3
According to the liberal view, freedom of expression, association, and
combination are requisites for integration of working-class parties into
established political institutions. Where these freedoms were absent, social
democratic parties were denied legal channels of expression and organization
and, we hypothesize, were induced to combat the regime to gain the political
space necessary to exist, even if they would otherwise have preferred
incremental policy reform.
A second line of argument stresses the importance of political inclusion
and, in particular, of manhood suffrage, on the grounds that inclusion moderates
and exclusion radicalizes (Lipset 1983).
As writers from Lenin to Selig Perlman (1928, 167-168) have argued,
denial of manhood suffrage meant that social democratic parties could not hope
to convert their potential support into legislative voice or pressure within the
existing political system and were induced to campaign for fundamental change
in the rules of the political game.
Where workers could not vote, laws were biased against them (Stephens
1979; Korpi 1983). Moreover, the denial of political citizenship to workers
alienated them by making them feel a class apart, and strengthened the claim of
social democratic parties that they represented workers as a homogenous class
against other classes (Lipset 1983).
Third, some writers argue that the participation of socialist parties in
elections led them away from radicalism.
Adam Przeworski and John Sprague have argued that electoral
participation demobilized workers as a class by individualizing representation
(Przeworski and Sprague 1986; Przeworski 1985; Burawoy and Przeworski 1989).
Socialist parties claimed to represent workers as a class, a claim that legitimized
their opposition to capitalism. However, elections undermined their attempt to
extend class solidarity to the political realm: “People who are capitalists or wage-
earners within the system of production all appear in politics undifferentiated
‘individuals’ or ‘citizens’ (Przeworski 1985, 13).
Once socialist parties had taken the electoral path, the road to political
power demanded electoral success. But despite socialist predictions, workers
never made up more than half of all citizens. So socialists were induced to make
cross-class appeals, and this undermined class cohesiveness, as Robert Michels
diagnosed:
“For motives predominantly electoral, the party of the workers seeks
support from the petty bourgeois elements of society, and this gives rise to more
or less extensive reactions upon the party itself. The Labour Party becomes the
party of the ‘people.’ Its appeals are no longer addressed to the manual workers,
but to ‘all producers,’ to the ‘entire working population,’ these phrases being
applied to all the classes and all the strata of society except the idlers who live
upon the income from investments” (Michels [1916] 1962, 254, quoted in
Przeworski 1985, 26).
Convention