Zhang Feian: A Study on the Ideological Characteristics of Western Party System Theories
On March 4, 2018, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out at a joint panel discussion during a session of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) that: "The system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation led by the Communist Party of China (CPC), as a basic political system in our country, is a great political creation of the CPC, the Chinese people, the various democratic parties, and personages without party affiliation; it is a new type of party system that has grown out of Chinese soil." This so-called "new type of party system" is distinguished from the "old" party systems of the West based on competitive elections. It breaks through the discourse hegemony of Western party system theory and provides directional guidance for constructing indigenous Chinese party theory and democratic discourse power. The political party is a fundamental concept of modern social science. Western party system theory is an ideology presented in a scientific guise, grounded in a typology of liberal democratic regimes. It maintains discourse hegemony over Western party studies and, in practice, defends the authoritative status of Western party systems. Since it is impossible for Western party system theory to establish the legitimacy and long-term nature of the CPC's governance, constructing a theory for China's new type of party system has become an unshirkable responsibility for Chinese scholars. As a prerequisite for this work, we must step out of the "scientific moving image" [1] of Western party system theory and profoundly reveal its ideological essence as a safeguard for the legitimacy of Western capitalist political systems. Based on the fact that existing academic achievements focus mostly on where the new Chinese party system is "new," this article pays particular attention to where the Western-centric old party systems are "old" and why they must be transcended.
I. "Cold War Social Science" and the Rise of Western Party System Theory
American social science after the 1950s unfolded against the broad backdrop of the Cold War and can be termed "Cold War Social Science." "As an organizing principle, the Cold War helps us reinterpret, from a historical perspective, the extensive social science research and activities carried out by the United States during this period of extraordinary expansion." The systematic "scientization" of American social science began during the Cold War, producing a vast array of foundational concepts and theories that defined disciplinary paradigms. However, "in an era where social sciences achieved unparalleled prestige and unprecedented autonomy, they never came close to escaping the gravitational pull of the state and society. On the contrary, their enterprise was shaped by the very same forces that allowed them entry into the corridors of power." American social science during this period was essentially an ideology presented in a scientific guise.
Thomas Kuhn pointed out that the hallmark of a birth of a science is the establishment of a research paradigm. For social sciences, the establishment of a research paradigm and the generation of discourse hegemony are the same process; when discourse hegemony is highly correlated with the legitimacy of state power, it becomes the locus of a nation’s soft power and core interests. Precisely because of this, the generation of social science research paradigms—unlike those of the natural sciences—is not purely the result of the natural evolution and accumulation of knowledge. It possesses strong historical contingency and political purpose; it is the result of interaction and collusion between the "knowledge community" and subjects of political power or economic interest. During the Cold War, although American social science formed many stable research paradigms, its ideological character remained extremely strong due to the certainty of its research orientation: anti-communism. This was especially true for American political science, which was "written from a characteristically American perspective," was "subsidiary to its state," and had "America" as its "unacknowledged pillar and ideal." Its research objective was to universalize and legitimize various American political institutions, thereby establishing the authoritative status and "model" characteristics of the American political system within regime typologies.
David Truman, a representative figure of American behavioralist political science, once frankly admitted that a serious study of political institutions would inevitably resort to "reconceptualization" and a new discursive system for inter-institutional comparison. In fact, from the day the Social Security Research Council approved the establishment of the Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP) more than a decade earlier, this reconceptualization of political institutional research had been put on the agenda. Truman’s words clearly present the research goals of American political science during the Cold War: to seek a unified research framework through reconceptualization, thereby establishing U.S. discourse hegemony in the field of political institutional research.
