Colours and Flavors of Democracy: Institutionalised Political Party (Systems) in between Competition and Collaboration
Colours and Flavors of Democracy: Institutionalised Political Party (Systems) in between Competition and Collaboration
escrito por Dini Harmita
Abstract
With emerging current challenges especially because of wars and pandemic, I found it's important to emphasise more our efforts in synchronising sciences. This paper is aimed at writing down summaries of my daily readings which I call as daily homework and have them posted on my social media in the forms of conversations, mind mapping drawings, etc. It all started with how I think all sciences are connected and I want to build the formula for how it can be useful. I grounded the arguments with political science theories because I want to use polarisation as the example of how the formula can be built, by revisiting Peter Mair through Casal Bértoa (2017, 2022), Einstein, Roger Penrose, and Stephen Hawking. As we all acknowledge, it's almost impossible not to have any competition in life, presupposes its logic goes the same or at least similar with the vice versa. Collaboration is also possible for any contexts, even when it seems very difficult. The question is how to make it possible. This paper studied the possibility.
Key words: Sciences, Political Science, Polarisation, Political Party, Party System, Competition, Collaboration.
It's sort of a habit to quote movies even for an amateur like me. One of my favourite movies titled A Good Year reminds me of what competition really means lately. Not to mention, the 'lately' represents almost centuries, and eight billion people in the world; that winning is no longer the everything, but the only thing. Collaboration thus sometimes sounds so naive. No one really believes two competitors can actually collaborate, especially political parties.
This paper studied the possibility. Answering the challenge from competition, somehow people struggle to have collaboration thus as our coping mechanism we actually treat the collaboration as the art of winning, directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously. Competition and collaboration inside political parties tend to be experienced as the battleships and concert of seat and voting percentage. I think the political parties' competition tends to be called or compared as a football play simply because of the art of winning it brings. Every side wants to win that much so they would do anything to score goals, including bringing around the ball to safe places first, handing it to the team members, having it sent back to the defence, moving it forward again, and then once there are blank spots, the goals are created or at least missed. Tragically, that's somehow called democracy, when monopoly becomes the main character of autocracy. Perhaps that's why moving the possibility of parties' collaboration forward shouldn't be seen that way only. It makes more sense to call collaboration inside a political party such ways but a bit exaggerated to have the systems' collaboration so, simply because each political party had their own interest, strength, and weakness. The only similar thing is to win any elections. When they are too similar they tend to fight. When they are too different they tend to compete too. As other concepts, theories, and discourses that can be very perceptive and contextual, so do both competition and collaboration of political parties and the systems.
Also dreams -if having the collaboration or real democracy could be called as a dream-, as per its definition as sleeping flowers we have when we sleep or any 'flying in the sky' wishes. Some people even theorised that we can call certain willingness as hopes simply because it's reachable and certain intention as wishes simply because it's too far to achieve. I may not be that expert in political party collaboration, but having observed the political parties and the systems I had at least one assumption saying that it's beyond what we can discuss to make certain social units or entities who want to reach any highest de jure positions to cooperate and collaborate. I remember watching Indonesian first President and Vice President Soekarno and Moh. Hatta in their movie. Moh. Hatta asked Soekarno at that time, he said, "are you sure we can lead a country with at least 200 million people in it?". Even the mightiest Soekarno said "even if we can't, there will be thousands of young people who will. All we need to do is just to start".
Now I believe that dialogue must have been automatically changed into "I'll give you 20% if I get elected". If there are sincere politicians, they tend to be defeated by the power of money as the unspoken campaign.
Casal Bértoa (2017) explained about rootedness as one of the indicators mentioned by scholars in political parties and the systems. Later in 2019, he, Mobrand, and Hamada, and in 2022, he and Lee, and in 2017, he wrote about how everything tends to always be about money. Public finance as one of the efforts to balance private finance was completely rejected by any arguments so far, yet they have proven scientifically that it can be useful, to balance both.
I didn't say money is the part of rootednesses but it's inevitable. Given that people need to at least eat, sleep, and get dressed up. It's human nature to be the best of everything, including to be the richest among the richest. No one ever said "I want to be poor". The fact that the richer tends to get richer and the poor tends to get poorer have led us to study about the gaps. It's not the other way around. That's why the oligarchs should actually not be offended, we are just reminding each other that there are parts of their money which also belong to the poor.
