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Programmatic Parties

December 2011 Lead Consultant: Nic Cheeseman Project Manager: Dan Paget Research and writing by: Adi Dasgupta, Daniel Epstein, Oleh Protsyk and Dan Paget.

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Table of Contents

List of Tables ........................................................................................................................ 5

List of Acronyms .................................................................................................................. 6

1 Programmatic Politics in Comparative Perspective ...................................... 7

1.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 7

1.2 Defining and operationalizing programmaticity ................................................ 9

1.3 Foundations of programmatic politics ..................................................................14

1.3.1 The role of the state ......................................................................................................... 14

1.3.2 The structure of society ................................................................................................. 15

1.3.3 Institutional design .......................................................................................................... 17

1.3.4 Party system institutionalization ............................................................................... 17

1.4 Pathways to programmatic politics .......................................................................19

1.4.1 Party genesis and development .................................................................................. 20

1.4.2 Party institutionalization and the sustainability of

programmatic politics..................................................................................................... 28

1.4.3 From parties to party systems .................................................................................... 31

1.5 The impact of programmatic politics ....................................................................36

1.5.1 Representation and accountability ........................................................................... 36

1.5.2 Governance .......................................................................................................................... 38

1.5.3 Political dynamics ............................................................................................................. 38

1.6 Policy recommendations............................................................................................40

1.6.1 Structural determinants of programmatic development ................................. 41

1.6.2 Party genesis ....................................................................................................................... 42

1.6.3 Programmatic party building ...................................................................................... 43

1.7 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................44

2 Brazil ............................................................................................................................ 47

2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................47

2.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Brazil ..........................................................48

2.3 Categorization and Description of Programmatic Parties .............................50

2.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics ....................................53

2.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics .............................................................................58

2.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Brazilian Case ..............................59

2.7 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................60

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3 India.............................................................................................................................. 63

3.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................63

3.2 History of Programmatic Politics in India ...........................................................64

3.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties ......................66



3.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Indian Case ...................................79

3.7 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................80

4 Ukraine ........................................................................................................................ 83

4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................83

4.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Ukraine ......................................................84

4.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties ......................87



4.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Ukrainian Case ......................... 101

4.7 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 103

5 Zambia ....................................................................................................................... 105

5.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 105

5.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Zambia .................................................... 106

5.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties ................... 109

5.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics ................................. 112

5.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics .......................................................................... 119

5.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Zambian Case ............................ 120

5.7 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 122

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List of Tables TABLE 1: THE MOST COMMON TYPES OF PROGRAMMATIC PARTY ............................................................. 11 TABLE 2: DISTINCTION BETWEEN ETHNIC AND CIVIC-PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES ................................... 13 TABLE 3: DRIVERS AND RETARDANTS OF PROGRAMMATIC POLITICS...................................................... 18 TABLE 4: SUMMARY OF PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES IN BRAZIL, INDIA, UKRAINE AND ZAMBIA ............. 28 TABLE 5: BRAZILIAN PARTY PROFILES .......................................................................................................... 50 TABLE 6: INDIAN PARTY PROFILES ................................................................................................................ 70 TABLE 7: SELECTED RESULTS OF PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE (%) ................................ 85 TABLE 8: UKRAINIAN PARTY PROFILES ......................................................................................................... 87 TABLE 9: ZAMBIAN PARTY PROFILES ........................................................................................................... 112

List of Figures FIGURE 1: TYPOLOGY OF PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES .................................................................................... 31 FIGURE 2: FIRST-ROUND PRESIDENTIAL VOTES IN BRAZIL, 1994–2010 .............................................. 49 FIGURE 3: PARTY SEAT SHARES IN THE LOK SABHA, 1951–2009 .......................................................... 65 FIGURE 4: SHARE OF PARTISAN AND NON-PARTISAN CABINET MEMBERS IN ROMANIA AND UKRAINE ......................................................................................................... 100 FIGURE 5: ZAMBIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RESULTS, 2001–2011................................................ 108

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List of Acronyms ARENA National Renovating Alliance BIMARU Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh BJP Bharatiya Janata Party BSP Bahujan Samaj Party DEM Democratas ENP Effective Number of Parties FDD Foundation for Democracy and Development HP Heritage Party IDEA Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance JDU Janata Dal (United) MDB Brazilian Democratic Movement MMD Movement for Multiparty Democracy PF Patriotic Front PDS Social Democratic Party PFL Party of the Liberal Front PL Liberal Party PSDB Brazilian Social Democratic Party PT Workers’ Party RJD Rashtriya Janata Dal RPG Responsible Party Government SDPU Social-Democratic Party of Ukraine SMD Single member district system SPU Socialist Party of Ukraine TDP Telugu Desam Party UDA United Democratic Alliance UNIP United National Independence Party UPND United Party for National Development UPP United Progressive Party ZCTU Zambian Congress of Trade Unions ZRP Zambian Republican Party

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1 Programmatic Politics in Comparative Perspective

1.1 Introduction A political system is programmatic when the parties within it predominantly generate policy, mobilize support, and govern, on the basis of a consistent and coherent ideological position. In other words, programmatic politics is the antithesis of clientelistic politics, in which parties seek to mobilize support through patron–client networks and seek power in order to gain control over state resources. The development of programmatic politics is important for a number of reasons. In party systems in which clientelistic or ethnic parties are the order of the day, elections do not generate debate over important issues such as economic policy and may not even focus on the performance of the last government. In clientelistic parties, for example, leaders gain support if they provide sufficient private benefits to their supporters—the question of how well they handle education and health policy is of little import. Thus the classic Downsian assumption that repeated political competition will result in parties more closely representing the favoured policy position of the median voter does not hold (Downs 1957). This is not to say that programmatic politics always results in more responsible government, or that the emergence of more programmatic party systems always translates into higher levels of representation for previously marginalized constituencies. But our study of programmatic development in a number of new democracies finds that the emergence of more policy-based political competition creates a context in which policy and competency become the deciding factors in how people vote, and in which leaders are far more likely to be held accountable if they fail to implement their platforms. Moreover, across our cases the rise of more programmatic parties appears to have encouraged economic innovation, reduced corruption, and focused policymaking on the needs of the very poor. Given this, it is all the more important to understand the factors that promote programmatic politics. In order to test some of the main hypotheses put forward by the literature and in the Desk Review (Luna 2012)—for example, that programmaticity often occurs as a by-product of the emergence of left-wing parties and that the institutionalization of parties and party systems is critical to the emergence of sustainable programmatic politics—we began by conducting in-depth case studies of four recent examples of programmatic development. Our cases of Brazil, India, the Ukraine and Zambia were chosen because they represent very different contexts in terms of their history, socio-economic composition, experience with democracy and level of economic development. By drawing comparisons between the four cases in our sample, and also over time within each case, we are able to identify the range of very different processes through which programmatic development may occur. Significantly, Brazil, India, the Ukraine and Zambia are all countries in which the emergence of policy-based parties was remarkable given the historic depth of clientelistic or ethnic ties; they are therefore emblematic examples of how political change can occur even in the most unlikely of cases. Based on the main lessons from our four cases, we develop a comparative framework in order to explain the key drivers, and retardants, of programmatic politics. This comparative chapter makes three important contributions to our understanding of programmatic development. First, we argue that previous work in this area has failed to recognize that parties have an ‘ethnic’ (or linguistic, religious and regional) and a ‘programmatic’ component. This is because in cases in which historical patterns of discrimination have created an overlap between ethnic and socio-economic groups, or

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the politicization of some ethnic communities has served to render them more responsive to certain policy platforms, parties can develop an agenda that is highly programmatic but also appeals overwhelmingly to a particular ethnic group. This is important because the policy-based nature of these parties, and their potential to support programmatic development, has often been ignored by commentators. However, this potential notwithstanding, we also find that ethnic–programmatic parties are more likely to heighten inter-communal tensions than their more ‘civic’ counterparts, and so may contribute to political instability in new democracies. We therefore distinguish between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ parties and explore the impact of each type of party on the evolution policy-based politics. Our second contribution is that we highlight the need to separate out programmatic development at the party and party-system level. All too often, discussions of programmatization assume that more programmatic parties will necessarily translate into a programmatic party system. Our cases demonstrate that this is incorrect. Although programmatic parties may have certain advantages over their rivals, for example because they find it cheaper to contest elections if they can run on the basis of policies rather than the distribution of patronage, one or two policy-based parties may have little impact if they have to compete against established ethnic and clientelistic parties that have access to resources. Instead, we find that it is only when most or all of the main political parties have strong programmatic elements that policy-based politics comes to be entrenched as the main dynamic of political competition between parties. Even when this tipping point is reached, we identify a number of factors that can undermine the evolution of a fully programmatic party system. It is therefore important to understand the actual processes through which changes at the level of individual parties do or don’t transform the wider political system. We build on the extant literature by focusing greater attention on the origins and genesis of programmatic political parties—topics that have tended to receive less coverage thus far. In none of our four cases did programmatic development occur as a result of the transformation of an established ethnic or clientelistic party. Rather, in Brazil, India, the Ukraine and Zambia we find that issue-based politics emerged when a new party was born programmatic, or became programmatic when it was young. Often, such parties emerged to represent groups that had long been marginalized or developed out of pre-existing civil society organizations. We argue that the varied origins of parties are particularly important, because the organizational structure they develop and the support base they cultivate shape their future paths of programmatic development. In order to provide a parsimonious account of some of these processes we develop a typological theory that bridges the gap between these two levels of analysis by explaining which types of programmatic party are more likely to inspire the transformation of the party system. Typological theories focus on identifying key sets of factors that make certain outcomes more or less likely. In this case, we focus on explaining the sustainability of programmaticity at the party level with reference to two key factors: the types of linkages that parties construct to voters and whether or not they build strong ties to civil society groups. We argue that parties that integrate ethnic groups into their support base during their early years, and fail to build strong ties to civil society actors, are more likely to experience programmatic backsliding. By contrast, parties that maintain a more ‘civic’ support base and incorporate civil society groups into their internal organization are the most likely to stay true to their programmatic commitments during the crucial period when programmatic politics has yet to be entrenched in the rest of the party system. Other things being equal, it is therefore the

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latter set of parties that are the most likely to drive the programmatic development of the party system.

1.2 Defining and operationalizing programmaticity Programmatization is a complex notion. For one thing, parties are not simply programmatic or non-programmatic. Rather, the parties identified in our four case studies are distributed across a broad spectrum, from largely clientelistic parties with little programmatic content, such as the Movement for Multi-party Democracy in Zambia, to parties that rely on patron–client relations to mobilize support but actually pursue coherent policy-based agendas, such as the Congress Party in India, to parties that mobilize support along programmatic lines, feature internal structures designed to promote programmatic policy formation, and pursue a stable set of ideological goals when in office, such as the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil. Second, as these examples demonstrate, parties may be more or less programmatic on a number of different dimensions. Because parties may be highly programmatic in some areas while being relatively unprogrammatic in others, it can be very difficult to rank them. For example, should the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), which has a party structure directed toward the pursuit of programmatic goals and attempts to implement them while in office, but relies more on clientelistic method to mobilize voters than programmatic ones, be considered more, less, or equally as programmatic as Zambia’s Patriotic Front, which has programmatic linkages with voters and is genuinely committed to programmatic policies, but has yet to consolidate its programmatic credentials in terms of the way that the party is organized and makes policy? One cannot answer this question without first deciding which dimension of programmaticity is the most important. Third, there is the question of whether all forms of programmaticity are equally normatively desirable. Parties may develop ‘stable ideological commitments’ to public goods within an inclusive civic framework, but they may also build a coherent and institutionalized policy position that effectively advances the interests of one specific ethnic, religious, regional or linguistic, community. Such ‘ethnic–programmatic’ parties evolve in a different way to ‘civic–programmatic’ parties and their presence has different consequences for the wider political system: most obviously, they are more likely to exacerbate inter-communal tensions and so have a detrimental impact on national unity. Finally, there is an important difference between the programmatic development of individual parties and the programmatic development of the party system, because individual parties may become more programmatic without this transforming the rest of the party system within which they operate. We therefore need to consider the relationship between party programmatization and party system programmatization—and the fact that because the ‘party system’ refers the product of the continual interaction of numerous parties, rather than the activity of a single party, we may need to employ different measures to capture the extent of programmatization in each case. The dimensions of programmaticity We follow the desk study in defining a programmatic party as one in which well structured and stable ideological commitments constitute the basis for:

1) The link between the party and its constituents 2) The internal organization of the party 3) The policy making process and the platform that results (Luna 2012: pp. 4)

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A fully programmatic party would fulfil all three of these conditions. In other words, a true programmatic party would not mobilize support using patron–client linkages (the strategy of clientelistic parties), nor make appeals and advocate policies that are explicitly designed to advance the interests of just one group (the behaviour of an ethnic party). However, many parties in the real world do not conform to this ideal type. Based on the three main components of an ideal-type programmatic party set out by Luna, Table 1 summarizes the most common combinations we identify in Brazil, India, Ukraine and Zambia. Of the parties covered by our case studies, only the PT in Brazil can be categorized as a fully programmatic party. Most of the remaining parties fail to fulfil at least one of the criteria. The most common programmatic limitation is that parties do not meet the second criteria: instead of being organized in a way that reflects and contributes to the party’s ideological goals, many parties are undemocratic and policy decisions do not reflect the way that the party links to voters or its stated aspirations but are rather taken by the small number of senior figures, in some cases the party’s elected representatives, and in others a small coterie around the leader. This is as true of many parties in advanced democracies as it is of developing countries and new democracies. The Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, for example, has consistently been wedded to a right or centre-right political agenda that emphasized the right of individuals to control their own destinies and has used this to mobilize support. Yet until internal party reform in 1998, the selection of the party leader was done exclusively by members of Parliament, with no reference to party activists or members. Similarly, the Patriotic Front party in Zambia espouses a clear economic message that it uses to mobilize support. Yet the lack of an effective internal organization means that the PF is hopelessly dependent on the party’s leader, Michael Sata, such that the poor and unemployed people that the party is committed to defending have no role to play in the way the party makes decisions. Such parties have all of the trappings of programmatic parties but this has not been entrenched in the party’s own rules. In these weak programmatic parties, the focus on public policy is susceptible to reversal in favour of clientelistic, charismatic or ethnic appeals. However, because these parties primarily mobilize support through programmatic linkages to the electorate, moving away from a programmatic position is likely to be costly. As a result, party elites are unlikely to embark on this strategy lightly. But programmaticity is not always driven from below. A small number of parties such as the BSDP in Brazil have developed programmatic organizations, and through them programmatic policies, without actually establishing programmatic linkages to their main constituencies. The desk study refers to these parties as elite–programmatic parties to signify the absence of a mass constituency for the policy-based politics that they advocate. We also find that some parties develop programmatic platforms even though they lack ideological links to voters and a programmatic organization. In such cadre–programmatic parties, we find that leaders focus on pursuing stable policy goals for two main reasons. First, because they believe that this is the best thing for the national good. Second, because their parties have developed as inclusive ‘catch-all’ organizations and so sectional appeals to certain communities would risk splitting the party’s diverse support base. The Congress Party in India, for example, restricted policy making authority to a small elite and mobilized support at the local level along ethnic or clientelistic lines, but embraced programmatic policies in order to maintain its broad ruling alliance. The programmatic policies adopted by cadre and elite parties may be vulnerable to reversal in the medium to long-term because such parties do not rely on programmatic appeals to mobilize support and so are unlikely to receive direct electoral punishment for a change of policy; this is particularly likely in the case of elite parties, because such parties lack an internal structure designed to promote programmatic ideas

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and have therefore failed to institutionalize their commitment to a policy-based approach. Finally, we also identify parties in which the party organization is representative of activists seeking to promote a more programmatic approach to politics, who nonetheless initially pursue alternative forms of political mobilization because these are the dominant forms of electoral competition. This sort of programmatic party is often unstable because there is a tension between the types of appeals it is likely to generate and the promises that leaders make to voters. Such unstable programmatic parties often experience this form of transformation as a result of the ability of more programmatically minded leaders to use their influence within the party to push a new approach. For example, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) began life, and initially mobilized support, along ethnic and clientelistic lines, but later developed more programmatic ties in line with the attitudes of influential programmatically minded activists. Because two parties may be equally programmatic in terms of the number of dimensions they fulfil, but may vary in terms of exactly which criteria they meet, it is often unclear whether a given party is more or less programmatic than another. For example, weak and elite parties are both programmatic on two of the three dimensions, but while weak parties fulfil the criteria of programmatic linkage and policy, elite parties fulfil the criteria of organization and policy. In order to fully rank parties we would therefore need to make a normative argument about which dimensions of programmaticity are more important than others. Instead, we suggest that it is more important to recognize that we can infer certain tendencies of what combination of the three dimensions of programmaticity that a given party fulfils. For example, parties that advocate programmatic policies as a result of elite consensus, such as the Congress Party in India, face little incentive to develop more meaningful programmatic ties to voters or more programmatic decision making processes. As a result, they are less likely to witness programmatic development over time.

Table 1: The most common types of programmatic party

Programmatic linkage

Programmatic organization

Programmatic Policy

Programmatic party type

Examples

Ideal type programmatic

party

PT (Brazil)

X Weak programmatic

party

PF (Zambia), Party of Regions (Ukraine)

X Elite programmatic

party

BSDP (Brazil)

X X Cadre programmatic

party

Congress (India)

X X Unstable programmatic

party

Early years of the BJP (India)

X X X Unprogrammatic party

MMD (Zambia)

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By contrast, parties that mobilize support on the basis of programmatic links, such as the PF in Zambia, have strong incentives to strengthen their programmatic ties to voters and to keep their supporters happy by espousing policy-based agendas. Other things being equal, weak programmatic parties are therefore less likely to abandon programmatic appeals in favour of clientelistic or ethnic approaches. This becomes even more likely when programmatic linkages are combined with programmatic forms of organization, so that party leaders face both a constituency demanding programmatic policies and a cadre of leaders keen to supply them; it is under these conditions that parties are most likely to move toward the programmatic ideal type. This point is taken up in greater depth in section 1.4. Programmatic parties: ethnic or civic? It is often assumed that, because programmatic parties have stable ideological commitments, by definition they must exist of a left–right spectrum and be inherently civic—in other words, that they are the very antithesis of ethnic parties (where ‘ethnic’ stands as shorthand for linguistic, ethnic, regional and religious parties). However, in many countries historical patterns of unequal resource distribution mean that some communities are systematically worse off than others in terms of their standard of living, access to the state and life expectancy. This phenomenon can be seen in a number of advanced democracies, perhaps most notably in the case of the native Indian and black communities of the United States, but it is most common in new democracies in which there has been little time to overcome the iniquities of authoritarian rule. Where such horizontal inequalities exist—in other words, where members of a particular ethnic group are consistently discriminated against simply because they are members of that group—ethnicity starts to operate in a similar way to class. Consequently, when political parties attempt to represent these groups, they often feature both an ethnic and programmatic component. Ethnic because they are predominantly focused on the advancement of one community and programmatic because the advancement of that community depends on the same kind of pro-poor redistribute policies traditionally advocated by left-wing European parties. In three of the four case studies covered in this project—India, Ukraine, and Zambia—we identify political parties that advance programmatic appeals and seek to construct programmatic linkages, but whose policy platforms are clearly designed to offer greater-than-average benefit to a specific ethnic group. The overlap between ethnicity and class is clearly the closest in India, where parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) have developed specifically to represent certain ‘castes’, ‘tribes’ and ‘religious minorities’. In Ukraine and Zambia the overlap between ethnicity and class is nowhere near as close as it is in India, but the historical politicization of identify groups by different leaders nonetheless had the effect of encouraging the diffusion of certain policy attitudes to specific communities. In Ukraine, for example, the historical politicization of regional identities has resulted in different parts of the country having very different attitudes toward Russia and how foreign policy should be conducted. It is important to distinguish ethnic–programmatic parties from civic–programmatic parties, because the former introduce communal politics into the party system and so although the growth and institutionalization of these parties may promote programmaticity, it often does so at the cost of further politicizing communal identities. We distinguish between ethnic– and civic–programmatic parties on the following basis:

Similarities. Neither ethnic– nor civic–programmatic parties employ justifying discourses that solely privilege the role or entitlements of particular ethnic groups, so they are not ethnic parties. At the same time, their programme is not

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dependent on the delivery of goods to supporters that are contingent or direct, and so non-supporters cannot be deliberately excluded from the benefits of office. As a result, they are not predominantly clientelistic parties (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007).

Differences. Ethnic–programmatic parties receive disproportionate support from voters of one ethnic group. Moreover, their policy programme includes measures that, although framed in a ‘national’ way, will inevitably benefit the same ethnic group more than others (for example, through poverty reduction programmes that benefit an ethnic group that is poor). In contrast, civic parties typically do not receive disproportionate support from certain ethnic groups (although this is not impossible) and their policy programmes do not disproportionately benefit those groups.

Table 2: Distinction between ethnic– and civic–programmatic parties


Policy-based programme at the heart of organization and linkages

Receive disproportionate support from certain ethnic groups

Policy programme benefits certain ethnic groups disproportionately

Employ discourses that privilege certain ethnic groups

Ethnic Yes Yes Yes Possibly, but not exclusively

Civic Yes Possibly, but usually not

No No

Parties and party systems The programmatic development of a political party may promote the programmatic development of the party system, but this is not always the case. In some countries, such as Zambia, the emergence of a single programmatic party has yet to influence other parties to adopt a more policy-based approach. Given this, it is important to distinguish between the programmatic development of one party and the programmatic development of the party system. Following the Desk Review, we define a party system as programmatic when most or all political parties have well structured and stable ideological commitments that constitute the basis for:

a) The link between parties and their constituencies b) The electoral competition between parties c) The policymaking process

‘Most or all parties’ may seem like a high threshold, but this is because the important thing when one looks at party systems is the nature of the parties’ interactions with one another. A party system is not programmatic if it features just one programmatic party, because if all other parties mobilize support on the basis of ethnic or clientelistic ties elections will not be decided by debates over policy issues, but by which of the range of mobilization strategies on show proves to be the most effective. Party systems only become programmatic when most or all of the parties fulfil at least some of the dimensions of programmaticity set out above—at this tipping point policy issues become the very stuff of political competition; as a result, party leaders become increasingly focused on the need to generate a more effective programmatic platform than rival parties. They therefore begin to invest in developing stronger policymaking

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capacity and more effective programmatic linkages to voters, which in turn promotes programmatic development at the party level. Exactly what conditions lead to this virtuous circle is the subject of section 1.4.

1.3 Foundations of programmatic politics While the discussion above underlines the variety of forms that programmatic parties can take, the cases of Brazil, India, Ukraine and Zambia also suggest a common set of factors that drive and retard programmatic development. Political economies shape the incentives and opportunities to employ programmatic methods of mobilization. Socio-economic factors affect the receptiveness of constituencies to programmatic mobilization and the relative cost of employing different strategies. Beyond these conditioning factors, a society’s associational life can facilitate the evolution of stronger political organizations while the degree of institutionalization of the party system mediates the probability that the programmatic approach of one or two parties will be taken up by others. These key factors are important because they reveal the contexts within which programmatic politics is most, and least, likely to take root. 1.3.1 The role of the state Characteristics of states affect programmatic politics because they shape the availability of clientelistic resources and the demand for public goods from voters. Keefer (2005) finds that states that industrialize before they democratize, and so develop strong Weberian states separated from society, are more likely to become programmatic. There are two main explanations for this pattern. First, industrialization encouraged the formation of class identities, which in turn encouraged parties to align themselves to the favoured set of economic policies of one class or another. Second, the construction of modern rule-bound bureaucracies and institutions required parties to play by the rules—or at least to play more by the rules. As a result, it became less feasible to misuse state resources in order to maintain clientelistic networks. Taken together, these two processes provided political entrepreneurs with strong incentives to eschew ethnic and patronage based strategies in favour of programmatic ones. By contrast, states that have never been ‘emancipated from society’ and have therefore failed to construct meritocratic and rule-bound bureaucracies have tended to foster the consolidation of ethnic and clientelistic forms of politics. This is because the functioning of formal institutions in such states is undermined by patrimonial networks such that incumbent leaders face few checks and balances. Thus the African state has typically been characterized as a ‘neo-patrimonial’ edifice in which leaders enjoy almost unlimited power and what matters is not the formal rules of the game as documented in the constitution, but the network of personal relations that descends from the president (Chabal and Daloz: 2004). Neo-patrimonial politics is associated with the blurring of the line between private and public authority, the distribution of state resources to sustain multi-tiered patron–client networks, and political mobilization along ‘traditional’ (for example, ethnic, linguistic, or religious) lines. But neo-patrimonialism is only one form of clientelistic system; in others, formal institutions are similarly weak but political competition is not as strongly structured by ‘ethnic’ considerations. What is common to all cases of clientelism is that the link between voters and parties is based on the exchange of resources and favours, rather than the ability of parties to develop policy platforms that capture the public imagination. Clientelism therefore undermines the need for established parties to develop programmatic manifestos and cultivates an expectation among voters that they

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should be directly rewarded for the support they provide to a given candidate; as a result, it represents a major barrier to the development of programmatic politics. In the African context, a number of scholars have documented how neo-patrimonial practices embed social structures and conceptions of politics, and create expectations of politicians that reinforce those forms of politics (Bayart 1992; Chabal and Daloz 1999). In cases in which clientelism leads to a winner-takes-all dynamic, such that leaders only extend government services and favours to those groups that supported them, voters know that because governments refuse to provide public goods they will almost certainly be excluded from access to resources if, by taking a principled stand and not voting for their ‘ethnic’ party, they open the door for a rival ethnic leader to secure power. Consequently, individuals may feel forced to behave ‘ethnically’ or ‘clientelistically’ even if they believe that this form of politics is bad for the country. For example, in Kenya, where there has been a long history of neo-patrimonial politics (Cheeseman et al 2010), survey data reveals that voters are more likely to support ethnic parties if they believe that others Kenyans are likely to do the same (Bratton and Kimenyi 2008). Moreover, beneficiaries of such systems have a strong incentive to preserve and perpetuate them. As a result, incumbents tend to deliberately keep institutions weak, which in turn undermines the prospects for reform. In Brazil, the form of clientelism that took hold was not neo-patrimonial; rather, it was based on strong and highly personalized patron–client networks that connected national political leaders to local interest groups. During the transition to multipartyism, clientelistic politicians successfully pushed for the introduction of an open-list congressional electoral system and a strong presidency. This institutional configuration focused national policymaking on the president, leaving congressmen to spend their time strengthening their control over their constituencies in order to be able to sell their support base to the presidential candidate willing to offer the most attractive deal (Hagopian 1996; Shugart 1998). As a result, patron–client politics was institutionalized under the new political dispensation. All four of our cases featured entrenched clientelistic practices which retarded the development of programmatic politics. But the sustainability of clientelism as a mode of governance depends on parties being able to maintain their access to resources. In countries such as Brazil and India the contraction of state budgets following periods of economic mismanagement created a clientelistic crisis that reduced the access of parties to resources (Van de Walle 2001; Hagopian 2009). As established parties are forced to reduce the scope of their patronage networks, and so the breadth of their support base, they become increasingly vulnerable to challenges from programmatic parties. Public financial management reform can have a similar effect by making it harder for clientelistic parties to fund their activities through access to states resources, and thereby facilitating the entry of new parties into the party system. 1.3.2 The structure of society The size and characteristics of particular social groups shape whether programmatic parties can form strong linkages to voters, and the type of programmatic linkages that they build. Large urban populations provide a strong foundation for programmatic politics for three reasons. First, urban areas tend to be more cosmopolitan and better educated and informed. They are therefore more likely to reject clientelistic and ethnic forms of political mobilization. Second, in cases where towns developed around hubs of manual labour, for example around mines, urban areas are characterized by the presence of unionized workers and a history of economic protest. Consequently, urban dwellers tend to be more sympathetic to programmatic appeals, especially when it

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comes to economic policy. Finally, high population density makes it easier to mobilize support on a non-ethnic basis. As a result, urban areas have typically been at the heart of programmatic politics (Resnick 2009). By contrast, large rural populations present challenging environments for programmatic politics. In rural areas, population dispersion, logistical campaign challenges and weak access to mass media frustrate programmatic linkages (Schramm 1964). This does not mean that parties based in rural areas have never set out programmatic agendas. In some cases, rural parties have set out clear policy-based platforms to defend the agricultural sector. However, often the programmatic character of these parties was limited to aristocratic cadres, who primarily acted to defend their own interests, and tended to mobilize support using clientelistic methods. Such parties were common in early twentieth century Latin American democracies (Bakewell 2004). Thus, while some parties with programmatic platforms have emerged from rural areas, they have rarely established programmatic linkages to voters. Of course, the social structure in a given country mediates this general pattern. In cases in which the position of regional ‘big men’ has been entrenched within local social structures, rural areas are likely to be particularly responsive to clientelistic mobilization (Heller 2002; Chabal and Daloz 1999), as seen in India (Wilkinson 2007). But these structures can develop in some urban conditions. In countries such as Brazil (Dew Wit and Berner 2009), urban slums developed extremely hierarchical social structures that were particularly conducive to clientelistic exchanges (Davis 2006). Equally, in countries such as Bolivia (Shih 2009) and Thailand (Phongpaichit 2008) poor rural constituencies have become more receptive to the provision of public goods as a result of more equal social structures and distinctive histories of political mobilization; under these circumstances, rural areas have formed effective bases for programmatic parties. Civil society organizations also play an important role in transmitting—and shaping—public preferences. When such organizations are strong and highly politicized, they offer ready-made programmes and structures that new programmatic parties can incorporate into their own. They therefore promote programmatic development, but also influence the content of policy debate in ways that privilege some constituencies over others. Civil society groups become politicized when extraordinary circumstances draw them into politics, and when they are incorporated into state–society relations in ways that empower them. For example, in Zambia trade unions gained a foothold in the national political economy when they were made central institutions in corporatist labour relations during the one-party state, and subsequently played a key role in the rise to power of first the MMD and later the PF. By contrast, in Brazil, trade unions were politicized as a result of the key role that they played in the democratization struggle (Foweraker 1996). Likewise, civil society organizations joined forces in Zimbabwe to form the Movement for Democratic Change in response to a recalcitrant and unresponsive government (LeBas 2011). Politicized civil society groups tend to be stronger in urban areas for the same reasons that programmatic constituencies are more likely to emerge in towns and cities, but also because religious organizations—which usually have the most effective national networks in developing countries—tend to avoid explicitly campaigning on political issues. As a result, vibrant civil societies tend to reinforce, rather than ameliorate, the ‘urban bias’ of programmatic politics. But here too there are exceptions. Land movements in Southern Africa and South America developed significant capacity in rural areas, in large part because the issues of concern to these constituencies were consistently overlooked by established political parties (Hammond 2009). In turn, the

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growing influence of these movements encouraged political entrepreneurs to incorporate these communities into their support base and to speak to their issues. By contrast, in cases in which civil society is weak and depoliticized, political parties have to do all the work of identifying and mobilizing programmatic constituencies themselves.

1.3.3 Institutional design Party organizational capacity and internal governance are strongly connected to the evolution of issue-based politics because they are necessary if political organizations are to perform the core functions that constitute programmatic parties: to mobilize voters on a coherent policy programme; to orientate party organization to the realization of that programme; and to pursue that programme in office. Moreover, parties require skilled and committed workers to formulate distinctive and coherent policy, and must have effective internal structures so that they can discipline members that deviate from the party line (Cox and McCubbins 2007). Consequently, a degree of infrastructural strength is required to support programmatic development. Internal party organization is also important because, as we saw in section 1.2, if parties do not have structures that communicate the views of party members and activists to party leaders, and if parties are not internally democratic and do not render party leaders accountable, they are more likely to deviate from their programmatic commitments. As a result, the institutionalization of internal structures that facilitate the representation of a programmatic constituency represents an important development, not least because it significantly increases the chances that the party’s programmatic stance will be sustained. It is important to note that party institutionalization is different to party system institutionalization, and refers to the extent to which internal party procedures and structures are codified and seen to be legitimate. It is when all actors accept a set of internal party rules that facilitate the formulation of issue-based strategies that programmatic politics becomes the ‘only game in town’. The balance of power within parties is shaped by the way in which political systems are designed. The choice of electoral system can empower leaders or undermine their position. A closed list proportional representation electoral system strengthens the appointment powers of the party leadership, which may empower party leaders to instil programmatic discipline. By contrast, Westminster style single-member-district elections create incentives for candidates to develop individual profiles and local linkages to their constituency that are independent of the party. Unless individual constituencies hold strong programmatic attitudes, this is likely to dilute the coherence and unity of potentially programmatic parties. Parliamentary rules also have an important role to play here, because they may impose high costs on MPs seeking to cross the floor, and so encourage party unity, or they may be permissive, and so facilitate ‘floor crossing’, which can empower clientelistic parties to disrupt their programmatic rivals. In Ukraine, the introduction of tougher rules strengthened parties and empowered them to discipline their members and manage the development and pursuit of a more coherent policy programme.

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1.3.4 Party system institutionalization Luna (2012) claims that party system institutionalization is necessary for programmaticity. An institutionalized party system is one that displays stable inter-party competition and features parties with roots in society (Mainwaring and Torcal 2005). In institutionalized party systems, party competition is stable (Mainwaring and Scully 1995). Other things being equal, stable party competition means that voters are better able to predict the positions that parties hold on different issues. Moreover, because parties have consistent platforms over time, they become more credible (Keefer 2005). This combination of predictability and credibility generates valuable symbolic resources for parties seeking to connect to voters, and useful informational shortcuts for voters seeking to work out which party to support. Because the ability to clearly communicate policy preferences is particularly important to the successful operation of a programmatic party (Luna 2012), party system institutionalization plays an important role in solidifying programmatic linkages. Party system institutionalization also refers to the extent to which parties penetrate society (Mainwaring and Scully 1995). Of course, the presence of parties with stronger linkages only promotes programmatic politics if those linkages are themselves programmatic. Otherwise, institutionalization simply consolidates alternative forms of political competition such as neo-patrimonial ethnic politics in Kenya and Nigeria, or clientelism in Chile and Argentina. However, when most or all parties are programmatic, party system institutionalization enables leaders to both fine-tune their stance in light of the preferences of their support base (Mainwaring and Scully 1995), and to shape and lead their supporters’ attitudes in programmatic ways (LeBas 2011). Significantly, such two-way connections between voters and parties generate channels that align the policy preferences of both. Without such ties, exogenous changes in voters’ policy preferences or party policy programmes can lead to a disconnection between what voters want and what parties provide. In contrast, where parties have roots in society, they are better able to continuously respond to changes in public attitudes (Mainwaring and Scully 1995).

Table 3: Drivers and Retardants of Programmatic Politics

Type of factor Drivers of programmatic politics

Retardants of programmatic politics

The role of the state Public finance reform; Weberian states; contraction of state resources.

Clientelism; social structures that empower local patrons; dominant party systems.

The structure of society Large urban constituencies; strong and politicized civil society groups, deep media penetration.

Large rural constituencies; weak and depoliticized civil society groups, low media penetration.

Institutional design Closed-PR system; strict floor-crossing rules; party funding; strong state-level government.

Candidate-focused electoral system; permissive floor-crossing rules.

Party system institutionalization

Stable party competition; stable party positions; party links to constituents; party coalition blocs.

Instability of party positions; voter distrust of parties.

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In fragmented party systems in which leaders must build coalitions to secure legislative majorities, the formation of alliances involving both programmatic and clientelistic parties can spread and institutionalize programmatic politics. Collaboration with a programmatic party imbues a clientelistic party with something of the programmatic party’s reputation and policy record, which in turn eases the challenge of building a credible programmatic platform. This appears to have taken place in Brazil, where broad ‘left’ and ‘right’ coalitions have formed around two programmatic parties, the PT and the PSDB, which in turn has encouraged smaller parties to formalize their stance on economic policy. Again, the relationship between the institutionalization of party blocs and programmatic development is contingent upon the number and strength of programmatic parties. Coalition politics tends to entrench the dominant mode of politics. If all or most parties are ethnic or clientelistic, the need for form coalitions is likely to spread these practices and so undermine the programmatic development of new parties. But when most or all parties are programmatic, coalition formation supports the further diffusion and consolidation of programmatic approaches.

1.4 Pathways to programmatic politics The development of programmatic polities involves a series of stages, from the genesis of a programmatic party, through its early development and institutionalization, to a final stage in which programmatic concerns are diffused throughout the party system. The experience of programmatic parties varies significantly across each of these stages, as summarized in Table 4. Thinking about the genesis and development of programmatic parties, each of our cases features some—but rarely all—of the factors that are generally thought to be conducive to programmatic advances, such as urbanization and trade union politics in Brazil and Zambia, institutional reform in Ukraine, and a reduction of clientelistic resources in India. The particular combination of factors present in a given case is significant, because it shapes the sort of parties that emerge, which in turn shapes the prospects for the programmatic development and the institutionalization of the party system. In other words, there are many different pathways to programmaticity and some of them are more robust than others. Here we focus on explaining two key variants of programmatic development: whether parties are institutionalized or non-institutionalized and whether parties are ethnic or civic. We do this by presenting a parsimonious model that focuses on the initial support base of the party and the nature of its relationship to civil society actors. But it is also important to recognize that intuitional and socio-economic factors can only take us so far. Some of the ‘pre-conditions’ for stable programmatic politics hold in countries in which we have not yet seen the emergence of serious policy-based parties. For example, most of sub-Saharan Africa saw a rapid decline in government revenue during the 1980s, which reduced the clientelistic resources available to incumbents but did little to reduce levels of corruption or to ameliorate the historical salience of ethnicity. And many Latin American countries feature powerful trade union lobbies but have not made anything like the programmatic progress seen in Brazil. Thus, structural factors should only be thought of as background conditions that facilitate programmatic development: they may be necessary for the evolution of long-term stable policy-based politics, but they are far from sufficient.

