Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contemporary Party Politics
Contemporary Party Politics
Robin T. Pettitt
© Robin T. Pettitt 2014
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Contents
List of Figures x
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction 1
Defining ‘political party’ 4
The three faces of party organisations 7
The structure of parties 9
The role of parties in democratic states 14
The crisis of parties 16
Outline of the book 19
2 Party Systems 21
The importance of understanding party systems 21
Early approaches to party systems 25
Party system typologies 27
The effective number of parties 33
Explaining party system variation 36
Which party system is best? 40
Conclusion 42
4 Ideology 60
On ideology and party politics 60
Political cleavages 64
Party families 67
vii
viii Contents
8 Campaigning 142
How campaigning has changed 142
First era 144
Second Era 145
Third Era 147
The limits of change 149
Drivers of change 153
Social changes 153
Technological change 154
Party-specific issues 155
Impact of changes 157
Financing 158
Conclusion 161
9 Government 162
Deciding to aim for government office 162
Getting into government – coalitions 169
Factors impacting on coalition formation 173
Portfolio allocation 175
Conclusion 176
Bibliography 208
Index 221
List of Figures
x
List of Tables
xi
Acknowledgements
One does not complete a project such as this without incurring consider-
able debt. On the academic side I would like to gratefully acknowledge
the work of several anonymous reviewers who have commented on the
text at various stages from proposal to final draft. They have undoubt-
edly helped improve the manuscript significantly. I would also like to
thank the people at Palgrave Macmillan for encouraging me in my
endeavours. I owe particular thanks to Steven Kennedy for seeing the
book through its early stages and to Stephen Wenham for seeing it
through to completion. Stephen Wenham in particular has been very tol-
erant of my many broken deadlines.
I would also like to thank Pascal Perrineau and CEVIPOF – Paris for
hosting me during some of my most productive months working on the
book. Rejane Senac facilitated my initial introduction to CEVIPOF for
which I am very grateful. Odile Gaultier-Voituriez was ever helpful in
getting me access to key pieces of literature.
Most importantly I need to thank my family for their tolerance and
forgiveness – especially Rainbow Murray for her love and support
throughout the slow birth of this book. Jeg elsker dig. Speaking of slow
births, it would not do to neglect the most important development during
the making of this book: the arrival of my beautiful daughter Alicia Hope
Murray-Pettitt. This book will not mean very much to you for the fore-
seeable future – but at least there will be one more thing in the house for
you to gnaw on.
xii
Chapter 1
Introduction
1
2 Contemporary Party Politics
democracy, was seen as having seen off its final competitor (Com-
munism) for the position of most desirable political system. The future,
argued people like Francis Fukuyama, belonged to liberal (party based)
democracies. If the future is indeed in the hands of liberal democracies,
then understanding the organisations at the heart of this political system
must be a prime concern.
Indeed, when looking around the world, there are only a handful of
countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the Central African Republic, that do
not have political systems based around political parties. The fact that so
few countries have political systems devoid of parties in some form
underlines the importance of this type of organisation. In short, political
parties are at the heart of all democratic and a great many non-democ-
ratic countries.
The fact that political parties should be such a dominant feature of
both democratic and non-democratic systems of government is hardly
surprising. Political parties organise people with roughly similar view-
points and give them a ‘label’ (that is, the party’s name). Under that label,
parties then present a programme for what they want to do should they
acquire power. This gives voters, the media and other observers a way of
judging what political trends are moving in a society. Imagine a parlia-
ment of several hundred members, without parties. It would be well
neigh impossible to establish a working majority for a government.
Voters would have a difficult time judging who was responsible for
certain actions, and therefore faced with a difficult task when deciding
whom to support at an election.
Further, political parties provide a critical link between citizens and
governments through their membership organisations. Political parties
have both a civil society element (the membership organisation) and a
government element (parliamentarians and ministers). Through that they
can give their leaders a level of popular legitimacy that personal indi-
vidual rule would find it difficult to match. This works both in demo-
cratic multi-party democracies and in one-party authoritarian regimes.
Even if there is no democratic element in a country’s system, dictators
have often found it expedient to at least pretend to have popular legiti-
macy through a party organisation.
Political parties are the vehicles through which both voters and cam-
paigners can be mobilised behind some cause – which in turn is key to
winning elections in democratic countries. Indeed, Michels wrote that:
[a] class which unfurls in the face of society the banner of certain defi-
nite claims and which aspires to the realization of a complex of ideals
[...] needs an organization. Be the claims economic or be they political,
organization appears the only means for the creation of a collective
Introduction 3
will. Organization [...] is the weapon of the weak in their struggle with
the strong (1915, p. 21)
Countries in which not only basic political freedoms and civil liberties
are respected, but these will also tend to be underpinned by a political
culture conducive to the flourishing of democracy. The functioning of
government is satisfactory. Media are independent and diverse. There
is an effective system of checks and balances. The judiciary is inde-
pendent and judicial decisions are enforced. There are only limited
problems in the functioning of democracies. (EIU, 2011, p. 30)
4 Contemporary Party Politics
have free and fair elections and even if there are problems (such as
infringements on media freedom), basic civil liberties will be respected.
However, there are significant weaknesses in other aspects of democ-
racy, including problems in governance, an underdeveloped political
culture and low levels of political participation. (EIU, 2011, p. 30)
There are several reasons why this book will focus on parties in demo-
cratic countries. One is linked to how one might define a political party,
which will be explored further below. Another is the close link between
political parties and democracy. It was explored above how modern
democracy is party-democracy. There is in the modern world an intrinsic
link between political parties and democracy. We did see that some dicta-
torships are based around a political party. However, dictatorships do not
need party politics to ‘function’. Democracy does. Hence, we can under-
stand dictatorships without necessarily paying a great deal of attention to
party politics. We cannot understand democracies without understanding
party politics. Considering how important democracy as a form of gov-
ernment has become since the end of the Cold War, the need to under-
stand the party politics side of democracy is overwhelming.
