A big tent party, or catch-all party, is a term used in reference to a political party having members covering a broad spectrum of beliefs.[1] This is in contrast to other kinds of parties, which defend a determined ideology, seek voters who adhere to that ideology, and attempt to convince people towards it.
Following the 2018 Armenian parliamentary election, the My Step Alliance rose to power on an anti-corruption and pro-democracy platform. The alliance has been described as maintaining a big tent ideology, as the alliance did not support any one particular political position. Instead, it focused on strengthening Armenia's civil society and economic development.[2]
The Liberal Party of Australia and its predecessors originated as an alliance of liberals and conservatives in opposition to the Australian Labor Party, beginning with the Commonwealth Liberal Party in 1909. This ideological distinction has endured to the present day, with the modern Liberal Party frequently described as a "broad church", a term popularised by former leader and Prime Minister John Howard. In this context, "broad church" is largely synonymous with "big tent". In the 21st century, the party is often characterised as having a "small-l liberal" wing and a conservative wing, which frequently come into conflict with each other. The party has historically found strong support primarily from the middle-class, though it has in recent decades appealed to socially conservative working-class voters.[3][4]
Argentina
From its foundation the Justicialist Party has been a Peronist catch-all party, which focuses on the figure of Juan Perón and his wife Eva. Since Nestor Kirchner took the presidency in 2003, the party is considered as part of center-left coalition. It has divided into left-wing and right-wing factions, with left-wing populistKirchnerists now dominating the party. Despite this, the right-wing faction still exists.
In Brazil, the Centrão (lit.'big centre') is a term for a large bloc of political parties that do not have a specific or consistent ideological orientation and whose aim is to maintain proximity to the executive branch in order to guarantee advantages and allow them to distribute privileges through clientelistic networks.[6] The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) is one of the oldest and most notable "Centrão" and Big Tent parties in Brazil; despite being Brazil's largest party, both in number of members and number of officials elected, it has never elected a President, but has used its position as the largest party as a "bargaining chip" for privileges and advantages.[7] MDB was founded in 1965 at the start of the Brazilian military dictatorship as part of an enforced two-party system by the dictatorship, in which the only allowed parties were National Renewal Alliance Party (ARENA), a catch-all party representing the interests of the dictatorship, and MDB, formed to represent a wide-range moderate and less radical opposition to the dictatorship, without a clear program except the democratization of the country.[8] Other Big Tent centrão parties include the Progressists (PP), Brazilian Labour Party (PTB), We Can (PODE), Brazil Union (UB), Social Democratic Party (PSD), Social Christian Party (PSC), Act (AGIR), Patriot (PATRI), Forward (AVANTE), Solidarity (SD).[9]
In Colombia, the presumed League of Anti-Corruption Governors, led by the former presidential candidate, sometimes referred to as "the Colombian Trump", has been described as a "catch-all party",[20] although analysts agree that it belongs to a more or less authoritarianright-wing. That is to say to a type of extreme right.[21][22]
Finland
The centre-right National Coalition Party has been described as catch-all party supporting the interests of the urban middle classes.[23]
France
The Renaissance party (formerly La République En Marche!) founded by President Emmanuel Macron has been described as a centrist party with a catch-all nature.[24]
The Bharatiya Janata Party which is the ruling party of India since 2014 has made a successful coalition of diverse Indian communities of all caste, class and gender denominations. The Indian National Congress attracted support from Indians of all classes, castes and religions supportive of the Indian independence movement.[26] The Janata Party which came into power in India in 1977, was a catch-all party that consisted of people with different ideologies opposed to The Emergency.[27]
Ireland
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are considered catch-all parties and are supported by people from different social classes and political ideologies.[28] The two parties are usually described as being very similar in their current and recent policies, both being positioned on the centre-right with a liberal-conservative ideology. The reasons for their remaining separate are mainly historical, with those who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the 1920s eventually becoming Fine Gael and those who opposed the treaty having joined Fianna Fáil to seek an independent Ireland.
