a few of the smaller parties—
52
plus, importantly, the PMDB—are less strongly attached, and sometimes switch.
Formation of these coalitions is electorally strategic, and thus parties are not usually
expected to adjust their policies in order to enter a coalition. However, long
participation in a coalition can have an effect on parties’ programmatic development.
For example, the old PL, which used to be known as a party of neo-liberal economic
ideology, through several iterations of collaboration with the PT, lost its programmatic
reputation and acquired one for fisoliolgísmo for simply working with whoever is in
power. But in general, the parties that suffer these effects tend to be second and thirdtier parties (the PL never received more than five per cent of the national vote in Brazil,
and merged into another party after the 2006 elections).
2.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics
This section will advance five explanations for Brazil’s relatively programmatic party
system, which is significant for a less developed country and a new democracy. The first
two can broadly are connected to socio-economic factors, the third to institutional
factors, and the last two are contingent upon particular confluences of events or
personalities. However, it is critical to note that each explanation depends on the
expectations that office-seeking politicians have of voters and of each other and the
actions that they undertake as in response to those expectations.
Before we turn to the explanations it is important to consider the broader economic
context in Brazil and its impact on political development. In the wake of successful,
though often macroeconomically destabilizing, import-substituting industrialization
(ISI), common throughout Latin America in the 1930s–1960s, the Brazilian military
regime stood out for its willingness to deepen ISI by demobilizing workers, which
brought foreign investment and greater macroeconomic stability (O’Donnell 1973). As a
result, although Brazil's economy was a monetary basket case throughout the post-debt
crisis era, it also featured a large industrial sector and powerful domestic business
classes, many of which were linked to foreign markets and capital (Frieden 1991).
During the same period the middle class expanded, especially in the state of São Paulo,
which now accounts for about a fifth of the country’s population and over a quarter of
its economic activity.
This background is important to understand the first two explanations of
programmaticity in Brazil. First, the relative marginalization of organized labour and
leftist sentiments was critical to the success of leftist parties that emerged in the late
1980s. It was the rise of parties such as the PT which led to the crowding out of
clientelistic parties and the gradual ‘programmatization’ of the party system discussed
above. Duverger's original conception of ‘contagion from the left’ was imagined in the
context of gradually expanding suffrage in Europe and the need for parties of capital to
adopt some of the left's policy initiatives when the masses secured the vote and thus the
potential to swamp parties with a small, elite voting base (1954: xxvii). However, the
notion of disciplined leftist parties imposing programmatic order on a party system is
just as relevant in the Brazilian case, with some modification. Although the success of
the PT did force other parties to reconsider their own platforms, programmatization
came less from the adoption of welfare state policies by rightist parties and more from
the rise to prominence of leftist parties themselves.
That the two most successful new parties to emerge in Brazil following the transition to
democracy were of the left was crucial to this process, as organizations based on
socialist ideals are expected to be more programmatic than parties with other bases of
support (Gunther and Diamond 2003). The electoral success of the PT and the PSDB was
53
therefore of great significance to the programmatization of the party system, even if the
latter quickly changed position to espouse a right of centre agenda. Consider the PT,
which sprung from obscurity to almost win the 1989 presidential election as Lula
outperformed Collor in much of the south of the country. The effectiveness of the PT’s
programmatic appeal simultaneously encouraged the party to develop greater
programmatic credentials and rival parties to adopt more coherent ideological
positions. Five years later, the high policy content of Cardoso’s campaign, along with his
proven success at defeating inflation with neo-liberal policies, enabled the PSDB to
secure a sweeping electoral victory. Thus, although the ideological stripe of the PSDB
changed, the initial commitment of both parties to programmatic politics, and their
subsequent success, provided political leaders with a reason to abandon traditional
parties in favour of new programmatic ones. Similarly, this trend gave leaders starting
new parties, or reinvigorating old ones (such as the Brazilian Socialist Party, PSB, which
in 2010 was allied with the PT and held six governorships across the country) good
reasons to think that developing programmatic linkages and policies was a critical first
step on the ladder to electoral success.
When programmatic parties secure power this effect is exaggerated, because nonprogrammatic parties are denied the access to clientelistic resources that comes from
control over the distribution of government spending and jobs. Thus, they must look for
alternative ways to mobilize support. As a result, losing parties are increasingly likely to
seek to develop programmatic linkages in order to establish a connection to voters that
is not dependent on access to state resources. This process also plays out at other levels
of the Brazilian political system, because exogenous shocks are frequent enough in state
and local campaigns that ruling clientelistic parties will, from time to time, be knocked
out of the top executive office. Again, as programmatic parties win power and deny old
clientelistic parties their only well-developed linkage mechanism, they force them to
adapt or fade away. In Brazil, where state politics are so important, such processes
occurred frequently, and in the 1980s and 1990s led to states that were traditionally
characterized by clientelistic linkage mechanisms experiencing higher levels of electoral
volatility (Epstein 2009).
We can see this phenomenon at work in Brazil's northeast, an area notorious for
clientelistic practices (Desposato 2000; Mainwaring 1999). In the 1980s and 1990s, the
PFL dominated party politics in many of the region’s large states, achieving nearhegemonic status in Pernambuco and especially Maranhão under the Sarney family
machine and Bahia under the machine of Antônio Carlos Magalhães (also known as
ACM). However, after winning governorships in these and a few other northeastern
states—often tainted by accusations of vote-buying and other practices of fisiologismo—
after 2002 the PFL was excluded from Lula’s governing coalition and so lost access to
the federal cabinet. At the next elections in 2006, the PFL lost all five governors' chairs it
had held in the region, showing how vulnerable the reliance of these state–party
machines on clientelism had made them.3 Today, eight of the ten states in the northeast
are governed by traditionally programmatic parties (two by the PT, two by the PSDB,
and four by the PSB). Consequently, rotation of power operated as another mechanism
of programmatic ‘contagion.’
Additionally, programmatic parties that won high office could use their positions to
establish new forms of linkage, including even clientelistic and personal networks, thus
consolidating their hold on power. The potency of such double linkage mechanisms is
The party nonetheless met with success in legislative elections elsewhere in the country, and by
2010 was able to win the governorship of Rio Grande do Norte, in the Northeast and that of Santa
Catarina, in the South.
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54
demonstrated in the state of Bahia, where PT candidate Jaques Wagner defeated the heir
of the old ACM machine, Paulo Souto of the PFL, in 2006. Souto had spent his term in
office in opposition to Lula's government, and so lacked the resources needed to
effectively compete with Wagner. Thereafter, Wagner used both programmatic and
clientelistic linkages to set up a stunning re-election win in 2010, when he increased his
margin of victory from just half a million votes to over 3 million.
Another important explanation for the rise of programmatic parties in Brazil emerges
directly from the work of Hagopian et al (2009), who argue that increasing budgetary
constraints in an ‘age of austerity’—enforced on Brazil from 1994 onward—reduced the
availability of clientelistic resources. Subsequently, party leaders were forced to find
alternative ways to mobilize support and so developed programmatic agendas. In effect,
the process identified by Hagopian et al is similar to the mechanism identified above;
the difference being that overall constraints on patronage resources undermined the
ability of all parties to engage in clientelism, not just opposition parties out-of-office.
Significantly, once parties actually develop and successfully implement such policies, it
becomes much more appealing for candidates to highlight valuable party labels that
attract votes at election time than to engage in clientelistic practices that are extremely
costly.4 Over time, this mechanism rendered political leaders increasingly dependent on
party structures. However, it is important to note that patronage networks and porkbarrel politics have by no means been eliminated, and so constraints on clientelism can
only be a partial explanation of the increasingly programmatic party system.
A third explanation emerges if we consider the impact of federalism and the multiple
arenas of local and especially state politics that it gives rise to. Brazilian states have
historically been strong and the centre weak. Consequently, the most important arenas
for contesting political power have often been the states, and state political machines
have shaped who holds power at the centre. This was especially true in the late 19th
century with the emergence of the ‘cafe com leite’ politics of São Paulo (coffee) and
Minas Gerais (milk—agriculture), state political machines helped to establish a string of
presidents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the 20th century has seen
growing centralization, states remain critical arenas of political contestation. We can see
this in the strategy of the modernizing Getúlio Vargas, who created a populist labourbased party, the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB), to maximize votes among urban workers
in the industrializing south and southeast of the country and simultaneously established
the (anomalously named) Social Democratic Party (PSD) to link together a number of
state–party machines in order to provide a foundation for his national political
ambitions.
This demonstrates the significance of securing support from many states to a
candidate’s presidential prospects (Samuels 2000). While such an alliance could
potentially be cobbled together by one politician or another on an ad hoc basis,
ambitious politicians have incentives to create a mechanism that can dependably
mobilize support across a number of states year after year. For example, while Vargas'
PSD purchased the support of landed oligarchic elites, such a party strategy was
extremely costly and depended on the constant assuaging of egos. By contrast, a strategy
that integrated different state political forces into a coherent programmatic party
promised to generate an organization in which loyalty was based on policy agreement
rather than the channelling of resources—a far more efficient and stable way to build a
viable presidential campaign.
That is, with autonomy, namely to switch parties at will; in Brazil, true independent candidacies
are not allowed, but even still today the profusion of partidos de aluguel means that this
informally the strategy of running outside a major party is more or less viable.
4
55
However, this is easier said than done. The difficulty of constructing such a network lies
in developing such a party with national ambitions in a context in which local political
machines dominate. But this very difficulty—the inability to access established
patronage networks—was also a boon for programmatic party development, for it
frustrated attempts of new parties to build a base through the co-optation of existing
political structures. As a result, programmatic parties were forced to remain exactly
that, and to focus their efforts on honing an ideological position powerful enough to
attract support in the absence of a level electoral playing field. Parties such as the PT
and PSDB did this successfully. Both of these programmatically structured parties
emerged originally in the more developed southeast of the country, but gradually
pushed to other regions of the country by attracting political talent to their ideological
banners.
For example, in 1982 in the agricultural and conservative southern state of Santa
Catarina, the PT recruited Luci Teresinha Choinacki, the daughter of farmers from the
rural western part of the state, at the age of 28. At this point, the party gave little or no
electoral advantages to a young politician in the state from clientelism or even an appeal
to industrial workers, but Choinacki, who was interested in women’s issues and
inequality, joined the party at the same time as she began to organize for the CUT. Four
years later, she became the first woman—and first petista (PT member) elected to the
state’s legislative assembly, and later went on to be elected to the National Chamber of
Deputies in 1990, 1998, 2002 and 2010. Although she struggled with higher office,
coming runner-up in races for the Brazilian Senate in 1994 and 2006, her role as the
earliest prominent petista in the state was critical in helping the party establish a
bridgehead, linking to left-leaning (and especially female) voters in a state that is
otherwise rather conservative, where the PT is not the top party today, but has a key
base of support (Eccel interview).
The critical role of the party’s ideology in attracting a talented young politician with a
bright future provided both an important means for the party to invest in its own future
success, and also helped to keep the party’s programme at the centre of its electoral
strategy. As the PT and PSDB both managed to use programmatic appeals to promising
political entrepreneurs to build a national network, the more credible reputation of
these organizations provided older parties with new incentives to try and improve their
own image by strengthening their programmatic credentials. This is seen clearly in the
case of the PFL, which moved to shed its reputation for fisiologismo. As a party leader is
quoted as saying, it had become critical for the future of the PFL to be known in the
national media as a party of ideas, not clientelism (Ferriera 2002: 55). Thus in
constituting an incentive structure that induced party politicians to invest in
programmatic organizations (in order to build geographically broad support networks),
Brazil’s state-centred federal system formed a fertile substrate that facilitated the
growth of programmaticity.
The fourth explanation takes us beyond socioeconomic and institutional factors to think
about contingent or individual causes. The most important individual in the Brazilian
case is Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the most important contingent factor is
perhaps the critical juncture created by the interaction of his personal political ability,
commitment to programmatic politics, and fortuitous presence on the Brazilian political
scene at the precise moment that the Real Plan was most needed. But the ability of the
PSDB to capture the centre-ground of Brazilian politics also depended on the
socioeconomic developments described at the start of this section. In other Latin
American countries, neo-liberal policies were backed by a thinner business class in an
uneasy coalition with informal sector workers (Weyland 1996). The support of this
56
latter constituency often depended on the presence of a charismatic leader and as a
result this arrangement rarely formed the basis of the sort of durable linkages that can
promote the institutionalization and/or increased programmaticity of the party system
in the long run. But Brazil had a pool of middle-class (though otherwise perhaps socially
heterogeneous) voters available for mobilization behind a neo-liberal programmatic
party. As a result, there was a ready-made constituency for the sort of neo-liberal
policies of the ‘Washington consensus’ that were typically painful for the working and
poorer classes (Williamson 1990).
But the effective management of this voter base owed much to the capacities of Cardoso
himself, first as finance minister and then as president. Both an effective statesman and
an academic committed by training to the power of policy consistency, Cardoso
embarked on a series of successful reforms that eventually undermined all but the most
dogged opposition to a 1997 proposal of constitutional reform that allowed him to seek
re-election. That dogged opponent, of course, was Lula: a skilled and charismatic figure
who adhered to his party's convictions to democratic socialism with a magnetism and
tenacity that helped raise the profile of programmatic appeals overall. Over the next
decade these two men dominated politics, blending and infusing the traditional political
struggle with policy contestation. The presence of two political giants who contested
three straight elections (including 2002, when José Serra, Cardoso's handpicked
successor, ran on the administration's accomplishments and lost to Lula) was an
important catalyst to the ‘freezing’ of programmatic cleavages into the party system
(Lipset and Rokkan 1967).
The strength of this cleavage is evidenced by the failure of ‘outsider’ politicians to make
a dent on the political landscape. In 1998, 2002, 2006, and 2010, party-disloyal
politicians rose to challenge the increasingly programmaticity of the system. Most were
potential populists, and all shunned the route of coming up through large stable parties,5
instead preferring to take control of small or medium-sized partidos de aluguel in order
to contest the ballot. Invariably, such strategies failed dismally, demonstrating the
durability of programmatic parties and the increasing institutionalization of the
programmatic party system.
A critical observation about the development of the Brazilian party system is how its
increased programmaticity has reinforced the institutionalization of the party-coalition
system and vice versa. In the presence of some socio-economic and fiscal conditions that
made clientelistic strategies more costly, leftist parties that were ‘born programmatic’
followed the incentives of a federal and electoral system that promoted the use of
programme for political recruitment and long-term growth. These two parties, the PT
and PSDB (even as the latter altered its ideology, but remained programmatic),
increasingly institutionalized their programmatic commitments and supported the
emergence of stable coalitions (promoted by electoral rules) of the left and right. As a
result, greater levels of programmatic politics have encouraged leaders to establish
more effective linkages and to strengthen their party organizations. In turn, the twin
processes of institutionalization and programmatization have helped voters to identify
the position of different parties and to hold them accountable for their performance,
which has undoubtedly had a salutary effect on Brazilian democracy overall.
Namely, they were Fernandon Collor (PRN, 1989), Ciro Gomes (PPS, 1998; and again in 2002),
Anthony Garotinho (PSB, 2002), Heloísa Helena (PSOL, 2006), and Marina Silva (PV, 2010).
5
57
2.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics
One important consequence of increased programmaticity of the party system is the
increasing focus of media coverage and legislative exchanges on ideologically coherent
approaches to addressing the nation’s problems. In a country with a 26 per cent poverty
rate and the world’s tenth highest income inequality,6 focusing attention on such issues
as taxation, economic growth, and government support for the poor and education—
especially on evaluations of the PT’s programmes such as ‘Fome Zero’ (Zero Hunger)
and ‘Bolsa Família’—has improved the quality of debate. Programmaticity has also
helped to reduce the political salience of issues that might otherwise distract from
governing the country. For example, in 2005 the ‘mensalão’ scandal erupted when it
came out that Lula’s chief of staff, José Dirceu, was implicated in a scheme to pay
monthly stipends to deputies from some smaller, less programmatic parties, in return
for their support in the Chamber. The scandal brought down Dirceu, but did not
destabilize the party system or distract from pressing issues of governance. Rather,
when Lula and the PT were up for re-election the following year, both main parties
focused around two-thirds of their free television time on detailing their policy agenda
(Boas 2010: 642–643).
The turn towards programmatic politics in Brazil has also had a centripetal influence on
the ideological spectrum of politics. Against the backdrop of the general success of
Cardoso’s inflation-fighting policies, the programmaticity of Brazilian politics by the
2000s encouraged Lula’s to moderate the PT’s position in order to get elected. Had Lula
not faced an established and successful rightist government, he might have been more
determined, and able, to win power on the back of a more orthodox, leftist line. At the
same time, the general consensus that Brazil has prospered under Lula’s programmatic
politics has forced the PSDB’s centre-right coalition to moderate its own position,
reluctantly expressing support for some level of state-led development.7 In other words,
and in contrast to the Indian and Ukrainian cases, programmatization has gone hand in
hand with political moderation, which in turn has reduced the tension between rival
political camps. One consequence of this has been that the Brazilian party system has
been relatively insulated from the impact kind of ‘outsider’ politicians—especially those
with a strongly anti-capitalist appeal—who have captured the presidency in places like
Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela in the past fifteen years, and at least in the last of these
countries undermined the democracy in the process.
However, this process has also generated some negative externalities. Political
moderation tends to exclude truly dramatic new policy innovations that might redress
social problems in revolutionary ways, and renders all progress incremental, which may
slow down democratic governments’ abilities to meet crises. At the same time, the
moderation of both parties has accelerated the trend of ‘electoralism’. As the PT and
PSDB develop catch-all appeals designed to consolidate their electoral position
(Kirchheimer 1986), they risk losing their programmatic edge. This raises the point that
the more successful programmatic parties are, the more difficult it may become for them
to retain their original focus, moving them toward the Desk Review’s conception of
Weak Programmatic Parties. If the catch-all model becomes increasingly pronounced,
the pattern of party linkages is also likely to change, shifting from programmatic
connections to personalistic networks or opportunistic party appeals. In turn, such a
development would result in parties increasingly resembling the Desk Review’s
CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/br.html).
7 Morais and Saad-Filho report 80 per cent approval ratings for Lula by the end of his two terms
in office (2011: 37).
6
58
conception of Programmatic Elite Parties. Thus, the feedback loop of electoral
imperatives and moderation seems to put a limit on how programmatic the main,
coalition-leading parties—and as a result the overall system—can become.
2.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Brazilian Case
Although programmaticity may be difficult to directly promote, several policy lessons
can be drawn from Brazil. The first is that strict adherence to democratic procedures
(not simply parchment institutions) is critical for the cultivation of programmaticity:
free and fair elections and permissive electoral and party registration regulations make
it easier for programmatic parties to evolve. Similarly, the protection of the rights and
freedoms of the press and of journalists is significant, because parties such as the PFL
are more likely to evolve into programmatic parties when they come under media
scrutiny and must develop a strong and clear reputation and a programme that is
credible to voters. A broad focus on democracy promotion should therefore be an
important component of any programme intended to support programmatic politics.
Equalizing media output is one concrete strategy that international actors such as IDEA
can realistically work towards. In Brazil, all non-pay television stations must provide
two blocks of political programming per day for free use by political parties during
election campaigns.8 This time is apportioned to the parties according to the size of their
delegations in the (soon-to-be-outgoing) national congress, and parties can use these
broadcasts however they choose. Such free airtime has become a central aspect of
election campaigns and has helped to maintain a level playing field. Moreover, such a
concentrated media focus incentivizes politicians to look serious and have something
serious to say. This has usually resulted in leaders focusing on programmatic appeals,
since they do not want to look lightweight compared to other candidates. Promoting the
introduction of a similar system of media access in other countries might also create
new opportunities for programmatic parties and encourage programmatic dialogue.
Second, the way in which leftist parties drove the programmatization of the party
system in Brazil suggests that, as in Zambia, party system transformation depends on
the ability of political entrepreneurs to harness urban workers, poor communities, and
left leaning constituencies. By running training programmes and workshops that bring
together political leaders, union activists and representatives of working class
communities, interested donors and NGOs can help to jump-start this process. Similarly,
programmes that focus on increasing the ability of previously marginalized
communities to exercise their democratic rights, for example by making it easier for
them to register to vote, will help aspiring programmatic organizations to mobilize
support.
Another central policy lesson that emerges from the causal path of programmatic
parties’ increasing geographic spread has to do with political recruitment. This is
perhaps one of the main ways in which party assistance can be useful. In developing
countries and newer democracies such as Brazil, personalistic politics are unavoidable.
But programmatic politics can trump them if it harnesses them. Winning elections—not
just tomorrow’s elections, but elections down the road—depends on parties’ ability to
recruit today, as party members and leaders, the attractive candidates of tomorrow. By
helping parties focus not just on using programmatic elements in today’s campaigns to
establish linkages with voters, but also on using programmes to recruit future political
stars, party assistance missions could provide an important accelerant to the process of
BBC News: Latin America and the Caribbean, ‘Brazil candidates begin daily election broadcasts’,
Aug 18, 2010 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11008240)
8
59
programmatization. By helping a party identify and recruit already ideologically likeminded activists in towns and regions where the party is not yet known or popular
(especially from marginalized groups such as women or the poor, whom leaders of
other, clientelistic, parties might not have thought to tap), party leaders—and the party
assistance missions that could help them to formulate recruiting strategies and
programmes—can help to build that national network of political actors who are
effective political communicators, and will as future candidates build linkages to voters
that can capitalize on their personal appeals, but also bring programmatically-minded
party politicians to government. This could be accomplished by programmes that might
identify what logistical and policy information would be particularly helpful for firsttime candidates, and then helping to identify outspoken young ‘proto-politicians’ in such
regions and offering them both ideological and logistical reasons for joining a particular
party. Since young parties in emerging democracies often have to devote strapped
resources to imminent elections or legislative battles, help focusing on a long-term
strategy like recruitment and grooming future leaders that would be shaped by
ideological appeals could be a huge boon to encouraging programmaticity, as well as
simply future stability in the party system.
The final policy lesson that emerges from the Brazilian case is motivated by Hagopian’s
analysis of the way in which budgetary restraint reduce the availability of resources for
clientelism and hence open up opportunities for programmatic parties (2009). It
suggests that improved budgetary processes and fiscal restraint may improve the
prospects for programmatically structured parties to edge out clientelistic ones. This
suggestion is a more macro-level policy lesson than the others that bears more directly
on party assistance, however.
2.7 Bibliography
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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Ames, Barry. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2001.
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in Latin America’, World Politics, 62, No 4 (2010), 636–675.