During the Cold War, a key link in the competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was the competition between political systems, and the legitimacy of these systems revolved around the "universal religion" of the era of mass politics—democracy. Democracy was originally a banner held high by socialist movements and socialist states; the primary value upheld by capitalism was not democracy, but liberty. However, as the 20th century entered the era of mass democracy, democracy became a core mass value that one could only support and never oppose. Under these conditions, whoever’s political system was defined as "democratic" gained the upper hand in the institutional competition. In this sense, "how one decides to conceptualize an idea becomes a profound political, normative, and ideological issue," and "all theories regarding essentially contested concepts involve normative and political power relations and positions." The American political science community possessed a high degree of self-awareness regarding this; they planned, step-by-step, to integrate contested concepts with their own institutions. One of the most important results was the construction of a party system theory predicated on competitive elections—that is, "party strife" [2]. This party system theory tightly bound Western party systems to democratic systems, attempting to exclude non-competitive party systems from the realm of democracy. This "theoretical consciousness" based on "political consciousness" was the direct driving force behind the sudden and rapid development of Western party system theory in the mid-20th century. On the surface, the development of party system theory appeared to be the result of natural evolution; in reality, it was a carefully orchestrated act of "conceptual politics" designed to brand the democratic nature of Western party systems while characterizing the Soviet-model one-party states as anti-democratic autocracies and dictatorships.
Political parties are the organizational mechanisms of modern society and the modern state generated during the process of Western modernization. They have been controversial since their birth. In particular, most influential Western modern politicians and scholars viewed them as derivatives of political factions that hindered community unity and triggered social fragmentation—diffuse forces that required institutional restraint to realize the public interest. For example, in the eyes of the American Founding Father George Washington, parties were "bad things" that needed to be contained or even prohibited from developing. James Madison, in the famous Federalist Papers No. 10, explicitly regarded "factions" (party strife) as a scourge, believing that they "instigated them [the people] to vex and oppress each other" rather than "cooperate for the common good." Because parties were not seen as necessary for the survival of the political community, nor did they receive value-recognition at the level of political philosophy, almost all theorists "treated the subject with an overwhelming tendency toward neglect." Francis Lieber’s On Civil Liberty and Self-Government, published in 1853, used only a page and a half to discuss parties; Joseph Alden’s The Science of Government under the American System contained only a single footnote involving parties; and John Burgess, the most prestigious American philosopher of the late 19th century, omitted parties entirely from his 1890 work Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law. For this reason, E.E. Schattschneider once said that for the better part of a century, political parties "slept in the dark corners of the intellectual world, ignored by all. Scholars and publishers explained everything—democracy, sovereignty, law, constitutions, suffrage, representation, liberty—but in all this, there was no room for the party... the party thus became the foundling of political philosophy."
Concerned by the universal neglect of party studies, Schattschneider stepped forward to vindicate the importance of parties. He linked the democratic system with party politics, claiming that "modern democracy is a byproduct of party competition," that parties are "a process established for elections," that "voter autonomy lies in the power of free choice," and that "democracy is not built within parties, but between parties." By establishing a correlation between democracy and party competition, it can be said that Schattschneider found the "shining path" to increasing the visibility of party system research. However, Schattschneider’s work was published in 1942, when the U.S. and SSSR were in a wartime alliance; Soviet democracy was praised by the American political science community, and Stalin was depicted as the image of a "kindly uncle." Since anti-communism was not the primary need, naturally no one possessed enough political sensitivity to unearth the "unique contribution" of Schattschneider’s Party Government. His theory of "responsible party government," on which he pinned great hopes, did not set off a boom in party studies. Parties remained at the margins of political science research; even after Maurice Duverger published Political Parties in 1951, the famous party theorist Giovanni Sartori still felt that his original motivation for writing was the perceived lack of general theory in party research.
However, the onset of the Cold War changed the fate of neglected party studies. The construction of liberal-democratic theory moved the study of parties and party systems from the margins to the center of Western political discourse and theory. Liberal-democratic theory relied on the procedural definition of democracy proposed by Schumpeter, in which a competitive election system based on a multi-party system was seen as the first essential element of democracy. By "hitching a ride" on democracy, the term "political party" gradually acquired more and more laudatory connotations within the political context of Western democratic constitutionalism. Simultaneously, constructing a set of party system theories compatible with liberal-democratic theory became an urgent academic task for the Western theoretical community. Spurred by this mission, the study of party system theory entered a "springtime" of vigorous development.
