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This chapter continues the analysis of party collapse by focussing in detail on three cases of collapse at the national level in democracies. These involved the Whig party in the US (1850s), the British Liberal party (early 20th century), and the Canadian Progressive Conservatives (1990s). Popular academic arguments that the American and British cases can be explained by reference to electoral realignment are rejected. In all three cases it was having two fight different sources of opposition that were eroding their strength at the same time that caused collapse. Strategies normally available to party elites in combating collapse could not be applied successfully here because of the dual nature of the crises. Finally, it is questioned whether conditions now make party management of their environments, to ward off potential collapse, more difficult; while this argument is rejected it is argued that they favour the development of less ‘pure’ forms of two-partism.

This chapter focuses primarily on what determines whether major parties that have collapsed cease to operate or, alternatively, continue as minor parties. Again, it focuses mainly on the American Whigs, who had dissolved by the later 1850s, and the British Liberals, who persisted after the 1920s. It examines four factors that prompted dissolution: (i) a presidential system using quasi plurality voting rules; (ii) frequent elections for many public offices; (iii) earlier party efforts to develop coattails effects, in fighting elections as a team; (iv) the linking by parties of political ambitions at different levels of office. The absence of these factors in the British case reduced the incentive for Liberals to abandon their party. However, contingency, especially the impact of the formation of the National government in 1931 and the Second World War also aided Liberal survival up to the 1950s.

This chapter argues that by the beginning of 1935 the positions of the main factions within Nicaragua were explicit. According to Lane, Somoza was ‘definitely determined to be the next president’. There was also a shift in the political distinctions within the country. What used to be a prime division between Liberals and Conservatives became a distinction between a gobernista or Somocista. It became a struggle for the US how to handle the fragile political condition to avoid being accused of intervening in Nicaraguan affairs and adhere to the policy of good neighbour. Despite the violence that erupted in Nicaragua, presidential elections were held on 8 December 1936 without incident. Somoza ran for president against the Arguello-Espinosa ticket, Somoza won and was inaugurated as president of Nicaragua. The chapter shows the part that Guardia played in the election.

The first chapter begins by exploring the scope for metropolitan anti-imperialism in around 1900, in particular the vulnerability of the British raj to a ‘linked-up’ agitation which united British Radicals and Indian nationalists in a single campaign. It analyses the successes and failures of the early efforts of the Indian National Congress and its British supporters to deliver such a double blow, first in the form of an agency arrangement with William Digby and Charles Bradlaugh, and later through vicarious championship by the Radicals and Liberals of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress.

The United States entered the postwar, post-FDR era with a recent history of rough political rhetoric. It had also established a tradition of basing fitness for a government job on the holder's “loyalty”. Much of the machinery and the discourse of “McCarthyism” was in place before the Cold War or McCarthy's advent. The main impetus behind this development came from conservatives of both parties, but especially Republicans, who deplored the New Deal and the changes it brought to American life. Yet to some extent, the conservative's targets shared their language and methodology. Liberals had accepted the notion of the “fifth column.” They usually dreaded its entrance from the Right—Nazis, Fascists, and their isolationist allies. The trials of the McCarthy era were aggravated by the fact that so few of the participants entered them with hands entirely clean.

The Labour Party meeting held in the spring of 1924 featured two new party recruits, Oswald and Cynthia Mosley. The inclusion of a woman was indicative of the degree to which the Labour Party was integrated into the dominant culture, an integration which limited any iconoclasm and involved an effective acquiescence in inequalities. In the election of November 1922, Labour gained three seats in Sheffield, a city where Liberalism was in confused retreat. These parliamentary successes were the prelude to a Labour majority on the city council four years later. In a heavily industrial city, these advances seemed indicative of the party's potential strength amongst specific working-class occupations. Yet none of Sheffield's Labour victors in 1922 came from the trade union movement. For some recruits, the Labour Party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden seemed attractive. In the 1920s, this pattern of recruitment seemed to highlight a shift in progressive politics that fitted into a broader vision of Labour's Forward March. This presentation simplified the complex routes by which Liberals crossed into the Labour Party.

This chapter examines the social composition of the main political parties in Ireland in 1881 and 1911. There was a clear ‘greening’ of the political representation during the period under review. However, it is evident that as nationalist politics became more green, unionist politics became more orange. It is also clear that whereas Conservative and Unionist representatives were often recruited from prosperous business and landed backgrounds, Home Rulers were generally recruited from the new Catholic rising middle class of shopkeepers, professionals and tenant farmers in the Irish provinces.