In a private context, it's explained as simple as discrimination and superiority when the poor labourers get very small salaries despite the fact that they work harder, mainly physically. In a public context, it's called corruption and it's much more severe because the money they use is actually the money of the people. That's how democracy was born. To make people lead and lean in themselves.
Being comfortable has created a prolonged status quo to be maintained. I was not surprised when people said "just obey those who have money". When actually it's not merely money that gives us all a dignity.
In political science, the gaps are explained in the polarisation as companionship of democracy, called populism and autocracy. The relationships between them somehow have made them tend to compete with each other, which is not wrong at all.
The discussion about how scientists should support moral aspects scientifically is also written here, particularly in chapter nine, after analysing and delivering the survey and literature review results.
Talking about the congruence of winning and knowledge when winning becomes the only thing, perhaps we could say that knowledge is everything simply because not only knowledge leads to victories, but mainly because it doesn't only take knowledge to win.
In relation to perception as the sub-set or node of science, belief, and myth, people tend to believe in something greater, the words of someone greater, what they see more, and only listen to what they want to listen, or hear what they want to hear. Knowledge has a great role itself in shaping our perception.
Afterwards, when we reach a certain level of knowledge accumulation we are not called as experts yet before it's proven that our knowledge is at least recognized by others, or useful. Ideally, when it's useful it should be recognized by others, but currently there are many ways to do so too. Such as, by being politicians. Perhaps that's why people keep being cynical towards the job and role. We can count how many of them are really experts in doing their jobs. It's interesting to know the people's perception about this, usually 100% the same even without 5% statistical errors.
After discussing the perception, we tend to realise how contexts matter a bit more. Voters from rural areas who don't know anything about vote buying and corruption would perceive the development done by Indonesian second President Soeharto had helped them, while social scientists and activists would see it as part of perennial decentralised imperialism.
The current war aggressively started by Russia is a very epic deinstitutionalisation process that turns into democratisation -mainly- led by Ukrainian example. As the only large business continent that can compete with Western Empire, East Asian cases as part of Asia is felt as a fight between demand and supply which we call as polarisation. As US and China cases, for several indicators, their competition may have created collaboration too, either to fight against, substitute, or to complete. The good point of being the -mainly economically and theoretically called as oligarchs- giants is that they give jobs to people including the poor, but tragically their excessive use of everything physically and mentally has caused certain damages such as pandemic and discrimination. Wise persons would say, something too much can be damaging too, even when at a certain dose they can be useful.
African and Latin American cases are the examples of contexts where natural resources are still untouchable and contested -especially with their Monarchs- simply because they have a bigger opportunity to prevent and solve any such exploitative use just like happened in previous cases.
Europe including the UK as part of the earlier civilizations has always been the biggest Monarch. I believe one and another kingdom in Europe are related, through blood and marriage at least. It presumes a coordinated power is easier to be done. To compete and collaborate in Europe tends to be relatively easier because of that, yet it has been proven that each entity or social unit there has its own challenges, though the options are very clear, do you want to choose democracy, populism, or authoritarianism?, and humans are that complex till sometimes we choose any just to win, even when it is against what we believe tends to be true, even if there are grey areas in between democracy, populism, and authoritarianism.
To win, particularly elections, people need to campaign. At least to campaign, people need money, being it's the acceptable currency now. Golds, Bitcoin, and Good Exchanges are still acceptable perhaps but in very small entities or social units. Exchanging goods or services without careful consideration might even be called gratification, corruption, or bribery. Each country has its own regulations to determine how many percent each political party or candidate could get from private finance at least for the campaign, presuming that the rest should be covered with public finance. Yet, its implementation tends to be risky. For example, parties can be cartelised to accumulate the funds and wins, both from public and private fundings.
Like everything in life, private finance also needs its balance, one of the objectives is at least to prevent financing inequalities and gaps between candidates and political parties. So does public finance, one of the goals is to fight electoral polarisation and political corruption. Sometimes we forget that we actually care about the poor so much but it has been embedded in our daily lives, and it is represented in those fights. We actually do it not merely for ourselves, but also for those who can't fight on their own. Political corruption somehow gives more negative effects to marginalised people. They become poorer and poorer simply because 99% of the money went to the rich pockets.
