Which Parties Count? - The Effective Number of Parties in the Albanian Party System

The aim of this paper is to explore and understand the Albanian Party System. The analysis will cover the period from the collapse of the communist regime in 1991 until 2014. It will try to investigate what forces drive the battle of the parties, what cleavages ‘divide’ society and consequently the party system as well as which are the parties that count the most. in order to assess this, the paper will focus on the parliamentary parties and will relay on various theoretical concepts of the contemporary literature on political parties. First it will draw on Sartori’s concept of ‘relevance’ in order to understand whether all the parliamentary parties over the course of twenty four years of pluralism are important or not and what weight do they have. Then it will use the Laakso & Taagepera index of the Effective Number of Parties to understand how power is distributed within the parliament.


Introduction
The party system could be defined as a structure, which enables the competition and cooperation among the political parties. Even though it is a structure, nonetheless it is not always stable. Lipset and Rokkan (1967) contend that this structure is stable and it is created as the result of the social cleavages formed within the society of the Western Europe in the beginning of the 20th century. Their thesis is that these cleavages are frozen; they are created once and for all and that they have determined the interaction among the political parties (competition or cooperation as well as the focus of their political program). Bartolini and Mair (2007) are in the same line. in their seminal work on the European electorate during 1885-1985, they observed that 'in the long term, the bonds which tie electorates into a set of political identities and alignments have demonstrated their resilience' (pp.262).
In this context, one might ask whether the Albanian party system has demonstrated any resilience or not. A stable party system is an indication of stable political parties with stable political identities and programs. On the other hand, the change of the party system is a concept which refers to the changes and development of it features, changes which occurs with the passing of time. Lane and Ersson (1994: 4-5) argues that the party system is measured by the following dimensions: The number of issues which indicate the number of cleavages in the party system as well as the polarization (the ideological distance between parties); The Effective Number of Parties and the Index of Fractionalization; The total volatility: the aggregate change of votes between consecutive elections. However, even though Lipset and Rokkan (1967) contend that the party system is a contingent of the social cleavages, it is influenced by other factors such as a change in the external environment, a change in economy, a change in the leadership of the party, a change of the electoral formula or even the collapse and change of the political system (Pennings & Lane, 2005 :4-5).