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broadcasts’, (2010) Aug 18 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america11008240>
Câmaro dos Deputados. ‘Biografia. Luci Choinacki’ (2011).
<http://www2.camara.gov.br/deputados/pesquisa/layouts_deputados_biografia?p
k=99986>
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Datafolha. ‘Posição Política 20 e 21/05/2010’ (2010) <http://datafolha.folha.uol.com.br
/folha/datafolha/tabs/posicao_politica_31052010_tb1.pdf>
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Desposato, Scott. ‘Institutional Theories, Societal Realities, and Party Systems: A
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Epstein, Daniel. ‘Clientelism Versus Ideology: Problems of Party Development in Brazil’.
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European Party System, edited by Peter Mair. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
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Lipset, Seymour Lipset, and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter
Alignments: An Introduction’ in Party Systems and Voter Alignments: CrossNational Perspectives edited by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. New
York: Free Press, 1967, 1–64.
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Case of Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Mainwaring, Scott. ‘Brazil: Weak Parties, Feckless Democracy’ in Building Democratic
Institutions: party systems in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
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Mainwaring, Scott, and Liñan, Aníbal Perez. ‘Party Discipline in the Brazilian
Constitutional Congress’, Legislative Studies Quarterly , 12, No 4 (1997), 453–483.
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Samuels, David. Ambition, Federalism, and Legislative Politics in Brazil. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Samuels, David. ‘From Socialism to Social Democracy: Party Organization and the
Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil’, Comparative Political Studies, 37,
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Interview
Eccel, Paulo. PT Member. State Deputy in Legislative Assembly of Santa Catarina.
Florianópolis. 23 May 2006.
62
3 India
3.1 Introduction
This case study of programmatic party politics in India focuses on two major
transformations, one at the national level and the other at the state level. At the national
level, India's party system has experienced fragmentation since the late 1980s, when the
decades-long hegemony of the Congress Party began to give way to heated multi-party
competition. The Congress Party's cadre programmatic party model—in which the
programmes formulated by party elites were not important to the way that the party
mobilized voters—has been challenged by parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and a range of regional parties. Many of these
newer parties have clear programmatic elements, yet they defy conventional categories
by combining programmatic platforms with targeted ethnicity-based appeals to voters.
On the one hand, these parties can be argued to represent an improvement on the
Congress model because they bridge the gap between elite and mass party politics.
Conversely, the often divisive nature of these parties’ strategies is not always conducive
to stability in a large and diverse democracy such as India. However, there is evidence
that over time these parties have moderated their emphasis on identity and as a result
are becoming less 'ethnic' in their style of politics. In other words, they are in a process
of becoming ‘ethnic–programmatic’ parties.
At the sub-national level, over the last two decades chief ministers and political parties
have emerged seeking to win elections by advocating programmes of economic
development and good governance at the state level. The strategies employed by such
parties are a stark contrast to the norm of vote buying and clientelism—or 'patronage
democracy'—that has characterized Indian state elections for decades. These 'good
governance' parties are reforming India's state-level politics and have brought about
real democratic gains both in terms of accountability and government performance.
States led by such programmatic parties have experienced dramatic improvements in
terms of economic growth and the quality of public services, and good governance
parties have been electorally successful as a result. Taken together, these two trends
represent a virtuous cycle that has encouraged other parties to adopt the model.
What explains the rise of ethnic–programmatic parties at the national level in India? The
story begins with the institutional decay of the Congress Party, which created
opportunities for new political entrepreneurs to enter the party system. But economic
liberalization has also been significant, reducing the central government's monopolistic
control over economic and political resources and thereby undermining the capacity of
the ruling party’s clientelistic linkages to deliver electoral dominance. This dual process
undermined the foundations of the Congress regime and opposition parties took
advantage of this window of opportunity to develop electoral linkages and programmes
that tapped the latent social cleavages that Congress—for decades an 'umbrella' party
that had embraced a wide range of disparate social groups and interests—had failed to
capitalize upon. As new parties such as the BJP developed into credible national
contenders, however, the pressures of competitive party politics encouraged them to
moderate their identity politics in order to expand beyond the relatively narrow support
bases that first brought them to prominence—leading to a second evolution that has
resulted in the emergence of nascent ethnic–programmatic parties.
What explains the rise of 'good governance' programmatic parties at the state level in
India? The decentralization of economic policymaking authority and resources
associated with economic liberalization made it feasible for political leaders to run on
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the basis of good governance campaigns—which carried little weight when states lacked
the capacity to affect these policy areas. The growing inter-state competition for private
investment has magnified the reward for pursuing pro-growth policies. At the same
time, we must leave space for individual agency. It was the emergence of a handful of
political leaders, such as Chandrababu Naidu, who understood that the new economic
and institutional context brought with it opportunities for a new kind of politics, that
kick-started the process of programmatization in India. Once these individuals had
emerged, demonstration effects meant that parties and voters in other states quickly
learnt of the economic benefits of ‘good governance’ parties—and their electoral
success. It was not long before similar developments began to play out in other states
across the country.
India, the world's largest democracy, thus offers a number of valuable lessons about
programmatic party politics. First, programmaticity is a complicated quality and may
emerge in more ‘civic’ or more ‘ethnic’ variants—some of which may be less
normatively desirable than others. Second, it suggests that although the political
transition from single-party dominance to multi-party competition in socially diverse
countries often results in the emergence of parties based around social and territorial
cleavages, over time political competition can induce leaders to moderate their identity
politics, giving rise to ethnic–programmatic parties. Third, it reveals that institutional
reforms matter. Decentralization was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the
evolution of more programmatic approaches at the state level. Fourth, it illustrates that
economic reforms can have an important impact upon programmaticity, especially
when they reduce the resources available for non-programmatic forms of linkage, such
as patron–client ties, and place leaders under greater pressure to deliver. Finally, the
Indian case highlights the importance of demonstration effects in the spread of
programmatic party politics, and so has much to tell us about how programmatic gains
become consolidated.
3.2 History of Programmatic Politics in India
India has experienced nearly continuous democracy—with a brief interruption during
the 'Emergency' period from 1975 to 1977—since independence in 1947. Yet India's
political party system has undergone steady evolution since independence: from an era
of 'pluralistic' single-party dominance by the Congress Party under Jawharlal Nehru
(1947-1967) during which there was substantial competition within the party (Kothari
1964), to a period (1967-1984) of 'authoritarian' single-party dominance by the
Congress Party, when power was centralized under Indira Gandhi (Bose and Jalal 2004),
to the present, post-economic liberalization phase of multi-party competition phase
(1991-present) in which power has alternated between coalition governments led by
the Congress Party and the BJP, respectively. A graph of the distribution of seats in the
Lok Sabha—the lower house of India's legislature—from the 1950s to the present day,
illustrates these recent developments (Figure 3).
Historically, a hallmark of India's national political party system has been the
combination of coherent and distinctive party programmes, formulated by party elites,
with highly clientelistic and populist electoral strategies (Brass 1994). In large part, this
is the product of Congress rule. Under India's first Prime Minister, Jawharlal Nehru, the
independence movement–turned political party articulated a clear programmatic
commitment to state-led development and industrialization (Guha 2007). Yet support
for this programme was purchased largely on the basis of a hierarchical patron–client
network that extended into India's local districts (Weiner 1967). To this day, the
Congress Party remains a quintessential 'cadre programmatic party'.
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Figure 3: Party Seat Shares in the Lok Sabha, 1951–2009
Sources: Election Commission of India
Since economic liberalization in 1991 and with the simultaneous decline of Congress
Party hegemony, new entrants to the national party system have begun to pursue
alternative forms of political organization. Initially, these parties carved out spaces for
themselves on the basis of ethnic appeals. The BJP, now a credible national alternative to
Congress, has risen to power largely based on the ideology of hindutva, Hindu
nationalism, which has successfully attracted voters away from the secular Congress
Party (Kohli 2001). Other parties have appealed to caste identities, such as the Bahujan
Samaj Party (BSP), a quasi-regional low-caste political party, or to linguistic/territorial
identities, as has been the case with a number of regional parties. While these parties do
offer coherent, distinct and stable political programmes and appeal to voters on that
basis, they also tend to target specific ethnic groups rather than the general electorate—
an approach which, overall, is in many respects programmatic but may nonetheless be
deleterious to national identity. However, some of these new parties appear to be
curtailing their emphasis on ethnicity in favour of widening the scope of their electoral
appeal, suggesting that they are in a process of evolving from ethnic parties into ethnic–
programmatic parties.
A second important trend has emerged at the state level. From the mid-1990s onwards,
political parties in a number of states have aggressively campaigned on prodevelopment and 'good governance' platforms, won landslide election victories, and
implemented successful reforms once in office. The paradigmatic case is Bihar—one of
India's very poorest states that for decades was synonymous with criminalized,
clientelistic politics and economic stagnation—which, following the election of reformist
chief minister Nitish Kumar in 2005, experienced annual growth above 11 per cent and
a genuine improvement in the quality of government (Economist 25 Nov 2010; New
York Times 10 April 2010). While Kumar has garnered the greatest amount of media
attention, he is only the latest in the fast-growing list of state-level chief ministers (and
their political parties) that have adopted such a programmatic strategy. This process
actually began a decade earlier with the rise of Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and
the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh during the 1990s (Rudolph and
Rudolph 2001). Although the ‘good governance’ party model has yet to spread to all of
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India's states, the emergence of politically successful programmatic parties committed
to good governance represents a paradigm shift in India's state-level politics.
3.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties
India does not feature classic ‘programmatic parties’. However, it does feature a number
of political parties that, in different ways, have embraced aspects of a programmatic
platform or mobilization strategy. Congress, a cadre–programmatic party, adopts
programmatic policy platforms even though it rallies support through clientelistic
strategies, while ethnic–programmatic parties such as the BJP and BSP establish
linkages to voters by formulating stable ideological positions but their policies
disproportionately benefit some ethnic communities (a term that is here used as a
shorthand for religious, regional, linguistic and caste identities) over others.
Congress: the cadre–programmatic party
Kothari (1964) has characterized the two decades of Congress dominance that followed
independence in 1947 as representing the emergence of the 'Congress System', a term
intended to capture pluralistic governing style of Jawharlal Nehru, the immensely
popular prime minister and leader of the Congress Party. Though opposition parties
possessed few seats in the national or state legislatures, they played a large role in
political debates and often influenced policy (Guha 2007). Similarly, though Nehru
wielded immense personal control over the party, he often accommodated opposing
views within the party, and generally pursed a consensus-oriented centrist political
strategy. It was this approach that underpinned the emergence of the cadre–
programmatic political machine that the Congress Party epitomizes to this day.
Nehru and the Congress Party leadership advocated and implemented an economic
strategy of state-led development and industrialization based on a succession of ‘fiveyear plans’ (Chhibber and Kollman 2004). Yet this economic programme, the major
agenda of the Congress Party, played little role in the way the party connected to
voters—which was instead based primarily on a hierarchical network of patronage that
extended into India's districts (Weiner 1967). In the words of Mitra: ‘Soon after
independence, the Congress co-opted landed gentry, businessmen, peasant proprietors,
new industrialists and the rural middle class—socially and economically entrenched
groups in society—into its organization. This provided the party with a strong and ready
structure of support, with electoral 'link men' who controlled various 'vote banks',
serviced through patronage’ (2011: 306). Thus, the Congress Party was programmatic in
its policymaking but clientelistic in its electoral linkages.
The disjuncture remains. For example, the dramatic liberal economic reforms initiated
by the Congress Party that dismantled India's decades-old licensing and state-directed
economic system from 1991 onward never emerged as an election issue. In Varshney's
words: 'In a survey of mass political attitudes in India conducted in 1996, only 19 per
cent of the electorate reported any knowledge of the economic reforms that had been
implemented, even though the reforms had been in existence since 1991. In the
countryside, where more than 70 per cent of Indians then lived, only about 14 per cent
had heard of the reforms (compared with 32 per cent of voters in cities). Economic
reforms were a non-issue in the 1996 and 1998 parliamentary elections. In the 1999
elections, the biggest reformers either lost or did not campaign on pro-market
platforms' (2007: 102). Similar observations have been made about the disconnect
between elite economic policymaking and mass politics in India by other researchers
(see Kohli 2006).
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There is also a striking disconnect between the party’s programme and the way that it
organizes itself. This is reflected in the way that Congress handles the question of party
leadership, which since Nehru has been transferred dynastically, with minimal
recruitment of grassroots political talent. Shortly after Nehru's death power was
transferred to Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, who surrounded herself with
sycophants and de-institutionalized the Congress Party (Kohli 1991); then to Rajiv
Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's son, who served a short stint as prime minister but died early in
his political career; then within a few years to Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi's widow, who
was elected leader of the Congress Party in 1997; and most recently to Rahul Gandhi,
Sonia Gandhi's son, a Congress Party MP who is widely expected to replace his mother
as party leader in the very near future.
The Bharatiya Janata Party: an ethno–programmatic party
The BJP controlled only two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984. In the 1998 general
elections, the party earned a total of 178 seats, enough to form a coalition government
with a collection of regional allies. It is now viewed as a credible national alternative to
the Congress Party and has successfully formed national coalition governments in 1996
and 1998–2004. Its rapid political ascent has been associated with its ability to appeal to
Hindu voters in the Hindi-speaking northern belt of India. But its strong organizational
base and committed cadre of grassroots workers has enabled it to forge effective links
with voters beyond that constituency as well. Over time, the BJP has shed the religious
nationalism that brought it to power in favour of a more secular, nationalist image.
The BJP's origins can be traced to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu
social movement founded in 1925. An offshoot of its predecessor party, the Bharatiya
Jana Sangh, the BJP was founded in 1980 and until the late 1980s remained a relatively
minor force in national party politics. However, by providing a political face for the
controversial efforts of Hindu nationalists to demolish an Islamic mosque built allegedly
on top of an holy ancient Hindu site in the town of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, the party
was catapulted to national influence in the early 1990s (Jaffrelot 2007).
The BJP has been able to appeal to a number of different constituencies using a number
of different types of appeals. The party’s commitment to hindutva, Hindu nationalism,
and the adoption of policies that were popular among India's northern upper-caste
Hindu voters, such as ‘religious legislation’ in the shape of bans on the slaughter of cows
and religious conversion, has been central to its rise. More troubling still, in certain
states such as Gujarat BJP governments have either tacitly supported or turned a blind
eye to anti-Muslim riots and violence. Unlike the Congress Party, which has historically
been something of a 'catch-all', secular, centrist party, the BJP has traditionally drawn its
leadership and membership from a relatively specific constituency: upper-caste Hindus
in northern India (Basu 2012). Yet at the same time, the BJP has made direct ideological
and programmatic appeals to voters on the basis of a more assertive foreign policy,
fewer affirmative action benefits for minorities and disadvantaged groups and a
coherent national economic plan. Both in terms of the party’s platform and linkage to
voters, then, the BJP has displayed some of the characteristics of both a programmatic
and an ethnic party.
The same is true when it comes to the way that the BJP is internally organized and
formulates policy. As with Congress, the BJP is a hierarchically organized party with
power heavily concentrated in the hands of a few party leaders. But in contrast to
Congress, these leaders tend to be drawn from its core ethnic base. Moreover, unlike the
elite programmes of the Congress Party, the BJP's Hindu nationalist ideology serves not
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only as an organizing principle for the policy programmes devised by party elites but is
also ardently adhered to by the party's grassroots workers and is an important
component of how the party links to voters and recruits its leaders (Thachil 2011). For
example, the BJP leadership is comprised primarily of lifelong political activists, such as
LK Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first BJP prime minister, who have extensive
grassroots experience. Indeed, Basu (2012) describes the BJP as a 'cadre-based mass
party', linked to voters through a highly disciplined and ideological organization of party
workers and social organizers.
As it evolved into a national political contender, the BJP began to downplay its public
emphasis on religious sectionalism in favour of casting itself as a clean and nationalistic
alternative to the Congress Party. Significantly, each time the BJP has come to power it
has implemented policies that have emphasized its ability to lead on national issues.
India carried out major nuclear weapons tests in 1998 under the leadership of a BJP-led
coalition government and a BJP government took an assertive foreign policy stance visà-vis Pakistan and led India to victory in the Kargil War with Pakistan in 1999.
Furthermore, the BJP's stints in office have demonstrated that the BJP is a capable
policymaking organization; BJP-led governments have overseen the passage of
sophisticated economic policy reform measures, including the Fiscal Responsibility and
Budgetary Management Act, a landmark deficit reduction measure, and the Special
Economic Zones Act, a major deregulatory measure (World Bank 2005; Panagariya
2004). It is worth noting that, while the BJP continues to employ the rhetoric of
economic nationalism, in reality it supports the same liberal economic reforms
originally implemented by the Congress Party and embraces globalization, which party
leaders view as the contemporary route to greater international power and status
(Jaffrelot 2007; Basu 2011).
The BJP thus possesses stable programmatic commitments that form the basis for the
link between the party and voters, differentiate it from its principal rival, the Congress
Party, and define the policies the party implements once elected to office. Although it
may once have been an ethnic party, the BJP has moved away from solely stressing
ethnic/religious themes. In its discourse, however, and some of its policies, it continues
to pander to the preferences of Hindu voters, partly due to the fact that it continues to
maintain linkages with Hindu social movements such as the RSS. The BJP thus appears
to be best characterized as an ethnic–programmatic party.
The Bahujan Samaj Party
Regional and caste parties have also proliferated with the decline of Congress Party
hegemony. Though individually not as influential as either the BJP or Congress,
collectively these parties have played an important role during the 1990s and 2000s as
allies of the Congress Party and BJP in alternating coalition governments. Although
small, such parties have often been pivotal members of their coalitions and national
elections have been won and lost based on their performance (Palshikar 2012). A
prominent example is the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a quasi-regional low-caste party
that has experienced considerable political success. Based primarily in Uttar Pradesh,
India's largest state, the BSP experienced an impressive rise in electoral success during
the 1990s, earning 21 Lok Sabha seats in the 2009 general elections, up from just three
seats in the 1991 general elections.
The BSP was founded in 1984 by Kanshi Ram, a Dalit (the 'lowest' caste in the Hindu
caste system) caste social activist. Originally a party of Dalits, the BSP has fashioned
electoral success over time by expanding its scope, bringing together as an electoral bloc
a disparate collection of constituencies: Dalits, minorities, including Christians, Muslims,
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and the tribal population, as well as other arguably disadvantaged groups, such as the
'Other Backwards Castes' (OBCs). It has brought these different groups together under
the moniker of 'Bahujans', or 'the deprived majority', a little-used term it has adopted
and propagated. The party has fashioned itself as a party of the downtrodden and the
party that stands against the dominance of high-caste Hindus (Hasan 2002). Like the
BJP, which also emerged from a social movement, the BSP is notable for its extremely
strong grassroots party organization, which has helped to mobilize voters to the party’s
cause (Jaffrelot 1998).
The BSP party subscribes to a distinct and coherent programme of Bahujan
empowerment. A major pillar of the party's programme is 'reservations', or affirmative
action policies, for disadvantaged groups and greater government spending in
disadvantaged communities. When Mayawati, the immensely charismatic leader of the
BSP, became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1995, she directed government spending
and benefits toward Dalit villages, as promised: ‘Mayawati is popular […] because during
her tenure as CM a number of welfare measures for Dalits were undertaken […] the land
'pattas' which had not been allotted to Dalits during the emergency but not given, were
actually distributed among them; “pucca” roads linking the villages to the main road,
construction of houses, drinking water pumps and toilets in the SC sections of the
villages; pensions for old persons […] were some of the schemes implemented’ (Jaffrelot
2007a). Mayawati has also delivered less socially targeted goods, such as rural
electrification (Min 2010). But at the same time, she is notorious for her alleged
corruption, cronyism and strong-arm politics, which together with patron–client ties
form the basis of the way that the party creates links with voters in the absence of an
effective formal party organization and institutionalization.
Given the BSP’s sectional foundation and clientelistic structure it is tempting to dismiss
it as a non-programmatic party. However, in many ways constructing a support base
around ethnicity and caste in the Indian context is analogous to mobilizing on the basis
of class in the European context. This is because in India communal forms of identity
such as caste play an important role in structuring the life chances of an individual. Most
obviously, caste and socio-economic status are highly, though not perfectly, correlated.
As a result, mobilizing support on the basis of ‘the deprived majority’ does not simply
represent an attempt to capitalize upon ethnic politics. Rather, it reflects the attempt to
establish a more equal and just political and economic system, and therefore bears
comparison to the appeals of leftist parties in Europe to the working-class vote in order
to pursue widespread economic reform. Thus, while the BSP displays some
characteristics of a clientelistic and ethnic party, its broad appeal can also be said to
have a clear programmatic component. Indeed, Stokes (2007) has referred to electoral
linkages of this kind as ‘programmatic redistributive linkages’.
Moreover, like the BJP, the BSP has over time sought to widen the scope of its appeal to
voters. Initially a party of the Dalits, over time the BSP has expanded to include other
disadvantaged groups as noted above. It now describes itself as the party of 'Bahujans',
which does not correspond to any ethnic group in particular but to the disadvantaged
more generally. A favourite metaphor of BSP leaders analogizes India to a ballpoint pen,
where the tip of the pen represents the dominant castes, and remaining length
represents the downtrodden 85 per cent that the BSP seeks to represent (Jaffrelot 1998:
38). Such metaphors convey a political ideology which is divisive but which is also
national is scope and goes beyond mere ethnic appeals. This is well illustrated by the
party’s recent attempt to bring Brahmins, members of the highest Hindu caste, into its
fold by organizing party rallies for Brahmin voters (Tripathi 2007).
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The BSP is associated with a clear and cohesive ideology and programme of Bahujan
empowerment. It differentiates itself from rivals such as the Congress Party and the BJP
on that basis, uses these appeals to form links to voters, and implements pro-Bahujan
policies when elected to (thus far, state) office. So although the party has been criticized
for being polarizing and divisive—some commentators have termed Mayawati the 'antiObama' in reference to her allegedly divisive political style—and continues to display
characteristics of being an ethnic and clientelistic party, the BSP also advocates an
important programmatic position. As a result, the BSP represent a new type of ethnic–
programmatic political party that is threatening to displace the old Congress Party
model of cadre programmatic politics in India's national party system.
Table 6: Indian Party Profiles
Party Name
Party organization
Party Linkages
Party type
Congress Party
Strong elite party
organization. Weak
grassroots party
organization. High
policymaking capacity.
Programmatic and
clientelistic linkages
nationwide.
Cadre–
programmatic
Bharatiya
Janata Party
Strong elite party
organization. Strong
grassroots party
organization. High
policymaking capacity.
