Political Parties and the Decline of Centrist Politics

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Aeron Davis, whose focus is on the role of political parties in political communication. Might we head towards a (non-)democratic future in which parties no longer exist in their present state – or is it just the dominant party model that is failing now?

On a variety of measures, including membership and participation, party structures have been declining for several decades; in many national systems, this has also contributed to an increased volatility in vote shares from election to election, independent of the voting systems (first-past-the-post or proportional representation) used in each national case.

Other studies had previously seen continuous increases in democratisation around the world, but this has been reversed dramatically in the past decade – especially in increasingly troubled systems such as the United States, Brazil, or Poland. Similarly, dominant centre-left parties have declined precipitously in many nations, while fledgling populist parties and their outsider leaders have emerged and in a number of cases even taken power.

The centrist argument around this is that this may be driven by extreme personalities, and merely constitutes a passing phase of irrationality. This also sees these developments as in line with broader societal trends towards individualisation and desyndicalisation; left/right political perspectives no longer fit this complicated societal environment. Globalisation, mediatisation, and other factors are also seen as contributing to the decline of parties, and of rational, consensus-based party-political processes; instead, populist and popular leaders and movements have emerged.

Another view is that centrism itself is collapsing, and that in response to the past dominance of centrism and its arrangements with mainstream media we are now seeing a resurgence of partisan politics and partisan media. As part of this, the centrist embrace of rationality and consensus is also being undermined, as the downsides of such rationality have become more obvious, and the professional electoral strategies of such centrist parties are increasingly revealed as glib and empty. These parties have also grown slow and bureaucratic, and therefore unable to compete with their fast-moving, personality-controlled populist challengers.

This does not mean that centrists can no longer win elections, but they are having to content with much more fast-moving, radical alternatives – which as a result are also unstable and irrational in their activities. Do we then need an alternative for parties altogether, or do we need to reform conventional parties in order to survive in this new environment?