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To provide a complete picture of the pathway through which different parties become more programmatic it is therefore necessary to consider the role for contingency and political leadership. Potential programmatic constituencies may only become available to programmatic parties once dominant parties collapse or ruling parties cease to effectively represent them. When such conditions occur, political leaders have a real, but fleeing, opportunity to engage in a new form of political competition; but taking advantage of this requires real political insight, timing, and not an insignificant amount of courage. Indeed, even when clear constituencies that are responsive to programmatic appeals lie dormant for decades it requires a political leader to make an—often brave—decision to try to construct a different kind of linkage with voters. Thinking about whether or not programmatic development at the party level has an impact on the wider party system requires us to think about how the diffusion of programmatic practices may take hold as a result of competition and transmission. Many programmatic parties drive programmatization at the party system level because they can mobilize voters more cheaply than other parties and so, over time, their rivals have a strong incentive to copy their model. Parties can also learn from the experience of other parties in the same country or in other countries and choose to become more programmatic in order to increase their chances of electoral success. But these processes can be easily derailed in three ways. First, less institutionalized and civic parties are more vulnerable to programmatic backsliding, which threatens to limit their transformative effect. Second, a poorly institutionalized party system may not feature parties that are stable enough for programmatic gains lessons to be learnt. Third, in cases in which the constituency for programmatic politics is limited, or where rival parties enjoy high external sources of funding/strong ethnic ties to distinct communities and so can continue to utilize clientelistic/ethnic methods of political mobilization regardless, rival parties face fewer incentives to adapt and so competition may not act as the motor of programmatic development.

1.4.1 Party genesis and development Although there are many commonalities between the instances of party genesis and development that occurred in Brazil, India, Ukraine and Zambia, each process has its own distinctive features. This section seeks to map out points of similarities and areas of discord in order to demonstrate the high degree of equifinality that we observe. It tells us much about the process of programmatic development that the main similarity that we identify is that programmatization is rarely, if ever, driven by an established clientelistic or ethnic party deciding to adopt a more coherent policy base. Instead, programmatic development was driven by the emergence of new political parties (although not always new leaders), or by the rapid growth of previously weak parties. In part, the factors that promoted programmatization are therefore the factors that empowered new opposition parties to overcome non-programmatic ruling parties. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that in all four cases we find that the genesis of programmatic parties resulted from the combination of three key factors: major changes to the political environment that empowered opposition parties, the existence of available programmatic constituencies, and the ability and willingness of political entrepreneurs to experiment with new forms of political mobilization.

1.4.1.1 Changing political environment A number of different changes to the wider political environment facilitated the emergence of new programmatic parties. Most obviously, in Brazil and India the ability

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of incumbent parties to use clientelistic strategies to retain power and restrict the growth of opposition parties was undermined by declining resources. As a result, incumbent parties that had previously relied on patron–client networks to mobilize support were forced to contract the reach of their political machines. In turn, this created opportunities for new political entrepreneurs to step in and establish linkages to groups that would previously have been thought of as part of the ruling alliance but now found themselves excluded from the distribution of state largesse. This is perhaps most clearly the case in India in the 1980s, where the country’s economic predicament empowered the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to demand reforms in return for financial support. A series of reforms implemented by the congress government from 1991 onward were designed to promote economic growth by opening up markets and limiting government intervention in the economy. But they also had a profound impact on the practice of politics. The process of economic liberalization, and the corresponding devolution of greater economic authority to the state level, constrained the ability of central government to determine political outcomes at both the national and local level. At the national level, falling revenue undermined the clientelistic networks of the once dominant Congress Party. Significantly, Congress was poorly placed to replace clientelistic appeals with ethnic ones, because its very success had derived from the construction of an inclusive dominant-party model; as a result, it could not explicitly appeal to ethnic interests without undermining the unity of its support base. This meant that Congress was particularly vulnerable to challenges from sectional parties such as the BJP, which effectively mobilized Hindu nationalism, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which rallied support among Dalits—a group of castes often referred to as the ‘untouchables’. Consequently, the share of the parliament controlled by Congress fell, from 50–70 per cent in the 1950s–1980s to 30–45 per cent thereafter. As the BSP and the BJP grew, they increasingly came to package identity based appeals a stable set of ideological commitments, and parties with programmatic elements began to take root within the party system. At the same time, the decision to allow state level governments to engage directly with private investors, and so empower them to bypass central government, created incentives for state level politicians to focus on economic policy for the first time. Significantly, the new opportunity to kick-start development at the local level encouraged opposition leaders to campaign against established clientelistic parties on platforms that stressed economic reforms and clean politics. In the 1990s, these changes enabled Chandrabababu Naidu and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) to take power in Andhra Pradesh and to govern on the basis of a ‘good governance’ agenda. The success of this more programmatic form of mobilization and governance inspired imitators, as discussed at greater length below. Most famously, over a decade later Nitish Kumar won power in Bihar and transformed a state known for its clientelistic politics and economic stagnation, generating annual growth of over 11 per cent. Another factor that can strengthen the hand of opposition political parties is parliamentary rules and the electoral system. Changes in such rules occur rarely, but proved to be central to the development of more programmatic parties in Ukraine. Ukraine’s first set of post-communist elections in 1994 were held under a single member district system with unrestrictive nomination rules which meant that candidates could easily ignore party labels in order to run as independents. As a result, individuals with strong local clientelistic networks but no base in a political party—such as local officials, heads of local councils, and businessmen—found it relatively easy to get elected: the successful presidential candidate in 1994 did not have a party affiliation

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and neither did 243 of the deputies that secured seats in the legislature (more than half of the total 450). While some new parties argued in favour of a system of proportional representation, MPs who were advantaged under the old system rejected the reforms, which threatened to undermine their clientelistic networks. The same MPs supported parliamentary rules that allowed deputies to form ‘parliamentary groups’ in groups of 14 or more. The low threshold, combined with the fact that parties had no control over such groups, meant that even when parties gained representation within parliament, they were poorly placed to enforce policy consistency on legislators. As a result, old political logics were protected at the expense of viable political parties—which effectively undermined the prospects for programmatic politics. This system was revised following the Orange Revolution, a series of protests against the outcome of a controversial presidential election in 2004 that critics claimed was marred by widespread electoral irregularities. In the wake of the protests, a period of intra-elite bargaining resulted in the adoption of a number of reforms that radically enhanced the importance of political parties. First, the weakening of the legislative and non-legislative powers of the president conferred new authority on the parliament. Second, elections were to be held on a system of proportional representation, which effectively ended the ability of individuals to gain election to the legislature as independents. Finally, the use of a closed list system, in which MPs were elected from lists drawn up by party leaders on the basis of the share of the vote received by the party, empowered leaders to increase (or reduce) an MP’s chances of gaining election by placing them higher (or lower) on the list. As a result, aspiring candidates had a good reason to toe the party line for the first time. The collective impact of these reforms returned political parties to a central role in the Ukrainian political system and led to a steady process of party system institutionalization. This process, in addition to the breakdown of local clientelistic networks as a result of the scrapping of single member district elections, encouraged parties to invest more resources in developing more attractive programmatic positions and strengthening their programmatic linkages to voters. Consider the example of the Party of Regions, which was the largest party in the legislature in 2006 and whose leader, Victor Yanukovych, won the presidential elections in 2010. The Party of the Regions was established in the late 1990s in order to serve the political interests of provincial elites. At first, it operated as a clientelistic political machine that lacked a coherent programmatic agenda. However, from 2004 onwards, when Yanukovych was effectively selected as the presidential candidate to represent the interests of the national political establishment, party elites recognized that they needed to develop a more effective set of policies and party structures in order to build a more effective national organization. In doing so, Yanukovych and his colleagues focused increasingly on the party’s claim to defend and uphold the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine—a message that played particularly well in the east and south-east of the country. This move saw the Party of Regions simultaneously engage in ethnic and programmatic appeals. On the one hand, the party set out to emphasize its regional roots. Conversely, it started to develop a more stable set of ideological commitments that directly represented the policy positions that were most popular among this set of communities. Most notably, it espoused a heavily pro-Russian foreign policy and in 2005 signed an agreement to collaborate with the ruling party in Russia, United Russia. In this way, the party underwent a process of programmatic development without reneging on its

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commitment to its ethnic base. In other words, the Party of Regions moved away from being a clientelistic/ethnic party and toward being an ethnic-programmatic party—the implications of which are discussed in greater depth below. While political reforms have the potential to promote party system institutionalization and associated processes of programmatic development, they are prone to reversal in new democracies. Having won power in 2010, Yanukovych used the remaining powers of the presidency to persuade the Constitutional Court to reinstate many of the powers the president had enjoyed in the old constitution. Although he now faces a far more institutionalized party system that is better placed to resist pressure from an all-powerful presidency, it seems unlikely that Yanukovych’s power-grab will not reduce the role that parties play within the political system. Moreover, because it was institutional reforms that promoted programmatic development in the Ukraine, rather than a decline in clientelistic resources, many of the conditions for the return of old political practices remain. In this sense, the Ukraine followed a particularly unstable pathway toward programmaticity.

1.4.1.2 Pre-existing programmatic constituencies In all four countries, the new parties that made rapid gains at the national level did so by developing strong programmatic linkages with untapped constituencies. This is perhaps clearest in the case of Brazil, where the PT built a reputation as an effective programmatic party by mobilizing workers and highly educated voters with progressive attitudes. During the tenure of Getúlio Dornelles Vargas in the 1940s and 1950s, government-incorporated unions had served to co-opt, rather than to express, the concerns of ordinary workers. In the 1970s, this situation was challenged by the New Unionism movement, led by the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT). In turn, CUT structures and supporters in the industrial south-east of the country became the foundation of the PT. This, and the fact that the party was led by committed Marxists, some of whom took up arms against the military regime—such as current party leader and President Dilma Rousseff—conferred credibility on the party’s left-wing stance. As the party expanded under the popular leadership of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (popularly known as Lula), it moved beyond this base by developing a strong class-based political agenda. This naturally took the party away from a discussion of ethnic or racial issues and toward a programmatic platform that addressed issues of economic fairness and promoted redistributive fiscal and welfare policies. The combination of the support of the CUT and the broad appeal of the party’s message in a country where many still lived in poverty enabled the PT to capture much of the urban poor and the informal sector, especially in the north-east. At the same time, the party’s emphasis on redistribution and welfare policies proved attractive to other economically marginalized communities such as the Afro-Brazilian community, which, in a different context, might have been mobilized on the basis of ethnicity. In other words, the PT grew by persuading various groups of the merits of its policy platform. But while this was an easy sell to CUT members in the party’s heartlands, it was harder to achieve in other parts of the country. As a result, the PT consistently adjusted its message, moving toward the centre ground of Brazilian politics and shedding its image as an extreme or Marxist party. Despite this process of gradual moderation in response to electoral competition, the PT maintained both a core set of values and a programmatic approach. According to a survey conducted by Datafolha in May 2010, while 35 per cent of ‘non-partisan’ voters reported that they were unable to identify their own ideology or did not have one, this was only true of 17 per cent of PT supporters.

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In the case of India, Ukraine, and Zambia, programmatic constituencies were somewhat more complicated because they were also ethnic constituencies. As previewed above, in India the programmatic bent of the BJP and BSP owed much to the fact that their natural ‘ethnic’ support base also had clear class interests as a result of historical inequalities in the distribution of national resources. Let us start with the case of the BSP, which emerged as a significant political force in large part because of the ability of a social activist, Kanshi Ram, to mobilize support among economically disadvantaged communities. Founded in 1984 as a mainly Dalit party, the BSP now represents over 450 lower-caste groups known as ‘scheduled castes’ and religious minorities such as Muslims and Christians. Many of these groups support the BSP because it directly represents their economic interests through the promotion of affirmative action policies, which is reflected in the party’s claim to be the party of the Bahujans (the deprived majority). In many ways the party’s platform is therefore classically programmatic. But because many of the BSP’s supporters are predominantly recruited along sectional lines as members of certain castes or religions—and not simply because individuals come to hear about the BSP’s policies through the media—the party’s base has an inevitable ethnic dimension, even if this is complicated by the high number of groups that it hopes to represent. This is reflected in the party’s struggle to expand beyond its original base in Uttar Pradesh. Although the BSP has done well to increase the number of parliamentary seats that it controls from three in the 1991 elections to 21 in the 2009 polls, it remains one of the smaller parties in the legislature, in large part because its ethno-religious orientation means that it cannot make inroads into the Hindu community that comprises around 80 per cent of the population. So although the overlap between class and ethnicity means that the BSP’s status as an ethnic–programmatic party has not undermined its policy platform, it has restricted the party’s expansion. The BJP followed a somewhat different tack, appealing to India’s northern upper-caste Hindu voters. In order to do this the party committed itself to hindutva, Hindu nationalism, and supported explicitly religious legislation such as bans on religious conversion. Because upper-caste Hindus tend to favour social policies that protect their religious concerns, economic policies that fail to redistribute wealth, and an aggressive foreign policy, the BJP was able to pursue a platform that was at one and the same time ‘ethnic’ and ‘programmatic’. Despite this, the ‘ethnic’ side of the party has often overshadowed the ‘programmatic’ side because BJP leaders have often employed aggressive language against other communities. For example, in Gujarat the party stands accused of tacitly encouraging anti-Muslim riots, while critics claim that in other areas it has inspired violence against Christians. Although official figures are problematic, it is widely believed that the level of anti-Christian attacks increased after the party took power in 1998. While this is deeply disturbing and demonstrates the potential dangers posed by ethnic–programmatic parties, it is important to note that, like the PT in Brazil, the BJP has moderated its position over time. Recognizing that they could not win power by appealing solely to upper caste Hindus, party leaders adopted nationalistic rhetoric and argued that their aim was to develop a strong India for all Indians. At the same time, the party softened its economic policy so that it could better appeal to potential supporters from a range of economic backgrounds. As part of this process, senior BJP figures sought to distance themselves from the party’s more extreme fringes. This process of moderation, in addition to the party’s capacity to mobilize its base, enabled the BJP to establish itself as a mainstream party and to make consistent gains in terms of its

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representation in the Lok Sabha (Parliament), from seven per cent of the seats in 1984 to 11 per cent in 1989, 20 per cent in 1991, and 37 per cent in 1998, when it became the largest party and formed a coalition government for the first time. A summary of the policies that the BJP implemented while in power is instructive. Although it has supported religious legislation such as bans on the slaughter of cows, it has cleverly used foreign policy to gain credibility and to broadcast its nationalist credentials. Most obviously, it was under the BJP that India carried out controversial nuclear weapons tests, adopted an aggressive foreign policy stance vis-à-vis Pakistan, and led India to victory against its great rival in the Kargil War in 1999. At the same time, the party has demonstrated the capacity to develop more subtle and complex legislation, which is the cornerstone of Responsible Party Government. While in office, the party passed complex policy reforms such as the Fiscal Responsibility and Budgetary Management Act and the Special Economic Zones Act. These policies are powerful evidence that the BJP has moderated its position over the years; for all of the party’s rhetorical commitment to economic nationalism, it actually introduced a set of liberal economic reforms that were in line with those promulgated by the Congress Party in the early 1990s. In the Ukraine and Zambia, ethnic identities also mapped onto particular sets of programmatic attitudes. In Zambia, for example, two historical processes rendered Bemba speakers more responsive to programmatic appeals than other ethnic communities. First, because of their geographical location Bembas were the group most likely to be employed in copper mining, and thus were especially likely to be members of trade unions and to take part in strikes and urban protest. The Bemba community also played a leading role in the nationalist struggle because the United Nationalist Independence Party (UNIP), the most powerful party within the nationalist movement, was at its strongest in urban areas along the line of rail—towns in which Bemba speakers were heavily represented. After independence, when trade unions led the protests against the economic failings of UNIP’s one-party state, Bemba speakers were once again at the heart of the political action. As a result, members of the Bemba community have historically been more responsive to programmatic messages and economic policies than members of other communities. Significantly, this applied to both urban and rural Bemba—to an extent. Because many individuals left rural areas in search of work and returned during periods of high unemployment, Zambia was characterized by cycles of urban-rural migration which created strong networks between Bembas living in urban and rural areas. In turn, this meant that news and ideas from the town were quickly communicated back to the village and vice versa. At the same time, the importance of remittances to the success of rural economies meant that policies which impacted on urban Bembas also affected rural Bembas. Taken together, these deep connections across space meant that rural Bembas became more sensitized to programmatic concerns than other rural communities. However, because people who live in rural areas tend to be less likely to marry into other ethnic groups, to be highly educated, and to receive government services, rural Bembas are more likely to view politics through an ‘ethnic’ lens than urban Bembas and other urban groups that have come to see politics in more ‘civic’ terms. Consequently, it was far from straightforward for Zambia’s new programmatic party, the Patriotic Front, to simultaneously mobilize rural Bemba and urban programmatic voters, as we shall see below. The pathway to programmatic politics was thus very different in India, Ukraine and Zambia than it was in Brazil. This is important, because the variation in whether or not countries developed programmatic politics through an ethnic constituency—in other

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words, whether a ‘civic’ or ‘ethnic’ programmatic party emerged—had significant implications for the sustainability of programmatic politics. The case of the BJP and the PF are particularly instructive on this point because they demonstrate two features common to many ethnic–programmatic parties. First, the potential to generate inter-communal tension, which means that ethnic–programmatic parties may not be as normatively desirable as civic–programmatic parties. Second, the tendency to moderate ethnic appeals and to build stronger programmatic platforms in order to expand support and win office, which means that the potential threat of such parties to national unity is lower than it might first appear.

1.4.1.3 Contingency and leadership Although they are critical to a complete understanding of programmatic development, the structural factors that we have so far considered—political institutions, socio-economic context, and so on—can only take us so far. In each of our cases, the presence of programmatic constituencies and changes to the wider political economy were necessary for the rise of programmatic parties, but they were not sufficient. To take advantage of more favourable conditions, parties needed leaders capable of identifying new opportunities and persuading their colleagues to follow them into uncharted waters. This is clear in the Indian case, where Naidu sparked a transformation of state level politics by recognizing that following the economic reforms of the early 1990s ‘good governance’ campaigns could be successful in both economic and electoral terms. The import of leadership is also apparent in Brazil, where the PSDB and the PT were fortunate to be led by Cardoso and Lula respectively, two individuals who were committed to programmatic goals and had the skills and the determination to implement their agendas when in office. But the role of contingency and leadership is best illustrated by the case of Zambia. As in India, the rise of programmatic politics in Zambia owed much to the breakdown of a once-dominant government. But in the Zambian case, shrinking clientelistic resources proved less significant than the changing composition of the ruling coalition. During the campaign against the one-party state and the government of Kenneth Kaunda, Bemba-speaking leaders such as Michael Sata and trade union representatives such as Frederick Chiluba had rallied programmatic constituencies to the cause of the opposition Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). Indeed, it was precisely Chiluba’s ability to draw on trade union structures and resources that led to him being proposed and accepted as the MMD’s leader. But after the MMD had secured a landslide victory in 2001 the party did little to deliver on its electoral promises. Most notably, Chiluba enacted a number of reforms that undermined the economic (and hence political) significance of the trade unions while engaging in a range of undemocratic practices such as electoral manipulation and corruption. Thereafter, the MMD became increasingly reliant on the rural vote to maintain power. A further transformation occurred after Chiluba stepped down having served two terms in office and selected Levy Mwanawasa as his successor as MMD leader. A number of senior Bemba-speaking figures such as Michael Sata left the party in protest at Mwanawasa’s appointment, causing Bemba voters to question whether the party represented their interests. At the same time, Mwanawasa quickly appointed a number of individuals from his Lenje group to influential positions. When the new administration announced plans to pursue corruption charges against Chiluba—himself a Bemba speaker—it appeared that a wholesale shift had taken place in both the ethnic composition and the loyalties of the party’s leadership. As a result, the composition of the MMD’s support base changed dramatically during its second decade in power: it lost

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support among programmatic urban voters and provinces populated by Bemba speakers, and gained support from a number of smaller ethnic groups in rural areas. Significantly, neither of the two main opposition parties of the 1990s was well placed to benefit from this process. Like the MMD, the United Party for National Development (UPDN) and the United National Independent Party (UNIP) secured the majority of their vote from certain ethnic communities in limited parts of the country (the south in the case of the UPND; the east in the case of the UNIP). Thus the two constituencies most sympathetic to a programmatic approach to politics—the Bemba and urban workers—found themselves unrepresented within the party system. It was this accident of Zambian politics that made the rise of Michael Sata and the Patriotic Front (PF) possible. After quitting the MMD in 2001, Sata found that the easiest way to drum up support was to appeal to his own Bemba-speaking community, and under intense time pressure he put together a presidential campaign that concentrated on his ethnic heartlands. This met with some success, but having only secured 3.35 per cent of the vote Sata recognized the need to reach out to a broader constituency. In contrast to his main rivals who almost exclusively relied upon ethnic and clientelistic strategies, Sata adopted a dual approach. First, he consolidated his base in rural Bemba-speaking areas, addressing the issues of local development most keenly felt by these communities. Second, he began to hold mass rallies in order to establish a support base in major urban areas. Having previously been governor of the capital city, Lusaka, during the one-party era, Sata understood that urbanites of various ethnic backgrounds could be mobilized by talking about their working conditions and government service delivery. The genius of Sata’s campaign was his realization that these two constituencies lacked representation within the party system, that they could be simultaneously mobilized under a common populist banner that promised state intervention to improve the economy, and that this represented his best chance of winning power. By adopting a non-ethnic message, Sata opened up the possibility of expanding his reach into peri-urban areas, which enabled him to make inroads into the MMD’s support base that would not have been possible if he had positioned himself as a Bemba nationalist. Having decided on this course of action, Sata skilfully identified a set of policy areas that had mass appeal and would allow him to differentiate the PF from the MMD. He pledged to put more money in people’s pockets while also providing better services. He promised to attack corruption and to make the government work for the people, rather than the other way around. And he accused the MMD and Chinese businesses of colluding to maintain the status quo, depicting himself as the protector of ‘ordinary’ Zambians—the only man capable of fighting for justice against powerful enemies both outside and inside the country. Underpinned by the credibility that he had earned as one of the more effective officials in both the one-party state and multi-party eras, this strategy proved to be highly effective. From 2001 onward, Sata increased his share of the vote to 29 per cent in 2006 and 39 per cent in the 2008 presidential by-elections that followed the unexpected death of Mwanawasa. During the same period, the PF increased the number of seats it held in the legislature and gained a stranglehold over local government in some urban areas. It was Sata’s leadership, most notably his deep understanding of Zambian politics and willingness to experiment with new forms of mobilization, which enabled the PF—rather than any of the more established parties that had secured more votes in 2001—to take advantage of the decline in support for the MMD that occurred from 2008 onward. The deterioration of the ruling party’s fortunes owed much to the way that it handled the succession battle following Mwanawasa’s death. The decision to appoint as

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party leader Rupiah Banda, former Vice President to Mwanwasa, undermined public confidence in the government because Banda was widely believed to have been managed and funded by figures such as Chiluba and Vernon Mwaanga, whose reputations had been tainted by accusations of corruption and other criminal activities while in office. The resurgence of this grouping within the MMD turned influential civil society and media actors against the government, and lent credibility to Sata’s claim that the MMD was colluding with Chinese investors. As a result, although the MMD significantly outspent the PF in the general election campaign of 2011 it was unable to prevent Sata from mobilizing hundreds of thousands of new voters and increasing his share of the vote to 43 per cent—enough to propel his populist platform into State House. In Zambia, then, as in our other cases, it was not simply changes to the political environment and the existence of programmatic constituencies that led to programmatic development; leadership and contingent factors were also important.

Table 4: Summary of programmatic parties in Brazil, India, Ukraine and Zambia

Country (Parties)

Genesis Party development

Party institution-alization

Party system development

Brazil (PT)

Clientelistic inchoate system. Labour movement.

Support and infrastructure gradually increased.

PT wins office and institutionalizes, moving towards the centre.

Institutionalization of left and right coalitions.

Zambia (PF)

Weakening governing party. Old labour networks, ethnic base.

Rapid growth in urban and rural support.

PF wins office but weakly organized; programmatic approach remains uninstitutionalized.

Slow and very limited contagion and institutionalization.

India (BJP, BSP)

Weakening governing party. Strong grass-roots movements, ethnic/caste base.

Gradual rise in support from Northern state movement.

BJP moderates policies to win office and gradually institutionalizes.

Transmission to other regional movements but not Congress; institutionalization of a variety of linkages.

Ukraine Inchoate, clientelistic party system, institutional reforms, business links.

Rapid emergence of a West–East/ Ukraine–Russia cleavage.

Party leaders become increasingly able to impose coherent policies, moderate institutionalization.

Parties increasingly institutionalized until institutional reforms reversed.

1.4.2 Party institutionalization and the sustainability of programmatic politics Our four cases suggest that, following the genesis of a programmatic party, the trajectory that the party is likely to take is strongly shaped by whether it institutionalizes its programmatic commitments and whether it develops with a civic (or an ethnic) focus. Section 1.3 has already suggested that, as indicated by the Desk Review, the institutionalization of a party is important to the sustainability and consolidation of its programmatic agenda. In other words, whether or not a party fulfils the second dimension of programmaticity—the extent to which the party is organized along

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programmatic lines—shapes how likely the party is to stay true to its programmatic origins. Whether or not a party is a civic–programmatic party is also important, because ethnic–programmatic parties often increase the salience of communal cleavages. Combining these two powerful predictors into a comparative framework can tell us much about the prospects for programmatic development at both the party, and the party system, levels. In order to present a parsimonious theory that accounts for the prevalence of these two factors, we abstract away from the thick historically grounded narratives presented in the case studies in order to develop a typological theory of party development. Typological theories identify ‘both actual and potential conjunctions of variables or sequences of events and linkages between causes and effects that may recur’ and represent a middle ground between historical case studies and large-N quantitative analysis (George and Bennett: 233). In other words, the typological approach seeks to identify key factors that make a certain outcome more or less likely. It is appropriate for dealing with a complex set of processes such as programmatic development because it deals in likelihoods rather than strict causal processes. In the four cases we identify here, we find that the most important drivers of institutionalization and ‘civicness’ are the composition of the initial support base of the party and the extent to which the party emerges out of pre-existing civil society organizations. In countries in which ethnic identities have historically been politicized, as in India and Zambia, new parties typically begin life by representing distinct ethnic communities, even if they simultaneously embrace a programmatic position. This has two major consequences. First, because the party has mixed linkages it often faces a real struggle to maintain harmony between its ‘ethnic’ and ‘programmatic’ base, which is likely to retard the evolution of more coherent policy platforms. Second, the ethnic dimension of the party maintains, and in some cases can intensify, the politicization of ethnic identities. By contrast, where parties do not construct ethnic linkages, it is far easier for party leaders to focus on programmatic goals, such as the provision of public goods. The relationship of the party to civil society actors is also important because, in cases in which parties emerge out of civil society protests or from particular organizations, they are more likely to develop effective organizational structures for two reasons. First, parties that emerge directly from civil society groups typically take on something of their form, which gives the party a ready-made—if often limited—internal party organization. Second, when the relevant civil society group has developed organizational resources such as trained personnel, cash reserves, and offices and vehicles—which is especially the case with trade unions—the party is able to draw on a pre-existing infrastructure. The combination of these two factors means that parties that develop with close ties to civil society groups are significantly more likely to establish policy making processes that give a voice to activists and supporters, and to be able to withstand attempts by party leaders to draw back from programmatic commitments. Considering the interaction of these two factors suggests four main variants of programmatic party development. When fledgling programmatic parties don’t establish links to ethnic communities and do form strong ties to civil society groups, they are most likely to emerge as institutionalized civic–programmatic parties. Such parties face few internal barriers to the identification and pursuit of programmatic agendas and so are the most likely to maintain their policy-based approach and thus to transmit it to the party system. The PT in Brazil represents a classic example of this kind of party. Not only did the PT benefit greatly from its links to organized labour, the party emerged in a context in which cleavages such as ethnicity and race had not historically been

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represented within the party system. It is no coincidence that the PT is the most clearly programmatic and stable party in our sample. When programmatic parties do integrate the support of an ethnic group but also emerge with strong ties to civil society, they are most likely to emerge as institutionalized ethnic–programmatic parties. Like institutionalized civic–programmatic parties, these organizations are likely to have a more developed infrastructure both within and without the party, but their diverse set of linkages nonetheless renders it more difficult to maintain policy cohesion. This was the case with the BJP in India, which emerged out of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu social movement that was founded in 1925. The backing of the RSS gave the party a set of committed activists, an organizational template, and a clear ethnic community. The BJP’s advocacy of Hindu-nationalist views both encouraged its supporters to mobilize along ethnic lines, and provided an example of the potential success of ethnic mobilization that rival parties quickly copied. However, although the significance of ethnic linkages slowed down the BJP’s programmatic evolution, the party has not suffered as much policy confusion as one might have expected give its mixed mandate because it has managed to develop a set of policies—such as an aggressive foreign policy—that appeal to more programmatic voters and which also reflect the views of the party’s ethnic base. When programmatic parties don’t initially integrate particular ethnic groups but also fail to form strong ties to civil society groups, they will probably become non-institutionalized civic programmatic parties. These parties do not face the contradictory pressures experienced by the BJP, but have not developed the kind of participatory and consolidated structures that would ensure they stay true to their programmatic concerns. The leaders of such parties, which fall into the category of the elite or cadre parties discussed in section 1.2, face fewer incentives to abandon a policy-based approach, but are also less likely to come under pressure to deepen their programmatic commitments. Brazil’s BSDP, and to a certain extent the Congress Party of India, represent examples of this kind of party: they campaign on clearly articulated policy platforms, but they lack the linkages to programmatic activists and supporters that would encourage them to further strengthen their programmatic credentials. As a result, such parties have rarely been the drivers of programmatic development at the party system level. Finally, when programmatic parties do build strong linkages to an ethnic group and only develop a limited relationship to civil society organizations, the most likely outcome is a non-institutionalized ethnic–programmatic party. Because such parties lack an effective infrastructure they are less likely to develop internal structures that channel pressure from programmatic constituencies to the party leadership. At the same time, because such parties represent a distinct ethnic group that is likely to claim that it should be the primary beneficiary of party policies—and from access to state resources should the party come to power—they are more likely to fall back on ethnic or clientelistic practices. For this reason non-institutionalized ethnic programmatic parties are the least likely to consolidate a programmatic organization and policy-based approach. Zambia’s PF is one such party. Michael Sata initially set out to mobilize his Bemba-speaking ethnic group, but later sought to marry this base to an urban consistency following a disastrous electoral showing in 2001. As with the BJP, the greater susceptibility of the PF’s ethnic constituency to programmatic messages meant that the policy dissonance forced on the party was not as severe as it might have been, but it has nonetheless left Sata with an impossible task following his electoral victory in 2011. On

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the one hand, rural Bemba voters are expecting higher prices for agricultural products and greater development spending. On the other, urban workers are expecting lower taxes and cheaper food. It will be incredibly difficult for Sata to satisfy both demands within the context of Zambia’s fragile economy. Moreover, the PF’s commitment to its economic policies has yet to be consolidated in the party’s structures because while Sata drew on a culture of radical urban protest and trade union networks, the party did not directly integrate these into its own organization. Instead, Sata only began to develop strong links to these organizations once it had emerged as a major player in the Zambian political scene. As a result, while the PF can effectively mobilize urban workers, its party structure contains few mechanisms to ensure that they will continue to be represented. The combination of tension between the expectations of different constituencies and low levels of party institutionalization mean that the prospects for programmatic backsliding are particularly high. This is significant, because if programmatic parties emerge in sub-Saharan Africa they are likely to be uninstitutionalized ethnic–programmatic parties as a result of the salience of ethnic identities and the relative lack of strong civil society organizations.

Figure 1: Typology of Programmatic Parties

1.4.3 From parties to party systems There are good reasons to think that the programmatic development of a party will promote the programmatic development of the party system, most obviously because the balance of programmatic to non-programmatic parties shifts in favour of the former. Less obviously, programmatic parties have clear comparative advantages compared to clientelistic parties. When rival parties come to understand these advantages, either

Initial support base

Relationship to civil society


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because they lose out to programmatic parties in political competition or because they learn about the success of programmatic strategies via the media and word of mouth, they face strong incentives to adopt a more programmatic approach themselves. To understand why this is so, consider the costs that clientelistic parties have to bear when mobilizing support. The very logic of the linkages established between clientelistic parties and their base means that individuals are unlikely to turn out to vote unless they are directly rewarded for doing so via the provision of resources, jobs, or some other form of personal benefit. Election campaigns thus come to focus on the distribution of resources to the party faithful—an expensive and time-consuming activity that is also susceptible to detection and censure by the Electoral Commission, should it be independent, and the international community, should election monitors be in place. By contrast, although programmatic parties may engage in some form of clientelistic activities, they predominantly mobilize support by persuading voters to commit to a set of policy goals. Of course, programmatic parties must fulfil their promises to their support base, but they can do this by changing government policy after they win office—not by handing out patronage before the polls. Other things being equal, programmatic parties therefore find it far cheaper to contest an election, which in turn gives them real advantages over their non-programmatic rivals—especially in vast countries in which the cost of constructing a national alliance based on clientelism is exaggerated, as in India. In other words, just as economic competition forces inefficient firms to adapt or go out of business, promoting innovation and hence long-term growth, political competition forces parties to respond to more efficient organizations or risk losing ground in the battle for votes. Of course, while in office clientelistic parties may be able to meet their patronage burdens via the misuse of state resources, in which case they may be able to withstand the challenge from more efficient programmatic parties. But this is only possible when the economy is doing well and parties can afford to meet their clientelistic duties; as a result, during a period of economic decline clientelistic parties are particularly vulnerable to defeat by policy-based rivals. When programmatic parties take office the advantages of their form of mobilization become even more apparent. This is because, starved of state resources, clientelistic parties are poorly placed to compete for office when they are in opposition—unless they enjoy access to vast private funds. For clientelistic parties that are not supported by wealthy donors and cannot raise funds from their members—which is common in developing countries where many voters live in poverty—the most feasible route back to power is to develop a more programmatic platform. Thus, programmatic politics can be diffused throughout the party system via political competition, and in particular the transfer of power to programmatic parties This is best illustrated by the case of Brazil, where the rise of the PT resulted in a steady process of programmatic development as a result of regular bouts of political competition. Significantly, Brazil witnessed the emergence of two programmatic parties at the same time: the PT and the PSDB. Both parties began life as leftist political organizations keen to push policy-based solutions to the country’s economic difficulties, but the PSDB later dropped its socialist rhetoric and instead adopted a centre-right agenda. In 1994, the PSDB was the first of the two to secure power, in large part because Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s track record of fighting inflation conferred credibility on his party’s proposals for getting the economy back on track. For its part, the PT’s Lula finally secured the presidency in 2002 having narrowly missed out in 1994 and 1998.