Ethnic and
programmatic linkages
nationwide.
Ethnic–
programmatic
Bahujan Samaj
Party
Mediocre elite party
organization.
Strong grassroots party
organization. Medium
policymaking capacity.
Ethnic, clientelistic and
programmatic linkages,
some national reach but
mainly in Uttar Pradesh.
Ethnic/clientelist
–programmatic
State-level politics: the rise of 'good governance' parties
While national politics only became competitive from the late 1980s onward, party
politics in India's states have been open for much longer. State politics has traditionally
been a highly clientelistic affair, with elections fought and won on the basis of patronage
rather than policy programmes (Wilkinson 2007). This is epitomized by India's
southern states, where parties of regional notables, such as the Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil
Nadu, compete in 'bidding wars' for the mass vote—making innovative offers of goods,
such as free electricity, free bicycles, cash, gold, alcohol and other items, in exchange for
votes. In reference to such practices, Chandra goes so far as to term India a 'patronage
democracy' (2004).
In this political and historical context, one of the most notable but under-studied recent
developments in Indian politics from the 1990s onward has been the rise of state-level
parties and chief ministers committed to programmes of 'good governance' and
economic development. These parties and chief ministers have been elected largely on
the basis of their programmatic appeals—though some forms of traditional politics have
invariably persisted. When in office they have implemented policies in line with their
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promises. Frequently, these policies have been successful, and the parties have been
returned to office with strong mandates.
This emerging paradigm can perhaps be traced to the victory of the Telugu Desam Party
(TDP) and the selection of Chandrababu Naidu as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in
1995. Naidu came to power with an electoral campaign based heavily on promises of
economic development and pro-growth policies. This electoral strategy was a genuine
innovation in state-level politics, particularly in the context of poor states in which
clientelism has tended to be particularly rampant. As Rudolph and Rudolph (2001) note,
Naidu swiftly became an ‘icon’ for liberal state-level economic reforms and economic
modernization in India. This was embodied in his decision, shortly after taking office, to
ask the international consulting firm McKinsey to craft an economic strategy document
for his government (Price 2010). Not only were Naidu’s reforms economically
successful, they were also immensely popular and resulted in him being returned to
power until 2004, despite the well-known anti-incumbency bias in Indian state elections
(Uppal 2009).
The 'Naidu model' of competing in elections on the basis of a programmatic platform
swiftly spread to other states in India, cutting across party and ideological lines. Unlikely
'converts' have included Jyoti Basu, the long-time communist chief minister (1977–
2000) of West Bengal who began to publicly advertise his desire to attract private
investment to the state, and Mayawati of the BSP, who incorporated the language of
public service delivery into her public speeches and, according to several studies,
actually delivered on this count (Min 2010). Additionally, a number of state chief
ministers and parties have emerged that have made good governance and economic
development the signature feature of their political campaigns. These include Narendra
Modi, the BJP politician who has become the longest-serving chief minister in Gujarat's
history by effectively championing economic modernization and development. Another
leader in this mould is Nitish Kumar, the Janata Dal (United) (JDU) politician who came
to power in Bihar's 2005 election on the back of a good governance agenda.
While many of these parties maintain ethnic and clientelistic ties with voters, they have
risen to power as a result of their ability to put together and communicate a civic
programmatic agenda that involves the provision of a number of public goods. In order
to fully appreciate the significance of this increase in programmaticity at the state level
it is worth dwelling on the case of Bihar. Prior to Kumar's tenure, Bihar had been
synonymous in the Indian imagination with clientelistic politics, economic stagnation,
crime, caste conflict, widespread poverty and, above all, Lalu Prasad, the famously
corrupt Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief minister who ruled the state from 1990–2005.
It is telling that for the final few years Prasad was forced to rule through his wife, who
became the nominal chief minister, after he was forced to resign during a corruption
scandal. For these reasons, among others, Bihar led the so-called BIMARU (Bihar,
Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) list of India's 'sick' states (bimaru means
'sick' in Hindi).
Yet despite the patronage resources at Prasad’s disposal, Kumar proved able to unseat
the RJD by drawing together an uneasy alliance of opposition forces around a largely
programmatic campaign. At his inauguration, Kumar restated his intention to pursue a
good governance agenda, to improve security, to improve infrastructure, and to attract
private investment to the state (The Hindu, Nov 25, 2005). The impact of Kumar's
reforms was quick and tangible. In the four years leading up to 2009, the state's GDP
grew annually at 10.5 per cent, exceeding the national average (The Economist, Jan 10,
2010). Crime plummeted, school enrolment rose, investment increased rapidly, and
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infrastructure improved dramatically, all of which enabled Kumar to retain power with
a landslide election victory in 2010.
'Good governance' parties and chief ministers represent a nascent programmatic
revolution in India's state-level politics. Although many fail to fully include grassroots
activists within the party organization, and so are similar in some ways to the cadre–
programmatic model of the Congress Party, in terms of linkage and policy they are
clearly programmatic. Instead of buying votes with patronage, they win support largely
on the basis of economic policy, typically advocate civic policies that improve conditions
for a range of groups, and implement the policies they campaign on when they gain
office.
The programmatic development of the party system
Growing programmaticity at the party level does not always translate into fully
programmatic party systems, as the case of Zambia demonstrates. Where India is
concerned, one needs to first differentiate the national party system from the myriad of
state-level party systems, and then to appreciate that multiple processes are playing out
at each level.
At the national party level, there have been contradictory trends. On the one hand, the
rise of ethnic–programmatic parties has contributed to the emergence of ‘vote bank’
politics, in which parties adopt programmes and mobilization strategies oriented
around existing ethnic and territorial cleavages and grievances. In this sense, increasing
political competition has facilitated the representation of identity politics within the
party system, as it has in much of Africa, and actually resulted in a decline in the level of
party system programmaticity because the focus of inter-party competition, and of
national policy debate, shifted toward the competing claims of rival groups.
However, once established as national political players, ethnic–programmatic parties
have significantly moderated their emphasis on identity politics in favour of widening
their appeal and casting themselves as legitimate national political contenders. Over the
past decade, the ‘ethnic’ component of ethnic–programmatic parties has become less
prominent. As a result, competition between parties and the main issues debated
around election time have begun to move away from ‘ethnic’ concerns and increasingly
focus on programmatic differences. Although India is only at the very beginning of this
process and the future remains uncertain, at the national level the party system appears
to be undergoing a process of programmatic development.
At the state level, the successful programmatic appeal of a small number of parties has
proved successful, and so provided incentives for other actors to adopt the model. In
states that have witnessed the rise of successful good governance parties, rival groups
have begun to adopt similar strategies in response. In these cases, we see clear evidence
of programmatic development within state-level party systems, with effects trickling
down to the village level. In Rajasthan, for example, Krishna (2007: 147) reports a local
district Congress politician telling him: 'The criterion for voting was earlier caste, now it
is development. Development work done in a village has the most effect on voting.'
Krishna (2007: 147) reports a similar statement by a BJP politician: 'Those individuals
are gaining most influence in villages who are able to get villagers' day-to-day work
done in government offices.' While each state is characterized by a unique party system,
and many have yet to experience the rise of credible programmatic parties, the
discourse of 'good governance' has spread across India. Even political leaders with little
desire to pursue programmatic policies must rhetorically commit themselves to
providing sound economic governance. Thus even where the linkage between parties
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and voters remains unprogrammatic, political competition between parties is
increasingly revolving around programmatic appeals.
3.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics
Why has there been a transformation in the level of programmaticity within parties and
party systems at both the national and local level? This section first examines possible
causes of the rise of ethnic–programmatic parties at the national level, highlighting the
effects of the institutional decay of the Congress Party, economic liberalization and the
comparative advantage of new entrants in adopting programmatic strategies oriented
around existing social cleavages. Then it discusses the role of political competition in
inducing ethnic–programmatic parties to reduce their emphasis on ethnicity-based
appeals. Finally, it discusses possible explanations for the emergence of programmatic
'good governance' parties at the state level, highlighting the role of economic
liberalization and decentralization, leadership and agency, and demonstration effects.
Explaining Variation in Programmaticity in National Party Politics
The rise of ethnic–programmatic political parties such as the BJP, the BSP and a range of
regional parties occurred at the expense of the Congress Party, which experienced a
sustained loss of seats in the legislature during the early 1990s. Perhaps the most
significant factor was the organizational decay of the Congress Party under Indira
Gandhi. Facing internal and external opposition to her rule, during the 1970s Indira
Gandhi severely weakened the Congress Party's internal institutions and concentrated
power in her own hands. This strategy included dismantling nearly all of the Congress
Party's internal democratic organs and replacing key office-holders at all levels within
the party with loyalists (Kochanek 2002). While Gandhi was able to garner personal
support based on her charismatic appeal, the distribution of patronage, and populist
rhetoric, the process of de-institutionalization weakened the Congress Party in the long
run because it left it without the well-developed local party organization needed to
mobilize sustained support. Kohli (1991) notes that districts once characterized by wellorganized local Congress Party associations (according to an earlier study by Weiner in
1967) featured barely any organized Congress Party presence just two decades later.
The impact of widespread organizational decay became apparent in the late 1980s,
when mounting challenges to Congress across India resulted in a so-called ‘crisis of
governability’ (Kohli 1991).
Two other factors also played a major role in the emergence of an open competitive
party system that was more conducive to programmatic development. First, economic
liberalization and the decentralization of economic policymaking power weakened the
Congress Party's control over central resources, undermining its purely distributive
appeal to voters and local political bosses. A balance of payments economic crisis in
1991 compelled Congress Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to adopt, as part of a financing
agreement with the International Monetary Fund, wide-ranging economic liberalization
and decentralization reforms. This had an impact at both the national and state level.
Most notably, the ‘License Raj’ system of permits was dismantled and states were given
greater control over industrial policy. Chhibber and Kollman (1998; 2004) argue—in an
adaptation of the logic of Duverger's Law (Palfrey 1989)—that this decentralization
contributed to the fragmentation of the national political party system by reducing the
incentives of regional voters and politicians to associate with the party in control of
resources at the centre. Before 1991, the Congress-dominated central government could
micromanage public projects, deciding where they would be located and where private
investment would be approved. However, after the 1991 reforms this source of political
73
leverage was significantly reduced, particularly with regard to the control of private
investment. As a result, it became less costly for voters and politicians in India's states to
support alternative parties at the national and state level.
Second, as the Congress Party's popularity began to fade at the turn of the 1990s,
opposition parties discovered that they could successfully lure voters away with
ethnicity-based programmatic appeals, something that the Congress Party's cadre
programmatic model was poorly placed to do. These conditions created an opening for
the rise of ethnic–programmatic parties. The reason that these new parties took on a
programmatic form instead of just a clientelistic one was that programmatic appeals,
with an ethnic focus, represent the comparative advantage of new entrants—which still
could not compete with the Congress Party in terms of access to patronage, even after
the reforms of the early 1990s. Mobilizing voters on the basis of programmatic linkages
meant that new parties did not have to compete with Congress in terms of the
distribution of patronage. By competing on the basis of a combination of identity and
policy, the new entrants could carve out a space for themselves within the political
system without first needing to access vast political funds.
In her study of 'ethnic parties' in India, Chandra (2004) argues that as an umbrella-type
organization the Congress Party was ill positioned to compete ideologically with
specialized parties dedicated to particular social cleavages and programmatic causes.
She argues, for example, that while the Congress Party had traditionally courted
scheduled caste voters in Uttar Pradesh, as a party representing many constituencies
and interests it was unable to make strong commitments to this group openly (for fear
of alienating other constituencies). She notes that this severely constrained Congress
Party politicians during elections: ‘Although in [the prominent Uttar Pradesh Congress
Party leader's] speech she twice raised grievances associated with Scheduled Castes,
such as untouchability, she raised these issues as a national leader concerned with the
problems of one of the many groups that made up her constituency, rather than as a
champion of the Scheduled Castes. Significantly, even in everyday conversations about
Scheduled Castes, Kumar prefers to use the term 'they' rather than we' (Chandra 2004:
151).
By contrast, BSP leaders such as Mayawati, herself a Dalit, have had few qualms
aggressively championing the cause of the Scheduled Castes. This flexibility has enabled
the BSP to better target and encroach upon electoral constituencies traditionally held by
the Congress Party and to overcome BSP's initial relative disadvantage in terms of
access to patronage. The BSP received particularly strong financial and political support
from middle- and upper-class members of the scheduled castes—a growing social
contingent—who were no longer content with the nominal representation provided by
the Congress Party and saw the BSP as a political tool to obtain social respect and
dignity (Chandra 2000).
Similarly, as a party that seeks to represent both Muslim and Hindu voters the Congress
Party has been committed to an official policy of secularism since independence. This
rendered the party ill equipped to compete ideologically against the BJP’s hindutva
platform. At the same time, the organizational weakness of the Congress Party made it
vulnerable to challenges from parties capable of building an extensive grassroots
organization and volunteer base, which the BJP has been able to do through its historical
links with Hindu social movements and volunteer organizations such as the RSS.
Thachil's (2011) account of this process is particularly striking because it documents the
effectiveness of the BJP grassroots organization in winning over even poorer voters,
large numbers of whom have voted for the BJP in multiple states and elections. Poor
voters are thought to be an unlikely pro-BJP constituency given the party's traditional
74
popularity among upper-caste Hindu voters. But by embedding themselves within local
communities and establishing a reputation for pro-poor services and activism, Thachil
argues, BJP social organizers have successfully attracted even poor voters to the party.
By comparison, the limited grassroots linkages of the Congress Party contributed to the
once-ruling party’s inability to check the rise of new rivals.
This explanation of the breakdown of Congress Party hegemony raises the question of
why the BJP and BSP reduced their focus on ethnicity-based appeals, moving away from
the very strategy that first elevated them to political prominence. This is best explained
as the product of intense political party competition in a diverse democracy. Both the
BJP and the BSP rose to prominence during the early 1990s on the basis of support from
relatively narrow ethnic constituencies: in the case of the BJP, upper-caste Hindus in
northern India; in the case of the BSP, Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. Although these areas
represented stable ‘vote banks’ they are national minorities and so are insufficient
sources of support for parties seeking national office. For example, Dalits only make up
17 per cent of the overall Indian electorate (Varshney 2000). Moreover, in an era of
coalition government in which any party must attract allies in order to form a national
government, parties could risk alienating all of their potential partners and so must
moderate some of their appeals (Varshney 2000).
As a result, the BJP and the BSP have sought to rebrand themselves as parties with a
wider appeal. Interestingly, this process has occurred at the national level and also
within some states. At the national level, BJP leaders have sought to move beyond
upper-caste Hindu voters in Northern India to attract voters in southern and eastern
India. As religion is not as important a social cleavage in these areas, this has required
the BJP to focus on other more programmatic issues. Similarly, in order to attract lowercaste voters, who make up much of the Indian electorate, the BJP has been forced to
advocate policies that focus on issues such as providing more effective government
services. At the state level, BJP governments have stopped tolerating or tacitly
encouraging violence against the Muslim minority in states where intense political
competition compels the government to either seek the Muslim vote or to make
alliances with parties that rely on the Muslim vote (Wilkinson 2004). Thus, political
competition, in combination with India's social and geographical diversity, has
contributed over time to the emergence of parties with a more inclusive and
programmatic appeal.
Explaining variation in programmaticity in party politics at the state level
In addition to the developments discussed above, a second set of processes has
facilitated programmatic development at the state level. Again, economic liberalization
and the devolution of authority over economic policy promoted 'good governance'
programmatic parties because it afforded state-level chief ministers the policymaking
discretion to have a tangible impact on state economic performance with state-level
policy. As a result, chief ministers have been able to campaign credibly on the issue of
development. Moreover, the inter-state competition for private investment unleashed
by liberalization has magnified the potential rewards for pursuing pro-business policies.
Finally, demonstration effects played a major role in the spread of programmatic
approaches, with politicians, parties and voters in states across India learning from the
economic and political success of the 'Naidu model'.
Economic liberalization and decentralization transformed the federal dynamics of
India's economy. Prior to 1991, inter-state competition for investment was primarily a
political competition for central transfers—a game in which the federal government was
the decisive player. After 1991, in the words of Rudolph and Rudolph (2001: 1541),
75
‘state chief ministers became the marquee players in India's federal market economy.’ In
1996, a group of state chief ministers even held a conference to discuss their new-found
federal autonomy, adopting for the meeting the triumphant slogan ‘federalism without a
centre’ (Saez 2002: 12). This development has had major implications for party politics.
When state economic fortunes depended largely on transfers and project approvals
from the centre, state chief ministers and political parties faced little pressure or
incentives to campaign on the issue of development or to implement innovative policies
within their states. This is reflected in the fact that before 1991 state-level economic
policies were relatively uniform (Howes et al. 2003). After 1991, however, with the
devolution of industrial policymaking authority to the states, state chief ministers
became responsible for a much greater share of their own states' development (Sinha
2005). Indian states could now borrow directly from institutional lenders as well as the
private sector. More importantly, with the deregulation of private investment, Indian
state economies could now access significant foreign and domestic direct private
investment.
For the first time, good governance made sense as an election issue. Chandrababu Naidu
was one of the first to demonstrate that there were major potential gains, both economic
and political, to be had by adopting an aggressive good governance programme and proinvestment industrial policy. Naidu, a political entrepreneur of the highest order,
worked tirelessly to attract private investment to Andhra Pradesh: ‘from Dallas to
Davos, he promoted his ambitious plans to transform Andhra Pradesh from a middle
rank into a top rank state’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 1542). He did this by taking
advantage of the new economic context. For example, the Naidu government was the
first state government in India to receive a direct sub-national loan from the World
Bank, which provided over $1 billion of funding for power sector reform and industrial
development (Sinha 2005: 87). This boost to government finances, which came shortly
in advance of state elections in 1999, played a significant role in Naidu's continued
electoral success.
There is little evidence to suggest that Andhra Pradesh possesses any unique structural
features which led to the emergence of this form of programmatic party politics. Rather,
scholars attribute this innovation largely to Naidu’s individual skill and drive: ‘In
contrast to [his predecessor's] penchant for slogans and irrepressible urge to enthral
audiences, Naidu chose to give emphatic accent on the developmental agenda and
navigate his party in a disciplined and workmanlike manner’ (Harshe and Srinivas
1999). The resulting boom in private investment, growth in jobs and rapid economic
development proved to be a remarkable electoral elixir, dampening criticism from
groups that lost political and economic influence under his administration, such as
farmers (Price 2010).
The precedent that it was possible to win elections on the basis of innovation and prodevelopment economic policy transformed the political landscape. Quickly, policy
variation and innovation across states emerged as a result of the attempts by various
leaders to follow in Naidu’s footsteps: ‘The situation by the end of the nineties was quite
different [to the situation before]. Individual states took a lead in introducing reforms in
different areas’ (Howes et al. 2003: 4). Rudolph and Rudolph (2001) term this change in
the style of state-level politics the ‘iconization’ of Chandrababu Naidu. Price (2010)
describes it as a shift in rhetorical focus from poverty to development, with ‘staples of
populist politics, including subsidies of food, electricity, fertilizer, seed, etc.’ losing
ground to concerns about growth and investment.
The media in India, as well as NGOs, many of which receive funding from international
donors, have played an important role in propagating the discourse of good governance
76
by reporting regularly on issues of political corruption (Wilkinson 2007). But the interstate spread of programmaticity was also a simple case of demonstration effects
operating within a federal system. Besley and Case (1995) suggest a model of political
‘yardstick competition’ in which rational voters utilize the experiences of nearby
jurisdictions to judge their own political incumbents. This logic applies just as much to
programmatic party politics as other forms of evaluation. Moreover, Howes et al support
the idea that state-level politicians in India learn about policies from other state-level
politicians: ‘First, we would point to a strong contagion effect at work […] Movement
between [the states] is fluid, news spreads and innovations seen to be successful in one
state quickly becomes candidates for adoption in others, often with the intermediation
of the central government, though sometimes by direct transfusion, as it were’ (2003: 4).
Of course, a further factor that has facilitated the diffusion of this model is the role of
national political parties themselves. If a leader from a given party successfully
implements a new model in one part of the country, the party is likely to encourage
other leaders to pursue a similar approach in other parts of the country. BJP state
governments and chief ministers, such as Narendra Modi of Gujarat and Ashok Gehlot of
Rajasthan, have developed notable reputations for good governance in multiple states,
and have clearly been an example for other BJP candidates.
Even if such processes of diffusion failed to operate, market forces may well have played
a crucial role in propagating the 'Naidu model' in any case. States that have cultivated a
business-friendly image have thrived economically since 1991, while those that have
failed to do so have stagnated. Sinha (2005: 19) observes, for example, that ‘Gujarat
attracted about 10.6 times as much per capita private investment as West Bengal for the
period 1991–2003.’ Similar disparities exist across other pairs of states. Consistent with
theories of 'market-preserving federalism' (Weingast 1995), economic competition has
rewarded states that have publicly pursued business-friendly policies and sanctioned
those that have failed to do so. Put another way, states that do not adopt good
governance reforms are likely to go out of business, just like a failing company that fails
to embrace innovation. Observes Wilkinson (2007: 133): 'State governments, in part to
gain access to World Bank loans and in part to show investors and voters they are doing
something about corruption, have also begun to pass freedom of information laws and
introduce computerization of records that will, over time, provide fewer opportunities
for politicians to extract rents'. Thus, the sub-national competition for private
investment in post-liberalization India has induced parties to cultivate reputations for
good governance.
Yet there is also a limit to the impact of structural and learning factors, for despite
liberalization in 1991 and the success of the Naidu model, many states have not yet seen
the emergence of good governance parties, while programmatic parties have emerged in
surprising places, such as Bihar. Wilkinson (2007), for example, writing just a few years
back, expressed doubt about the possibility of reform of the clientelistic political
environment in Bihar: 'In some cases, such as Bihar, where levels of economic growth
are very low or negative and the middle-class out-migration is high, it is hard to see any
real push for reform succeeding except in the very long term, absent an intervention
from the central government' (2007: 138). Despite all of the mentioned structural
impediments, Nitish Kumar has been able to reform Bihar, largely due to his personal
political skill. This highlights the continued significance of political agency. The presence
of committed political entrepreneurs, such as Nitish Kumar, Narendra Modi and
Chandrababu Naidu, appears to be a crucial and unpredictable ingredient in the
emergence of programmatic party politics.
