May political parties refuse to govern? On integrity, compromise and responsibility

ABSTRACT

After the parliamentary elections in Germany in September 2017, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), The Greens (Bündnis90/Die Grünen) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) started to negotiate about forming a coalition government. But, surprising to many, the FDP decided to let these coalition talks collapse, and many commentators in Germany found it highly problematic for a political party to refuse to take responsibility in government. Interestingly, the question whether (or: when) democratic parties may legitimately refuse to govern has so far been neglected in political theory and political philosophy. The article develops a general answer by discussing several possible reasons for thinking that it is sometimes wrong to refuse to govern and thereby engages both democratic theory and the recent literature on compromise. The resulting view is that parties have an ‘integrity prerogative’ that allows them to refuse to govern, except when there is no reasonable and stable alternative government coalition available.

KEYWORDS:

• Political parties
• government coalitions
• democracy
• compromise
• responsibility
• integrity
• FDP

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the audiences of a conference on ‘Doing Realist Political Theory’ in Münster in July 2018 and a political philosophy workshop in Berlin in December 2018 for helpful discussions of earlier versions of this paper. For helpful written comments and (Zoom) discussions, I thank Adam Gjesdal, Keith Hankins, Eric Schliesser, Dietrich Schotte, John Thrasher and Fabio Wolkenstein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The FDP formed a coalition government with the Christian Democrats from 1949–1956 (under Chancellor Adenauer), 1961–1966 (under Chancellors Adenauer and Erhard), 1982–1998 (under Chancellor Kohl) and 2009–2013 (under Chancellor Merkel), and with the Social Democrats from 1969–1982 (under Chancellors Brandt and Schmidt).

2. The two best results were 2009 with 14,6% and 1961 with 12,8%, the worst results were 2013 with 4,8% and 1969 with 5,8%.

3. More precisely the concern were ‘subsidiär Schutzberechtigte’, i.e. persons who did not get asylum and are not refugees according to the 1952 Refugee Convention, but nevertheless have a protected status.

4. Muirhead defends a combination of the ideals of deliberative democracy and partisan democracy. The two ideals are in tension with each other, according to him, but they can correct each other’s defects (Muirhead, 2010, p. 131). For empirical evidence that parties in fact still play a significant mobilizing role see Dalton et al. (2011, ch. 3).

5. Rosenblum also emphasizes that parties are a form of ‘regulated rivalry’ and thus achieve conflict management (Rosenblum, 2008, pp. 119–26) and that parties can be cast as complementary bearers of partial truths (Rosenblum, 2008, pp. 136–56), even though they do not ‘add up’ to a comprehensive, philosophically defensible whole (Rosenblum, 2008, p. 159).

6. Looking at the function of parties may also ground other obligations for them, e.g., the obligation not to sabotage parliamentary processes.

7. White and Ypi also emphasize integrity considerations in the context of political parties (White & Ypi, 2016, pp. 155–56). Integrity may not be the only reason why parties may refuse to govern, though. After all, another function of political parties in parliamentary democracies is to form an effective and powerful parliamentary opposition.

8. One could also argue that some parties should not be willing to govern at all, basically because they are not competent to do so (see Brennan, 2016, ch. 6).

9. The SPD’s candidate for Chancellor Schulz lost most of his party positions over too quickly changing his mind and breaking his word …

10. To some extent, what is stable and reasonable will depend on the relevant political culture, but to some extent it will not.

11. Similarly, a Jamaica coalition was still a viable alternative during the coalition talks between CDU/CSU and SPD that followed the collapsed Jamaica coalition talks. That the first Jamaica coalition talks did not work out does not imply that they do not work out some time later (maybe with different political personnel).

12. Edmund Burke also emphasizes the ideational nature of political parties in his often cited definition of political parties: ‘Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’ (Burke, 1770/1886, p. 119). The Burkean view of parties is contested. Against Burke, Schattschneider defines a political party simply as ‘an organized attempt to get power’ (Schattschneider, 1942/2004, p. 35; similarly Schumpeter, 1942, p. 283). As the case of the FDP shows, parties need not always attempt to get power in government, though. But all parties indeed aim at power insofar as they aim at political offices, including seats in parliaments.

