Political Parties: Empty

Vessels?

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Political Parties: Empty
Vessels?

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

MICAELLA GARDUCE
JUSTINE RIZON
Introduction
 Introduction

 There is no uniform of a political party. Definitions

differ in accordance with the historical, politico-
legal, socio-cultural, and spatial environment in
which political parties exist.
 Introduction

 However, authors agree that a party may be

distinguished from other types of organizations in
that it constitutes a group of individuals whose
primary objective is to attain control of the
government through the electoral process. (Bone,
1972)
 Introduction

 According to Heywood (2002), A political party is “a

group of people organized to gain formal
representation or win government power; a party
usually displays some measure of ideological
cohesion.”
 Introduction

 However, many experts believe that political parties

are waning.
People’s behaviour is becoming more private.
 People’s behaviour is becoming more private.

 People tend to be more individualistic.

 People’s behaviour is becoming more private.

 Before, people affiliated to political parties would

converge and have meetings and gatherings.
People’s behaviour is becoming more private.

 Today, de Tocqueville compared political parties as

more like a supporter of some charity, wherein you
may pay a membership fee, but will not necessarily
turn out the vote at election time.
Politics is becoming more secular.
Politics is becoming more secular.

 People nowadays would pay more attention on what

the leaders had or politicians in a political party had
done for them, rather than the value or the ideology
the party represents.
Politics is becoming more secular.

 There is also a strong correlation between political

partisanship and good public administration.
Politics is becoming more secular.

 A strong party base may help politicians to push

through unpopular but necessary reforms. A weak
one means that followers flee when the going gets
tough. (The Economist, 2010)
Politics is becoming more secular.

 In many industrial democracies, working-class

voters chose left-wing parties out of self-interest.
Other voters, fearing the power of organized labour,
voted the other way. But when most people count
themselves as middle-class, such tribal ties wane.
Politics is becoming more secular.

 In countries where the ideological gap between

parties has narrowed, their brands may no longer be
useful labels for busy or ignorant voters.
Politics is becoming more secular.

 Accustomed to choice as consumers, voters

increasingly pick policies rather than signing up to
comprehensive world views.
Involvement of mass media
Involvement of mass media

 The transformation of campaigning through the

mass media has tended to favor candidates over
party structures.
Involvement of mass media

 The business of winning elections has become more

capital-intensive and less labour-intensive, making
political donors matter more and political activists
less.
Involvement of mass media

 These ads may or may not be entirely truthful, but

they are often very effective.
Threat of interest and pressure groups
Threat of interest and pressure groups

 For some time the mass party was regarded as being

the party of the future, but with the introduction of
the ‘catch-all-party’, the concept of the party as a
representative of pre-defined sectors of society was
rigorously challenged.
Threat of interest and pressure groups

 Some academics also claim that parties are playing a

smaller role and think tanks a bigger one, in making
policy.
Threat of interest and pressure groups

 As think tanks aim at pushing a specific political

agenda, their relationship with politicians and
political parties becomes crucial.
Threat of interest and pressure groups

 Political think tanks and party institutes are not

widespread in Asia, unlike Europe and North
America.
Threat of interest and pressure groups

 James Gomez, a civil society leader from Singapore

said that the state has always played a dominant role
in intellectual institutions in many countries in Asia
and continues to do so today.
Threat of interest and pressure groups

 In the case of the Philippines, politicians usually get

their advice from the outside, and thus the party is
not needed.
Party membership is falling, too
Party membership is falling, too

Do parties care about this?

Party membership is falling, too

Do parties care about this?

 According to McGuinness (2012), political parties

may not mind this too much.
Party membership is falling, too

 Parties are less reliant on a wide membership

network as mass communications allow them to
reach voters directly.
Party membership is falling, too

 Funds gathered from wealthy donors and the state

make parties less dependent on individual members’
subscriptions and small donations.
Party membership is falling, too

 Parties may even see a vocal membership as an

electoral liability.
Party membership is falling, too

 However, Lucie-Smith (2013) argued that political

parties do need memberships to survive.
Party membership is falling, too

 The members provide a pool of talent from which

leaders emerge; and from the membership come the
activists who pound the pavements at election time.
Party membership is falling, too

 On the other hand, other efforts seek to turn

independent politicians—often seen as cranks and
amateurs—into effective candidates.
Party membership is falling, too

 Party membership in Philippine parties is very

limited in numbers and the organizational level of
most parties is far from being a membership-party.
Party membership is falling, too

 These parties are funded by self-proclaimed

candidates, party big-wigs and oligarchs.
Party membership is falling, too

 Therefore they can only fall back on very limited

financial resources to maintain on-going party
activities—such as regular party conferences—
between electoral campaigns.
Party membership is falling, too

 There are cases, though, where members of the

political party do not leave the party, but instead
they shift from one part to another.
Party membership is falling, too

 Other efforts seek to turn independent politicians—

often seen as cranks and amateurs—into effective
candidates.
Is the party over?
Is the party over?