A final reason is that a competitive party system, that is, where mul-
tiple parties are allowed to compete for power freely, unlike for example
communist single-party states, is one of the defining features of modern
democracy. Hence, party politics is at its most diverse and thus inter-
esting and worthy of study in a democracy. If there is only one party in
existence our task is very simple and therefore not that interesting. In a
system with several parties all jockeying for position and power, the task
is that much more complicated, and, therefore, also that much more
worthwhile.
This chapter will next explore the definition of what a political party
is. The chapter will then explore various aspects of party organisations,
before looking at the main roles performed by political parties in demo-
cratic states. It will then give an overview of the idea that political parties
are currently in a state of crisis. The chapter will end with an overview of
the contents of this book.
as diverse as their host countries. For that reason it can often be difficult,
but also endlessly fascinating, to explore them as a group. Indeed, merely
defining what a party is can be problematic. Some are old well-estab-
lished institutions, with long histories and strongly hierarchical structure
where each member knows where they fit in the organisation and who is
in charge – largely because they can read about it in the party’s rules.
Examples of such parties would be the British, German and French
socialist parties. Others, like the Republicans and Democrats in the
United States have even longer histories, but are much more loosely
organised with much less in the way of a hierarchical structure or clear
lines of command. Yet others, such as List Pim Fortuyn in the
Netherlands and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Forward Italy) and Il
Popolo della Libertà (The People of Freedom) were set up as their foun-
ding leader’s personal political projects. Some parties, usually smaller
fringe parties, have a very clear political ideology were as others are more
amorphous and designed to offend as few people as possible. The que-
stion is to what extent we can come up with a definition that captures all
these very varied organisations. We usually know a political party when
we see it, but coming up with a clear definition is not easy considering
this great diversity.
Indeed, definitions of parties have varied and changed over time. In a
text first published in 1770 Edmund Burke defined a party as ‘a body of
men [sic] united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national
interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’
(Burke, 1981, p. 317). It is no doubt true that most parties would argue
that what they do is in the national interest. However, this is not unique
to political parties. Arguably the Church of England and other state reli-
gion organisations would claim to be doing the same. In addition, the
national interest could also be said to be the focus of Political Action
Committees (PAC) in the United States. A PAC will spend money in
support of for example a particular candidate, but will not be running
candidates itself. They do so with a view to promote a particular cause or
principle, but are by their very definition not political parties. Their
defined role in US legislation is to raise and spend money in the name of
a cause. Any number of campaign organisations, such as Amnesty
International and Greenpeace also campaign on very specific principles,
but we would not regard them as political parties. In short, ‘a body of
men’, that is, an organisation of some sort, pursuing a particular prin-
ciple is not something that is unique to political parties.
Burke’s definition suggests political parties are linked to political prin-
ciples, something which will be explored in Chapter 4. These principles
are sometimes seen as being derived from underlying conflicts in society –
conflicts in which the interests of distinct groups are seen to clash. In the
6 Contemporary Party Politics
tions. What sets parties apart from other political organisations is that
they field candidates for popularly elected assemblies. The definition of a
political party used here will therefore be a shortened version of what
Bille came up with:
This definition, derived from several prominent scholars, also adds to the
reasons for focusing on democratic countries. If the central defining
feature of a political party is that it fields candidates in elections, then
there needs to be such elections in place for us to talk about a party in the
sense defined above. Clearly, this definition only makes sense in a demo-
cratic country. This would suggest that for example the Communist
Parties of Cuba, China and North Korea are not ‘true’ parties. There is
no currently existing definition of a party that could include ‘parties’ such
as those in control of Cuba, China and North Korea, but exclude organi-
sations that are usually not seen as parties, such as trade unions or other
interest organisations. It could perhaps be argued that if an organisation
calls itself as a party, then we should see it as a party. However, there are
organisations, such as the Indian National Congress and the Union pour
un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement) in France
which do not have party in the title, but are usually seen as parties.
Hence, for the purpose of this book, it seems to make most sense to
restrict ourselves to the definition given above, and focus on democratic
countries for the reasons discussed.
Now that we know how to identify a party and distinguish it from other
political organisations it is necessary to consider what a party looks like
as an organisation. How are they organised and what elements are they
made up of internally?
As noted earlier, political parties are endlessly varied. Each party will
have found its own response to its political circumstances, which in turn
will be different for each country and for each party within that country.
However, it is still possible to make some generalisations about the struc-
ture of political parties. Very generally it is possible to argue that a party
is made up of three ‘faces’ (Katz and Mair, 1993).
The first is what is referred to as the party in public office. This
element of the party consists of its publically elected officials (e.g., parlia-
mentarians) and members of the government (i.e., ministers). Then there
8 Contemporary Party Politics
party? The most popular idea is that the balance of power between the
three faces has changed over the years. The argument is that the party in
central office and the party on the ground have become subservient to the
party in public office, especially in the context of policy making. This did
not happen quietly or without a great deal of, to some extent ongoing,
resistance from the party in central office and in particular the party on
the ground, but is a point of view which is broadly accepted. This change
has been particularly profound in the traditional mass-membership party
(see Chapter 3). In this kind of party, the party in central office was there
to organise and also represent the party on the ground. However, over
time the party in central office increasingly became the tool of the party
in public office, used to manage and control the party on the ground. The
result is that, not only has the party in public office largely taken control
of the organisation, but the party as a whole is increasingly epitomised by
the party in public office. What this means is that when commentators
and a great many academics write that Party X has done something or
other, what they are actually saying is that the party in public office, or
even just the leader(ship) of the party in public office, has taken a deci-
sion on something. In short a party is a multifaceted organisation which
will act with greater or lesser degrees of unity. Hence, if we are to truly
understand party behaviour we must do so keeping in mind that parties
are often internally divided to a greater or lesser extent.
