Birth of Too Many Political Parties Stirs Backlash in New Democracies : Transition: Fragmentation stalls reforms, bringing deep frustration. Russia and Poland are prime examples of the trend. Even ideology is threatened.

WASHINGTON —  When voters in the arid West African nation of Niger turned out for their first free parliamentary elections this year, candidates from 12 parties were on the ballot.

In the reunified nation of Yemen on the Arabian peninsula, the choice was among a dizzying array of 23 parties and thousands of independent candidates.

In South America, Bolivian voters had to decide from among 14 parties.

As one-party regimes give way to democracy in countries across five continents, the transition is producing a surprising, even alarming phenomenon--too much democracy. So much democracy, in fact, that in many of the 40 or so countries that have thrown off their governments in recent years, it may actually threaten the process of democratization itself.

“The fragmentation of democratic forces in virtually every new democracy has become a major area of concern,” said Allen Weinstein, president of the Center for Democracy in Washington. “It means that the degree of cohesion needed to organize and structure a democratic coalition doesn’t exist.”

Not only does the trend pose a general threat to the ideology that lies at the heart of modern Western civilization. But, more concretely, analysts fear it could destabilize a host of countries, large and small, that the world thought had made largely peaceful and successful transitions in recent years.

In the worst case, the proliferation of parties could touch off a vicious cycle of political gridlock that would aggravate economic and social tensions. The result could be a political breakdown that could be resolved in one of two disastrous ways: the rise of right-wing authoritarian rule or civil disorder requiring foreign intervention.

Even in countries that do not veer from the democratic course, democracy’s fragmentation has seriously stalled reforms, resulting in deep public frustration and political backlash.

Of the many states facing the problem, Western analysts are now most alarmed about the trend’s emergence in Russia, which is still one of the world’s most populous countries and its second-biggest nuclear power.

Russia is scheduled to hold critical parliamentary elections in December, and at last count, about two dozen parties and other groups had entered the political arena. The possible outcome: One form of political gridlock and instability could replace another.

The trend toward too many political parties has a host of causes: political inexperience and immaturity, individual ambitions, social rivalries and experimentation with diverse ideas. In many places it represents a reaction against the one-party systems in both left-wing totalitarian nations and right-wing authoritarian countries.

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“Everywhere in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, there’s a real revulsion to the notion of a single party,” said Nelson Ledsky, a senior associate at Washington’s National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. “So they’re moving away from ideology and forming new parties around individuals or little groups.”

In extreme cases, the result can sound comical: the Lumberjacks’ Party in Gabon, the Polish Beer Drinkers’ Party and the Buddhist Believers’ Party in Mongolia.

But the consequences can be serious.

“Even the tiniest of parties can obstruct a government’s program because no party has the majority required to get bills passed,” said Joe Ryan, resident scholar at New York-based Freedom House.

Poland may have set the record with 111 formal or informal groupings that fielded candidates, through 67 registered parties or coalitions, in 1991 parliamentary elections.

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But the problem is not just the numbers. It is also the parties’ short lives and shifting platforms.

In the Philippines, one of the oldest of the world’s new democracies, enduring party structures have failed to take root in the seven years since the overthrow of dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. Parties have materialized for elections, then disintegrated and reappeared in kaleidoscopic realignments.

Seven parties competed separately for president and vice president; more than a dozen parties and factions fielded candidates for Parliament in last year’s general elections. To confuse matters further, some candidates were claimed by more than one party and several switched parties during the campaign.

Now the president and the vice president come from different parties, neither one of which is the leading party in Parliament. The party of President Fidel V. Ramos, who won election with less than 24% of the vote and beat his closest rival by only about 8,000 votes out of 23 million votes cast, finished third in elections for both chambers of Parliament.

As a result, no party had a clear mandate or sufficient support to win smooth passage of its agenda--a key reason there has been little change in the style of governing since Marcos’ ouster.

“In many new democracies there’s little party discipline, leaving those elected unable to govern well,” Ledsky said. “They can’t rely on a regular constituency, and they constantly have to watch over their shoulders to what’s happening among voters.”

Even in the new democracies with the least fragmented parliaments--Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic--the largest parties have to rely on two or more other parties to form a government or pass a bill.

Elsewhere, Brazil’s multi-party system is particularly fluid--and erratic. Twenty-one parties competed in the 1990 elections, with 11 winning a dozen or more seats and another six winning between one and five seats. The party of the presidential winner came in fourth, winning less than 8% of the seats.