77
3.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics
Programmatic development has had an impact on policymaking at both the national and
state levels. At the national level, governments have been more likely to produce
efficacious public policies and govern effectively, despite an increasingly fragmented
party system and the residue of identity-based parties. This is reflected in the economic
reforms that have been endorsed by both the BJP and Congress, and have led to two
decades of solid GDP growth. Moreover, the emergence of parties with a greater policy
focus appears to have helped to prevent the political system from becoming mired in
deadlock: a real concern given the continual need for coalition governments.
In the current context, parties must work hard to overcome the disconnect between
mass politics and elite policymaking that characterized the era of Congress Party
hegemony, because failure to reflect the public mood can undermine a party’s electoral
chances. Consider the BJP's disastrous 'India Shining' campaign during the 2004 general
elections, which was viewed as callously over-optimistic in light of the poverty that the
majority of Indians endure and contributed to a resounding electoral defeat. The focus
of policy debates has also changed, and they are now more likely to feature discussion of
what can be done to help some of the worst off. 'Reservations', or affirmative action
policies, have become a politicized and polarizing issue, with parties such as the BSP
pushing for quotas in higher education and government for disadvantaged groups and
with the BJP opposing such measures. Indeed, the new-found pressure to earn votes
with economic policies was an important factor behind the decision of a Congress Partyled government to implement the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in 2005, a
major policy initiative which guaranteed every rural household in India one hundred
days of paid government work per year. Thus, greater programmatic competition has
had a direct impact on the standard of living of ordinary Indians.
The rise of parties such as the BJP and BSP has effectively reduced the historic gap
between elite policymaking and mass politics, but the effect of greater programmatic
competition has not all been positive. Critics argue that as a result of the growing
influence of regional political parties and the increasing focus of political parties on
electoral politics, the quality of legislative policymaking in India has declined. Certainly,
legislative attendance and the amount of time spent drafting and debating bills has
steadily fallen. This has many roots. Some critics argue that it is a product of the fact that
Indian MPs increasingly come from less distinguished backgrounds, with experience
mainly in the rough and tough world of local politics. It is striking that a large
percentage of Indian MPs today have criminal records (Kapur and Mehta 2006).
However, more research needs to be conducted in this area, as others argue that much
of the legislative work in parliament has simply shifted to committees. Moreover, there
are clear benefits to the changing composition of the legislature, which is now more
representative of the Indian population in terms of caste and class than ever before
(Shankar and Rodrigues 2011).
At the state level, meanwhile, programmatic parties have had mostly positive effects on
policy outcomes. Both Bihar and Gujarat, a low- and high-income state, respectively,
have experienced dramatic gains in economic productivity following the election of
programmatic parties. State GDP visibly took off in Gujarat shortly following the election
of Narendra Modi and the BJP in 2001 and in Bihar shortly following the election of
Nitish Kumar and the JDU in 2005. At the same time, state institutions have been
tremendously strengthened. Both Kumar and Modi are credited with cracking down on
corruption and overhauling inefficient bureaucracies. In Bihar, Kumar has strengthened
the police, the courts and the schools considerably, and has also stepped up spending on
78
infrastructure, most notably the road system (Chand 2010). For his part, Modi has been
noted for creating an extremely transparent, efficient and business- and investorfriendly bureaucracy (Sinha 2005).
However, there are also variations between states, which reflect the disposition of the
individuals and parties in power. Kumar's most remarkable achievement is perhaps the
restoration of law and order to Bihar, previously one of India's most violent and crimeridden states (Economist 2010a). Modi, by contrast, has a less positive record. A
prominent BJP leader, he has been accused of knowingly failing to stop anti-Muslim riots
in Gujarat in 2002 which resulted in the death of over 1,000 Muslims (Hindu 2011).
Here the tension between the different components of the BJP’s platform is laid bare—
although, as noted above, the party has moved away from this sort of behaviour as it has
consolidated as an ethnic–programmatic party.
3.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Indian Case
India offers several 'portable' lessons with regard to programmatic party politics.
First, party programmaticity is a complicated quality and can emerge through a number
of different processes. The evolution of the BJP from an ethnic party to an ethnic–
programmatic party, for instance, involved a period in which the party’s Hindu
nationalist programme led to violence against Muslims. The BJP represents a coherent
and stable set of ideological policies, but many of these are not normatively desirable.
Even if the BJP continues to abandon the more extreme aspects of its position and
consolidate as an ethnic–programmatic party, its linkages to voters and policies are
likely to be less conducive to national unity and political stability than that of a civic–
programmatic party. It is therefore vital that democracy promotion actors take a critical
attitude with regard to what forms of programmaticity they seek to promote.
Political competition in a diverse democracy can induce political parties to moderate
their emphasis on ethnic cleavages. Both the BJP and the BSP have significantly
moderated their identity politics over time in order to widen the scope of their electoral
appeal in a competitive political environment. The reduction of barriers to national
political competition is therefore important to the long-term promotion of
programmaticity. This means that the promotion of campaign finance reform, the
modernization of electoral technology, the deployment of election observers, and other
instruments to induce or ensure robust political competition are important strategies
that donors and others can use to drive programmatic development.
Economic reforms can have a major impact upon programmaticity by altering the
resources and opportunity sets of political parties and political party leaders. In the
Indian case, economic liberalization and decentralization contributed to the decline of
clientelistic parties and the emergence of new parties in a programmatic mould. Given
this, it is important to keep in mind the relationship between economic and political
reform. Most obviously, anti-corruption campaigns and programmes to promote fiscal
accountability and transparency should be supported because they are likely to
indirectly promote programmatic development in the long run.
At the same time, the devolution of key policymaking responsibilities to the sub-national
level may encourage sub-national politicians and parties to adopt programmatic
strategies and to compete to demonstrate their good governance credentials. By
supporting programmes of devolution—where conditions on the ground render them
79
feasible—international actors such as IDEA can help to create the conditions under
which parties and leaders have an incentive to adopt programmatic positions.
Demonstration effects can be crucial in the spread of programmatic party politics. The
success of Chandrababu Naidu and the TDP established a precedent that led to the
adoption of programmatic strategies in a number of other states, notably Bihar and
Gujarat. The rapid spread of ‘good governance’ models demonstrates the great
importance of education, communication and training.
Organizing events in which such lessons can be more easily communicated to aspiring
political leaders is therefore a very feasible way in which the democracy promotion
community can advance the position of programmatic parties. This may be implemented
though the facilitation of dialogue between parties across states, the facilitation of
dialogue between parties and civil society organizations, and the provision of policy
advice and consulting services.
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4 Ukraine
4.1 Introduction
Ukraine provides an example of an Eastern European country that started the postcommunist transition in the early 1990s with no pre-existing party system. The process
of emergence and consolidation of a party system over the course of the last two
decades has been characterized by many problems and setbacks. For most of this
period, parties remained rather weak both in terms of institutionalization and
programmatic development. Only in the last five years has the majority of political
parties and the party system in general become more institutionalized and made some
gains in terms of programmaticity.
The programmatic profiles of Ukrainian parties have sharpened considerably over the
second half of the 2000s. Parties’ ideological commitments started to play a more
prominent role in national politics. Such commitments increasingly constitute the basis
for the link between parties and their voters and play a more prominent role in
structuring party competition. The country’s policymaking process has also become
more influenced by parties’ ideological commitments. Gains in programmaticity in the
case of Ukraine are closely linked with the process of party system institutionalization.
Individual political entrepreneurs, executive government bureaucracy, sectional and
regional interests dominated national politics in the 1990s. Parties, rather than these
other types of political actors, started to occupy the centre stage of national politics only
in the 2000s. Party system institutionalization provided strong incentives for parties to
invest in the development of their programmatic capacities.
These gains in programmaticity, however, are not necessarily irreversible. There are
some signs that the programmatic development of the Ukrainian party system might be
impeded by the very recent constitutional and political changes that weaken the role
that party system plays in the country’s politics. Thus, the Ukrainian case provides a
good example of a non-linear pattern of programmatic development in a lower-middle
income country that moves back and forth on its path towards democratic
consolidation.
This study offers an analysis of the evolution of programmaticity and pays special
attention to causal factors influencing the development of programmatic politics. While
recognizing that the programmatic outcomes observed in the Ukrainian case are a
product of many types of influences, this case study highlights especially the impact of
political institutions on the programmatic development of political parties in Ukraine.
Ukraine has experienced a considerable number of major institutional reforms over the
course of its twenty years of independence and it is argued here that these reforms have
had a major impact on party behaviour. Process tracing over time is a key method
employed here to discern the causal effects of changes in the institutional framework.
Institutions constitute a particularly interesting subject in the context of research on
programmatic politics due to the fact that policymakers usually have a higher degree of
control over institutional design rather than over structural conditions or international
influences. Constitutional reforms of executive–legislative relations, electoral system
changes, and revisions of party finance rules have all been highly consequential in the
Ukrainian case. Institutional reforms debated and implemented in Ukraine are on the
policy agenda of many societies that undergo major political transitions and face
increasing pressures to democratize public life. The lessons from the multiple Ukrainian
experiments with institutional design should thus be of interest to a broad audience of
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national policymakers—including those that debate semi-presidential constitutional
design and electoral system changes in various parts of the world—and to international
institutions supporting countries’ pursuit of paths to more programmatically oriented
politics.
4.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Ukraine
After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Ukraine faced the challenge of building a party
system from scratch. As with many other Soviet bloc countries, independent Ukraine
inherited a well-institutionalized, albeit seriously discredited, communist successor
party, and a host of small and relatively weak organizations formed primarily from the
pieces of an oppositional umbrella political movement established in the last years of
the Soviet period. The democratic opening of the early 1990s and the lax party
registration rules led to a rapid proliferation of political parties. The majority of these
organizations were ideologically amorphous, lacked the capacity to formulate public
policy proposals and had a very limited organizational presence in the centre and the
regions. New party projects were usually organized around individual political
entrepreneurs seeking to enhance their personal standing or the public profile of small
groups of political activists. Most of them lacked the resources to build party
organizations and to participate in the electoral process (Wilson and Birch 1993).
The marginal role that political parties played in the early period of Ukrainian
independence can be tellingly illustrated by the weak presence of parties in the
policymaking process. None of the three main national policymaking institutions—
presidency, parliament and cabinet—was controlled by the parties. In each of the first
three presidential elections (1991, 1994 and 1999), the successful contender for the
presidency—which became a powerful executive office—had no party affiliation and
relied on a broad heterogeneous coalition of partisan and non-partisan actors. The first
post-communist legislature, whose tenure extended from 1994 until 1998, had 243 nonpartisan deputies out of a total of 450. The second legislature (1998–2002) had 143
independents. The independents were usually representatives of regional elites:
regional government officials, directors of big industrial or agricultural enterprises, and
heads of local councils. They relied on their local networks to win elections in singlemember districts, which constituted the basis of Ukraine’s electoral system in the 1990s
(Birch, 2000). Ukrainian cabinets formed during the same period consisted of
technocrats, presidential loyalists and representatives of regional and sectional
interests. Politics in general during this period was dominated by president-controlled
executive government bureaucracies and regional/sectional interests.
Table 7 below provides data on the electoral performance of Ukraine´s main political
parties. Ukraine had five rounds of parliamentary elections—these elections were based
on a single-member system in 1994, a mixed system in 1998 and 2002, and a full PR
system in 2006 and 2007. ‘A main party is defined as one that successfully competed in
more than one cycle of parliamentary elections and have been represented in the
parliament of at least two convocations [parliamentary terms]’ (Meleshevych 2010).
Only three parties out of 15 that won one or more seats in the 1994 parliamentary
elections met this criterion. These three parties—the Communist Party of Ukraine, the
Socialist Party of Ukraine, and Rukh—are examples of early programmatic parties in
Ukrainian political history. Each of them has stable and well-structured ideological
commitments—the first two are parties of the traditional left and the last one is a rightoriented party—and relied on these commitments to build linkages to the voters and to
participate in the electoral process. Each of the parties took part in every round of
electoral competition—Rukh was a member of the electoral coalition of Our Ukraine in
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the last three parliamentary elections and enjoyed a varying degree of electoral success
throughout the analyzed period. The combined result of these parties in the 1994
elections—less than 25 per cent of parliamentary seats—highlights the limited influence
of these parties in the country’s political system at the start of the post-communist
transition.
Table 7: Selected Results of Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine (%)
1994
SMD
19982
14.85
24.65
19.98
3.66
5.39
Rukh
5.96
9.40
—
—
—
Socialist Party of Ukraine2
3.80
8.56
6.87
5.69
2.86
People’s Democratic Party
—
5.01
—
0.49
0.34
4
6.70
—
—
Party
Communist Party of Ukraine
Social Democratic Party of Ukraine
20021 2006
PR results only
2007
Electoral Coalition For United Ukraine
—
—
11.77
—
—
Electoral Coalition Our Ukraine
—
—
23.57
13.95
14.15
Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc
—
—
7.26
22.29
30.71
Party of Regions
—
—
—
32.14
34.37
Lytvyn Bloc
—
—
—
2.44
3.96
SMD = single-member district; PR = proportional representation.
1 Mixed electoral formula: 50 per cent PR and 50 per cent SMD.
2 The Electoral Coalition of SPU and SelPU in 1998.
Source: Meleshevych (2010).
Political parties started to play a much greater role in the Ukrainian political system
only in the late 1990s. Party influence grew, first of all, in the parliament, where parties
started to successfully challenge various other forms of legislative organization such as
ad-hoc parliamentary groupings based on regional or sectional interests. Parties that
gained prominence during this period tended to claim ‘centrist’ programmatic
orientations and exhibited ideological profiles that were less coherent than the profiles
of parties on the political left and right (Protsyk and Wilson 2003; Meleshevych 2010).
They relied primarily on clientelistic strategies to build linkages to the electorate.
Generating the resources required to sustain these practices, which were based on a
direct material exchange with voters, depended on these parties’ abilities to secure
access to the dominant executive office in the Ukrainian political system, the presidency.
President Kuchma, who served in office for two terms between 1994 and 2004, presided
over the construction of a political system dominated by non-ideological parties.
Examples of such centrist parties and blocs, either founded or supported by the
presidential office, include the People’s Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party of
Ukraine, and the Electoral Coalition for United Ukraine. As Table 7 indicates, the
People’s Democratic Party received only five per cent of votes in the PR segment of the
1998 elections. The party’s parliamentary group, however, included many more
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members than this percentage suggests due to a large number of independent deputies
elected in the SMD districts who chose to join the pro-presidential faction after the
elections. The Electoral Coalition for United Ukraine—the main pro-presidential
electoral block in the 2002 elections—included five parties with centrist ideological
profiles and strong ties to various geographic regions of Ukraine. The results in Table 7
undercount the number of non-ideological centrist party projects that were represented
in the Ukrainian parliament in the late 1990s and early 2000s; some of these projects
were successful only during one electoral cycle and thus do not meet the criteria for
inclusion in Table 7. Overall, Ukraine experienced a high level of party fragmentation in
this period. One recent study finds in the Ukraine that the effective number of electoral
contestants in 1998 was 10.75, in 2002 was 7.46, in 2006 was 5.65, and in 2007 was
4.22 (Meleshevych 2010).
Ukraine’s party system was reformatted in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential
elections, which due to electoral fraud resulted in mass protest events known as the
Orange Revolution, and led to major constitutional reforms (D'Anieri, 2007; Wilson,
2006). Party fragmentation decreased considerably and many non-ideological centrist
parties disappeared from the centre stage of Ukrainian politics after the 2006
parliamentary elections. While old ideologically oriented parties on the left and the right
continued to be represented in the parliament during this period, their electoral
supported dwindled considerably in comparison to the late 1990s. Parties that came to
dominate Ukraine’s politics were relatively new political organizations. As Table 7
shows, the lion’s share of parliamentary seats in the post-2006 period was distributed
among the three political organizations: the Party of Regions, the Yulia Tymoshenko
Bloc and the Electoral Coalition Our Ukraine. A mixture of ideological, charismatic and
clientelistic appeals characterizes the functioning of Ukrainian parties in the second half
of the 2000s. This period, however, saw some major qualitative shifts in the role that
parties play in the country’s political system as parties established a virtual monopoly
on representation in parliament and finally conquered remaining key national political
institutions—the presidency and the cabinet. Subsequently, party affiliation of
presidents and cabinet ministers has become the norm and the fact of partisan control
of key government institutions has helped to increase the transparency of the political
process for voters.
It is only during this period that we can talk about a full institutionalization of main
political parties—the winners of the 2006 parliamentary elections. These parties started
to meet the criteria of programmatic organization, building up their internal capacity
and enlarging the scope, density and regularity of interactions between supporters,
activists and leaders within the party structure. They also started to acquire a degree of
decisional autonomy—although large business continued to be a major influence in
determining policies and strategies of each of the three most electorally successful
parties listed above. Other characteristics of an institutionalized party (Randall &
Svasand 2002)—value infusion and reification—have also been exhibited, to a varying
degree, by the 2006 election winners.
Parties’ new responsibilities for forming the legislative majority and the executive
government provided a major impetus for party politicians to invest in their
programmatic capabilities. The ideological profiles of some main parties—the Party of
Regions and the Electoral Coalition Our Ukraine in particular—became more structured
and more prominent in electoral campaigns. At the same time, the Ukrainian party
system saw a rather successful example of building charismatic linkages by one of the
leading political forces, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, whose female leader, Yulia
Tymoshenko, became one of main heroes of the 2004 Orange Revolution and developed
a personalistic appeal to large segments of the electorate (Meleshevych, 2010).
86
While parties could report considerable progress in building ideological or, in some
individual cases, charismatic links, parties’ relations with resource-rich constituencies—
large financial capital and industrial groups, regional business conglomerates—continue
to be dominated by the logic of clientelistic exchanges. Parties depend heavily on these
constituencies to finance party activity and reward these constituencies with regulatory
favours, preferential access to government procurements, and other types of
particularistic benefits.
4.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties
The programmatic positioning of political parties in Ukraine has been conditioned by
the legacies of the communist period and the country’s structural characteristics. The
left–right economic dimension and the ethnocultural dimension constitute two primary
axes of party competition in the country. During the 1990s programmatic competition
was primarily defined by parties’ attempts to mobilize voter support on the basis of
attitudinal differences towards the communist past and pro-democracy/pro-market
reforms. In the 2000s, regionally based ethnocultural differences emerged as a primary
focus of parties’ mobilization strategies and as the main dimension of party competition.
As will be discussed in more detail later, this ethnocultural competition, albeit regionally
rooted, should be considered in the Ukrainian context as a programmatic dimension that
is based on a continuum of universally conceived policies rather than on a distribution
of particularistic benefits to rigidly defined regional constituencies.
Table 8: Ukrainian Party Profiles
Party Name
Party organization
Party Linkages
Party type
Party of
Regions
Strong party organization
and policy-making capacity.
Little internal democracy.
Programmatic and
regional linkages,
principally to urban and
peri-urban areas in the
east and south. Closely
linked with some of the
country’s largest oligarchic
business groups.
Weak
programmatic
party.
Yulia
Tymoshenko
Bloc (based on
Bat´kivshchyna
party)
Medium-strength party
organization and policymaking capacity. Little
internal democracy.
Charismatic linkages, both
urban and rural
constituencies principally
in the centre and west of
the country.
Charismatic
party.
Our Ukraine
Medium-strength
organization. Medium
policy-making capacity. High
level of internal democracy.
Programmatic and
regional linkages,
predominantly in the west
of the country, but falling
grassroots support.
Weak
programmatic
party.
Socialist Party
of Ukraine
Medium-strength party
organization and policymaking capacity. High level
of internal democracy. Long
history and strong
institutional memory.
Programmatic linkages,
principally to rural areas in
the centre of the country.
Programmatic
party.
87
Throughout the analyzed period, parties exhibited varying propensities to formulate
well-structured ideological commitments and to use them as the basis for: a) the link
between a party and its constituency; b) electoral competition among parties; and c) the
policymaking process (Luna 2011). Before providing some general measures of
programmaticity of the Ukrainian party system it would be useful to provide a short
comparison of two contrasting cases of party behaviour in the Ukrainian context.
The Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU) developed a clear-cut and elaborate programme
based on principles of state regulation of market reforms and opposition to privatization
of land and key sectors of the economy; support of social welfare; a parliamentary
rather than presidential form of government; and further democratization of public life.
The party consistently campaigned on these principles and formed stable and durable
linkages with a constituency whose ideological profile was distinct and coherent—this
constituency was primarily a rural one which, in the Ukrainian context, was
characterized by lower levels of education and income (Birch, 2000). While in
parliament, the party stayed true to its core left-of-centre ideological principles, pursued
legislative policies that were in line with these principles, and opposed presidential
attempts to establish executive dominance. The party was represented in several
consecutive legislatures and lost the support of its voters only after entering the 2006
government coalition of which party voters did not approve—a clear case of
punishment by voters for the party’s failure to stay the course preferred by the
constituency. As Table 7 indicates, party electoral support dropped from 5.7 per cent to
2.9 per cent over the course of the year between 2006 and 2007.
The Social-Democratic Party of Ukraine (SDPU) developed a programme rhetorically
positioning the party in the social democratic camp. Yet the party’s electoral strategies
hardly reflected its declared principles. Party campaigning focused not on systematic
efforts to elaborate specific socio-democratic policies and to communicate them to
potential core constituencies but on constructing electoral machines distributing
material benefits or patronage promises to targeted constituencies (Matsuzato, 2002).
The party vote, for example, was characterized by geographically concentrated and
isolated pockets of electoral strength reflecting the local presence of business groups
linked to party leadership; the party had strong levels of electoral support in the Kiev
region and—about 800 km away—in the remote Zakarpatia region. Matzusato (2002)
documents how the national party leadership established its electoral base in that
region by forging ties with local business elites (serving as a mediator between them
and the central government and securing these elites‘ access to financial resources and
central government-granted regulatory concessions) and by distributing ‘gifts’ and free
public concerts to the voters at election time. The party’s legislative agenda had little to
do with social democratic principles and was continuously adjusted in accordance with
preferences of the country’s president, Kuchma, in the course of the latter´s pursuit of
market-oriented reforms and executive dominance. An eventual decline in the party’s
electoral support in the 2000s is best explained by party system-level changes rather
than by any programmatic accountability mechanisms.
These two parties are illustrative of the mix of mobilization strategies being employed in
the Ukrainian party system in the 1990s and 2000s. Both of these parties had a roughly
comparable representation in the Ukrainian parliament in the 1990s and the first half of
the 2000s, but each displayed very different levels of programmatic orientation. At the
same time, differences in the internal structures of the parties were small: both parties
established local organizations in each region of the country, had a rather similar
hierarchy of party organs and employed many similar internal decision-making
procedures. The major difference came from different patterns of engaging with the
88
electorate: fostering programmatic or clientelistic patterns of mobilizing the voters.