However, the idea of the three faces of political parties only gives us a
very general view of how parties are structured internally. It tells use very
little about how these elements operate in practice. Saying something
general about how parties operate is very difficult. The practical day-to-
day running of a party is where the diversity of political parties really
comes into play. Parties have found their own answers to how to organise
and these answers will be affected by the history of a party, the people in
it and the national context a party finds itself in.
What we can say is that parties tend to be strongly affected by a
country’s electoral system. At the local level most party leaders will try to
ensure that there is a local branch in every electoral district to organise
and mobilise members and supporters, at the very least at election time.
Hence, at a very basic level, the number of branches a party has will be
partly affected by how many electoral districts a country is divided into.
Parties will vary greatly in the extent to which party leaders encourage
members and supporters to be active in the periods between elections.
Some party leaders, especially in the United States, prefer local activity to
10 Contemporary Party Politics
To deal with matters in between the main party conference, parties tend
to have some form of national committee or executive. The exact powers
and membership will vary, but it is often the case that the national com-
mittee is seen as the highest authority after the party conference.
Membership is often made up of representatives from the different parts
of the party: that is, the parliamentary party, local and/or regional
branches, local and regional government politicians and sometimes other
affiliated organisations such as trade unions. In some parties there will be
a national committee which meets every few months, as well as a smaller
executive which meets on a more regular basis. Regardless of the exact
12 Contemporary Party Politics
may at first not seem to matter much: why should one care about how
detailed a party’s rulebook is?
Duverger argues that this is important. One key reason why it is
important is that parties that are relatively informal, or weakly articu-
lated, are inherently undemocratic. If, say, the power of the leader is left
vague and informal it is difficult to accuse the leader of overstepping his
or her authority. Similarly, if the rights of grassroots members are unspec-
ified how can they demand their due influence, when that due is unclear?
On the other hand, a very formalised party with a high degree of organi-
sational articulation is not inherently democratic. A party can be articu-
lated in a democratic or an undemocratic direction. However, because the
rules are very detailed and everybody’s rights and responsibilities (or the
lack thereof) are clear and unambiguous it is easy to tell whether a party
is democratic or not. Many communist parties, especially those with
strong links to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, tended to be
very top led through a system known as ‘democratic centralism’.
Officially, democratic centralism meant that there would be open debate
about a topic before a vote was taken. Once a decision had been made,
all members were expected to stick to that decision religiously with no
dissent expressed. In effect it often meant that the leadership was in
control of the organisation. The leadership issues instructions and the
members followed. The party’s hierarchical nature was very clear from
the rulebook, so everybody knew their place.
Compare this to the British Conservative Party which only acquired a
formal rulebook after William Hague became leader in 1997, and even
then it seems to have been largely ignored. The Conservative Party has
traditionally been very top led. The members had only a very marginal
influence on the work of the parliamentary party, and until the election
of Ian Duncan Smith in 2001, had no influence on the selection of the
party leader. Indeed, for much of the party’s history the leader was not so
much selected as ‘emerged’ out of informal deals and compromises
between senior party figures. So, the Conservative Party is not very dem-
ocratic, but the lack of internal democracy is achieved in a different, and
informal, way compared to the highly articulated communist parties of
old.
In short, the more detailed the rulebook the easier it is to tell who is in
control. The vaguer it is, the more the leadership is able to assert their
control through informal means and the inherent power that comes with
having access to the resources associated with high office. In informal
organisations, members have few tools with which to temper that power.
As a general trend, left wing parties have detailed rulebooks, and right
wing parties do not.
14 Contemporary Party Politics
Now that we know more about what parties are and what they look like,
it is worth considering what they do. As was argued at the beginning of
this chapter, parties are extremely important in the running of democratic
states. The reason for this importance is the breadth and depth of the
roles that parties fulfil.
Perhaps the most important role of political parties is that they create
‘linkage’ between governments and voters.
The political party is the one agency that can claim to have as its very
raison d’être the creation of an entire linkage chain, a chain of connec-
tions that runs from the voters through the candidates and the elec-
toral process to the officials of government. (Lawson, 1988, p. 16)
Linkage is a very broad term, but Lawson is probably the writer who is
most well known for having dealt with this subject in the context of
political parties. Lawson argues that there are several kinds of linkage a
party can engage in.
which kind they should provide. That is, the debate is both descriptive
and prescriptive. The evidence on the descriptive side is very varied and
often provides evidence of all four types of linkage at various times and
places. The prescriptive side, that is, what kind of linkage parties should
provide often argues that parties ought to provide forms of linkage that
foster more active and inclusive forms of democracy.
Lawson argues that depending on what kinds of linkage a party pro-
vides it may be working either for or against the development of a
healthy democracy. Participatory linkage is always good for democracy.
Electoral/responsive linkage may or may not contribute to democracy. It
very much depends on how accurate the responsiveness is. Clientelistic
linkage certainly contribute towards the maintenance of power for a
party, but depending on how that power is used, may work for or against
democracy. Directive linkage using education will again help a party
maintain power, but that can be good or bad for democracy depending
on its use. Coercion is always bad for democracy.
