Читать книгу Borders and Margins - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Part 4 of the book focuses on the interaction between party systems and political parties in multilevel layered-out systems. Lori Thorlakson and Guy Lachapelle present the case of federal and provincial parties in Canada, while Juan Rodriguez and Astrid Barrio look at the Spanish case, and Kris Deschouwer the Belgium case. First, Lori Thorlakson argues that multilevel politics in a federal system can follow a model of second-order party competition or involve completely separate elections. The latter scenario, she demonstrates, has characterized the Canadian federal system. Thorlakson argues that provincial elections do not fit the model of second-order party competition, as there is a considerable distinction between provincial and federal politics in Canada, owing to the independence of provincial parties from their federal counterparts. This leads to incongruent voter behaviour stemming from separate voter [24] identity at different territorial levels. Examining major political parties at the provincial and federal level, Thorlakson finds that the overwhelming majority are united only by weak or non-existent organizational linkages. Federal parties are thus allowed to associate themselves with more parties of the same political persuasion, she argues, while provincial governments pursue their own interests in light of conflicts between the different party levels. With the exception of Québec, Thorlakson shows that Canadian politics is marked by widespread party label incongruence and party system diversity due to the separation between provincial and federal levels of government. Congruence, Thorlakson notes, is the exception rather than the rule in Canada, and it is measured by the level of organizational linkages and the number of political parties at the provincial level. Strong fiscal and policy decentralization have created an incentive and competition for holding public office at a provincial level, as greater political autonomy and fiscal resources allow provincial governments to shape and respond to provincial policy demands. Canada’s low level of congruence, party system nationalization, and inconsistent partisanship makes it unique in comparison to other multilevel democracies in the Americas.

Guy Lachapelle examines how a political party can be involved in international affairs and create new type of multilevel politics, citing the example of the Parti Québécois and its role in promoting the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity. As policy entrepreneurs working to bring specific issues to the forefront of the public and international sphere, political parties can play a major part in shaping paradiplomatic relations undertaken by regional governments. The articulation of Québec’s domestic concerns and foreign policy on the international stage represents one such example. Over the years, Québec’s political parties have wavered in their interest in international relations. The lone exception, the Parti Québécois, has been more active in debating international issues at their conferences through the Comité des Relations Internationales (CRI). The CRI’s objectives and actions were concerned largely with collecting information and fostering partnerships and international relations that might help Québec play a larger role on the world stage in the event that it becomes a sovereign state. After its 2003 defeat, however, debates on international issues have waned within the Parti Québécois, which has reverted back to mobilizing public opinion on the issue of cultural diversity. While cultural diversity has remained an issue for the current Québec government, the Parti Québécois provided the impetus for a widespread debate on the issue, portraying itself as the defender of cultural diversity. The Parti Québécois is thus an example of a political party within a multilevel system that furthers its own policy interests even where there is a shared jurisdiction in areas of foreign policy control. It has added its voice to the debate on cultural diversity, arguing in favour of its legal protection in the face of rampant globalization, and holding it up as a model for political parties in multilevel systems.

[25] Juan Rodriguez and Astrid Barrio study the role of political parties in Spain. Decentralization of unitary states, such as Spain, forces political parties to adapt to the new framework in order to remain competitive in a multilevel system. Rodriguez and Barrio set out to explain how statewide political parties interact in the context of Spanish multilevel competition through the use of coalition-based strategies, and how these strategies allow them to achieve optimum electoral and institutional performance. This multilevel competition is characterized by a regionally differentiated electoral system and calendar, a regional discrepancy between nationalist and regionalist demands in several regions, a challenging position of the parties representing these demands on each level, and the existence of electorates showing different behaviour on each electoral level. As a result of this competition and newly devolved institutions, statewide parties have gradually changed their discourse and organization in order to strengthen their electoral presence in different territories. These indicators can be used to measure this adaptation: vertical integration, as evidenced in the presence of formal and informal linkages between the central office and regional organizations; influence, evidenced in the increased importance of regional leaders in national politics; and autonomy, seen in the incidence of interference by national organizations in regional affairs. Rodriguez and Barrio argue that while statewide political parties are adapting to this new decentralization and form of competition, their main challenge comes from the rising importance of non-statewide parties (NSWP) at both the regional and national level; in order to understand the dynamics of Spanish politics, these salient levels of government cannot be overlooked, they suggest. They examine the growing strength of NSWPs in the national system as well as regional subsystems and statewide coalition strategies adopted by parties before and after regional elections. While decentralization has not impacted the number of NSWPs, it has increased their salience and influence on political institutions, providing a considerable challenge to statewide parties and forcing them to change their practices and strategies in order to remain competitive on both regional and national levels.

Kris Deschower examines the recently devolved federation of Belgium and its complex political system based on two overlapping substates, regions and language communities. Once a unitary state, Belgium became a federation following constitutional reforms in 1995. These reforms led to the disintegration of statewide parties and their complete disappearance from Belgian politics. Replacing them were increasingly autonomous substate governments divided from west to east by a language border. Flemish- and French-language populations – which make up 60% and 40% of the total population, respectively – wrangled over the terms of devolution, with Flemish speakers favouring a federation based on language communities, and French speakers arguing in favour of a devolution into three major regions. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and overlapping language communities and territorial regions were [26] created, with the result that the Belgian federation and its political parties, today, are ruled by this linguistic bipolarity. This is evidenced at the federal level, where government must be made up of an equal share of French and Flemish speakers, and at the regional level, where electoral competitions are held within each language group. Political parties in Belgium are limited, in scope, to one of the two language communities and two of the three regions, and they are active on both federal and substate levels of government. This split party system produces two results, one for each language group, and ultimately denies differentiation between regional and federal elections because unilingual parties vie for the same votes at both levels, thereby causing a strong overlap. These major linguistic and regional cleavages and the divergent views of Belgium at the time of devolution are responsible for its complex institutional setup and division at regional and federal levels of government.