In drawing together these ‘ground-clearing’ studies of local political participation in Merignac and Sevenoaks, we wish briefly to highlight five main themes: the sphere of ‘local political participation’ as an idea and political process; the ‘cartography’ of activities that comprise it; the linkages between participation and certain sociological, political and psychological traits; participation as a response to issues and problems and, finally, the character of non-participation. We will consider each of these aspects in turn.

On the face of it, as chapter 2 made clear, the local political field is very different in the two countries – ‘government’ in Britain and ‘administration’ in France. And yet the evidence, principally on this theme from Sevenoaks, suggests that for the citizenry at least, things might not be so different. For what emerged in that locality was that local issues, and actions taken in pursuit of them, were seen as falling predominantly outside of the ‘political arena’. Indeed, only some 38% of the issues and 12% of the associated actions were unequivocally ‘political’. By these measures, it would seem, British citizens see their local public affairs predominantly in non-political terms – as ‘administration’ perhaps rather than ‘government’?

Most political participation is conducted on a local stage. Even in our mobile, modern society, relatively few people pursue their affairs, whether social or political, beyond the boundaries of a particular locality. One of the characteristic features of ‘political professionals’ is precisely that they escape the gravitational field of the locality.

However, to say that most social and political activities are carried on in one single place does not necessarily imply that these activities are themselves locally determined. Many will be local instantiations of nationally determined practices. People vote in local constituencies in national elections whose outcomes are largely settled on the basis of national or international issues. Equally, they may campaign in local sections of a national pressure group, or contact the local official of a central government department about a problem. Moreover, social structures which have so powerful an impact on patterns of participation are commonly produced by forces which regulate the whole nation, its culture and its economy. Few localities in modern life can remain isolated and idiosyncratic, as the film Heimat by Edgar Reitz vividly illustrated.

Indeed, there are many political scientists who would argue that local policies on major issues are for the most part the outcome of non-local forces which may include nationally based economic and professional sectional interests (Dunleavy 1980: 98–133) as well as, in Britain, the increasingly centralising pressures mounted by national government (Newton and Karran 1985; Goldsmith and Newton 1983).

One of the advantages of studying public participation at the local level is that it is somewhat easier to establish the specific context which gives rise to action, particularly by individuals. The national political stage tends to be one in which great issues are debated, about which individual citizens may have views but the outcome of which they cannot affect in any very direct way. For this reason, the ‘great issues’ do not necessarily produce the largest amount of participation (Moyser, Parry and Day 1986). However, as was argued when discussing the existence of a distinctively ‘local’ form of participation in the introductory chapter, it is not possible to exclude entirely the national dimension from many aspects of the local context. Moreover, many of the problems which arise in a locality, concerning housing or education, will have their close parallels elsewhere. Indeed, one of the objectives of the study of participation is to examine the almost routine patterns of political life between the highlights of election periods.

Nevertheless, problems do take on more specific forms in different localities and the prevailing social and demographic structure, the party political alliances and the social norms will give their own bias to the outcome. This in turn leads us to a consideration of the methodological choices which lie behind the two chapters.

We can distinguish two broad approaches to the study of political participation. The first focuses on the long-term personal predispositions which affect behaviour.

introduction

The subject of this essay is the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), traditionally translated into English as the Freedom Party of Austria. It is a party with numerous internal contradictions, especially of an ideological nature. For years after its launch in 1956, it was almost universally reviled in Austria as a party of old Nazis. In 1979 it joined the Liberal International and now wishes to be known in English as the Liberal party of Austria. In 1983, the FPÖ commenced its first ever period of federal governmental office, and in a coalition with the Socialists at that.