However, even though the idea of linkage has attracted a great deal of
attention the roles that parties fulfil go beyond that. Pedersen (1989, p.
268) summarises the roles of parties as follows:
It should be clear by now that political parties are highly complex organi-
sations that fulfil a wide range of crucial tasks in democratic societies.
However, despite how important they are, parties have never been very
popular. The modern manifestation of this unpopularity is the notion that
political parties are in crisis.
Parties have a long history, with the deepest roots to be found in
Western Europe and the United States. For as long as parties have existed
they have been viewed by many with deep suspicion, often tipping over
into outright hostility. The problem is neatly encapsulated by the title of
Scarrow’s (2006) overview of the rise of political parties: ‘the unwanted
emergence of party based politics’. As early as 1835 de Tocqueville wrote
that ‘parties are an evil inherent in free governments’ (see White, 2006, p.
7). The antipathy towards political parties has deep roots in political phi-
losophy. One prime example of this is Rousseau’s work on the ‘general
will’. According to Rousseau the ‘general will’ is what should be the
guide for collective action. The general will can be reached when every
individual in a society, without any kind of outside interference, considers
what the right way forward is. The general will must be the collective
opinion of all individuals in society, acting as individuals: ‘If, when the
people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations,
the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of
the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision
will always be good’ (Rousseau, 1966, p. 23). However, it is important
that every individual acts independently, and without reference to any
sub-group within society. Any kind of faction will undermine the general
will:
when factions arise [...] the differences become less numerous and give
a less general result [...] It is therefore essential, if the general will is to
be able to express itself, that there be should be no partial society
within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own
thoughts. (Rousseau, 1966, p. 23)
While not often cited, the idea that parties undermine the collective will
and exacerbate divisions is widely held. Hence, from the very beginning
of their existence, parties were viewed as something negative, if also
unavoidable.
This negative view of political parties is continued in the first compre-
hensive study of political parties, Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the
Organization of Political Parties, first published in English in 1902.
Ostrogorski does not object to groupings of parliamentarians – that is,
Introduction 17
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
USA
France
GB
Italy
Spain
Canada
Japan
Mexico
South Africa
Australia
Norway
Sweden
Argentina
Poland
Switzerland
Brazil
Chile
India
Romania
Taiwan
Ukraine
Ghana
New Zealand
Germany
Figure 1.1 Confidence in political parties: Not very much/None at all (percentage)
the party in public office. What he does object to is the existence of extra-
parliamentary organisations – that is, the party on the ground. Their
excessive control over members of parliament was alleged to undermine
the smooth running of a parliamentary democracy.
This antipathy towards political parties continues today. As we can see
from Figure 1.1 there is a widespread lack of confidence in political
parties in all the countries for which data is presented here. There are
clearly some variations from country to country; however, nowhere is
lack of confidence lower than 50 per cent. In some countries the lack of
confidence is almost total.
In addition to this outright hostility to political parties from both
scholars and the population of the democratic world at large, doubts
about the role of parties in modern politics is reflected in a growing field
of study: the crisis of political parties. The idea that political parties are
in crisis is not new, but it is widespread. Daalder (1992, p. 269) writes
that ‘we all talk about the crisis of party’. Mair (2003, p. 6) wrote: ‘That
political parties are in crisis, and potentially on the verge of serious
decline, is now more or less accepted wisdom among commentators
throughout the established democracies’. This was a theme he expanded
on three years later (Mair, 2006, p. 50), but with even more glum conclu-
sions than in the 2003 piece: ‘parties may be able to fill public office, but
having abandoned their representative role, they may no longer be able to
18 Contemporary Party Politics
justify doing so’. The party crisis idea has evidently been a regularly
occurring theme in the literature for decades.
The idea that parties are in crisis is based on two broad issues. The
first is that parties across the democratic world are said to have seen a
significant decline in their membership organisations. The idea of parties
having a mass membership organisation is so closely intertwined with
views of what a party ought to look like that this decline is seen as a sign
that parties are in crisis. The issue of party members will be explored
further in Chapter 5.
The second element in the party crisis argument is based on claims that
parties are no longer fulfilling the roles they should be fulfilling in demo-
cratic societies. This is the essence of Mair’s argument. Leaders of polit-
ical parties may still have a key role in governing countries in the
democratic world. However, increasingly party leaders are withdrawing
into the world of government institutions and away from civil society.
Party leaders govern, but they no longer represent (Mair, 2006). This
echoes Lawson’s work on linkage. After having worked on the idea that a
key function of parties it to provide linkage between rulers and the ruled
she went on to argue that they are increasingly failing to do so effectively.
They are losing members, their top leaders are becoming increasingly iso-
lated from the rest of society and are failing to reflect and act on the
political demands of the voters.
However, while the idea of a party crisis and party failure may be
long standing and widespread, it is argued that a lot of the literature on
this topic is shot through with underlying normative assumptions
(Daalder, 1992). When authors talk of parties being in crisis they do so
on the basis of more or less subjective assumptions about what parties
ought to be doing. Early ‘party crisis’ ideas questioned the very legiti-
macy of parties (as outlined above) based on ideas about how democ-
racy ought to function. Later there were questions over certain kinds of
party – that is, a concern over the rise of fascist and communist parties.
The last of the ‘parties in crisis’ elements is the argument that democ-
racy has moved beyond the need for parties, that parties are now redun-
dant.