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The emergence of two highly competitive programmatic parties crowded out the many clientelistic parties that had previously dominated Brazilian politics. Old political machines based on patron–client ties were rendered comparatively inefficient by the presence of two parties capable of mobilizing support on the basis of their policy commitments. The impact of this was particularly pronounced in Brazil because of the size of the country and the significance of state-level politics for the battle for national power. The ability of state-level political leaders to direct their supporters to vote for one party or another meant that the success of a presidential campaign depended on the ability of a candidate to integrate a range of local power brokers into their political machine. This conferred considerable leverage on state-level political leaders, who were therefore able to demand a high price in return for their loyalty. Building a viable national coalition could therefore be exceptionally expensive; as a result, clientelistic parties were particularly vulnerable to challenges from effective programmatic parties. Especially once the PSDB and the PT gained power at the state and national level, forcing rivals into a prolonged period of opposition without access to resources, clientelistic parties were faced with a simple choice: adapt or die. The potential benefits of programmatic parties are not only diffused as a result of direct competition—they can also be transmitted through demonstration effects. In India, for example, the success of some state-level programmatic parties inspired others to follow their lead. Chandrababu Naidu was one of the first politicians to win a state election on the basis of a good governance agenda. Having secured power in Andhra Pradesh, Naidu was able to take advantage of the decentralization of economic decision-making authority to negotiate a loan worth more than $1 billion from the World Bank. This deal, and the high levels of economic growth that resulted from his pro-investment industrial policy, enabled Naidu to win a landslide re-election. Thereafter, a number of aspiring political entrepreneurs in other states such as Gujurat drew on Naidu’s model to design their own good governance campaigns, resulting in what Rudolph and Rudolph have referred to as the ‘iconization’ of Naidu (2001). It is worth noting that many of those who have followed in Naidu’s footsteps lacked a genuine commitment to the implementation of policy reforms and have simply borrowed his rhetoric because they see it as a cheap strategy to mobilize support. But even in these cases, the success of Naidu, and others like him, changed the nature of the political debate. Non-programmatic leaders quickly realized that it is no longer wise to run wholly unprogrammatic campaigns. And by publicly committing themselves to a good governance agenda, they must now face the fact that they may be punished by voters if they fail to deliver on their promises. Of course, many contingent factors may derail these processes of programmatization through competition and transmission. Programmatic parties may perform poorly in office, creating sufficient public antipathy to open the door for clientelistic rivals. At the same time, unexpected economic collapse, scandals and foreign policy disasters may undermine public confidence, even in a policy-based party that is otherwise performing well. More importantly, there are a number of important structural factors that shape whether the logic outlined above is likely to play out in a given case. In particular, low levels of party and party system institutionalization, along with entrenched ethnic or clientelistic constituencies, undermine the prospects for programmatic development at the party system level. Low levels of party institutionalization matter because if programmatic parties give up on their policy-based commitments no transformation of the party system will occur. Successful programmatic parties are less likely to engage in programmatic backsliding, because party leaders well understand the advantages that programmatic parties have

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over their rivals in terms of the cost of campaigning. Despite this, within the universe of programmatic parties some sub-types are more vulnerable to backsliding than others. As we saw above, non-institutionalized ethnic parties lack the programmatic party structure that would ensure the continuity of a policy-based approach and, because they enjoy the support of a particular community, are also better placed to resort to group-based forms of political linkage. When such parties win power and can access state resources, so that clientelistic strategies become more viable, the case for maintaining a programmatic stance may become less compelling. Ethnic–programmatic parties are also problematic because their overt representation of a particular ethnic group may create the perception among other communities that they are not represented within the party. In turn, this can enable rival parties to rally ‘marginalized’ communities, and in the process increase the political salience of communal identities. Consider the rise of the programmatic parties in the Ukraine. Some of the main political parties have become more programmatic over time, with the Party of Regions and the electoral coalition Our Ukraine developing more structured ideological profiles. However, the very issues around which these parties were constructed has exacerbated divisions. In particular, the distinctive foreign policy orientations of different communities meant that the intensification of a ‘pro-West’ vs. ‘pro-Russia’ cleavage within the party system mapped onto pre-existing ethnocultural cleavages between the Russian-speaking East and the Ukrainian-speaking West, which further entrenched sub-national identities and in the process threatened to undermine national unity. So while successful ethnic–programmatic parties demonstrate the advantages of a non-clientelistic model and so may promote a general process of programmatic development, they may also inspire other parties to strengthen their ethnic appeals, generating a party system characterized by a complex mixture of organizations that are as ethnic as they are programmatic. As a result, parties such as Our Ukraine, India’s BJP and Zambia’s PF are the least likely to generate long-term programmatic change in other parties. Conversely, institutionalized civic–programmatic parties, such as the PT, are the type of party least likely to give up on their programmatic roots or to trigger a fresh wave of ethnic politics; they therefore represent the best hope for the long–term programmatic development of party systems. As Luna argues in the Desk Review (2012), party system institutionalization is important because parties cannot develop consistent policies, communicate these policies to voters, and be evaluated on how well they implemented their policies while in office, if the party system is inchoate and volatile. For example, in countries like Kenya where every election is preceded by the breakdown of old parties and the creation of new ones, voters are confronted with a new party system every five years. Under these circumstances, it is very difficult for voters to hold parties to account and so party leaders face fewer incentives to make good on their policies. At the same time, parties become known not for their policy positions but for the personalities they contain, which leads campaigns away from a focus on programmatic debate. Evidence for this proposition comes from across our cases. The programmatic development of the party system in Brazil began in earnest during a period in which the party system was also institutionalizing. The presence of the PT on the left, and the PDSB on the right, created two major political blocks around which other parties positioned themselves, resulting in two relatively stable ‘left’ and ‘right’ coalitions. The relative durability of these coalitions both supported the stabilization of the party system and encouraged parties to develop coherent ‘right of centre’ and ‘left of centre’

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platforms. In this example, programmatization and institutionalization were two intertwined processes that supported each other. An even more striking example of the importance of party system institutionalization comes from the Ukraine. In the 1990s political parties played a marginal role in the political system as discussed above. As a result, both the programmatic development and the institutionalization of parties and party systems were held back. It was only when parliamentary and electoral rules transformed this picture, rendering party labels more valuable and empowering party leaders to discipline their deputies, that the party system became more prominent and stable. This development, in turn, represented a critical first step in the slow and partial process of programmatization described above. Finally, when countries feature limited programmatic constituencies the potential for programmatic development is undermined because when non-programmatic parties have no hope of mobilizing support using policy-based platforms they may choose to ignore, rather than respond to, the success of programmatic parties. This is significant because in some of our cases specific communities were found to be particularly responsive to programmatic appeals, while the rest of the electorate remained more responsive to ethnic or clientelistic forms of mobilization. As a result, once programmatic communities had been effectively captured by new programmatic movements, other parties found it hard to win new supporters via the adoption of a more policy-based approach. Even if other pools of programmatic voters do exist, parties that have historically mobilized support using more ethnic or clientelistic strategies may find that they lack the credibility to reach out to these consistencies. At the same time, the traditional supporters of these parties, who have become used to being mobilized along ethnic or clientelistic lines, tend to feel that they have been abandoned if parties cease to appeal to their community or to provide patronage, and are therefore unlikely to turn out at election time. Non-programmatic parties may therefore have little to gain and much to lose from changing strategies if they compete in countries in which large constituencies are unresponsive to programmatic appeals. This is well illustrated by the case of Zambia, where the emergence of the PF has done little to encourage other parties to adopt a more programmatic approach. In large part this was because by the time that the PF had risen to prominence (during the 2006 election campaign) it had already captured the country’s two main programmatic constituencies: rural Bemba and urban dwellers. Consequently, the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and the opposition United Party of National Development (UPND) faced little incentive to develop more policy-based appeals. Let us begin by looking at the options available to the leaders of the MMD. First, MMD leaders recognized that their supporters had voted for the party in previous elections because they were included in the share of government spoils, not because of any ideological commitment. When the party came to power in 1991 it carried with it the hopes of trade unions and business elites alike, but by the mid-2000s the MMD’s support base had shrunk and was mainly based in rural areas in which the ruling party could influence the campaign through its control of traditional leaders. MMD strategists were therefore reluctant to turn their back on clientelistic strategies while the party was in power (until 2011). At the same time, the attacks on the character of senior MMD leaders by civil society groups and The Post, Zambia’s only independent newspaper, meant that new policy-based initiatives were unlikely to be taken seriously—at least by those in urban areas with access to a variety of news sources. Significantly, this group comprises one of Zambia’s strongest programmatic constituencies.

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Similarly, UPND leaders also saw little value in competing with the PF for the ‘programmatic vote’. By 2006, the party’s support base had dwindled and was mainly among the Tonga-speaking people who mainly live in Southern Province. Although the pressure to reverse the UPND’s fortunes was great, there were few inviting options available to the party’s leader, Hakainde Hichilema. The party’s core supporters were unlikely to be impressed if the UPND abandoned its commitment to its Tonga base in order to look for support outside of Southern Province. At the same time, Hichilema’s reputation as a Tonga nationalist made it unlikely that other groups would take him seriously if he suddenly presented himself as a civically minded programmatic leader. As a result, the UPND stuck to its tried and tested strategies, and the consistent expansion of PF support between 2001 and 2011 did little to trigger wider processes of programmatic development.

1.5 The impact of programmatic politics As the level and nature of programmatic politics changed in the four cases considered in this project, so did the character of each country’s politics and governance. Programmatic parties tend to focus on substantial policy debate, on the capacities of leaders and the record of the government. Other things being equal, this is likely to improve the quality of the government’s performance on economic and other issues over time. In Brazil, India and Zambia, the rise of programmatic parties resulted in a great voice for previously marginalized groups and the adoption of pro-poor policies by governments. In India, programmatic politics precipitated the pursuit of good governance agendas at the state level, although deeper political realities often limited what progress could be made. In cases in which programmatic party systems developed, such as Brazil, they imposed order and regularity on party politics and on policy formation, which stabilized political systems and made it easier for voters to hold their representatives to account. However, when programmatic politics emerged they typically generated further political polarization because the emergence of clear ideological cleavages between different constituencies focuses attention on what separates, rather than unites, the population. 1.5.1 Representation and accountability Voters’ policy preferences are represented when political candidates bearing policies are elected to public office, are thereby mandated to pursue those policies, and consequently pursue those policies in office (Manin, Przeworkski and Stokes 1999). Of all the linkage types that connect parties and voters, programmatic ones alone secure the political representation of policy preferences (Luna 2012: pp. 4). Other linkage types do not include the development of coherent policy programmes and so do not give voters a clear set of platforms to choose between. In each of the cases studied, the development of programmatic politics gave voice to the policy choices of previously underrepresented communities. In Zambia, neo-liberal policy agendas, rooted in the strong influence of international financial institutions, were out of step with popular policy attitudes. By 2010, an overwhelming popular consensus had emerged about the failure of the ruling party’s economic governance, and the need for greater state intervention in the economy. However, until the rise of the PF no political party sought to represent these views. Instead, the main parties effectively divided the opposition to the status quo by mobilizing support on the basis of ethnicity and the distribution of patronage. It was only after Michael Sata set about building a

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populist movement that brought together discontented members of various ethnic communities that Zambians were able to vent their disapproval of the economic policies of the MMD government. In India, the emergence of different programmatic parties increased the representation of two very different constituencies within the party system. The needs of the very poorest in society, which had been marginalized by the domination of the Congress party, were given more prominent representation within the party system by the emergence of the BSP. At the same time, the rise of the BJP brought to the table the policy concerns of Hindu nationalists, such as the desire to see the government adopt a more aggressive foreign policy, to defend the country’s cultural characteristics and to stress India’s independence from other international and transnational players. Representation is undermined in the absence of accountability. A political party is held accountable prospectively when voters choose parties to govern on the basis of their policy programme, and retrospectively when voters punish or reward parties for their performance in office (Muller et al 2000). Significantly, programmatic development also promotes a form of politics in which parties are more likely to be held to account for their performance in areas such as good governance and the performance of the economy. In ethnic or clientelistic party systems, voters do hold leaders account, but they do this on the basis of how well the ruling party has taken care of their community, or how well party leaders delivered on their duties as patrons—not on the basis of whether or not they have provided public goods. As a result, governments often go unpunished for major failings, such as presiding over corruption, economic stagnation and inefficient bureaucracies. Because programmatic parties mobilize support on the basis of their policy positions, they are much more likely to face censure for poor performance or for failing to deliver on their promises. In Ukraine, the vote share of the Socialist Party of Ukraine fell after it entered a coalition government of which its supporters disapproved in 2006. Likewise, in India, the programmatic BJP lost general elections in 2004 when it ran on an over-optimistic ‘India Shining’ slogan that did not reflect the country’s continued economic problems. As a result, programmatic parties are more likely both to encourage a policy debate and to implement their stated policies. Programmatic politics also promotes accountability and representation within political parties when they fulfil the second dimension of programmaticity (programmatic forms of internal organization). In other words, programmatic parties will be internally accountable and representative if party organizations tie them to their policy goals. In Brazil, strong party organizations anchor the policy platforms on which parties run for office. Partisan party members exert internal accountability over party leaderships, and ensure that they align their policy priorities with those of party programmes. Equally, methods of recruitment and value diffusion ensure that party members and leaders are personally dedicated to the party’s goals. In Brazil, the PT has remained responsive to party supporters and activists. Although the party moved towards the centre in the 1990s to broaden its electoral base, this shift was not simply imposed from above; rather, it reflected the views of a new political generation that was slowly rising through the party’s ranks. Thus institutionalized programmatic parties continue to represent their supporters, even in party systems that otherwise provide weak channels for accountability.

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1.5.2 Governance In the cases included in this report, almost all programmatic parties have focused on poverty reduction and development. In government and opposition, they have won widespread support by building linkages with low-income constituencies and developed strategies aimed at promoting pro-poor growth. In Brazil, the PT rolled out programmes such as Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero (Zero Hunger)—groundbreaking policies that have had a dramatic effect on income and development (Rocha 2008). In India, the appeal of the BSP drove the Congress-led government to introduce the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guaranteed every rural household 100 days of government work per year. With the exception of the Ukraine, we find that programmatic parties in countries with high levels of inequality have championed the needs of the poor. A number of the parties have also run on explicitly good governance campaigns and subsequently delivered on their promises to clean up corrupt practices and provide efficacious government. Most notably, in India, good governance candidates have made a significant impact in office at the state level. In Gujurat, Narendra Damodardas Modi has been credited with creating a business-friendly environment within an efficient, transparent state (Sinha 2005). In Bihar, Nitish Kumar made notable improvements to a range of public organizations and line departments, while also initiating schemes that provided bicycles to girls that stayed at school and loan schemes for farmers (Chand 2010). In both states, effective economic reforms attracted significant FDI, provided new jobs and resulted in higher economic growth. Programmatic linkages yield two strong mechanisms that make it less likely that leaders will engage in corruption. First, by mobilizing support around valence issues and the importance of good governance, parties become particularly vulnerable to corruption scandals that could erode their electoral support. Second, programmatic parties have less need to misuse state resources because their electoral success is not dependent on their ability to distribute patronage to their supporters. This is especially true in programmatic party systems, in which policy-based parties do not have to compete with clientelistic parties and so are less likely to lose an election because they have been outspent. Thus, although all parties in developing countries face funding challenges because their supporters are typically poorly placed to fund the party organization, the incentives to engage in corrupt activities are not as strong as they are for clientelistic parties. However, when parties have little reason to fear that corruption will be exposed, the incentives to undertake good governance reforms remain weak. In 2005—long after the emergence of a competitive programmatic party system in Brazil—the PT was wracked by the ‘mensalão’ scandal in which José Dirceu, President Lula’s chief of staff, was accused of being involved in a scheme in which small parties and deputies were paid to support the PT in Congress. Likewise, in India, corruption remains an everyday part of politics (Wilkinson 2007). Where states remain porous, or the influence of certain businesses in politics has become entrenched, as in the Ukraine, corruption is likely to persist. Programmatic politics may reduce the extent of corruption, then, but it is no panacea. 1.5.3 Political dynamics Beyond direct governance performance, programmatic politics changes patterns of political behaviour. Programmaticity can provide the linkages and constellations of shared interests that are necessary to support processes of party system

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institutionalization. Section 1.3 described the ways in which party system institutionalization promotes programmatic politics. Equally, programmatic politics promotes party system institutionalization. In Brazil, both processes developed symbiotically. The programmatic agendas of the PT and PSDB projected an order over the party system that regularized competition between ‘left’ and ‘right’ blocks—even though the party system remains highly fragmented. In turn, the stability of party competition encouraged parties to strengthen their programmatic linkages between parties and their supporters. As in Brazil, programmatic politics may also result in a process of polarization in which the gap between the views of different communities, and the positions taken up by parties, widens. LeBas argues that this is because parties often get most traction with voters over divisive issues precisely because voters care so much about them. Indeed, LeBas suggests that in some cases parties actually seek to play on divisive issues because widening the gap between parties and constituencies strengthens the barriers between parties and so makes it easier for party leaders to prevent their supporters from defecting (LeBas 2011). Polarization is more likely to take place when two issue-based parties emerge with directly opposing policy platforms. In Brazil, the rise of the PSDB and the PT both gave the party system new structure and emphasized the ideological difference between the left and right of the political spectrum. In India, the emergence of the BJP and BSP polarized the positions of the poor relative to the wealthy, and the Hindu majority relative to the country’s numerous minorities. In Ukraine, existing ethno-regional cleavages were reinforced when political parties developed stronger programmatic platforms based on ‘pro-Western’ and ‘pro-Russian’ stances. It is programmatic divides that produce polarization, not just the presence of a programmatic party. As previewed above, polarization is particularly problematic in the case of ethnic–programmatic parties, because competition may encourage the relevant parties to strengthen their ethnic, as well as their programmatic, linkages. In both India and the Ukraine, polarization took on an ethnic dimension which reinforced the differences between communities. Most alarmingly, in India the BJP’s Hindu-nationalist ideology focused attention on Hindu/Muslim and Hindu/Christian tensions, and party members have been accused of complicit inter-communal violence such as the riots in which 1,000 Muslims were killed in 2002 (Hindu 2011). In this way ethnic–programmatic parties can generate some of the same externalities that we would normally associate with ethnic parties. Yet although the relationship between programmaticity and polarization is a cause for concern, our case studies suggest that this need not cancel out the positive changes that programmatic development promotes. First, as noted above, polarization mainly occurs when two parties emerge with directly opposing positions. Second, even when the conditions for polarization exist, parties face strong incentives to avoid excessive polarization because they have the best chance of winning elections if they broaden their appeal to voters, which usually requires party leaders to modify their stance. In Brazil, India and Zambia, programmatic parties did inspire greater controversy around the issues they raised, but also moved quickly toward the centre ground so that by the time they secured power they had become more acceptable to a range of constituencies. Finally, it is important to remember that the impact of programmatic development on representation, governance and wider political dynamics depends on the extent to which policy-based politics takes root. When programmatic politics becomes entrenched in competitive party systems, it tends to support cleaner and more

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responsive parties, stable party systems and more effective governments. However, when programmatic parties compete in partially programmatic systems the structural drivers of accountability and representation are weakened. This is because the presence of established ethnic and clientelistic parties, which have no interest in engaging in policy-based debate and instead encourage voters to focus on their responsibilities to their patrons or their communal identities, means that attention is diverted away from programmatic concerns. In Zambia, for example, the emergence of the PF within a heavily ethnic and clientelistic party system did little to change the way that politics was conducted. This may change following the party’s election in 2011, but the Zambian case is nonetheless an important reminder that the most positive effects of programmaticity occur once most or all of the main parties are programmatic. When countries move beyond this tipping point, the effects of programmaticity are likely to be of a higher magnitude.

1.6 Policy recommendations Section 1.5 detailed how programmatic politics may improve governance, support stable policy-making and contribute to pro-poor development. Based on the empirical evidence presented above, this section draws out a number of policy recommendations for party assistance providers seeking to galvanize and facilitate the development of programmatic politics. The selection of lessons is motivated by three main considerations: the feasibility of interventions for organizations such as International IDEA, existing party assistance methodology, and best practice. Although party assistance stretches back to at least the 1970s (Erdmann 2010), systematic assessments of the impact of party assistance have only been conducted in the last decade. According to Carothers (2006), party assistance efforts have performed poorly, a view shared by other scholars (Erdmann 2010; Domingo 2010; Domingo et al 2011). Early party assistance work consisted, for the most part, of a combination of technical assistance, knowledge transfers and the facilitation of inter-party dialogue. It was characterized by unrealistic, transformative goals and relied on the idea of a ‘mythological’ ideal party to which parties in developing countries were unfairly—and unhelpfully—compared (Carothers 2006). Likewise, context-specific interventions have only recently become standard practice, resulting in a tendency to promote a one-size-fits-all approach. Other evaluations in this field have noted that party assistance did not operate with well-defined goals, or substantiated theories of change (Erdmann 2010). For example, political economy analyses, long since applied to other areas of donor development policy, were only applied to party assistance in the late 2000s (Domingo 2010). As a result, all too often democracy promotion agencies failed to recognize that for reforms to be ‘owned’ by local actors, they needed to be aligned with the interests of party leaders. Current best practice in the field has taken on board these lessons and suggests that party assistance should:

Be tailored to context.

Be aligned with parties’ incentives.

Take advantage of donor core competencies and take account of the limitations

of what can be achieved through party assistance.

Be rooted in a clear theory of change.

Have clear and measurable outputs.

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This study has demonstrated a number of key drivers of programmaticity around which donors could implement best practice programmes. The discussion of factors that drive and retard programmatic politics presents an empirical base for assessing which tools and interventions are most appropriate for democracy assistance providers. Moreover, the synthesis of how these factors fit together and form different pathways of programmatic development sheds light on the sort of donor interventions that would be most appropriate in each context. Equally, it enables us to identify temporal- and context-specific challenges for programmatic development. However, many of the most important drivers of programmaticity are deep structural factors, such as the make-up of society and the structural base of the economy; factors over which democracy promotion organizations have minimal influence. This section highlights potential interventions in areas that NGOs, donors and other international organizations have historically achieved greater traction. In doing so it provides practical examples of how policymakers can constructively engage to promote programmatic development in four key areas: the structural determinants of programmatic politics; the genesis of programmatic parties; programmatic party building; and the evolution of programmatic party systems. 1.6.1 Structural determinants of programmatic development Structural determinants such as socioeconomic conditions affect the receptiveness of voters to programmatic appeals, and hence the efficacy of policy-based strategies for political entrepreneurs. When such conditions work to retard the development of programmatic linkages, for example where levels of education are low, formal employment is low, and patron–client ties predominate, it stunts the development of a programmatic party system. In India and Zambia, these background conditions meant that while some communities were receptive to programmatic appeals, others were not—especially in areas where clientelism was entrenched and access to sources of political information was limited. As a result, lopsided party systems evolved which featured a combination of programmatic and non-programmatic linkages. Though these sorts of demographic and economic factors take decades to change, this does not mean that party assistance programmes can do nothing to render communities more responsive to programmatic appeals. For example, greater media access may help to overcome some of the barriers to policy-based politics that are often said to derive from structural factors. Other things being equal, rural voters are less likely to act programmatically than their urban counterparts because they tend to operate in more ethnic and clientelistic environments, which is partly because such communities are often less well educated, live in more culturally homogenous areas, and are more vulnerable to exclusion from public goods. The significance of these factors is compounded by the way in which limited access to mass media deprives poor and rural voters of crucial information about political party performance and political debates. In Zambia, the Afrobarometer survey finds that there is a 19 per cent gap between the proportion of rural and urban dwellers that listen to the news on the radio at least several times per week, and a 51 per cent gap in the number of rural and urban dwellers that watch the news on television at least several times per week, with urban respondents listening and watching more in each case (Afrobarometer 2010). By implementing programmes that improve and equalize media access, party assistance providers can begin to ameliorate some of the reasons that rural areas tend to feature less policy-based politics. Donors should commission scoping studies to identify which constituencies lack access to public media, and to assess variation in the quality and neutrality of political debate nationwide. Such studies would enable donors to carefully

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target programmes to reduce gaps between different communities in their access to information, for example by funding media outlets or by sponsoring programmes that transfer political information and promote political debate. Moreover, party assistance providers might work with government to ensure harmonized access to mass media. In Brazil, television channels are forced by law to provide slots for political programmes every day during election campaigns, which are allocated to parties in proportion to their share of the vote in the previous Congress. The Brazil case study reveals that these party broadcast slots have encouraged weak, non-programmatic party leaders to develop their policy platforms in order to have something to say. 1.6.2 Party genesis In each of the cases studied, programmatic politics began with parties that were born programmatic or developed programmatic elements in their early years. In the absence of such parties, programmatic platforms would not have been developed by existing parties. The early development of new parties therefore constitutes a critical moment in which the development of programmatic politics can be supported; working with new parties should therefore be prioritized. Conversely, our analysis suggests that donor engagement with established parties—which has been the main focus of party assistance thus far—is unlikely, on its own, to have a significant effect on programmatic development. In both India and Zambia, programmatic parties rapidly gained ground by speaking to the grievances of citizens that existing parties had long neglected. Each tapped into widespread popular sentiment about policy issues that had been either ignored, or marginalized by the existing political order. Other parties have found success using similar methods, as in Thailand, where the Thai Rak Thai party mobilized a long-neglected rural base, and in Bolivia, where the Movement for Socialism party mobilized an indigenous rural and lower class base. In each case, coherent constituencies lay neglected for years before they were mobilized by political entrepreneurs. In each case, feats of programmatic innovation enabled young parties to find new ways of connecting to voters, often in the absence of any precedent of programmatic politics. It is likely that there are many more potentially programmatic constituencies that have been overlooked, especially in countries marked by extensive clientelism. Party assistance programmes could help to stimulate the development of programmatic politics by commissioning a scoping study to identify representation gaps in developing democracies. Such a study would draw on survey data and manifesto analyses to chart the distribution of policy preferences and party platforms in order to test for disconnects between the two. Where clear programmatic gaps exist, parties can hope to make rapid electoral gains by adopting more policy-based approaches—and so donor and party incentives will be aligned. The findings of the proposed scoping study could be communicated to political leaders and party activists by making it publicly available and via a broader party support outreach schemes. Where the potential for programmatic innovation is found to be high, party assistance providers could run Political Innovation Programmes that would include the provision of training to political parties to enable them to develop political platforms that meet particular constituencies’ needs and to support to CSOs that articulate and campaign on behalf of those constituencies. At the same time, donors could convene forums between key stakeholders and local political leaders to strengthen the linkages between them. In doing so, such a programme would unlock the potential for policy-based political competition by fostering greater programmatic linkages at the grass roots.

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Building strong connections between civil society organizations and political parties is particularly important because, as discussed in Section 1.3, such connections often galvanize programmatic development. CSOs that support the development of political parties, such as Hindu nationalist organizations in India and trade unions in Brazil, often become key stakeholders in formidable electoral machines. Moreover, as discussed in Section 1.3, when parties develop by building links to established civil society groups they are more likely to establish programmatic structures and to institutionalize programmatic goals. Significantly, donors are well placed to act as neutral convenors to facilitate the development of collaborative working relationships between CSOs, existing or new parties, and representatives of coherent programmatic constituencies. For example, such an intervention would fit neatly into the sorts of party assistance programmes that are already running. 1.6.3 Programmatic party building Section 1.3 detailed how effective party organization aids programmatic development. Institutionalization is necessary to coordinate and disseminate a consistent party message and maintain a party reputation. A party that is internally organized to facilitate the adoption of a policy-based approach is likely to be less prone to programmatic backsliding. However, a number of factors mitigate the emergence of strong party organizations—especially when funding is scarce, parties develop rapidly, or there are political economic factors that undermine party cohesion. Moreover, as shown in Section 1.4, some paths of programmatic development are more likely to deliver weak parties than others. Parties that arise without strong roots in civil society, and those that are led by populist leaders, are more likely to develop programmatic linkages without programmatic structures. Such parties are prone to policy drift and often struggle to maintain the cohesion of their platforms. Party funding can address some of these organizational challenges. In both Ukraine and Zambia, we identify a lack of funding as a key driver of weak party organizations. In Zambia, the PF claim that they delayed holding internal party elections until ten years after they were founded due to a shortfall in funding. Of course, party funding may also be diverted from its intended purpose by leaders seeking personal gain, or who fear that a more effective party organization would be more difficult to control. But by providing carefully targeted party assistance for parties to strengthen their core functions in cases where leaders appear to genuinely aspire to develop a stronger infrastructure, donors can intervene to support the all-important process of institutionalization. A number of political institutions and electoral system choices may also strengthen or weaken programmatic parties. The introduction of parliamentary and electoral rules that created barriers to floor-crossing reversed the erosion of party authority in Ukraine. Likewise, the move from a strong presidency and single-member constituency elections to a weak presidency and a closed system of proportional representation empowered Ukrainian parties over independent candidates, and so enabled parties to maintain their values, reputation and policy agenda. In turn, this supported the emergence of a more policy-oriented party system. In other words, party and party system institutionalization can be promoted through legislative and electoral rules that empower party leaders. Of course, choices of political rules and electoral system will be shaped by a range of other factors and fully proportional systems are often thought to hamper the evolution of strong ties between parties and voters because they lack constituency MPs. Given this, a mixed-member proportional system which includes both first-past-the-post MPs and party list MPs may be the best way to promote programmaticity through institutional change.

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Although changes to electoral systems are rare, contrary to received wisdom this is an area in which donors have often played an important role. For example, in post-conflict cases such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, donors helped to select and construct electoral systems. Indeed, further opportunities to engage in this area regularly present themselves. Zambia, for example, is likely to undergo a thorough period of constitutional review following the victory of Michael Sata in 2011. Moreover, in cases in which donors find it harder to gain traction on these issues they can still affect useful interventions by supporting civil society organizations that advocate institutional reform. Of course, there is a danger that by strengthening the position of party leaders such interventions would promote institutionalization at the expense of internal democracy, and in doing so would render the maintenance of a party’s programmatic identity dependent on the will of the party leader. It is therefore imperative that the goal of generating more stable and effective parties is balanced against the need to encourage parties to make their leaders accountable to party members and activists. In some cases, internal party democracy is mostly characterized by factionalism (Boucek 2010) and clientelistic internal politics. However, when parties have established strong programmatic linkages, more representative and accountable structures are likely to strengthen party cohesion and root a party to its ideological commitments. When faced with such cases, party assistance providers should seek to make their support conditional upon the promotion of internal party democracy.

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Van de Walle, Nicholas. ‘Presidentialism and clientelism in Africa’s emerging party systems’, Journal of Modern African Studies (2003) 41: pp. 297–321.

Wilkinson, Steven. ‘Explaining Changing Patterns of Party–Voter Linkages in India’ in Patrons, Clients and Policies. eds. Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson, Cambridge: CUP, 2007.

Newspapers The Economist. ‘A Triumph in Bihar’, November 25, 2010. The Hindu. ‘Gujarat Police Officer Implicates Modi in Riots’, April 22, 2011.

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2 Brazil

2.1 Introduction The Brazilian party system is both quite complicated and crowded. Twenty-two parties won seats in the lower house of the Brazilian congress (the Chamber of Deputies) in the 2010 congressional elections, the largest with less than 17 per cent of the national vote. The fragmentation of the Chamber rose to a new high in these elections, with an Effective Number of Parties (ENP)1 of over eleven by votes, and over ten by seats. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil's party system became notorious for its weakness, clientelism, and generally inchoate quality—and its lack of programmaticity (see Ames 2001; Lamounier 1986, Mainwaring 1995 & 1999; Samuels 2000). However, over the past two and a half decades, this chaotic party system characterized by mostly unprogrammatic parties, very low party loyalty among both voters and politicians, and a highly unstable set of major or ‘relevant’ parties has settled down. It now displays patterns that increase the usefulness of party labels as informational shortcuts and thus voters’ capacity to vote according to their broader policy interests, instead of merely on the basis of short-term personal gain such as clientelism. Indeed, as of 2011, RPG seems be consolidating and Brazil can plausibly be said to approach the programmaticity of the older North American democracies, if not those of Western Europe (Hagopian, Gervasoni and Moraes 2009). The central issues of programmatic competition in the Brazilian context mostly relate to socioeconomic issues: taxes, spending (especially transfers), deficits, trade, and monetary policy management. Because of the profusion of parties in Brazil, it is important to consider the party system overall as a unit of analysis; this case study will also include special focus on four of the most important parties. Considering the party system is essential because programmatic cleavages are most relevant at the level of the two principal party coalitions, which have demonstrated their durability over the last decade: one left-wing coalition led by the currently-ruling Workers’ Party (PT), and a second centre-right coalition led by the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). The second main ‘take home’ point about Brazil’s distinctive pathway to becoming a programmatic party system is that it is principally the story of these two parties, which were ‘born’ with programmatic party elements, gradually crowding out much more clientelistic or personalistic parties. This is in contrast to cases in which initially unprogrammatic parties became increasingly programmatic, as in Zambia. The Brazilian case highlights the importance of a number of important factors to the emergence of responsible party government. Most notably, it strongly reaffirms one of the main conclusions of the Desk Review: that in some cases the institutionalization of the party system is a necessary condition for the emergence of programmatic politics. In Brazil, programmaticity did not become the predominant mode of politics until the set of relevant parties from which voters and politicians choose stabilized. Until repeated iterations of choosing from an established set of parties became a ‘stable, valued, recurring pattern of a behaviour’ (Huntington, 1968: 12), voters did not rely on party platforms when deciding who to support. But three other processes were also of great importance. First, the imposition of neo-liberal economic reforms constrained supplies of the resources needed for clientelistic politics and thus undermined the longevity of established unprogrammatic parties. Second, given the greater constraints on clientelism it was easier for leftist parties to impose ideological order on the political

1 Based on the Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera technique (1979).

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system by defeating clientelistic parties. Thus the old story of programmaticity emerging as a result of ‘contagion from the left’ is of great relevance in the Brazilian case. Third, the relationship between federalism, the logic of electoral competition, and the emergence of programmatic party organization and linkages is of great—and often overlooked—importance. Most significantly, the decentralization of political power ensures that state and local political operations—and the offices they compete over—are critical building blocks that presidential candidates must harness if they are to be successful. Programmatic appeals have been a key strategy that presidential hopefuls have used to create a loyal chain of organizations and individuals at the state and municipal level across Brazil’s vast territory.2 Of course, a good deal of causal weight must also be attributed to contingent factors, such as the presence of two charismatic leaders who were both committed to practicing programmatic politics, and did so effectively.

2.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Brazil Brazil's contemporary party system grew out of the enforced bipartidarismo inaugurated by the 1964–1985 military regime in the third year of its rule, when it created two parties, the National Renovating Alliance (ARENA) for it supporters, and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB—PMDB after 1977) for opposition politicians to have a legitimate vehicle of political activity. After the reform of party legislation in 1977, which was allegedly designed to buoy the regime's fortunes by splitting the opposition (Mainwaring 1999: 87), multiple parties were allowed. This development was of great significance for the Brazilian party system, for it led to nine gubernatorial victories for the PMDB, the emergence of PT as a party, and a five-way competition in the 1982 national elections which in turn contributed to an enormous electoral setback for the government's party—renamed as the Social Democratic Party (PDS). In 1985, the regime of the generals stepped down in a pacted transition and the National Congress that had been elected in 1982 sat as an electoral college to select the first civilian president in over two decades. This process generated a new party, the Party of the Liberal Front (PFL), which split from the PDS to join with the PMDB in support of an opposition president, Tancredo Neves. However, Neves died before taking office, leaving José Sarney, backed by the PFL, as Brazil's first civilian president—although the PMDB, which occupied nearly two thirds of ministerial posts, was the principal party that supported his administration (Ferrerira 2002: 52). The administrations of Sarney (1985–1989) and his successor Fernando Collor (who left office early due to impeachment at the end of 1992) were politically and economically tumultuous. Numerous politicians switched between a growing number of parties (15–20 in recent years), some multiple times (Mainwaring and Liñan 1997). The PMDB suffered electorally during this period, in part due to its support of the Cruzado Plan, which proved economically untenable. Many politicians left the party, including a wing of progressive intellectual politicians led by future president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who formed the PSDB in 1988. At the same time, many others, especially former supporters of the military regime, joined it. Nonetheless, the PMDB has regularly been the largest or second largest party in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, has secured support from across the country, won many governorships, and provided

2 This account draws on the logic of John Aldrich (1995), but suggests that in a much more crowded field of political contenders than 1820s America, ideology (or programme) is important not just to win over established political machines, but to implant new ones, attracting new young politicians to party loyalty with ideological appeals.

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ministers for several governments—although it has never been successful at running its own candidate for president. The most successful party in the 1990s was the PSDB, which won the presidency in 1994 under Cardoso, whose Real Plan as Finance Minister was seen to have saved Brazil from hyperinflation following the fall of Collor. The PSDB won again in 1998 after securing a constitutional amendment allowing executive re-election. The PT, under Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, gradually emerged as the principal opposition party, slowly at first (though Lula was runner-up in every presidential election from 1989 until he won in 2002), and offered a far-left alternative to the declaredly ‘centre-left’ PSDB. Despite this, the ruling party dutifully, and relatively successfully, followed neo-liberal policy prescriptions for liberalization, privatization, and tough monetary policy throughout Cardoso’s tenure. The PFL and the new version of PDS—which has been renamed several times and is today known as the Progressive Party (PP)—were dependable supporters of the Cardoso administration, while myriad smaller parties on right, left and centre engaged in ‘small-time’ politics, usually with ambitions that reached no higher than local or perhaps state-wide office.

Figure 2: First-round Presidential Votes in Brazil, 1994–2010

By 2002, Lula had moderated his leftist rhetoric enough to be electable, and had secured a right-wing coalition partner in the small but outspoken Liberal Party (PL) to back up his moderate credentials (Samuels 2004). Meanwhile, Cardoso's chosen successor, José Serra—a less skilled political operator—had lost the support of the PFL due to squabbles with the powerful Sarney family. The combination of these two developments enabled Lula to win the presidency, and he was re-elected four years later with a similar coalition, this time facing off against the successful PSDB governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin. In 2010, Lula's handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, won re-election with a

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coalition much like Lula's but expanded to include the PMDB, as well as several other small parties. She defeated the PSDB, which again ran Serra, backed by a coalition that included the PFL (by this point renamed Democratas, DEM) and the left-centre People’s Socialist Party, one of several small parties tracing their lineage to the original Brazilian Communist party. Importantly, these party coalitions, which have evolved into two clear camps, tend to vote together in congress, although they often recombine in unexpected ways during state-level political competition.

2.3 Categorization and Description of Programmatic Parties The two most important parties in the story of Brazil’s increasing programmatization are the PT and PSDB, which together crowded out clientelistic parties and acted as the bases for coalitions of the left and right. Although the degree of programmatic development of the two main parties does not fulfil every aspect of the ‘programmatic party’ ideal type, the success of their programmatic strategies has certainly shifted the party system towards a programmatic party system. However, it is worth noting that the nature of these coalitions has been somewhat problematic for programmaticity as there are a few parties in each coalition that do not fit with the direction or degree of programmaticity of the overall coalition.

Table 5: Brazilian Party Profiles

The PT emerged as a party out of the New Unionism movement in Brazil, which in turn emerged in the 1970s as a response to the government-incorporated unions of the Vargas era (mid-century). The Central Única dos Trabalhadores emerged as the main organization of the movement, and rapidly became the PT's electoral base, anchoring the party strongly in the industrial southeast of Brazil. Through a leadership of committed Marxists, including some who took up arms against the military regime, such as Lula's successor, current president Dilma Rousseff, and a strong connection to the CUT's well-organized unions, the PT quickly became known as a programmatic party. Historically, its support has come from two groups: organized labour (especially the

Party Name Party organization Party Linkages Party type

Workers’ Party

Strong party organization and policymaking capacity. Moderate internal democracy and strong grass roots presence.

Programmatic linkages to core constituencies in the industrial South East. Elements of charismatic linkages.

Programmatic party.

Brazilian Social Democratic Party

Medium-strength party organization and strong policymaking capacity.

Mixture of clientelistic, charismatic and programmatic linkages.

Elite programmatic party.

Brazilian Democratic Movement Party

Weak party organization, low coherence and weak ability to diffuse values.

Clientelistic linkages and some programmatic linkages segmented by state and region.

Clientelistic party, waning programmatic agenda.

Party of the Liberal Front

Medium-strength party organization and strong policy cohesion in Congress.

Clientelistic linkages, strong in rural North East, and now South, South East.

Clientelistic party, growing programmatic coherence.

