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Summaries of all the compulsory articles for the course Political Parties, Origins, Transformations and Future Prospects

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  • January 11, 2019
  • 36
  • 2018/2019
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Summaries articles Political Parties, Origins, Transformations and
Future Prospects
Changing models of party organization and party democracy: The emergence of the Cartel
Party
R.S. Katz and P. Mair (1995)
The Mass Party and the Catch-All Party

• Mass-party model
o Assumption of the essential meaning of and institutional prerequisite for democracy
▪ Fundamental units of political life are pre-defined and well-defined social
groups, membership which is bound up in all aspects of the individual’s life
▪ Politics → competition, conflict and cooperation of these groups
• Political parties are the agencies through which these
groups/members participate in politics, make demands on the state
and attempt to capture control of the state by placing their own
representatives in key offices
• Parties are the essential link between citizens and the state
o Key requirement for a successful party: increase level of commitment for possible
voters (members of its ‘natural’ social constituency)
• Catch-all party model
o Emergence of those parties challenged the notion of the party as representative of
pre-defined sectors of society
▪ Beginnings of an erosion of traditional social boundaries in the late 1950s
and 1960s implied a weakening of formerly highly distinctive collective
identities, making it less easy to identify separate sectors of the electorate
and to assume shared long-term interests
▪ Economic growth and the increased importance of the welfare state
facilitated elaboration of programmes that were no longer so necessarily
divisive nor partisan, but that could be claimed to serve the interests of all,
or almost all
▪ With the development of mass media, party leaders began to enjoy a
capacity to appeal to the electorate at large, an electorate made up of voters
who were learning to behave more like consumers than active participants
o Result: Americanization of European politics
▪ Elections are about the choice of leader, instead of choice of policies or
programmes
▪ Popular control and accountability were no longer to be ensured
prospectively (based on clearly defined alternatives), but rather
retrospectively (based on experience and record)
▪ Electoral behaviour was no longer believed to be moulded by
predispositions, but based on choice




1

,Stages of party development

• Classic mass-party
o Party of civil society, based on sectors of the electorate and intended to break into
the state and modify public policy in the long-term interests of the constituency to
which it is accountable
• Catch-all party
o Party that stands between civil society and the state and seek to influence the state
from outside, seeking temporary custody of public policy in order to satisfy the short-
term demands of its pragmatic consumers
• There is an evolutionary process, running roughly from the mid-19th century to the present
day, driven by a series of stimuli and responses, and which has moved both the relationships
among and the clarity of the boundaries between parties, state and civil society → process in
4 separate stages
1. Liberal régime censitaire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
▪ Restrictive suffrage requirements and other limitations on the political
activity
▪ People who made up the politically relevant elements of civil society and the
people who occupied the positions of power in the state were so closely
connected by ties of family and interest that even when the 2 groups were
not simply coterminous, they were heavily interpenetrating
▪ Politics that assumed to be a single national interest → role of government
to find and implement → political parties in pursuit of ‘public interest’
2. Régime censitaire as industrialization and its attendant urbanization proceeded;
number of people able to meet the suffrage requirements increased
▪ Restrictions on working-class organization were increasingly seen to be
incompatible with the liberal rationale of the bourgeois state and, were
unable to prevent working class from organizing and taking action in the
political and industrial spheres
• Result: clearer separation between the state and the now vastly
larger politically relevant portion of civil society, with the latter
growing to include large numbers of people who were not personally
connected to those managing the state, and who perceived the state
in terms of ‘them’ rather than ‘us’
▪ Mass party with organized membership, formal structures and meetings is
characteristic for this second stage
▪ State and civil society clearly separated → parties are the bridge
3. Old mass parties beginning to respond to their own rise and thus with parties from
both the traditional left and the traditional right beginning to converge on the catch-
all party model
▪ Such parties continue to have members, but they no longer seriously
attempt to encapsulate them → party membership becomes just one of
many independent memberships that an individual may (not) maintain
▪ Parties had an offensive strategy, exchanging ‘effectiveness in depth for a
wider audience and more immediate electoral success’ (Kirchheimer)
• Changes in mass communication (tv) → enhancing conditions that
allow or indeed compel parties to make universal appeals directly to