What is also critical to emphasize here is the fact that the overall constitutional design of
the country’s political system during that period stimulated, for reasons discussed in the
next section of this study, the development of less programmatically oriented party
projects and penalized politicians committed to competing on an ideological basis.
Overall, clientelistic structuring of party politics dominated Ukrainian politics during
this period.
A number of systematic measures of programmaticity are available to illustrate this
conclusion. One is party discipline in the roll call voting. Harasymiv (2002) reports
results of an analysis of the voting record of the fourteen parliamentary factions that
existed in the 1994–98 parliament. Parties that were earlier identified in this study as
ideologically oriented projects—the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of
Ukraine, and Rukh—were rated correspondingly as first, second and fourth in terms of
party discipline. The faction that occupied the third position (Statehood) existed only
through the first two years of the parliamentary term and was later dissolved.
Another such measure is party membership switching in the parliament. Ukraine had an
extremely high number of cases of ‘floor crossing’ by MPs throughout the first decade
and a half of the country’s transition (Whitmore, 2004). For example, one study reports
that in a three-year period (1998–2001) Ukraine’s 450 deputies managed to change
sides a staggering 562 times (Protsyk & Wilson, 2003). Changing a parliamentary faction
several times during the same parliamentary term became a common practice. The
switching phenomenon primarily characterized ad-hoc groupings of non-partisan MPs
and parliamentary groups of parties that positioned themselves as centrist. More
programmatically oriented parties of the left and the right experienced a smaller
number of switches. These parties, however, controlled a significantly smaller number
of parliamentary seats than various centrist groupings for most of the analyzed period,
so the continuity in parliamentary group membership had a rather narrow base in the
parliament.
The number of switchers in the parliament dropped dramatically during the second
time period analyzed in this study: 2006–9. The 2006–7 and 2007–present parliaments
(prior to 2010) saw very few switches. For example, the parliament elected in 2006 saw
only six switches in more than a year of its term in office. Constitutional and electoral
reforms conducted in the mid-2000s had the effect of strengthening the role of political
parties in the political system and providing incentives for politicians to invest in the
programmatic and organizational capacities of the parties. This strengthening of the
parties was reflected in increased membership continuity and stability of party factions
in the parliament. Although no detailed quantitative studies of party behaviour in
parliament during this period have been published yet, casual observations suggest that
party discipline as measured by the uniformity of roll-call votes has also improved quite
dramatically.
Some sporadic observations also suggest that electoral and party programmes gain
more significance in the post-2006 period. The heightened relevance of programmatic
positions of parties became manifest in the levels of attention paid to discussions of
party programmes in electoral campaigns and coalition formation talks after the 2006
and 2007 parliamentary elections. This level of attention to programmatic documents
on the part of party politicians themselves and the expert community are
unprecedented in Ukrainian politics. Content analysis of party programmes suggests
that these documents became more elaborate, while party positions along the
ethnocultural dimension, which became highly salient in the 2000s, are now more
polarized. The parties also invested considerable resources in developing policy profiles
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on other important policy matters. This manifested itself, for example, in the
institutionalization of the practice of specialized party speakers. Unlike in the past, when
party leaders handled communication on all major policy issues largely single-handedly,
now the main political parties have speakers/experts covering separate policy areas and
communicating party lines on each of these policy areas to voters. Finally, in 2007, votes
were cast to retrospectively punish a party for its policy behaviour. The Socialist Party
of Ukraine (SPU), discussed above, failed to cross the three per cent electoral threshold
after the party joined the government coalition in the 2006–7 parliament, even though it
was opposed by the party’s supporters. Between 2006 and 2009, several elements of the
model of responsible party government began to emerge in Ukraine.
However, the consolidation of this model has been called into question by the most
recent round of institutional reforms. The old Ukrainian constitution, which empowers
the president and limits the role of political parties in government formation, was
restored after the election of the new president in 2010, which marked the beginning of
a new period in Ukrainian politics. One clear indication that parties’ abilities to maintain
coherent ideological profiles can still be reversed is that the number of MPs switching
sides within parliament rose rapidly in 2010. More than 50 opposition deputies chose to
join the government coalition or were excluded by opposition parliamentary factions
from their ranks due to their support of government initiatives in 2010 and 2011. While
discipline around party votes in the parliament remains generally high, opposition
parties in particular have begun to find it increasingly difficult to ensure a uniform
pattern of legislative behaviour by their members. Although a return to the party system
of the 1990s, with very weak levels of programmaticity, is unlikely, fostering
programmatic linkages and programmatic policymaking in the newly established
institutional environment will prove to be very challenging. These characteristics are
summarized in Table 4 above.
4.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics
In explaining causal paths to programmaticity this section reviews four general types of
factors: structural conditions, the institutional framework, international influences and
the role of individuals. The role of each of these groups of factors in accounting for the
programmaticity outcomes varies significantly. Some of these factors—such as
structural conditions and international influences—define the important parameters of
the context in which political parties operate rather than constitute an immediate causal
determinant of programmatic consolidation. The section concludes by providing a
synthesis of factors and influences that shaped Ukraine’s path of programmatic
development.
Legacies and Structures
Ukraine’s legacies are among the least conducive in the Eastern European region for the
development of programmatic party politics. Earlier studies identified a substantial
variation among post-communist states in terms of the character of legacies that shape
interactions between citizens and politicians (Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski &
Toka, 1999). Different paths of development during the communist and pre-communist
periods endowed the participants of the post-communist political process with varying
sets of resources, skills and expectations. These paths are largely defined by the
interaction of the pre-communist experience of collective interest mobilization and civil
service organization (how autonomous the state bureaucracy was from special
interests) within distinct communist party regimes. Different combinations of these
characteristics have been conceptualized as constituting three distinct types of legacies:
90
bureaucratic–authoritarian, national–accommodative and patrimonial. Patrimonial
legacies—characterized by the lack of widespread democratic competition and by the
pervasiveness of clientelistic practices of the civil service—provide the weakest
foundations for the development of a programmatically oriented party system.
Ukraine has one of the most entrenched systems of patrimonial practices in Eastern
Europe thus making it an unlikely candidate for the institutionalization of programmatic
party competition. The failure of parties to structure politics along programmatic lines
during the initial period of Ukraine’s post-1991 transition are well in line with
propositions of the literature about the impact of the patrimonial legacy. Ukraine’s postcommunist state is very weak in terms of its ability to separate the interests of those
who occupy the executive branch of government from the state itself: instead, state
bureaucracies are typically used to accumulate political power and to convert state
economic assets into private wealth. High party system fragmentation and a lack of
partisanship in the first post-communist legislatures was sustained by the ability of
emerging private business groups, and sectional and regional interests to negotiate with
the executive to grant them preferential treatment and control of certain segments of
state bureaucracies in exchange for providing political support for the executive in the
legislature. In turn, the nature of Ukraine’s executive and its preferences in terms of
political organization have been profoundly shaped by the design of political
institutions.
In terms of social structures—understood here as enduring social divisions—the
literature on Ukraine emphasizes the importance of class and regional divisions
(D’Anieri 2007). The politicization of these divisions resulted in the persistent political
importance of the traditional left–right cleavage and ethnocultural differences. While
these ethnocultural differences divide Ukraine into the Ukrainian-speaking West and the
Russian-speaking East (this is a somewhat simplified version of Ukraine’s regional
differences; for a more sophisticated interpretation, see, for example, Katchanovski,
2006), these divisions are not very deep in social terms. For example, language use and
region of residence does not affect associational life—common national level
associations exist in all spheres of public life (national associations of journalists,
medical doctors etc.), the rates of inter-ethnic marriages are very high, many people
report native fluency in both main languages and cultures. The majority of the
population of Eastern Ukraine still defines itself as ethnic Ukrainians (although Russianspeaking).
The fact that Ukraine is not a deeply divided society is highly consequential for national
politics. While some of the main national parties have strong regional bases, the
comparatively ‘shallow’ character of regional divisions enables them to compete for
votes nationally and gain some levels of electoral support even in the other region’s
core. Thus, the Party of Regions, which has its electoral stronghold in Eastern Ukraine, is
able to gain support across the country even when its programmatic goals in the
ethnocultural realm include making Russian the country’s second official language and
intensifying educational exchanges with the Russian Federation. The Party of Regions is
not an equivalent of the Bloc Quebecois in Canada and both politicians and voters know
that. The bundle of cultural policies advocated by the Party of Regions is in the party’s
view a public good and not a particularistic policy targeting a territorially defined
constituency.
Given a relatively ‘shallow’ character of regional divisions their dominance in
structuring party competition in Ukraine is rather puzzling. The question of why
regional and not class-based divisions have proved so far to be the most salient line of
political competition requires separate examination. Ukraine’s design of political
91
institutions—a choice of a popularly elected presidency, first of all—is one determinant.
In post-Soviet countries with substantial regional divisions and competetive political
regimes, such as Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan, presidential elections tend to highlight and
accentuate regional divisions. Ukraine’s first presidential elections took place in 1991—
well before the first parliamentary elections (1994)—and exhibited a pronounced
regional variation in terms of distribution of vote for the leading candidates. The run-off
of the 1994 presidential elections split the country into the Western and Eastern halves
in terms of support for the two contenders, a pattern which was broadly replicated both
in the 2004 and 2010 presidential elections. The 1999 presidential contest was the only
one which did not exhibit this pattern of vote distribution in the run-off. Politicization of
regional divisions already in the early cycles of presidential elections in post-communist
Ukraine and the fact that presidential elections acquired characteristics of the firstorder elections in the country’s political system are suggested in the literature to have a
framing effect on the voters’ perception of which social divisions are politically
important. Political parties that subsequently started to emphasize their differences on
ethnocultural dimensions were thus able to capitalize on the already politically
activated regional divisions. The long-term ‘freezing’ of the current format of party
system, which is characterized by the dominance of ethnocultural competion, appears to
be problematic. The ongoing process of Ukraine’s transformation into a market
economy stimulates the growth of social inequalities and contributes to the objective
strengthening of political relevance of class-based divisions (Protsyk 2012).
Institutions
Institutions have a major effect on politicians’ incentives and ability to structure
relations with voters along the lines of programmatic competition. Institutions are
conceptualized here as having effects on patterns of political relations that are, to a
significant extent, independent and distinct from the effects of structures and legacies.
Rather than endowing political actors with skills and resources, institutions provide
them with a set of incentives and constraints for pursuing political actions. There is
ongoing discussion in political science about the endogenous nature of political
institutions (Greif and Laitin, 2004). Structures and legacies have a major influence on
the design of political institutions. Yet structures can not fully pre-determine the nature
of political institutions. Proponents of the full endogeneity thesis would have a hard
time explaining, for example, why two neighbouring countries that share many
structural conditions and Soviet legacies—Ukraine and Moldova—chose such different
sets of political institutions. Moldova opted for a constitutional design with a very weak
president (first popular and later indirectly elected), a cabinet responsible to the
parliament and a closed list system of proportional representation. By contrast, Ukraine
initially adopted a constitution that endowed the president with very strong legislative
and non-legislative powers and provided for the creation of a cabinet headed by the
prime minister and accountable both to the president and parliament. Moreover,
Ukraine´s first post-communist elections were held under a system of single member
districts.
Three periods in the development of programmaticity that have been identified—pre2006, 2006–9, 2010–present—are associated with major changes in Ukraine’s
institutional framework. The pre-2006 period was defined by the semi-presidential
system described above. The 2006–9 period saw major constitutional regime and
electoral system changes, including the introduction of a constitutionally weaker
president (although the country remained a semi-presidential system) and a fully
proportional electoral system for parliamentary elections. In 2010 Ukraine´s previous
constitution was restored, which provides for a powerful presidency and a cabinet
subordinate both to the president and parliament. To understand the full effect of
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political institutions on the development of programmaticity it is necessary to focus on
the influence of the electoral system and parliamentary procedures, presidency and
party finance rules.
Electoral system and parliamentary procedures
Ukraine´s first post-communist parliamentary elections held in 1994 were run under a
single member district system (SMD) according to the double ballot system. In other
words, a second round was required if the candidate that was first past the post did not
receive an absolute majority of the vote in the first round. Unrestrictive nomination
rules provided an equal playing field for party and independent candidates. The second
and the third elections held, respectively, in 1998 and 2002 used a mixed electoral
formula: one half of the 450 seats were contested in SMD districts while the second half
was distributed according to closed-list PR rules. The next two legislative elections, in
2006 and 2007, featured only a closed PR list component.
In the specific post-Soviet context characterized by the absence of any tradition of multiparty competition, single-member district electoral rules provided disincentives for the
development of political parties. SMD elections and the SMD component of mixed
elections were clearly candidate- rather than party-oriented. Candidates without party
affiliation but with established local clientelistic networks relied on these networks to
win seats in the parliament. The number of successful independents in successive
Ukrainian parliaments testifies to the viability of this strategy. Aspiring politicians saw
little value in investing in a collective enterprise of building a party rather than
constructing a personalized machine for winning elections in a given geographically
defined electoral district. Although proposals to introduce a fully proportional electoral
system were already being advocated by the newly formed political parties in the
beginning of the 1990s, these proposals were repeatedly rejected in the parliament.
Such proposals threatened to undermine clientelistic networks and to deprive local
powerbrokers of their competitive advantage and thus were discarded by the successive
legislative majorities in the 1990s.
The same majorities also endorsed lax parliamentary rules for the formation of
legislative groupings and factions. For most of the pre-2006 period these rules required
only 14 deputies—three per cent of the legislature—to form a parliamentary group.
Deputies elected under party labels in either SMD or, later, under PR, always had the
option to join one of such ad-hoc groupings, further undermining the value of a party
label.
This situation changed as a result of intra-elite compromises that followed the 2004
Orange Revolution, when election fraud during the 2004 presidential election inspired
mass mobilization. The adoption of a fully proportional electoral system was one of the
outcomes of this intra-elite bargaining. Constitutional reform that weakened the
legislative and non-legislative powers of the president was another major outcome of
this compromise. The 2006 and then pre-term 2007 parliamentary elections, which
were held according to a closed list PR system in one nationwide district, also
dramatically changed the role and position of parties in the political system. Parties now
had full control over legislative representation which makes MPs dependent on party
labels, while parties have started investing heavily in infusing their evolving
organizational structures with programmatic agendas and meanings.
New party assertiveness expressed itself in the overhaul of parliamentary rules after the
2006 elections, when the power to make and break government coalitions in the
parliament was reserved exclusively for parties—the rights of individual deputies to
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join or leave a coalition was no longer recognized. In the aftermath of constitutional
reform, the country´s Constitutional Court confirmed the legality of this provision. The
provision further strengthened political parties by making them key actors in the
government formation process and increasing the identifiability and transparency of
this process for the voters.
These new procedures for forming a governing coalition, however, were overturned in
2010, when new president Victor Yanukovytch assumed office and reinstated the earlier
rules despite protests from the opposition in parliament. Remarkably, the Constitutional
Court approved the restoration of the old parliamentary rules, reflecting its usual
willingness to serve the interests of whoever is in power. The pro-Yanukovych
government coalition, which would have been impossible without a number of
individual deputies who defected from opposition factions, was thus legitimated by the
Court. As a result, the number of switches by MPs has since increased again. Among the
defectors from the opposition factions were a number of business people, some of
whom informally explained their decision to support the new coalition by the fear of
government actions against their businesses if they were to remain in opposition. Other
defectors appear to have been rewarded with the allocation of government posts to
their close relatives. Overall, political parties lost their ability to control their deputies.
The Presidency
The strong legislative and non-legislative powers of the president during the pre-2006
period, along with a weak system of checks and balances, led to the complete dominance
of the presidential office in Ukraine´s political system during that period. Presidential
dominance had a number of negative effects on the programmatic evolution of political
parties. These effects can be divided into the by-products of the existing system of
governance and intentional efforts to weaken parties. The initial period of Ukraine´s
post-communist transition was dominated by the presidency of Leonid Kuchma who
served twice in office from 1994 until 2004. Kuchma was an officially non-partisan
president who relied on ad-hoc coalitions of partisan and independent deputies in the
parliament to govern. The presidential office used selective incentives or sanctions to
ensure the compliance of the majority of deputies with the president’s legislative
agendas. Legislative majorities were constructed in such a way that they provided an
endorsement for presidential policies and cabinet appointments. Precisely because
these majorities were only able to endorse, rather than to author, policy decisions and
appointment, legislative activity contributed little to the emancipation of political
parties. Consequently, successive Ukrainian cabinets, the formation of which required
legislative participation, were seen as agents of the president. In turn, parties’ limited
involvement in cabinet formation denied them the opportunity to use cabinet formation
and maintenance as a means of strengthening the coherence of party policy profiles and
preparing party candidates for executive positions.
President Kuchma also intentionally created new barriers to the emergence of stronger
parties. He found that maintaining the SMD segment of electoral competition suited his
goals of power accumulation and therefore consistently used his control of legislative
majorities to prevent the success of legislative initiatives intended to introduce a fully
proportional electoral system for parliamentary elections. His opposition to such an
electoral system persisted even after he sanctioned the construction of pro-presidential
party projects.
However, the period of inter-elite bargaining after 2004 created the opportunity for
constitutional reform, which substantially weakened presidential powers and denied
Kuchma´s successor Victor Yushchenko many of the instruments that his predecessor
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had use to maintain a central role in the political process. It is important to note that this
reform was not the translation of the preferences of the most powerful political actors at
the time into formal rules; it was a result of an exogenous shock delivered by the Orange
Revolution’s mass mobilization events. Among the non-legislative powers that the
Ukrainian president lost were cabinet nomination powers. During the 2006–9 period
the choice of cabinet and its prime minister was entirely in the hands of a parliament
controlled by political parties. The full responsibility for cabinet formation proved to be
a highly important factor for strengthening the organizational and programmatic
capacities of all parliamentary parties, as all of them participated in the formation of
successive cabinets during this period.
Constitutional rules were revised again in the middle of 2010 when the newly elected
president, Victor Yanukovych, pushed the reinstatement of the old version of the
constitution through the Constitutional Court. The reacquisition of strong legislative and
non-legislative powers by the president once again changed the basic rules of the game.
However, in comparison to Kuchma´s period, president Yanukovych faced a much more
institutionalized party system. At the time of writing, it therefore remains to be seen
whether the re-introduction of a constitutionally strong presidency will again
substantially undermine parties’ abilities to structure political processes along
programmatic lines.
Party finance rules
Unlike rules governing parliamentary elections or the allocation of executive powers,
party finance rules have not been the subject of game-changing revisions. The major
continuity in terms of finance rules is the absence of public funding for political parties.
The majority of political parties in Ukraine are chronically under-funded. The complete
absence of budget financing for day-to-day party expenses are among the key barriers
preventing political parties to maintain their operations. Scarcity of public money and
insufficiency of membership dues—parties probably cannot afford to charge
considerable amounts to their members due to most members’ low incomes—make the
contributions of corporate sponsors particularly critical for sustaining the financial
vitality of political parties (Protsyk and Walecki, 2007).
Parties could be conceptualized as being involved in exchanges with the two types of
constituencies: vote-rich and resource-rich (Kitschelt 2000). Relations of Ukrainian
parties with the first type of constituency—the ordinary voters—have been increasingly
structured along programmatic lines. Party relations with the second type of
constituencies—various interest groups and, first of all, oligarchic business interests—
remain highly clientelistic in nature. Parties continue to provide their business donors
with policies that meet their preferences in terms of regulatory framework, budget
procurements and property rights. A small number of the country’s richest business
people continue to have a disproportionate influence on parties’ internal decisionmaking.
The current system of party finance rules penalizes parties that try to compete in the
political marketplace without the backing of special interests. Such parties simply lack
the resources to build organizational structures and to run credible electoral campaigns.
Even political parties with traditionally strong ideological linkages to the voters—the
Communist Party of Ukraine, Rukh, and the Socialist Party of Ukraine—have to
compromise their programmatic standing to ensure financial support. Two ways of
doing this are to include numerous business leaders in their electoral lists—a common
practice in some Eastern European countries (Protsyk and Matichescu, 2011)—and
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lobbying for the adoption of bills favouring particularistic interests of business groups in
the legislature.
There have been some attempts to introduce legislation to allow public funding of
parties but to date they have failed. Parties that conditioned their organizational
behaviour on expectations that public funding would be provided to support their
operational needs have therefore suffered internal crises and organizational
breakdowns. The fortunes of former president Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, are
telling in this respect. One of the former managers recently explained how the party’s
attempts to make transparent its financial operations in anticipation of the legislative
passage of a public funding bill led the party to stop relying on a common practice of
under-the-table payments and to borrow money in the expectation of the passage of the
new law. Thus when the legislation failed to make it through the parliament, the party
was unable to pay back the large debts that it had incurred, and so was unable to pay
party functionaries and fund party activities (Leshchenko, 2011).
The absence of public funding not only increases the dependency of parties on corporate
donors, it also motivates ruling parties to use their access to state administrative
resources as a source of funding for partisan activities. For example, the local
organization of a ruling party is sometimes established by drawing on the personnel and
the infrastructure of executive governmental agencies. Local state administrations are
then used to ensure the membership growth of party organizations. At the same time,
municipal authorities are pressed to provide better terms of rent for party offices while
local tax administrations are engaged to ‘encourage’ local businesses to make
contributions to the party.
International influences
Ukraine’s proximity to the European Union is an important factor in the country’s
political evolution. The country’s engagement with the European Union and other
Western institutions and structures has had positive effects on the levels of
programmaticity of party politics. These Western influences can be grouped into two
major categories. First, the close contacts with Western institutions stimulate and
reinforce elements of programmatic structuring that are already present in the party
system. For example, Ukraine’s main political parties seek close ties with ideologically
similar party groups in the European Parliament and membership in international party
unions. Such membership enhances a party’s reputation on the domestic scene, enables
access to resources controlled by international unions, such as international
conferences and staff training on internal organizations or campaign matters, and
creates partners for lobbying such important decision-making bodies as the European
Parliament on Ukraine-related foreign policy matters. To meet their European
counterparts’ expectations of ideological proximity or to satisfy criteria for membership
in international party unions, Ukrainian parties have to invest in elaborating coherent
programmatic stances.