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bank workers, metalworkers and public sector unions) and from highly educated voters who tend to take more progressive stances on a range of issues, including the party’s redistributive policies that were often not to their own benefit. Since Lula’s election, the ranks of PT voters have further swelled to include much of the urban poor and informal sector, especially in the northeast of the country, including a significant proportion of the Afro-Brazilian population which is concentrated in that region. The party’s campaigns and literature invariably invoke issues of class and economic fairness and equality, and its consistent, moderately redistributive fiscal and welfare policies reflect these programmatic commitments. However, although the party’s profile has remained programmatic throughout the period, the PT has moved toward the centre of the political spectrum as it has become increasingly electorally successful (Ibid). This has moved the party’s ideological position a bit, but hasn’t changed its programmatic nature, and largely reflects its vigorous internal party democracy, which saw power gradually shift away from far-leftist elements who were seen as partly responsible for Lula’s electoral losses in the 1990s (Ibid: 1012–13). One important aspect of all of Brazil’s parties that contributes towards general programmatic party development is their internal organization, which is federally regulated and includes committees at different sub-national levels that, by different means, elect or select delegates to the parties’ upper level organs, such as the national directorate or national executive committee. The PT is noteworthy among Brazil’s parties in its particular mechanisms as it includes a direct secret-ballot election for the party’s national presidency, which promotes a focus on party strategy closely linked to the programmatic positions of party rank-and-file. In general, the PT comes closest to qualifying as a fully programmatic party according to all three dimensions set out by the Desk Review: electoral linkage, party organization, and government and legislative action. However, one countervailing trend in the PT is worthy of note: some of its success at ‘crowding out’ other more clientelistic or personalistic parties is due to its ability to add unprogrammatic strains to its electoral and policy repertoire. These include elements of segmented linkages and personalistic, charismatic leadership under Lula—a metalworker missing one finger who only learned to read in his 20s. The PT’s programmaticity is illuminated by surveys examining voters’ ideological positions. Datafolha conducted a poll in May of 2010 asking voters to place themselves on an ideological spectrum, and examining the crosstabs for party preferences reveals how much more programmatic PT partisans are than non-partisans. This can be seen among the respondents who failed to identify their own ideologies (unable or had none). 35 per cent of non-partisans failed to do so, while only 17 per cent of PT sympathizers failed (Datafolha 2010:10). The PSDB was the ruling party from 1994–2002 under Cardoso and has served as the leader of the opposition coalition in both electoral and legislative competition since 2002. Like the PT, the PSDB has shown programmatic elements from the start, made up as it was of progressive politicians who split from the PMDB in the late 1980s, displeased with its increasingly heterogeneous and unprogrammatic character (Power 2002). However, unlike the PT, its centre-left, social-democratic programme was defined more by its progressive, academically-minded leadership, several of whom had spent the years of the military regime in exile in foreign universities, or otherwise removed from politics, than by linkages to any socioeconomic group whose interests might moor it securely to a particular set of programmes. As a result, the PSDB moved rightward in order to provide the macroeconomic stability seen as critical by Cardoso and many Brazilians who were exhausted by multiple rounds of hyperinflation. The party thus endorsed technocratic and even neo-liberal programmes, even if it rejected

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that label, and by the late 1990s the party anchored the centre-right of Brazil’s political spectrum (Ibid: 625–626). As with the PT’s moderation, this was a considered and purposeful shift in ideology based on frank assessments of economic theory and practice (Ibid: 628), rather than the party spurning programmatic politics to try and win votes. Voters continue to associate the PSDB with a centre-right agenda. Nonetheless, because the party has never exactly embraced neo-liberal ideology in campaigns, even as it has become known for adhering to such precepts in economic policy (Spanakos and Renno 2009: 15, 17–18), it falls more under the Desk Review's category of ‘Programmatic Elite Party’. Furthermore, the PSDB has also made use of personalized appeals, most notably through its reliance on Cardoso, whose enormous popularity was due at least partly to non-programmatic factors such as his charismatic authority and general ‘good governance’. Today, though, the PSDB still displays high levels of programmaticity. In the same Datafolha poll referenced above, respondents who preferred it failed at ideological self-placement at a rate of only 13 per cent, compared to 35 per cent for those without a party preference, and 25 per cent for the sample overall (Datafolha 2010:10). Two other parties deserve some mention with regards to programmaticity. The first is the PMDB, which was seen as highly programmatic in the years around the 1985 transition. However, its programmatic development was based on its opposition to the military regime, which quickly became defunct as a programmatic cleavage in Brazilian politics. Moreover, with the influx of former supporters of the military regime, led by Sarney in 1990, the PMDB’s programmatic profile was undermined. In general, the party is weakly coherent nationally, with geographically segmented linkages that include leftist programmes in some states, rightist programmes in others, and a clientelistic approach in most. Thus, the party has almost become less programmatic over the last quarter century (at least until recently—see below), even while maintaining its position as the first or second largest party in terms of votes and seats in the Congress. The PFL, on the other hand, has gone from being known as a party of the more economically backward northeast of Brazil with a penchant for fisiologismo (‘bossism’, a blanket term referring to clientelism and nepotism) to a more programmatic organization, having embraced liberal economic orthodoxy. To date, the party has demonstrated one of the highest rates of party cohesion in the legislature (Desposato 2006: 1024). In considering programmaticity of the party system overall, it is critical to consider the role of the two great coalitions. The centre-right PSDB has depended on the rightist PFL as its principal coalition partner in every presidential election 1994 to 2010, with the exception of 2002. Opposed to this now-institutionalized PSDB–PFL coalition has been the coalition of the PT with other smaller leftist parties. Both coalitions have proved to be cohesive during parliamentary debate (Lyne 2005). Other parties, some programmatic and some unprogrammatic, or even ‘partidos de aluguel’ (‘parties for rent’) have tended to be subsumed into this main axis of electoral and legislative competition. The less cohesive PMDB has shown a strong tendency to split geographically in presidential elections and has not run its own candidate since 1994, and small and medium-sized non-programmatic parties have typically also ended up serving the electoral ends of one coalition leader or the other. There are a few instances of ideological incoherence to be found in these two grand coalitions, such as the PL’s presence in the left coalition and the PPS’s recent appearance in the PSDB–PFL coalition. But on balance, the smaller parties, even though a few may be ideologically at odds with the coalition leaders, or simply lack ideology, end up doing the bidding of the leading parties, and as a result have not perceptibly reduced the programmatic structuration of the coalition overall, in terms of the criteria set out in the Desk Review. The core of each of these coalitions is quite well institutionalized, although a few of the smaller parties—

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plus, importantly, the PMDB—are less strongly attached, and sometimes switch. Formation of these coalitions is electorally strategic, and thus parties are not usually expected to adjust their policies in order to enter a coalition. However, long participation in a coalition can have an effect on parties’ programmatic development. For example, the old PL, which used to be known as a party of neo-liberal economic ideology, through several iterations of collaboration with the PT, lost its programmatic reputation and acquired one for fisoliolgísmo for simply working with whoever is in power. But in general, the parties that suffer these effects tend to be second and third-tier parties (the PL never received more than five per cent of the national vote in Brazil, and merged into another party after the 2006 elections).

2.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics This section will advance five explanations for Brazil’s relatively programmatic party system, which is significant for a less developed country and a new democracy. The first two can broadly are connected to socio-economic factors, the third to institutional factors, and the last two are contingent upon particular confluences of events or personalities. However, it is critical to note that each explanation depends on the expectations that office-seeking politicians have of voters and of each other and the actions that they undertake as in response to those expectations. Before we turn to the explanations it is important to consider the broader economic context in Brazil and its impact on political development. In the wake of successful, though often macroeconomically destabilizing, import-substituting industrialization (ISI), common throughout Latin America in the 1930s–1960s, the Brazilian military regime stood out for its willingness to deepen ISI by demobilizing workers, which brought foreign investment and greater macroeconomic stability (O’Donnell 1973). As a result, although Brazil's economy was a monetary basket case throughout the post-debt crisis era, it also featured a large industrial sector and powerful domestic business classes, many of which were linked to foreign markets and capital (Frieden 1991). During the same period the middle class expanded, especially in the state of São Paulo, which now accounts for about a fifth of the country’s population and over a quarter of its economic activity. This background is important to understand the first two explanations of programmaticity in Brazil. First, the relative marginalization of organized labour and leftist sentiments was critical to the success of leftist parties that emerged in the late 1980s. It was the rise of parties such as the PT which led to the crowding out of clientelistic parties and the gradual ‘programmatization’ of the party system discussed above. Duverger's original conception of ‘contagion from the left’ was imagined in the context of gradually expanding suffrage in Europe and the need for parties of capital to adopt some of the left's policy initiatives when the masses secured the vote and thus the potential to swamp parties with a small, elite voting base (1954: xxvii). However, the notion of disciplined leftist parties imposing programmatic order on a party system is just as relevant in the Brazilian case, with some modification. Although the success of the PT did force other parties to reconsider their own platforms, programmatization came less from the adoption of welfare state policies by rightist parties and more from the rise to prominence of leftist parties themselves. That the two most successful new parties to emerge in Brazil following the transition to democracy were of the left was crucial to this process, as organizations based on socialist ideals are expected to be more programmatic than parties with other bases of support (Gunther and Diamond 2003). The electoral success of the PT and the PSDB was

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therefore of great significance to the programmatization of the party system, even if the latter quickly changed position to espouse a right of centre agenda. Consider the PT, which sprung from obscurity to almost win the 1989 presidential election as Lula outperformed Collor in much of the south of the country. The effectiveness of the PT’s programmatic appeal simultaneously encouraged the party to develop greater programmatic credentials and rival parties to adopt more coherent ideological positions. Five years later, the high policy content of Cardoso’s campaign, along with his proven success at defeating inflation with neo-liberal policies, enabled the PSDB to secure a sweeping electoral victory. Thus, although the ideological stripe of the PSDB changed, the initial commitment of both parties to programmatic politics, and their subsequent success, provided political leaders with a reason to abandon traditional parties in favour of new programmatic ones. Similarly, this trend gave leaders starting new parties, or reinvigorating old ones (such as the Brazilian Socialist Party, PSB, which in 2010 was allied with the PT and held six governorships across the country) good reasons to think that developing programmatic linkages and policies was a critical first step on the ladder to electoral success. When programmatic parties secure power this effect is exaggerated, because non-programmatic parties are denied the access to clientelistic resources that comes from control over the distribution of government spending and jobs. Thus, they must look for alternative ways to mobilize support. As a result, losing parties are increasingly likely to seek to develop programmatic linkages in order to establish a connection to voters that is not dependent on access to state resources. This process also plays out at other levels of the Brazilian political system, because exogenous shocks are frequent enough in state and local campaigns that ruling clientelistic parties will, from time to time, be knocked out of the top executive office. Again, as programmatic parties win power and deny old clientelistic parties their only well-developed linkage mechanism, they force them to adapt or fade away. In Brazil, where state politics are so important, such processes occurred frequently, and in the 1980s and 1990s led to states that were traditionally characterized by clientelistic linkage mechanisms experiencing higher levels of electoral volatility (Epstein 2009). We can see this phenomenon at work in Brazil's northeast, an area notorious for clientelistic practices (Desposato 2000; Mainwaring 1999). In the 1980s and 1990s, the PFL dominated party politics in many of the region’s large states, achieving near-hegemonic status in Pernambuco and especially Maranhão under the Sarney family machine and Bahia under the machine of Antônio Carlos Magalhães (also known as ACM). However, after winning governorships in these and a few other northeastern states—often tainted by accusations of vote-buying and other practices of fisiologismo—after 2002 the PFL was excluded from Lula’s governing coalition and so lost access to the federal cabinet. At the next elections in 2006, the PFL lost all five governors' chairs it had held in the region, showing how vulnerable the reliance of these state–party machines on clientelism had made them.3 Today, eight of the ten states in the northeast are governed by traditionally programmatic parties (two by the PT, two by the PSDB, and four by the PSB). Consequently, rotation of power operated as another mechanism of programmatic ‘contagion.’ Additionally, programmatic parties that won high office could use their positions to establish new forms of linkage, including even clientelistic and personal networks, thus consolidating their hold on power. The potency of such double linkage mechanisms is

3 The party nonetheless met with success in legislative elections elsewhere in the country, and by 2010 was able to win the governorship of Rio Grande do Norte, in the Northeast and that of Santa Catarina, in the South.

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demonstrated in the state of Bahia, where PT candidate Jaques Wagner defeated the heir of the old ACM machine, Paulo Souto of the PFL, in 2006. Souto had spent his term in office in opposition to Lula's government, and so lacked the resources needed to effectively compete with Wagner. Thereafter, Wagner used both programmatic and clientelistic linkages to set up a stunning re-election win in 2010, when he increased his margin of victory from just half a million votes to over 3 million. Another important explanation for the rise of programmatic parties in Brazil emerges directly from the work of Hagopian et al (2009), who argue that increasing budgetary constraints in an ‘age of austerity’—enforced on Brazil from 1994 onward—reduced the availability of clientelistic resources. Subsequently, party leaders were forced to find alternative ways to mobilize support and so developed programmatic agendas. In effect, the process identified by Hagopian et al is similar to the mechanism identified above; the difference being that overall constraints on patronage resources undermined the ability of all parties to engage in clientelism, not just opposition parties out-of-office. Significantly, once parties actually develop and successfully implement such policies, it becomes much more appealing for candidates to highlight valuable party labels that attract votes at election time than to engage in clientelistic practices that are extremely costly.4 Over time, this mechanism rendered political leaders increasingly dependent on party structures. However, it is important to note that patronage networks and pork-barrel politics have by no means been eliminated, and so constraints on clientelism can only be a partial explanation of the increasingly programmatic party system. A third explanation emerges if we consider the impact of federalism and the multiple arenas of local and especially state politics that it gives rise to. Brazilian states have historically been strong and the centre weak. Consequently, the most important arenas for contesting political power have often been the states, and state political machines have shaped who holds power at the centre. This was especially true in the late 19th century with the emergence of the ‘cafe com leite’ politics of São Paulo (coffee) and Minas Gerais (milk—agriculture), state political machines helped to establish a string of presidents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the 20th century has seen growing centralization, states remain critical arenas of political contestation. We can see this in the strategy of the modernizing Getúlio Vargas, who created a populist labour-based party, the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB), to maximize votes among urban workers in the industrializing south and southeast of the country and simultaneously established the (anomalously named) Social Democratic Party (PSD) to link together a number of state–party machines in order to provide a foundation for his national political ambitions. This demonstrates the significance of securing support from many states to a candidate’s presidential prospects (Samuels 2000). While such an alliance could potentially be cobbled together by one politician or another on an ad hoc basis, ambitious politicians have incentives to create a mechanism that can dependably mobilize support across a number of states year after year. For example, while Vargas' PSD purchased the support of landed oligarchic elites, such a party strategy was extremely costly and depended on the constant assuaging of egos. By contrast, a strategy that integrated different state political forces into a coherent programmatic party promised to generate an organization in which loyalty was based on policy agreement rather than the channelling of resources—a far more efficient and stable way to build a viable presidential campaign.

4 That is, with autonomy, namely to switch parties at will; in Brazil, true independent candidacies are not allowed, but even still today the profusion of partidos de aluguel means that this informally the strategy of running outside a major party is more or less viable.

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However, this is easier said than done. The difficulty of constructing such a network lies in developing such a party with national ambitions in a context in which local political machines dominate. But this very difficulty—the inability to access established patronage networks—was also a boon for programmatic party development, for it frustrated attempts of new parties to build a base through the co-optation of existing political structures. As a result, programmatic parties were forced to remain exactly that, and to focus their efforts on honing an ideological position powerful enough to attract support in the absence of a level electoral playing field. Parties such as the PT and PSDB did this successfully. Both of these programmatically structured parties emerged originally in the more developed southeast of the country, but gradually pushed to other regions of the country by attracting political talent to their ideological banners. For example, in 1982 in the agricultural and conservative southern state of Santa Catarina, the PT recruited Luci Teresinha Choinacki, the daughter of farmers from the rural western part of the state, at the age of 28. At this point, the party gave little or no electoral advantages to a young politician in the state from clientelism or even an appeal to industrial workers, but Choinacki, who was interested in women’s issues and inequality, joined the party at the same time as she began to organize for the CUT. Four years later, she became the first woman—and first petista (PT member) elected to the state’s legislative assembly, and later went on to be elected to the National Chamber of Deputies in 1990, 1998, 2002 and 2010. Although she struggled with higher office, coming runner-up in races for the Brazilian Senate in 1994 and 2006, her role as the earliest prominent petista in the state was critical in helping the party establish a bridgehead, linking to left-leaning (and especially female) voters in a state that is otherwise rather conservative, where the PT is not the top party today, but has a key base of support (Eccel interview). The critical role of the party’s ideology in attracting a talented young politician with a bright future provided both an important means for the party to invest in its own future success, and also helped to keep the party’s programme at the centre of its electoral strategy. As the PT and PSDB both managed to use programmatic appeals to promising political entrepreneurs to build a national network, the more credible reputation of these organizations provided older parties with new incentives to try and improve their own image by strengthening their programmatic credentials. This is seen clearly in the case of the PFL, which moved to shed its reputation for fisiologismo. As a party leader is quoted as saying, it had become critical for the future of the PFL to be known in the national media as a party of ideas, not clientelism (Ferriera 2002: 55). Thus in constituting an incentive structure that induced party politicians to invest in programmatic organizations (in order to build geographically broad support networks), Brazil’s state-centred federal system formed a fertile substrate that facilitated the growth of programmaticity. The fourth explanation takes us beyond socioeconomic and institutional factors to think about contingent or individual causes. The most important individual in the Brazilian case is Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the most important contingent factor is perhaps the critical juncture created by the interaction of his personal political ability, commitment to programmatic politics, and fortuitous presence on the Brazilian political scene at the precise moment that the Real Plan was most needed. But the ability of the PSDB to capture the centre-ground of Brazilian politics also depended on the socioeconomic developments described at the start of this section. In other Latin American countries, neo-liberal policies were backed by a thinner business class in an uneasy coalition with informal sector workers (Weyland 1996). The support of this

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latter constituency often depended on the presence of a charismatic leader and as a result this arrangement rarely formed the basis of the sort of durable linkages that can promote the institutionalization and/or increased programmaticity of the party system in the long run. But Brazil had a pool of middle-class (though otherwise perhaps socially heterogeneous) voters available for mobilization behind a neo-liberal programmatic party. As a result, there was a ready-made constituency for the sort of neo-liberal policies of the ‘Washington consensus’ that were typically painful for the working and poorer classes (Williamson 1990). But the effective management of this voter base owed much to the capacities of Cardoso himself, first as finance minister and then as president. Both an effective statesman and an academic committed by training to the power of policy consistency, Cardoso embarked on a series of successful reforms that eventually undermined all but the most dogged opposition to a 1997 proposal of constitutional reform that allowed him to seek re-election. That dogged opponent, of course, was Lula: a skilled and charismatic figure who adhered to his party's convictions to democratic socialism with a magnetism and tenacity that helped raise the profile of programmatic appeals overall. Over the next decade these two men dominated politics, blending and infusing the traditional political struggle with policy contestation. The presence of two political giants who contested three straight elections (including 2002, when José Serra, Cardoso's handpicked successor, ran on the administration's accomplishments and lost to Lula) was an important catalyst to the ‘freezing’ of programmatic cleavages into the party system (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). The strength of this cleavage is evidenced by the failure of ‘outsider’ politicians to make a dent on the political landscape. In 1998, 2002, 2006, and 2010, party-disloyal politicians rose to challenge the increasingly programmaticity of the system. Most were potential populists, and all shunned the route of coming up through large stable parties,5 instead preferring to take control of small or medium-sized partidos de aluguel in order to contest the ballot. Invariably, such strategies failed dismally, demonstrating the durability of programmatic parties and the increasing institutionalization of the programmatic party system. A critical observation about the development of the Brazilian party system is how its increased programmaticity has reinforced the institutionalization of the party-coalition system and vice versa. In the presence of some socio-economic and fiscal conditions that made clientelistic strategies more costly, leftist parties that were ‘born programmatic’ followed the incentives of a federal and electoral system that promoted the use of programme for political recruitment and long-term growth. These two parties, the PT and PSDB (even as the latter altered its ideology, but remained programmatic), increasingly institutionalized their programmatic commitments and supported the emergence of stable coalitions (promoted by electoral rules) of the left and right. As a result, greater levels of programmatic politics have encouraged leaders to establish more effective linkages and to strengthen their party organizations. In turn, the twin processes of institutionalization and programmatization have helped voters to identify the position of different parties and to hold them accountable for their performance, which has undoubtedly had a salutary effect on Brazilian democracy overall.

5 Namely, they were Fernandon Collor (PRN, 1989), Ciro Gomes (PPS, 1998; and again in 2002), Anthony Garotinho (PSB, 2002), Heloísa Helena (PSOL, 2006), and Marina Silva (PV, 2010).

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2.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics One important consequence of increased programmaticity of the party system is the increasing focus of media coverage and legislative exchanges on ideologically coherent approaches to addressing the nation’s problems. In a country with a 26 per cent poverty rate and the world’s tenth highest income inequality,6 focusing attention on such issues as taxation, economic growth, and government support for the poor and education—especially on evaluations of the PT’s programmes such as ‘Fome Zero’ (Zero Hunger) and ‘Bolsa Família’—has improved the quality of debate. Programmaticity has also helped to reduce the political salience of issues that might otherwise distract from governing the country. For example, in 2005 the ‘mensalão’ scandal erupted when it came out that Lula’s chief of staff, José Dirceu, was implicated in a scheme to pay monthly stipends to deputies from some smaller, less programmatic parties, in return for their support in the Chamber. The scandal brought down Dirceu, but did not destabilize the party system or distract from pressing issues of governance. Rather, when Lula and the PT were up for re-election the following year, both main parties focused around two-thirds of their free television time on detailing their policy agenda (Boas 2010: 642–643). The turn towards programmatic politics in Brazil has also had a centripetal influence on the ideological spectrum of politics. Against the backdrop of the general success of Cardoso’s inflation-fighting policies, the programmaticity of Brazilian politics by the 2000s encouraged Lula’s to moderate the PT’s position in order to get elected. Had Lula not faced an established and successful rightist government, he might have been more determined, and able, to win power on the back of a more orthodox, leftist line. At the same time, the general consensus that Brazil has prospered under Lula’s programmatic politics has forced the PSDB’s centre-right coalition to moderate its own position, reluctantly expressing support for some level of state-led development.7 In other words, and in contrast to the Indian and Ukrainian cases, programmatization has gone hand in hand with political moderation, which in turn has reduced the tension between rival political camps. One consequence of this has been that the Brazilian party system has been relatively insulated from the impact kind of ‘outsider’ politicians—especially those with a strongly anti-capitalist appeal—who have captured the presidency in places like Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela in the past fifteen years, and at least in the last of these countries undermined the democracy in the process. However, this process has also generated some negative externalities. Political moderation tends to exclude truly dramatic new policy innovations that might redress social problems in revolutionary ways, and renders all progress incremental, which may slow down democratic governments’ abilities to meet crises. At the same time, the moderation of both parties has accelerated the trend of ‘electoralism’. As the PT and PSDB develop catch-all appeals designed to consolidate their electoral position (Kirchheimer 1986), they risk losing their programmatic edge. This raises the point that the more successful programmatic parties are, the more difficult it may become for them to retain their original focus, moving them toward the Desk Review’s conception of Weak Programmatic Parties. If the catch-all model becomes increasingly pronounced, the pattern of party linkages is also likely to change, shifting from programmatic connections to personalistic networks or opportunistic party appeals. In turn, such a development would result in parties increasingly resembling the Desk Review’s

6 CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/br.html). 7 Morais and Saad-Filho report 80 per cent approval ratings for Lula by the end of his two terms in office (2011: 37).

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conception of Programmatic Elite Parties. Thus, the feedback loop of electoral imperatives and moderation seems to put a limit on how programmatic the main, coalition-leading parties—and as a result the overall system—can become.

2.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Brazilian Case Although programmaticity may be difficult to directly promote, several policy lessons can be drawn from Brazil. The first is that strict adherence to democratic procedures (not simply parchment institutions) is critical for the cultivation of programmaticity: free and fair elections and permissive electoral and party registration regulations make it easier for programmatic parties to evolve. Similarly, the protection of the rights and freedoms of the press and of journalists is significant, because parties such as the PFL are more likely to evolve into programmatic parties when they come under media scrutiny and must develop a strong and clear reputation and a programme that is credible to voters. A broad focus on democracy promotion should therefore be an important component of any programme intended to support programmatic politics. Equalizing media output is one concrete strategy that international actors such as IDEA can realistically work towards. In Brazil, all non-pay television stations must provide two blocks of political programming per day for free use by political parties during election campaigns.8 This time is apportioned to the parties according to the size of their delegations in the (soon-to-be-outgoing) national congress, and parties can use these broadcasts however they choose. Such free airtime has become a central aspect of election campaigns and has helped to maintain a level playing field. Moreover, such a concentrated media focus incentivizes politicians to look serious and have something serious to say. This has usually resulted in leaders focusing on programmatic appeals, since they do not want to look lightweight compared to other candidates. Promoting the introduction of a similar system of media access in other countries might also create new opportunities for programmatic parties and encourage programmatic dialogue. Second, the way in which leftist parties drove the programmatization of the party system in Brazil suggests that, as in Zambia, party system transformation depends on the ability of political entrepreneurs to harness urban workers, poor communities, and left leaning constituencies. By running training programmes and workshops that bring together political leaders, union activists and representatives of working class communities, interested donors and NGOs can help to jump-start this process. Similarly, programmes that focus on increasing the ability of previously marginalized communities to exercise their democratic rights, for example by making it easier for them to register to vote, will help aspiring programmatic organizations to mobilize support. Another central policy lesson that emerges from the causal path of programmatic parties’ increasing geographic spread has to do with political recruitment. This is perhaps one of the main ways in which party assistance can be useful. In developing countries and newer democracies such as Brazil, personalistic politics are unavoidable. But programmatic politics can trump them if it harnesses them. Winning elections—not just tomorrow’s elections, but elections down the road—depends on parties’ ability to recruit today, as party members and leaders, the attractive candidates of tomorrow. By helping parties focus not just on using programmatic elements in today’s campaigns to establish linkages with voters, but also on using programmes to recruit future political stars, party assistance missions could provide an important accelerant to the process of

8 BBC News: Latin America and the Caribbean, ‘Brazil candidates begin daily election broadcasts’, Aug 18, 2010 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11008240)

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programmatization. By helping a party identify and recruit already ideologically like-minded activists in towns and regions where the party is not yet known or popular (especially from marginalized groups such as women or the poor, whom leaders of other, clientelistic, parties might not have thought to tap), party leaders—and the party assistance missions that could help them to formulate recruiting strategies and programmes—can help to build that national network of political actors who are effective political communicators, and will as future candidates build linkages to voters that can capitalize on their personal appeals, but also bring programmatically-minded party politicians to government. This could be accomplished by programmes that might identify what logistical and policy information would be particularly helpful for first-time candidates, and then helping to identify outspoken young ‘proto-politicians’ in such regions and offering them both ideological and logistical reasons for joining a particular party. Since young parties in emerging democracies often have to devote strapped resources to imminent elections or legislative battles, help focusing on a long-term strategy like recruitment and grooming future leaders that would be shaped by ideological appeals could be a huge boon to encouraging programmaticity, as well as simply future stability in the party system. The final policy lesson that emerges from the Brazilian case is motivated by Hagopian’s analysis of the way in which budgetary restraint reduce the availability of resources for clientelism and hence open up opportunities for programmatic parties (2009). It suggests that improved budgetary processes and fiscal restraint may improve the prospects for programmatically structured parties to edge out clientelistic ones. This suggestion is a more macro-level policy lesson than the others that bears more directly on party assistance, however.

2.7 Bibliography Aldrich, John. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Ames, Barry. The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan

Press, 2001. Boas, Taylor. ‘Varieties of Electioneering: Success Contagion and Presidential Campaigns

in Latin America’, World Politics, 62, No 4 (2010), 636–675. BBC News: Latin America and the Caribbean, ‘Brazil candidates begin daily election

broadcasts’, (2010) Aug 18 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11008240>

Câmaro dos Deputados. ‘Biografia. Luci Choinacki’ (2011). <http://www2.camara.gov.br/deputados/pesquisa/layouts_deputados_biografia?pk=99986>

CIA World Factbook, ‘Brazil’ (2011) <https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/br.html>

Datafolha. ‘Posição Política 20 e 21/05/2010’ (2010) <http://datafolha.folha.uol.com.br /folha/datafolha/tabs/posicao_politica_31052010_tb1.pdf>

Desposato, Scott. ‘The Impact of Electoral Rules on Legislative Parties: Lessons from the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies’, The Journal of Politics, 68, No 4 (2006), 1018–1030.

Desposato, Scott. ‘Institutional Theories, Societal Realities, and Party Systems: A Comparison of Legislative Politics in five Brazilian States’, paper prepared for Midwestern Political Science Association Conference (2000).

Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans. Barbara & North, Robert. New York: Wiley, 1954.

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Epstein, Daniel. ‘Clientelism Versus Ideology: Problems of Party Development in Brazil’. Party Politics, 15, No. 3 (2009), 335–355.

Ferreira, Denise Paiva. PMDB x PFL: Marchas e contramarchas 1982–2000. Goiânia, Brazil: Editora Alternativa, 2002.

Frieden, Jeff. Debt, Development, and Democracy: Modern Political Economy and Latin America, 1965–1985. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Gunther, Richard, and Larry Diamond, ‘Species of Political Parties: a New Typology’, Party Politics, 9, No 2 (2003), 167–199.

Hagopian, Frances, Gervasoni, Carlos, and Juan Andres Moraes. ‘From Patronage to Program: The Emergence of Party-Oriented Legislators in Brazil’, Comparative Political Studies, 42, No. 3 (2009), 360–391.

Huntington, Samuel. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968.

Kirchheimer, Otto. ‘The Transformation of the Western European Party Systems’, in Political Parties and Political Development edited by Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Lamounier, Bolivar. ‘Partidos Políticos e Sistema Eleitoral’, in Textos de Instituto de Estudos Econômicos, Sociais, e Políticos de São Paulo (IDESP). No. 13 (1986).

Latinobarómetro Annual Report 2009, (2009) <www.latinobarometro.org> Lijphart, Arend, ‘Dimensions of Ideology in European Party Systems’, in The West

European Party System, edited by Peter Mair. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 253–265.

Lipset, Seymour Lipset, and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction’ in Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives edited by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. New York: Free Press, 1967, 1–64.

Lyne, Mona. ‘Parties as Programmatic Agents: A Test of Institutional Theory in Brazil’, Party Politics. 11, No 2 (2005), 193–216.

Mainwaring, Scott. Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Mainwaring, Scott. ‘Brazil: Weak Parties, Feckless Democracy’ in Building Democratic Institutions: party systems in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Mainwaring, Scott, and Liñan, Aníbal Perez. ‘Party Discipline in the Brazilian Constitutional Congress’, Legislative Studies Quarterly , 12, No 4 (1997), 453–483.

Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera. ‘“Effective” Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to Western Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, 12 (1979), 3–27.

Morais, Lecio, and Saad-Filho, Alfredo. ‘Brazil Beyond Lula: Forging Ahead or Pausing for Breath?’ Latin American Perspectives, 38, No 31 (2011), 31–44.

O'Donnell, Guillermo, Modernization and Bureaucratic-authoritarianism: studies in South American politics. Berkeley, CA: Institute for International Studies, University of California, 1973.

Power, Timothy. ‘Blairism, Brazilian Style? Cardoso and the “Third Way” in Brazil’, Political Science Quarterly. 116, No 4 (2001–2002), 611–636.

Samuels, David. ‘The Gubernatorial Coattails Effect: Federalism and Congressional Elections in Brazil’, The Journal of Politics, 62, No 1 (2000), 240–253.

Samuels, David. Ambition, Federalism, and Legislative Politics in Brazil. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Samuels, David. ‘From Socialism to Social Democracy: Party Organization and the Transformation of the Workers’ Party in Brazil’, Comparative Political Studies, 37, No 9 (2004), 999–1024.

Samuels, David. ‘Concurrent Elections, Discordant Results’, Comparative Politic, 33, No. 1 (2000).

Spanakos, Anthony, and Renno, Lúcio. ‘Elections and Economic Turbulence in Brazil:

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Candidates, Voters, and Investors’, Latin American Politics and Society, 48, No 4 (2009), 1–26.

Tribunal Eleitoral Regional de Santa Catarina website <http://www.tre-sc.gov.br>. Weyland, Kurt. ‘Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: Unexpected Affinities’,

Studies in comparative international development, 31, No 3 (1996), 3–31. Williamson, John. ‘What Washington Means by Policy Reform’ in Latin American

Adjustment: how much has happened? edited by John Williamson. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990, 7–21.

Interview Eccel, Paulo. PT Member. State Deputy in Legislative Assembly of Santa Catarina.

Florianópolis. 23 May 2006.

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3 India

3.1 Introduction This case study of programmatic party politics in India focuses on two major transformations, one at the national level and the other at the state level. At the national level, India's party system has experienced fragmentation since the late 1980s, when the decades-long hegemony of the Congress Party began to give way to heated multi-party competition. The Congress Party's cadre programmatic party model—in which the programmes formulated by party elites were not important to the way that the party mobilized voters—has been challenged by parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and a range of regional parties. Many of these newer parties have clear programmatic elements, yet they defy conventional categories by combining programmatic platforms with targeted ethnicity-based appeals to voters. On the one hand, these parties can be argued to represent an improvement on the Congress model because they bridge the gap between elite and mass party politics. Conversely, the often divisive nature of these parties’ strategies is not always conducive to stability in a large and diverse democracy such as India. However, there is evidence that over time these parties have moderated their emphasis on identity and as a result are becoming less 'ethnic' in their style of politics. In other words, they are in a process of becoming ‘ethnic–programmatic’ parties. At the sub-national level, over the last two decades chief ministers and political parties have emerged seeking to win elections by advocating programmes of economic development and good governance at the state level. The strategies employed by such parties are a stark contrast to the norm of vote buying and clientelism—or 'patronage democracy'—that has characterized Indian state elections for decades. These 'good governance' parties are reforming India's state-level politics and have brought about real democratic gains both in terms of accountability and government performance. States led by such programmatic parties have experienced dramatic improvements in terms of economic growth and the quality of public services, and good governance parties have been electorally successful as a result. Taken together, these two trends represent a virtuous cycle that has encouraged other parties to adopt the model. What explains the rise of ethnic–programmatic parties at the national level in India? The story begins with the institutional decay of the Congress Party, which created opportunities for new political entrepreneurs to enter the party system. But economic liberalization has also been significant, reducing the central government's monopolistic control over economic and political resources and thereby undermining the capacity of the ruling party’s clientelistic linkages to deliver electoral dominance. This dual process undermined the foundations of the Congress regime and opposition parties took advantage of this window of opportunity to develop electoral linkages and programmes that tapped the latent social cleavages that Congress—for decades an 'umbrella' party that had embraced a wide range of disparate social groups and interests—had failed to capitalize upon. As new parties such as the BJP developed into credible national contenders, however, the pressures of competitive party politics encouraged them to moderate their identity politics in order to expand beyond the relatively narrow support bases that first brought them to prominence—leading to a second evolution that has resulted in the emergence of nascent ethnic–programmatic parties. What explains the rise of 'good governance' programmatic parties at the state level in India? The decentralization of economic policymaking authority and resources associated with economic liberalization made it feasible for political leaders to run on

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the basis of good governance campaigns—which carried little weight when states lacked the capacity to affect these policy areas. The growing inter-state competition for private investment has magnified the reward for pursuing pro-growth policies. At the same time, we must leave space for individual agency. It was the emergence of a handful of political leaders, such as Chandrababu Naidu, who understood that the new economic and institutional context brought with it opportunities for a new kind of politics, that kick-started the process of programmatization in India. Once these individuals had emerged, demonstration effects meant that parties and voters in other states quickly learnt of the economic benefits of ‘good governance’ parties—and their electoral success. It was not long before similar developments began to play out in other states across the country. India, the world's largest democracy, thus offers a number of valuable lessons about programmatic party politics. First, programmaticity is a complicated quality and may emerge in more ‘civic’ or more ‘ethnic’ variants—some of which may be less normatively desirable than others. Second, it suggests that although the political transition from single-party dominance to multi-party competition in socially diverse countries often results in the emergence of parties based around social and territorial cleavages, over time political competition can induce leaders to moderate their identity politics, giving rise to ethnic–programmatic parties. Third, it reveals that institutional reforms matter. Decentralization was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the evolution of more programmatic approaches at the state level. Fourth, it illustrates that economic reforms can have an important impact upon programmaticity, especially when they reduce the resources available for non-programmatic forms of linkage, such as patron–client ties, and place leaders under greater pressure to deliver. Finally, the Indian case highlights the importance of demonstration effects in the spread of programmatic party politics, and so has much to tell us about how programmatic gains become consolidated.

3.2 History of Programmatic Politics in India India has experienced nearly continuous democracy—with a brief interruption during the 'Emergency' period from 1975 to 1977—since independence in 1947. Yet India's political party system has undergone steady evolution since independence: from an era of 'pluralistic' single-party dominance by the Congress Party under Jawharlal Nehru (1947-1967) during which there was substantial competition within the party (Kothari 1964), to a period (1967-1984) of 'authoritarian' single-party dominance by the Congress Party, when power was centralized under Indira Gandhi (Bose and Jalal 2004), to the present, post-economic liberalization phase of multi-party competition phase (1991-present) in which power has alternated between coalition governments led by the Congress Party and the BJP, respectively. A graph of the distribution of seats in the Lok Sabha—the lower house of India's legislature—from the 1950s to the present day, illustrates these recent developments (Figure 3). Historically, a hallmark of India's national political party system has been the combination of coherent and distinctive party programmes, formulated by party elites, with highly clientelistic and populist electoral strategies (Brass 1994). In large part, this is the product of Congress rule. Under India's first Prime Minister, Jawharlal Nehru, the independence movement–turned political party articulated a clear programmatic commitment to state-led development and industrialization (Guha 2007). Yet support for this programme was purchased largely on the basis of a hierarchical patron–client network that extended into India's local districts (Weiner 1967). To this day, the Congress Party remains a quintessential 'cadre programmatic party'.