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, voters, rather than communicating principally to and through their
core supporters
▪ Parties are less the agents of civil society acting on, and penetrating the
state, and are rather more like brokers between civil society and the state,
with the party in government leading an essentially Janus-like existence
• Parties aggregate and present demands from civil society to the
state bureaucracy ánd are agents of that bureaucracy in defending
policies to the public
▪ Parties-as-brokers model → democracy primarily in the bargaining and
accommodation of independently organized interests
• Position of parties as brokers between civil society and the state
suggests that the parties themselves may have interests that are
distinct from those of their clients on either side of the relationship
• Capacity of a party to perform the brokerage function depends not
only on its ability to manipulate the state, but it can also use its
power of the state to protect its own interests
4. The emergence of a cartel party
▪ Electorate decides to spend their time for other activities / organizations
• Goals of politics become more self-referential, with politics
becoming a profession in itself

See overview models of party and their characteristics table 1, p.18

Handbook of Party Politics: Party Systems and Party System Types
S.B. Wolinetz, edited by R.S. Katz and W. Crotty (2006)
The systemic dimension: party system properties

• ‘With the exception of the single-party states, several parties co-exist in each country: the
forms and modes of their coexistence define the ‘party system’ of the particular country
being considered. In addition to characteristics of the parties, these include: new elements
that do not exist for each party community considered in isolation: numbers, respective
sizes, alliances, geographical localization, political distribution and so on. A party system is
defined by a particular relationship amongst all these characteristics’ (Duverger)
• ‘Parties make for a ‘system’ only when they are parts ( in the plural); and a party system is
precisely the system of interactions resulting from inter-party competition. That is, the
system in question bears on the relatedness of parties to each other, on how each party is a
function (in a mathematical sense) of the other parties and reacts, competitively or
otherwise, to the other parties’ (Sartori)
• Party systems have a number of distinct features which arise from electoral competition and
parties’ relation to each other
o Number of parties contesting elections and winning legislative seats
o Their relative size and strength
o Number of dimensions on which they compete
o Distance which separates them on key issues
o Their willingness to work with each other in government formation
o Process of governing




3

, Counting parties

• Decision about which parties should be included → f.e. only parties winning seats
• Which parties should you count?
o All parties
o Some can be excluded on the basis of either size or standards of relevance
▪ Ware excluded parties with less than 3% of the vote
▪ Sartori: coalition potential and blackmail potential
o Weighted or disaggregated measures with or without explicit cut-offs for smaller or
irrelevant parties
▪ Rae’s fractionalization index
• Does not measure the number of political parties directly, but
estimates the probability that any two randomly chosen voters or
legislators will be of the same party
▪ Laakso and Taagepera’s effective number of political parties
• Measured by dividing 1 by the sum of the squares of proportions of
votes (effective number of electoral parties, ENEP) or seats won by
each party (effective number of parliamentary parties, ENPP)

Party system types

• Classification on the basis of relative strength and size of parties (Blondel)
o Using the share of the vote won by political parties in elections from 1945-1966 to
construct a fourfold typology
▪ Two-party systems
▪ Two-and-a-half-party systems
▪ Multiparty systems with a predominant party
▪ Multiparty systems without a predominant party
• Patterns of government formation
o Dahl used parties’ behaviour in electoral and legislative arenas to develop a fourfold
scheme: patterns of opposition can be
▪ Strictly competitive (Britain)
▪ Cooperative and competitive (USA, France and Italy)
▪ Coalescent and competitive (Austria and wartime Britain)
▪ Strictly coalescent (Colombia)
o Each of these types can be further broken down into two-party and multiparty
categories
o Rokkan used patterns of government formation to classify the party systems of
smaller democracies
▪ 1 (Austria and Ireland) vs. 1 + 1 format (British and German pattern)
▪ 1 (Scandinavian) vs. 3-4 pattern (Norway, Sweden, Denmark)
▪ Multi-party systems
• One vs. one vs. two-three (1 vs. 1 vs. 1 + 2-3 pattern)
• Sartori’s typology: moderate versus polarized pluralism
o Standard distinction among one-party two-party, and multiparty competition is too
crude to explain very real differences among party systems
▪ Rules which tell practitioners which parties to count and which to exclude →
should be counted based on their effect on party competition


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