Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Brokerage party

Canada's Liberal Party has been in power for twelve years and "for almost 80 of the past 109 years". David Frum describes the Liberals' problems in today's NY Times.

Frum says Canada's Liberals are
not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India's Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.
I think I've heard something similar about Fiann Fáil once or twice.