Interview with Joseph LaPalombara, professor at Yale University: “Political parties are everywhere in decline”

Everywhere in the world it seems there is some kind of discontent with regard to the traditional political parties, even to the entire parties system. Which are the changes underwent by the political parties that generate such discontent?

Joseph LaPalombara, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Management at Yale University in the United States is currently one of the most influential political scientists in the world. He describes the new developments of political parties, in an interview given for Europunkt to Vladimir Adrian Costea.

Citeşte varianta în limba română aici.

Vladimir Adrian Costea: What are the new paths the political parties follow in the early twenty-first century?

Joseph LaPalombara: Parties in the Twenty-First Century. I open these remarks with the superfluous observation that political parties are not what they used to be.  This transformation has many causes, among which the advent of the so-called social media, still growing by leaps and bounds, appears downright insignificant.  To be sure, social media imply that the very concept of what is a political party must change in the era of the internet, emails, Facebook and twitters.  But transformation of this kind have occurred in the past, many times, and we should be mindful, for example, that, by the middle of the last century, there had already occurred radical changes in what someone like Roberto Michels might define as a political party.

My sense of the basic change we are now experiencing is that the political party as such is in decline.  For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, as Immanuel Wallerstein has noted, the traditional political parties have been widely replaced by the “party state.”  This condition is apparently set to continue for a relatively long time.  It is equally the case that, unlike the past, political parties in a very wide range of political systems and governmental forms no longer depend on mass memberships; they have also come to be major instruments whereby all manner of political elites, including dictators, use something called the party as the instrument for mobilizing the masses, not just electorally but also for a wide range of political and developmental activities.  The ‘Cartel Party,” as Richard Katz and others have taught us, is now a key instrument for mobilizing large numbers of persons to engage in activities which are far removed from elections.

What are the main changes of the characteristics of political parties in the early twenty-first century compared to the twentieth century?

It seems apparent from the above that it is a mistake to think of political parties only as they may relate to the mobilization of adherents for electoral purposes.  In this century it is already apparent that political parties (of a kind which some will label terrorist organizations) are no longer based on traditional criteria such as class, place or region but also on such factors as religion. This leads to the observation that, as is now painfully apparent, the emergence of some political parties is inimical to the very existence of the nation-state.

This is not necessarily a brand new concept, as one reading of the history of the CPSU and the Comintern would suggest. But certainly ISIS can be conceptualized as a political party whose purpose it is to ignore, or destroy, any institutional arrangement that represents an obstacle to the effective unification of people who share a particular identity, wherever the latter may be.

What are the challenges faced by political parties when trying to overcome the foundation moment?

It seems to me that one of the most daunting contemporary challenges involving the political party is the extent to which the party, or the party’s leaders, are able to operate with a very high degree of independence form their own party base. To put this a bit differently, we are traversing a period when political party elites enjoy previously unimagined opportunities to condition and to control the base, and not vice versa!

One might point to how several one-party states are ruled in Africa. Or the astonishing abilities of the Chinese Communist Party might be cited as another example.  Far from being limited to striking conditions of democratic political systems, parties have increasingly become sometimes perplexing instruments of mass control. The comment is perplexing because this appears now to be as true of many apparently democratic systems as it is of dictatorships. The rise of the so-called populist parties in the U.S. as well as in Europe would be examples of what I have in mind.

To what extent personalization triggers a decrease in the significance of internal competitive elections among the political parties?

It must be acknowledged that contemporary instruments of instant mass communications, and of violence, are increasingly available not just to rulers of political and governmental systems but to their opponents as well, including opponents who will readily use violence to impose their views and preferences.  This existential condition is likely to worsen.

It creates a huge need for reconceptualization as to the role of parties on the part of all those who reject violence as an acceptable political instrument.  I mean by this that there now exists all of the conditions required to promote the fragmentation of masses of persons into smaller, warring groups, a potential development that seems to me to be already manifested in the proliferation of policial parities that is endemic to, for example, democratic systems where one still finds “free” elections.  One of the remarkable aspects of ISIS is its (apparent!) ability to overcome this fragmentation in the name of Islam.

Several things are implicit in what I have said so far.  First, there is no longer the need for a national political party to have or to create a local organizational base.  A corollary to this is that the so-called base can no longer pretend to control national party leaders.  Second, national party leaders no longer need either the regional or local leaders in order to contact the party base or to influence it.  In the United States in 2015-2016 for example, Donald Trump was able to win Republican (and other) voters notwithstanding that, through the primaries, he was widely opposed by almost all of the Republican Party’s leaders.

It seems to me obvious that much of what I have said suggests that personalismo is everywhere very much on the rise.  Traditional political parties and their salience have declined everywhere. The electronic and media transformations have made it possible for individuals, including populists, to seek and gain offices irrespective of what may be the views of other party leaders and elites.  Donald Trump in the U.S. is an obvious example.  But so is France, not only because of the appeareance of Marine Le Pen, but also because one of her opponents can stay in the race, in spite of what other elites may think, because he believes he can appeal to mass voters, even after it is demonstrated that he engaged (like others not running for the presidency), with his family, in corrupt behavior.

Conclusion:  Political parties are everywhere in decline.  Party legitimacy is no longer as salient as it once was.  Party leaders and stalwarts are being replaced by the electoral professionals. The party activists and cadres are basically superfluous; they are gone.  The NGOs everywhere are rapidly coming to displace and to replace political parties.  More than ever in the past, perhaps, political science will have to come to terms with a very simple and universal fact, long ago underlined by Arthur Fisher Bentley: political outcomes of all manner and variety are overwhelmingly determined by the intervention of organized groups, particularly those with the economic wherewithal to use contemporary instruments of controlled behavior.

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Joseph LaPalombara is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Management Emeritus, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Comparative Research. He is a member of the American and the Connecticut Academies of Arts and Sciences, and has held fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Program. He has been awarded the Medals of Honor by the Presidency of the Italian Republic and by the Italian Constitutional Court. He is editor-in-chief of Italy magazine, editor of the Journal of International Business Education and a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals. His current research is focused on the relationship between public policies, global corporations and the flow of foreign direct investment to less-developed countries. Publications include: Politics Within Nations (1974); Democracy, Italian Style (1987); Multinational Corporations and Developing Countries (1981);  two chapters (“Underestimated Contributions of Political Science to Organizational Learning,” and “Power and Politics in Organizations”) in Handbook of Organizations Learning (2001) and Stati uniti? Italia e USA a confronto  (2009).