A few weeks ago, I was giving a lecture on the institutionalization of the Five Star Movement to a group of first-year political science students. At the end, a pupil asked me how, if all parties are doomed to narrow their most radical promises once in government, it is possible to ‘change the system’. I had no compelling answer for the student's question, but Jonathan Hopkin's book on anti-system politics can help us to disentangle this matter.
The book essentially proposes an explanation for the rise of what the author defines as ‘anti-system politics’ rooted in the changes in rich democracies' political economy, or better ‘a theory of anti-system politics that puts economic change at the center stage’ (p. 50). But what is ‘anti-system politics’? Hopkin draws on Sartori's well-known definition and argues that while in the 60s anti-system parties opposed the liberal-democratic order, in this historical period they oppose ‘neoliberal democracy’, that is to say ‘an economic model that ultimately only worked for a minority, and a political system that closed off alternatives to it’ (p. 10). Anti-system politics is thus the structural response to the failures of the (political and economic) system, and the symptom of the failure of the political establishment to represent popular demands for protection from the brutal effects of the economic crisis. With its focus on structural economic factors, the main alternative theory that the book seeks to deny, or better to complement, is Inglehart and Norris' theory on the ‘cultural backlash’, according to which ‘the rise of authoritarian populism is the consequence of a conservative reaction against the cultural “silent revolution” of socially liberal attitudes’ (see Gilles Pittoors' book review published in the issue 50 of this journal).
The book is structured in three main parts. The first part deals with the relationship between capitalism and democracy and explains the current crisis of political representation as the consequence of economic changes that have subjected Western societies to growing inequality and insecurity, while undermining the ability of political institutions to respond to popular pressures. Then the author proposes the framework that underpins the second and third part of the book, devoted to anti-system politics in the Anglosphere (UK and USA) and Eurozone (Greece, Portugal, plus two separate chapters on Spain and Italy).
The core of the author's reasoning is that ‘the more societies are exposed to economic and financial distress, the more likely it is that anti-system forces will win greater shares of the vote’ (p. 83). Differences in institutions (in particular, the structure of the welfare state) determine the extent and nature of anti-system support: both what the author defines as ‘anti-system left’ and ‘anti-system right’ have in common the rejection of the neoliberal order; while the former expresses it in the form of a fight against inequality, the latter does it in the name of the defense of national interests.
In the US and the UK, the countries most affected by the inequality produced by the market system, anti-system left (namely, Sanders and Corbyn) and right (Trump and the Brexit coalition) coexist. In Europe, the cleavage between older and authoritarian-oriented voters and younger and progressive ones, but also the differences between member states with respect to their debt, produced different patterns of anti-system politics. Creditor countries had strong welfare states and less acute economic problems, but they were still affected by rising inequality, slow wage growth, and welfare cuts that particularly affected older, less educated voters sympathetic to the anti-system right, that consequently experienced more success. Debtor countries, on the contrary, suffered worse crises, but their systems of social protection tended to protect pensioners and older male workers more than younger citizens, who were thus more inclined to protest by supporting the anti-system left.
Italy is an exception of which it is interesting talking, given the journal in which this review appears and my field of expertise. According to the author, in this country, differently from the other South-European ones, anti-system ‘left’ (the Five Star Movement) and ‘right’ (the Lega) coexist, also due to the different patterns of the socio-economic fabric of the Italian territory. The author is rightly skeptical when he includes the Five Star Movement within the ‘left’, and appropriately recognizes its ideological ambiguity. It is true, on the other hand, that the absence of a strong anti-austerity social movement in Italy is puzzling. It could be explained on one side with the characteristics of the Democratic Party, a party decidedly located in the center of the party system that presents a clear neoliberal stance, and on the other precisely with the presence of the FSM, a party that, especially at the beginning, attracted with its rhetoric (and managed to normalize) the protest of a part of the population that in other circumstances could have gone more left.
The book relies on a solid base of information and the author proves to know well the (not few) systems on which the book is focused. It is grounded in data and in the literature. It is well-written, accessible also to a public outside academia, and convincing in the argumentations. Nevertheless, some critical points need to be discussed.
At page 51, the author gives a definition of anti-system political movement, writing: ‘Anti-system political movements are defined by the system they oppose: they share a rejection of “the prevailing political or social order”, and the values it represents’. He cites a recent article by Mattia Zulianello, Anti-System Parties Revisited: Concept Formation and Guidelines for Empirical Research, appeared in 2018 in the journal Government and Opposition (vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 653–681) but it seems that he doesn't take full advantage of that text, and a better effort of conceptual clarification would have given added value to the text. Zulianello proposes a multidimensional definition of what an anti-system party is, based both on its ideological orientation toward the status quo, and on its systemic interactions, that is its role in the party system. Anti-system parties are thus not only those that question the status quo for tactical reasons (e.g. during electoral campaigns), but they also don't take part in interactions, and don't cooperate, with actors variously associated with the status quo.
The dimension of the ‘systemic integration’ is not taken into consideration in Hopkin's book. In this sense, labeling the President of the United States as ‘anti-system’ is, in my opinion, confusing, and connects to another shortcoming, that is the investigation of actors' agency. Only on page 256, that is to say in the conclusions, the author acknowledges that actors may act for ‘opportunistic’ reasons. One thing is what ‘anti-system’ actors promise (their rhetoric and anti-system discourse), another is what they actually do within the system (e.g. participating to governments), and a third are their motivations (obtaining consensus in the first case, maintain power in the second). These three aspects could have been better disentangled, and would perhaps have helped to explain the failure of anti-system actors to meet their promises, of which I will write in the last part of this review.
Finally, I understand the choice of not using the category of populism, even because not all populist parties qualify as anti-system parties, but I found not fully convincing some of the motivations given for this choice. In particular, on page 6 the author writes that: ‘the term [populism] has inescapably acquired a heavily pejorative connotation, undermining serious and systematic analysis’. While it is true that the term may have, for some, a pejorative connotation, it is not always true (some political actors proudly claim to be ‘populist’); and while perhaps a part of the burgeoning literature on populism can in some cases be considered as not serious and systematic, I'm sure it is not always like that. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. But these critical points should not distract us from the fact that Anti-System Politics is a truly well-documented and stimulating effort to explain the crisis we live in.
To conclude, I can go back to the question that opened this review, that is to say ‘how to change the system’, and what this book teaches us on this matter. Hopkin's book shows very clearly that ‘deviating from the neoliberal playbook became increasingly difficult for elected politicians’ (p. 256). Citizens' demand for anti-system politics is real, but even in the cases in which anti-system politicians obtained the power, they failed to meet the expectations of their voters. Because they couldn't, or because they didn't want to, it's very hard to tell, and we don't find the answer in this book (but hopefully it will be a matter of further research). This is true not only in the case of Trump, that ‘failed to genuinely challenge what he consistently described as a “rigged system”’ (p. 253), but also in the extreme cases of the Greek and UK referendum, in which voters gave a clear input to their representatives, that was nevertheless neglected. However, yet 100 years ago, Robert Michels in his Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy taught us that there will always be ‘newcomers’: parties and political actors claiming more or less opportunistically to represent an ambition to change. The problem, for the ‘system’, will be when citizens will stop to believe them. In this regard, the abstention rate is a signal to keep an eye to.