Something big has always been started with small steps. Walking, driving, and flying into possibilities are still way too impossible especially for making political parties and the systems collaborate -at least for the poor, for example- if we still think that way. To make it possible, political science can't stand alone. Therefore, I tried to integrate the ideas of the interactions between sciences that can be more useful for explaining the competition and collaboration.
Understanding the nature of the competition mainly between political parties and their systems, Casal Bértoa and Enyedi (2021) wrote about the party cooperation as the part of party system closure. The way of bringing it into practice takes time and energy that's why examining it through parliamentary systems is currently easier and more applicable.
If democracy has been naturally given to them -parliamentarians, political parties and the systems- and the polarisation with corruption still happens, perhaps we need to start thinking that every democracy pre-requires a soft taking off and landing, called as rootedness. Caring about the poor has always been inside all of us no matter how many the percentage is, sometimes we are just too shy to admit it. Not to mention, sometimes cartelisation and coalition made it worse by confirming the stigma of how bad the political parties and politicians are. The aforementioned stigma is titled as 'they only want money'. That's why, again, the private and public finance balance is important. By that, we are allowing every side to contribute and feel the sense of belonging, monitor and evaluate the use of the funding, and eventually have scientists and journalists call it collaboration.
Blushed by colours of thousand moles of sciences, Casal Bértoa (2022) revisited Peter Mair's by simply summarising in beautiful way that in political sciences, party system can be frozen due to lack of ability in adapting towards changes be it to collaborate which tends to be in positive ways, and or to compete that can be positive and or negative. As humble as Peter Mair himself, euphemistically he mentioned it as 'misdirected matching' in natural science. As part of Party Institutionalization and Party System Institutionalization indicators, Casal Bértoa (2017) mentioned stability as one of the subsections. In 2022 when he delivered the 10th Peter Mair's lecture, he reflected the stability in human relationships. "Routine creates stability", he wrote (2022, p.8).
To ease us with our jobs, be it scientifically or practically, we tend to classify things such as into, through, or with taxonomies, families, genus, dimensions, sectors, and or colours. As other authors tend to be always sparked by, my curiosity about how we should properly engage sciences internally including the practices integratedly has led me to write this paper. This paper is written based on a compilation of my daily analysis and summary towards articles I read, so it's mainly built from secondary data.
Social Sciences: Life and Death
Just like poverty, as reminded by Güell (2023) in his article titled El Nuevo Sentido Público de La Ciencia, sciences have many dimensions; including how we perceive it, be it as a scientist, a practitioner, both, or neither. One of the important dimensions is about its moral of being positive or negative, for social sciences; and for example, positive or negative relationships for quantitative analysis. For natural sciences, I am going to talk about it in the second chapter.
Soriano Mendiara (2023) with his article titled Una Historia de Dos Presidentes, triggered me to develop debates between politicians, at least Joe Biden and Donald Trump, of the greatest Americans, by using the majestic 5W+1H question words. The questions I developed also include questions related to natural sciences, trying to understand more what Güell (2023) means about positivity and negativity of sciences.
Most people think that life and death are matters of natural sciences, such as cardiologists could heal heart diseases, engineers could create electric vehicles so that people would survive winter with more affordable prices, climatologists could combat climate changes, when actually some people couldn't breathe not only because of the weak heart but also because of too many pressures, electric vehicles need good sales and marketing to reach the heart of the customers, and it takes patience to remind all of us about healthier diet and sustainable living. That's why, social sciences also have a lot of things to do with life and death. Not to mention, a micro and meso system would not be able to exist without the macro one, thus there's always an art and science in governing.
It goes without saying to Biden and Trump. From all of the proposed simple questions to both, the predicted answers relied mainly upon not only each other's strength and weakness, but also interest. Given that Americans are always proud of being Americans, the answers of both would actually be similar, but since changes are the only sure thing, for example for the very current climate change and war issues, they would also consider their larger groups' interest, not only theirs or their political parties. In social sciences, this could be explained by political science's behavioural organisation theories, psychology's interdependence theories, economics' monopoly and imperialism theories, sociology's conflict of interest theories. How about natural sciences?
