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24 | Zoltan Simon
“these are all the same’, making them disinterested in, or even hostile to
politics and political organisations.
Falling membership fees also generate financial pressure on political
parties. In most European countries, the only viable solution to compensate
them in the long run seems to be through state funding, which, in turn,
creates converging interests among party leaderships at the expense of their
ties with party members. Richard Katz and Peter Mair call this a system of
cartel parties (Katz and Mair 1995), transforming political parties into state
agents as public service agencies (Mair 2013, 83-89).
Party leaders, in particular those with solid media capital, may even come
to the conclusion that party members are a useless disruptive factor in their
political activities and are therefore to be avoided, resulting in taxi or couch
parties (also called voicemail or virtual parties) —- referring to a membership
so small that they can fit into a taxi or on a couch - selling a broad range of
political messages and promises (products), mainly through mass media, to
citizens as political consumers (supermarket parties; see also Gallagher et al.
2011, 349-358; Magone 2011, 346-355). In Mair’s well-formulated conclusion:
“political competition has come to be characterised by the contestation of
socially inclusive appeals in search of support from socially amorphous
electorates” (Mair 2009, 220; also Mair 2013, 57).
While the waning of social cleavages and coherent social constituencies,
and the catch-all strategies embraced by mainstream political parties,
undermine political-ideological differences in the political competition and
public debates, this trend is reinforced by external pressures and constraints
imposed by globalisation and European integration. These further narrow
the spectrum of policy options and choices for leaders and parties in national
political arenas. As Schmidt says:
In fact, the very existence of the EU as a system of supranational governance above
the nation-state alters the democratic properties of national institutions, along with
their claims to legitimacy ... mainstream parties have had increasing difficulty in
mediating between their responsibilities to govern (by the EU rules) and their need
to be responsive to their electorates. National citizens often no longer feel that their
political input matters. The resulting malaise has in turn fueled the rise of anti¬
systemic parties given to populist extremism and Euroskepticism ... As a result, the
national-level “politics without policy” that I had metaphorically identified in 2006
has only worsened. We now increasingly see “politics against policy” in contentious
areas such as the euro, or even “politics against polity” as in the case of Brexit.
(Schmidt 2020, 14, emphasis in the original)
Should we accept this analysis, it does not come as a surprise that the recent
and ongoing crises have further intensified these trends (Dinan et al. 2017,
369). They have also showcased the persisting differences between political
systems and cultures in Western and in - even more volatile - Central and