Voter loyalties in Brazil have been no more constant. Since democracy was restored in 1985, support for one party soared from 2% to 40%, only to plummet back to 6%.

“One of the necessary conditions for stable democratic systems is that a fair portion of the electorate be stupidly, unquestionably loyal to parties so that, no matter how bad things are, they don’t defect,” said Seymour Martin Lipset, a leading American political sociologist at the Woodrow Wilson Institute.

“But you don’t have that in these new systems,” Lipset said. “So if governments go wrong, as they are bound to do in new systems, then electorates turn against governments and parties turn against each other and it makes the process of consolidating democracy harder.”

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Poland is a case in point. In 1991 parliamentary elections, 29 parties won seats, the largest with less than 14% of the vote. The result was so fragmented that a majority coalition required at least five parties.

In the end, a minority coalition of three parties took two months to form Poland’s first democratic government after the 1991 elections. And last year, Poland ran through three governments in an attempt to find one that worked.

Poland’s predicament is common throughout Eastern Europe. Of the seven former Communist countries (excluding the former Yugoslavia and its offshoots), only one has witnessed the emergence of a limited party system with one group capable of winning a majority. That country is Albania, Europe’s most economically backward nation.

For this year’s elections, Poland introduced a threshold for party representation in Parliament. Parties with less than 5% of the vote and coalitions with less than 8% were disqualified. That modification winnowed the number of parties with seats in Parliament from 29 to a more manageable eight. But it had a substantial drawback: The 30% of the voters who cast their ballots for the other parties have no representation in Parliament.

“Thresholds can be effective in forcing some parties to fade away or to group with others,” said Marc Plattner, a counselor at the National Endowment of Democracy in Washington. “But they can also hurt by putting some democrats out of business or by making large numbers of voters feel left out of the system.”

Some new democracies actually promote multiple party systems. Latvia and Estonia, two of the Baltic states absorbed by the Soviet Union in World War II, encouraged fragmented party systems after breaking from Communist rule in 1991 to reflect how democratic their countries had become. They regarded multiple parties as a way to prevent the accumulation of power by a single individual or group.

Ironically, the result is often just the opposite.

“At a time when the supporters of democracy are moving into a wide variety of parties, the adversaries of democracy--whether reds or browns, on the anti-democratic left or right--are collecting their energies, cohering their forces into one or at least a few parties,” Weinstein explained.

Fragmentation among democratic parties has contributed to the return to power of renamed Communists in Lithuania and Poland and to the rise of rightist rule in the Dominican Republic.

During Algeria’s two-year democratic experiment, the emergence of 54 parties played a role in the subsequent showing by fundamentalist Islamic groups, which came in first and fourth. Fear of Islamic rule, in turn, led the military to stage a coup. The North African state, now led by a junta and living under emergency rule, is further from democracy than it was a decade ago.

Although analysts expect many of the new political parties ultimately to wither and die, the problem in most countries will get worse before it gets better. That bodes ill for Russia, which is still preparing for its first free, multi-party parliamentary elections in December.

“The second round of free elections is likely to produce more parties and more disarray than the first in most of these countries,” Ledsky said. “So whatever we see in Russia in December--if things go as they have elsewhere--then in four years Russia will almost certainly have further disintegration of parties and even less coherence.”

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Nor can anyone be sure that political fragmentation is only a temporary phenomenon. “It should become clear after the first few elections which parties have staying power,” said Arend Lijphart, a UC San Diego political scientist. “Some of the more hopeful cases--Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--will be in better shape in three years or so. Others will take longer, maybe a decade.

“But the longer it takes, the greater the danger that a country won’t arrive at a truly democratic system at all,” Lijphart added. In response to gridlock and political infighting, he said, voters may turn increasingly to authoritarian politicians to get things done.

History shows that most new democracies--France before 1871, other Western European nations after 1848 and repeatedly in Latin America and Africa--have been overthrown, Lipset, the sociologist, pointed out. “Unless stable parties can be formed, competitive democratic politics is not likely to last in many of the Eastern European and Central Asian polities,” Lipset said.

Democracies have traditionally caught hold through a gradual process of coalition building, consensus shaping, and, if all else fails, agreeing to disagree based on commitment to a process if not a policy. In the United States, Lipset said, the two-party system did not really settle down until 1832.

But the situation in today’s new democracies differs from earlier political evolution in Western Europe and North America, where the vote expanded over more than a century from elites to include both sexes and all classes, races and sexes. Most new democracies today, by contrast, are enfranchising entire populations all at once, at a time when many societies are more fragmented than ever.