II. Western Party System Theory and the Hegemony of Liberal-Democratic Discourse
After the 1950s, research on Western party systems (party regimes) entered its heyday, with various party system theories emerging in droves. On the surface, these theories exhibited a diverse and open character, yet they all took "party competitiveness" as their meta-standard. The first to systematically apply the concept of the "party system" was Duverger. In his seminal work Political Parties, he viewed the party system as the result of multi-party interaction: "except in one-party states, every country has several parties coexisting, and the forms and modes of their coexistence define the party system of a particular country." Sartori stated in his representative work Parties and Party Systems that "only political systems characterized by the interaction of parties, and thus by a system of such interaction, should be called party systems." Sartori specifically explained why a party system must be competitive. He believed that a party system must be characterized by "subsystem autonomy" and requires the "recognition of disagreement and the institutionalization of opposition." He argued that "a 'one-party system' does not exist and cannot be so called, because in such cases what is actually referred to is a 'state system' in which the party’s role is to serve the ends of the state rather than social ends." In Sartori's view, only parties that serve society can constitute a "party system"; "one might say that society shapes the party system, but one cannot say that society shapes the party-state system." Under this "sociocentric" [3] perspective, Western party system theory is predicated on pluralism and competitiveness. They may accept that Communist Parties use the word "party" and admit that Communist Parties are parties, but they believe the "party-state system" of a Communist Party absolutely cannot constitute a "party system." The result of this conception is that any party system model that does not conform to the "competitive election party" lacks procedural legitimacy in Western party system discourse; non-competitive parties can only become the organizational mechanism of a "normal" modern state by transforming into competitive election parties. Until the 21st century, Western party system research still had not escaped the conceptual shackles that a party system is merely a tool for competitive elections. In the Handbook of Party Politics edited by Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, the party system is directly defined as a system "formed by the mutual competition of parties for elective office and control of government." Peter Mair, one of today's most authoritative party researchers in Western academia, also regards competition as the meta-standard of the party system, emphasizing that the core of any party system is the competition for executive office, and it is precisely for the needs of competition that people form parties in practice and promote their institutionalization.
The reason Western party system theory adheres to the standard of pluralistic competition is that it is not a scientific theory for the empirical study of the world's existing party systems, but rather an ideology bound up with the discursive hegemony of liberal democracy. As long as the definition of Western-style democracy remains unchanged, and as long as socialist systems are viewed as a threat to the capitalist system, it is impossible for Western party system theory to recognize the legitimacy of non-competitive party systems. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels, based on historical materialism, viewed ideology as the conceptual form of the superstructure, noting that it serves the interests of the ruling class that occupies the dominant position in the economic base. To gloss over its own particular interests, the ruling class must be capable of "representing its interest as the common interest of all the members of society," thereby "giving its ideas the form of universality, and representing them as the only rational, universally valid ones." Western party system theory is precisely a product of the ideological counter-offensive launched by the bourgeoisie in the face of rising socialist momentum after capitalist credit was battered by the Great Depression; it carries the mission of universalizing and singularizing the Western party system.
Starting from the mid-19th century, although capitalism was on the rise, the discursive advantage of the bourgeoisie gradually eroded under the rise of various socialist forces, particularly the profound critique of Marxism. That is to say, as the proletariat became conscious, the bourgeoisie’s ability to describe its own class interests as universal interests became severely deficient. From the late 19th century to the beginning of the Cold War, the core agenda of the social sciences was set by left-wing discourse. Scholars debated the rights and wrongs, as well as the relative merits, of socialism and capitalism. From this topic, analytical perspectives such as imperialism, colonialism, and democratism emerged, each directly questioning the legitimacy of capitalism. As Schumpeter argued, the value-rationalism developed by the bourgeoisie during the anti-feudal process created a "critical frame of mind" which, "after destroying the moral authority of so many other institutions, eventually turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to his amazement that the rationalist attitude does not stop at the credentials of kings and popes, but goes on to attack the whole system of private property and bourgeois values." The expansion of value-rationality rendered the "bourgeois fortress politically defenseless." Democrats and socialists used the very slogans of "liberty," "equality," and "popular sovereignty" put forward by the bourgeoisie during the anti-feudal process to critique the capitalist system itself. This critique from the realm of values was difficult to pacify through responses based on value-rationality. To transform this passive state of being ideologically under attack, Schumpeter soberly realized: "Just as the call for utilitarian credentials was never addressed to kings, dukes, and popes in a judicial frame of mind that would have been ready to accept a satisfactory answer, so capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment."