Italy
In Italy, the Five Star Movement, founded and formerly led by the comedian and actor Beppe Grillo, has been described as a catch-all protest party and "post-ideological big tent" because its supporters do not share similar policy preferences, are split on major economic and social issues and are united largely based on "anti-establishment" sentiments.[29] The Five Star Movement's "successful campaign formula combined anti-establishment sentiments with an economic and political protest which extends beyond the boundaries of traditional political orientations", but its "'catch-all' formula" has limited its ability to become "a mature, functional, effective and coherent contender for government".[29] The Northern League attracted voters in its early years from all of the political spectrum. Forza Italia, on the centre-right, and the Democratic Party, on the centre-left, are considered to be catch-all parties and were mergers of political parties with numerous ideological backgrounds.[citation needed]
Historically, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had been formed as a big-tent party uniting groups ranging from Keynesian centrists to nationalist neoliberals. The party developed an intricate factional system to maintain co-operation and to ensure hegemonic success in elections. However, the party has seen some former factions defect or die out since the 1990s, especially the more moderate ones, which has led the party to shift overall towards the right.
The New Frontier Party, which existed from 1994 to 1997, was considered a big political party because it was created to oppose the LDP by people of various ideologies, including social democrats, liberals, neoliberals, Buddhist democrats, and conservatives.[30]
The former main centre-left opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), was Japan's version of third way politics and served since the mid-1990s as a ‘big tent party’ for a plethora of heterogeneous groups ranging from two socialist parties to liberal and conservative groups.[31]
Mexico
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held power in Mexico for 71 uninterrupted years, from 1929 to 2000. It was founded after the Mexican Revolution by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles. Then known as the National Revolutionary Party, it was founded with the intent of providing a political space to allow all surviving leaders and combatants of the Mexican Revolution to participate and to resolve the grave political crisis that had been caused by the assassination of President-elect Álvaro Obregón in 1928. Throughout its nine-decade existence, the PRI has adopted a very wide array of ideologies, which have often been determined by the President of the Republic in office at the time. The party nationalized the petroleum industry in 1938 and the banking industry in 1982. In the 1980s, the party went through reforms that shaped its current incarnation, with policies characterized as centre-right, such as the privatization of state-run companies, closer relations with the Catholic Church, and embracing free-market capitalism and neoliberal policies.[32][33][34]
Romania's Social Democratic Party has been referred to as a catch-all party. Political analyst Radu Magdin described it in December 2016 as having conservative values, while being economically liberal, and espousing left-leaning rhetoric on public policies.[39]
Spain
Citizens (Spanish: Ciudadanos) has been considered as an example of astroturfing in the Spanish media since 2015. Originally founded as a social-democratic regional party opposed to Catalan nationalism, the party switched to a catch-all message to attract votes from the right to the moderate left in the party's appearance in the national political landscape. Its stance includes a mix of liberalism and pro-Europeanism, but the party has also embraced populist views on the legitimacy of its political opponents; conservative views on topics such as the criminal system and personal property and Spanish nationalist positions; and many problems by its own leader, Inés Arrimadas. It has become one of the most recognisable catch-all parties in the history of the country. In the mid-2010s, however, the party's main ideology is perceived to have drifted towards the right, with Albert Rivera admitting that it would not agree to form a coalition with the two main centre-left and left parties after the April 2019 Spanish general election, regardless of the results.[40][41][42] Furthermore, some commentators argue that Ciudadanos was attempting to supplant the People's Party, which suffered massive losses as the hegemonic party of the right and thus contributed to the shift in Ciudadanos to the right. Similarly, Ciudadanos has allied with both the conservative People's Party and the far-right Vox to achieve coalitions in regional parliaments. That has given rise to the expression "the three rights" or colloquially "El Trifachito" to describe the grouping, which defines its opposition as "the left".
South Africa
The African National Congress (ANC) has been the governing party of South Africa since the country's first democratic election, in 1994, and it has been described by the media as a "big tent" party.[43][44][45][46] An important aspect of its electoral success has been its ability to include a diverse range of political groups most notably in the form of the Tripartite Alliance between the ANC; the South African Communist Party; and the country's largest trade union, COSATU.[44] Additional interest groups in the party are members of the business community and traditional leaders.
^Brokerage politics: "A Canadian term for successful big tent parties that embody a pluralistic catch-all approach to appeal to the median Canadian voter... adopting centrist policies and electoral coalitions to satisfy the short-term preferences of a majority of electors who are not located on the ideological fringe."[10][11]
^Brooks, Stephen (2004). Canadian Democracy: An Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 265. ISBN978-0-19-541806-4. two historically dominant political parties have avoided ideological appeals in favour of a flexible centrist style of politics that is often labelled "brokerage politics"
^Ambrose, Emma; Mudde, Cas (2015). "Canadian Multiculturalism and the Absence of the Far Right". Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. 21 (2): 213–236. doi:10.1080/13537113.2015.1032033. S2CID145773856.