This essay seeks to explain the FPÖ's transition from a party of protest to a party of government. First, it will show that the FPÖ's contradictions are a hallmark of the political tradition from which it derives. Secondly, it will examine the current tensions and conflicts in the FPÖ's organisation. Thirdly, I shall look at the party's often precarious electoral situation, concentrating in particular upon the profile of its protest voters, who have traditionally constituted a substantial proportion of the FPÖ's electoral support. Then, I shall outline the programmatic development of the party, with special reference to the most recent developments in the relationship between the FPÖ's national and liberal traditions. The penultimate section of this paper will concentrate upon the party's experience in government. Here the party appears to have had some success in one of its major objectives, namely to start reducing the influence of Austria's very powerful and ubiquitous system of Proporz (the party-political allocation of public offices).

background and historical development

International co-operation of political parties belonging to the same political-ideological ‘family’ in the framework of ‘Internationals’ is a well-known phenomenon. Parties understand such organisations primarily as round tables for exchanging views and discussing ideas in a rather general manner. In 1947, liberals established the Liberal World Union, now renamed as the ‘Liberal International’, as such a forum for mutual information and communication. It has to be regarded as a loose grouping, since the participating parties did represent the whole broad spectrum of liberal positions. The Liberal Manifesto of Oxford, adopted at the founding convention in 1947 – amended in 1967 with the Liberal Declaration of Oxford – did reflect the political heterogeneity of the member parties; it was too general to serve as a basis and programmatic guideline for common activities. The members regarded the organisation as a loose but useful forum.

In 1952 the ‘Mouvement Libéral pour l'Europe Unie’ (MLEU) was founded as an organisation which should concentrate its activities on issues of European unification; the MLEU was independent from the Liberal International. In 1961 membership in this specialised organisation was restricted to parties and politicians from EC countries only. In 1972 the MLEU was incorporated as a regional organisation into the Liberal International, which since 1969 had started to promote the establishment of closer links and more intense co-operation amongst liberal parties from EC countries, adding to the consolidation of the community.

introduction

By June 1986, liberal parties were represented in the governments often of the thirteen Western European countries examined in this book. This was a better record than, for example, social democratic, socialist or labour parties could boast at that time. Yet, in the post Second World War period, liberal parties have generally been counted far more in electoral terms than with regard to their role in coalitions and governments. They have consequently been regarded as ‘small’ or ‘minor’ parties and their influence has been neglected or concealed. Influence over government policy can be exercised both from within a governing coalition and from without. The latter prevailed, for example, in Italy in the mid to late seventies when the Communist Party became a ‘silent partner’ in government by often abstaining in votes on bills the ruling Christian Democratic Party introduced in parliament – undoubtedly at a bargaining cost over policy content. On the other hand, participation within a governing coalition is no guarantee for wielding influence, if either no cabinet posts are held (as, for example, in the British Lib–Lab Pact in the seventies) or only a few and relatively unimportant portfolios are held by a particular party. In other words, the number and importance of portfolios held, the length of time parties have been either in government or in certain ministries, and similarities and differences in policy content vis-à-vis other coalition partners become important factors over whether or not influence can be wielded by particular parties.

liberal parties in the netherlands defined

Two Dutch parties can legitimately claim to be part of the liberal famille spirituelle, the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, or VVD in the Dutch acronym) which adopted its present name in 1948 and which has been a member of the Liberal International since 1960, and Democraten '66 (or D'66 – recently renamed D66 without apostrophe), which, established in 1966 as a party of radical reform, consciously sought to break the hold of traditional class and religious alignments in Dutch politics in favour of a far going programme of institutional reform.

Of these two parties, the VVD undoubtedly has the older and better title. The 1948 party grew from the Partij van de Vrijheid (Freedom Party) which was established in 1946 as a new incarnation of the pre-Second World War Liberale Staatspartij De Vrijheidsbond. That party in turn had been formed in 1921 to collect a number of different liberal and other parties which had developed side by side in a period of limited franchise and a district system before the First World War, and in the aftermath of that war. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the liberals had regarded themselves (and had been regarded by others) as very much a dominant force in Dutch politics. They had represented the cause of constitutional reform – which had led in 1848 to a comparatively early breakthrough of responsible parliamentary government in the Netherlands, under a constitutional revision which was very much the work of a liberal Professor of Constitutional Law, Johan Rudolf Thorbecke.

introduction

When the president of the European Parliament was elected in January 1987, the Liberal group voted for the left-wing Radical Marco Panella on the first ballot and for Sir Henry Plumb, a Conservative, on the second. The group claimed that ‘by shifting en bloc from Panella to Plumb’ [it] ‘thereby illustrated the deep unity which exists – in their diversity – between the European Liberals’. Others might consider that this behaviour illustrated the lack of political coherence amongst the European parties which claim to be liberal. Liberal parties thus confront us with a major problem of classification and of analysis. In simple terms, the problem arises because the Liberal family itself asserts that it exists; yet even the most superficial glance at the Liberal group in the European Parliament or at the Liberal International finds it to be a most heterogeneous collection, embracing elements that on close inspection strike the political scientist as being surprising candidates for inclusion. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that political scientists have, until now, tended to focus only on the major party families and have not yet given much attention to the smaller party families. The problem is, in fact, very complex and can be approached at several different levels.

