Do the political parties in your new democracy (present or historical) get along?

Great Debates
1

I was speaking recently to someone here in Taiwan about the political environment here. At one point, I said that I feel like, in Taiwan, that there are two governments: the DPP and KMT. I’ve never been anywhere the parties seem so averse to cooperating on anything.

I should stop here and admit that my Chinese is still intermediate at best, though my observations have been mostly met with nodding heads when I bring this up in conversation.

While I don’t put American politicians on a pedestal, I do feel that there are plenty of them who stay out of the spotlight, do pretty good work, and stay out of the bitter partisan bickering.

In Taiwan, that doesn’t seem possible. Rarely have I ever read of DPP and KMT politicians working together to advance policy. Moreover, the baseness and triviality of many of the arguments politicians waste their energy on here is mind-boggling, and the media (one of the freest in Asia) feeds the fire.*

When I brought up this two-government perspective recently, my interlocutor said, “Yeah, well, that’s just normal for new democracies.”

So, in your burgeoning or fledgling democracy, are the political parties totally seperate? Do they cooperate on anything? Do they attack each other on matters that go well beyond policy issues, into the realm of blatant personal attacks?

Also, if you want to take issue with my view of Taiwan, certainly feel free.

Finally, I’m currently reading Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis. The book does give me the impression that the beginnings of democracy are dirty and cutthroat, seeing the sort of things that our “Founding Fathers” did to each other behind each other’s backs.

  • Think Obama flag pin stories on a regular basis.
2

Not so much, no. It’s mostly because the ruling ANC has such an overwhelming majority (change-the-constitution-by-itself 2/3 levels of majority). And on the regional level its worse - Cape Town is run by the Democratic Alliance party, but the province it’s in is run by the ANC. Personal attacks court cases, lots of acrimony - it’s all par for the course.

3

The antics of the Taiwan legislature even made it into the Mike Myers movie The Cat in the Hat - the kids watch the legislators fighting on TV as juvenile entertainment.

Knowing of how British politics had become a blood sport, George Washington hoped that we would have no parties at all in the U.S.; of course that was a forlorn hope. It’s the nature of homo politicus to divide into groups of like-minded people. There’s strength in numbers, after all. Many new democracies have extremely bitter, divisive politics because they’re still figuring out that compromise is not necessarily an admission of weakness, but a vital party of getting things done. Until the rule of law is well and truly established, there can be a winner-take-all mentality that can be very corrosive to bipartisanship or multipartisanship.

Founding Brothers is a great book. Ellis definitely earned his Pulitzer.

4

From what I can tell of the fledgling days of the US, the Democrats were wildly against anything the Federalists wanted. Anytime they gained the presidency, they’d disband the army, shut down the national bank, and any other number of things, just to have re-instated them by the end of their term because the Federalists at that time really had a better grip on what needed to happen militarily and financially for the nation as a whole.

The Civil War could be seen as being essentially the end result of this split in overly disparate beliefs, though I think that what solved it was tossing off the spoils system (which I believe precedes Andrew Jackson though he really made it take off.)

5

this is really dependent on the party system. In two-party systems, where one party does not need another party to govern, antagonism does not pose a problem. In multi-party systems, no single party is going to gain a majority of the seats in parliament and they’ll have to compromise. In this type of situation, parties will be on friendlier terms.

In two-party systems, the two parties might grow closer to each other (at least ideologically) following the logic explained here. But even in this case, there might be personal hatreds in spite of ideological closeness.

6

Really? That’s both sad and funny. I’ve seen most of that movie, but I never saw that scene…

7

It’s near the beginning.