The Institutional Factors and the Party System
In order to understand the dynamics of the party system, it is important to understand that which are the parties that structure such system, or as Bartolini and Mair question: Which Parties Count? Do we count all parties that contest the elections or only those who are part of the parliament? 'The number of parties' is a difficult concept to measure, because scholars very often do not come to terms how to count parties which have different sizes and different relevance (Webb, 2000: 4-5).
Sartori's seminal work on party system has always been a point of reference for scholars of political parties to start their investigation. Sartori does not just count parties, which contest in elections. He does not even count all parties, which have seats in parliament. Sartori considers as important only the parties that compete for government positions because they indicate 'the extent to which political power is fragmented or non-fragmented, dispersed or concentrated' (2005: 106). According to him it is important to count only the relevant parties and 'the relevance of the party is a function not only of the relative distribution of power … but also, and especially, of its position value, that is , of its positioning along the left-right dimension' (pp.107). Sartori links the relevance of the party with the electoral strength of the party and the electoral strength of the party with its governing potential, or the coalition potential for each party, because '[w]hat really weights in the balance of multipartism is the extent to which a party may be needed as a coalition partner for one or more of the possible governmental majorities. A party may be small but have a strong coalition-bargaining potential. Conversely, a party may be strong and yet lack coalition-bargaining power" (pp.107-108). in order to define the relevance of the party, Sartori suggests that in order to find out whether a party is relevant or not 'we can discount the parties that have neither (i) coalition potential nor (ii) blackmail potential. Conversely, we must count all the parties that have either a governmental relevance in the coalition -forming arena, or a competitive relevance in the oppositional arena (pp.108).
It is clear that the political parties position themselves not only along the left-right dimension, but they focus on issues such as religion, culture or ethnicity. Duverger (1954) observed that the party system is created by the fractionalization and superposition: cleavages do not create pure ideal type models of political parties. According to him there are three dimensions which organize the political parties: clerical vs. anti-clerical; east-west, central planning vs. liberal economy. With the fall of communism the east-west cleavage ceased to exist and the two others are those which shape the party system.
Notwithstanding its relevance, the Duverger's theory reflects merely the cleavages in France and indeed, it has been criticized for being ethno-centric. Other authors, such as Lipset and Rokkan (1976) observed that the western party system is the result of two revolutions: the national revolution and the industrial revolution. The national revolution produced the territorial cleavage, which gave effect to two conflicts: state-church and dominant culture -ethnic/cultural minorities. On the other hand, the industrial revolution produced the functional cleavage, which gave rise to two conflicts: employersemployees conflict or capitalist -working class conflict if we have to use a Marxist approach and the urban -rural conflict.
Lijpart (1969) is another scholar who observed the emergence of the consociational democracy which is characterized by a plural society with segmental cleavages and segmental elites which cooperate between each other through consociational structures. According to him the consociational democracy has seven conceptual divisions or cleavages: socioeconomic; religious; cultural -ethic; urban-rural; regime support; foreign policy and post-materialism (1984: 122, 130). Even though Lijphart identified seven dimensions in his seminal book on patterns of democracy in the Western Europe, there was no country where one could find more than 4.5 dimensions, which was the case of France. The rest of the countries had between 1 and 3.5 issue dimensions. These kind of cleavages, which Mair (2008, 155-156) considers as vertical divisions are especially observable in the countries which are characterized by the segmentation and fractionalization of the electorate, which means that only one ore few parties could compete for the votes of certain part of the electorate. Therefore, the differences between the party systems of different countries are determined by the importance and strength of the second most important dimension (i.e. language, religion, ethnicity) which generally superposes over the left-right dimension (socioeconomic cleavage) acknowledged by all.
The common element for all these scholars is that regardless of the identification of the issue dimensions, being those economic, cultural, ethnic or religious, the bottom line is that the party system is shaped by them and it cannot exist as such without their existence. in this context, in order to analyse the Albanian case it is important to find out which cleavage/s structure/s and shape/s the party system. This will help to discover the dimensions of the party system. Sartori (1974:345) argues that the political parties fail to compete with each other for two systemic reasons. One of them is when they position themselves in different axes. Due to the fact, that they are born as the result of two different cleavages, their electorate of belonging is different and thus there is no risk of electors shifting their preferences in the succeeding elections from one party to the other. The second reason relates to the ideological distance: the greater the distance the less likely they will compete with each other. in this case the political parties are positioned in the same axe but are so far apart from each other, the degree of polarization is so high, so that there is no possibility of votes' transfer between them. This is the case of ethnic parties: they have clear borderlines of electorate and consequently there is no possibility that a votes' transfer might happen (Horowitz, 1985:346). Therefore, when analysing the Albanian case, we will not deal with those political parties, which fail to compete for electorate votes.
In order to understand that which parties compete and over how many issue dimensions it is important to know which are the parliamentary parties. According to Sartori: …it does matter how many are the parties. for one thing, the number of parties immediately indicates, albeit roughly, an important feature of the political system: the extent to which the political power is fragmented or non-fragmented, dispersed or concentrated. Likewise, simply by knowing how many parties there are, we are alerted to the number of the possible 'interaction streams' that are involved. …Since these interactions occur at multiple levels -electoral, parliamentary and governmental -the indication clearly is that the greater the number of parties (that have a say) the greater the complexity and probably the intricacy of the system…Furthermore, and in particular, the tactics of party competition and opposition appear related to the number of parties; and this has, in turn, and important bearing on how governmental coalitions are formed and are able to perform (2005, 106).
Therefore it is important to number the parties, but according to Sartori only the relevant parties. The following table gives and overview of the distribution of seats in the Albanian parliament effective first democratic elections in 1991 until 2013.  The presence of the smaller parties is due to two factors. The first is the constitutional condition to approve laws with qualitative majority voting. Therefore, a simple majority of 50%+1 was not sufficient. The Albanian Constitution has stipulated that in order to approve important laws and to elect the president of the Republic, it is needed the approval of the 3/5 of the total number of deputies (84 deputies) (Article 81, 87)1. However, Table 1 shows that in the elections of 1992, 1996 and 1997 the winners (respectively DP, DP and SP) got more than 3/5 of the seats in parliament and therefore had no need to form coalitions government. Therefore, we may conclude that until 1997, the small parties were indeed small and their presence had not effect in the parliamentary activity of the winning party as well as on the cabinet composition. The presence of Republican Party ( in coalition with Democratic Party) and that of the Social-Democratic Party and Union of Human Rights Party (in coalition with Socialist Party) could be explained with the necessity that the winner parties had to create an image of all encompassing, so as to have a greater legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. In conclusion we may observe that the existence of the small parties in the second decade after the collapse of the communist regime is enabled by institutional factors such as the Constitutional Laws on voting principles in parliament and the electoral system.