At the intellectual level, attempting to identify liberal parties should produce important lessons for the study of parties and party systems.

introduction

At the general election in March 1983, the Finnish Liberal People's Party, Liberaalinen Kansanpuolue (LKP), lost its toehold in the 200 seat national assembly (Eduskunta). This meant for the first time since the creation of a modern legislative system in Finland in 1907, there were no liberal representatives in parliament – precisely the same fate which had befallen the Norwegian Liberals (Venstre) two years earlier. To many observers of the Finnish political scene, this disastrous result for LKP came as little surprise, and the newspaper obituaries to mark the peaceful demise of the party were doubtless composed shortly after the Liberals' decision to become a member organisation of the Centre (formerly Agrarian) Party early in 1982. It was in this twilight world as ‘a party within a party’ that LKP lost all four of its parliamentarians and plummeted to an all-time nadir of 0.8 per cent of the active electorate in 1983. It seemed the end of the line for Finnish liberalism and its absorption into a federated political centre similar to the UDF in France.

The road back for the party will be long and hard. At the local government elections in October 1984, to be sure, LKP contrived to increase its vote slightly (1.3 per cent of the valid poll) and then emboldened by the resurgence of liberalism in neighbouring Sweden and the 14.3 per cent gained by Folkpartiet at the autumn 1985 general election, LKP seized the opportunity of breaking the knot with the Centre Party.

introduction

The first task in any study of liberalism in Denmark is to decide which parties can justifiably be classified as ‘liberal’, given the country's fragmented party system, particularly since 1973. There are two main candidates for this label and both will be dealt with in this chapter.

The name of the first, Venstre, (founded in the 1870s) translates literally as ‘The Left’, which relates to the party's nineteenth-century origins as the proponent of electoral reform and the parliamentary principle of governmental responsibility to the popularly elected majority. Under the name ‘The United Left’, Venstre issued Denmark's first political party manifesto in 1872, emphasising reformist aims and opposition to the anti-parliamentary government of ‘The Right’ which continued to hold power under the monarch until 1901.

The name Venstre is sometimes translated into English as the Liberal Democratic Party, and sometimes as Agrarian Liberals, in recognition of the main source of their electoral support, both originally and currently. In 1970 the party confirmed its own claim to its liberal inheritance by formally adopting a suffix to its name, becoming Venstre – Danmarks liberale Parti.

The second candidates for the ‘liberal’ label are the Radical Liberals, Det radikale Venstre (often referred to as the Radicals). They broke away from Venstre in 1905, partly reflecting dissatisfaction among smallholders that Venstre's tax reforms bore more heavily on them than on large farms, and partly because of their objection to proposed increases in defence expenditure. Nevertheless, the Radicals shared Venstre's orientation towards individual political participation and limited government.

To talk about parties belonging to liberalism in Switzerland is not an easy task. To the outsider the Swiss political system is quite a sophisticated one; so sophisticated that a political scientist following an approach based on economic rationality would give up the idea of studying such a country, since it is far too complicated given its political weight and influence in the world system.

As a federal country, Switzerland is divided into 26 states (cantons and half-cantons) with their own political culture, tradition, administration and party systems. The country is split into four languages and two religions; some cantons are bilingual and others are bi-denominational. Federal parties are rather vague and badly organised bodies, and the main parties are cantonal. Parliamentary parties and parliamentary groups do exist, but they are quite undisciplined. Even the social democrats are unable to achieve the political cohesion they show in other parliaments in the world. MPs do not sit either following the French hemicycle or the British ‘face to face’ opposition system. In the Senate – Conseil des Etats, Ständerat–they sit by cantonal delegation and in the House – Conseil national, Nationalrat – the MPs' desks are allocated according to a rather mysterious formula, combining language, party and canton, with decisions taken randomly. There is no majority rule, and the sole opposition is made up of small right-wing and left-wing parties – xenophobes, neo-fascists, communists and left socialists – even the ecologists accept the rules of amicable agreement. This means that the majority/opposition pattern varies depending on the issues involved. When an opposition party becomes electorally important, it receives a portfolio in either the federal or cantonal cabinets.

introduction; who are the italian liberals?

