adversary politics

Term coined by S. E. Finer in his edited book Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform (1975) for the British parliamentary system, which he characterized as ‘a stand-up fight between two adversaries for the favour of the lookers-on’. He argued that the Labour and Conservative parties had become locked into sterile confrontation of extremisms, which might be broken by electoral reform, to which he was a recent convert. Supporters of the adversary politics hypothesis point to the debasement of parliamentary debate and Question Time; opponents variously argue that the adversaries were not adversarial on everything (for instance, in their common opposition to electoral reform) and that adversary politics was a temporary pathology.

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