Daalder’s argument suggests that when people talk about parties
being in crisis, what they really mean is that parties are no longer living
up to some pre-set idea of what a democratic state should look like.
Hence, if we are to fully understand the claims that parties are in crisis
we would need to evaluate these underlying normative assumptions. In
essence, whether one agrees with the party crisis idea is less an objec-
tive evaluation, but a normative one based on what one thinks parties
ought to be doing. We will return to this theme in the conclusion to this
book.
Introduction 19
The rest of the book will be divided into 10 chapters. Chapter 2 will deal
with party systems. Perhaps the most important factor parties have to
cope with in their political activities is other parties. The party system a
party operates in is a key environmental factor in our understanding of
party life. Hence, we will look first at party systems.
Chapter 3 will look at how parties have developed and, according to
some, moved through different stages from one party type to another.
This is a lively and expanding area of party politics, and new suggestions
for party types is a regular feature of the literature.
Chapter 4 will look at the issue of ideology. One of the key ideas of
what parties are is that they are vessels for an ideology. Parties are there
to promote and defend a particular view of society, a view derived from
underlying and long-standing divisions in society. Most of the literature
on ideology focuses on Europe, and we will consider the extent to which
‘traditional’ views of ideology also hold outside Europe.
The focus of Chapter 5 is party members. A number of questions will
be asked and answers sought, including why party leaders would want to
encourage the building or maintenance of a mass membership organisa-
tion; and why anyone would want to join a party. The chapter will also
look at the issue of what is happening to party membership numbers.
Chapter 6 will look at how candidates for public office are selected.
One issue the chapter will pay particular attention to is whether the
gender imbalance in most parliaments in the democratic world can be
explained by parties not selecting enough women candidates. Selection is
an important issue in party life since virtually no one gets into a legisla-
tive assembly without party endorsement. Parties therefore act as key
gatekeepers to power.
In Chapter 7 the book will look at policy making. The chapter will
cover issues such as: who are involved in policy making; who should,
normatively, be involved; and who wants to be involved.
Following that, Chapter 8 will examine the work that parties do in
election campaigning. The chapter will examine some of the arguments
about the ways in which parties’ campaigning activities have changed and
how those changes have affected party organisations.
The focus of Chapter 9 is the struggle of parties to get into govern-
ment. The chapter will look at whether all parties desire government
office and what might explain the decision either way. The chapter will
also look at the challenges a party faces once the decision to try to enter
government has been made.
Chapter 10 will look at the internationalisation of party politics. This
is a topic that has a long history, but is also an area which has delivered
20 Contemporary Party Politics
less than some people would have liked. The chapter will look at the
party Internationals, at Europarties and at the internationalisations of
campaign consultancy.
Finally, Chapter 11 will consider the future of party politics and
whether parties are in crisis.
Chapter 2
Party Systems
21
22 Contemporary Party Politics
petitors will affect the behaviour of a party considerably. If there are only
two parties in a system there is only one ‘stream of interaction’ to con-
sider. This is the case in the United States where the only two noteworthy
competitors are the Republicans and the Democrats (see Figure 2.1). In a
slightly simplified view of the UK party system there are three streams of
interaction. If we look at the case of Denmark, which after the 2011 elec-
tion had eight parties in parliament, the tactical situation faced by each
party is far more complicated. Each party has to consider seven rivals
when deciding on what action to take. In short, the more parties there are
the more complicated is the political battlefield a party has to cope with.
The number of parties present in a parliament will also have a signifi-
cant impact on government formation. In a two-party system one party
will by definition get a majority of the seats. However, in a party system
with more than two parties this is no-longer automatically the case. The
larger the number of parties in a parliament, the bigger the chance that
no party will manage to achieve an overall majority of the seats. This
means that a coalition government may be necessary. This will be
explored further in Chapter 9.
In addition, the extent to which seats are spread out between several
parties will have an impact on how many parties will have to be involved
in a coalition. Compare the situation in the United Kingdom and
Denmark (Figure 2.2). In Denmark after the 2011 election no single party
came anywhere near an overall majority. The two biggest parties, the
Liberals and the Social Democrats, had no interest in forming a govern-
ment together. Indeed, no party from either the left-of-centre or the right-
of-centre ‘blocks’ would join in a government with parties from the other
side. Collectively the parties in the left-of-centre block had a majority.
However, the Red Green Alliance is regarded as being too far to the left
to be a realistic government partner. The result therefore was a minority
coalition of the Socialists, the Social Democrats and the Social Liberals –
with the Red Green Alliance providing support from outside the govern-
ment. By contrast the 2010 election in the United Kingdom was far
simpler. While a very unusual result for the United Kingdom in that no
party achieved an overall majority, the Conservative Party was close and
only needed the support of the Liberal Democrats to be able to form a
majority coalition.
This indicates another reason why party systems are important:
understanding a party system will help us understand how fragmented
power is in a country. In a two-party system power will be far more con-
centrated (in whichever party has a majority) than in a multi-party
system. This will have a major impact on the nature of politics in a given
country. In a country where politics is more or less dominated by two
parties (such as the United States and more often than not the United
Party Systems 23
USA
Republicans Democrats
UK
Liberal
Democrats
Denmark
Red-Green Socialist
Alliance People’s
Danish Party
People’s
Party
Social
Democrats
Liberal Party
Social
Conservative Liberals
People’s
Party
Liberal
Alliance
Denmark (2011)
Red Block Blue Block
30
⎫
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎬
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎭
⎫
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎬
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎭
25
Percentage of seats
20
15
10
0
Red Green Socialist Social Social Liberal Conservative Liberal Danish
Alliance People’s Democrats Liberals Alliance Party Party People’s
Party Party
UK (2010)
50
45
40
Percentage of seats
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Labour Party Liberal Democrats Conservatives Others
The time has now come to look at some of the most important
approaches to classifying party systems.
