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CIAO DATE: 04/05/07
Dominant Parties and Democratic Defects
by Matthijs Bogaards
The democratic tide of the past decades spread great hope in democracy's potential to provide an empowering, yet stable, system of government across the globe. In many countries, democracy's gains remain strong. More often than not, however, newly transitioned states have encountered serious- sometimes fatal-obstacles on the road to liberal government. One such barrier that has hamstrung numerous countries is the emergence of a dominant party. Until recently, there has been little consensus on the exact definition of a dominant party, but broadly, it is a political party that maintains an entrenched hold on a state's governmental system. The classic example is Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled unchallenged for seven decades until 2000.
Around the world, there is a growing concern that dominant parties have the potential to threaten both states that are democratic and countries that are ripe for political liberalization. In newly transitioned states such as Namibia and South Africa, the fear is that dominant parties will undermine the new democratic dispensation through their monopoly of power. In authoritarian regimes like Malaysia and Singapore, the long-entrenched dominant party stands in the way of democratization. This article surveys our knowledge of one-party democracy and proposes a new research agenda by drawing on the distinction between democratic and authoritarian dominant parties and recent scholarship on so-called "defective democracies."
Political scientists have long struggled over the definition of a dominant party, but there are four criteria that most conceptualizations take into account: 1) the threshold for dominance; 2) the inclusion or exclusion of opposition elements; 3) the presence or absence of divided government in presidential systems of government; 4) the time-span under consideration. Specific definitions of dominant parties differ in how they incorporate these criteria. 1 According to some political scientists, the threshold for dominance, that is, the percentage of seats a party must capture in a parliamentary system to gain the status of "dominant," ranges from a mere plurality to a supermajority of 70 percent of the legislature. Some definitions specify that the opposition should be dispersed, divided, or have an inferior bargaining position, whereas others ignore the state of the opposition.
What is more, the number of elections a party must win in order to establish dominance varies widely in the existing literature. According to the Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori, for example, a party becomes dominant in a parliamentary system after three consecutive electoral victories.2 For the purposes of this article, a dominant party system will be one in which a single party has won a parliamentary majority in three consecutive multi-party elections. Similarly in a presidential system of government, the dominant party must capture the executive office for three consecutive terms. A dominant party, therefore, combines electoral, parliamentary, and executive dominance over a specified period of time.3
Matthijs Bogaards is Professor in Comparative Politics at International University Bremen in Germany.