Natural Sciences or Sciences Sciences: Nobel Materials
European dependency towards Russia and China's energy has challenged scholars to write about it and practitioners to act upon, including Gil Teltre (2023)5 who wrote an article titled El Año en Que (Casi) Todo Cambió en La Política Energética Europea. He mentioned natural gas as one of the main energies being dependent upon, with diversification, green acceleration, and demand reduction as efforts to reduce the dependency.
Gil Teltre (2023) showed the reduction as the increase of energy independence percentage averaged 70% to 85% in the whole Europe from November 21, 2022 to January 14, 2023, with Germany being 88%. With such data we can actually calculate the speed tendency thus I can predict that we need 0.2-0.4% increase per day by March 17. Since we need to survive the energy necessity during the winter itself, I suggested the facilitation process follows the demand reduction to be able to acknowledge what people really need and want, by also considering the nature of each country's latitude and longitude.
Such science utilisation should be notably and nobly useful for humankind and our ecosystems, but how far both social and natural sciences can complete each other?
Completing the Round if it's a Circle: Social and Natural Sciences
It sounds like elections indeed, when we hear the word 'round', but indeed life is a cycle. Just like how Longo (2023) explained about the never ending series of corruption especially among politicians through his article titled La Insoportable Levedad de La Malversación. He mainly defined corruption as the act of using public money for personal interests. Using mainly the experience of the Catalonia Community in Spain, he briefly explained the circle of corruption.
Building follow up arguments upon his, I compared the Spanish with general facts and discourses growing around especially in Indonesia. With the similar definition, we can actually see the corruption itself from different points of view including the eyes of the victims and corruptors themselves. Longo (2023) mentioned that its punishment tends to be validly legal everywhere, yet it's no longer an assumption that most of the time one corruption case needs to be covered with other cases, which lead to normalisation of corruption. Its tolerance level increases especially when the victims do not know that they're softly helped by the corruptors. Trapped into the system, the corruptors themselves are sometimes pushed to use the public budget for their personal interests, not only for fulfilling their own wishes but also to secure next year's budget. Extending the definition into time corruption, it's not rare to find cases especially in developing and underdeveloped countries where the employers don't pay their overtime properly. Corruption then becomes a habit. With colours of corruption, judicial, legislative, executive, monarch, even grassroots, corruption can easily be found. As a result, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. With the help of a very simple statistic saying that Spain has 47.42 million population in 2021 and 21.70% of them are at risk of being poor, I then compared it with Indonesia that has 273.8 million population in 2021 yet in March 2022 9.54% of them are poor. Whether the poverty reduction in Indonesia includes any definition of corruption or not must require another set of research but such a combination of sciences may give us perspective of the interactions between sciences be it within the social sciences itself and or with natural sciences. As for the Spain case, paying more attention to the poor or marginalised or vulnerable people as potential victims of any corruption, thus I suggested perhaps because both Sanchez from PSOE and Feijoo from PP whom big possibilities will be fighting for the next election have limited knowledge about it, they should then try to know them better. That's presumably how science and practice could interact better. Collaborating with other related scientists, natural scientists or quantitative social scientists can even build the maths of corruption not only to solve it, but also to prevent it.
The Theory of Everything
Inevitably, Stephen Hawking will come to our mind when we talk about the Theory of Everything. I watched the movie a thousand times but just now -literally just now- when I am writing this I come to understand why he wanted to build a single equation that can explain everything when he was asked what was next after his doctoral study. It's not because we want a template but because we want to ease everyone's job including ourselves to prevent and solve problems. In my case I want to build a formula when the sciences can collaborate with each other, not only the scientists themselves. I guess it can be called humanisation or personification or science.
Following the wars, especially Russian aggression to Ukraine since February 24, 2022; Petrenko (2023) in his article titled Condiciones de Un Acuerdo de Paz con Rusia explained softly the emerging question among readers about when the war is going to be ended. He mentioned that political scientists also have the same question but in addition with how it's going to be ended.
By reading his article automatically I made a timeline, one of my favourite methods, not only because we can see the bigger picture that makes our whiteboard full but also we can analyse many things from it. We can see the causality, anomaly, and tendency, including the positivity or negativity of events that I believe would lead us to better facts and understanding mainly of the use of sciences.