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Figure 3: Party Seat Shares in the Lok Sabha, 1951–2009

Sources: Election Commission of India Since economic liberalization in 1991 and with the simultaneous decline of Congress Party hegemony, new entrants to the national party system have begun to pursue alternative forms of political organization. Initially, these parties carved out spaces for themselves on the basis of ethnic appeals. The BJP, now a credible national alternative to Congress, has risen to power largely based on the ideology of hindutva, Hindu nationalism, which has successfully attracted voters away from the secular Congress Party (Kohli 2001). Other parties have appealed to caste identities, such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a quasi-regional low-caste political party, or to linguistic/territorial identities, as has been the case with a number of regional parties. While these parties do offer coherent, distinct and stable political programmes and appeal to voters on that basis, they also tend to target specific ethnic groups rather than the general electorate—an approach which, overall, is in many respects programmatic but may nonetheless be deleterious to national identity. However, some of these new parties appear to be curtailing their emphasis on ethnicity in favour of widening the scope of their electoral appeal, suggesting that they are in a process of evolving from ethnic parties into ethnic–programmatic parties. A second important trend has emerged at the state level. From the mid-1990s onwards, political parties in a number of states have aggressively campaigned on pro-development and 'good governance' platforms, won landslide election victories, and implemented successful reforms once in office. The paradigmatic case is Bihar—one of India's very poorest states that for decades was synonymous with criminalized, clientelistic politics and economic stagnation—which, following the election of reformist chief minister Nitish Kumar in 2005, experienced annual growth above 11 per cent and a genuine improvement in the quality of government (Economist 25 Nov 2010; New York Times 10 April 2010). While Kumar has garnered the greatest amount of media attention, he is only the latest in the fast-growing list of state-level chief ministers (and their political parties) that have adopted such a programmatic strategy. This process actually began a decade earlier with the rise of Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh during the 1990s (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001). Although the ‘good governance’ party model has yet to spread to all of

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India's states, the emergence of politically successful programmatic parties committed to good governance represents a paradigm shift in India's state-level politics.

3.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties India does not feature classic ‘programmatic parties’. However, it does feature a number of political parties that, in different ways, have embraced aspects of a programmatic platform or mobilization strategy. Congress, a cadre–programmatic party, adopts programmatic policy platforms even though it rallies support through clientelistic strategies, while ethnic–programmatic parties such as the BJP and BSP establish linkages to voters by formulating stable ideological positions but their policies disproportionately benefit some ethnic communities (a term that is here used as a shorthand for religious, regional, linguistic and caste identities) over others. Congress: the cadre–programmatic party Kothari (1964) has characterized the two decades of Congress dominance that followed independence in 1947 as representing the emergence of the 'Congress System', a term intended to capture pluralistic governing style of Jawharlal Nehru, the immensely popular prime minister and leader of the Congress Party. Though opposition parties possessed few seats in the national or state legislatures, they played a large role in political debates and often influenced policy (Guha 2007). Similarly, though Nehru wielded immense personal control over the party, he often accommodated opposing views within the party, and generally pursed a consensus-oriented centrist political strategy. It was this approach that underpinned the emergence of the cadre–programmatic political machine that the Congress Party epitomizes to this day. Nehru and the Congress Party leadership advocated and implemented an economic strategy of state-led development and industrialization based on a succession of ‘five-year plans’ (Chhibber and Kollman 2004). Yet this economic programme, the major agenda of the Congress Party, played little role in the way the party connected to voters—which was instead based primarily on a hierarchical network of patronage that extended into India's districts (Weiner 1967). In the words of Mitra: ‘Soon after independence, the Congress co-opted landed gentry, businessmen, peasant proprietors, new industrialists and the rural middle class—socially and economically entrenched groups in society—into its organization. This provided the party with a strong and ready structure of support, with electoral 'link men' who controlled various 'vote banks', serviced through patronage’ (2011: 306). Thus, the Congress Party was programmatic in its policymaking but clientelistic in its electoral linkages. The disjuncture remains. For example, the dramatic liberal economic reforms initiated by the Congress Party that dismantled India's decades-old licensing and state-directed economic system from 1991 onward never emerged as an election issue. In Varshney's words: 'In a survey of mass political attitudes in India conducted in 1996, only 19 per cent of the electorate reported any knowledge of the economic reforms that had been implemented, even though the reforms had been in existence since 1991. In the countryside, where more than 70 per cent of Indians then lived, only about 14 per cent had heard of the reforms (compared with 32 per cent of voters in cities). Economic reforms were a non-issue in the 1996 and 1998 parliamentary elections. In the 1999 elections, the biggest reformers either lost or did not campaign on pro-market platforms' (2007: 102). Similar observations have been made about the disconnect between elite economic policymaking and mass politics in India by other researchers (see Kohli 2006).

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There is also a striking disconnect between the party’s programme and the way that it organizes itself. This is reflected in the way that Congress handles the question of party leadership, which since Nehru has been transferred dynastically, with minimal recruitment of grassroots political talent. Shortly after Nehru's death power was transferred to Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, who surrounded herself with sycophants and de-institutionalized the Congress Party (Kohli 1991); then to Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's son, who served a short stint as prime minister but died early in his political career; then within a few years to Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi's widow, who was elected leader of the Congress Party in 1997; and most recently to Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi's son, a Congress Party MP who is widely expected to replace his mother as party leader in the very near future. The Bharatiya Janata Party: an ethno–programmatic party The BJP controlled only two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984. In the 1998 general elections, the party earned a total of 178 seats, enough to form a coalition government with a collection of regional allies. It is now viewed as a credible national alternative to the Congress Party and has successfully formed national coalition governments in 1996 and 1998–2004. Its rapid political ascent has been associated with its ability to appeal to Hindu voters in the Hindi-speaking northern belt of India. But its strong organizational base and committed cadre of grassroots workers has enabled it to forge effective links with voters beyond that constituency as well. Over time, the BJP has shed the religious nationalism that brought it to power in favour of a more secular, nationalist image. The BJP's origins can be traced to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu social movement founded in 1925. An offshoot of its predecessor party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the BJP was founded in 1980 and until the late 1980s remained a relatively minor force in national party politics. However, by providing a political face for the controversial efforts of Hindu nationalists to demolish an Islamic mosque built allegedly on top of an holy ancient Hindu site in the town of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, the party was catapulted to national influence in the early 1990s (Jaffrelot 2007). The BJP has been able to appeal to a number of different constituencies using a number of different types of appeals. The party’s commitment to hindutva, Hindu nationalism, and the adoption of policies that were popular among India's northern upper-caste Hindu voters, such as ‘religious legislation’ in the shape of bans on the slaughter of cows and religious conversion, has been central to its rise. More troubling still, in certain states such as Gujarat BJP governments have either tacitly supported or turned a blind eye to anti-Muslim riots and violence. Unlike the Congress Party, which has historically been something of a 'catch-all', secular, centrist party, the BJP has traditionally drawn its leadership and membership from a relatively specific constituency: upper-caste Hindus in northern India (Basu 2012). Yet at the same time, the BJP has made direct ideological and programmatic appeals to voters on the basis of a more assertive foreign policy, fewer affirmative action benefits for minorities and disadvantaged groups and a coherent national economic plan. Both in terms of the party’s platform and linkage to voters, then, the BJP has displayed some of the characteristics of both a programmatic and an ethnic party. The same is true when it comes to the way that the BJP is internally organized and formulates policy. As with Congress, the BJP is a hierarchically organized party with power heavily concentrated in the hands of a few party leaders. But in contrast to Congress, these leaders tend to be drawn from its core ethnic base. Moreover, unlike the elite programmes of the Congress Party, the BJP's Hindu nationalist ideology serves not

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only as an organizing principle for the policy programmes devised by party elites but is also ardently adhered to by the party's grassroots workers and is an important component of how the party links to voters and recruits its leaders (Thachil 2011). For example, the BJP leadership is comprised primarily of lifelong political activists, such as LK Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first BJP prime minister, who have extensive grassroots experience. Indeed, Basu (2012) describes the BJP as a 'cadre-based mass party', linked to voters through a highly disciplined and ideological organization of party workers and social organizers. As it evolved into a national political contender, the BJP began to downplay its public emphasis on religious sectionalism in favour of casting itself as a clean and nationalistic alternative to the Congress Party. Significantly, each time the BJP has come to power it has implemented policies that have emphasized its ability to lead on national issues. India carried out major nuclear weapons tests in 1998 under the leadership of a BJP-led coalition government and a BJP government took an assertive foreign policy stance vis-à-vis Pakistan and led India to victory in the Kargil War with Pakistan in 1999. Furthermore, the BJP's stints in office have demonstrated that the BJP is a capable policymaking organization; BJP-led governments have overseen the passage of sophisticated economic policy reform measures, including the Fiscal Responsibility and Budgetary Management Act, a landmark deficit reduction measure, and the Special Economic Zones Act, a major deregulatory measure (World Bank 2005; Panagariya 2004). It is worth noting that, while the BJP continues to employ the rhetoric of economic nationalism, in reality it supports the same liberal economic reforms originally implemented by the Congress Party and embraces globalization, which party leaders view as the contemporary route to greater international power and status (Jaffrelot 2007; Basu 2011). The BJP thus possesses stable programmatic commitments that form the basis for the link between the party and voters, differentiate it from its principal rival, the Congress Party, and define the policies the party implements once elected to office. Although it may once have been an ethnic party, the BJP has moved away from solely stressing ethnic/religious themes. In its discourse, however, and some of its policies, it continues to pander to the preferences of Hindu voters, partly due to the fact that it continues to maintain linkages with Hindu social movements such as the RSS. The BJP thus appears to be best characterized as an ethnic–programmatic party. The Bahujan Samaj Party Regional and caste parties have also proliferated with the decline of Congress Party hegemony. Though individually not as influential as either the BJP or Congress, collectively these parties have played an important role during the 1990s and 2000s as allies of the Congress Party and BJP in alternating coalition governments. Although small, such parties have often been pivotal members of their coalitions and national elections have been won and lost based on their performance (Palshikar 2012). A prominent example is the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a quasi-regional low-caste party that has experienced considerable political success. Based primarily in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state, the BSP experienced an impressive rise in electoral success during the 1990s, earning 21 Lok Sabha seats in the 2009 general elections, up from just three seats in the 1991 general elections. The BSP was founded in 1984 by Kanshi Ram, a Dalit (the 'lowest' caste in the Hindu caste system) caste social activist. Originally a party of Dalits, the BSP has fashioned electoral success over time by expanding its scope, bringing together as an electoral bloc a disparate collection of constituencies: Dalits, minorities, including Christians, Muslims,

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and the tribal population, as well as other arguably disadvantaged groups, such as the 'Other Backwards Castes' (OBCs). It has brought these different groups together under the moniker of 'Bahujans', or 'the deprived majority', a little-used term it has adopted and propagated. The party has fashioned itself as a party of the downtrodden and the party that stands against the dominance of high-caste Hindus (Hasan 2002). Like the BJP, which also emerged from a social movement, the BSP is notable for its extremely strong grassroots party organization, which has helped to mobilize voters to the party’s cause (Jaffrelot 1998). The BSP party subscribes to a distinct and coherent programme of Bahujan empowerment. A major pillar of the party's programme is 'reservations', or affirmative action policies, for disadvantaged groups and greater government spending in disadvantaged communities. When Mayawati, the immensely charismatic leader of the BSP, became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1995, she directed government spending and benefits toward Dalit villages, as promised: ‘Mayawati is popular […] because during her tenure as CM a number of welfare measures for Dalits were undertaken […] the land 'pattas' which had not been allotted to Dalits during the emergency but not given, were actually distributed among them; “pucca” roads linking the villages to the main road, construction of houses, drinking water pumps and toilets in the SC sections of the villages; pensions for old persons […] were some of the schemes implemented’ (Jaffrelot 2007a). Mayawati has also delivered less socially targeted goods, such as rural electrification (Min 2010). But at the same time, she is notorious for her alleged corruption, cronyism and strong-arm politics, which together with patron–client ties form the basis of the way that the party creates links with voters in the absence of an effective formal party organization and institutionalization. Given the BSP’s sectional foundation and clientelistic structure it is tempting to dismiss it as a non-programmatic party. However, in many ways constructing a support base around ethnicity and caste in the Indian context is analogous to mobilizing on the basis of class in the European context. This is because in India communal forms of identity such as caste play an important role in structuring the life chances of an individual. Most obviously, caste and socio-economic status are highly, though not perfectly, correlated. As a result, mobilizing support on the basis of ‘the deprived majority’ does not simply represent an attempt to capitalize upon ethnic politics. Rather, it reflects the attempt to establish a more equal and just political and economic system, and therefore bears comparison to the appeals of leftist parties in Europe to the working-class vote in order to pursue widespread economic reform. Thus, while the BSP displays some characteristics of a clientelistic and ethnic party, its broad appeal can also be said to have a clear programmatic component. Indeed, Stokes (2007) has referred to electoral linkages of this kind as ‘programmatic redistributive linkages’. Moreover, like the BJP, the BSP has over time sought to widen the scope of its appeal to voters. Initially a party of the Dalits, over time the BSP has expanded to include other disadvantaged groups as noted above. It now describes itself as the party of 'Bahujans', which does not correspond to any ethnic group in particular but to the disadvantaged more generally. A favourite metaphor of BSP leaders analogizes India to a ballpoint pen, where the tip of the pen represents the dominant castes, and remaining length represents the downtrodden 85 per cent that the BSP seeks to represent (Jaffrelot 1998: 38). Such metaphors convey a political ideology which is divisive but which is also national is scope and goes beyond mere ethnic appeals. This is well illustrated by the party’s recent attempt to bring Brahmins, members of the highest Hindu caste, into its fold by organizing party rallies for Brahmin voters (Tripathi 2007).

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The BSP is associated with a clear and cohesive ideology and programme of Bahujan empowerment. It differentiates itself from rivals such as the Congress Party and the BJP on that basis, uses these appeals to form links to voters, and implements pro-Bahujan policies when elected to (thus far, state) office. So although the party has been criticized for being polarizing and divisive—some commentators have termed Mayawati the 'anti-Obama' in reference to her allegedly divisive political style—and continues to display characteristics of being an ethnic and clientelistic party, the BSP also advocates an important programmatic position. As a result, the BSP represent a new type of ethnic–programmatic political party that is threatening to displace the old Congress Party model of cadre programmatic politics in India's national party system.

Table 6: Indian Party Profiles


Congress Party Strong elite party organization. Weak grassroots party organization. High policymaking capacity.

Programmatic and clientelistic linkages nationwide.

Cadre–programmatic

Bharatiya Janata Party

Strong elite party organization. Strong grassroots party organization. High policymaking capacity.

Ethnic and programmatic linkages nationwide.

Ethnic–programmatic

Bahujan Samaj Party

Mediocre elite party organization. Strong grassroots party organization. Medium policymaking capacity.

Ethnic, clientelistic and programmatic linkages, some national reach but mainly in Uttar Pradesh.

Ethnic/clientelist–programmatic

State-level politics: the rise of 'good governance' parties While national politics only became competitive from the late 1980s onward, party politics in India's states have been open for much longer. State politics has traditionally been a highly clientelistic affair, with elections fought and won on the basis of patronage rather than policy programmes (Wilkinson 2007). This is epitomized by India's southern states, where parties of regional notables, such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu, compete in 'bidding wars' for the mass vote—making innovative offers of goods, such as free electricity, free bicycles, cash, gold, alcohol and other items, in exchange for votes. In reference to such practices, Chandra goes so far as to term India a 'patronage democracy' (2004). In this political and historical context, one of the most notable but under-studied recent developments in Indian politics from the 1990s onward has been the rise of state-level parties and chief ministers committed to programmes of 'good governance' and economic development. These parties and chief ministers have been elected largely on the basis of their programmatic appeals—though some forms of traditional politics have invariably persisted. When in office they have implemented policies in line with their

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promises. Frequently, these policies have been successful, and the parties have been returned to office with strong mandates. This emerging paradigm can perhaps be traced to the victory of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the selection of Chandrababu Naidu as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1995. Naidu came to power with an electoral campaign based heavily on promises of economic development and pro-growth policies. This electoral strategy was a genuine innovation in state-level politics, particularly in the context of poor states in which clientelism has tended to be particularly rampant. As Rudolph and Rudolph (2001) note, Naidu swiftly became an ‘icon’ for liberal state-level economic reforms and economic modernization in India. This was embodied in his decision, shortly after taking office, to ask the international consulting firm McKinsey to craft an economic strategy document for his government (Price 2010). Not only were Naidu’s reforms economically successful, they were also immensely popular and resulted in him being returned to power until 2004, despite the well-known anti-incumbency bias in Indian state elections (Uppal 2009). The 'Naidu model' of competing in elections on the basis of a programmatic platform swiftly spread to other states in India, cutting across party and ideological lines. Unlikely 'converts' have included Jyoti Basu, the long-time communist chief minister (1977–2000) of West Bengal who began to publicly advertise his desire to attract private investment to the state, and Mayawati of the BSP, who incorporated the language of public service delivery into her public speeches and, according to several studies, actually delivered on this count (Min 2010). Additionally, a number of state chief ministers and parties have emerged that have made good governance and economic development the signature feature of their political campaigns. These include Narendra Modi, the BJP politician who has become the longest-serving chief minister in Gujarat's history by effectively championing economic modernization and development. Another leader in this mould is Nitish Kumar, the Janata Dal (United) (JDU) politician who came to power in Bihar's 2005 election on the back of a good governance agenda. While many of these parties maintain ethnic and clientelistic ties with voters, they have risen to power as a result of their ability to put together and communicate a civic programmatic agenda that involves the provision of a number of public goods. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this increase in programmaticity at the state level it is worth dwelling on the case of Bihar. Prior to Kumar's tenure, Bihar had been synonymous in the Indian imagination with clientelistic politics, economic stagnation, crime, caste conflict, widespread poverty and, above all, Lalu Prasad, the famously corrupt Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief minister who ruled the state from 1990–2005. It is telling that for the final few years Prasad was forced to rule through his wife, who became the nominal chief minister, after he was forced to resign during a corruption scandal. For these reasons, among others, Bihar led the so-called BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) list of India's 'sick' states (bimaru means 'sick' in Hindi). Yet despite the patronage resources at Prasad’s disposal, Kumar proved able to unseat the RJD by drawing together an uneasy alliance of opposition forces around a largely programmatic campaign. At his inauguration, Kumar restated his intention to pursue a good governance agenda, to improve security, to improve infrastructure, and to attract private investment to the state (The Hindu, Nov 25, 2005). The impact of Kumar's reforms was quick and tangible. In the four years leading up to 2009, the state's GDP grew annually at 10.5 per cent, exceeding the national average (The Economist, Jan 10, 2010). Crime plummeted, school enrolment rose, investment increased rapidly, and

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infrastructure improved dramatically, all of which enabled Kumar to retain power with a landslide election victory in 2010. 'Good governance' parties and chief ministers represent a nascent programmatic revolution in India's state-level politics. Although many fail to fully include grassroots activists within the party organization, and so are similar in some ways to the cadre–programmatic model of the Congress Party, in terms of linkage and policy they are clearly programmatic. Instead of buying votes with patronage, they win support largely on the basis of economic policy, typically advocate civic policies that improve conditions for a range of groups, and implement the policies they campaign on when they gain office. The programmatic development of the party system Growing programmaticity at the party level does not always translate into fully programmatic party systems, as the case of Zambia demonstrates. Where India is concerned, one needs to first differentiate the national party system from the myriad of state-level party systems, and then to appreciate that multiple processes are playing out at each level. At the national party level, there have been contradictory trends. On the one hand, the rise of ethnic–programmatic parties has contributed to the emergence of ‘vote bank’ politics, in which parties adopt programmes and mobilization strategies oriented around existing ethnic and territorial cleavages and grievances. In this sense, increasing political competition has facilitated the representation of identity politics within the party system, as it has in much of Africa, and actually resulted in a decline in the level of party system programmaticity because the focus of inter-party competition, and of national policy debate, shifted toward the competing claims of rival groups. However, once established as national political players, ethnic–programmatic parties have significantly moderated their emphasis on identity politics in favour of widening their appeal and casting themselves as legitimate national political contenders. Over the past decade, the ‘ethnic’ component of ethnic–programmatic parties has become less prominent. As a result, competition between parties and the main issues debated around election time have begun to move away from ‘ethnic’ concerns and increasingly focus on programmatic differences. Although India is only at the very beginning of this process and the future remains uncertain, at the national level the party system appears to be undergoing a process of programmatic development. At the state level, the successful programmatic appeal of a small number of parties has proved successful, and so provided incentives for other actors to adopt the model. In states that have witnessed the rise of successful good governance parties, rival groups have begun to adopt similar strategies in response. In these cases, we see clear evidence of programmatic development within state-level party systems, with effects trickling down to the village level. In Rajasthan, for example, Krishna (2007: 147) reports a local district Congress politician telling him: 'The criterion for voting was earlier caste, now it is development. Development work done in a village has the most effect on voting.' Krishna (2007: 147) reports a similar statement by a BJP politician: 'Those individuals are gaining most influence in villages who are able to get villagers' day-to-day work done in government offices.' While each state is characterized by a unique party system, and many have yet to experience the rise of credible programmatic parties, the discourse of 'good governance' has spread across India. Even political leaders with little desire to pursue programmatic policies must rhetorically commit themselves to providing sound economic governance. Thus even where the linkage between parties

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and voters remains unprogrammatic, political competition between parties is increasingly revolving around programmatic appeals.

3.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics Why has there been a transformation in the level of programmaticity within parties and party systems at both the national and local level? This section first examines possible causes of the rise of ethnic–programmatic parties at the national level, highlighting the effects of the institutional decay of the Congress Party, economic liberalization and the comparative advantage of new entrants in adopting programmatic strategies oriented around existing social cleavages. Then it discusses the role of political competition in inducing ethnic–programmatic parties to reduce their emphasis on ethnicity-based appeals. Finally, it discusses possible explanations for the emergence of programmatic 'good governance' parties at the state level, highlighting the role of economic liberalization and decentralization, leadership and agency, and demonstration effects. Explaining Variation in Programmaticity in National Party Politics The rise of ethnic–programmatic political parties such as the BJP, the BSP and a range of regional parties occurred at the expense of the Congress Party, which experienced a sustained loss of seats in the legislature during the early 1990s. Perhaps the most significant factor was the organizational decay of the Congress Party under Indira Gandhi. Facing internal and external opposition to her rule, during the 1970s Indira Gandhi severely weakened the Congress Party's internal institutions and concentrated power in her own hands. This strategy included dismantling nearly all of the Congress Party's internal democratic organs and replacing key office-holders at all levels within the party with loyalists (Kochanek 2002). While Gandhi was able to garner personal support based on her charismatic appeal, the distribution of patronage, and populist rhetoric, the process of de-institutionalization weakened the Congress Party in the long run because it left it without the well-developed local party organization needed to mobilize sustained support. Kohli (1991) notes that districts once characterized by well-organized local Congress Party associations (according to an earlier study by Weiner in 1967) featured barely any organized Congress Party presence just two decades later. The impact of widespread organizational decay became apparent in the late 1980s, when mounting challenges to Congress across India resulted in a so-called ‘crisis of governability’ (Kohli 1991). Two other factors also played a major role in the emergence of an open competitive party system that was more conducive to programmatic development. First, economic liberalization and the decentralization of economic policymaking power weakened the Congress Party's control over central resources, undermining its purely distributive appeal to voters and local political bosses. A balance of payments economic crisis in 1991 compelled Congress Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to adopt, as part of a financing agreement with the International Monetary Fund, wide-ranging economic liberalization and decentralization reforms. This had an impact at both the national and state level. Most notably, the ‘License Raj’ system of permits was dismantled and states were given greater control over industrial policy. Chhibber and Kollman (1998; 2004) argue—in an adaptation of the logic of Duverger's Law (Palfrey 1989)—that this decentralization contributed to the fragmentation of the national political party system by reducing the incentives of regional voters and politicians to associate with the party in control of resources at the centre. Before 1991, the Congress-dominated central government could micromanage public projects, deciding where they would be located and where private investment would be approved. However, after the 1991 reforms this source of political

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leverage was significantly reduced, particularly with regard to the control of private investment. As a result, it became less costly for voters and politicians in India's states to support alternative parties at the national and state level. Second, as the Congress Party's popularity began to fade at the turn of the 1990s, opposition parties discovered that they could successfully lure voters away with ethnicity-based programmatic appeals, something that the Congress Party's cadre programmatic model was poorly placed to do. These conditions created an opening for the rise of ethnic–programmatic parties. The reason that these new parties took on a programmatic form instead of just a clientelistic one was that programmatic appeals, with an ethnic focus, represent the comparative advantage of new entrants—which still could not compete with the Congress Party in terms of access to patronage, even after the reforms of the early 1990s. Mobilizing voters on the basis of programmatic linkages meant that new parties did not have to compete with Congress in terms of the distribution of patronage. By competing on the basis of a combination of identity and policy, the new entrants could carve out a space for themselves within the political system without first needing to access vast political funds. In her study of 'ethnic parties' in India, Chandra (2004) argues that as an umbrella-type organization the Congress Party was ill positioned to compete ideologically with specialized parties dedicated to particular social cleavages and programmatic causes. She argues, for example, that while the Congress Party had traditionally courted scheduled caste voters in Uttar Pradesh, as a party representing many constituencies and interests it was unable to make strong commitments to this group openly (for fear of alienating other constituencies). She notes that this severely constrained Congress Party politicians during elections: ‘Although in [the prominent Uttar Pradesh Congress Party leader's] speech she twice raised grievances associated with Scheduled Castes, such as untouchability, she raised these issues as a national leader concerned with the problems of one of the many groups that made up her constituency, rather than as a champion of the Scheduled Castes. Significantly, even in everyday conversations about Scheduled Castes, Kumar prefers to use the term 'they' rather than we' (Chandra 2004: 151). By contrast, BSP leaders such as Mayawati, herself a Dalit, have had few qualms aggressively championing the cause of the Scheduled Castes. This flexibility has enabled the BSP to better target and encroach upon electoral constituencies traditionally held by the Congress Party and to overcome BSP's initial relative disadvantage in terms of access to patronage. The BSP received particularly strong financial and political support from middle- and upper-class members of the scheduled castes—a growing social contingent—who were no longer content with the nominal representation provided by the Congress Party and saw the BSP as a political tool to obtain social respect and dignity (Chandra 2000). Similarly, as a party that seeks to represent both Muslim and Hindu voters the Congress Party has been committed to an official policy of secularism since independence. This rendered the party ill equipped to compete ideologically against the BJP’s hindutva platform. At the same time, the organizational weakness of the Congress Party made it vulnerable to challenges from parties capable of building an extensive grassroots organization and volunteer base, which the BJP has been able to do through its historical links with Hindu social movements and volunteer organizations such as the RSS. Thachil's (2011) account of this process is particularly striking because it documents the effectiveness of the BJP grassroots organization in winning over even poorer voters, large numbers of whom have voted for the BJP in multiple states and elections. Poor voters are thought to be an unlikely pro-BJP constituency given the party's traditional

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popularity among upper-caste Hindu voters. But by embedding themselves within local communities and establishing a reputation for pro-poor services and activism, Thachil argues, BJP social organizers have successfully attracted even poor voters to the party. By comparison, the limited grassroots linkages of the Congress Party contributed to the once-ruling party’s inability to check the rise of new rivals. This explanation of the breakdown of Congress Party hegemony raises the question of why the BJP and BSP reduced their focus on ethnicity-based appeals, moving away from the very strategy that first elevated them to political prominence. This is best explained as the product of intense political party competition in a diverse democracy. Both the BJP and the BSP rose to prominence during the early 1990s on the basis of support from relatively narrow ethnic constituencies: in the case of the BJP, upper-caste Hindus in northern India; in the case of the BSP, Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. Although these areas represented stable ‘vote banks’ they are national minorities and so are insufficient sources of support for parties seeking national office. For example, Dalits only make up 17 per cent of the overall Indian electorate (Varshney 2000). Moreover, in an era of coalition government in which any party must attract allies in order to form a national government, parties could risk alienating all of their potential partners and so must moderate some of their appeals (Varshney 2000). As a result, the BJP and the BSP have sought to rebrand themselves as parties with a wider appeal. Interestingly, this process has occurred at the national level and also within some states. At the national level, BJP leaders have sought to move beyond upper-caste Hindu voters in Northern India to attract voters in southern and eastern India. As religion is not as important a social cleavage in these areas, this has required the BJP to focus on other more programmatic issues. Similarly, in order to attract lower-caste voters, who make up much of the Indian electorate, the BJP has been forced to advocate policies that focus on issues such as providing more effective government services. At the state level, BJP governments have stopped tolerating or tacitly encouraging violence against the Muslim minority in states where intense political competition compels the government to either seek the Muslim vote or to make alliances with parties that rely on the Muslim vote (Wilkinson 2004). Thus, political competition, in combination with India's social and geographical diversity, has contributed over time to the emergence of parties with a more inclusive and programmatic appeal. Explaining variation in programmaticity in party politics at the state level In addition to the developments discussed above, a second set of processes has facilitated programmatic development at the state level. Again, economic liberalization and the devolution of authority over economic policy promoted 'good governance' programmatic parties because it afforded state-level chief ministers the policymaking discretion to have a tangible impact on state economic performance with state-level policy. As a result, chief ministers have been able to campaign credibly on the issue of development. Moreover, the inter-state competition for private investment unleashed by liberalization has magnified the potential rewards for pursuing pro-business policies. Finally, demonstration effects played a major role in the spread of programmatic approaches, with politicians, parties and voters in states across India learning from the economic and political success of the 'Naidu model'. Economic liberalization and decentralization transformed the federal dynamics of India's economy. Prior to 1991, inter-state competition for investment was primarily a political competition for central transfers—a game in which the federal government was the decisive player. After 1991, in the words of Rudolph and Rudolph (2001: 1541),

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‘state chief ministers became the marquee players in India's federal market economy.’ In 1996, a group of state chief ministers even held a conference to discuss their new-found federal autonomy, adopting for the meeting the triumphant slogan ‘federalism without a centre’ (Saez 2002: 12). This development has had major implications for party politics. When state economic fortunes depended largely on transfers and project approvals from the centre, state chief ministers and political parties faced little pressure or incentives to campaign on the issue of development or to implement innovative policies within their states. This is reflected in the fact that before 1991 state-level economic policies were relatively uniform (Howes et al. 2003). After 1991, however, with the devolution of industrial policymaking authority to the states, state chief ministers became responsible for a much greater share of their own states' development (Sinha 2005). Indian states could now borrow directly from institutional lenders as well as the private sector. More importantly, with the deregulation of private investment, Indian state economies could now access significant foreign and domestic direct private investment. For the first time, good governance made sense as an election issue. Chandrababu Naidu was one of the first to demonstrate that there were major potential gains, both economic and political, to be had by adopting an aggressive good governance programme and pro-investment industrial policy. Naidu, a political entrepreneur of the highest order, worked tirelessly to attract private investment to Andhra Pradesh: ‘from Dallas to Davos, he promoted his ambitious plans to transform Andhra Pradesh from a middle rank into a top rank state’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 1542). He did this by taking advantage of the new economic context. For example, the Naidu government was the first state government in India to receive a direct sub-national loan from the World Bank, which provided over $1 billion of funding for power sector reform and industrial development (Sinha 2005: 87). This boost to government finances, which came shortly in advance of state elections in 1999, played a significant role in Naidu's continued electoral success. There is little evidence to suggest that Andhra Pradesh possesses any unique structural features which led to the emergence of this form of programmatic party politics. Rather, scholars attribute this innovation largely to Naidu’s individual skill and drive: ‘In contrast to [his predecessor's] penchant for slogans and irrepressible urge to enthral audiences, Naidu chose to give emphatic accent on the developmental agenda and navigate his party in a disciplined and workmanlike manner’ (Harshe and Srinivas 1999). The resulting boom in private investment, growth in jobs and rapid economic development proved to be a remarkable electoral elixir, dampening criticism from groups that lost political and economic influence under his administration, such as farmers (Price 2010). The precedent that it was possible to win elections on the basis of innovation and pro-development economic policy transformed the political landscape. Quickly, policy variation and innovation across states emerged as a result of the attempts by various leaders to follow in Naidu’s footsteps: ‘The situation by the end of the nineties was quite different [to the situation before]. Individual states took a lead in introducing reforms in different areas’ (Howes et al. 2003: 4). Rudolph and Rudolph (2001) term this change in the style of state-level politics the ‘iconization’ of Chandrababu Naidu. Price (2010) describes it as a shift in rhetorical focus from poverty to development, with ‘staples of populist politics, including subsidies of food, electricity, fertilizer, seed, etc.’ losing ground to concerns about growth and investment. The media in India, as well as NGOs, many of which receive funding from international donors, have played an important role in propagating the discourse of good governance

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by reporting regularly on issues of political corruption (Wilkinson 2007). But the inter-state spread of programmaticity was also a simple case of demonstration effects operating within a federal system. Besley and Case (1995) suggest a model of political ‘yardstick competition’ in which rational voters utilize the experiences of nearby jurisdictions to judge their own political incumbents. This logic applies just as much to programmatic party politics as other forms of evaluation. Moreover, Howes et al support the idea that state-level politicians in India learn about policies from other state-level politicians: ‘First, we would point to a strong contagion effect at work […] Movement between [the states] is fluid, news spreads and innovations seen to be successful in one state quickly becomes candidates for adoption in others, often with the intermediation of the central government, though sometimes by direct transfusion, as it were’ (2003: 4). Of course, a further factor that has facilitated the diffusion of this model is the role of national political parties themselves. If a leader from a given party successfully implements a new model in one part of the country, the party is likely to encourage other leaders to pursue a similar approach in other parts of the country. BJP state governments and chief ministers, such as Narendra Modi of Gujarat and Ashok Gehlot of Rajasthan, have developed notable reputations for good governance in multiple states, and have clearly been an example for other BJP candidates. Even if such processes of diffusion failed to operate, market forces may well have played a crucial role in propagating the 'Naidu model' in any case. States that have cultivated a business-friendly image have thrived economically since 1991, while those that have failed to do so have stagnated. Sinha (2005: 19) observes, for example, that ‘Gujarat attracted about 10.6 times as much per capita private investment as West Bengal for the period 1991–2003.’ Similar disparities exist across other pairs of states. Consistent with theories of 'market-preserving federalism' (Weingast 1995), economic competition has rewarded states that have publicly pursued business-friendly policies and sanctioned those that have failed to do so. Put another way, states that do not adopt good governance reforms are likely to go out of business, just like a failing company that fails to embrace innovation. Observes Wilkinson (2007: 133): 'State governments, in part to gain access to World Bank loans and in part to show investors and voters they are doing something about corruption, have also begun to pass freedom of information laws and introduce computerization of records that will, over time, provide fewer opportunities for politicians to extract rents'. Thus, the sub-national competition for private investment in post-liberalization India has induced parties to cultivate reputations for good governance. Yet there is also a limit to the impact of structural and learning factors, for despite liberalization in 1991 and the success of the Naidu model, many states have not yet seen the emergence of good governance parties, while programmatic parties have emerged in surprising places, such as Bihar. Wilkinson (2007), for example, writing just a few years back, expressed doubt about the possibility of reform of the clientelistic political environment in Bihar: 'In some cases, such as Bihar, where levels of economic growth are very low or negative and the middle-class out-migration is high, it is hard to see any real push for reform succeeding except in the very long term, absent an intervention from the central government' (2007: 138). Despite all of the mentioned structural impediments, Nitish Kumar has been able to reform Bihar, largely due to his personal political skill. This highlights the continued significance of political agency. The presence of committed political entrepreneurs, such as Nitish Kumar, Narendra Modi and Chandrababu Naidu, appears to be a crucial and unpredictable ingredient in the emergence of programmatic party politics.

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3.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics Programmatic development has had an impact on policymaking at both the national and state levels. At the national level, governments have been more likely to produce efficacious public policies and govern effectively, despite an increasingly fragmented party system and the residue of identity-based parties. This is reflected in the economic reforms that have been endorsed by both the BJP and Congress, and have led to two decades of solid GDP growth. Moreover, the emergence of parties with a greater policy focus appears to have helped to prevent the political system from becoming mired in deadlock: a real concern given the continual need for coalition governments. In the current context, parties must work hard to overcome the disconnect between mass politics and elite policymaking that characterized the era of Congress Party hegemony, because failure to reflect the public mood can undermine a party’s electoral chances. Consider the BJP's disastrous 'India Shining' campaign during the 2004 general elections, which was viewed as callously over-optimistic in light of the poverty that the majority of Indians endure and contributed to a resounding electoral defeat. The focus of policy debates has also changed, and they are now more likely to feature discussion of what can be done to help some of the worst off. 'Reservations', or affirmative action policies, have become a politicized and polarizing issue, with parties such as the BSP pushing for quotas in higher education and government for disadvantaged groups and with the BJP opposing such measures. Indeed, the new-found pressure to earn votes with economic policies was an important factor behind the decision of a Congress Party-led government to implement the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in 2005, a major policy initiative which guaranteed every rural household in India one hundred days of paid government work per year. Thus, greater programmatic competition has had a direct impact on the standard of living of ordinary Indians. The rise of parties such as the BJP and BSP has effectively reduced the historic gap between elite policymaking and mass politics, but the effect of greater programmatic competition has not all been positive. Critics argue that as a result of the growing influence of regional political parties and the increasing focus of political parties on electoral politics, the quality of legislative policymaking in India has declined. Certainly, legislative attendance and the amount of time spent drafting and debating bills has steadily fallen. This has many roots. Some critics argue that it is a product of the fact that Indian MPs increasingly come from less distinguished backgrounds, with experience mainly in the rough and tough world of local politics. It is striking that a large percentage of Indian MPs today have criminal records (Kapur and Mehta 2006). However, more research needs to be conducted in this area, as others argue that much of the legislative work in parliament has simply shifted to committees. Moreover, there are clear benefits to the changing composition of the legislature, which is now more representative of the Indian population in terms of caste and class than ever before (Shankar and Rodrigues 2011). At the state level, meanwhile, programmatic parties have had mostly positive effects on policy outcomes. Both Bihar and Gujarat, a low- and high-income state, respectively, have experienced dramatic gains in economic productivity following the election of programmatic parties. State GDP visibly took off in Gujarat shortly following the election of Narendra Modi and the BJP in 2001 and in Bihar shortly following the election of Nitish Kumar and the JDU in 2005. At the same time, state institutions have been tremendously strengthened. Both Kumar and Modi are credited with cracking down on corruption and overhauling inefficient bureaucracies. In Bihar, Kumar has strengthened the police, the courts and the schools considerably, and has also stepped up spending on

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infrastructure, most notably the road system (Chand 2010). For his part, Modi has been noted for creating an extremely transparent, efficient and business- and investor-friendly bureaucracy (Sinha 2005). However, there are also variations between states, which reflect the disposition of the individuals and parties in power. Kumar's most remarkable achievement is perhaps the restoration of law and order to Bihar, previously one of India's most violent and crime-ridden states (Economist 2010a). Modi, by contrast, has a less positive record. A prominent BJP leader, he has been accused of knowingly failing to stop anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002 which resulted in the death of over 1,000 Muslims (Hindu 2011). Here the tension between the different components of the BJP’s platform is laid bare—although, as noted above, the party has moved away from this sort of behaviour as it has consolidated as an ethnic–programmatic party.

