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