The objective is clear. I wanted to negotiate with Russia, especially Putin and their allies, because one of the current most possible ways to have the war ended is by having them withdraw the troops from Ukraine, by keeping in mind the involvement of the defence business system. By literally calculating everyone's efforts including battles in the fields, fundraising, defence system support, refugee shelters, winter package, sanctions especially for the oligarchs and related sides who help Putin with percentage, I could identify a 5% gap. My analysis of several videos of an autocratic leader such as Putin can't made me realise that he can't negotiate with others by himself. He is only strong among his robots. Even the innocent people of Russia who fought in the field are already tired following what he wants. He threatened his people to do such mobilisation, he threatened the world with nuclear and next aggression cooking, including to Japan, and he spread propaganda saying that Russia wants peace while Zelensky does not, which is 100% incorrect.
As I mentioned in Chapter II, Europe tends to depend on China too. With a thriving worry that the EU would make the same mistake as what happened with Russia, Arnal (2023)8 wrote an article titled 'China: Will the EU make the same mistakes as with Russia?'. The highest figure of the dependency she mentioned is reflected in the statistic saying that 98% of rare earths consumed by the EU come from China. Grasping the whole idea where China has also lent 100 billion $ to developing countries under the Belt and Road Initiative but with a weak framework, I noticed that we need to support both EU and China, especially because it leads to a sustainable living of all countries, including Democratic Republic of Congo where the EU got 68% of Cobalt from.
I had the chance to observe China directly around two decades ago. It was their land system that is very distinctive, the Government rents their land for factories from all over the world. With a lower wage for labourers, China became a haven for producers, especially manufacturers. When the time comes for them to realise the importance of taking care of their environment too, they do not stop doing their business obviously. Therefore, they have been curing their country's environmental issues and trying to involve others to help them with Designed in China products, instead of the common Made in China. So having this in mind, we can actually make the best use of science interaction to work as one universe.
Conclusion: Revisiting Einstein
When Einstein developed E = MC2, he must be thinking about the theory of everything too because it's literally applicable for many things, being the square can also be calculated by multiplying the C, so it can also be MCB, MCC, MCQ, etc; and M can be a sum, also C, B, and Q.
By keeping that in mind, it means the formula can also be used to predict polarisation. If E is a bipolarized world, then M can be Westernization, and C can be Orientalization. Let's bear in mind that C can be one too, thus let's treat it that way so there will be less inequalities. Now if we want to create a multi polarised world, what the MC should be? I would say indigenous development for M but since indigenous is often defined and perceived for example as tribe and ethnic groups, let's borrow Mansuri and Rao (2013)9's term: localised development. While for C, since systems interact with each other, localised developments need to be synergistically harmonised. As Stephen Hawking, who was inspired by Roger Penrose, who was inspired by Albert Einstein would say: "wouldn't it be nice?", but allow me to follow with a different question, "if such sciences can be that reciprocal?" in colouring the competition into collaboration and giving a democracy flavour through institutionalised rootednesses such as the cooperation itself. Some theories may have different definitions between collaboration and cooperation but basically all tend to say that to cooperate is to start collaborating, be it in political parties, parliaments, and other entities including their systems. Wouldn't it be nice?
References
Arnal J (2023), China: Will the EU make the same mistakes as with Russia? Agenda Pūblica El País
Casal Bértoa F (2017) Political parties or party systems? Assessing the ‘myth’ of institutionalisation and democracy. West European Politics, 40:2, 402-429. DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2016.1216921
Casal Bértoa F, Enyedi Z (2021), Party System Closure: Party Alliances, Government Alternatives, and Democracy in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Casal Bértoa F (2022) The problem of party system change revisited: the 2022 Peter Mair Lecture. Irish Political Studies. DOI: 10.1080/07907184.2022.2161034
Gil Teltre M (2023), El Año en Que (Casi) Todo Cambió en La Política Energética Europea. Agenda Pūblica El País
Güell E (2023) El Nuevo Sentido Público de La Ciencia. Agenda Pūblica El País
Longo F (2023), La Insoportable Levedad de La Malversación. Agenda Pūblica El País
Mansuri G, Rao V (2013), Localizing Development : Does Participation Work?. Policy Research Report;. Washington, DC: World Bank. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/11859 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO
Petrenko I (2023), Condiciones de Un Acuerdo de Paz c
Lon Rusia. Agenda Pūblica El País
Soriano Mendiara P (2023), Una Historia de Dos Presidentes. Agenda Pūblica El País
