Mongolia is facing a parliamentary crisis, the origin of which traces back to the crisis in political parties. Today Mongolians are seeing the domino effect of how a crisis in political parties leads to a decline in politics, economics, and society.
We have spent nearly thirty years talking about reforms and maturity of political parties, but there hasn’t been a public debate or discussion to flesh out what it really means.
Not maturity, but institutionalisation
Samuel Huntington first coined the term ‘institutionalisation’ in his book ‘Political Order in Changing Societies’. He defined institutionalisation as the process by which political parties acquire stability and obtain common organisational values. When not institutionalised, political parties tend to lean too much towards polarised views and have less stability. This makes competition weaker and doesn’t allow for the emergence of a credible opposition.
English scholar Fernando Casal Bertoa studied institutionalisation in political parties in the 1960s and established that, once political parties are institutionalised to a certain degree, democracy becomes an irreversible process.
Since 1990, Mongolia has been governed by two major political parties either on their own or in a coalition with each other. However, the government has been replaced 16 times, which brings the average age of our government to 1.5 years. It is a clear indicator that our political parties are not institutionalised. Although Mongolia has room for a third political force, we haven’t seen the emergence of any credible political party.
Mongolian political parties have been marked as ‘semi-institutionalised’ in the 2018 Internal Democracy Index of Political Parties produced by the DeFacto Institute. For example, the Democratic Party (DP) has branches that operate as if they were a completely separate entity. These branches hide information from each other, let alone share it. Our political parties don’t produce financial reports. In order to comply with the law, they publish specific information on their website, but take them down after a few days. There is not even a common set of standards or a model that political parties must comply with when disclosing their reports.
The Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) criticises how the DP keeps replacing their own government when they are in power. But what happened in the recent months shows that the 80-year-old MPP does exactly the same. The MPP and the DP both lack the capability to be an effective opposition. Citizen D. Enkhbat sent out a very accurate tweet saying ‘If MPP is not doing a good job, it also means DP is not doing a good job. And, vice versa.’ As a system, our political parties haven’t been institutionalised.
Not a government organisation, but a representative organisation
What exactly constitutes a political party? A political party can be defined as a group of people who seek to obtain governing power, sharing a common set of values and policy ideas. The main duty of a political party lies in connecting people with the state – being the bridge between the two. Mongolians have viewed the two major political parties as that bridge for some time, but their faith is getting weaker and weaker. Our people have been increasingly distancing themselves from political parties out of dislike and disapproval. There are several reasons behind this trend.
First of all, Mongolian political parties have increasingly been funded from the public budget with various excuses and reasons. It may help reduce corruption, but it is also contributing to political parties become non-civic organisations. In other words, political parties are becoming less dependent on membership fees and donations from ordinary citizens.
Secondly, political parties are seeing their membership base go down. Previously political parties had a lot of members, which made them representative organisations. Today our two major parties both claim to have over 150,000 members, but the number of actual members stood at around 15,000 when the party leadership was contested.
The third reason is that political parties are out of touch with the times we are living in, so they are unable to be supported by anyone. Our political parties have become obsolete in everything that matters, including their structure, organisation, policy, and ideology. Especially in terms of structure, Mongolian political parties can’t let go of their socialist mentality of having a single, dominant party that has a huge structure built on forced administration.
How can we fix the bridge?
First, Mongolia needs to review its political system in order to institutionalise the political party system. Fernando Casal Bertoa has shown that the semi-presidential system affects political party institutionalism negatively. Mongolia’s presidents have always been a major factor in creating and/or fuelling factional politics. These factions have consistently been the triggers that are leading to the systematic collapse of political parties. Mongolia is supposed to be a parliamentary system, and the role of the President is supposed to be largely symbolic.
Secondly, internal democracy needs to be developed within political parties. In the last few years, every parliamentary session had the ‘Law on Political Parties’ on its agenda, but it has never been discussed. The reason is very simple. Our political parties are so heavily controlled by oligarch groups that they cannot even discuss this law. The law needs to be urgently discussed and passed, so that it would require political parties to work more closely with people and adopt a more flexible, smaller structure. Also, this law needs to specifically incorporate key functions of democracy, such as members’ involvement, competition, transparency, and reporting. Mongolia even has a political party whose leadership hasn’t been changed for 20 years.
Thirdly, our civic society needs to form and mature. In his book ‘From Totalitarianism to Defective Democracy’, Czech scholar Michal Klima wrote about how a political system based on clientelism has formed in post-communist countries due to political parties becoming controlled by their financiers. He concluded that the underlying reason was that the civic society didn’t form or mature. Given they are a subset of the political system that has interconnections with other systems such as civic society and free press, political parties can’t do reforms on their own.
Winston Churchill said ‘Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ Similarly, political parties may be the worst, but there is no democracy without political parties. Therefore, our challenge, perhaps a historic one, is how we can institutionalise our political parties and how we can create a stable, more compact system.
We cannot develop our country without overcoming this challenge.
2019.01.23
Trans. by B.Amar