3.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Indian Case India offers several 'portable' lessons with regard to programmatic party politics. First, party programmaticity is a complicated quality and can emerge through a number of different processes. The evolution of the BJP from an ethnic party to an ethnic–programmatic party, for instance, involved a period in which the party’s Hindu nationalist programme led to violence against Muslims. The BJP represents a coherent and stable set of ideological policies, but many of these are not normatively desirable. Even if the BJP continues to abandon the more extreme aspects of its position and consolidate as an ethnic–programmatic party, its linkages to voters and policies are likely to be less conducive to national unity and political stability than that of a civic–programmatic party. It is therefore vital that democracy promotion actors take a critical attitude with regard to what forms of programmaticity they seek to promote. Political competition in a diverse democracy can induce political parties to moderate their emphasis on ethnic cleavages. Both the BJP and the BSP have significantly moderated their identity politics over time in order to widen the scope of their electoral appeal in a competitive political environment. The reduction of barriers to national political competition is therefore important to the long-term promotion of programmaticity. This means that the promotion of campaign finance reform, the modernization of electoral technology, the deployment of election observers, and other instruments to induce or ensure robust political competition are important strategies that donors and others can use to drive programmatic development. Economic reforms can have a major impact upon programmaticity by altering the resources and opportunity sets of political parties and political party leaders. In the Indian case, economic liberalization and decentralization contributed to the decline of clientelistic parties and the emergence of new parties in a programmatic mould. Given this, it is important to keep in mind the relationship between economic and political reform. Most obviously, anti-corruption campaigns and programmes to promote fiscal accountability and transparency should be supported because they are likely to indirectly promote programmatic development in the long run. At the same time, the devolution of key policymaking responsibilities to the sub-national level may encourage sub-national politicians and parties to adopt programmatic strategies and to compete to demonstrate their good governance credentials. By supporting programmes of devolution—where conditions on the ground render them

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feasible—international actors such as IDEA can help to create the conditions under which parties and leaders have an incentive to adopt programmatic positions. Demonstration effects can be crucial in the spread of programmatic party politics. The success of Chandrababu Naidu and the TDP established a precedent that led to the adoption of programmatic strategies in a number of other states, notably Bihar and Gujarat. The rapid spread of ‘good governance’ models demonstrates the great importance of education, communication and training. Organizing events in which such lessons can be more easily communicated to aspiring political leaders is therefore a very feasible way in which the democracy promotion community can advance the position of programmatic parties. This may be implemented though the facilitation of dialogue between parties across states, the facilitation of dialogue between parties and civil society organizations, and the provision of policy advice and consulting services.

3.7 Bibliography Basu, Amrita (2012). ‘The BJP’ in Atul Kohli and Prerna Singh (ed.) Handbook of Indian

Politics. Routledge pp. 120–129. Besley, Timothy and Anne Case (1995). ‘Incumbent Behavior: Vote-seeking, Tax-Setting,

and Yardstick Competition’ in American Economic Review Vol. 85, No. 1 (March). Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal (2004). Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political

Economy. 2nd edition. Oxford: OUP. Brass, Paul (1994). The Politics of India Since Independence. 2nd edition. Cambridge: CUP. Chand, Vikram (2010). Public Service Delivery in India: Understanding the Reform Process.

Oxford: OUP. Chandra, Kanchan (February 2000). ‘The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The

Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur’ in The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 59, No. 1.

Chandra, Kanchan (2004). Why Ethnic Parties Succeed. Cambridge: CUP. Chhibber, Pradeep and Ken Kollman (June, 1998). ‘Party Aggregation and the Number of

Parties in India and the United States’ in American Political Science Review, vol. 92, No. 2.

Chhibber, Pradeep and Ken Kollman (2004). The Formation of National Party Systems. Princeton: PUP.

The Economist. ‘A Triumph in Bihar’ November 25, 2010a. The Economist. ‘On the Move: Bihar's Remarkable Recovery’ January 28, 2010b. Guha, Ramachandra (2007). India After Gandhi. New Delhi: Picador. Harshe, Rajen and C. Srinivas (1999). ‘Vote for Development: How Sustainable?’ in

Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 34, No. 44: 3103–3105. The Hindu (November 25, 2005). ‘Nitish Promises “good governance”’. The Hindu (April 22, 2011). ‘Gujarat Police Officer Implicates Modi in Riots’. Hasan, Zoya (2002). ‘Representation and Redistribution: The New Lower Caste Politics of

North India’ in Zoya Hasan (ed.) Parties and Party Politics in India, Oxford: OUP. Howes, Stephen, Ashok Lahiri and Nicholas Stern (2003). State-level Reforms in India:

Towards More Effective Government. Macmillan: New Delhi. Jaffrelot, Christophe (1998). ‘The Bahujan Samaj Party in North India: No Longer Just a

Dalit Party?’ in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, VOL. XVIII NO. 1

Jaffrelot, Christophe (2007). Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Permanent Black).

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Jaffrelot, Christophe (2007a). ‘Caste and the Rise of Marginalized Groups’ in Sumit Ganguly, Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (eds.) The State of India's Democracy. Baltimore: JHU Press.

Kapur, Devesh and Pratap Mehta (2006). The Indian Parliament as an Institution of Accountability. Democracy, Governance and Human Rights Program Paper Number 23, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.

Kochanek, Stanley (2002). ‘Mrs. Gandhi's Pyramid’ in Zoya Hasan (ed.) Parties and Party Politics in India, Oxford: OUP.

Kohli, Atul (1991). Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability. Cambridge: CUP.

Kohli, Atul (2001). ‘Introduction’ in The Success of India's Democracy. Cambridge: CUP. Kohli, Atul (2006). ‘Politics of Economic Growth in India’, Economic and Political Weekly,

April 8: 1361–70. Kothari, Rajni (Dec., 1964). ‘The Congress 'System' in India’ in Asian Survey, Vol. 4, No. 12. Krishna, Anirudh (2007). ‘Politics in the Middle: Mediating Relationships between the

Citizens and the State in Rural North India’ in Patrons, Clients and Policies. eds. Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson, Cambridge: CUP.

Manor, James (2010). ‘Beyond clientelism: Digvijay Singh’s participatory, pro-poor strategy in Madhya Pradesh’, in Pamela Price and Arild Engelsen Ruud, eds. Power and Influence in India: Bosses, Lords, and Captains, Delhi: Routledge, pp. 193–213.

Min, Brian (2010). ‘Distributing Power: Electrifying the Poor in India’. Working Paper: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~brianmin/Min_UP_20101019.pdf

Mitra, Subrata (2011). Politics in India: Structure, Process and Policy. Routledge. The New York Times. ‘Turnaround of India State Could Serve as Model’, 10April, 2010. Palshikar, Suhas (2012). ‘Regional and Caste Parties‘ in Atul Kohli and Prerna Singh (eds.)

Handbook of Indian Politics. Routledge. Panagariya, Arvind (2004). ‘India in the 1980s and 1990s: A Triumph of Reforms’ in IMF

Working Paper Series WP/04/43. Price, Pamela Gwynne (2010). ‘Development, Drought and Campaign Rhetoric in South

India: Chandrababu Naidu and the Telugu Desam Party, 2003–2004’ in Arild Engelsen Ruud & Pamela Gwynne Price (eds.), Power and Influence in India: Bosses, Lords and Captains. Routledge.

Palfrey, Thomas (1989). ‘A Mathematical Proof of Duverger's Law’ in Peter Ordeshook (ed.) Models of Strategic Choice in Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

Rudolph, Lloyd and Susan Rudolph (2001). ‘Iconisation of Chandrababu: Sharing Sovereignty in India’s Federal Market Economy’ in EPW 5 May 2001: 1541–52

Saez, Lawrence (2002). Federalism Without a Center. Sage: New Delhi. Shankar, B.L. and Valerian Rodrigues (2011). The Indian Parliament. New Delhi: OUP. Stokes, Susan (2007). ‘Political Clientelism’ in Carles Boix and Susan Stokes (eds.)

Handbook of Comparative Politics. Oxford: OUP. Sinha, Aseema (2005). The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thachil, Tariq (July 2011). ‘Embedded Mobilization: Non-state Service Provision as

Electoral Strategy in India’ in World Politics Vol. 63, No. 3. Tripathi, Ashis (March 22, 2007). ‘Bahujan Samaj to Brahmin Samaj’ in The Times of

India, Lucknow, India edition. Uppal, Yogesh (2009). ‘The Disadvantaged Incumbents: Estimating Incumbency Effects in

Indian State Legislatures’ in Public Choice, 138(1), 9–27. Varshney, Ashutosh (Feb., 2000). ‘Is India Becoming More Democratic?’ in The Journal of

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Weingast, Barry (1995). ‘The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development’ in Journal of Law, Economics and Organization Vol. 11, No. 1.

Wilkinson, Steven (2004). Votes and Violence. Cambridge: CUP. Wilkinson, Steven (2007). ‘Explaining Changing Patterns of Party–Voter Linkages in

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4 Ukraine

4.1 Introduction Ukraine provides an example of an Eastern European country that started the post-communist transition in the early 1990s with no pre-existing party system. The process of emergence and consolidation of a party system over the course of the last two decades has been characterized by many problems and setbacks. For most of this period, parties remained rather weak both in terms of institutionalization and programmatic development. Only in the last five years has the majority of political parties and the party system in general become more institutionalized and made some gains in terms of programmaticity. The programmatic profiles of Ukrainian parties have sharpened considerably over the second half of the 2000s. Parties’ ideological commitments started to play a more prominent role in national politics. Such commitments increasingly constitute the basis for the link between parties and their voters and play a more prominent role in structuring party competition. The country’s policymaking process has also become more influenced by parties’ ideological commitments. Gains in programmaticity in the case of Ukraine are closely linked with the process of party system institutionalization. Individual political entrepreneurs, executive government bureaucracy, sectional and regional interests dominated national politics in the 1990s. Parties, rather than these other types of political actors, started to occupy the centre stage of national politics only in the 2000s. Party system institutionalization provided strong incentives for parties to invest in the development of their programmatic capacities. These gains in programmaticity, however, are not necessarily irreversible. There are some signs that the programmatic development of the Ukrainian party system might be impeded by the very recent constitutional and political changes that weaken the role that party system plays in the country’s politics. Thus, the Ukrainian case provides a good example of a non-linear pattern of programmatic development in a lower-middle income country that moves back and forth on its path towards democratic consolidation. This study offers an analysis of the evolution of programmaticity and pays special attention to causal factors influencing the development of programmatic politics. While recognizing that the programmatic outcomes observed in the Ukrainian case are a product of many types of influences, this case study highlights especially the impact of political institutions on the programmatic development of political parties in Ukraine. Ukraine has experienced a considerable number of major institutional reforms over the course of its twenty years of independence and it is argued here that these reforms have had a major impact on party behaviour. Process tracing over time is a key method employed here to discern the causal effects of changes in the institutional framework. Institutions constitute a particularly interesting subject in the context of research on programmatic politics due to the fact that policymakers usually have a higher degree of control over institutional design rather than over structural conditions or international influences. Constitutional reforms of executive–legislative relations, electoral system changes, and revisions of party finance rules have all been highly consequential in the Ukrainian case. Institutional reforms debated and implemented in Ukraine are on the policy agenda of many societies that undergo major political transitions and face increasing pressures to democratize public life. The lessons from the multiple Ukrainian experiments with institutional design should thus be of interest to a broad audience of

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national policymakers—including those that debate semi-presidential constitutional design and electoral system changes in various parts of the world—and to international institutions supporting countries’ pursuit of paths to more programmatically oriented politics.

4.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Ukraine After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Ukraine faced the challenge of building a party system from scratch. As with many other Soviet bloc countries, independent Ukraine inherited a well-institutionalized, albeit seriously discredited, communist successor party, and a host of small and relatively weak organizations formed primarily from the pieces of an oppositional umbrella political movement established in the last years of the Soviet period. The democratic opening of the early 1990s and the lax party registration rules led to a rapid proliferation of political parties. The majority of these organizations were ideologically amorphous, lacked the capacity to formulate public policy proposals and had a very limited organizational presence in the centre and the regions. New party projects were usually organized around individual political entrepreneurs seeking to enhance their personal standing or the public profile of small groups of political activists. Most of them lacked the resources to build party organizations and to participate in the electoral process (Wilson and Birch 1993). The marginal role that political parties played in the early period of Ukrainian independence can be tellingly illustrated by the weak presence of parties in the policymaking process. None of the three main national policymaking institutions—presidency, parliament and cabinet—was controlled by the parties. In each of the first three presidential elections (1991, 1994 and 1999), the successful contender for the presidency—which became a powerful executive office—had no party affiliation and relied on a broad heterogeneous coalition of partisan and non-partisan actors. The first post-communist legislature, whose tenure extended from 1994 until 1998, had 243 non-partisan deputies out of a total of 450. The second legislature (1998–2002) had 143 independents. The independents were usually representatives of regional elites: regional government officials, directors of big industrial or agricultural enterprises, and heads of local councils. They relied on their local networks to win elections in single-member districts, which constituted the basis of Ukraine’s electoral system in the 1990s (Birch, 2000). Ukrainian cabinets formed during the same period consisted of technocrats, presidential loyalists and representatives of regional and sectional interests. Politics in general during this period was dominated by president-controlled executive government bureaucracies and regional/sectional interests. Table 7 below provides data on the electoral performance of Ukraine´s main political parties. Ukraine had five rounds of parliamentary elections—these elections were based on a single-member system in 1994, a mixed system in 1998 and 2002, and a full PR system in 2006 and 2007. ‘A main party is defined as one that successfully competed in more than one cycle of parliamentary elections and have been represented in the parliament of at least two convocations [parliamentary terms]’ (Meleshevych 2010). Only three parties out of 15 that won one or more seats in the 1994 parliamentary elections met this criterion. These three parties—the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, and Rukh—are examples of early programmatic parties in Ukrainian political history. Each of them has stable and well-structured ideological commitments—the first two are parties of the traditional left and the last one is a right-oriented party—and relied on these commitments to build linkages to the voters and to participate in the electoral process. Each of the parties took part in every round of electoral competition—Rukh was a member of the electoral coalition of Our Ukraine in

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the last three parliamentary elections and enjoyed a varying degree of electoral success throughout the analyzed period. The combined result of these parties in the 1994 elections—less than 25 per cent of parliamentary seats—highlights the limited influence of these parties in the country’s political system at the start of the post-communist transition.

Table 7: Selected Results of Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine (%)

Party 1994 19982 20021 2006 2007 SMD PR results only

Communist Party of Ukraine 14.85 24.65 19.98 3.66 5.39

Rukh

5.96 9.40 — — —

Socialist Party of Ukraine2

3.80 8.56 6.87 5.69 2.86

People’s Democratic Party

— 5.01 — 0.49 0.34

Social Democratic Party of Ukraine

4 6.70 — —

Electoral Coalition For United Ukraine

— — 11.77 — —

Electoral Coalition Our Ukraine

— — 23.57 13.95 14.15

Yuliya Tymoshenko Bloc

— — 7.26 22.29 30.71

Party of Regions

— — — 32.14 34.37

Lytvyn Bloc

— — — 2.44 3.96

SMD = single-member district; PR = proportional representation. 1 Mixed electoral formula: 50 per cent PR and 50 per cent SMD. 2 The Electoral Coalition of SPU and SelPU in 1998. Source: Meleshevych (2010).

Political parties started to play a much greater role in the Ukrainian political system only in the late 1990s. Party influence grew, first of all, in the parliament, where parties started to successfully challenge various other forms of legislative organization such as ad-hoc parliamentary groupings based on regional or sectional interests. Parties that gained prominence during this period tended to claim ‘centrist’ programmatic orientations and exhibited ideological profiles that were less coherent than the profiles of parties on the political left and right (Protsyk and Wilson 2003; Meleshevych 2010). They relied primarily on clientelistic strategies to build linkages to the electorate. Generating the resources required to sustain these practices, which were based on a direct material exchange with voters, depended on these parties’ abilities to secure access to the dominant executive office in the Ukrainian political system, the presidency. President Kuchma, who served in office for two terms between 1994 and 2004, presided over the construction of a political system dominated by non-ideological parties. Examples of such centrist parties and blocs, either founded or supported by the presidential office, include the People’s Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, and the Electoral Coalition for United Ukraine. As Table 7 indicates, the People’s Democratic Party received only five per cent of votes in the PR segment of the 1998 elections. The party’s parliamentary group, however, included many more

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members than this percentage suggests due to a large number of independent deputies elected in the SMD districts who chose to join the pro-presidential faction after the elections. The Electoral Coalition for United Ukraine—the main pro-presidential electoral block in the 2002 elections—included five parties with centrist ideological profiles and strong ties to various geographic regions of Ukraine. The results in Table 7 undercount the number of non-ideological centrist party projects that were represented in the Ukrainian parliament in the late 1990s and early 2000s; some of these projects were successful only during one electoral cycle and thus do not meet the criteria for inclusion in Table 7. Overall, Ukraine experienced a high level of party fragmentation in this period. One recent study finds in the Ukraine that the effective number of electoral contestants in 1998 was 10.75, in 2002 was 7.46, in 2006 was 5.65, and in 2007 was 4.22 (Meleshevych 2010). Ukraine’s party system was reformatted in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential elections, which due to electoral fraud resulted in mass protest events known as the Orange Revolution, and led to major constitutional reforms (D'Anieri, 2007; Wilson, 2006). Party fragmentation decreased considerably and many non-ideological centrist parties disappeared from the centre stage of Ukrainian politics after the 2006 parliamentary elections. While old ideologically oriented parties on the left and the right continued to be represented in the parliament during this period, their electoral supported dwindled considerably in comparison to the late 1990s. Parties that came to dominate Ukraine’s politics were relatively new political organizations. As Table 7 shows, the lion’s share of parliamentary seats in the post-2006 period was distributed among the three political organizations: the Party of Regions, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and the Electoral Coalition Our Ukraine. A mixture of ideological, charismatic and clientelistic appeals characterizes the functioning of Ukrainian parties in the second half of the 2000s. This period, however, saw some major qualitative shifts in the role that parties play in the country’s political system as parties established a virtual monopoly on representation in parliament and finally conquered remaining key national political institutions—the presidency and the cabinet. Subsequently, party affiliation of presidents and cabinet ministers has become the norm and the fact of partisan control of key government institutions has helped to increase the transparency of the political process for voters. It is only during this period that we can talk about a full institutionalization of main political parties—the winners of the 2006 parliamentary elections. These parties started to meet the criteria of programmatic organization, building up their internal capacity and enlarging the scope, density and regularity of interactions between supporters, activists and leaders within the party structure. They also started to acquire a degree of decisional autonomy—although large business continued to be a major influence in determining policies and strategies of each of the three most electorally successful parties listed above. Other characteristics of an institutionalized party (Randall & Svasand 2002)—value infusion and reification—have also been exhibited, to a varying degree, by the 2006 election winners. Parties’ new responsibilities for forming the legislative majority and the executive government provided a major impetus for party politicians to invest in their programmatic capabilities. The ideological profiles of some main parties—the Party of Regions and the Electoral Coalition Our Ukraine in particular—became more structured and more prominent in electoral campaigns. At the same time, the Ukrainian party system saw a rather successful example of building charismatic linkages by one of the leading political forces, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, whose female leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, became one of main heroes of the 2004 Orange Revolution and developed a personalistic appeal to large segments of the electorate (Meleshevych, 2010).

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While parties could report considerable progress in building ideological or, in some individual cases, charismatic links, parties’ relations with resource-rich constituencies—large financial capital and industrial groups, regional business conglomerates—continue to be dominated by the logic of clientelistic exchanges. Parties depend heavily on these constituencies to finance party activity and reward these constituencies with regulatory favours, preferential access to government procurements, and other types of particularistic benefits.

4.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties The programmatic positioning of political parties in Ukraine has been conditioned by the legacies of the communist period and the country’s structural characteristics. The left–right economic dimension and the ethnocultural dimension constitute two primary axes of party competition in the country. During the 1990s programmatic competition was primarily defined by parties’ attempts to mobilize voter support on the basis of attitudinal differences towards the communist past and pro-democracy/pro-market reforms. In the 2000s, regionally based ethnocultural differences emerged as a primary focus of parties’ mobilization strategies and as the main dimension of party competition. As will be discussed in more detail later, this ethnocultural competition, albeit regionally rooted, should be considered in the Ukrainian context as a programmatic dimension that is based on a continuum of universally conceived policies rather than on a distribution of particularistic benefits to rigidly defined regional constituencies.

Table 8: Ukrainian Party Profiles


Party of Regions

Strong party organization and policy-making capacity. Little internal democracy.

Programmatic and regional linkages, principally to urban and peri-urban areas in the east and south. Closely linked with some of the country’s largest oligarchic business groups.

Weak programmatic party.

Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (based on Bat´kivshchyna party)

Medium-strength party organization and policy-making capacity. Little internal democracy.

Charismatic linkages, both urban and rural constituencies principally in the centre and west of the country.

Charismatic party.

Our Ukraine Medium-strength organization. Medium policy-making capacity. High level of internal democracy.

Programmatic and regional linkages, predominantly in the west of the country, but falling grassroots support.


Socialist Party of Ukraine

Medium-strength party organization and policy-making capacity. High level of internal democracy. Long history and strong institutional memory.

Programmatic linkages, principally to rural areas in the centre of the country.

Programmatic party.

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Throughout the analyzed period, parties exhibited varying propensities to formulate well-structured ideological commitments and to use them as the basis for: a) the link between a party and its constituency; b) electoral competition among parties; and c) the policymaking process (Luna 2011). Before providing some general measures of programmaticity of the Ukrainian party system it would be useful to provide a short comparison of two contrasting cases of party behaviour in the Ukrainian context. The Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU) developed a clear-cut and elaborate programme based on principles of state regulation of market reforms and opposition to privatization of land and key sectors of the economy; support of social welfare; a parliamentary rather than presidential form of government; and further democratization of public life. The party consistently campaigned on these principles and formed stable and durable linkages with a constituency whose ideological profile was distinct and coherent—this constituency was primarily a rural one which, in the Ukrainian context, was characterized by lower levels of education and income (Birch, 2000). While in parliament, the party stayed true to its core left-of-centre ideological principles, pursued legislative policies that were in line with these principles, and opposed presidential attempts to establish executive dominance. The party was represented in several consecutive legislatures and lost the support of its voters only after entering the 2006 government coalition of which party voters did not approve—a clear case of punishment by voters for the party’s failure to stay the course preferred by the constituency. As Table 7 indicates, party electoral support dropped from 5.7 per cent to 2.9 per cent over the course of the year between 2006 and 2007. The Social-Democratic Party of Ukraine (SDPU) developed a programme rhetorically positioning the party in the social democratic camp. Yet the party’s electoral strategies hardly reflected its declared principles. Party campaigning focused not on systematic efforts to elaborate specific socio-democratic policies and to communicate them to potential core constituencies but on constructing electoral machines distributing material benefits or patronage promises to targeted constituencies (Matsuzato, 2002). The party vote, for example, was characterized by geographically concentrated and isolated pockets of electoral strength reflecting the local presence of business groups linked to party leadership; the party had strong levels of electoral support in the Kiev region and—about 800 km away—in the remote Zakarpatia region. Matzusato (2002) documents how the national party leadership established its electoral base in that region by forging ties with local business elites (serving as a mediator between them and the central government and securing these elites‘ access to financial resources and central government-granted regulatory concessions) and by distributing ‘gifts’ and free public concerts to the voters at election time. The party’s legislative agenda had little to do with social democratic principles and was continuously adjusted in accordance with preferences of the country’s president, Kuchma, in the course of the latter´s pursuit of market-oriented reforms and executive dominance. An eventual decline in the party’s electoral support in the 2000s is best explained by party system-level changes rather than by any programmatic accountability mechanisms. These two parties are illustrative of the mix of mobilization strategies being employed in the Ukrainian party system in the 1990s and 2000s. Both of these parties had a roughly comparable representation in the Ukrainian parliament in the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, but each displayed very different levels of programmatic orientation. At the same time, differences in the internal structures of the parties were small: both parties established local organizations in each region of the country, had a rather similar hierarchy of party organs and employed many similar internal decision-making procedures. The major difference came from different patterns of engaging with the

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electorate: fostering programmatic or clientelistic patterns of mobilizing the voters. What is also critical to emphasize here is the fact that the overall constitutional design of the country’s political system during that period stimulated, for reasons discussed in the next section of this study, the development of less programmatically oriented party projects and penalized politicians committed to competing on an ideological basis. Overall, clientelistic structuring of party politics dominated Ukrainian politics during this period. A number of systematic measures of programmaticity are available to illustrate this conclusion. One is party discipline in the roll call voting. Harasymiv (2002) reports results of an analysis of the voting record of the fourteen parliamentary factions that existed in the 1994–98 parliament. Parties that were earlier identified in this study as ideologically oriented projects—the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, and Rukh—were rated correspondingly as first, second and fourth in terms of party discipline. The faction that occupied the third position (Statehood) existed only through the first two years of the parliamentary term and was later dissolved. Another such measure is party membership switching in the parliament. Ukraine had an extremely high number of cases of ‘floor crossing’ by MPs throughout the first decade and a half of the country’s transition (Whitmore, 2004). For example, one study reports that in a three-year period (1998–2001) Ukraine’s 450 deputies managed to change sides a staggering 562 times (Protsyk & Wilson, 2003). Changing a parliamentary faction several times during the same parliamentary term became a common practice. The switching phenomenon primarily characterized ad-hoc groupings of non-partisan MPs and parliamentary groups of parties that positioned themselves as centrist. More programmatically oriented parties of the left and the right experienced a smaller number of switches. These parties, however, controlled a significantly smaller number of parliamentary seats than various centrist groupings for most of the analyzed period, so the continuity in parliamentary group membership had a rather narrow base in the parliament. The number of switchers in the parliament dropped dramatically during the second time period analyzed in this study: 2006–9. The 2006–7 and 2007–present parliaments (prior to 2010) saw very few switches. For example, the parliament elected in 2006 saw only six switches in more than a year of its term in office. Constitutional and electoral reforms conducted in the mid-2000s had the effect of strengthening the role of political parties in the political system and providing incentives for politicians to invest in the programmatic and organizational capacities of the parties. This strengthening of the parties was reflected in increased membership continuity and stability of party factions in the parliament. Although no detailed quantitative studies of party behaviour in parliament during this period have been published yet, casual observations suggest that party discipline as measured by the uniformity of roll-call votes has also improved quite dramatically. Some sporadic observations also suggest that electoral and party programmes gain more significance in the post-2006 period. The heightened relevance of programmatic positions of parties became manifest in the levels of attention paid to discussions of party programmes in electoral campaigns and coalition formation talks after the 2006 and 2007 parliamentary elections. This level of attention to programmatic documents on the part of party politicians themselves and the expert community are unprecedented in Ukrainian politics. Content analysis of party programmes suggests that these documents became more elaborate, while party positions along the ethnocultural dimension, which became highly salient in the 2000s, are now more polarized. The parties also invested considerable resources in developing policy profiles

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on other important policy matters. This manifested itself, for example, in the institutionalization of the practice of specialized party speakers. Unlike in the past, when party leaders handled communication on all major policy issues largely single-handedly, now the main political parties have speakers/experts covering separate policy areas and communicating party lines on each of these policy areas to voters. Finally, in 2007, votes were cast to retrospectively punish a party for its policy behaviour. The Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU), discussed above, failed to cross the three per cent electoral threshold after the party joined the government coalition in the 2006–7 parliament, even though it was opposed by the party’s supporters. Between 2006 and 2009, several elements of the model of responsible party government began to emerge in Ukraine. However, the consolidation of this model has been called into question by the most recent round of institutional reforms. The old Ukrainian constitution, which empowers the president and limits the role of political parties in government formation, was restored after the election of the new president in 2010, which marked the beginning of a new period in Ukrainian politics. One clear indication that parties’ abilities to maintain coherent ideological profiles can still be reversed is that the number of MPs switching sides within parliament rose rapidly in 2010. More than 50 opposition deputies chose to join the government coalition or were excluded by opposition parliamentary factions from their ranks due to their support of government initiatives in 2010 and 2011. While discipline around party votes in the parliament remains generally high, opposition parties in particular have begun to find it increasingly difficult to ensure a uniform pattern of legislative behaviour by their members. Although a return to the party system of the 1990s, with very weak levels of programmaticity, is unlikely, fostering programmatic linkages and programmatic policymaking in the newly established institutional environment will prove to be very challenging. These characteristics are summarized in Table 4 above.

4.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics In explaining causal paths to programmaticity this section reviews four general types of factors: structural conditions, the institutional framework, international influences and the role of individuals. The role of each of these groups of factors in accounting for the programmaticity outcomes varies significantly. Some of these factors—such as structural conditions and international influences—define the important parameters of the context in which political parties operate rather than constitute an immediate causal determinant of programmatic consolidation. The section concludes by providing a synthesis of factors and influences that shaped Ukraine’s path of programmatic development. Legacies and Structures Ukraine’s legacies are among the least conducive in the Eastern European region for the development of programmatic party politics. Earlier studies identified a substantial variation among post-communist states in terms of the character of legacies that shape interactions between citizens and politicians (Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski & Toka, 1999). Different paths of development during the communist and pre-communist periods endowed the participants of the post-communist political process with varying sets of resources, skills and expectations. These paths are largely defined by the interaction of the pre-communist experience of collective interest mobilization and civil service organization (how autonomous the state bureaucracy was from special interests) within distinct communist party regimes. Different combinations of these characteristics have been conceptualized as constituting three distinct types of legacies:

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bureaucratic–authoritarian, national–accommodative and patrimonial. Patrimonial legacies—characterized by the lack of widespread democratic competition and by the pervasiveness of clientelistic practices of the civil service—provide the weakest foundations for the development of a programmatically oriented party system. Ukraine has one of the most entrenched systems of patrimonial practices in Eastern Europe thus making it an unlikely candidate for the institutionalization of programmatic party competition. The failure of parties to structure politics along programmatic lines during the initial period of Ukraine’s post-1991 transition are well in line with propositions of the literature about the impact of the patrimonial legacy. Ukraine’s post-communist state is very weak in terms of its ability to separate the interests of those who occupy the executive branch of government from the state itself: instead, state bureaucracies are typically used to accumulate political power and to convert state economic assets into private wealth. High party system fragmentation and a lack of partisanship in the first post-communist legislatures was sustained by the ability of emerging private business groups, and sectional and regional interests to negotiate with the executive to grant them preferential treatment and control of certain segments of state bureaucracies in exchange for providing political support for the executive in the legislature. In turn, the nature of Ukraine’s executive and its preferences in terms of political organization have been profoundly shaped by the design of political institutions. In terms of social structures—understood here as enduring social divisions—the literature on Ukraine emphasizes the importance of class and regional divisions (D’Anieri 2007). The politicization of these divisions resulted in the persistent political importance of the traditional left–right cleavage and ethnocultural differences. While these ethnocultural differences divide Ukraine into the Ukrainian-speaking West and the Russian-speaking East (this is a somewhat simplified version of Ukraine’s regional differences; for a more sophisticated interpretation, see, for example, Katchanovski, 2006), these divisions are not very deep in social terms. For example, language use and region of residence does not affect associational life—common national level associations exist in all spheres of public life (national associations of journalists, medical doctors etc.), the rates of inter-ethnic marriages are very high, many people report native fluency in both main languages and cultures. The majority of the population of Eastern Ukraine still defines itself as ethnic Ukrainians (although Russian-speaking). The fact that Ukraine is not a deeply divided society is highly consequential for national politics. While some of the main national parties have strong regional bases, the comparatively ‘shallow’ character of regional divisions enables them to compete for votes nationally and gain some levels of electoral support even in the other region’s core. Thus, the Party of Regions, which has its electoral stronghold in Eastern Ukraine, is able to gain support across the country even when its programmatic goals in the ethnocultural realm include making Russian the country’s second official language and intensifying educational exchanges with the Russian Federation. The Party of Regions is not an equivalent of the Bloc Quebecois in Canada and both politicians and voters know that. The bundle of cultural policies advocated by the Party of Regions is in the party’s view a public good and not a particularistic policy targeting a territorially defined constituency. Given a relatively ‘shallow’ character of regional divisions their dominance in structuring party competition in Ukraine is rather puzzling. The question of why regional and not class-based divisions have proved so far to be the most salient line of political competition requires separate examination. Ukraine’s design of political

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institutions—a choice of a popularly elected presidency, first of all—is one determinant. In post-Soviet countries with substantial regional divisions and competetive political regimes, such as Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan, presidential elections tend to highlight and accentuate regional divisions. Ukraine’s first presidential elections took place in 1991—well before the first parliamentary elections (1994)—and exhibited a pronounced regional variation in terms of distribution of vote for the leading candidates. The run-off of the 1994 presidential elections split the country into the Western and Eastern halves in terms of support for the two contenders, a pattern which was broadly replicated both in the 2004 and 2010 presidential elections. The 1999 presidential contest was the only one which did not exhibit this pattern of vote distribution in the run-off. Politicization of regional divisions already in the early cycles of presidential elections in post-communist Ukraine and the fact that presidential elections acquired characteristics of the first-order elections in the country’s political system are suggested in the literature to have a framing effect on the voters’ perception of which social divisions are politically important. Political parties that subsequently started to emphasize their differences on ethnocultural dimensions were thus able to capitalize on the already politically activated regional divisions. The long-term ‘freezing’ of the current format of party system, which is characterized by the dominance of ethnocultural competion, appears to be problematic. The ongoing process of Ukraine’s transformation into a market economy stimulates the growth of social inequalities and contributes to the objective strengthening of political relevance of class-based divisions (Protsyk 2012). Institutions Institutions have a major effect on politicians’ incentives and ability to structure relations with voters along the lines of programmatic competition. Institutions are conceptualized here as having effects on patterns of political relations that are, to a significant extent, independent and distinct from the effects of structures and legacies. Rather than endowing political actors with skills and resources, institutions provide them with a set of incentives and constraints for pursuing political actions. There is ongoing discussion in political science about the endogenous nature of political institutions (Greif and Laitin, 2004). Structures and legacies have a major influence on the design of political institutions. Yet structures can not fully pre-determine the nature of political institutions. Proponents of the full endogeneity thesis would have a hard time explaining, for example, why two neighbouring countries that share many structural conditions and Soviet legacies—Ukraine and Moldova—chose such different sets of political institutions. Moldova opted for a constitutional design with a very weak president (first popular and later indirectly elected), a cabinet responsible to the parliament and a closed list system of proportional representation. By contrast, Ukraine initially adopted a constitution that endowed the president with very strong legislative and non-legislative powers and provided for the creation of a cabinet headed by the prime minister and accountable both to the president and parliament. Moreover, Ukraine´s first post-communist elections were held under a system of single member districts. Three periods in the development of programmaticity that have been identified—pre-2006, 2006–9, 2010–present—are associated with major changes in Ukraine’s institutional framework. The pre-2006 period was defined by the semi-presidential system described above. The 2006–9 period saw major constitutional regime and electoral system changes, including the introduction of a constitutionally weaker president (although the country remained a semi-presidential system) and a fully proportional electoral system for parliamentary elections. In 2010 Ukraine´s previous constitution was restored, which provides for a powerful presidency and a cabinet subordinate both to the president and parliament. To understand the full effect of

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political institutions on the development of programmaticity it is necessary to focus on the influence of the electoral system and parliamentary procedures, presidency and party finance rules. Electoral system and parliamentary procedures Ukraine´s first post-communist parliamentary elections held in 1994 were run under a single member district system (SMD) according to the double ballot system. In other words, a second round was required if the candidate that was first past the post did not receive an absolute majority of the vote in the first round. Unrestrictive nomination rules provided an equal playing field for party and independent candidates. The second and the third elections held, respectively, in 1998 and 2002 used a mixed electoral formula: one half of the 450 seats were contested in SMD districts while the second half was distributed according to closed-list PR rules. The next two legislative elections, in 2006 and 2007, featured only a closed PR list component. In the specific post-Soviet context characterized by the absence of any tradition of multi-party competition, single-member district electoral rules provided disincentives for the development of political parties. SMD elections and the SMD component of mixed elections were clearly candidate- rather than party-oriented. Candidates without party affiliation but with established local clientelistic networks relied on these networks to win seats in the parliament. The number of successful independents in successive Ukrainian parliaments testifies to the viability of this strategy. Aspiring politicians saw little value in investing in a collective enterprise of building a party rather than constructing a personalized machine for winning elections in a given geographically defined electoral district. Although proposals to introduce a fully proportional electoral system were already being advocated by the newly formed political parties in the beginning of the 1990s, these proposals were repeatedly rejected in the parliament. Such proposals threatened to undermine clientelistic networks and to deprive local powerbrokers of their competitive advantage and thus were discarded by the successive legislative majorities in the 1990s. The same majorities also endorsed lax parliamentary rules for the formation of legislative groupings and factions. For most of the pre-2006 period these rules required only 14 deputies—three per cent of the legislature—to form a parliamentary group. Deputies elected under party labels in either SMD or, later, under PR, always had the option to join one of such ad-hoc groupings, further undermining the value of a party label. This situation changed as a result of intra-elite compromises that followed the 2004 Orange Revolution, when election fraud during the 2004 presidential election inspired mass mobilization. The adoption of a fully proportional electoral system was one of the outcomes of this intra-elite bargaining. Constitutional reform that weakened the legislative and non-legislative powers of the president was another major outcome of this compromise. The 2006 and then pre-term 2007 parliamentary elections, which were held according to a closed list PR system in one nationwide district, also dramatically changed the role and position of parties in the political system. Parties now had full control over legislative representation which makes MPs dependent on party labels, while parties have started investing heavily in infusing their evolving organizational structures with programmatic agendas and meanings. New party assertiveness expressed itself in the overhaul of parliamentary rules after the 2006 elections, when the power to make and break government coalitions in the parliament was reserved exclusively for parties—the rights of individual deputies to