13. Representation is a complex idea (see Pitkin, 1967; Schwartz, 1988; Vieira & Runciman, 2008), and it need not focus on political parties. For empirical studies on whether parties are actually representative of their voters see Dalton (1985), Dalton et al. (2011, ch. 6), and Rigby and Wright (2013). Some theorists emphasize that political parties should be inclusive in representing social perspectives, and that special affirmative measures in party practices are necessary if a party is not to over-represent the perspectives of privileged groups (Ryden, 1996, ch. 6; Young, 2000, pp. 135, 150–51).

14. Christiano argues that representatives are free to make compromises with regard to political means, but not with regard to political ends (Christiano, 1996, p. 218).

15. One can assess these consequences in moral terms, but also in prudential terms. When doing the former one is looking at pragmatic moral reasons to compromise, when doing the latter one is looking at pragmatic prudential reasons to compromise. Our question is whether pragmatic reasons could show that it is sometimes wrong for a political party to refuse to govern, and whether it was wrong in the case of the FDP. ‘Wrong’ is to be understood in a moral sense, not in a prudential sense, of course, and so focus on pragmatic moral reasons to compromise. It is not quite clear whether the FDP had pragmatic prudential reasons to compromise. Göring-Eckardt from The Greens was certainly not the only one who thought that the FDP’s decision was mainly grounded in its perception of the party’s very own interests. (She also argued that the FDP prioritized its own interests to its responsibility for the country; see Müller, 2017). After the experience of 2009–2013, Lindner’s strategy to present the party as a principled party that is not willing to govern at any price made sense, and so the FDP’s decision seems quite prudent. Interestingly, though, the general public did not react like the FDP had hoped. Instead of expressing respect for the new principled FDP, many people took Steinmeier’s line instead, arguing that the FDP shied away from taking responsibility. The polls went down for the party, albeit not dramatically, and fun was made of Lindner’s sentence that it is better not to govern than to govern badly (e.g., ‘Better not to resuscitate than to resuscitate badly. Fired paramedic’; see ‘Lieber nicht … ’: So reagiert das Netz auf das FDP-Mem von Christian Lindner, 2017). On the other hand, we will never know what would have happened if the FDP had entered a Jamaica coalition and made the requisite compromises. Time will tell how people think about the decision from November 2017 in retrospect and how it influences the perception of the FDP.

16. Just as a side-note: This way of thinking about reasons to compromise seems misplaced in many contexts. To think meaningfully about reasons to compromise presupposes that one takes the perspective of the respective party and their supporters, and assumes that they are correct. But this brings us into methodological waters that I cannot explore further here.

17. White and Ypi concede that there may be principled reasons to compromise, but they argue that integrity concerns outweigh these reasons (White & Ypi, 2016, pp. 157–62). Against White and Ypi, Weinstock points out that ‘if there is a cost to integrity that may sometimes be exacted by compromise, that cost has already been accepted by the very fact of agreeing to a platform with political rivals within a party’ (Weinstock, 2019).

18. On compromise and integrity see Benjamin (1990), van Willigenburg (2000), Lepora (2012), Lepora and Goodin (2013), and Hoffmaster and Hooker (2017).

19. Relatedly, Weinstock also argues that we have to integrate the concerns of ‘losers’, if we do not want to live in a winner-takes-all society (Weinstock, 2013, pp. 551–52). Not only democracy, but also community thus generates principled reasons to compromise.

20. Principled respect-based reasons to compromise are also advanced by Bellamy (Bellamy, 2012, p. 457) and Bird (1996, p. 92).

21. One might also think that such indirect reasons can only make it wrong to refuse to govern when certain additional conditions are fulfilled, for example, when a ‘fair’ compromise is available. But this would not make a difference with regard to the present argument. On fair compromises see Jones and O’Flynn (2013) and Wendt (2019).

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Fabian Wendt

Fabian Wendt is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Political Science and core faculty member of the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Authority (Polity Press 2018) and Compromise, Peace and Public Justification: Political Morality Beyond Justice (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and has published articles in venues like Philosophical Studies, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, or Social Philosophy and Policy.