How to change the indictment? The only way was to transform capitalism from the defendant into the plaintiff. According to the popular discourse in the social sciences at the time, the struggle between the US and the USSR was a contest between two paths of modernization and institutional models: capitalism and socialism. In this debate, capitalism not only had no certainty of victory but stood on the opposite side of the history of human evolution, destined to be replaced by socialism; the only point of contention was whether the replacement would be through revolution or reform. This historical confidence based on science meant that "Soviet communism was increasingly regarded as the mortal enemy of 'Americanism' because it articulated itself as an alternative modernity—a path by which poor and oppressed peoples could change the status quo without having to replicate the American model."
As Soviet power grew and socialist states increased in number, this historical confidence increasingly manifested as a real historical trend. Consequently, the United States felt a deep sense of threat from communism and the Soviet model toward its national security and way of life, resulting in an unprecedented sense of fear. Through the exaggeration and exploitation of the government and media, this fear quickly transformed anti-communism in the US from a mere idea or attitude into a guiding ideological creed. In the words of Sidney Lens, by the 1940s, "anti-communism was no longer a gesture, but a credo." However, under the historical circumstances of that time, opposing communism was no easy task. Unless the US demonized communism, it could never win a war against it given the crisis of capitalist credibility. In 1949, a US Congressional subcommittee submitted a report after visiting the Far East, claiming that it was insufficient for the US merely to propose "'containing communism' through military means"; the US needed to reaffirm American democratic principles. In 1955, Theodore Repplier, then-chairman of The Advertising Council, reaffirmed the importance of the discursive power of democracy during a meeting with Eisenhower, stating that if the US wanted to win the Cold War, it must promote and export ideas more attractive than communism. The idea he referred to was "liberal democracy."
Thus, liberal democracy became the US's trump card in its confrontation with the socialist camp during the Cold War and the key step in changing the indictment. The construction of liberal-democratic discourse was a systematic project. The first problem to solve was how to define democracy so that it could serve capitalism and be decoupled from socialism. After all, starting from the 19th century, the banner of democracy had been held high by socialists, while the bourgeoisie primarily promoted and prided itself on liberty. Sartori, one of the chief architects of liberal-democratic theory, frankly admitted that liberalism was initially opposed to democratism; however, after the emergence of socialism, liberalism completed its annexation of democracy.
The first step in liberalism's annexation of democracy was to establish a definition of democracy closely related to liberty and to make this definition a theoretical consensus with the significance of a disciplinary paradigm. Before the emergence of the liberal-democratic paradigm, the study of democracy was in what Kuhn called a "pre-scientific" stage. In the pre-scientific stage, scholars lacked common concepts and theories regarding democracy and frequently engaged in disputes; there were as many concepts and theories of democracy as there were researchers. Among so many concepts of democracy, how was one to be selected for US use? The criterion was very simple and clear: "If the definition of this term is to be made to analyze according to our meaning... it must be capable of being applied unambiguously to the range of distribution of those countries we think should be grouped together, as distinguished from those countries we think should not." A definition that set a standard no Western country could meet was meaningless; likewise, a definition of democracy that could apply to both Western countries and one-party states was also meaningless.