Three Ukrainian parties, for example, had in the 2000s an observer status with Europe’s
largest union of parties, the European People’s Party (EPP). These parties were Rukh,
Our Ukraine, and Bat’kivshchyna (led by Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Yulia
Tymoshenko Bloc). Our Ukraine and Bat’kivshchyna have subsequently become
members of the EPP. Bat’kivshchyna’s decision to seek an observer status and later, in
2008, a membership status with the EPP caused especially large debates both inside the
party and in the media. The reason for this was that the party’s charismatic female
leader Yulia Tymoshenko initially positioned herself as a supporter of centre-left
ideology. During internal party debates, programmatic documents of the Socialist
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International, Party of European Socialists, and the European People’s Party were
distributed and discussed by party membership (Nemyria 2007). While
Bat’kivshchyna’s decision to opt for the union with the EPP has so far done little to
transform the nature of the party’s highly populist and unstructured appeal to the
voters, it undoubtedly stimulated collective thinking inside the party about the
importance of ideological positioning and the need to enhance party capacities to
generate programmatic materials.
Secondly, engagement with Western institutions limits the space available for Ukrainian
parties to engage in clientelistic exchanges and to abuse norms and principles of
programmatic political competition. As Ukraine moves closer to fulfiling its ambitions of
having an association agreement with the EU and being more integrated into other
Western structures, it becomes more difficult for Ukrainian parties to sustain
patrimonial politics. Currently, the ruling party’s efforts to politicize courts and the civil
service or to limit the independence of media get a lot international attention and
criticism. In particular, the conditionality powers of the EU have been increasingly
important in constraining the undemocratic impulses of Ukrainian political leaders.
Role of individuals
None of the main political parties in Ukraine have yet become a ‘perpetually lived
organization,’ that is to say an organization whose existence is independent of the lives
of its members. Recent scholarship highlights the importance of having such
organizations in various realms of public life in order to secure countries’ entrance into
the club of most developed societies (North, Wallis and Weingast, 2009). Almost all
main Ukrainian parties are led by the individuals who created them or presided over
their initial accession to a group of electorally successful organizations. The relatively
short period of the existence of the Ukrainian party system, which has not yet exceeded
the average time span of a politician’s career, makes it difficult to estimate the effects of
leadership changes on party survival and performance. Personalistic politics was
especially widespread during the pre-2006 period. Many smaller party projects that,
nevertheless, had some representation in parliament, were fully controlled by one
individual or a small group of individuals capable of financing essential party expenses.
These individuals were often successful business people. In such cases the party
organization often became an opportunistic label, devoid of any coherent ideological
standing and geared to pursue the economic interests of its oligarchic leadership.
The restructuring of Ukrainian party politics after 2006 squeezed these ‘centrist’ parties
out of the mainstream and denied them parliamentary representation. The highly
personalized nature of party leadership is nonethess still a feature of some of the more
institutionalized parties that have tended to dominate party politics recently.
Significantly, there is little evidence that leaders of these parties extend great effort to
foster the programmatic coherence of their organizations. Instead, party leaders usually
attempt to cultivate their personal charisma, a strategy that is often at odds with the
strengthening of a party’s ideological profile. There are, however, a few examples where
party leaders’ behaviour is consistent with the goals of establishing a ‘perpetually lived
organization’. The leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, which has already been
discussed in this study, stepped out of office after the party failed to cross the electoral
threshold and win parliamentary representation in the 2007 election. This is a rare
example in which a prominent party leader took responsibility for an organization’s
failures. The highly personalized tradition of Ukrainian politics has led to a situation
where the personality of the leader is an important element of the party’s general profile
and its efforts to maximize the party label’s recognition with voters. This is, probably,
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one of the factors explaining party members’ unwillingness to replace leaders even
when party statutes provides ready-to-use mechanism to accomplish this.
Path of programmatic development
The discussion presented above illustrates the multiplicity of factors that have
influenced programmatic development of Ukrainian parties. The path to a programmatic
party system in the Ukrainian case is closely linked to party system institutionalization.
It is important to note that Ukraine has had parties that were programmatically oriented
from the moment they were founded, prior to the period when the party system became
institutionalized. The Communist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, and
Rukh—all established in the early 1990s—have a strong programmatic orientation. The
first two could be considered as successor parties of the Communist Party of Soviet
Union (CPSU)—their ability to develop programmatic appeal was enhanced by the fact
that they inherited skills, resources and the loyalty of an ideologically driven segment of
the CPSU membership base. Rukh rose to prominence as an ideological alternative to the
CPSU and its programmatic character is a product of ideologically driven confrontation
between pro-communist and anti-communist forces in the early 1990s.
Ukraine’s institutional choices that were made during this initial period of postcommunist transition—a combination of constitutionally very powerful non-partisan
presidency and a majoritarian electoral system—had, however, the effect of severely
limiting the role of parties in the political system. Other types of political actors—
sectoral and regional interest groups, executive government bureacracies—came to
dominate legislature and national politics in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These
fragmented groups also started to create numerous clientalistically oriented party
projects that proved to be relatively succesful in securing parliamentary representation
for several groupings of regional and sectoral elites during this period. The early
programmatic parties, which tried to mobilize voters on the basis of class divisions, lost
out in competiton with clientelistic party projects backed by the almighty presidential
office and became small niche parties by the early 2000s.
The major constititutional revisions in the middle of the 2000s—the weakening of the
power of the presidential office and the introduction of a full PR system—put parties at
the centre stage of the nation’s politics and stimulated the process of party system
institutionalization. The rules and nature of inter-party competition have recently
started to exibit a degree of stabilization; parties can now also claim to have more
extensive roots in society. These developments are signs of party system institualization
(Mainwaring and Torcal 2006). Such institutionalization in its turn provides incentives
for parties to develop their programmatic profiles and to use programmatic positioning
as a basis for activities in various political arenas. Thus, system-level developments in
the Ukrainian context are a major source of pressure on parties to become more
programmatic. The example of the Party of Region—the largest party in the Ukrainian
parliament in the 2006 and 2007 electoral cycles, whose leader also won the 2010
presidential elections—is telling in this respect. The party, established in the late 1990s
by regional elites in one of Ukraine’s industrially developed provinces in the east of the
country, was a typical example of a clientalistic political machine created to serve the
political interests of one of many groupings of provincial elites. When its leader Victor
Yanukovych became the national political establishment’s candidate in the 2004
presidential elections, for the first time the party faced a need to develop nationwide
organizational structures and articulate a coherent and structured ideological profile. A
subsequent rounds of electoral competition—the 2006 and 2007 parliamentary races
and the 2010 presidential elections—allowed the party to hone its ideological profile
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and to establish a degree of regularity in its interactions with various constituencies of
the party.
Party competition in the second half of the 2000s was organized primarily along
ethnocultural dimensions. Such organization of inter-party contestation provides more
limited opportunities for programmaticity gains than competition structured along class
lines. In the case of Brazil discussed in this study, it was leftist parties that drove the
programmatization of the party system. In the case of Ukraine, the politicization of
ethnocultural differences makes it problematic to achieve a robust degree of
programmatization. That is why two major parties that define the opposite ends of
ethnocultural dimensions (but share much in terms of pro-market positioning on
economic issues)—the Party of Regions and Our Ukraine—are classified in this study as
weakly programmatic.
4.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics
While political leadership in the Ukrainian political system has traditionally emanated
from the presidential office, much of the executive decision-making has been
concentrated in the cabinet. The latter included, on average, between twenty and thirty
ministers responsible for various policy portfolios. The cabinet ministers were
nominated by the president and approved by the parliament. Before the mid-2000s, the
cabinets were dominated by appointees without party affiliation. They were usually
technocrats who gained the confidence of the president and often had the support of
various sectional interests in the parliament. Such a composition of the nation’s main
executive body imposed considerable costs. As a result, Ukraine’s technocratic cabinets
have suffered from a chronic fragmentation of cabinet policymaking and parochialism of
ministerial interests (Sundakov, 1997).
Fragmentation was the product of a situation in which individual politicians appointed
to cabinet positions did not comprise a team bound together by shared political beliefs
and programmatic goals. Ministers, who obtained their portfolios not because of their
membership in political organizations but because of their individual merits and
technical expertise, were inclined to be preoccupied with their department’s issues and
not with the overall performance of the cabinet. Parochialism was manifested in a
tendency by ministers, whose professional roots were in the industries they were now
in charge of, to associate themselves with the interests of that particular sector rather
than the public. These individuals viewed themselves as representatives of these sectors
in the cabinet and tried to satisfy the demands of their sectional constituencies rather
than the needs of the citizens who consume their goods or services. For example, the
minister of transportation was more preoccupied with the wellbeing of transportrelated bureaucratic structures and enterprises than with the quality of transportation
services that consumers receive.
The emancipation of parties and the development of their programmatic profiles, which
were stimulated by the 2004 institutional changes, led to a sea change in processes of
cabinet formation and ministerial decision-making. From the mid-2000s cabinets
started to be composed of teams of like-minded politicians representing parties that
formed a governing coalition. These politicians often possessed very limited or even no
prior experience in the policy sectors they were assigned to but had a clear political
mandate to bring about changes in the quality of policies and services produced or
delivered by that specific ministry. For example, the Ministry of the Interior, which had
always been headed by a professional police officer, received a democratic activist from
a radical opposition party, Yuri Lutsenko, as its head after the Orange Revolution. He
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used his mandate to fight human rights abuses and the lack of openness and
transparency in the work of the ministry.
Quantitative reflection of changes in cabinet formation practices is presented in Figure 4
below. It shows changes in the share of partisan and technocratic ministers over time.
For the purposes of comparison, the graph also provides similar data for one of
Ukraine’s neighbours, Romania. Romania also opted for a semi-presidential design at
the start of its transition but the constitution provided the president with very limited
powers.
As the graph indicates, there was a sharp drop in the number of non-partisan ministers
in Ukraine after the mid-2000s. Romania, which started its transition with institutions
that were much more conducive to emancipation of political parties, had a considerable
number of non-partisan cabinet members in the first half of the 1990s but later on
tended to select predominantly partisan candidates for cabinet positions.
Figure 4: Share of Partisan and Non-Partisan
Cabinet Members in Romania and Ukraine
Graph 1. Share of Partisan and Non-Partisan Cabinet Members
in Romania and Ukraine
Romania
100
Ukraine
80
60
Per cent
40
20
0
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
Independent
1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
Partisan
Source: Author’s own calculations.
The second example of the effects of greater programmaticity comes from the area of
inter-ethnic relations. This example is less straightforward and more thought-provoking
since it raises some questions about the desirability of having more programmatic
competition on some policy dimensions. Immediately prior to the 2004 Orange
Revolution, but even more so in the aftermath, the leading political parties started to
elaborate their programmatic positions on ethnocultural issues and to use these
positions as a key theme in electoral campaigns at local and national levels. Parties used
ethnocultural themes to mobilize voters in their key core regional constituencies.
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Electoral campaigns defined by the emphasis on strikingly different bundles of linguistic
and cultural policies and related foreign policy orientations (pro-West vs. pro-Russia)
had the effect of activating and accentuating these types of differences. Party policies in
the aftermath of an election—through the control of such cabinet portfolios as education
or culture—became ideologically charged and highly contested. Never before had the
Ministry of Education and its language use of policies or history teaching programmes
received so much attention among the general public in Ukraine. The polarization of
public opinion on these matters highlighted the ever-existing regional differences in
Ukraine and started to generate considerable challenges to the very idea of national
unity. These challenges and the associated risks of territorial disintegration led parties
to somewhat revise their stances on ethnocultural issues and decrease the emphasis on
these issues in the most recent 2010 presidential electoral campaign. Parties had
incentives to do this because the regional divide was not deep. There is a very large
segment of the population, which is located in the nation´s centre both in terms of
ethnocultural positioning and geographic location, which parties with different
ethnocultural preference schedules are eligible to compete for.
This example raises the question of whether competition on ethnocultural issues should
be considered a case of programmatic competition. Kitschelt (2000) argues that ethnic
and regional parties are by definition forms of clientelistic politics because they propose
particularistic rather than universalistic principles for linkage formation. While
Ukraine’s main political parties have a strong regional vote base, they manage to attract
a considerable amount of electoral support across the main regional divides and thus
could not be classified as regional or ethnic. They are nationwide parties that, at a
certain stage of their development, opted to structure programmatic competition along
ethnocultural lines. After learning about the risks of such competition for the long-term
stability of the state, they are now in search of other competitive dimensions.
Politicization of ethnocultural differences could be considered a form of programmatic
competition, albeit a highly problematic one in its consequences.
4.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Ukrainian Case
The combination of a semi-presidential framework with a powerful president and SMD
electoral rules proved to have a negative effect on institutionalization and programmatic
structuring of the party system in the Ukrainian case. Moreover, some findings from
comparative work on the post-communist region also suggest that this particular
institutional combination serves as a strong deterrent for the development of a party
system and for strengthening parties’ programmatic capabilities (Birch, 2005; Protsyk,
2011). Party funding rules, which force parties to rely almost exclusively on private
funding, were another feature of Ukraine’s institutional design shown to undermine
programmaticity and to feed clientelistic circuits of exchange between parties and
resource-rich constituencies.
The supply side of the political marketplace in Ukraine in the early 1990s was
characterized by the emergence of both programmatic and non-programmatic party
offers. This case study has highlighted the development of two such programmatic
projects: the Socialist Party of Ukraine, which tried to offer a modernized leftist
alternative to voters, and Rukh, which appealed to rightwing voters. It was Ukraine´s
specific choice of constitutional, electoral and party finance rules that weakened these
parties’ abilities to compete in the political marketplace and contributed to the fact that
they lost out in the competition with non-ideological party projects in the late 1990s and
early 2000s.
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The institutional changes that almost all of Ukraine’s ideological parties had advocated
since the early 1990s—the introduction of PR rules and revision of the semipresidential constitutional framework—were finally implemented in the second half of
the 2000s. Party system emancipation is a result of these changes. The failure to
implement another institutional measure—party finance reform—has led to the
continuation of parties’ complete dependence on resource-rich constituencies, although
this paper reports considerable progress in party efforts on building programmatic ties
to vote-rich constituencies.
All institutional features discussed here are modifiable, which provides room for policy
discussions and interventions. These institutional choices, for example, will likely
feature prominently on the agenda of current and future states in transition to
democracy, or undergoing constitutional review. Whether it is debates about the basic
parameters of constitutional design, electoral system choice, or party finance models,
there is value in bringing evidence and experiences from other places to bear on the
problem. It is true that the existing institutions are not the product of a haphazard
choice; they are often in place because they reflect the preferences of the most powerful
actors in a political system. This, however, does not mean that bringing additional
information or engaging in deliberation about the pros and cons of different
institutional solutions will have no effect on the distribution of preferences or on the
probability of revisiting decisions made earlier. In the Ukrainian case, for example,
propositions about introducing a full PR electoral system in the 1990s and the early
2000s were repeatedly rejected on the grounds that parties were too weak in terms of
their organizational presence at the grass-root level and in terms of their limited
policymaking capacities. Yet there was very little recognition in the public space of the
fact that the preservation of existing electoral rules and cabinet formation practices in
the Ukrainian context served as a major deterrent for the emancipation of political
parties. Support for civil society organizations that advocate institutional change and
raise awareness about relevant issues constitutes a useful policy intervention in such
context.
Equally missing from the understanding of the general public and, more importantly,
from the understanding of the broadly defined policymaking community in Ukraine, is
the importance of public funding for parties. This idea of introducing public funding
provisions proved to be highly unpopular with the electorate, reducing the parliament’s
will to undertake major reforms in this area. Clientelism-oriented politicians and the
oligarchic business interests supporting them were only too happy to fight such
proposals. These circumstances may be mirrored in other countries outside the
developed world. Learning about successful experiences of making party finance
reforms and disseminating this knowledge internationally could be an important
mechanism for encouraging programmatic politics. Facilitating collaboration among
national actors—a number of Ukrainian NGOs repeatedly raised the issue of public
funding for parties—can help change regulations and laws that govern party finance.
The ties of Ukrainian political parties with international party unions proved to provide
an important stimulus for thinking about party ideologies and about the need to develop
well-structured and stable ideological commitments. It is difficult to assess a
contribution that such ties make to the implementation of declared programmatic
principles into the actual day-to-day operation of parties in electoral and policymaking
arenas. Even limited benefits that such ideological cross-fertilization brings to party
ideological committees responsible for the quailty of party programmatic documents,
however, deserve attention. When international ties are intense and regular the benefits
might become more substantial.
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The Ukrainian case also highlights the importance of the broader legal and political
environment for achieving greater levels of programmaticity in a party system. How
parties act depends not only on the above listed institutions that directly determine
constraints and incentives for party politicians’ behaviour but also on the situation in
other domains such as the judicial system, the state bureaucracy and mass media. As
this paper reports, the recent changes in constitutional and parliamentary rules, which
restored old legislative coalitions and cabinet formation procedures and objectively
weakened political parties, were the product of politically motivated decisions by the
Constitutional Court. Policy efforts directed at fighting systemic corruption and
strengthening the autonomy of the judicial system, neutrality of bureaucracy, or
independence of mass media should be seen as making important contributions to the
entrenchment of a more programmatically oriented political process and to the
institutionalization of programmatic parties.
4.7 Bibliography
Birch, S. (2000). Elections and Democratization in Ukraine. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Birch, S. (2005). ‘Single-member district electoral systems and democratic transition’,
Electoral Studies, 24, 281–301.
D'Anieri, P. J. (2007). Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional
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5 Zambia
5.1 Introduction
In Zambia, there have been several fleeting moments when politics has become more
programmatic, but it is only since 2002 that an electorally successful form of populism
has emerged. Its rise has been not only remarkable, but significant for programmatic
politics elsewhere, because it has developed under conditions that other policy-based
parties have found inhospitable. Between 1991 and 2011, Zambia was governed by a
dominant party (Burnell 2002) surrounded by a fragmented, weak opposition
(Simutanyi 2005). Party labels were not useful as descriptors of party policies (Lebas
2011). Rather, parties were connected to voters through clientelistic exchanges; politics
was personal, ethnic and neo-patrimonial (Burnell 2001; Erdmann 2007; Posner 2006),
features that were interconnected and mutually reinforcing (Van de Walle 2003;
Manning 2005; Rakner and Van de Walle 2009). These characteristics can be found in
other cases in Africa and beyond.
The vehicle of programmatic politics since 2002 has been the Patriotic Front (PF). Led
by the canny veteran Michael Sata, the PF adopted a set of innovative strategies,
mobilizing both ethnic and urban constituencies, a practice that has resulted in the party
being categorized as ‘ethnopopulist’ in the literature (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011).
Employing this segmented voter strategy, Sata developed strong links to previously
untapped constituencies by articulating unsung grievances and developing policies that
respond to them—all of which enabled him to rise from the margins of political
relevance to become the Republican President of Zambia in just ten years. This
remarkable political innovation has broken the mould in Zambia’s Third Republic and
affirms the importance of leadership, as hypothesized by the International IDEA Desk
Review (Luna 2012).
The origins of the PF are significant because they have shaped the type of programmatic
politics that has emerged. The PF overcame barriers to party development in Zambia by
adopting provocative messages that galvanized urban support and by tapping into old
organizational networks and forms of popular protest that have their roots in the trade
union movement. Zambia’s new politics is thus rooted in its old politics. This allowed the
PF to overcome a range of obstacles to develop a programmatic platform, such as the
ruling party’s monopoly over clientelistic resources, but it also led it to use
uncompromising political rhetoric. The PF has responded to the mood on the street, and
relied upon its leader’s unmediated relationship with voters to gain support. While this
has helped it to develop programmatic linkages, it has stymied its programmatic
development in other ways. As the PF has grown in popularity, it has absorbed smaller
parties and party switchers, but this has diluted the coherence of the party and
stretched its under-developed structures to breaking point. Moreover, since 2001, Sata
has consolidated his electoral position without seeking to strengthen the party’s
organizational capacity; as a result, the PF remains a weak programmatic party (Luna
2012: 4).
Zambia offers important insights into how programmatic politics can emerge even in the
most unlikely of contexts. Policy-based politics emerged because an opposition party
responded to overlooked popular attitudes. The PF has blazed a trail that might be
picked by both politicians and policymakers, for there may be many other countries in
which the potential for programmatic politics has not been realized. However, the
development of the PF has not been matched by the development of a programmatic
party system. The lacklustre response of other parties to the challenge set out by the PF
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speaks of the failure of other parties to innovate, but also of the challenges that the way
in which their core constituencies place limits on programmatic development: in short,
many voters continue to expect ethnic appeals and clientelistic rewards. The Zambian
case suggests that donors and policymakers should consider how they can help to
develop the structures of new parties and guide the creation of not just programmatic
parties, but programmatically structured party systems.
5.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Zambia
Zambia was born of an independence struggle that galvanized large urban
constituencies into action and placed at the centre a narrative of nationalism and an
ideology of African socialism, called humanism in its Zambian incarnation. The United
National Independence Party (UNIP) that led the anti-colonial struggle (Mulford 1967)
won elections in 1964 and came to office with a strong party structure in high-density
areas (Cheeseman 2006: 112) and a clear agenda: the nationalization of key industries,
ambitious plans of state spending and careful ethnic balancing within state and party
institutions. However, this agenda was steadily supplemented by authoritarian
strategies to maintain power. Soon after, independence representatives of Bembaspeaking regions, notably the Copperbelt, Northern Province and Luapula Province,
complained of marginalization. They felt that their positions and benefits did not
satisfactorily reflect the critical role that they had played in the independence struggle.
Led by Simon Kapwepwe, Bemba politicians captured vital party positions at the 1967
UNIP party conference, but after Kaunda was seen to side with another faction they left
UNIP and formed the United Progressive Party (UPP). By leaving UNIP, they sparked a
wave of by-elections over the ‘vacant’ seats in 1971, which most UPP candidates lost, in
large part due to UNIP coercion. Although short-lived, the UPP critiqued the corruption
and waste of the UNIP government and articulated the sectional demands of the Bemba
constituency (Cheeseman 2006: 146). Fearing that the UPP would form an alliance with
other opposition parties, Kaunda moved to establish a one-party state in 1972. UNIP
subsequently sought to extend control by building corporate structures to control trade
unions and establishing centralized control of local government (Cheeseman 2006).
However, because UNIP party structures were largely unresponsive to local demands
and quickly lost sight of the party’s founding principles, the employment of
authoritarian measures to consolidate Kaunda’s grasp on power alienated voters and
resulted in a period of rapid decline.