Duverger was the first scholar to seriously attempt to classify party
systems. His categorisation schema was simple and also somewhat crude.
Duverger limited himself to three categories: ‘the single-party, the Anglo-
Saxon two-party, and the multi-party system’ (Duverger, 1964, p. 203).
While this is certainly a start it is also reasonably obvious that such a
simple schema is inadequate for a number of reasons. The single-party
system is perhaps defensible in that Duverger sees this kind of system as a
non-competitive system. In other words, some form of authoritarian
regime where all other parties are simply banned. It is, therefore, fairly
easy to identify. The idea of a two-party system seems fairly simple on the
surface. However, the exact dividing line between a two-party system and
a multi-party system is not entirely clear. So, while the United States is
very clearly a two-party system, the United Kingdom has often been
regarded as being a two-party system, but there are several significant
players in the system beyond the main two parties, a factor that became
especially evident after the 2010 election when the third largest party, the
Liberal Democrats, joined the Conservative Party in government. Indeed,
Duverger himself acknowledged this problem.
However, perhaps the biggest problem with Duverger’s schema is how
he deals with the multiparty system. Duverger virtually abandons any
attempt to say much about ‘more-than-two’ party systems. All he has to
say is that they are somewhat complicated to deal with: ‘The typology of
the multi-party system is difficult to establish: innumerable varieties can
be imagined ranging from three parties to infinity, and within each
variety innumerable patterns and shades of difference are possible’
(Duverger, 1964, p. 229). He is left with merely describing a number of
specific examples. It therefore seems that while Duverger’s approach to
party systems has been called ‘pioneering’ (Blau, 2008, p. 169) this is
26 Contemporary Party Politics
mainly because he was the first to deal with the issue of party systems in
a reasonably systematic way. Nevertheless, while Duverger’s schema of
party systems may have been somewhat underdeveloped there are still
two issues in his work on this that are worth following up on: his view of
the duality of politics and the impact of electoral systems on party
systems.
According to Duverger, politics is usually about a duality of choices –
or put differently, about a choice between two options. There may not
always be a ‘duality of parties’, but there is always a ‘duality of tenden-
cies’ (Duverger, 1964, p. 215). This means that for Duverger ‘the centre
does not exist in politics. The term “centre” is applied to the geometrical
spot where the moderates of opposing tendencies meet: the moderates of
the Right and the moderates of the Left’ (Duverger, 1964, p. 215). Based
on that Duverger argues that two-party systems are superior to multi-
party systems since the two-party system ‘seems to correspond to the
nature of things’ (Duverger, 1964, p. 215). However, if two-party’ism is
natural and corresponds to the nature of politics, that does somewhat
leave the questions of why multi-party systems exist and indeed why they
are so prolific. Duverger (1964, pp. 230–3) suggests a number of reasons,
but the most significant factor he proposed in the creation of multi-party
systems is the nature of the electoral system. This issue will be considered
later in this chapter.
Others have tried to overcome the inadequacies of Duverger’s categori-
sation. Most notably Jean Blondel (1968) who investigates the voting
pattern in 19 democratic countries and identifies six types of party
systems.
Blondel’s approach is clearly much more fine grained that Duverger’s. His
idea of a two-and-a-half party system appears useful in dealing with the
problem of countries where there are two major parties, so not a multi-
party system, but where there is also a clear third ‘presence’. The British
Liberal Democrats is a good example of this ‘half’ party.
Party Systems 27
1 One party
2 Hegemonic party
3 Predominant party
4 Two-party
5 Limited pluralism
6 Extreme pluralism
7 Atomised
Party Systems 29
Segmentation
Polarization
• One party
• Hegemonic party
• Predominant party
• Two-party
• Moderate pluralism
30 Contemporary Party Politics
• Polarised pluralism
• Atomised
Not all these features need be present to make a system polarised, but the
more that are present the more polarised a system is. A quintessential
example of polarised pluralism is Weimar Germany (1919–33). It had
most of the characteristics of a polarised system, particularly the presence
of strong anti-systemic parties – Communists and Nazis – which created
a centrifugal pull away from the centre. The Nazis and Communists
attacked both each other and the pro-Weimar parties in a triangular com-
petition and were not concerned with obtaining control of the system,
but with replacing it completely, something the Nazis were eventually
successful in doing. Another example is France during the Fourth
Republic (1946–58). Again there were anti-systemic parties in the form of
the Communists and the Gaullists. Again one side was successful in over-
turning the entire government structure when the Gaullists ushered in the
Fifth Republic.
It is important to note that extreme pluralism (many parties) does not
necessarily mean polarised pluralism (intense ideological confrontation).
The number of parties is not the distinguishing feature. For example,
Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland all have enough parties
to have ‘extreme pluralism’, but are not ideologically polarised and
therefore remain in the ‘moderate pluralism’ category (Sartori, 2005, pp.
130–7). This is an important distinction to make. The number of parties
can change quite quickly, certainly from one election to another. Hence,
relying on the number of parties would mean that a country could shift
from one category to another relatively quickly, making our analysis of
Party Systems 33
Sartori’s approach is without a doubt the most widely cited way to cate-
gorise party systems. It has admittedly been subjected to a fair few criti-
cisms, not least the fact that it can be difficult to actually judge which
parties have blackmail potential.