Which definition of democracy could happen to match the institutional characteristics of the West while simultaneously excluding one-party states? Schumpeter’s "competitive election" view of democracy, due to its superficial consistency with the actual structures of the two most prominent post-war liberal-democratic states (the UK and the US), was quickly regarded as the most realistic expression of democratic systems. Schumpeter’s definition viewed multi-party competitive elections as the core element of democracy, asserting that "democracy is a political method," and "the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." "The principle of democracy then merely means that the reins of government should be handed to those who possess more support than any of the competing individuals or groups." After Schumpeter's definition of democracy was established as the paradigm for liberal-democratic theory, democracy became equated with partisan struggle. This definition not only successfully turned capitalism from the defendant into the plaintiff—the struggle between capitalism and socialism became one between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, with socialism being labeled anti-democratic—but also changed the fate of party system research, which had long been neglected by theorists. The competitive party system was tagged with the "democracy" label and became the new darling of academia. Western party systems and democracy were linked by a bond "which we dare not sever." From then on, party system theory was constructed along the path of party typology and democratic assessment standards, to the extent that Sartori declared that "democracy in its actual operation is primarily a party system."
As early as 1942, Schattschneider keenly pointed out that the reason party systems were ignored by political theorists was the belief that they were irrelevant to democracy. At that time, whether they were anti-democratic or pro-democratic theorists, the definition of democracy they accepted was "popular sovereignty," believing that "it is illogical to derive the modern party from the traditional concept of popular sovereignty." Understanding democracy as popular sovereignty meant that "the definition of democracy had nothing to do with the operation of democratic government institutions... and parties were excluded from the discussion... The area between popular sovereignty and government is precisely the habitat of the party... The only way to find the party is to revise these definitions of democracy." "The parties created democracy, or more precisely, modern democracy is a by-product of party competition." Although not out of the same theoretical concerns, Schumpeter echoed Schattschneider’s plea in that same year. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published that year, Schumpeter completed the revision of the concept of democracy, detaching it from the classical model of popular sovereignty and drawing an equal sign between democracy and party competition. Furthermore, Schumpeter frankly stated that one direct purpose of his revised definition was to provide an "efficient criterion" for "distinguishing democratic governments from non-democratic ones." In his view, the "classical democracy" theory based on popular sovereignty allowed democratic models different from Western "representative democracy"—namely, the socialist democratic model aiming for economic equality—to "conform equally well or better to the will and happiness of the people." His proposal of the concept of "competitive democracy" was predicated on the critique of the "classical democracy" theory based on popular sovereignty, which undoubtedly concealed a deep motive to seize the power of "democracy" discourse from socialist countries.
The degree to which a theory is realized depends on the degree of practical need. By the Cold War era, the "painstaking efforts" of Schumpeter and Schattschneider were finally understood by colleagues engaged in "Cold War social science." They took up the mission of these two men and completed the monopoly of the discourse of democracy by Western democratic and party systems. One of the most outstanding representatives, Sartori, did not hesitate to shed the mask of neutrality habitually paraded by Western scholars, declaring with certainty: "Democracy is Western-style democracy," and "'Democracy' is but a shorthand for 'liberal democracy'." Because liberal democracy is tightly linked to partisan struggle, Western party system theory has since carried the "burden of democracy," unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of non-Western party systems. In the eyes of Western scholars, investigations into the party systems of non-Western democracies like China only possess significance in terms of democratic genesis or transitology, lacking practical or theoretical value. Their greatest interest is merely predicting how China's party system can be maintained, when it will disintegrate, and its eventual collapse. In this sense, Western party system theory is an ideology; it maintains the discursive hegemony of Western party research while defending the authoritative status of Western party systems in practice.