After the prohibition of the UPP, the baton of opposition passed to the unions. Labour
has a long history of activity and protest in Zambia. The Zambian Copperbelt was a hub
of industrial mining and at independence their number had reached 102,000 (Lebas
2011: 83). As early as 1935, labour unions became important associations and foci of
political action. Waves of strikes in 1935 and 1940 extracted better wages from
employers. Following independence, labour unions grew increasingly belligerent,
demanding better living conditions. In an attempt to quell demands for unaffordable
wage increases, UNIP absorbed and took control of their organizational structures. A
new centralized Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) was formed in 1964,
designed to integrate urban workers into the ruling party, and in 1971 a one-union-persector policy was introduced, while union membership was made compulsory. This
system was intended to empower UNIP to channel labour demands and grievances, and
exert control over unions (Larmer 2011). However, rank-and-file union members
continued to assert their independence from the ruling party and to protest against
changes in public policy. During the mid-1970s, when Zambia’s terms of trade worsened
as copper prices collapsed and oil prices rose, mineworkers began to protest against
declining living standards. When labour leaders appeared to sell out to UNIP,
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mineworkers organized strikes independently, and resisted central control from the
grass roots and middle tiers of their organizations (Larmer 2007). In the 1980s, as a
currency crisis developed and economic fundamentals worsened, the government
administered two successive structural adjustment programmes that were met with
‘wildcat strikes’. They were followed by further strikes and widespread rioting, and
throughout the 1980s it was the unions that led national protest (Lebas 2011).
Urban unrest and deeply damaging economic adjustment precipitated the fall of UNIP.
The party’s erosion at grass-roots level meant that by the end of 1980s it had little
mobilizational power and struggled to retain the loyalty of many Zambians. In 1990, at
the Garden House Conference, a collection of intellectuals, trade unionists, businessmen
and turncoat UNIP members formed the Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD).
Although the party had little time to organize, and was at best a heterogeneous, loose
coalition (Phiri 2005), it benefited from popular discontent with the one-party regime
and upon the organizational base of the trade unions. ZCTU leader Frederick Chiluba
was appointed president of the MMD at the second party conference in 1991. From then
on, union infrastructure provided the backbone of the new party’s organization.
Following Kaunda’s decision to reintroduce multi-party elections in 1991, the MMD’s
effective campaign machine moved up a gear and capitalized on UNIP’s failure to resolve
economic and governance crises. The MMD won a landslide victory and captured 75.8
per cent of the vote in the presidential election and 125 of the 150 seats in the National
Assembly.
In power, President Chiluba faced a number of challenges. The MMD had been borne on
the back of popular discontent with Kaunda’s management of the economy and
structural adjustment programmes, but to cope with continuing economic crisis the new
government had no option but to pass further neo-liberal reforms (Rakner 2001). The
unpopularity of these measures compounded the MMD’s fear of losing power. Wary of a
UNIP revival, the MMD deployed an array of authoritarian tools to preserve their
dominance, including constitutional gerrymandering, the abuse of police powers,
violence and the misuse of state resources (Burnell 2002; Rakner 2003). These methods
were compounded by internal infighting (Momba 2003), which led to UNIP’s decline.
However, a series of other parties emerged, chiefly the United Party of National
Development (UPDN). In 2000 to 2001, Frederick Chiluba made an unsuccessful attempt
to change the party and republican constitutions and run for a third term as president.
The bid was disputed bitterly within the MMD, and in the process 27 MPs were expelled
from the party in 2000 and 2001 (Paget 2010), followed by others who resigned and
joined the opposition, forming the Heritage Party (HP), the Forum for Democracy and
Development (FDD) and the Zambian Republican Party9 (ZRP). Chiluba chose to appoint
a weak candidate as MMD presidential candidate, Levy Mwanawasa (Paget 2010). In
doing so, he overlooked Party Secretary Michael Sata, who left the party and formed the
PF.
Together, this array of parties created a crowded, fragmented political opposition. The
MMD won the 2001 election, but Mwanawasa secured only 29 per cent of the vote—a
lead of only two per cent over the UPND. By the time of the 2006 general election, the
MMD had consolidated its support base. MMD reclaimed much of Western Province in
2006 by bringing back critical former members, winning 13 of the 17 seats there, in
contrast to the three seats they won in 2001, and drove UNIP out of Eastern Province,
securing 15 of the 19 of the available seats by drawing into the fold old UNIP members,
including Rupiah Banda. The return of former MMD members from FDD, UPND and HP
The Republican Party had been formed after an earlier fallout that saw Benjamin Mwila leave
the MMD in the year 2000.
9
107
was critical to the recovery of the party and its change in support. These ‘homecomings’
were made possible by an internal power struggle within the MMD which saw former
president Chiluba and many of his allies driven from the party by the Mwanawasa.
Chiluba’s departure removed the main barrier to the return of these old members, but in
doing so cost the MMD other constituencies. MMD support fell in Chiluba’s heartland,
the Bemba-speaking Copperbelt, Northern and Luapula Provinces. Dramatic changes
also occurred in the support base of other parties. After the death of the UPND leader in
2004, the party suffered from a painful split and lost support outside its Southern
Province stronghold. There was also significant volatility in the fortunes of other parties.
UPND and FDD took Lusaka in 2001, but lost it in 2006. Together, these changes made
for a highly fluid party system, centred on a ruling party that used its position as
incumbent to ensure its continued electoral viability, and a divided opposition made up
by parties that lacked the organizational integrity or party unity to avert factionalism,
especially in the context of solicitations from the ruling party.
Figure 5: Zambian Presidential Election Results, 2001–2011
Source: African Elections Database, http://africanelections.tripod.com/zm.html,
accessed 24 September 2011.
One of the least noted opposition parties in the 2001 elections was the PF, which
received only three per cent of the vote, most of which was concentrated in the
Copperbelt area, home to many Bemba speakers of Sata’s ethnic group. Following the
poor showing in the 2001 elections, Sata began to hold rallies, which was seen as
unusual (Katele 2010) given that national elections were four years away. However, it
soon emerged that Sata was using these rallies to take advantage of the MMD’s ailing
support in Bemba-speaking regions between 2002 and 2006. During this period the PF
leader drew upon his time as a man-of-action city administrator in Lusaka and honed a
performance style that spoke to the grievances of the poor and those dissatisfied with
government performance. From this point on the PF quickly emerged as a major force in
Zambian politics. Having only secured one MP in 2002, Sata gained 29 per cent of the
presidential vote in 2006, trailing Mwanawasa by just 14 per cent—the best
performance by an opposition party. At this point, the PF’s voter base was centred in the
Bemba-speaking provinces, where they won 37 of the 57 parliamentary seats, and
108
Lusaka, where the PF took seven of the 12 seats. In the 2008 presidential by-election
that followed the death of Levy Mwanawasa, Sata secured 38 per cent of the poll, losing
by just two per cent to the MMD’s Rupiah Banda. In the 2011 presidential election, Sata
once again expanded his support base and won a remarkable victory, scooping 43 per
cent of the poll10, the highest vote received by one candidate since 1996 (figure 4).
5.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties
In the Third Republic, the political struggles described in section 5.2 did not translate
into policy agendas that parties employed to connect to voters until the mid-2000s. With
few exceptions, parties mobilized using other strategies, and did not represent party
members with cohesive policy preferences—and most still fit this characterization.
However, the emergence of the PF marked a notable departure from this norm. The
similarities between Sata’s narrative of MMD failure and the desires of the PF’s support
base suggest that there are programmatic linkages between the PF and its supporters.
However, unbundled, the different ways in which the PF’s mobilization strategies are
segmented geographically reveals a more complicated picture. Moreover, the PF has low
levels of party cohesion and policymaking capacities. Consequently, though the PF
employs some programmatic strategies, it is best described as a weak programmatic
party (Luna 2012: 4) that benefits from a mixture of programmatic and nonprogrammatic support.
In Zambia, many moments of political conflict have been decidedly programmatic. In
addition to UNIP’s nationalist campaign and the struggle of the UPP to represent
mounting frustration among workers and the poor at the emergence of a bureaucratic
bourgeoisie parasitic on the state, the MMD won a landslide victory in 1991 because of
mass frustration with the poor governance and desperate economic conditions that had
epitomized the one-party state (Rakner 2003). In 2001, the breakaway of MPs from the
MMD and the formation of the FDD and HP resulted in part from internal conflict within
the ruling party over Chiluba’s bid for an unconstitutional third term. Although personal
ambition affected whether leaders came out for or against Chiluba (Burnell 2001),
ideological objections to the subversion of the constitution played a crucial role in
galvanizing opposition (Paget 2010), as did the efforts of a high-powered civil society
campaign coordinated by the Oasis Forum (VonDoepp 2005). In each of these political
struggles, political competition focused on public goods, with parties often competing to
demonstrate a greater credibility in the provision of valence goods such as economic
growth and reduced corruption.
However, in none of these instances did voter mobilization become consistently based
around these issues. After taking power in 1991, both the MMD and opposition parties
chose to mobilize on personalistic, clientelistic or ethnic campaigns. The very high rate
of party switching amongst both MPs and entire party branches (Burnell 2001; Lebas
2011; Kalaluka 2011) is a good indicator of the low value assigned to party labels and
the irrelevance of individual commitment to the values of a particular party (Lebas
2011). Insofar as the two major parties in 2001 had programmatic bases, they were neoliberal ones that focused on the generation of business-friendly environments and
privatization (Simutanyi 2005; Rakner 2003) Yet both of these platforms were
remarkably out of kilter with popular policymaking preferences at the time. As
Afrobarometer data presented later in this paper illustrates, there is overwhelming
consensus in Zambia of the need for the state to play a leading role in development and
the regulation of the private sector which contrasts with the programme that the MMD
was pursuing at the time.
10
Based on results from 143 of 150 constituencies, pending complete results.
109
Indeed, even the PF did not mobilize on popular appeals in 2001. Instead, the party’s
manifesto was economically liberal and promised to cut taxes and focused on prudent
financial management (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 626). The base of the party, moreover,
was geographically concentrated. The PF only won substantial votes in the Copperbelt,
and was described by Scarritt (2006) as a ‘potentially ethnic party’. Somewhat
surprisingly, in the 2001 election no party effectively sought to represent the more
‘leftist’ views of urban workers and the majority of ordinary Zambians.
However, after the 2001 election, the PF began a process of political learning
(Cheeseman and Ford 2011). Sata realized that votes could be captured by speaking to
the grievances of large, impoverished constituencies, who believed that their needs had
not been met by past or present MMD governments. In doing so, Sata benefited from the
experience of working with former President Chiluba, perhaps the only other Zambian
of that political generation that effectively employed a populist style of mobilization,
although less systematically so. In the run-up to the 2006 polls, the PF began to
articulate a vision of a more proactive role for the state in the economy. Sata promised
that, it elected, he would make ‘Zambia for Zambians’, ensure that 49 per cent of
privatized companies remain in Zambian hands, and promised that 25 per cent of these
companies would be allocated to workers (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 627). Sata
connected the role of the state in the economy to the illegitimate collusion between
corrupt politicians and international business, and portrayed himself as a man that
could use state power to upset this status quo. Encouraged by positive responses to his
message on the ground, as the elections neared he mounted a campaign against
irresponsible foreign, and especially Chinese, business in Zambia. In particular, Sata
criticized Chinese businesses for entering markets that should be reserved ‘for
Zambians’ (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 627), was outspoken on the conduct of the Chinese
Non-Ferrous Metal Corporation after protesting workers were fired upon (Fraser and
Lungu 2009) and accused the Chinese embassy of financing of the MMD. By portraying
the relationship between the Chinese and the MMD as the cause of Zambian problems,
the PF was able to portray Sata as the defender of Zambian interests (Fraser and Larmer
2007).
In summary, Sata’s programmatic agenda:
1. was in favour of state intervention to support low-income households and
reduce inequality;
2. supported trade unions and better working conditions for workers, especially in
the mining sector;
3. was nationalistic, and to this end supportive of a unifying ‘Zambian’ identity
rather than a set of sub-national ethnic identities;
4. emphasized practical action and the integrity of state officials;
5. was in favour of self-sufficiency in relation to western donors and the
IMF/World Bank; and
6. advocated enforcing tough standards on foreign countries and companies that
wish to do business in Zambia, most notably, but not limited to, the Chinese.
Significantly, Afrobarometer data suggests that it was precisely these policy positions
that motivated Zambians to vote for him. Using survey data collected in 2009,
Cheeseman and Ford show that supporters of the PF were more likely to believe that the
economic reforms introduced by the MMD had hurt most Zambians and were more
likely to rate the MMD’s economic policies poorly. In addition, 83 per cent of PF
supporters are of the opinion that the government should control the sale of copper
(2011: 14). These beliefs sit comfortably within the PF’s critique of the MMD’s neoliberal agenda. Moreover, Cheeseman and Ford find that supporters of the PF were more
110
likely to distrust Zambian state institutions and to perceive Zambian state institutions to
be corrupt (2011: 14), which is consistent with the PF’s attack on the widespread
corruption of the MMD. The consistent support for the PF from key constituencies in
Lusaka and the Bemba-speaking provinces in the 2006, 2008 and 2011 elections, and
the close match between the party’s agenda and its supporters’ beliefs, provides strong
evidence that Sata effectively created programmatic linkages to the electorate.
However, despite this the PF has also been reliant on Sata’s personal appeal to
communicate its message to voters. The party’s use of large rallies to reach voters—
necessary because of the PF’s lack of funds and state control of mass media—has
underlined the personal link between the PF leader and certain constituencies, at the
expense of the party itself. As a result, the linkages the PF has formed have been partly
charismatic. Sata’s reputation as a direct, no-nonsense man of action willing to stick up
for the little guy has given the party’s programmatic appeals credibility.
It is the powerful combination of Sata’s effective campaigning and well-designed
programmatic appeals that enabled the PF to establish an electoral base despite the
notable segmentation of PF support. Cheeseman and Hinfelaar (2010) present statistical
data showing that voters in urban and peri-urban areas are more likely to vote for the
PF. However, Bemba-speaking voters are also more likely to vote for the PF in rural
areas partially because there is a greater propensity for Bemba speakers to hold the key
beliefs identified above that align with PF policies (Cheeseman and Ford 2011: 13). The
PF thus reaches two segmented core constituencies, one urban and populist, and
another rural and Bemba, but reaches both with a partially coherent message.
Consequently, the PF is an ethno-populist party (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011). Under
the terms set out in Section 1.2, the PF is also an ethnic–programmatic party.
While the PF employs programmatic linkages, it is not a fully programmatic party. The
PF does not have organizational structures that can diffuse these programmatic
preferences within the party, reproduce them, and police their communication and
pursuit. Several commentators have described the PF’s internal organization as informal
(Fraser and Larmer 2007) or weak (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011). The PF therefore has
programmatic linkages but limited organizational capacity to reproduce and pursue
those goals, which makes it a weak programmatic party.
Although Sata has only been in power for three months at the time of writing, the PF’s
performance to date is consistent with this assessment. So far, the party has
demonstrated a commitment to programmatic goals, but one that has had to be adapted
to deal with the reality of managing an underdeveloped and fragile economy. In the first
weeks of office, the minister for mines advocated a windfall tax (Silwamba 2011) and
the acquirement of 35 per cent state ownership of mining companies (Chisala 2011). At
the time of writing, these policy suggestions have been reversed, and the Sata
administration has only adopted modest fiscal measures that are redistributive and
focus on the mining sector. Sata’s rhetoric against Chinese investors has also been scaled
back. Just over a month into his presidency, Sata dispatched first president Kenneth
Kaunda as a special envoy to China in order to repair relations (Lusaka Times 2011).
Given the weakness of the party’s organization and the consequent lack of
institutionalization of programmatic strategies, there is also the danger that over time
the PF will suffer from policy drift and will end up as a ‘policy switcher’ party that
disappoints its supporters by failing to deliver on its promises.
111
Table 9: Zambian Party Profiles
Party name
Party organization
Party linkages
Party type
Patriotic Front
Weak party organization.
Low policymaking capacity.
Little internal democracy.
Connected to strong local
networks.
Blend of programmatic,
charismatic and ethnic
linkages, principally to
urban and peri-urban
areas, and Bemba.
Weak
programmatic
party.
Movement for
Multiparty
Democracy
Limited party organization.
Low policymaking capacity.
A history of combative
internal politics. Falling
grass-roots support.
Ethnic, clientelistic,
charismatic linkages, in
predominantly rural areas.
Clientelistic
party.
United Party
for National
Development
Mediocre party organization.
Low policymaking capacity.
Lacklustre internal
democracy since a decisive
party split in 2005.
Ethnic, clientelistic,
charismatic linkages,
principally from Lozi and
Tonga speakers in
Southern, Western and
Central Provinces.
Ethno-regional
party.
5.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics
In the past, programmatic parties had not developed in Zambia. The choices made by
opposition and incumbent party leaders together created a party system in which the
governing party was dominant, the opposition was fragmented, and parties had strong
clientelistic and ethnic mobilization networks but weak partisan reputations. The PF
emerged when realignments in this party system generated multiple unrepresented
constituencies. Internal MMD conflicts left Bemba constituencies feeling excluded,
constituencies that provided a convenient stepping stone to a wider programmatic
agenda. However, the rapid expansion of the PF has created strains on the party that
have stretched its thin organization and weakened its programmatic base.
The challenge of clientelism
Since the foundation of the Third Republic, a series of mutually reinforcing mechanisms
have impeded the development of programmatic politics. First, dominant incumbent
parties in neo-patrimonial, electoral–authoritarian states have few reasons to develop
programmatic appeals. The MMD was able to control the development of the opposition
by harassing and co-opting its members. It also divided the PF in 2008 by forming a
constitutional assembly in which some ‘rebel’ PF members sat, despite instructions to
the contrary from the party leadership, and undermined opposition unity by interfering
in the elite alliances between the PF and UPND in 2006 and 2008 (Scott 2009; Mwaanga
2010). By doing so, the ruling MMD kept the opposition weak, divided and incapable of
developing effective programmatic appeals. Their continual electoral dominance in the
1990s permitted the MMD to let their programmatic reputation and organizational
structures decay (Lebas 2011). Although there is evidence that the MMD repositioned
itself in response to popular PF proposals (Cheeseman and Hinfelaar 2010), the MMD
has been relying extensively on state resources (Mulikita 2010) to underwrite
clientelistic methods of mobilization.
Concordantly, in electoral authoritarian states, opposition parties are incentivized to
adopt short-term strategies that shore up support in electoral heartlands, rather than
112
developing wide-reaching programmatic appeals (Rakner and Van de Walle 2009).
Given the low chances of winning elections outright, opposition politicians can best
maximize their influence and consequent rewards by seeking to become the dominant
brokers between larger political parties and their own regions, and can maximize their
individual profiles by becoming heads of their own parties (Cooper 2010). In contexts in
which the political salience of ethnicity is high, this is best achieved by developing
ethno-regional appeals and entering into powerful patron–client networks—strategies
that marginalize party labels and organizations.
In Kenya, the executive chose to consolidate power by developing a network of strong
ethnic brokers as early as the 1960s (Cheeseman 2006: 160). Small ethno-regional
constituencies, in turn, were left out in the cold and lost out in allocations of resources.
Since multiparty elections were convened in 1992, Kenyan elites have consistently
chosen to leave parties in order to consolidate core ethnic constituencies (Elischer
2008). Such strategies are evident in Zambia, where there were 28 registered parties in
2003 (Simutanyi 2005). In particular, the division of MMD defectors in 2001, between
the FDD, UPND and HP, represented a moment at which politicians chose fragmentation
over consolidation.
The barriers to programmatic development, moreover, are underpinned by structural
factors in rural constituencies. Levels of education are noticeably lower in rural areas
compared to urban areas (Chapoto et al 2011). This has significant implications for the
quality of information that individuals receive and their ability to process it critically.
Whereas 75 per cent of urban respondents listen to radio news at least several times a
week, only 56 per cent of rural respondents do (Afrobarometer 2010). Equally, as
expenditure focused on rural areas represents a small proportion of total government
spending (Akroyd and Smith 2007), and rural poverty is higher (Chapoto et al 2011),
rural citizens are more receptive to patron–client exchanges.
The literature is unclear about the extent and form of neo-patrimonial social structures
in Zambia. While the access of public officials to state funds is well documented (Van
Donge 2008), the forms of clientelism employed in rural areas, and the reliance upon
chiefs, MPs and informal structures, is a topic of ongoing research. However, it is clear
that non-programmatic parties have consistently secured rural support while struggling
to mobilize in urban areas. By 2001, the MMD had lost support in Lusaka and urban
areas (Fraser and Larmer 2006) and by 2006 the party had become heavily reliant on
the rural vote to fend off the challenge posed by the PF and Sata. Moreover, the
geographical distribution of votes suggests that ethnicity plays an important role in
structuring political behaviour (Owei-Hwedie 1998).
Overall, clientelism and patterns of ethnic mobilization in Zambia have led to weak,
small opposition parties doomed to opposition or dependent upon the ruling party
(Simutanyi 2008). These choices by incumbent and opposition parties led to high rates
of party switching, especially between opposition parties and the MMD, which in turn
has undermined party labels and reputations (Tavits 2007; Lebas 2011). These
characteristics of parties and party systems have been observed elsewhere. Political
parties in Africa have been typically described as ethnic (Erdmann 2004; Horowitz
1985), in possession of weak organizational structures, noninstitutionalized, clientelistic
and non-programmatic (Erdmann 2004; Salih 2003; Carothers 2006; Van de Walle
2003; Basedau and Stroh 2008; Carbone 2007); while party systems are often
cauterized as featuring a dominant party and a fragmented and weak opposition (Van de
Walle 2003; Manning 2005; Rakner and Van de Walle 2009). Together, these
mechanisms have generally worked to impede the development of programmatic
parties.
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Structural determinants of programmatic politics
The rise of an ethnic–programmatic party within such a party system can only be
explained with reference to the ability of the PF to harness the support of Zambia’s
urban workers and the importance of the labour movement to political change.
Organized labour and mineworkers have been a consistent source of radical politics in
Zambia. As early as the 1930s, trade unions were popular vehicles for worker demands
against mining companies on the Copperbelt. Such was the strength of unions that the
wage bill for African mineworkers in Zambia doubled between 1950 and 1954, despite
an increase in the labour force of just seven per cent (Lebas 2011: 82). By the late
colonial period unionized workers had voted to abandon ‘tribal’ forms of
representation, asserting their ‘class’ interests (Larmer 2007; Ferguson 1999).
This dynamic continued after independence, as union members continued to campaign
for better working conditions. When UNIP sought to use security forces to monitor and
control unions in the 1980s, miners used their control of mining sites, and physical force
to resist (Larmer 2006: 300). When radical union leaders were expelled from the ZCTU
by UNIP, mineworkers went on strike until they secured their reinstatement. This
culture of aggressive urban politics (Larmer 2007) created a potent base for potential
populist politics that appealed to nation-regarding partisan issues, and which reached
beyond ethno-regional lines.
