Political Science alumni, Glendal Wright, offers some insight into the changing dynamics of political parties in this essay “Comparing Political Parties in Europe and the USA: Different Paths But Same Destination.”
It is risky to make comparisons and predictions between the Europe and the USA in terms of the directions of their political parties. European countries are multi-party systems, with the exception of the UK where the two parties of Conservative and Labour dominate, but are considerably fragmented within their party organization. The Brexiteers in the Conservative Party and a breakaway group within the Labour Party demonstrates this fragmentation. In the USA the two political parties, Democrat and Republican, are overwhelming dominant, but like the UK, have significant differences within their organizations.
What seems particularly significant is that in both Europe and the USA, the political parties are responding to the extremes of the left and the right, more than the center or moderate positions. It seems interesting that both a multi-party system and a two-party system are headed to the same destination—an extreme in terms of their policies and the candidates they are presenting to the voters.
The orientation of parties on both sides of the Atlantic has centered on what has been termed populism. The emergence of the populist-oriented parties has been one of the most striking features of the new political alignments on continental Europe. The common features of these populist parties are their opposition to the exiting political elites and an antipathy toward financial institutions, immigrants and minorities. A further characteristic is that they tend to be overly influenced by the personality or charisma of the leader of the party or movement rather than to the particular issues that the traditional parties support. The populist parties also tend to override democratic freedoms, including a free press, independent judiciary, and suppression of the opposition in elections.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has examined the rise of the new populist parties over the past two decades in Europe and finds the following key features:
• In 2000, 12 populist parties participated in the elections, but in 2017 this rose to 28.
• 74 out of the 102 populist parties are on the right of the political spectrum
• The number of populist parties in governments has risen from 7 to 14 since 2000
• The percentage of the vote for populist parties rose from 7% in 2000 to 24% in 2018.*
New political parties are more easily able to be formed and win seats in parliaments in continental Europe due to the use of the proportional representation basis of the elections. Small and newly formed parties that meet a certain vote threshold, such as 5% of the vote, are allocated seats in the parliament proportionate to that vote.
The effect of this electoral system is to speed up the polarization of the political divides in these countries and the loss of votes by the previously dominant parties. This has been played out in practically all continental European countries following the financial crisis and the immigration flow from the Middle East and Africa to Europe over the past decade.
In the meantime, in the USA, the political extremes are more and more capturing and becoming the base of the two main political parties. This has happened in the Republican Party where the Tea Party movement and the immigration issues have formed the basis of their platforms. The Democrat Party has come along more slowly, but this trend is starting to become more evident with the support that Bernie Sanders gathered in the 2016 Democrat Party primaries and is more apparent in the Democrat Party candidates for President in 2020 that have tended farther to the left of the party with ideas of taxing the wealthy more, medicare for all, etc.
The result is that while the European and USA political parties have taken different paths to realign their support, the result is that on both sides of the Atlantic the populist approaches and the hollowing out of the political center to the extremes has become the dominate feature of the political landscape. While in the USA, the two main political parties will probably not be replaced by a third party or independent candidate for President due to the electoral system advantage, in Europe the proportional system there may likely fragment even more and breakdown the political systems. The Brexit issue that has divided the UK parties may well lead to a breakup of the country.
*Eurman, Martin, Yascha Mounk, and Limor Gultchin, European Populism, Trends, Threats, and Future Prospects, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2017.