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join or leave a coalition was no longer recognized. In the aftermath of constitutional reform, the country´s Constitutional Court confirmed the legality of this provision. The provision further strengthened political parties by making them key actors in the government formation process and increasing the identifiability and transparency of this process for the voters. These new procedures for forming a governing coalition, however, were overturned in 2010, when new president Victor Yanukovytch assumed office and reinstated the earlier rules despite protests from the opposition in parliament. Remarkably, the Constitutional Court approved the restoration of the old parliamentary rules, reflecting its usual willingness to serve the interests of whoever is in power. The pro-Yanukovych government coalition, which would have been impossible without a number of individual deputies who defected from opposition factions, was thus legitimated by the Court. As a result, the number of switches by MPs has since increased again. Among the defectors from the opposition factions were a number of business people, some of whom informally explained their decision to support the new coalition by the fear of government actions against their businesses if they were to remain in opposition. Other defectors appear to have been rewarded with the allocation of government posts to their close relatives. Overall, political parties lost their ability to control their deputies. The Presidency The strong legislative and non-legislative powers of the president during the pre-2006 period, along with a weak system of checks and balances, led to the complete dominance of the presidential office in Ukraine´s political system during that period. Presidential dominance had a number of negative effects on the programmatic evolution of political parties. These effects can be divided into the by-products of the existing system of governance and intentional efforts to weaken parties. The initial period of Ukraine´s post-communist transition was dominated by the presidency of Leonid Kuchma who served twice in office from 1994 until 2004. Kuchma was an officially non-partisan president who relied on ad-hoc coalitions of partisan and independent deputies in the parliament to govern. The presidential office used selective incentives or sanctions to ensure the compliance of the majority of deputies with the president’s legislative agendas. Legislative majorities were constructed in such a way that they provided an endorsement for presidential policies and cabinet appointments. Precisely because these majorities were only able to endorse, rather than to author, policy decisions and appointment, legislative activity contributed little to the emancipation of political parties. Consequently, successive Ukrainian cabinets, the formation of which required legislative participation, were seen as agents of the president. In turn, parties’ limited involvement in cabinet formation denied them the opportunity to use cabinet formation and maintenance as a means of strengthening the coherence of party policy profiles and preparing party candidates for executive positions. President Kuchma also intentionally created new barriers to the emergence of stronger parties. He found that maintaining the SMD segment of electoral competition suited his goals of power accumulation and therefore consistently used his control of legislative majorities to prevent the success of legislative initiatives intended to introduce a fully proportional electoral system for parliamentary elections. His opposition to such an electoral system persisted even after he sanctioned the construction of pro-presidential party projects. However, the period of inter-elite bargaining after 2004 created the opportunity for constitutional reform, which substantially weakened presidential powers and denied Kuchma´s successor Victor Yushchenko many of the instruments that his predecessor

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had use to maintain a central role in the political process. It is important to note that this reform was not the translation of the preferences of the most powerful political actors at the time into formal rules; it was a result of an exogenous shock delivered by the Orange Revolution’s mass mobilization events. Among the non-legislative powers that the Ukrainian president lost were cabinet nomination powers. During the 2006–9 period the choice of cabinet and its prime minister was entirely in the hands of a parliament controlled by political parties. The full responsibility for cabinet formation proved to be a highly important factor for strengthening the organizational and programmatic capacities of all parliamentary parties, as all of them participated in the formation of successive cabinets during this period. Constitutional rules were revised again in the middle of 2010 when the newly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, pushed the reinstatement of the old version of the constitution through the Constitutional Court. The reacquisition of strong legislative and non-legislative powers by the president once again changed the basic rules of the game. However, in comparison to Kuchma´s period, president Yanukovych faced a much more institutionalized party system. At the time of writing, it therefore remains to be seen whether the re-introduction of a constitutionally strong presidency will again substantially undermine parties’ abilities to structure political processes along programmatic lines. Party finance rules Unlike rules governing parliamentary elections or the allocation of executive powers, party finance rules have not been the subject of game-changing revisions. The major continuity in terms of finance rules is the absence of public funding for political parties. The majority of political parties in Ukraine are chronically under-funded. The complete absence of budget financing for day-to-day party expenses are among the key barriers preventing political parties to maintain their operations. Scarcity of public money and insufficiency of membership dues—parties probably cannot afford to charge considerable amounts to their members due to most members’ low incomes—make the contributions of corporate sponsors particularly critical for sustaining the financial vitality of political parties (Protsyk and Walecki, 2007). Parties could be conceptualized as being involved in exchanges with the two types of constituencies: vote-rich and resource-rich (Kitschelt 2000). Relations of Ukrainian parties with the first type of constituency—the ordinary voters—have been increasingly structured along programmatic lines. Party relations with the second type of constituencies—various interest groups and, first of all, oligarchic business interests— remain highly clientelistic in nature. Parties continue to provide their business donors with policies that meet their preferences in terms of regulatory framework, budget procurements and property rights. A small number of the country’s richest business people continue to have a disproportionate influence on parties’ internal decision-making. The current system of party finance rules penalizes parties that try to compete in the political marketplace without the backing of special interests. Such parties simply lack the resources to build organizational structures and to run credible electoral campaigns. Even political parties with traditionally strong ideological linkages to the voters—the Communist Party of Ukraine, Rukh, and the Socialist Party of Ukraine—have to compromise their programmatic standing to ensure financial support. Two ways of doing this are to include numerous business leaders in their electoral lists—a common practice in some Eastern European countries (Protsyk and Matichescu, 2011)—and

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lobbying for the adoption of bills favouring particularistic interests of business groups in the legislature. There have been some attempts to introduce legislation to allow public funding of parties but to date they have failed. Parties that conditioned their organizational behaviour on expectations that public funding would be provided to support their operational needs have therefore suffered internal crises and organizational breakdowns. The fortunes of former president Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, are telling in this respect. One of the former managers recently explained how the party’s attempts to make transparent its financial operations in anticipation of the legislative passage of a public funding bill led the party to stop relying on a common practice of under-the-table payments and to borrow money in the expectation of the passage of the new law. Thus when the legislation failed to make it through the parliament, the party was unable to pay back the large debts that it had incurred, and so was unable to pay party functionaries and fund party activities (Leshchenko, 2011). The absence of public funding not only increases the dependency of parties on corporate donors, it also motivates ruling parties to use their access to state administrative resources as a source of funding for partisan activities. For example, the local organization of a ruling party is sometimes established by drawing on the personnel and the infrastructure of executive governmental agencies. Local state administrations are then used to ensure the membership growth of party organizations. At the same time, municipal authorities are pressed to provide better terms of rent for party offices while local tax administrations are engaged to ‘encourage’ local businesses to make contributions to the party. International influences Ukraine’s proximity to the European Union is an important factor in the country’s political evolution. The country’s engagement with the European Union and other Western institutions and structures has had positive effects on the levels of programmaticity of party politics. These Western influences can be grouped into two major categories. First, the close contacts with Western institutions stimulate and reinforce elements of programmatic structuring that are already present in the party system. For example, Ukraine’s main political parties seek close ties with ideologically similar party groups in the European Parliament and membership in international party unions. Such membership enhances a party’s reputation on the domestic scene, enables access to resources controlled by international unions, such as international conferences and staff training on internal organizations or campaign matters, and creates partners for lobbying such important decision-making bodies as the European Parliament on Ukraine-related foreign policy matters. To meet their European counterparts’ expectations of ideological proximity or to satisfy criteria for membership in international party unions, Ukrainian parties have to invest in elaborating coherent programmatic stances. Three Ukrainian parties, for example, had in the 2000s an observer status with Europe’s largest union of parties, the European People’s Party (EPP). These parties were Rukh, Our Ukraine, and Bat’kivshchyna (led by Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc). Our Ukraine and Bat’kivshchyna have subsequently become members of the EPP. Bat’kivshchyna’s decision to seek an observer status and later, in 2008, a membership status with the EPP caused especially large debates both inside the party and in the media. The reason for this was that the party’s charismatic female leader Yulia Tymoshenko initially positioned herself as a supporter of centre-left ideology. During internal party debates, programmatic documents of the Socialist

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International, Party of European Socialists, and the European People’s Party were distributed and discussed by party membership (Nemyria 2007). While Bat’kivshchyna’s decision to opt for the union with the EPP has so far done little to transform the nature of the party’s highly populist and unstructured appeal to the voters, it undoubtedly stimulated collective thinking inside the party about the importance of ideological positioning and the need to enhance party capacities to generate programmatic materials. Secondly, engagement with Western institutions limits the space available for Ukrainian parties to engage in clientelistic exchanges and to abuse norms and principles of programmatic political competition. As Ukraine moves closer to fulfiling its ambitions of having an association agreement with the EU and being more integrated into other Western structures, it becomes more difficult for Ukrainian parties to sustain patrimonial politics. Currently, the ruling party’s efforts to politicize courts and the civil service or to limit the independence of media get a lot international attention and criticism. In particular, the conditionality powers of the EU have been increasingly important in constraining the undemocratic impulses of Ukrainian political leaders. Role of individuals None of the main political parties in Ukraine have yet become a ‘perpetually lived organization,’ that is to say an organization whose existence is independent of the lives of its members. Recent scholarship highlights the importance of having such organizations in various realms of public life in order to secure countries’ entrance into the club of most developed societies (North, Wallis and Weingast, 2009). Almost all main Ukrainian parties are led by the individuals who created them or presided over their initial accession to a group of electorally successful organizations. The relatively short period of the existence of the Ukrainian party system, which has not yet exceeded the average time span of a politician’s career, makes it difficult to estimate the effects of leadership changes on party survival and performance. Personalistic politics was especially widespread during the pre-2006 period. Many smaller party projects that, nevertheless, had some representation in parliament, were fully controlled by one individual or a small group of individuals capable of financing essential party expenses. These individuals were often successful business people. In such cases the party organization often became an opportunistic label, devoid of any coherent ideological standing and geared to pursue the economic interests of its oligarchic leadership. The restructuring of Ukrainian party politics after 2006 squeezed these ‘centrist’ parties out of the mainstream and denied them parliamentary representation. The highly personalized nature of party leadership is nonethess still a feature of some of the more institutionalized parties that have tended to dominate party politics recently. Significantly, there is little evidence that leaders of these parties extend great effort to foster the programmatic coherence of their organizations. Instead, party leaders usually attempt to cultivate their personal charisma, a strategy that is often at odds with the strengthening of a party’s ideological profile. There are, however, a few examples where party leaders’ behaviour is consistent with the goals of establishing a ‘perpetually lived organization’. The leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, which has already been discussed in this study, stepped out of office after the party failed to cross the electoral threshold and win parliamentary representation in the 2007 election. This is a rare example in which a prominent party leader took responsibility for an organization’s failures. The highly personalized tradition of Ukrainian politics has led to a situation where the personality of the leader is an important element of the party’s general profile and its efforts to maximize the party label’s recognition with voters. This is, probably,

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one of the factors explaining party members’ unwillingness to replace leaders even when party statutes provides ready-to-use mechanism to accomplish this. Path of programmatic development The discussion presented above illustrates the multiplicity of factors that have influenced programmatic development of Ukrainian parties. The path to a programmatic party system in the Ukrainian case is closely linked to party system institutionalization. It is important to note that Ukraine has had parties that were programmatically oriented from the moment they were founded, prior to the period when the party system became institutionalized. The Communist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, and Rukh—all established in the early 1990s—have a strong programmatic orientation. The first two could be considered as successor parties of the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU)—their ability to develop programmatic appeal was enhanced by the fact that they inherited skills, resources and the loyalty of an ideologically driven segment of the CPSU membership base. Rukh rose to prominence as an ideological alternative to the CPSU and its programmatic character is a product of ideologically driven confrontation between pro-communist and anti-communist forces in the early 1990s. Ukraine’s institutional choices that were made during this initial period of post-communist transition—a combination of constitutionally very powerful non-partisan presidency and a majoritarian electoral system—had, however, the effect of severely limiting the role of parties in the political system. Other types of political actors— sectoral and regional interest groups, executive government bureacracies—came to dominate legislature and national politics in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These fragmented groups also started to create numerous clientalistically oriented party projects that proved to be relatively succesful in securing parliamentary representation for several groupings of regional and sectoral elites during this period. The early programmatic parties, which tried to mobilize voters on the basis of class divisions, lost out in competiton with clientelistic party projects backed by the almighty presidential office and became small niche parties by the early 2000s. The major constititutional revisions in the middle of the 2000s—the weakening of the power of the presidential office and the introduction of a full PR system—put parties at the centre stage of the nation’s politics and stimulated the process of party system institutionalization. The rules and nature of inter-party competition have recently started to exibit a degree of stabilization; parties can now also claim to have more extensive roots in society. These developments are signs of party system institualization (Mainwaring and Torcal 2006). Such institutionalization in its turn provides incentives for parties to develop their programmatic profiles and to use programmatic positioning as a basis for activities in various political arenas. Thus, system-level developments in the Ukrainian context are a major source of pressure on parties to become more programmatic. The example of the Party of Region—the largest party in the Ukrainian parliament in the 2006 and 2007 electoral cycles, whose leader also won the 2010 presidential elections—is telling in this respect. The party, established in the late 1990s by regional elites in one of Ukraine’s industrially developed provinces in the east of the country, was a typical example of a clientalistic political machine created to serve the political interests of one of many groupings of provincial elites. When its leader Victor Yanukovych became the national political establishment’s candidate in the 2004 presidential elections, for the first time the party faced a need to develop nationwide organizational structures and articulate a coherent and structured ideological profile. A subsequent rounds of electoral competition—the 2006 and 2007 parliamentary races and the 2010 presidential elections—allowed the party to hone its ideological profile

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and to establish a degree of regularity in its interactions with various constituencies of the party. Party competition in the second half of the 2000s was organized primarily along ethnocultural dimensions. Such organization of inter-party contestation provides more limited opportunities for programmaticity gains than competition structured along class lines. In the case of Brazil discussed in this study, it was leftist parties that drove the programmatization of the party system. In the case of Ukraine, the politicization of ethnocultural differences makes it problematic to achieve a robust degree of programmatization. That is why two major parties that define the opposite ends of ethnocultural dimensions (but share much in terms of pro-market positioning on economic issues)—the Party of Regions and Our Ukraine—are classified in this study as weakly programmatic.

4.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics While political leadership in the Ukrainian political system has traditionally emanated from the presidential office, much of the executive decision-making has been concentrated in the cabinet. The latter included, on average, between twenty and thirty ministers responsible for various policy portfolios. The cabinet ministers were nominated by the president and approved by the parliament. Before the mid-2000s, the cabinets were dominated by appointees without party affiliation. They were usually technocrats who gained the confidence of the president and often had the support of various sectional interests in the parliament. Such a composition of the nation’s main executive body imposed considerable costs. As a result, Ukraine’s technocratic cabinets have suffered from a chronic fragmentation of cabinet policymaking and parochialism of ministerial interests (Sundakov, 1997). Fragmentation was the product of a situation in which individual politicians appointed to cabinet positions did not comprise a team bound together by shared political beliefs and programmatic goals. Ministers, who obtained their portfolios not because of their membership in political organizations but because of their individual merits and technical expertise, were inclined to be preoccupied with their department’s issues and not with the overall performance of the cabinet. Parochialism was manifested in a tendency by ministers, whose professional roots were in the industries they were now in charge of, to associate themselves with the interests of that particular sector rather than the public. These individuals viewed themselves as representatives of these sectors in the cabinet and tried to satisfy the demands of their sectional constituencies rather than the needs of the citizens who consume their goods or services. For example, the minister of transportation was more preoccupied with the wellbeing of transport-related bureaucratic structures and enterprises than with the quality of transportation services that consumers receive. The emancipation of parties and the development of their programmatic profiles, which were stimulated by the 2004 institutional changes, led to a sea change in processes of cabinet formation and ministerial decision-making. From the mid-2000s cabinets started to be composed of teams of like-minded politicians representing parties that formed a governing coalition. These politicians often possessed very limited or even no prior experience in the policy sectors they were assigned to but had a clear political mandate to bring about changes in the quality of policies and services produced or delivered by that specific ministry. For example, the Ministry of the Interior, which had always been headed by a professional police officer, received a democratic activist from a radical opposition party, Yuri Lutsenko, as its head after the Orange Revolution. He

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used his mandate to fight human rights abuses and the lack of openness and transparency in the work of the ministry. Quantitative reflection of changes in cabinet formation practices is presented in Figure 4 below. It shows changes in the share of partisan and technocratic ministers over time. For the purposes of comparison, the graph also provides similar data for one of Ukraine’s neighbours, Romania. Romania also opted for a semi-presidential design at the start of its transition but the constitution provided the president with very limited powers. As the graph indicates, there was a sharp drop in the number of non-partisan ministers in Ukraine after the mid-2000s. Romania, which started its transition with institutions that were much more conducive to emancipation of political parties, had a considerable number of non-partisan cabinet members in the first half of the 1990s but later on tended to select predominantly partisan candidates for cabinet positions.

Figure 4: Share of Partisan and Non-Partisan Cabinet Members in Romania and Ukraine

Source: Author’s own calculations.

The second example of the effects of greater programmaticity comes from the area of inter-ethnic relations. This example is less straightforward and more thought-provoking since it raises some questions about the desirability of having more programmatic competition on some policy dimensions. Immediately prior to the 2004 Orange Revolution, but even more so in the aftermath, the leading political parties started to elaborate their programmatic positions on ethnocultural issues and to use these positions as a key theme in electoral campaigns at local and national levels. Parties used ethnocultural themes to mobilize voters in their key core regional constituencies.

0

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1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010

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Graph 1. Share of Partisan and Non-Partisan Cabinet Members in Romania and Ukraine

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Electoral campaigns defined by the emphasis on strikingly different bundles of linguistic and cultural policies and related foreign policy orientations (pro-West vs. pro-Russia) had the effect of activating and accentuating these types of differences. Party policies in the aftermath of an election—through the control of such cabinet portfolios as education or culture—became ideologically charged and highly contested. Never before had the Ministry of Education and its language use of policies or history teaching programmes received so much attention among the general public in Ukraine. The polarization of public opinion on these matters highlighted the ever-existing regional differences in Ukraine and started to generate considerable challenges to the very idea of national unity. These challenges and the associated risks of territorial disintegration led parties to somewhat revise their stances on ethnocultural issues and decrease the emphasis on these issues in the most recent 2010 presidential electoral campaign. Parties had incentives to do this because the regional divide was not deep. There is a very large segment of the population, which is located in the nation´s centre both in terms of ethnocultural positioning and geographic location, which parties with different ethnocultural preference schedules are eligible to compete for. This example raises the question of whether competition on ethnocultural issues should be considered a case of programmatic competition. Kitschelt (2000) argues that ethnic and regional parties are by definition forms of clientelistic politics because they propose particularistic rather than universalistic principles for linkage formation. While Ukraine’s main political parties have a strong regional vote base, they manage to attract a considerable amount of electoral support across the main regional divides and thus could not be classified as regional or ethnic. They are nationwide parties that, at a certain stage of their development, opted to structure programmatic competition along ethnocultural lines. After learning about the risks of such competition for the long-term stability of the state, they are now in search of other competitive dimensions. Politicization of ethnocultural differences could be considered a form of programmatic competition, albeit a highly problematic one in its consequences.

4.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Ukrainian Case The combination of a semi-presidential framework with a powerful president and SMD electoral rules proved to have a negative effect on institutionalization and programmatic structuring of the party system in the Ukrainian case. Moreover, some findings from comparative work on the post-communist region also suggest that this particular institutional combination serves as a strong deterrent for the development of a party system and for strengthening parties’ programmatic capabilities (Birch, 2005; Protsyk, 2011). Party funding rules, which force parties to rely almost exclusively on private funding, were another feature of Ukraine’s institutional design shown to undermine programmaticity and to feed clientelistic circuits of exchange between parties and resource-rich constituencies. The supply side of the political marketplace in Ukraine in the early 1990s was characterized by the emergence of both programmatic and non-programmatic party offers. This case study has highlighted the development of two such programmatic projects: the Socialist Party of Ukraine, which tried to offer a modernized leftist alternative to voters, and Rukh, which appealed to rightwing voters. It was Ukraine´s specific choice of constitutional, electoral and party finance rules that weakened these parties’ abilities to compete in the political marketplace and contributed to the fact that they lost out in the competition with non-ideological party projects in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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The institutional changes that almost all of Ukraine’s ideological parties had advocated since the early 1990s—the introduction of PR rules and revision of the semi-presidential constitutional framework—were finally implemented in the second half of the 2000s. Party system emancipation is a result of these changes. The failure to implement another institutional measure—party finance reform—has led to the continuation of parties’ complete dependence on resource-rich constituencies, although this paper reports considerable progress in party efforts on building programmatic ties to vote-rich constituencies. All institutional features discussed here are modifiable, which provides room for policy discussions and interventions. These institutional choices, for example, will likely feature prominently on the agenda of current and future states in transition to democracy, or undergoing constitutional review. Whether it is debates about the basic parameters of constitutional design, electoral system choice, or party finance models, there is value in bringing evidence and experiences from other places to bear on the problem. It is true that the existing institutions are not the product of a haphazard choice; they are often in place because they reflect the preferences of the most powerful actors in a political system. This, however, does not mean that bringing additional information or engaging in deliberation about the pros and cons of different institutional solutions will have no effect on the distribution of preferences or on the probability of revisiting decisions made earlier. In the Ukrainian case, for example, propositions about introducing a full PR electoral system in the 1990s and the early 2000s were repeatedly rejected on the grounds that parties were too weak in terms of their organizational presence at the grass-root level and in terms of their limited policymaking capacities. Yet there was very little recognition in the public space of the fact that the preservation of existing electoral rules and cabinet formation practices in the Ukrainian context served as a major deterrent for the emancipation of political parties. Support for civil society organizations that advocate institutional change and raise awareness about relevant issues constitutes a useful policy intervention in such context. Equally missing from the understanding of the general public and, more importantly, from the understanding of the broadly defined policymaking community in Ukraine, is the importance of public funding for parties. This idea of introducing public funding provisions proved to be highly unpopular with the electorate, reducing the parliament’s will to undertake major reforms in this area. Clientelism-oriented politicians and the oligarchic business interests supporting them were only too happy to fight such proposals. These circumstances may be mirrored in other countries outside the developed world. Learning about successful experiences of making party finance reforms and disseminating this knowledge internationally could be an important mechanism for encouraging programmatic politics. Facilitating collaboration among national actors—a number of Ukrainian NGOs repeatedly raised the issue of public funding for parties—can help change regulations and laws that govern party finance. The ties of Ukrainian political parties with international party unions proved to provide an important stimulus for thinking about party ideologies and about the need to develop well-structured and stable ideological commitments. It is difficult to assess a contribution that such ties make to the implementation of declared programmatic principles into the actual day-to-day operation of parties in electoral and policymaking arenas. Even limited benefits that such ideological cross-fertilization brings to party ideological committees responsible for the quailty of party programmatic documents, however, deserve attention. When international ties are intense and regular the benefits might become more substantial.

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The Ukrainian case also highlights the importance of the broader legal and political environment for achieving greater levels of programmaticity in a party system. How parties act depends not only on the above listed institutions that directly determine constraints and incentives for party politicians’ behaviour but also on the situation in other domains such as the judicial system, the state bureaucracy and mass media. As this paper reports, the recent changes in constitutional and parliamentary rules, which restored old legislative coalitions and cabinet formation procedures and objectively weakened political parties, were the product of politically motivated decisions by the Constitutional Court. Policy efforts directed at fighting systemic corruption and strengthening the autonomy of the judicial system, neutrality of bureaucracy, or independence of mass media should be seen as making important contributions to the entrenchment of a more programmatically oriented political process and to the institutionalization of programmatic parties.

4.7 Bibliography Birch, S. (2000). Elections and Democratization in Ukraine. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Birch, S. (2005). ‘Single-member district electoral systems and democratic transition’,

Electoral Studies, 24, 281–301. D'Anieri, P. J. (2007). Understanding Ukrainian Politics: Power, Politics, and Institutional

Design. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Greif, A. & Laitin, D. (2004). ‘A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change’, American

Political Science Review, 98, 633–652. Harasymiv, B. (2002). Post-Communist Ukraine. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukraine

Studies Press. Katchanovski, I. (2006). Cleft Countries: Regional Political Divisions and Cultures in Post-

Soviet Ukraine and Moldova. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag. Kitschelt, H. (2000). ‘Linkages between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities’,

Comparative Political Studies, 33, 845–879. Kitschelt, H., Mansfeldova, Z., Markowski, R., & Toka, G. (1999). Post-Communist Party

Systems: Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leshchenko, S. (2011). ‘Roman Bezsmertnyi: Ia mozhu poiasnyty, chomu prohrav Yushchenko’. Ukrains´ka Pravda, internet edition, 15.06.2011.

Mainwaring, S. & Torcal (2006). ‘Party system institutionalization and party system theory after the third wave of democratization’, in R. Katz & Crotty (Eds.), Handbook of Party Politics. London: Sage

Matsuzato, K. (2002). ‘Elites and the party system of Zakarpattya Oblast': Relations among levels of party system in Ukraine’. Europe-Asia Studies, 54, 1267–1299.

Meleshevych, A. (2010). ‘Political Parties in Ukraine: Learning Democratic Accountability?’ In K. Lawson, B. He, & A. Kulik (Eds.), Political Parties and Democracy: Volume III: Post-Soviet and Asian Political Parties. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Nemyria, H. (2007). ‘Pro “zminu orientatsiji” v partii “Bat´kivshchyna”’. Ukrains´ka Pravda, internet edition, 08.08.2007.

North, D. C., Wallis, J. J., & Weingast, B. R. (2009). Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Protsyk, O. & Walecki, M. (2007). ‘Party Funding in Ukraine’, in D. Smilov & J. Toplak (Eds.), Political Finance and Corruption in Eastern Europe (pp. 189–209). Burlington: Ashgate.

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Protsyk, O. & Wilson, A. (2003). ‘Centre Party Politics in Russia and Ukraine: Patronage, Power and Virtuality’, Party Politics, 9, 703.

Protsyk, O. (2011). ‘Semi-Presidentialism under Postcommunism’, in R. Elgie, S. Moestrup, & Y.-S. Wu (Eds.), Semi-Presidentialism and Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan.

Protsyk, O. & Matichescu, M. L. (2011). ‘Clientelism and Political Recruitment in Democratic Transition: Evidence from Romania’, Comparative Politics, 43, 207–224.

Protsyk, O. (2012). ‘Ukraine’, in S. Berglund, J. Ekman, and K. Deegan-Krause (Eds.), Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Randall, V. & Svasand (2002). ‘Party Institutionalization in New Democracies’, Party Politics, 8, 5–29.

Sundakov, A. (1997). ‘The Machinery of Government and Economic Policy in Ukraine’, in P.K. Cornelius & P. Lenain (Eds.), Ukraine: Accelerating the Transition to Market. Washington: International Monetary Fund.

Whitmore, S. (2004). State Building in Ukraine: the Ukrainian Parliament, 1990-2003. (1st ed.) London: Routledge Curzon.

Wilson, A. (2006). Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Yale: Yale University Press. Wilson, A. & Birch, S. (1993). ‘Political Parties in Ukraine’, Europe–Asia Studies, 45, 693–

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5 Zambia

5.1 Introduction In Zambia, there have been several fleeting moments when politics has become more programmatic, but it is only since 2002 that an electorally successful form of populism has emerged. Its rise has been not only remarkable, but significant for programmatic politics elsewhere, because it has developed under conditions that other policy-based parties have found inhospitable. Between 1991 and 2011, Zambia was governed by a dominant party (Burnell 2002) surrounded by a fragmented, weak opposition (Simutanyi 2005). Party labels were not useful as descriptors of party policies (Lebas 2011). Rather, parties were connected to voters through clientelistic exchanges; politics was personal, ethnic and neo-patrimonial (Burnell 2001; Erdmann 2007; Posner 2006), features that were interconnected and mutually reinforcing (Van de Walle 2003; Manning 2005; Rakner and Van de Walle 2009). These characteristics can be found in other cases in Africa and beyond. The vehicle of programmatic politics since 2002 has been the Patriotic Front (PF). Led by the canny veteran Michael Sata, the PF adopted a set of innovative strategies, mobilizing both ethnic and urban constituencies, a practice that has resulted in the party being categorized as ‘ethnopopulist’ in the literature (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011). Employing this segmented voter strategy, Sata developed strong links to previously untapped constituencies by articulating unsung grievances and developing policies that respond to them—all of which enabled him to rise from the margins of political relevance to become the Republican President of Zambia in just ten years. This remarkable political innovation has broken the mould in Zambia’s Third Republic and affirms the importance of leadership, as hypothesized by the International IDEA Desk Review (Luna 2012). The origins of the PF are significant because they have shaped the type of programmatic politics that has emerged. The PF overcame barriers to party development in Zambia by adopting provocative messages that galvanized urban support and by tapping into old organizational networks and forms of popular protest that have their roots in the trade union movement. Zambia’s new politics is thus rooted in its old politics. This allowed the PF to overcome a range of obstacles to develop a programmatic platform, such as the ruling party’s monopoly over clientelistic resources, but it also led it to use uncompromising political rhetoric. The PF has responded to the mood on the street, and relied upon its leader’s unmediated relationship with voters to gain support. While this has helped it to develop programmatic linkages, it has stymied its programmatic development in other ways. As the PF has grown in popularity, it has absorbed smaller parties and party switchers, but this has diluted the coherence of the party and stretched its under-developed structures to breaking point. Moreover, since 2001, Sata has consolidated his electoral position without seeking to strengthen the party’s organizational capacity; as a result, the PF remains a weak programmatic party (Luna 2012: 4). Zambia offers important insights into how programmatic politics can emerge even in the most unlikely of contexts. Policy-based politics emerged because an opposition party responded to overlooked popular attitudes. The PF has blazed a trail that might be picked by both politicians and policymakers, for there may be many other countries in which the potential for programmatic politics has not been realized. However, the development of the PF has not been matched by the development of a programmatic party system. The lacklustre response of other parties to the challenge set out by the PF

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speaks of the failure of other parties to innovate, but also of the challenges that the way in which their core constituencies place limits on programmatic development: in short, many voters continue to expect ethnic appeals and clientelistic rewards. The Zambian case suggests that donors and policymakers should consider how they can help to develop the structures of new parties and guide the creation of not just programmatic parties, but programmatically structured party systems.

5.2 History of Programmatic Politics in Zambia Zambia was born of an independence struggle that galvanized large urban constituencies into action and placed at the centre a narrative of nationalism and an ideology of African socialism, called humanism in its Zambian incarnation. The United National Independence Party (UNIP) that led the anti-colonial struggle (Mulford 1967) won elections in 1964 and came to office with a strong party structure in high-density areas (Cheeseman 2006: 112) and a clear agenda: the nationalization of key industries, ambitious plans of state spending and careful ethnic balancing within state and party institutions. However, this agenda was steadily supplemented by authoritarian strategies to maintain power. Soon after, independence representatives of Bemba-speaking regions, notably the Copperbelt, Northern Province and Luapula Province, complained of marginalization. They felt that their positions and benefits did not satisfactorily reflect the critical role that they had played in the independence struggle. Led by Simon Kapwepwe, Bemba politicians captured vital party positions at the 1967 UNIP party conference, but after Kaunda was seen to side with another faction they left UNIP and formed the United Progressive Party (UPP). By leaving UNIP, they sparked a wave of by-elections over the ‘vacant’ seats in 1971, which most UPP candidates lost, in large part due to UNIP coercion. Although short-lived, the UPP critiqued the corruption and waste of the UNIP government and articulated the sectional demands of the Bemba constituency (Cheeseman 2006: 146). Fearing that the UPP would form an alliance with other opposition parties, Kaunda moved to establish a one-party state in 1972. UNIP subsequently sought to extend control by building corporate structures to control trade unions and establishing centralized control of local government (Cheeseman 2006). However, because UNIP party structures were largely unresponsive to local demands and quickly lost sight of the party’s founding principles, the employment of authoritarian measures to consolidate Kaunda’s grasp on power alienated voters and resulted in a period of rapid decline. After the prohibition of the UPP, the baton of opposition passed to the unions. Labour has a long history of activity and protest in Zambia. The Zambian Copperbelt was a hub of industrial mining and at independence their number had reached 102,000 (Lebas 2011: 83). As early as 1935, labour unions became important associations and foci of political action. Waves of strikes in 1935 and 1940 extracted better wages from employers. Following independence, labour unions grew increasingly belligerent, demanding better living conditions. In an attempt to quell demands for unaffordable wage increases, UNIP absorbed and took control of their organizational structures. A new centralized Zambian Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) was formed in 1964, designed to integrate urban workers into the ruling party, and in 1971 a one-union-per-sector policy was introduced, while union membership was made compulsory. This system was intended to empower UNIP to channel labour demands and grievances, and exert control over unions (Larmer 2011). However, rank-and-file union members continued to assert their independence from the ruling party and to protest against changes in public policy. During the mid-1970s, when Zambia’s terms of trade worsened as copper prices collapsed and oil prices rose, mineworkers began to protest against declining living standards. When labour leaders appeared to sell out to UNIP,

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mineworkers organized strikes independently, and resisted central control from the grass roots and middle tiers of their organizations (Larmer 2007). In the 1980s, as a currency crisis developed and economic fundamentals worsened, the government administered two successive structural adjustment programmes that were met with ‘wildcat strikes’. They were followed by further strikes and widespread rioting, and throughout the 1980s it was the unions that led national protest (Lebas 2011). Urban unrest and deeply damaging economic adjustment precipitated the fall of UNIP. The party’s erosion at grass-roots level meant that by the end of 1980s it had little mobilizational power and struggled to retain the loyalty of many Zambians. In 1990, at the Garden House Conference, a collection of intellectuals, trade unionists, businessmen and turncoat UNIP members formed the Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD). Although the party had little time to organize, and was at best a heterogeneous, loose coalition (Phiri 2005), it benefited from popular discontent with the one-party regime and upon the organizational base of the trade unions. ZCTU leader Frederick Chiluba was appointed president of the MMD at the second party conference in 1991. From then on, union infrastructure provided the backbone of the new party’s organization. Following Kaunda’s decision to reintroduce multi-party elections in 1991, the MMD’s effective campaign machine moved up a gear and capitalized on UNIP’s failure to resolve economic and governance crises. The MMD won a landslide victory and captured 75.8 per cent of the vote in the presidential election and 125 of the 150 seats in the National Assembly. In power, President Chiluba faced a number of challenges. The MMD had been borne on the back of popular discontent with Kaunda’s management of the economy and structural adjustment programmes, but to cope with continuing economic crisis the new government had no option but to pass further neo-liberal reforms (Rakner 2001). The unpopularity of these measures compounded the MMD’s fear of losing power. Wary of a UNIP revival, the MMD deployed an array of authoritarian tools to preserve their dominance, including constitutional gerrymandering, the abuse of police powers, violence and the misuse of state resources (Burnell 2002; Rakner 2003). These methods were compounded by internal infighting (Momba 2003), which led to UNIP’s decline. However, a series of other parties emerged, chiefly the United Party of National Development (UPDN). In 2000 to 2001, Frederick Chiluba made an unsuccessful attempt to change the party and republican constitutions and run for a third term as president. The bid was disputed bitterly within the MMD, and in the process 27 MPs were expelled from the party in 2000 and 2001 (Paget 2010), followed by others who resigned and joined the opposition, forming the Heritage Party (HP), the Forum for Democracy and Development (FDD) and the Zambian Republican Party9 (ZRP). Chiluba chose to appoint a weak candidate as MMD presidential candidate, Levy Mwanawasa (Paget 2010). In doing so, he overlooked Party Secretary Michael Sata, who left the party and formed the PF. Together, this array of parties created a crowded, fragmented political opposition. The MMD won the 2001 election, but Mwanawasa secured only 29 per cent of the vote—a lead of only two per cent over the UPND. By the time of the 2006 general election, the MMD had consolidated its support base. MMD reclaimed much of Western Province in 2006 by bringing back critical former members, winning 13 of the 17 seats there, in contrast to the three seats they won in 2001, and drove UNIP out of Eastern Province, securing 15 of the 19 of the available seats by drawing into the fold old UNIP members, including Rupiah Banda. The return of former MMD members from FDD, UPND and HP

9 The Republican Party had been formed after an earlier fallout that saw Benjamin Mwila leave the MMD in the year 2000.

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was critical to the recovery of the party and its change in support. These ‘homecomings’ were made possible by an internal power struggle within the MMD which saw former president Chiluba and many of his allies driven from the party by the Mwanawasa. Chiluba’s departure removed the main barrier to the return of these old members, but in doing so cost the MMD other constituencies. MMD support fell in Chiluba’s heartland, the Bemba-speaking Copperbelt, Northern and Luapula Provinces. Dramatic changes also occurred in the support base of other parties. After the death of the UPND leader in 2004, the party suffered from a painful split and lost support outside its Southern Province stronghold. There was also significant volatility in the fortunes of other parties. UPND and FDD took Lusaka in 2001, but lost it in 2006. Together, these changes made for a highly fluid party system, centred on a ruling party that used its position as incumbent to ensure its continued electoral viability, and a divided opposition made up by parties that lacked the organizational integrity or party unity to avert factionalism, especially in the context of solicitations from the ruling party.

Figure 5: Zambian Presidential Election Results, 2001–2011

Source: African Elections Database, http://africanelections.tripod.com/zm.html, accessed 24 September 2011.

One of the least noted opposition parties in the 2001 elections was the PF, which received only three per cent of the vote, most of which was concentrated in the Copperbelt area, home to many Bemba speakers of Sata’s ethnic group. Following the poor showing in the 2001 elections, Sata began to hold rallies, which was seen as unusual (Katele 2010) given that national elections were four years away. However, it soon emerged that Sata was using these rallies to take advantage of the MMD’s ailing support in Bemba-speaking regions between 2002 and 2006. During this period the PF leader drew upon his time as a man-of-action city administrator in Lusaka and honed a performance style that spoke to the grievances of the poor and those dissatisfied with government performance. From this point on the PF quickly emerged as a major force in Zambian politics. Having only secured one MP in 2002, Sata gained 29 per cent of the presidential vote in 2006, trailing Mwanawasa by just 14 per cent—the best performance by an opposition party. At this point, the PF’s voter base was centred in the Bemba-speaking provinces, where they won 37 of the 57 parliamentary seats, and

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Lusaka, where the PF took seven of the 12 seats. In the 2008 presidential by-election that followed the death of Levy Mwanawasa, Sata secured 38 per cent of the poll, losing by just two per cent to the MMD’s Rupiah Banda. In the 2011 presidential election, Sata once again expanded his support base and won a remarkable victory, scooping 43 per cent of the poll10, the highest vote received by one candidate since 1996 (figure 4).