When identifying liberalism in Italy after the Second World War, familiar comparative distinctions between types of liberalism are indeed relevant. Such distinctions as between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ – or between ‘social’ and ‘economic’ or simply ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ forms of liberalism are all directly applicable to the Italian Republican and Liberal Parties respectively, as a broad description of their basic and somewhat divergent programmatic outlooks over time. As to that other set of distinctions between liberal parties, namely whether they are ‘historical’ or de jure as against de facto or ‘behavioural’ forms of liberalism, the PLI and PRI fall respectively into the two different categories. This is first and foremost because the former calls itself ‘liberal’ and the latter does not, although this is not to deny that the Republicans represent a ‘historical’ party in Italy of their own variety.

In other words, the PRI and the PLI express different versions of the same ideological tendency as seen in comparative terms. So far as this Italian example is concerned, any diachronic assessment of the two parties in question will show that however much they have converged strategically and programmatically in recent years they nevertheless boast separate traditions, have usually followed different paths in government and have for most of their histories possessed rather distinct social and electoral bases. Acknowledging therefore the truism that political parties are hardly static entities, such mutual movement on the part of the PRI and PLI may well be viewed as pursuing ‘two roads of Italian liberalism’.

introduction

Organised liberalism has survived in Britain in the face of a number of formidable obstacles. Although once one of two great parties of state, the principal social cleavage it helped articulate, religion, has long since lost its electoral significance. After the First World War British politics came to be dominated by class, and in the process the Liberal Party not only lost electoral support but also split on more than one occasion and saw one wing of the party joining the Conservatives. Since 1945 none of its members has held ministerial office and by 1951 its electoral support had fallen to 2.5 per cent of the vote. These difficulties have been compounded by the operation of the singlemember plurality system which has ensured that its geographically evenly spread vote has never been able to secure more than a handful of seats.

Yet despite this unfavourable combination of circumstances, organised liberalism has not only survived but now flourishes. There is but one Liberal Party able to command a level of support which would in any other West European country accord it major party status. True, it has given up some of its independence by entering into an electoral alliance with the Social Democratic Party, formed in 1981 after a split within the Labour Party. But the formation of that party was encouraged by the leader of the Liberal Party himself as a means of pursuing the party's long-term strategy and now the SDP–Liberal Alliance is seen by some as the rekindling of a progressive ideological tradition which originated within the Liberal Party at the turn of the century.

introduction

Sweden is commonly looked upon as the middle-way Schlaraffenland, yet its citizens have not found the middle parties to their liking. Rather, the Liberal Party, (Folkpartiet) has often been made an object of ridicule by its opponents and in the media; television cannot resist the temptation to portray the party as an unholy alliance of atheist social science professors from Stockholm and pietist smallholders from the hinterland.

The Liberal Party's overall performance has not generally been applauded by the Swedish electorate. The party's reluctant stance on whether to join bourgeois coalition cabinets engendered much antipathy towards them among the public at large. The Liberal Party was seen as the champion of the ‘alternating-majority formula’ of governing, i.e. minority cabinets depending on either bourgeois or socialist support to pass legislation in parliament. Political tightrope walking is alien to the rationalist political culture of Sweden.

Time and again political commentators have prophesied the demise of the Liberal Party. Predictions of this kind have repeatedly turned out to be premature, most obviously in 1985 when the Liberal vote soared to 14.2 per cent from a previous all-time low of 5.9 per cent in 1982.

This chapter is meant to be an introduction to the nature and trends of Swedish liberal politics. The various topics raised in the course of the empirical analyses will be synthesised in a concluding discussion on whether Sweden is an illiberal society or, on the contrary, too liberal to be in need of a liberal party, or if the Liberal Party (until very recently) has misconceived its mission in Swedish politics.