Along with this history of urban radicalism, continued economic decline in the 1990s
and the unequal distribution of growth in the 2000s helped to spread and sustain a
desire for an interventionist state, a role for the state that UNIP carved out and
exemplified in their 27 years of rule. Despite this, between 1991 and 2001, public
spending was scaled back and key assets were privatized. Consequently, formal sector
employment fell, the industrial sector shrank and poverty in Zambia increased (Fraser
and Larmer 2007). Zambia’s score in the Human Development Index declined in
absolute terms from 0.462 in 1990 to 0.345 in 2000. Although it began to recover
thereafter and reached 0.395 in 2010, the general trend was downward. Consequently,
although economic growth averaged 5.3 per cent between 2001 and 2010, many became
discontented with government policy. The negative impact of policies in the Third
Republic is reflected in popular opinion surveys. The Afrobarometer Survey of 2009
found that between 74 and 90 per cent of respondents rated the government’s
performance on a collection of economic issues negatively (Cheeseman and Ford 2011:
9). This resounding dissatisfaction with economic policies was matched by policy
preferences that resonate with union demands and a large role for the state in
policymaking. Between 60 and 80 per cent of Zambians surveyed in the Afrobarometer
believe that the government should be solely responsible for providing most resources,
including control of copper, a critical Zambian industry (75 per cent), and agricultural
credit (77 per cent) (Cheeseman and Ford 2011: 9). Eighty per cent believe that the
government should run key enterprises.
This culture of aggressive urban politics and dissatisfaction with government policy
(Larmer 2007) created a potent base for potential populist politics that appealed to
nation-regarding partisan issues, and which reached beyond ethno-regional lines.
Weyland (2001) offers a definition of populism that is transferable between cases, in
which populism is a mobilization strategy by a personalized party that is multi-class or
ethnic but has an urban base and connects the party leader directly to voters (Weyland
2001). Moreover, Fraser and Larmer (2007: 613) argue that the ‘logic of articulation’
employed by Sata connects the PF to a particular form of populism conceptualized by
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Laclau, whereby the populist describes a ‘people’ with legitimate demand that are
frustrated by the illegitimate actions of a group of actors that form the status quo.
Sata recognized that a populist appeal would be most effective if he could find a set of
enemies to mobilize voters’ frustrations against, and so he directed criticism at
international, and especially Chinese, investors. In the 2000s, a boom in the price of
copper generated high returns for mining companies, but this little benefited the
Zambian treasury as a result of the favourable deals that had been offered to companies
in order to persuade them to invest in Zambia back when copper prices were lower.
Chinese mine investors developed a (sometimes exaggerated) reputation for treating
their workers poorly, paying lower average wages, and neglecting workers’ rights
(Fraser and Lungu 2009). These grievances were compounded by high-profile images of
Chinese managerial negligence such as an explosion at a Chinese-owned factory in
which 46 Zambian were killed (Mwanawina 2008: 9). Protests that culminated in
Chinese managers shooting Zambians at Chambishi Mine in 2008 and at Collum Coal
Mine (Lombe, Silwamba & Chanda 2010) exacerbated anti-Chinese sentiment.
Sata played on the public mood, adopting a populist strategy that spoke to widespread
grievances by arguing that the MMD and international investors, especially Chinese
investors, were ‘the powerful’, while the PF was on the side of the ordinary struggling
Zambian. This approach, which effectively established a non-ethnic ‘them and us’
cleavage within Zambian politics, proved remarkably effective at mobilizing a crossethnic support base. By adopting a policy-based approach to policies that specifically
addressed economic issues, the PF diverted energies that might have gone into creating
an ethnic base into a civic appeal. By tapping into a culture of protest that lies in mining
areas, the PF connected itself to a confrontational mode of politics that prevented
compromise or co-optation with the ruling party, and so blunted the impact of
clientelistic practices.
Contingency and the role of leadership
The constituencies that the PF set out to mobilize had become available as a result of a
fortuitous set of circumstances amid the many realignments in Zambian politics in the
2000s. Given this, the rise of the PF cannot be explained by the absence of a discussion
of contingent factors and the ability of leaders—in this case Sata—to take advantage of
unexpected political change. After the election of President Mwanawasa in 2001, the
MMD was wracked by a brief struggle for control (Paget 2010). Mwanawasa, the
republican president, sought to free himself of the influence of the party president and
former republican president, Chiluba. Mwanawasa’s executive powers won the day, and
Chiluba and his key allies were not only forced from key positions in the party, but were
made the targets of an Anti-Corruption Commission. Many of the leaders caught up in
these proceedings were Bemba and had developed support in important Bemba
constituencies, notably in the Copperbelt, Northern Province and Luapula Province.
When they were imprisoned or ‘retired’ into the diplomatic service, their support base
in these constituencies was left unclaimed. Significantly, these constituencies were those
in which a populist would be most likely to win because they lie in areas with a history
of urban radicalism. Bemba speakers are more likely than those of any other ethnic
group to rate the MMD’s economic policies negatively, to distrust state institutions and
to favour state intervention in the economy (Cheeseman and Ford 2011).
In 2002, Sata faced a recruitment problem. PF senior party staff, when interviewed,
described the difficulty of finding and training MP candidates between 2002 and 2006
(Scott and Kabimba 2009). In the 2001 election, the PF had returned only one MP.
Although the internal conflict within the MMD had driven many senior allies of Chiluba
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from the party, Mwanawasa’s effective management of the conflict had not provided a
pool of defective sitting MPs that could be easily approached. Moreover, in the 2006
elections the PF only managed to field candidates in a small number of constituencies;
by contrast, a rival opposition alliance, the United Democratic Alliance (UDA), fielded
candidates in almost every constituency in Zambia (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 625). The
challenge of recruiting possible MP candidates was further exacerbated by the poor
reputation of the party, which faced Sata with a catch-22 situation. Given their low
standing in the 2001 tripartite elections, the PF could not convince potential candidates
to join the party, or voters to support them, until others saw the PF as a viable
opposition party. Equally, unless the party could recruit credible candidates, it was
impossible for Sata to project this image of the party. This problem was compounded by
the fact that by 2002, Zambia’s party system was saturated with young opposition
parties, some of which threatened to lay claim to the Bemba-speaking constituencies
that Sata had begun to mobilize in 2001.
Michael Sata responded to this challenge in two main ways that demonstrate the
significance of individual leaders to the evolution of programmatic parties. First, he used
large rallies and mass media to build his profile and project himself as key politician in
the area (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 630). Sata was able to draw upon his history as
Governor of Lusaka, when he led a march against IMF-imposed structural adjustment
programmes (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 624). Radio broadcasts allowed Sata to reach
constituencies that would otherwise remain distant to election campaigns at a low cost.
Sata’s caustic and plain-speaking oratory style, which earned him the nickname ‘King
Cobra’, caught on quickly through these media. These strategies enabled Sata to
circumvent his fledgling organizational base by speaking to voters directly; he thereby
reached large constituencies before his competitors could. In doing so, he developed a
mobilization strategy that depended upon his personality and his charismatic appeal to
voters. More than any other party considered in this study, the PF rose on the back of its
leader’s popularity.
Second, Sata drew on the same networks that he had developed during his tenure as
Party Secretary of the MMD. At the same time, Chiluba, keen to destabilize the
Mwanawasa government that had brought charges of corruption against him, helped
Sata to connect to a further set of organizational networks that included former union
networks (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 625). As a result, the same networks that had
provided support for the MMD in the late 1980s were now employed by the PF, who
gained access to local resources and channels of information. This allowed Sata to reach
grass-root supporters without constructing a formal or well-structured party
organization.
A secondary challenge for Sata was how to marry the more ‘ethnic’ support base that the
PF had appealed to in 2001 to the more ‘programmatic’ base that the party developed in
the run up to the 2006 polls. As described above, Bemba-speaking voters are more likely
to share the policy attitudes of urban voters. These connections formed a bridge that
allowed Sata to extend and maintain an ethnically focused appeal while preserving his
reputation as a national politician. In Zambia, purely populist constituencies represent a
limited proportion of the vote. In 2008, there were only 13 urban constituencies, and 39
peri-urban ones (Cheeseman and Hinfelaar 2010: 22), representing just over a third of
all constituencies, and so Sata could not have won the 2011 election on ‘programmatic’
support alone. Because Bemba speakers were particularly open to populist appeals, he
didn’t have to; rather, he could mobilize rural-Bemba and urban dwellers under one
coherent campaign.
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Institutional landscape
The Desk Review (Luna 2012: 44) found that electoral system choices had no effect on
the emergence of programmatic politics. The evidence from Zambia supports this
conclusion. Zambia has a president who is voted for in a single-round election, with a
single member district (SMD) electoral system for the National Assembly. Other things
being equal, both features should create barriers to the emergence of new parties
(Tavits 2007) and so prevent the emergence of programmatic politics in nonprogrammatic systems. However, the PF represents a powerful counterfactual to this
hypothesis, reflecting the marginal importance of electoral systems compared to other
factors in the Zambian case. While SMD electoral systems prevent parties gaining seats if
their vote share is geographically disbursed, in Zambia many support groups are
clustered in particular regions, with the effect that parties that tap these constituencies
can return MPs at much the same rate as they would under a proportional system.
Moreover, while Zambia’s electoral system should discriminate against new parties the
fluidity of the Zambian party system meant that there were frequently unclaimed
constituencies that young parties could seek to mobilize. Indeed, it was the deep
fragmentation of the opposition that enabled the PF to leapfrog the UPND—which
gained 27 per cent of the vote in 2001—to become the leading opposition party in the
2006 polls.
Internal party organization and party building
Many comparative studies suggest that internal organization (Luna 2012: 4) and
internal democracy (Lebas 2011) promote programmaticity. However, in Zambia, the
path of programmatic development has relied upon, and reinforced, internal party
disorganization. Sata’s ethno-populist mobilization strategy was centred upon his
personal performance. The centrality of a party leader to party popularity endows that
leader with power (Weyland 2001), and creates personalized parties; it is therefore
unsurprising that the PF’s mobilizing strategy has been based on a limited party
organization (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011: 11). Moreover, the expansion of PF support
after 2008 was based on rapid gains beyond the PF’s two core constituencies. These
advances relied on ad hoc organizational structures and local intermediaries.
Consequently, the organizational integrity of the party, and the coherence of its
message, was further stretched.
A second trend also threatened to undermine the PF’s unity. As the 2011 general
elections approached, the rate of party switching increased sharply. A number of
current or retired leaders from the MMD and civil society joined the PF, some of whom
went on to take up positions in the first PF cabinet. The rapid changes in the party’s
leadership strained the cohesion of elite relations as new and established personalities
clashed. In some areas, these elite defections were mirrored by the defection of whole
party branches of the MMD and UPND to PF (and in some cases, the defection of some
party branches of the PF to other parties). The integration of new branches into the
party further diluted the strength of the party’s programmatic values.
The lack of funding for political parties only serves to compound this problem. In
Zambia, there is no public funding of political parties. Parties are financed by a collection
of MP contributions and discrete, secretive supporters (Mulikita 2010), which may have
included foreign businesses, and in the case of the PF in 2006, Taiwan (Fraser and
Larmer 2007: 628). This put considerable constraints on party capacity. The PF’s vicepresident explained that one of the reasons that a party conference was not held before
2011 was that the cost involved in convening one was prohibitive (Scott 2010). In the
absence of a national convention, there was no way that the party leadership could
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systematically educate and discipline activists and members. From 2001–10 the PF only
made limited gains in party resource as its candidates won local government positions.
As the party took hold of local councils, it gained a stronger footing in nearby
constituencies. However, given the speed of the PF’s rise, and the centralized form of
Zambian governance, even this made only a limited impact on the party’s fortunes.
The experience of the PF therefore demonstrates that parties can become programmatic
without becoming institutionalized. Party institutionalization as defined by Randall and
Svasand (2002) includes two dimensions regarding the rest of the polity—decisional
autonomy vis-à-vis other societal actors and reification (the party’s establishment in the
public imagination)—and two internal dimensions: value infusion and systemness. The
discussion above makes clear that the PF was not institutionalized internally, even
though its vote share began to stabilize by 2011. As a consequence, the PF in opposition
and in government was not rooted to its policies by any internal mechanisms, and nor
was there cohesion between the party’s members about the best policy agenda to
pursue in office.
Programmaticity at the party-system level
The Desk Review also hypothesizes that stability of voting patterns is a necessary
precondition of programmatic linkages, because only with stability can party
reputations crystallize and linkages consolidate. However, the rise of the PF shows that
programmatic linkages can emerge very quickly. The PF galvanized programmatic
support between 2002 and 2006, and extended it between 2007 and 2011. Moreover, as
Scott has noted, the rise of the PF contributed to the recentralization of the Zambian
party system (2009). From a fragmented and volatile multi-party system in 2001,
Zambian politics has become much more stable and predictable in the late 2000s. The
programmatic appeal of the PF allowed it to reach out to a large constituency that other
parties had failed to mobilize, effectively blocking the expansion of other smaller parties
that were pushing more sectional appeals. Along with the continued ability of the UPND
to rally its homelands of Southern Province, and the MMD to manipulate its control of
the state to sustain its support, this supported the consolidation of a three-party system.
Should this process of party system institutionalization continue following the PF’s rise
to power, Zambia would represent a case in which programmatic development
promoted institutionalization; the opposite relationship to that suggested by Luna
(2012).
Although there are signs that the Zambian party system is institutionalizing, it is not yet
showing signs of becoming fully programmatic. Unlike Brazil, the growth and electoral
success of a programmatic party has not induced ‘contagion from the left’. In part, the
absence of contagion was due to the MMD’s reliance upon rural constituencies which
affected the cost–benefit calculus of developing a programmatic platform on which to
mobilize support. In power, the MMD had little to gain in core and swing constituencies
by developing a more policy-based platform—its core areas of support were unlikely to
respond to a programmatic message and the party lacked the credibility to change tack
so quickly. Indeed, the MMD’s opportunities to change its image were impaired by its
limited influence over public opinion in the face of opposition from civil society. Several
civil society actors, including The Post newspaper, Citizens Forum, Transparency
International Zambia and a string of outspoken church members turned on MMD by
2009. In the light of the caustic campaign that these actors launched against the MMD,
the party gained a reputation for corruption that was hard to shift; a reputation
enhanced by a legacy left behind by the Chiluba presidency (Van Donge 2009).
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But the absence of contagion in Zambia also reflected the fact that the country did not
experience a transfer of power until 2011. This meant that it was not so clearly
important for the PF’s rivals to develop their own policy-based approaches, as in Brazil.
At the same time, because the MMD did not experience life as an opposition party prior
to 2011, it has never been forced to contemplate how to compete with the PF in the
absence of the advantages of incumbency. Yet for the next set of tripartite elections in
2016, the MMD will be forced to operate without state resources and so will struggle to
mount an effective clientelistic campaign. In order to reduce their campaign costs, they
may well seek cheaper mobilization techniques and hence invest in a more cohesive
policy platform. There is some evidence that the MMD is likely to adopt this strategy:
while in government the MMD announced plans to implement a windfall tax on mining
profits and reduce popular taxes in a limited but clear attempt to head off the rise of the
PF.
At the time of writing, two main pathways appear to be open in Zambia. First, the PF
could slowly institutionalize its programmatic commitments, inspiring rival parties to
do the same, leading to a gradual process of contagion. Second, the PF could prove to be
unstable and move away from its commitments on economic issues in favour of
misusing state resources to maintain power. If the party were to follow this path it
would make it extremely difficult for opposition parties to mount an effective challenge
in the short-term, but in the long-term the PF would also struggle to maintain its
programmatic support. These voters would then become available for new
programmatic policies to mobilize against the ruling party, in much the same way that
the PF took over many of the constituencies that had originally supported the MMD. In
other words, if Zambia goes down this second pathway, political competition would be
characterized by continual electoral volatility, with spells of programmatic development
and then backsliding. Significantly, which path the country takes will depend on how the
PF evolves as a party of government, highlighting the significance of changes at the party
level for the consolidation of programmatic party systems.
In the mid-2000s, Sata was presented with an opportunity to mobilize a support base
that was simultaneously urban and rural, ethnic and populist. As we have seen, the
timing of the opportunity, the fragmentation of the party system and the existence of
former trade union and MMD branches that could be activated by Sata to quickly mount
a campaign were all critical to the success of the PF, but also left the party leader-centric.
As the PF has grown, however, the trappings of this leader-centric party model and its
rapid expansion have held its programmatic character back. In the future, this expansion
may derail the trajectory of the party and with it the prospects for a more programmatic
party system.
5.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics
Despite increased political competition and the emergence of the PF, there have been
few signs of change in terms of economic, political and social outcomes thus far. For
example, although the PF set out an appealing narrative that linked poor economic
policy to collusion and corruption, the misuse of state funds has not abated. Indeed,
toward the end of MMD rule corruption once again became a major governance issue.
After evidence of widespread corruption within the Zambian Ministry of Health in 2009,
Dutch, Canadian, and Swedish donors suspended aid, followed by the Global Fund for
HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Zambia Watchdog 2010; Saluzeki 2010).
The MMD’s capacity to respond to these crises has been undermined by the weakness of
the Banda presidency and the party’s methods of political mobilization. Banda began
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with a relatively weak base within the party, and only secured the MMD presidential
candidacy through the support of members of the party elite (Cheeseman and Hinfelaar
2010). As a result, he is indebted to corrupt elements that are tainted by their
association with the regime of President Chiluba. Although Chiluba still faced corruption
charges when Banda took office, he was subsequently found not guilty amidst
allegations that the MMD had put the judiciary under political pressure (Reuters 2010).
Moreover, the ruling party’s dependence on the misuse of state resources to stay in
office meant that effectively dealing with corruption complaints would undermine the
party’s ability to retain power. Since taking office Michael Sata has launched a new anticorruption drive, declaring that that he is ‘allergic to corruption’, but at the time of
writing it is too early to judge whether this represents a serious attempt to change the
nature of Zambian politics.
One area in which the emergence of the PF did make a significant difference was in the
salience of programmatic issues within the political agenda. We have already seen that
while the MMD was in government it ‘borrowed’ certain PF policies in an attempt to
undermine Sata’s message. Although many of these pledges to get tough with foreign
investors and to reduce taxes were not effectively implemented, they may well be now
that the PF is in power. In the first budget in 2011, the royalty tax on mines was doubled
from three per cent to six per cent, and income taxes were reduced, consistent with a
promise to ‘put more money in peoples’ pockets’ during the campaign.
5.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Zambian Case
The PF can be understood to have developed through a series of phases. First, the party
emerged as a major opposition player by developing a policy agenda and mobilization
strategy that was targeted to harness widespread unaddressed grievances and
unresolved policy demands. Second, the PF consolidated its position as a leading party
of opposition but simultaneously experienced new challenges, and the programmatic
nature of its appeal was strained. Third, throughout its development, party leaders
failed to increase the party’s organizational capacity. Finally, the PF rose to public office
ten years after it was formed, which may pave the way for a ‘contagion’ effect that will
transform the party system. Donor policy should be trained to address the contextspecific opportunities and barriers to the emergence programmatic politics at each
stage of this process.
Platforms
Zambia was a hospitable environment for the development of a programmatic party
because it featured a culture of popular protest around economic issues and a
groundswell of criticism of the policies of the incumbent regime. However, it took a feat
of political imagination, learning and creativity to tap into this as a political party. Other
parties in Zambia did not identify this potential and failed to build programmatic
strategies to respond to it. The case of the PF thus demonstrates the importance of
individual leadership and innovation. It is likely that there are other potential grounds
for new strains of programmatic politics, especially in Africa, that have gone unnoticed
by policymakers and domestic politicians. International IDEA and other donor
organizations can help to galvanize political actors to respond to the unmet policy
preferences of their electorates. One way to do this would be to establish a scoping
study in countries where there is little programmatic politics to use surveys and local
experts to identify where there is the most potential for policy-based appeals to be
successful. These studies could be made publicly available as a resource for
policymakers and civil and political actors in each country. Moreover, the scoping study
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could be used to select a group of high potential countries, or sub-national regions
within countries, in which donors could then roll out projects to promote
programmaticity. For example, an outreach project for domestic political leaders and
activists could help existing political parties to see how they can better connect to their
constituents, provide training for party leaders that wish to develop policy-based
platforms, and demonstrate to civil society organizations how they can get their policy
priorities to be reflected in the campaigns of established parties.
Institutionalization
Zambia provides the PF with few examples of organizational best practice past or
present to draw upon in order to overcome the party’s chronic internal weaknesses. In
turn, the lack of institutionalization means that the PF’s programmatic stance is
vulnerable to reversal. International IDEA and other concerned organizations might
respond to the challenges that new programmatic parties face at the stage of
consolidation by providing organizational support
Party organization has also been hindered by lacklustre party funding, which is required
to support expensive party structures. A tailored programme of party funding could
support the organizational development of political parties and in turn promote
programmaticity. The model of party support recently piloted in Uganda, where
international donors established a basket fund to provide funding of £200,000 to all
major parties that met certain criteria in terms of accounting systems and transparency,
represents one strategy for achieving this goal.
Governance
As the PF has grown it has continuously experimented to hone its message to focus upon
issues that its supporters respond to, but has struggled to maintain the coherence of its
message and the cohesion of party members. Moreover, the influx of new leaders into
the party has made it more difficult to establish a coherent party line. In part, this is
because constructing a policy agenda that is consistent across a wide range of issue
areas demands high levels of resources and skilled personnel that parties in developing
contexts frequently lack. International IDEA and donors might construct a programme
of policy development to provide an advisory service to emerging political parties.
Demonstration and transmission
Despite the trail that the PF has blazed, there has been little uptake of its mobilization
strategies by other political parties to date. There are many barriers to the transmission
of programmatic lessons. For example, in some cases, a party’s position in public office,
or the attitudes of its supporter and potential swing voters, foreclose the option of
adopting the mobilization strategies and programmatic policies of a rival party. A lack of
information about the strategies and success of other parties also hampers the spread of
policy-based campaigns. If other parties are to emulate the PF’s success, it will require
the diffusion of programmatic ideas and practices across the continent. This is an area in
which democracy promotion interventions can help. In the past, African leaders often
learnt authoritarian lessons from one another, such as when the strategies that Kenya’s
Daniel arap Moi used to maintain control were utilized by other leaders seeking to stave
off defeat following the return to multipartyism in the early 1990s. A more positive
sharing of knowledge can be achieved in the present day by establishing forums within
which leaders that have successfully established programmatic parties can share their
experiences with leaders of non-programmatic parties.
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