III. Western Party System Theory Under Competitive Norms
Because Western party system theory is a product of the Cold War and serves as an ideology to maintain the discursive hegemony of Western party systems, its theoretical construction exhibits a stable characteristic that takes Western party system practice as the standard. This characteristic is "competitiveness." Western party system theory has constructed a seemingly complete and detailed theoretical system around the definitions, typologies, origins, and transitions of party systems. However, this theoretical system consistently follows the Western-centric principle of "competitiveness." The "definitional" study of party systems refuses to recognize the conceptuality of non-competitive party systems; the study of "origins" has never systematically researched the historical generation of non-Western party systems; the "typologies" exclude non-competitive parties from the counting of parties; and the study of "transitions" regards Western party systems as the democratic model and the final reform coordinate for non-competitive parties. These theoretical paradigms based on "competitiveness," even by the standards of non-Marxist Western sociology of knowledge, possess highly ideological characteristics. For example, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought defines "ideology" as "forms of expression of beliefs and opinions with symbolic significance, which use methods of representing, understanding, and evaluating the real world to form, mobilize, guide, organize, and justify certain patterns or modes of behavior, while negating all other patterns or modes of behavior." Given that the second part of this article has devoted considerable space to explaining the competitive characteristics of the definitions of Western party systems, the following will provide a systematic analysis of two other important components of Western political system theory—party system typology and party system origins—to see how these theories use "competitiveness" as a standard to negate non-competitive party system models.
1. Western Party System Typology Party system typology is the most widely influential field of research in Western party system theory, second only to the study of definitions. After directly defining a party system as "the system formed by the mutual competition of political parties to elect positions and control the government," Western party system typologies generally classify existing party systems based on the number of parties. Based on the principle of "competitiveness," Western party system typologies determine the number of parties by the criteria of their ability to participate in elections and obtain a certain number of effective seats in parliament.
As a pioneer in the study of party system typology, Maurice Duverger first divided party systems into one-party, two-party, and multi-party systems in his work based on the number of competing parties, initiating the precedent of using the number of parties as the basis for classification. Jean Blondel inherited and developed Duverger's classification method. On the basis of classification by the number of parties, he introduced the analytical perspective of the relative strength of parties. Using the vote shares of parties in parliamentary elections from 1945 to 1966, he divided party systems into four types: two-party systems, two-and-a-half-party systems, multi-party systems with one dominant party, and multi-party systems without a dominant party.
After the method of classifying party systems by the number and strength of parties was widely adopted, Robert Dahl, based on the principle of competitiveness, reviewed the patterns of opposition parties in Western democratic countries. According to different modes of government formation and opposition interaction, and indexed by differences in the competitive strategies of opposition parties, he divided party systems into four types: strictly competitive (Britain), co-operative-competitive (USA, France, and Italy), coalition-competitive (Austria and wartime Britain), and strictly coalescent (Colombia). Robert Dahl's classification scheme further highlighted the competitiveness of parties. This scheme indicated that two-party and multi-party systems do not need to be distinguished from simple counting hypotheses or standard type hypotheses; the competitive and coalition-competitive typology combines party systems that might be divided into two-party and multi-party systems. Following Robert Dahl, Stein Rokkan further refined the classification of multi-party systems according to the patterns of alliance and opposition among major parties during elections. Focusing on smaller countries, he distinguished three different party systems: the first is the 1 vs. 1+1 model, primarily competed for by two parties with occasional alliances with a third party, such as in Austria and Ireland; the second is the 1 vs. 3–4 model, where one large party faces a coalition of three or four small parties, represented by Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, also known as the "Scandinavian model"; the third is the 1 vs. 1 vs. 2–3 model of competition between three or more parties of balanced strength, also known as the "balanced multi-party system."
Within Western party system typology, the most influential classification standard is that proposed by Giovanni Sartori in his book Parties and Party Systems. Sartori argued that dividing parties into one-party, two-party, and multi-party competitive systems was too simplistic and crude to explain the real differences between party systems. He specifically proposed "relevance" to determine which parties should be included and which could be ignored when classifying party systems. He first excluded the "party-state system" [11] of Communist countries from the field of political system research, believing that Communist countries do not have party systems in the true sense. Then, he clarified the rules of party strength affecting political systems, arguing that a party's strength is first and foremost its electoral strength, which can also be called "seat strength." According to a party's "seat strength," Sartori argued that the rules for deciding whether a party should be counted under multi-party conditions are two-fold: first, those parties with governing relevance in the arena of forming governing coalitions must be emphasized; second, those parties in the opposition position that can change the direction of the governing party's competition by moving left or right on the ideological spectrum—thereby determining centripetal or centrifugal shifts—must also be emphasized. These two rules mean that smaller parties should be counted as having governing relevance if they possess "coalition potential" (i.e., being a necessary partner for forming a viable governing coalition in many cases) or "blackmail potential" (i.e., the party’s existence can affect the competitive strategies of parties with coalition potential). Parties that never have influence over coalition seats are considered irrelevant. Finally, according to his standards of party influence, Sartori divided party systems into seven types: one-party, hegemonic, predominant (one party consistently maintains a majority in elections), two-party, limited pluralism (3–5 parties), extreme pluralism (6–8 parties), and atomized (more than 8 parties).