 Despite the said decline of political parties, it is

perfectly possible for parties to continue to structure
political life and offer accountable political choice.
Is the party over?

 Wright et al. (2013) argued that there are two sorts

of responses to this decline of party, both coherent
but pointing in different directions.
Is the party over?

 The first response is to try to ‘reinvent’ parties by

making them looser, opening them up, reducing
barriers to participation and generally making them
more attractive.
Is the party over?

 However this reinvention approach is certainly

worth pursuing if parties want to show that they are
at least trying to respond to the diminished position
in which they find themselves.
Is the party over?

 The second response is to recognize that the age of

the mass party is simply over and that new structures
of representation and participation have to be
embraced instead.
Is the party over?

 The task is not to reinvent parties but to replace

them.
Is the party over?

 This means accepting that politics is now the

preserve of a professional political class, but
surrounding it with a dense network of scrutiny,
transparency and accountability from a whole variety
of groups and organizations.
Is the party over?

 It might also mean developing mechanisms of direct

democracy such as the referendum to by-pass the
representational hold of the declining political
parties.
Is the party over?

 It also glides over the central function that political

parties have an organizing political choice in a
reasonably coherent way and in enabling political
power to be held to account.
Is the party over?

 They may be imperfect in all kind of ways, but the

role they perform is nevertheless fundamental.
Is the party over?

 The decline of party will only be beneficial to those

sources of private power that want to escape from
the disciplines of political accountability.
Is the party over?

 It is clearly necessary to take up the representational

and participatory slack that party decline has
produced, and to do so in new and innovative ways,
but this does not mean that parties have ceased to
matter.
Conclusion
 Conclusion

 The reason for the decline of parties is that they have

moved too close to the institutions of the state, and
they have consequently neglected, or have been
forced to neglect, their representative role.
 Conclusion

 Although this may be seen as a strategy of survival,

in which new weaknesses become compensated by
new strengths, it probably cannot succeed in the
longer term.
 Conclusion

 In other words, unless parties are also

representative, they will experience considerable
difficulty in legitimizing their procedural role.
 Conclusion

 The importance of the political parties to the

electoral process is rapidly diminishing.
 Conclusion

 Modern media has reduced the candidates'

dependence on party networks to spread their
message.
Conclusion
Conclusion
 Conclusion

 And reforms allow political interest groups such as

union members, business associations,
environmental groups, and gun associations to spend
unlimited amounts of money on behalf of a
candidate as long as the spending is not coordinated
by the candidate's campaign organization.
 Conclusion

 Also, the independents- those claiming no party

affiliation—has been the trend on elections.
Conclusion
Conclusion
 Conclusion

Party Popular vote

Total %
UNA 80,257,922 26.97
Independent 48,332,949 16.24
Nacionalista 45,531,389 15.30
Top three (3) of the summar of the May 13, 2013 elections Philippine Senate elections per party
Source: Wikipedia

This table shows that more and more people are voting on
independent politicians, having the popular vote being second to
the highest, next to the UNA party.
 Conclusion

 And split-ticket voting is more and more common—

rather than voting a straight-party ticket.
 Conclusion

 These situations greatly affect in the decline of

political parties, however, political parties still play a
role in the government, and still retain the power to
take control of the government apparatus.
 Conclusion

 Parties do not select candidates, but are instead

formed by the candidates themselves as vehicles for
their own campaigns.
 Conclusion

 In other words, when we talk of parties in the

Philippines, there is a wide gap between standard
and practice.
 Conclusion

 Consequently, the public often views efforts aimed at

party-strengthening as mere attempts to further
establish traditional politics and elite interests.
 Conclusion

 To answer the question, “Are political parties empty

vessels?” The researchers come to a conclusion that
if we are to compare political parties from what it
was before to what it is today, then the answer would
be yes.
 Conclusion

 However, as what Tocqueville said, parties have in

general adapted well to changing circumstances.
Political parties find ways to survive through many
ways as the world around it changes.
 Conclusion

 If we are to consider the consequences that political

parties have to encounter and how would they react
to these consequences, then the answer would be
that there is still life to these political parties, and
still struggles to do so.
 Conclusion

 It is perfectly possible for parties to continue to

structure political life and offer accountable political
choice without also being the monopolists of political
power. This means having more spaces where party
presses more lightly; but it also provides the
justification for more public interest regulation
around the activities of parties.
 Conclusion

 Parties have to learn to share power; but those who

want to bury parties need to learn why it is
important to keep them alive.