5.3 Conceptualization and Description of Programmatic Parties In the Third Republic, the political struggles described in section 5.2 did not translate into policy agendas that parties employed to connect to voters until the mid-2000s. With few exceptions, parties mobilized using other strategies, and did not represent party members with cohesive policy preferences—and most still fit this characterization. However, the emergence of the PF marked a notable departure from this norm. The similarities between Sata’s narrative of MMD failure and the desires of the PF’s support base suggest that there are programmatic linkages between the PF and its supporters. However, unbundled, the different ways in which the PF’s mobilization strategies are segmented geographically reveals a more complicated picture. Moreover, the PF has low levels of party cohesion and policymaking capacities. Consequently, though the PF employs some programmatic strategies, it is best described as a weak programmatic party (Luna 2012: 4) that benefits from a mixture of programmatic and non-programmatic support. In Zambia, many moments of political conflict have been decidedly programmatic. In addition to UNIP’s nationalist campaign and the struggle of the UPP to represent mounting frustration among workers and the poor at the emergence of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie parasitic on the state, the MMD won a landslide victory in 1991 because of mass frustration with the poor governance and desperate economic conditions that had epitomized the one-party state (Rakner 2003). In 2001, the breakaway of MPs from the MMD and the formation of the FDD and HP resulted in part from internal conflict within the ruling party over Chiluba’s bid for an unconstitutional third term. Although personal ambition affected whether leaders came out for or against Chiluba (Burnell 2001), ideological objections to the subversion of the constitution played a crucial role in galvanizing opposition (Paget 2010), as did the efforts of a high-powered civil society campaign coordinated by the Oasis Forum (VonDoepp 2005). In each of these political struggles, political competition focused on public goods, with parties often competing to demonstrate a greater credibility in the provision of valence goods such as economic growth and reduced corruption. However, in none of these instances did voter mobilization become consistently based around these issues. After taking power in 1991, both the MMD and opposition parties chose to mobilize on personalistic, clientelistic or ethnic campaigns. The very high rate of party switching amongst both MPs and entire party branches (Burnell 2001; Lebas 2011; Kalaluka 2011) is a good indicator of the low value assigned to party labels and the irrelevance of individual commitment to the values of a particular party (Lebas 2011). Insofar as the two major parties in 2001 had programmatic bases, they were neo-liberal ones that focused on the generation of business-friendly environments and privatization (Simutanyi 2005; Rakner 2003) Yet both of these platforms were remarkably out of kilter with popular policymaking preferences at the time. As Afrobarometer data presented later in this paper illustrates, there is overwhelming consensus in Zambia of the need for the state to play a leading role in development and the regulation of the private sector which contrasts with the programme that the MMD was pursuing at the time. 10 Based on results from 143 of 150 constituencies, pending complete results.

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Indeed, even the PF did not mobilize on popular appeals in 2001. Instead, the party’s manifesto was economically liberal and promised to cut taxes and focused on prudent financial management (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 626). The base of the party, moreover, was geographically concentrated. The PF only won substantial votes in the Copperbelt, and was described by Scarritt (2006) as a ‘potentially ethnic party’. Somewhat surprisingly, in the 2001 election no party effectively sought to represent the more ‘leftist’ views of urban workers and the majority of ordinary Zambians. However, after the 2001 election, the PF began a process of political learning (Cheeseman and Ford 2011). Sata realized that votes could be captured by speaking to the grievances of large, impoverished constituencies, who believed that their needs had not been met by past or present MMD governments. In doing so, Sata benefited from the experience of working with former President Chiluba, perhaps the only other Zambian of that political generation that effectively employed a populist style of mobilization, although less systematically so. In the run-up to the 2006 polls, the PF began to articulate a vision of a more proactive role for the state in the economy. Sata promised that, it elected, he would make ‘Zambia for Zambians’, ensure that 49 per cent of privatized companies remain in Zambian hands, and promised that 25 per cent of these companies would be allocated to workers (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 627). Sata connected the role of the state in the economy to the illegitimate collusion between corrupt politicians and international business, and portrayed himself as a man that could use state power to upset this status quo. Encouraged by positive responses to his message on the ground, as the elections neared he mounted a campaign against irresponsible foreign, and especially Chinese, business in Zambia. In particular, Sata criticized Chinese businesses for entering markets that should be reserved ‘for Zambians’ (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 627), was outspoken on the conduct of the Chinese Non-Ferrous Metal Corporation after protesting workers were fired upon (Fraser and Lungu 2009) and accused the Chinese embassy of financing of the MMD. By portraying the relationship between the Chinese and the MMD as the cause of Zambian problems, the PF was able to portray Sata as the defender of Zambian interests (Fraser and Larmer 2007). In summary, Sata’s programmatic agenda:

1. was in favour of state intervention to support low-income households and reduce inequality;

2. supported trade unions and better working conditions for workers, especially in the mining sector;

3. was nationalistic, and to this end supportive of a unifying ‘Zambian’ identity rather than a set of sub-national ethnic identities;

4. emphasized practical action and the integrity of state officials; 5. was in favour of self-sufficiency in relation to western donors and the

IMF/World Bank; and 6. advocated enforcing tough standards on foreign countries and companies that

wish to do business in Zambia, most notably, but not limited to, the Chinese. Significantly, Afrobarometer data suggests that it was precisely these policy positions that motivated Zambians to vote for him. Using survey data collected in 2009, Cheeseman and Ford show that supporters of the PF were more likely to believe that the economic reforms introduced by the MMD had hurt most Zambians and were more likely to rate the MMD’s economic policies poorly. In addition, 83 per cent of PF supporters are of the opinion that the government should control the sale of copper (2011: 14). These beliefs sit comfortably within the PF’s critique of the MMD’s neo-liberal agenda. Moreover, Cheeseman and Ford find that supporters of the PF were more

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likely to distrust Zambian state institutions and to perceive Zambian state institutions to be corrupt (2011: 14), which is consistent with the PF’s attack on the widespread corruption of the MMD. The consistent support for the PF from key constituencies in Lusaka and the Bemba-speaking provinces in the 2006, 2008 and 2011 elections, and the close match between the party’s agenda and its supporters’ beliefs, provides strong evidence that Sata effectively created programmatic linkages to the electorate. However, despite this the PF has also been reliant on Sata’s personal appeal to communicate its message to voters. The party’s use of large rallies to reach voters—necessary because of the PF’s lack of funds and state control of mass media—has underlined the personal link between the PF leader and certain constituencies, at the expense of the party itself. As a result, the linkages the PF has formed have been partly charismatic. Sata’s reputation as a direct, no-nonsense man of action willing to stick up for the little guy has given the party’s programmatic appeals credibility. It is the powerful combination of Sata’s effective campaigning and well-designed programmatic appeals that enabled the PF to establish an electoral base despite the notable segmentation of PF support. Cheeseman and Hinfelaar (2010) present statistical data showing that voters in urban and peri-urban areas are more likely to vote for the PF. However, Bemba-speaking voters are also more likely to vote for the PF in rural areas partially because there is a greater propensity for Bemba speakers to hold the key beliefs identified above that align with PF policies (Cheeseman and Ford 2011: 13). The PF thus reaches two segmented core constituencies, one urban and populist, and another rural and Bemba, but reaches both with a partially coherent message. Consequently, the PF is an ethno-populist party (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011). Under the terms set out in Section 1.2, the PF is also an ethnic–programmatic party. While the PF employs programmatic linkages, it is not a fully programmatic party. The PF does not have organizational structures that can diffuse these programmatic preferences within the party, reproduce them, and police their communication and pursuit. Several commentators have described the PF’s internal organization as informal (Fraser and Larmer 2007) or weak (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011). The PF therefore has programmatic linkages but limited organizational capacity to reproduce and pursue those goals, which makes it a weak programmatic party. Although Sata has only been in power for three months at the time of writing, the PF’s performance to date is consistent with this assessment. So far, the party has demonstrated a commitment to programmatic goals, but one that has had to be adapted to deal with the reality of managing an underdeveloped and fragile economy. In the first weeks of office, the minister for mines advocated a windfall tax (Silwamba 2011) and the acquirement of 35 per cent state ownership of mining companies (Chisala 2011). At the time of writing, these policy suggestions have been reversed, and the Sata administration has only adopted modest fiscal measures that are redistributive and focus on the mining sector. Sata’s rhetoric against Chinese investors has also been scaled back. Just over a month into his presidency, Sata dispatched first president Kenneth Kaunda as a special envoy to China in order to repair relations (Lusaka Times 2011). Given the weakness of the party’s organization and the consequent lack of institutionalization of programmatic strategies, there is also the danger that over time the PF will suffer from policy drift and will end up as a ‘policy switcher’ party that disappoints its supporters by failing to deliver on its promises.

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Table 9: Zambian Party Profiles

Party name Party organization Party linkages Party type

Patriotic Front Weak party organization. Low policymaking capacity. Little internal democracy. Connected to strong local networks.

Blend of programmatic, charismatic and ethnic linkages, principally to urban and peri-urban areas, and Bemba.


Movement for Multiparty Democracy

Limited party organization. Low policymaking capacity. A history of combative internal politics. Falling grass-roots support.

Ethnic, clientelistic, charismatic linkages, in predominantly rural areas.

Clientelistic party.

United Party for National Development

Mediocre party organization. Low policymaking capacity. Lacklustre internal democracy since a decisive party split in 2005.

Ethnic, clientelistic, charismatic linkages, principally from Lozi and Tonga speakers in Southern, Western and Central Provinces.

Ethno-regional party.

5.4 Causes of and Impediments to Programmatic Politics In the past, programmatic parties had not developed in Zambia. The choices made by opposition and incumbent party leaders together created a party system in which the governing party was dominant, the opposition was fragmented, and parties had strong clientelistic and ethnic mobilization networks but weak partisan reputations. The PF emerged when realignments in this party system generated multiple unrepresented constituencies. Internal MMD conflicts left Bemba constituencies feeling excluded, constituencies that provided a convenient stepping stone to a wider programmatic agenda. However, the rapid expansion of the PF has created strains on the party that have stretched its thin organization and weakened its programmatic base. The challenge of clientelism Since the foundation of the Third Republic, a series of mutually reinforcing mechanisms have impeded the development of programmatic politics. First, dominant incumbent parties in neo-patrimonial, electoral–authoritarian states have few reasons to develop programmatic appeals. The MMD was able to control the development of the opposition by harassing and co-opting its members. It also divided the PF in 2008 by forming a constitutional assembly in which some ‘rebel’ PF members sat, despite instructions to the contrary from the party leadership, and undermined opposition unity by interfering in the elite alliances between the PF and UPND in 2006 and 2008 (Scott 2009; Mwaanga 2010). By doing so, the ruling MMD kept the opposition weak, divided and incapable of developing effective programmatic appeals. Their continual electoral dominance in the 1990s permitted the MMD to let their programmatic reputation and organizational structures decay (Lebas 2011). Although there is evidence that the MMD repositioned itself in response to popular PF proposals (Cheeseman and Hinfelaar 2010), the MMD has been relying extensively on state resources (Mulikita 2010) to underwrite clientelistic methods of mobilization. Concordantly, in electoral authoritarian states, opposition parties are incentivized to adopt short-term strategies that shore up support in electoral heartlands, rather than

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developing wide-reaching programmatic appeals (Rakner and Van de Walle 2009). Given the low chances of winning elections outright, opposition politicians can best maximize their influence and consequent rewards by seeking to become the dominant brokers between larger political parties and their own regions, and can maximize their individual profiles by becoming heads of their own parties (Cooper 2010). In contexts in which the political salience of ethnicity is high, this is best achieved by developing ethno-regional appeals and entering into powerful patron–client networks—strategies that marginalize party labels and organizations. In Kenya, the executive chose to consolidate power by developing a network of strong ethnic brokers as early as the 1960s (Cheeseman 2006: 160). Small ethno-regional constituencies, in turn, were left out in the cold and lost out in allocations of resources. Since multiparty elections were convened in 1992, Kenyan elites have consistently chosen to leave parties in order to consolidate core ethnic constituencies (Elischer 2008). Such strategies are evident in Zambia, where there were 28 registered parties in 2003 (Simutanyi 2005). In particular, the division of MMD defectors in 2001, between the FDD, UPND and HP, represented a moment at which politicians chose fragmentation over consolidation. The barriers to programmatic development, moreover, are underpinned by structural factors in rural constituencies. Levels of education are noticeably lower in rural areas compared to urban areas (Chapoto et al 2011). This has significant implications for the quality of information that individuals receive and their ability to process it critically. Whereas 75 per cent of urban respondents listen to radio news at least several times a week, only 56 per cent of rural respondents do (Afrobarometer 2010). Equally, as expenditure focused on rural areas represents a small proportion of total government spending (Akroyd and Smith 2007), and rural poverty is higher (Chapoto et al 2011), rural citizens are more receptive to patron–client exchanges. The literature is unclear about the extent and form of neo-patrimonial social structures in Zambia. While the access of public officials to state funds is well documented (Van Donge 2008), the forms of clientelism employed in rural areas, and the reliance upon chiefs, MPs and informal structures, is a topic of ongoing research. However, it is clear that non-programmatic parties have consistently secured rural support while struggling to mobilize in urban areas. By 2001, the MMD had lost support in Lusaka and urban areas (Fraser and Larmer 2006) and by 2006 the party had become heavily reliant on the rural vote to fend off the challenge posed by the PF and Sata. Moreover, the geographical distribution of votes suggests that ethnicity plays an important role in structuring political behaviour (Owei-Hwedie 1998). Overall, clientelism and patterns of ethnic mobilization in Zambia have led to weak, small opposition parties doomed to opposition or dependent upon the ruling party (Simutanyi 2008). These choices by incumbent and opposition parties led to high rates of party switching, especially between opposition parties and the MMD, which in turn has undermined party labels and reputations (Tavits 2007; Lebas 2011). These characteristics of parties and party systems have been observed elsewhere. Political parties in Africa have been typically described as ethnic (Erdmann 2004; Horowitz 1985), in possession of weak organizational structures, noninstitutionalized, clientelistic and non-programmatic (Erdmann 2004; Salih 2003; Carothers 2006; Van de Walle 2003; Basedau and Stroh 2008; Carbone 2007); while party systems are often cauterized as featuring a dominant party and a fragmented and weak opposition (Van de Walle 2003; Manning 2005; Rakner and Van de Walle 2009). Together, these mechanisms have generally worked to impede the development of programmatic parties.

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Structural determinants of programmatic politics The rise of an ethnic–programmatic party within such a party system can only be explained with reference to the ability of the PF to harness the support of Zambia’s urban workers and the importance of the labour movement to political change. Organized labour and mineworkers have been a consistent source of radical politics in Zambia. As early as the 1930s, trade unions were popular vehicles for worker demands against mining companies on the Copperbelt. Such was the strength of unions that the wage bill for African mineworkers in Zambia doubled between 1950 and 1954, despite an increase in the labour force of just seven per cent (Lebas 2011: 82). By the late colonial period unionized workers had voted to abandon ‘tribal’ forms of representation, asserting their ‘class’ interests (Larmer 2007; Ferguson 1999). This dynamic continued after independence, as union members continued to campaign for better working conditions. When UNIP sought to use security forces to monitor and control unions in the 1980s, miners used their control of mining sites, and physical force to resist (Larmer 2006: 300). When radical union leaders were expelled from the ZCTU by UNIP, mineworkers went on strike until they secured their reinstatement. This culture of aggressive urban politics (Larmer 2007) created a potent base for potential populist politics that appealed to nation-regarding partisan issues, and which reached beyond ethno-regional lines. Along with this history of urban radicalism, continued economic decline in the 1990s and the unequal distribution of growth in the 2000s helped to spread and sustain a desire for an interventionist state, a role for the state that UNIP carved out and exemplified in their 27 years of rule. Despite this, between 1991 and 2001, public spending was scaled back and key assets were privatized. Consequently, formal sector employment fell, the industrial sector shrank and poverty in Zambia increased (Fraser and Larmer 2007). Zambia’s score in the Human Development Index declined in absolute terms from 0.462 in 1990 to 0.345 in 2000. Although it began to recover thereafter and reached 0.395 in 2010, the general trend was downward. Consequently, although economic growth averaged 5.3 per cent between 2001 and 2010, many became discontented with government policy. The negative impact of policies in the Third Republic is reflected in popular opinion surveys. The Afrobarometer Survey of 2009 found that between 74 and 90 per cent of respondents rated the government’s performance on a collection of economic issues negatively (Cheeseman and Ford 2011: 9). This resounding dissatisfaction with economic policies was matched by policy preferences that resonate with union demands and a large role for the state in policymaking. Between 60 and 80 per cent of Zambians surveyed in the Afrobarometer believe that the government should be solely responsible for providing most resources, including control of copper, a critical Zambian industry (75 per cent), and agricultural credit (77 per cent) (Cheeseman and Ford 2011: 9). Eighty per cent believe that the government should run key enterprises. This culture of aggressive urban politics and dissatisfaction with government policy (Larmer 2007) created a potent base for potential populist politics that appealed to nation-regarding partisan issues, and which reached beyond ethno-regional lines. Weyland (2001) offers a definition of populism that is transferable between cases, in which populism is a mobilization strategy by a personalized party that is multi-class or ethnic but has an urban base and connects the party leader directly to voters (Weyland 2001). Moreover, Fraser and Larmer (2007: 613) argue that the ‘logic of articulation’ employed by Sata connects the PF to a particular form of populism conceptualized by

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Laclau, whereby the populist describes a ‘people’ with legitimate demand that are frustrated by the illegitimate actions of a group of actors that form the status quo. Sata recognized that a populist appeal would be most effective if he could find a set of enemies to mobilize voters’ frustrations against, and so he directed criticism at international, and especially Chinese, investors. In the 2000s, a boom in the price of copper generated high returns for mining companies, but this little benefited the Zambian treasury as a result of the favourable deals that had been offered to companies in order to persuade them to invest in Zambia back when copper prices were lower. Chinese mine investors developed a (sometimes exaggerated) reputation for treating their workers poorly, paying lower average wages, and neglecting workers’ rights (Fraser and Lungu 2009). These grievances were compounded by high-profile images of Chinese managerial negligence such as an explosion at a Chinese-owned factory in which 46 Zambian were killed (Mwanawina 2008: 9). Protests that culminated in Chinese managers shooting Zambians at Chambishi Mine in 2008 and at Collum Coal Mine (Lombe, Silwamba & Chanda 2010) exacerbated anti-Chinese sentiment. Sata played on the public mood, adopting a populist strategy that spoke to widespread grievances by arguing that the MMD and international investors, especially Chinese investors, were ‘the powerful’, while the PF was on the side of the ordinary struggling Zambian. This approach, which effectively established a non-ethnic ‘them and us’ cleavage within Zambian politics, proved remarkably effective at mobilizing a cross-ethnic support base. By adopting a policy-based approach to policies that specifically addressed economic issues, the PF diverted energies that might have gone into creating an ethnic base into a civic appeal. By tapping into a culture of protest that lies in mining areas, the PF connected itself to a confrontational mode of politics that prevented compromise or co-optation with the ruling party, and so blunted the impact of clientelistic practices. Contingency and the role of leadership The constituencies that the PF set out to mobilize had become available as a result of a fortuitous set of circumstances amid the many realignments in Zambian politics in the 2000s. Given this, the rise of the PF cannot be explained by the absence of a discussion of contingent factors and the ability of leaders—in this case Sata—to take advantage of unexpected political change. After the election of President Mwanawasa in 2001, the MMD was wracked by a brief struggle for control (Paget 2010). Mwanawasa, the republican president, sought to free himself of the influence of the party president and former republican president, Chiluba. Mwanawasa’s executive powers won the day, and Chiluba and his key allies were not only forced from key positions in the party, but were made the targets of an Anti-Corruption Commission. Many of the leaders caught up in these proceedings were Bemba and had developed support in important Bemba constituencies, notably in the Copperbelt, Northern Province and Luapula Province. When they were imprisoned or ‘retired’ into the diplomatic service, their support base in these constituencies was left unclaimed. Significantly, these constituencies were those in which a populist would be most likely to win because they lie in areas with a history of urban radicalism. Bemba speakers are more likely than those of any other ethnic group to rate the MMD’s economic policies negatively, to distrust state institutions and to favour state intervention in the economy (Cheeseman and Ford 2011). In 2002, Sata faced a recruitment problem. PF senior party staff, when interviewed, described the difficulty of finding and training MP candidates between 2002 and 2006 (Scott and Kabimba 2009). In the 2001 election, the PF had returned only one MP. Although the internal conflict within the MMD had driven many senior allies of Chiluba

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from the party, Mwanawasa’s effective management of the conflict had not provided a pool of defective sitting MPs that could be easily approached. Moreover, in the 2006 elections the PF only managed to field candidates in a small number of constituencies; by contrast, a rival opposition alliance, the United Democratic Alliance (UDA), fielded candidates in almost every constituency in Zambia (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 625). The challenge of recruiting possible MP candidates was further exacerbated by the poor reputation of the party, which faced Sata with a catch-22 situation. Given their low standing in the 2001 tripartite elections, the PF could not convince potential candidates to join the party, or voters to support them, until others saw the PF as a viable opposition party. Equally, unless the party could recruit credible candidates, it was impossible for Sata to project this image of the party. This problem was compounded by the fact that by 2002, Zambia’s party system was saturated with young opposition parties, some of which threatened to lay claim to the Bemba-speaking constituencies that Sata had begun to mobilize in 2001. Michael Sata responded to this challenge in two main ways that demonstrate the significance of individual leaders to the evolution of programmatic parties. First, he used large rallies and mass media to build his profile and project himself as key politician in the area (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 630). Sata was able to draw upon his history as Governor of Lusaka, when he led a march against IMF-imposed structural adjustment programmes (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 624). Radio broadcasts allowed Sata to reach constituencies that would otherwise remain distant to election campaigns at a low cost. Sata’s caustic and plain-speaking oratory style, which earned him the nickname ‘King Cobra’, caught on quickly through these media. These strategies enabled Sata to circumvent his fledgling organizational base by speaking to voters directly; he thereby reached large constituencies before his competitors could. In doing so, he developed a mobilization strategy that depended upon his personality and his charismatic appeal to voters. More than any other party considered in this study, the PF rose on the back of its leader’s popularity. Second, Sata drew on the same networks that he had developed during his tenure as Party Secretary of the MMD. At the same time, Chiluba, keen to destabilize the Mwanawasa government that had brought charges of corruption against him, helped Sata to connect to a further set of organizational networks that included former union networks (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 625). As a result, the same networks that had provided support for the MMD in the late 1980s were now employed by the PF, who gained access to local resources and channels of information. This allowed Sata to reach grass-root supporters without constructing a formal or well-structured party organization. A secondary challenge for Sata was how to marry the more ‘ethnic’ support base that the PF had appealed to in 2001 to the more ‘programmatic’ base that the party developed in the run up to the 2006 polls. As described above, Bemba-speaking voters are more likely to share the policy attitudes of urban voters. These connections formed a bridge that allowed Sata to extend and maintain an ethnically focused appeal while preserving his reputation as a national politician. In Zambia, purely populist constituencies represent a limited proportion of the vote. In 2008, there were only 13 urban constituencies, and 39 peri-urban ones (Cheeseman and Hinfelaar 2010: 22), representing just over a third of all constituencies, and so Sata could not have won the 2011 election on ‘programmatic’ support alone. Because Bemba speakers were particularly open to populist appeals, he didn’t have to; rather, he could mobilize rural-Bemba and urban dwellers under one coherent campaign.

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Institutional landscape The Desk Review (Luna 2012: 44) found that electoral system choices had no effect on the emergence of programmatic politics. The evidence from Zambia supports this conclusion. Zambia has a president who is voted for in a single-round election, with a single member district (SMD) electoral system for the National Assembly. Other things being equal, both features should create barriers to the emergence of new parties (Tavits 2007) and so prevent the emergence of programmatic politics in non-programmatic systems. However, the PF represents a powerful counterfactual to this hypothesis, reflecting the marginal importance of electoral systems compared to other factors in the Zambian case. While SMD electoral systems prevent parties gaining seats if their vote share is geographically disbursed, in Zambia many support groups are clustered in particular regions, with the effect that parties that tap these constituencies can return MPs at much the same rate as they would under a proportional system. Moreover, while Zambia’s electoral system should discriminate against new parties the fluidity of the Zambian party system meant that there were frequently unclaimed constituencies that young parties could seek to mobilize. Indeed, it was the deep fragmentation of the opposition that enabled the PF to leapfrog the UPND—which gained 27 per cent of the vote in 2001—to become the leading opposition party in the 2006 polls. Internal party organization and party building Many comparative studies suggest that internal organization (Luna 2012: 4) and internal democracy (Lebas 2011) promote programmaticity. However, in Zambia, the path of programmatic development has relied upon, and reinforced, internal party disorganization. Sata’s ethno-populist mobilization strategy was centred upon his personal performance. The centrality of a party leader to party popularity endows that leader with power (Weyland 2001), and creates personalized parties; it is therefore unsurprising that the PF’s mobilizing strategy has been based on a limited party organization (Cheeseman and Larmer 2011: 11). Moreover, the expansion of PF support after 2008 was based on rapid gains beyond the PF’s two core constituencies. These advances relied on ad hoc organizational structures and local intermediaries. Consequently, the organizational integrity of the party, and the coherence of its message, was further stretched. A second trend also threatened to undermine the PF’s unity. As the 2011 general elections approached, the rate of party switching increased sharply. A number of current or retired leaders from the MMD and civil society joined the PF, some of whom went on to take up positions in the first PF cabinet. The rapid changes in the party’s leadership strained the cohesion of elite relations as new and established personalities clashed. In some areas, these elite defections were mirrored by the defection of whole party branches of the MMD and UPND to PF (and in some cases, the defection of some party branches of the PF to other parties). The integration of new branches into the party further diluted the strength of the party’s programmatic values. The lack of funding for political parties only serves to compound this problem. In Zambia, there is no public funding of political parties. Parties are financed by a collection of MP contributions and discrete, secretive supporters (Mulikita 2010), which may have included foreign businesses, and in the case of the PF in 2006, Taiwan (Fraser and Larmer 2007: 628). This put considerable constraints on party capacity. The PF’s vice-president explained that one of the reasons that a party conference was not held before 2011 was that the cost involved in convening one was prohibitive (Scott 2010). In the absence of a national convention, there was no way that the party leadership could

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systematically educate and discipline activists and members. From 2001–10 the PF only made limited gains in party resource as its candidates won local government positions. As the party took hold of local councils, it gained a stronger footing in nearby constituencies. However, given the speed of the PF’s rise, and the centralized form of Zambian governance, even this made only a limited impact on the party’s fortunes. The experience of the PF therefore demonstrates that parties can become programmatic without becoming institutionalized. Party institutionalization as defined by Randall and Svasand (2002) includes two dimensions regarding the rest of the polity—decisional autonomy vis-à-vis other societal actors and reification (the party’s establishment in the public imagination)—and two internal dimensions: value infusion and systemness. The discussion above makes clear that the PF was not institutionalized internally, even though its vote share began to stabilize by 2011. As a consequence, the PF in opposition and in government was not rooted to its policies by any internal mechanisms, and nor was there cohesion between the party’s members about the best policy agenda to pursue in office. Programmaticity at the party-system level The Desk Review also hypothesizes that stability of voting patterns is a necessary precondition of programmatic linkages, because only with stability can party reputations crystallize and linkages consolidate. However, the rise of the PF shows that programmatic linkages can emerge very quickly. The PF galvanized programmatic support between 2002 and 2006, and extended it between 2007 and 2011. Moreover, as Scott has noted, the rise of the PF contributed to the recentralization of the Zambian party system (2009). From a fragmented and volatile multi-party system in 2001, Zambian politics has become much more stable and predictable in the late 2000s. The programmatic appeal of the PF allowed it to reach out to a large constituency that other parties had failed to mobilize, effectively blocking the expansion of other smaller parties that were pushing more sectional appeals. Along with the continued ability of the UPND to rally its homelands of Southern Province, and the MMD to manipulate its control of the state to sustain its support, this supported the consolidation of a three-party system. Should this process of party system institutionalization continue following the PF’s rise to power, Zambia would represent a case in which programmatic development promoted institutionalization; the opposite relationship to that suggested by Luna (2012). Although there are signs that the Zambian party system is institutionalizing, it is not yet showing signs of becoming fully programmatic. Unlike Brazil, the growth and electoral success of a programmatic party has not induced ‘contagion from the left’. In part, the absence of contagion was due to the MMD’s reliance upon rural constituencies which affected the cost–benefit calculus of developing a programmatic platform on which to mobilize support. In power, the MMD had little to gain in core and swing constituencies by developing a more policy-based platform—its core areas of support were unlikely to respond to a programmatic message and the party lacked the credibility to change tack so quickly. Indeed, the MMD’s opportunities to change its image were impaired by its limited influence over public opinion in the face of opposition from civil society. Several civil society actors, including The Post newspaper, Citizens Forum, Transparency International Zambia and a string of outspoken church members turned on MMD by 2009. In the light of the caustic campaign that these actors launched against the MMD, the party gained a reputation for corruption that was hard to shift; a reputation enhanced by a legacy left behind by the Chiluba presidency (Van Donge 2009).

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But the absence of contagion in Zambia also reflected the fact that the country did not experience a transfer of power until 2011. This meant that it was not so clearly important for the PF’s rivals to develop their own policy-based approaches, as in Brazil. At the same time, because the MMD did not experience life as an opposition party prior to 2011, it has never been forced to contemplate how to compete with the PF in the absence of the advantages of incumbency. Yet for the next set of tripartite elections in 2016, the MMD will be forced to operate without state resources and so will struggle to mount an effective clientelistic campaign. In order to reduce their campaign costs, they may well seek cheaper mobilization techniques and hence invest in a more cohesive policy platform. There is some evidence that the MMD is likely to adopt this strategy: while in government the MMD announced plans to implement a windfall tax on mining profits and reduce popular taxes in a limited but clear attempt to head off the rise of the PF. At the time of writing, two main pathways appear to be open in Zambia. First, the PF could slowly institutionalize its programmatic commitments, inspiring rival parties to do the same, leading to a gradual process of contagion. Second, the PF could prove to be unstable and move away from its commitments on economic issues in favour of misusing state resources to maintain power. If the party were to follow this path it would make it extremely difficult for opposition parties to mount an effective challenge in the short-term, but in the long-term the PF would also struggle to maintain its programmatic support. These voters would then become available for new programmatic policies to mobilize against the ruling party, in much the same way that the PF took over many of the constituencies that had originally supported the MMD. In other words, if Zambia goes down this second pathway, political competition would be characterized by continual electoral volatility, with spells of programmatic development and then backsliding. Significantly, which path the country takes will depend on how the PF evolves as a party of government, highlighting the significance of changes at the party level for the consolidation of programmatic party systems. In the mid-2000s, Sata was presented with an opportunity to mobilize a support base that was simultaneously urban and rural, ethnic and populist. As we have seen, the timing of the opportunity, the fragmentation of the party system and the existence of former trade union and MMD branches that could be activated by Sata to quickly mount a campaign were all critical to the success of the PF, but also left the party leader-centric. As the PF has grown, however, the trappings of this leader-centric party model and its rapid expansion have held its programmatic character back. In the future, this expansion may derail the trajectory of the party and with it the prospects for a more programmatic party system.

5.5 Effects of Programmatic Politics Despite increased political competition and the emergence of the PF, there have been few signs of change in terms of economic, political and social outcomes thus far. For example, although the PF set out an appealing narrative that linked poor economic policy to collusion and corruption, the misuse of state funds has not abated. Indeed, toward the end of MMD rule corruption once again became a major governance issue. After evidence of widespread corruption within the Zambian Ministry of Health in 2009, Dutch, Canadian, and Swedish donors suspended aid, followed by the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Zambia Watchdog 2010; Saluzeki 2010). The MMD’s capacity to respond to these crises has been undermined by the weakness of the Banda presidency and the party’s methods of political mobilization. Banda began

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with a relatively weak base within the party, and only secured the MMD presidential candidacy through the support of members of the party elite (Cheeseman and Hinfelaar 2010). As a result, he is indebted to corrupt elements that are tainted by their association with the regime of President Chiluba. Although Chiluba still faced corruption charges when Banda took office, he was subsequently found not guilty amidst allegations that the MMD had put the judiciary under political pressure (Reuters 2010). Moreover, the ruling party’s dependence on the misuse of state resources to stay in office meant that effectively dealing with corruption complaints would undermine the party’s ability to retain power. Since taking office Michael Sata has launched a new anti-corruption drive, declaring that that he is ‘allergic to corruption’, but at the time of writing it is too early to judge whether this represents a serious attempt to change the nature of Zambian politics. One area in which the emergence of the PF did make a significant difference was in the salience of programmatic issues within the political agenda. We have already seen that while the MMD was in government it ‘borrowed’ certain PF policies in an attempt to undermine Sata’s message. Although many of these pledges to get tough with foreign investors and to reduce taxes were not effectively implemented, they may well be now that the PF is in power. In the first budget in 2011, the royalty tax on mines was doubled from three per cent to six per cent, and income taxes were reduced, consistent with a promise to ‘put more money in peoples’ pockets’ during the campaign.

5.6 Lessons and Policy Implications from the Zambian Case The PF can be understood to have developed through a series of phases. First, the party emerged as a major opposition player by developing a policy agenda and mobilization strategy that was targeted to harness widespread unaddressed grievances and unresolved policy demands. Second, the PF consolidated its position as a leading party of opposition but simultaneously experienced new challenges, and the programmatic nature of its appeal was strained. Third, throughout its development, party leaders failed to increase the party’s organizational capacity. Finally, the PF rose to public office ten years after it was formed, which may pave the way for a ‘contagion’ effect that will transform the party system. Donor policy should be trained to address the context-specific opportunities and barriers to the emergence programmatic politics at each stage of this process. Platforms Zambia was a hospitable environment for the development of a programmatic party because it featured a culture of popular protest around economic issues and a groundswell of criticism of the policies of the incumbent regime. However, it took a feat of political imagination, learning and creativity to tap into this as a political party. Other parties in Zambia did not identify this potential and failed to build programmatic strategies to respond to it. The case of the PF thus demonstrates the importance of individual leadership and innovation. It is likely that there are other potential grounds for new strains of programmatic politics, especially in Africa, that have gone unnoticed by policymakers and domestic politicians. International IDEA and other donor organizations can help to galvanize political actors to respond to the unmet policy preferences of their electorates. One way to do this would be to establish a scoping study in countries where there is little programmatic politics to use surveys and local experts to identify where there is the most potential for policy-based appeals to be successful. These studies could be made publicly available as a resource for policymakers and civil and political actors in each country. Moreover, the scoping study

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could be used to select a group of high potential countries, or sub-national regions within countries, in which donors could then roll out projects to promote programmaticity. For example, an outreach project for domestic political leaders and activists could help existing political parties to see how they can better connect to their constituents, provide training for party leaders that wish to develop policy-based platforms, and demonstrate to civil society organizations how they can get their policy priorities to be reflected in the campaigns of established parties. Institutionalization Zambia provides the PF with few examples of organizational best practice past or present to draw upon in order to overcome the party’s chronic internal weaknesses. In turn, the lack of institutionalization means that the PF’s programmatic stance is vulnerable to reversal. International IDEA and other concerned organizations might respond to the challenges that new programmatic parties face at the stage of consolidation by providing organizational support Party organization has also been hindered by lacklustre party funding, which is required to support expensive party structures. A tailored programme of party funding could support the organizational development of political parties and in turn promote programmaticity. The model of party support recently piloted in Uganda, where international donors established a basket fund to provide funding of £200,000 to all major parties that met certain criteria in terms of accounting systems and transparency, represents one strategy for achieving this goal. Governance As the PF has grown it has continuously experimented to hone its message to focus upon issues that its supporters respond to, but has struggled to maintain the coherence of its message and the cohesion of party members. Moreover, the influx of new leaders into the party has made it more difficult to establish a coherent party line. In part, this is because constructing a policy agenda that is consistent across a wide range of issue areas demands high levels of resources and skilled personnel that parties in developing contexts frequently lack. International IDEA and donors might construct a programme of policy development to provide an advisory service to emerging political parties. Demonstration and transmission Despite the trail that the PF has blazed, there has been little uptake of its mobilization strategies by other political parties to date. There are many barriers to the transmission of programmatic lessons. For example, in some cases, a party’s position in public office, or the attitudes of its supporter and potential swing voters, foreclose the option of adopting the mobilization strategies and programmatic policies of a rival party. A lack of information about the strategies and success of other parties also hampers the spread of policy-based campaigns. If other parties are to emulate the PF’s success, it will require the diffusion of programmatic ideas and practices across the continent. This is an area in which democracy promotion interventions can help. In the past, African leaders often learnt authoritarian lessons from one another, such as when the strategies that Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi used to maintain control were utilized by other leaders seeking to stave off defeat following the return to multipartyism in the early 1990s. A more positive sharing of knowledge can be achieved in the present day by establishing forums within which leaders that have successfully established programmatic parties can share their experiences with leaders of non-programmatic parties.

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Kalumba, Katele. National Secretary of the MMD. Member of Parliament for Chiengi Constituency. Lusaka. 16 September 2009.

Mwaanga, Vernon Johnson. Chief Whip, Nominated Member of Parliament. Member of the MMD. Lusaka, 1 April 2010.

Scott, Dr Guy. Member of Parliament for Lusaka Central. Member of the PF. Lusaka 16 September 2009.

Zukas, Simon. Lusaka, 16 March 2010.

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