However, another, perhaps more serious problem, is that in Sartori’s
scheme a party is either relevant (counts as 1) or irrelevant (counts as 0)
– there is no middle ground (Blau, 2008; Lijphart, 1999). This is
perhaps too black and white for the shades of grey world that is poli-
tics. Some parties will inevitable be more relevant than others. It may
34 Contemporary Party Politics
UK
4
3.5
3
2.5
2 ENEP
1.5 ENPP
1
0.5
0
1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
New Zealand
4
3.5
3
2.5
2 ENEP
1.5 ENPP
1
0.5
0
1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
seats and therefore become more attractive options for voters. Before
1994 the parliamentary party system was stubbornly resistant to the
increasing fragmentation at the electoral level. However, after 1994 the
wider distribution of the vote was also reflected in a wider distribution of
seats. So, using the idea of the effective number of parties we are able to
calculate quantitatively what the impact of, for example, changing the
electoral system has been.
The effective number of parties approach is not without its flaws. For
example, a party which has only a very small impact on the effective
number of parties score may actually be very important politically. An
effective number of parties score may suggest that a country is dominated
by two parties, but gloss over the fact that a small centrist party is in the
36 Contemporary Party Politics
position of ‘king maker’ and therefore wields enormous power. The effec-
tive number of parties can, therefore, not by itself tell us everything about
the distribution of power in a country. However, the approach does
provide useful insights into a country’s party system. The fact that we
have a quantifiable measure of party system fragmentation at several
levels of analysis (such as electoral and parliamentary) allows us to
explore changes within and across countries fairly easily.
and B will get about 50 per cent of the seats each on 40 per cent of the
vote. This is in essence what happens in the United Kingdom, except that
the vote is much more unevenly distributed than in the above example
which allows smaller parties to concentrate enough votes in some con-
stituencies to still win some seats.
The psychological effects are the ways that voters and party leaders
react to these mechanical effects. The idea is that if voters expect their
vote to be wasted by voting for smaller parties they will be more inclined
to give their vote to a larger one.
Further, within any political party there will be extremists and moder-
ates – the ‘pacific and the fire-eaters’ (Duverger, 1964, p. 230). If these fail
to cooperate we may see a split which creates a new party. However, the
pacific and the fire eaters may have to work together when operating under
an electoral system where smaller parties are punished. By contrast, under
PR smaller parties find it easier to survive which may encourage splits
within existing parties (Duverger, 1964, p. 252) as minority groups strike
out on their own. In other words PR makes establishing broad umbrella
parties less appealing. Groups, which may under a plurality system have
joined together, will be tempted to form separate parties under PR. In a
country like the United Kingdom, 5 per cent of the vote across the country
is unlikely to get you any seats. In more proportional systems, such as in
Sweden or Germany, 5 per cent of the vote will yield something like 5 per
cent of the seats, enough to potentially make a difference in a multi-party
system. This may well explain the increase in electoral fragmentation
evident in New Zealand after 1994 as illustrated in Figure 2.4. With a
more proportional electoral system, voters have more incentive to consider
voting for smaller parties as these now have a far greater likelihood of
success; which in turn makes it more tempting for political activists to
strike out on their own, rather than join or remain in a larger party.
However, while the technical and psychological effects of the electoral
system certainly provide reasonable and believable arguments for how
different party systems came into being, there is a problem. This problem
could broadly be summarised as a chicken and egg problem. In other
words, what came first: the party system or the electoral system? It has
been argued that ‘it may be more accurate to conclude that [the electoral
system is] a result rather than a cause of the party system in a given
country’ (Grum, 1958, p. 375). Several studies have taken up this idea.
Taagepera (2003, p. 7) suggests a ‘causality flowing in the reverse direc-
tion, from the number of parties towards electoral rules’, which in turn
echoes an earlier claim by Lipson that ‘chronologically, as well as logi-
cally, the party system is prior to the electoral system’ (Lipson, 1964, p.
343). In a wide ranging analysis of 219 elections in 87 countries since the
nineteenth century Colomer (2005) concludes that:
Party Systems 39
Majoritarian rules induce the formation of two large parties, but two-
party configurations also maintain or choose majoritarian rules.
Proportional representation permits the development of multiple
parties, but multi-party systems also tend to establish or confirm pro-
portional representation rules. (p. 4, see also pp. 17–18)
The reason why it might be argued that the party system pre-dated the
electoral system in a given country is that the number of parties may in
fact be more easily explained by the number of societal cleavages or con-
flicts in society rather than the electoral system. Instead of seeing the elec-
toral system encouraging or restricting party formation, it could be
argued that the number of parties is influenced far more by underlying
societal conflicts. The idea is that parties grow out of and represent
groups in society sitting on opposing sides of social conflicts – such as the
classic class conflict between proletariat and bourgeois, or between
national and/or religious majorities and minorities. This would then
suggest that both party systems and electoral systems are affected by the
ways in which society is split politically in a given country. So, in a society
where there is only one political conflict, for example between proletariat
and bourgeois there will only be two major parties. This may then lead to
the use of an electoral system that reflects and maintains this duality.
Conversely, if in addition to the conflict between proletariat vs. bourgeois,
there is also a conflict between say different national groups this might
lead to the adoption of an electoral system that allows both of these
cross-cutting conflicts to be represented in the form of political parties.