^Ronald J. Hrebenar; Akira Nakamura, eds. (2014). Party Politics in Japan: Political Chaos and Stalemate in the 21st Century. Routledge. p. 81. ISBN9781317745976. The initial period of party system change found its first culmination in 1996 when a new catch-all party, the Shinshinto (New Frontier Party), got founded by Ozawa and others.
^Spremberg, Felix (November 25, 2020). "How Japan's Left is repeating its unfortunate history". International Politics & Society Journal. Retrieved November 19, 2021. The former main centre-left opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), was Japan's version of third way politics and served since the mid-1990s as a 'big tent party' for a plethora of heterogeneous groups ranging from two socialist parties to liberal and conservative groups.
^Schettino, Macario (June 6, 2018). "Mexico 2018: How AMLO Took a Page from the PRI Playbook". Americas Quarterly. Archived from the original on June 7, 2019. Retrieved September 18, 2018. Morena's star has risen so quickly because it offers refuge to such a wide range of beliefs and ideologies. The party has room for old guard supporters of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, young leftist academics, former PRI leaders, evangelical Christians, actors, athletes, and even the odd business tycoon or two. In this way the party resembles the big tent of the PRI, which more than a guiding philosophy was guided by the administration of political power.
^Graham, Dave (March 20, 2018). "Mexican leftist's 'big tent' pitch puts presidency in sight". Reuters. Retrieved September 18, 2018. In a few months, he has assembled a coalition stretching from socially conservative Christian evangelicals to admirers of socialist Venezuela and business tycoons, each with contrasting visions for Mexico. Dozens of lawmakers from across the political spectrum have switched sides to join Lopez Obrador's National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), a party that is not yet four years old.
^David C. King, "The Polarization of American Parties and Mistrust of Government" in Why People Don't Trust Government (eds. Joseph S. Nye, Philip Zelikow, David C. King: Harvard University Press, 1997).
^Lisa Young, Feminists and Party Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 84.
^Holly M. Allen, "New Deal Coalition" in Class in America: An Encyclopedia (Vol. 2: H-P), ed. Robert E. Weir (ABC-CLIO, 2007), p. 571: "During the 1930s liberals, labor unions, white ethnics, African Americans, farm groups, and Southern whites united to form the New Deal coalition. Though never formally organized, the coalition was sufficiently cohesive to make the Democratic Party the majority party from 1931 into the 1980s. Democrats won seven out of nine presidential contests and maintained majorities in both houses of Congress from 1932 to 1964. The divisiveness of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, the increasing segmentation of the labor force, and waning influence of unions, and the relative weakness of Democratic Party leadership are among the factors that led to the coalition's erosion in the late 1960s."
^Paul Gottfried, The conservative movement: Social movements past and present , Twayne Publishers, 1993, p. 46.
^Maguire, Maria (1986). "Ireland". In Peter Flora (ed.). Growth to Limits: Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy. Walter de Gruyter. p. 333. ISBN978-3-11-011131-6.
^Iskandaryan, Alexander (May 23, 2012). "Armenian Elections: Technology vs. Ideology"(PDF). Caucasus Analytical Digest. ETH Zurich: 3. Both major parties in the Armenian parliament [Republican Party and Prosperous Armenia] represent elite groups. With almost no ideology to speak of, they are catch-all parties, a phenomenon becoming typical in the modern world.
^David Torrance, "Scotland's Progressive Dilemma," The Political Quarterly, 88 (2017): 52–59. doi:10.1111/1467-923X.12319.
^Gallagher, Tom; Allan M. Williams (1989). "Southern European socialism in the 1990s". In Tom Gallagher; Allan M. Williams (eds.). Southern European Socialism: Parties, Elections, and the Challenge of Government. Manchester University Press. p. 271. ISBN978-0-7190-2500-6.
^Pallaver, Günther (2008). "South Tyrol's Consociational Democracy: Between Political Claim and Social Reality". In Jens Woelk; Francesco Palermo; Joseph Marko (eds.). Tolerance Through Law: Self Governance and Group Rights In South Tyrol. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. pp. 305, 309. ISBN978-90-04-16302-7.
^Lublin, David (2014). Minority Rules: Electoral Systems, Decentralization, and Ethnoregional Party Success. Oxford University Press. p. 229. ISBN978-0-19-994884-0.