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Abstract
No matter the region of the world under study, party (system) institutionalisation has been traditionally considered to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the survival of democracy. Despite being one of the most quoted statements in the democratisation literature, the few studies looking at the relationship between institutionalisation and democratic endurance have found no evidence of the ‘almost magical’ powers of the former. This article revisits the abovementioned research question by making use of an original dataset covering all European democracies between 1848 and 2014. The main findings are threefold: (1) it is not the institutionalisation of political parties but the institutionalisation of party systems as a whole that has fostered the prospects for democratic survival in Europe; (2) there is a threshold of systemic institutionalisation which, once reached, will avoid democratic collapse; and (3) systemic over-institutionalisation does not seem to be so perilous for the survival of democracy.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the participants of a panel on ‘The Struggle for Democracy: Historical Accounts’ at the EPSA Conference in Edinburgh (2014) as well as the participants of the Seminar Series held at the Department of Comparative Politics of the University of Bergen, and especially Lars Svåsand, Michael Álvarez and Yvette Peters, together with Kevin Keegan-Krause and Zsolt Enyedi, for their value comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article.
Notes
1. For a criticism of the positive relationship between institutionalisation and democratic consolidation, see Tóka (Citation1997), Chabal and Daloz (Citation1999) or, more recently, Enyedi (Citation2016).
2. Still, for the sake of robustness, the article also uses other ‘traditional indicators’ of PSI and PI.
3. Similarly, the article does not deny the eventual contribution of other factors to the survival (e.g. economic development, EU membership, etc.) or collapse (e.g. economic crisis, historical legacies, etc.) of (a particular) democracy.
4. Something which, otherwise, has become one of the most popular (but never confirmed) assumptions in political science.
5. For an in-depth analysis of the problems with Mainwaring and Scully’s (Citation1995) framework see Luna’s recent work, either with Altman (Citation2011) or alone (Citation2014).
6. For a similar understanding, please see Bakke and Sitter (Citation2005) or Mair (Citation2001).
7. Also because, as Casal Bértoa and Enyedi (Citation2016: 265) point out, it is ‘conceptually and empirically superior to the ones suggested by scholars so far’Citation.
8. A step-by-step explanation (examples included) of how iPSI is calculated can be found at: http://whogoverns.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Rules-for-calculating-iPSI.pdf.
9. Usually those with more than 10 per cent of the vote at a given election (Mainwaring and Scully Citation1995). Conversely, Lewis’ IPS considers all political parties with parliamentary representation (at least twice).
10. Randall and Svåsand (Citation2002: 9) point here to the so-called unevenness of PI.
11. Including the presence or absence of certain organisational changes (i.e. splits and mergers).
12. Contrary to the title of Lewis’ article, IPS looks more at the continuity of party representation-cum-organisation (Lewis Citation2006: 562, 566) and ‘their relative success in elections’ (574). I am particularly grateful to one of the reviewers for this point.
13. Logit regression or survival analysis would be perfectly suitable had I wanted to, respectively, explain variation in democratic endurance, measuring the impact PSI and/or PI have had on democratic survival, or analyse how do any of the former factors increase or decrease the probability of the latter phenomenon. However, as mentioned above, this is not the aim of this article.
14. Available at http://whogoverns.eu/cabinets/#.
15. My case selection not only coincides with most studies in the field (Mainwaring et al. Citation2016), but also mostly overlaps with other similar datasets (Boix et al. Citation2013; Coppedge et al. Citation2016).
16. The idea is to avoid situations in which time constitutes the main explanatory variable. Thus, it would be unfair to compare Hungary or any post-communist democracy in 2015 with the UK or any other traditional Western European democracy in the same year as in the latter political parties had four times as long as the former to interact and, therefore, create a cumulative experience helping them to routinise their behaviour making it more predictable and stable.
17. For an in-depth study of why P(S)I should positively affect the level of democracy see also Thames and Robbins (Citation2007).
18. While the Kingdom of Greece (1875‒1900), Restoration Spain (1900‒1923) and inter-war Portugal (1911‒1925) have not been included due to unavailability of the data (Nohlen and Stöver Citation2010: 1539, 1815), the lack of at least a pair of elections in the French Second Republic (1848‒1851), the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1921), inter-war Poland (1922‒1926) and post-World War II Greece (1946‒1948) impeded the calculation of the IPS for these four democratic regimes.
19. This distinction between institutionalised (iPSI>0) and under-institutionalised (iPSI ≤ 0) party systems is consistent with other previous large-N (Casal Bértoa Citation2013; Tavits Citation2005) and small-N (Berg-Schlosser and Mitchell Citation2000) comparative studies. Changes in the threshold (e.g. iPSI ≥ 0) do not alter the results (available from the author upon request).
20. Coverage equals 0.97.
21. Thus, in an unprecedented move, representatives of the extreme right-wing ‘Pro Patria’ bloc were granted access to government in September 1930. Less than three years later (i.e. in January 1932), the nationalist Greater German People’s Party (GDVP) would be excluded from a coalition government between the Christian Social Party (CS) and the Rural Party (LB) for the first time.
22. Following Mainwaring and Scully (Citation1995: 31–2), the cutting point here is an ENPP of 4, which distinguishes ‘extreme pluralist’ (ENPP ≥ 4) party systems from the rest: namely, ‘limited pluralist’ (ENPP between 3 and 3.9), two-and-a-half (ENPP between 2.5 and 2.9) and bi-party (ENPP < 2.5) systems.
23. TEV, although not ENPP (0.62), also points to the lack of PSI as an ‘almost necessary’ (0.85) condition for the collapse of a democracy.
24. These are clearly distinguishable periods, separated by a major event or ‘structural juncture’ (e.g. world war, end of the Cold War, etc.), in which a clearly identifiable group of countries (e.g. Southern European, post-communist, etc.) were (re-)incorporated into the family of democratic nations.
25. This cut-off point has been chosen according to the following criteria: (1) it displays by far the higher gap in the level of PI between two (consecutive) countries, (2) it perfectly coincides with the average European level of PI in the period under study, (3) it divides the sample in two almost equal clusters, and (4) it is consistent with the literature (e.g. Janda Citation1980).
26. Significantly (at 0.01 level) correlated, in any case, with IPS (r = 0.63).
27. Those with less than 1 million inhabitants.