Public images of political parties: A necessary evil?

Abstract

The debate on citizen images of political parties is long standing, but recently it has taken on added importance as the evidence of party dealignment has spread across Western democracies. This article assembles an unprecedented cross-national array of public opinion data that describe current images of political parties. Sentiments are broadly negative, and this pessimism has deepened over the past generation. Then, we demonstrate how distrust of parties decreases voting turnout, contributes to the fragmentation of contemporary party systems and the electoral base of new protest parties, and stimulates broader cynicism towards government. Although political parties are the foundation of the system of representative democracy, fewer citizens today trust political parties, and this is reshaping the nature of democratic politics.

Notes

We would like to thank Anthony McGann, Ingrid van Biezen, and Martin Wattenberg for their comments on a previous version of this paper. This is a revised version of an article that first appeared in Rivista italiana di scienza politica 34 (December 2004), 381–404.

1. ‘Empty Vessels’, Economist, 24 July 1999, 51–2.

2. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data were acquired from the CSES website: http://www.cses.org. The other data in this article came from the Inter-university Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan.

3. Both items are measures on a five point agree/disagree scale; Table 1 presents the two agree categories for each question, and thus should be comparable. These two questions are strongly intercorrelated. For the 13 nations in Table 1, the average Pearson r correlation between the two items is .26.

4. These are not isolated findings. For instance, the 1997 Canadian election study asked a battery of party image questions (Gidengil et al. 2001). They found that sizeable minorities see the parties as untrustworthy and uncaring, with one Canadian in three believing that parties hardly ever keep their election promises (32 per cent) and do not care what ordinary people think (35 per cent). Similarly, Torcal et al. (2002) found that citizens in Southern Europe believed parties were necessary for democracy to function, but they were simultaneously sceptical about the performance of parties.

5. Another possibility is that voters are expressing doubts about parties other than their own. In other words, most parties might be considered untrustworthy – except the party that the respondent personally supports. Yet, attachment to one's preferred political party has also diminished over the past several decades in most of these nations (Dalton 2000). It is likely that voters hold their own party as more trustworthy than the opposition–democracy functions on this premise – but it is also apparent that attachment to one's preferred party have also weakened.

6. For instance, 90 per cent of the Swedes and Spanish respondents reported voting in the previous election, as did 96 per cent of the Danes and 99 per cent of the Australians. We excluded Australia from Table 4 because voting is compulsory and only 18 people reported not voting in the election (and 11 of these were in the category of least trust in parties). In addition, reported turnout often exceeds official statistics; for instance, 77 per cent of Americans said they voted in the 1996 election, although official turnout rates are 49 per cent of the voting age public. In other analyses (not shown) we combined party images, age and education in a multivariate model to predict turnout to ensure that the correlations in Table 4 are not spuriously due to other basic predictors. The coefficients for party images remained significant and little changed from the patterns presented in Table 4.

7. Distrust in parties seems to have a general demobilising effect upon voters that reaches beyond electoral participation. For instance, in most nations those who distrust parties also score lower in national indices of political knowledge included in the CSES survey. However, many of the knowledge questions are based on political parties or elected officials, and this might exaggerate the partisan effect.

8. The campaign activity items were not included in the CSES dataset. Instead, we accessed the data from the separate national election studies that included the CSES supplement. The number and type of campaign activities vary across nations in the CSES surveys. Thus, the absolute levels of activity should not be compared across nations.

9. The literature is uncertain about which parties should be defined as anti-establishment parties. We include all far-right nationalist, communist and extreme-left socialist parties. In addition, we include Green parties as long as they are not more ideologically centrist than the mainstream left party. Specifically, we defined the following as anti-establishment parties: Australia, Greens (L); Canada, Reform (R); Denmark, Red-Green List (L) and Danish People's Party (R); Germany, PDS (L), Greens (L), Republikaner (R), and DVU (R); Japan, Communist (L); Netherlands, Green Left (L); New Zealand, Alliance (L) and NZ First (R); Norway, Red Electoral Alliance (L) and Progress Party (R); Spain, Communist (L); Sweden, Extreme Left (L) and Greens (L); Switzerland, Swiss People's Party (R).

10. The data are from the 1996 election. In the following elections, a more viable anti-party party has emerged in Pauline Hansen's One Nation Party.