The golden age of mass party democracy was also authoritarian and corrupt

Evidence

The golden age of party democracy described by Eribon was, of course, no irenic idyll. In France itself, the Fifth Republic issued from a Gaullist coup d’état that introduced a semipresidential system with patently authoritarian features. Dictatorships ruled Greece, Spain, and Portugal for long stretches of the Cold War. At the height of the Trente Glorieuses, European powers fought bitter counterinsurgencies to forestall the independence of their remaining colonial possessions in Africa. Patriarchal structures dominated domestic life, while women were expected to submit to their male breadwinners. Well into the second half of the twentieth century, Flemish and Italian priests told their congregants how to vote, while party bosses dictated editorials to newspaper editors. The Tangentopoli scandal of the early 1990s exposed Italy’s partitocrazia as flamboyantly corrupt. As a character declares in Belgian writer Hugo Claus’s best-known novel, published in 1983: “It’s all politics … and we’re sick of politics!” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 127

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bribery rather than repression was the chief tool for controlling media and legislators — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 63