Since Sartori, few have proposed new party system classification methods. A relatively innovative one was Peter Mair's attempt to use competition for government as a new method. He pointed out that in party systems where competition for government is characterized by closure, parties exist in a state of wholesale alternation, and the parties entering government are often limited to a few. A typical example of a closed competitive structure is Britain or Japan. Distinguishing from the closed competitive structure is the open competitive model, represented by the Netherlands and Denmark. In the open model, new parties easily enter the governing coalition, and with the emergence of new parties, the party's mode of governance also exhibits innovation.
2. Western Party System Origins The study of party system origins, as the name suggests, explores the theories behind why party systems form. Because the definition of Western party systems has already localized the party system within the competitive Western party model, when exploring origins, the focus of Western scholars is limited to digging into the reasons why different countries form different competitive configurations. Regarding non-competitive party systems, such as the system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, they have never analyzed their historical roots and rational basis from an objective perspective. They believe that non-competitive party systems only have value for study within "transitionology" and hold no significance for the exploration of origins. Regarding the reasons why competitive parties form different system models, Western scholars have mainly proposed two research paths: institutionalist and sociological analysis.
The most influential institutionalist analysis in the study of party system origins is "Duverger’s Law," which is revered as a classic. In his groundbreaking book Political Parties, Duverger first explored the influence of electoral systems on party systems, initiating the precedent of studying the origins of political systems from an institutionalist perspective. Duverger’s basic view was that there is a mutual influence between electoral systems and party systems, wherein the electoral system is the independent variable and the party system is the dependent variable. Regarding specific causal relationships, the simple-majority single-ballot system leads to a two-party system, known as "Duverger’s Law"; proportional representation tends to lead to multi-party systems, and the two-round absolute majority system tends to form multiple parties with political alliance relationships, known as the "Duverger Hypothesis." Beyond this, the institutionalist research path also focuses on the relationship between presidential or parliamentary systems and party systems, arguing that the "winner-takes-all" characteristic of presidential elections curbs the proliferation of small parties, making multi-party systems more inclined toward cooperation, and that presidentialism is conducive to the formation of a stable two-party system.
The sociological analysis of party system origins is represented by the research of Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. In 1967, Lipset and Rokkan edited the collection Party Systems and Voter Alignments; their co-authored opening essay had a major impact. In this paper, Lipset and Rokkan proposed "cleavage theory" to explain the origins of party systems. This theory holds that modern party systems are the product of social conflicts occurring over several centuries in the West, and that different structures of social cleavage are the roots of different party systems. "Social cleavage" originates from divisions between different groups in society; class, identity, religion, and ethnicity constitute the causes of social cleavage in different countries, societies, and periods. When society is divided into different groups, those with the same interests and value identities form a collective consciousness and desire to unite fellow members through organizational forms. In the process of the gradual universalization of suffrage, political parties became an effective way for different interest groups to express preferences and realize interests, evolving into spokespersons for different social groups within the government. Lipset and Rokkan pointed out that in the process where the formation of Western nation-states ran parallel with the Industrial Revolution, four lines of cleavage emerged: center-periphery, church-state, rural-urban, and capital-labor. The differences and conflicts between these four lines, as well as the number and nature of the social fissures created by these conflicts, are the fundamental reasons for the formation of different types of party systems in Europe. How conflicts are resolved, the outcome of each resolution, and the results of interactions between political elites all influence party alignments and electoral rules. When a certain party gains an advantage in early alignments with voters and obtains parliamentary dominance, it has the opportunity to formulate an electoral system favorable to itself, thereby squeezing the space for the survival and development of competitors. In this process, different parties strive to maintain representation of different groups, binding themselves to the fixed interests of the social structure; when this binding is "locked in," the party system is produced.
