Political Party

Do politics matter? This founding issue of modern political science questions the functions of politics in modern political systems. In democratic regimes, it has often been posed differently: Do parties matter? The role of political parties, competing for votes to reach power, is undoubtedly problematic given recent changes in governance. But, the question of the influence of political parties is far from new. In fact, for a long time, contrary to traditional or economic theories of democracy, many scholars have advocated the idea that political parties have no impact at all on the government of society. The reasons are numerous and have changed over time.

In democratic theory, whether traditional or economic, people vote in accordance with policy preferences, and political parties propose and try to implement specific policies for instrumental or intrinsic reasons. Hence, the identity of the governing parties or the proximity of elections should matter in policy making. Two famous models of political business cycles were built on this assumption: The opportunistic one considers that parties in government try to win elections by stimulating the economy just before elections, and the partisan one predicts that the change of governmental parties induces changes in policy reflecting the distinct political preferences of succeeding governmental parties. Much of empirical research supports the general perspective of partisan influence on policy making, including the level of welfare provision or the size of government.

In contrast, however, other studies postulate and provide evidence that political parties do not affect governance. For example, for some scholars, the welfare state expenses depend on economic growth and demographic variations. More recently, renewing the industrial society convergence theory, scholars explained that globalization, the increasing levels of complex interdependence and international capital mobility, sharply decrease the probability of partisan influence. An exhaustive historical work on British policies confirms that parties do not matter in policy making.

In short, there are two essentially divergent views on the relationship between political parties and governance. One way to overcome this contradiction is to reformulate the question: When do parties matter for governance? To answer it, we have to focus on the conditions of partisan influence in the general process of governance: The interaction between partisan variables and institutional or socioeconomic variables. For example, the impact of capital mobility on partisan policies is neither null nor univocal, but changes according to whether there is a fixed or floating exchange rate regime. In this issue area, therefore, parties could and do have a clear impact on tax and monetary policies. Furthermore, convergence among parties on traditional macroeconomic demandside policies coincides with divergence on supplyside economic strategies: Conservative parties give priority to private provision of production factors (fixed and human capital formation), whereas social democratic parties favor the public provision of production factors.