POLITICAL PARTIES

POLITICAL PARTIES
MAURICE DUVERGER
Institut d'Etudes Politiques de V University de Paris
POLITICAL PARTIES
THEIR ORGANIZATION AND ACTIVITY
IN THE MODERN STATE
translated by
BARBARA and ROBERT NORTH
with a Foreword by
D. W. BROGAN
METHUEN & CO LTD
II NEW FETTER LANE E.C.4
FOREWARD
Party is organized opinion', said Disraeli, a judgment very like that
of Benjamin Constant quoted by M. Duverger. But Disraeli knew that party,
even a hundred years ago, was more than that. He had not described Tadpole
and Taper for nothing, nor did he undertake to organize the amorphous Tory
interest into a new party, without reflecting that more than a community of
opinion was required. But his emphasis, like that of Benjamin Constant, was
on opinion and we start on our reflections on our party system, or that of
any other country, with the simple and erroneous assumption that parties
are and must be primarily doctrinal bodies. This is not so and M. Duverger
shows us not only that this is not so, that the doctrinal unity of a party
may be only one of the factors that accounts for its existence and
efficacy, but that it may be largely fictitious and accidental or, at best,
rest on a historical tradition that may not have any great relevance to the
problems facing the party or the country in which the party exists and
works.
It is important to emphasize this truth, for we fall, too easily, into
the trap of identifying parties with the same label, the same formal
doctrine with one another and are surprised when we find that, for reasons
that we fail to grasp, two 'Socialist' parties react in very different ways
and find it difficult to collaborate because their fundamental unity of
doctrine, assuming that there is one, is not, in itself, an adequate
foundation on which to build a common programme and a common plan of
immediate action, much less to put that plan of action into effect.
It is the first of the many merits of this pioneering book that', by
his wealth of illustration and documentation, M. Duverger makes plain to us
the great variations in party organization, in social composition, in the
kind of aims and interests that the party professes to serve (and perhaps,
does serve) that are possible. Because it is roughly true to say that
modern parties have the longest continuous history in Britain, we fall into
the naive assumption that British parties are model parties and that
countries like France, or Germany, or the United States which do not have
neat two-party systems of
Les Partis Politiques was first published in Paris in 1951, by Armond
Colin. The present trans-lation incorporates revisions subsequently made by
the author.
First English language edition published July 15th, 1954 Reprinted
twice in 1955
Second English Edition revised, 1959
Reprinted twice
Third Edition 1964
Reprinted 1967
sbn 416 56840 8
First published as a University Paperback 1964
Reprinted three times
Reprinted 1972
SBN 416 68320 7
Printed in Great Britain by
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BARNES AND NOBLE IMPORT DIVISION
The British type are wrong, that the multiplicity of parties (as in
France), the absence of doctrinal division (as in the United States), is an
anomaly that history must be in the process of rectifying. It need not be
and that is one of the first lessons that we can learn here from the great
range and appositeness of M. Duverger's illustrations. We do learn a
necessary humility from the very varied experiences of countries like
Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, even from the only South American state
in which democracy (in our sense) can be said to be deeply rooted. And the
highly idiosyncratic character of the party system of Uruguay, with its
century-old colorados and blancos is of value to us, if only by reinforcing
the lesson that there are more things in the political heaven and earth
than we dream of when contemplating, with excessive satisfaction, the
perfection of our own party system, and the parliamentary system of which
it is both a product and an essential element.
For M. Duverger will have none of the fashionable denigration of
parties; they are a necessity of the democratic system and never more than
today. Never more than today, because the modern party system is modern. It
is a twentieth-century mechanism designed to solve the problem of how to
bring 'the people', the new mass voters, into the political community.
Here, again, M. Duverger's outside point of view is of especial value to
us. Because, in a narrow sense, our party system is old, because party
names and party affiliations are still, in some regions, traditional, we
are inclined to ignore the novelty of much or most of our party habits and
so fail to see what are the true novelties, the true possibilities and the
true dangers of our present party system.
We have known since the pioneer work of Sir Lewis Namier how rash it
is to interpret the party system of the eighteenth century in our terms. We
have learned from Dr. Gash how rash it is to interpret the early nineteenth
century in our terms. We have more recently learned from Dr. Pelling how
ambiguous a term is 'the rise of the Labour party' and from Mr. Ivor Bulmer-
Thomas how novel, in many ways, are our current party practices. But we are
still victims of bad linguistic habits and misunderstood history. It is
refreshing to look at our system without importing into our field of vision
memories of the Long Parliament and the quarrels over the Exclusion Bill.
In Britain, as in all other countries, we are seeing a growth in party
power and discipline that comes from what the French call the 'decline of
the notables'. When, as in England until quite
recently and in France in a somewhat more remote period of time, there
were in most regions, 'natural leaders', usually members of traditionally
respected and powerful families, the party system was bound to be weak. A
Russell, a Cavendish, a Hobhouse did not need the approbation of party
headquarters to be the natural representative of the Whig or Liberal
interest. A Stanley in Lancashire had an important political position even
if the record of the dynasty was not one of absolute fidelity to either of
the great 'parties'. It is still true that a conservative party, in all
countries, has a larger number of ' notables' in its ranks than has a party
of the left (if it is really, not merely verbally, a party of the left). It
is recruited, in its upper ranks that is, from men with weight independent
of their mere place in the party hierarchy and they often owe their place
in that party hierarchy to their own social and professional position. This
is true not only of the British Conservative party, but of the Radicals in
France for they are ' notables' in their own way, prominent local lawyers,
doctors, 'intellectuals', prosperous bourgeois. It is natural, as M.
Duverger points out, that a party like this should want single-member
constituencies where the personal weight of its leaders can count and
should resent joint-lists and proportional representation and all the
modern mechanics of elections that make the party investiture so
overwhelmingly important. Here France is only following on a road that
Britain has already trodden.
For to bring the masses into the political system means to encourage
parties that are not mere aggregates of local and personal interests, but
parties that give or profess to give to the man in the street a voice in
politics that he cannot have if all he is given as a political choice is
between one group of notables and another.
It is here that M. Duverger makes one of his most useful distinctions,
between the 'interior' and 'exterior' parties. The old parties were really
parliamentary groupings; their justification, theoretical in the time of
Burke, theoretical and practical in the era after the first Reform Act, was
to get a working parliamentary majority together. The party, outside
parliament, had a mainly fictitious existence. But the new parties
representing the masses had to have a party life outside parliament.
Parliamentary politics might be only one of the objects, one of the
instruments of the party and of the groups it professed to represent. The
non-parliamentary section of the party might be profoundly suspicious of
the parliamentary forces as they always had to compromise, to accept
deals, to suppress or ignore party doctrines. And all these, however
necessary, were, at best, odious necessities to the class that the French
call the 'militants' the convinced and active party members. In France,
these militants took with a bad grace the truth in Robert de Jouvenel's
dictum, 'there is more in common between two deputies, one of whom is
revolutionary, than between two revolutionaries, one of whom is a deputy'.
And one r