Lipset and Rokkan’s theory is distinctly different from institutionalism. Based on sociological explanations, they view institutions as dependent variables, arguing that institutions are the result rather than the cause of the interaction of social forces, which negates the significant influence of specific institutional structures on the party system. Subsequently, many scholars followed the method of using cleavage theory to analyze party systems, further demonstrating the relationship between the type of party system and the nature and number of social cleavages, forming views such as "using the number of social cleavages to predict the number of relevant parties" and "the more structural cleavages in a society, the greater the number of parties." However, no matter how much sociological research focuses on the impact of social structure itself on the party system, it has not devoted energy to explaining why developing countries form party systems different from competitive elections, let alone recognizing the necessity of non-competitive party systems for late-developing modernizing countries to concentrate authority to complete the tasks of state-building and modernization.
IV. Conclusion
By systematically analyzing the Cold War origins of Western party system theory, its correlation with the ideological hegemony of liberal-democratic discourse, and the resulting normative research path that treats competitiveness as the fundamental characteristic of party systems, this article fully demonstrates that Western party system theory is not a so-called value-neutral scientific theory. Rather, it is an ideology that maintains the legitimacy of the Western capitalist political system. Within the research horizon of Western scholars, the party system is merely a tool for competitive elections subordinated to the liberal-democratic system. Non-competitive party systems are directly defined by them as anti-democratic systems; consequently, China’s system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation [12] has consistently been viewed as a representative of the "party-state system" or "one-party system." The fact that multiple political parties have existed since the founding of the People's Republic of China has been completely ignored because the relationship between China's various parties is one of cooperation rather than competition. The Western determination of the number of parties is predicated entirely on competitiveness: "any group, however loosely organized, that seeks to elect candidates to public office under a given label" can be called a political party. Parties that do not have a competitive relationship are excluded from the "count" of the party system. If one relies on Western party system theory, it is impossible to understand the functionality, rationality, and superiority of China's party system. This is because Western party system theory is an "old" theory serving the interests of the bourgeoisie and predicated on competition; it is built upon the foundation of social fragmentation, using competitiveness to disintegrate integration [13] in order to prevent the people from forming a collective interest, and moreover, to prevent a party representing the collective interests of the people from taking power and threatening the rule of the bourgeoisie.
To understand Western party systems, we must proceed from the methodology of the Marxist historical materialist conception of history and understand that the ultimate cause of all social changes and political transformations should be sought in the changes to the modes of production and exchange. Social existence determines social consciousness; as a political superstructure, the Western party system is built upon the economic base of private ownership of the means of production under capitalism, serving the goal of maximizing the interests of capital. Under the conditions of the capitalist economic base, the contradictions between different classes and groups are irreconcilable, manifesting characteristics of competition and division. Therefore, the bourgeois state requires a "society-centered" competitive view of democracy and uses political parties as tools to realize liberal democracy while distancing itself from and evading the class nature of political parties. Only by having a profound understanding of the "oldness" of the Western party system—understanding that it is attached to bourgeois conceptions of the state, democracy, and political parties, and is an ideology representing bourgeois interests—can we possess a stronger theoretical self-awareness [14] to construct China's own party theory. This will allow us to safeguard China's discourse power [15] in the field of party studies, and to understand the superiority and progressiveness of China's new-type party system [16]. We must understand that China's new-type party system is built upon the Marxist conceptions of the state and democracy; it "is a product of the integration of Marxist party theory with China’s actual conditions, and is capable of truly, extensively, and persistently representing and realizing the fundamental interests of the broadest masses of the people and the fundamental interests of all ethnic groups and sectors of society," and constitutes "a major contribution to human political civilization."