The Effective Number of Parties
The concept of relevance is somehow ambiguous and therefore it is necessary to use some more specific criteria to establish whether a party is relevant or not. Consequently it is necessary to count the relative size of the party in a party system. in order to do so we will use the Laakso and Taagepera (1979) index which shows the Effective Number of Parties and is calculated as follows: where 's' is the proportion of the parliamentary seats of party 'i'. If applied such formula in the Albanian case the ENP would be: But how to interpret the ENP. Siaroff (2000) has compiled the following scheme, which helps to understand what type of system does the ENP indicate: If we apply such scheme to the Albanian context and attempt to match it with the distribution of seats given at Table 1, then we would have: when it is true that it was the Socialist Party predominates with 73 deputies, but it was followed by the Democratic party with 34 and then the rest of the parties had less than ten deputies in parliament and therefore there is no comparison between these parties.
Regardless of its shortcomings the Siaroff scheme helps to understand who are the relevant parties in the Albanian political scene. in addition to the two main parties, the Socialist and the Democratic Party, the Socialist Movement for Integration has appeared to play the kingmaker role in the creation of governmental coalitions in country.

Conclusion
The paper sought to explore the dynamics of party interactions in the Albanian political scene. The fall of communist system was followed by the emergence of political parties of different political platforms. The paper attempted to disentangle the various data on the Albanian political parties and to capture any pattern of party competition and coalition. Duverger (1954), Sartori (2005), Lipset and Rokkan (1967) and Lijphart (1977) are the main scholars which fed into the theoretical framework of this paper the issue dimensions which structure the party system. The common cleavage for all these scholars was the socio-economic one which position the political parties along the left-right spectrum. However, in order to understand how many cleavages organize the political scene in Albania it was important to understand who are the relevant parties. Sartori's concept of relevance was helpful here. in pursuit of which are the relevant parties we found out that in Albania we have only political parties with coalition potential but not with blackmail potential.
The main political parties in the Albanian scene since the collapse of the communist regime are the Democratic Party, the Socialist Party, the Republican Party, the Union for Human Rights Party, the Agrarian Party and the Socialist Movement for Integration. These are the only parties whose members have had ministerial positions in the various governments created since 1991. With exception to the Union for Human Rights Party which represent the Greek minority in country, the other parties have positioned themselves along the left-right dimension. Furthermore, the smaller parties are located in the centre of the political spectrum, which means that only centripetal forces organize the political scene in Albania.
Finally the Siaroff party system classification and the Effective Number of Parties Index clearly indicates that in Albania predominates a Two party system which in the last elections have tended to become two and a half. This also confirms the presupposition that the only cleavage which shapes and structures the party system in Albania is the socio-economic one.