Devolution was the first thing in mind of the Liberal leaders between 1886 and 1914 which caused the presence of a home rule for Ireland — ‘John Bull’s other island’. A majority of Liberals thought that there was a need to devolve. They also thought that home rule was a good idea. They feared that, unless Ireland were granted home rule, the government of the United Kingdom (UK) would be able to govern Ireland only by means of force. More positively, W. E. Gladstone and his successors believed that the granting of home rule would reconcile the people of Ireland to its remaining part of the UK.

The Treasury was the department that, more than any other, was at the centre of Edwardian political controversy. Particularly under Lloyd George, the Treasury had to adapt itself to more active participation by central government in the relief of poverty and had to begin to act like a central department of government, seeking value for money, while at the same time holding firmly to the canons of public finance. With regards to public finance, the principal difference between the Conservative and Liberal parties in general elections was the question of how defence expenditure and social reform were to be paid for. From 1903 the orthodoxy of free trade was challenged by a tariff reform campaign, led initially by Joseph Chamberlain, who recommended that Britain should return to a policy of protection. The Liberals sought to avoid a need to raise revenue from tariffs, first by economies in defence expenditure, and then by raising direct taxation on the more affluent members of society.

Who were the left liberals? No political grouping in Imperial Germany, anti-Semitic splinter groups apart, had a comparable history of splits and short-lived mergers. These disruptions were partially bridged by continuity of personnel and tradition. The label ‘left liberal’ was itself a product of diversity. It included North German groups who generally called themselves Freisinnige. However, most South German left liberals, reflecting a greater openness and attachment to radical political reform, referred to themselves as Democrats. Left liberal, as used here and by contemporaries, was an umbrella term to cover the political terrain between the National Liberals and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). There remains the need for a more detailed and accurate assessment of left liberal sociology. Two features emerge from an analysis of left liberal social composition. The first is the clear correlation between party and social hierarchy. The second is the wide, but correspondingly shallow spread of left liberal support. Left liberalism was also a party of minorities.

The aftermath of the 1912 Reichstag elections offered a strange mixture of change, continuity, and confusion. There had been a striking clear-out of sitting deputies: only 187 of the 397 deputies elected in 1907 were also returned in 1912. Amidst such electoral carnage, however, party leaders remained largely unscathed. Those who paid the electoral price in 1912 were mainly the more junior and less influential parliamentarians. Continuity amongst party leaders was more than matched by ministers and senior officials on the other side of the political dialogue: 1912 lacked even the couple of sacrifices which had accompanied the Bülow Bloc. The period 1912–1914 saw a continuation of the pattern of left liberal-National Liberal relations established by the fall of the Bülow Bloc. Despite the efforts of the right, the National Liberals continued mainly to seek agreement with left liberals rather than Conservatives.

The perception that Baden provided a possible guide for the future internal development of the Reich was widely held: a guide not only in narrowly political matters — the relationship between monarch, executive, and legislature, the political alignment of parties, the electoral franchise — but in the wider social attitudes and apparatus they implied, such as publicly accountable administration, cross-class consensus and free assembly and association. An important issue to be considered, therefore, is to what extent pre-war Baden offered a viable path of political reform and social integration which might have been followed more generally. The example of Baden provides an excellent opportunity to examine two crucial questions facing the left liberals in Wilhelmine Germany: how to cope with a politicized mass electorate and the ability of a minority party to secure influence through formal and informal coalitions. Badenese politicians criticized Prussian Conservatives and thus explicitly supported the Reich and its institutions. They claimed that it was Prussian reactionaries, not liberal South Germans, who were the particularists. The National Liberals took the lead in expressing nationalist sentiment.

Silesia, like Baden and Schleswig-Holstein, was to be found at a geographical extremity of imperial Germany. In contrast to its more industrialized and Protestant western neighbour, Silesia was not seen by government, political parties, and observers as being in the forefront of the electoral battle for or against social democracy. However, if the mould of politics in Silesia was not broken, both the issues and style of politics had altered considerably. The economic, social, and confessional variety of Silesia, together with the strength of local political traditions make the province an excellent testing ground of the extent and content of ‘new politics’. Unlike Baden, Schleswig-Holstein, and most of Wilhelmine Germany, Silesia was a region in which all of the major parties were serious contenders in elections, although the National Liberals were somewhat under-represented. The merit of analysing the path of political change where conditions to an extent militated against it applies not only to Silesia as a whole, but Lower Silesian left liberalism in particular.