This idea is represented in Figure 2.5. This shows an example of an
imaginary country with two societal cleavages. On the one hand there is
disagreement over whether the government should promote national
unity or autonomy for minority populations. Real life examples of such a
debate would be Scotland and Wales within the United Kingdom and
National unity
A B
Laissez faire Planning
C D
Minority autonomy
Figure 2.5 The making of multi-party systems through overlapping political divides
40 Contemporary Party Politics
Catalonia and the Basque Country within Spain. The other disagreement
is over economic laissez faire vs. planning as in the classic class cleavage
found in many countries. In this example parties A and B can agree on
laissez faire, but part ways on national unity vs. autonomy. They, there-
fore, cannot exist as one party necessitating two parties. Similarly B and
D agree on the need for planning but also part ways over national unity.
A and B agree on national unity, but disagree over the need for national
planning and C and D agree on minority autonomy, but fall out over
planning. Hence, because of over-lapping and incompatible political
cleavages, this imaginary country has a multi-party system. So the under-
lying societal conflicts has created a multiparty system, which in turn has
led to the adoption of a PR system which ensures, or at least encourages,
the continuing existence of the multiparty system as illustrated. As
Taagepera and Grofman (1985, p. 350) argue: ‘it may be that countries
with many issue dimensions do purposely pick electoral systems which
enable more than two parties to survive’ (see Chapter 4 for a discussion
of societal conflicts and parties).
It is of course possible that an electoral system was adopted at a time
when there were only two main opposing groups in society leading to the
use of Single Member Plurality. However, later more conflicts started to
emerge, but the two main parties created by the original conflict saw no
need to change the electoral system. The traditional two-party system is
therefore ‘artificially’ maintained by the electoral system despite not fully
reflecting new political conflicts. Arguably this is what has been hap-
pening in the United Kingdom since the 1970s.
Hence, when trying to explain the variations of party systems across
countries, there seems to be a complex interaction between societal cleav-
ages, the electoral system and the number of parties in existence. Political
cleavages create political parties. However, different electoral systems
make it more difficult for small parties to survive, which could mean that
a single large party is able to absorb several political cleavages within it.
Then again, the electoral system of a country is chosen by political parties
– and any party would want an electoral system that suits its situation –
that is, small parties will be concerned with proportionality, larger parties
less so. The electoral system chosen will, therefore, depend on how many
parties exist at the time – which will to a large extent be explained by the
political cleavages in a country.
Quite regardless of which party systems exist and how they are formed,
there is the question of whether some systems are somehow ‘better’ than
Party Systems 41
others. It has been argued that ‘the literature on party systems is [...]
replete with normative statements which extol certain party systems but
damn others’ (Daalder, 1992, p. 274).
Indeed, there is a long standing argument that the two-party system is
better than the multi-party system. One example is Duverger and his view
that dualities are natural in politics. If two opposing camps are natural in
politics, so must be two-party systems. Linked to this is an idealisation of
the single-party majority government. Single-party majority governments
are extolled for their stability, and according to Amery’s (1947, p. 19)
view of ‘strong and stable government first’ there really is no viable alter-
native to the two-party system. A single party with a majority is far better
able to make swift decisions, without the need for debating and reaching
compromises that are said to hold back minority and coalition govern-
ments.
The strongest advocacy for the two-party system comes from the idea
of ‘responsible two-party government’ (American Political Science
Association Committee on Political Parties, 1950; Ranney, 1962). The
argument here is that with two parties competing to form single-party
majority governments it will be clear who is responsible for the actions of
governments. Parties can thus be very easily judged on whether they have
succeeded in carrying out their electoral promises.
The other side of this argument is a rejection of multi-party systems.
This rejection is often based on the problems experienced in the Weimar
Republic and Third Republic France before the Second World War and in
Italy and Fourth Republic France after 1945. An excessive number of
extreme parties made for unstable governments, and it is argued, ulti-
mately caused the breakdown of democracy in Germany in the 1930s and
the rise of Nazism. The same led to the breakdown of the Fourth
Republic in France to be replaced with the Fifth Republic. Italy after the
Second World War was (and arguably is) a basket case of too many
parties and weak governments.
However, from the 1950s onwards there has been a re-evaluation of
multi-party democracies. One moving force behind this re-evaluation was
the discovery that economically and socially there was no evidence that
two-party democracies did any better than multi-party democracies.
Indeed, Lijphart argues that consensus style democracies, with multi-
party systems at their heart, are better than majoritarian democracies and
their two-party systems. According to Lijphart (1999, pp. 275–6) con-
sensus democracies:
are more likely to be welfare states; they have a better record with
regard to the protection of the environment; they put fewer people in
prison and are less likely to use the death penalty; and consensus
42 Contemporary Party Politics
democracies in the developed world are more generous with their eco-
nomic assistance to developing countries.
Conclusion
This is not to say that parties do not change as they clearly do. The point
is that once a party has become ‘institutionalised’, to use Panebianco’s
term, or set in its ways, it often takes a considerable amount of effort to
change it. Parties, as with most established organisations, are ‘small c
conservative’ in that they change only gradually and often reluctantly. To
understand the current shape of parties it is, therefore, necessary to also
understand how they originated and developed.
Some of the key theories of how parties emerged and evolved as organ-
isations will be the main focus of this chapter. There are two main theo-
ries of how parties first developed. The most well known comes from
Duverger. Duverger’s theory is fairly simply and also the one most com-
monly used to understand the origins of parties and the effects those
origins have on the subsequent life of parties. Panebianco starts from
Duverger’s theory, but critiques it and presents an alternative perspective.
In the following we will first look at Duverger’s theory followed by
Panebianco’s. After that will be a review of one of the central preoccupa-
tions of the party politics literature – the evolution of party types.
43
44 Contemporary Party Politics
While Duverger’s view of party emergence is the most popular, it has also
been criticised. Panebianco points out that it fails to explain how parties
of similar origins nevertheless end up having very different structures. His
claim is that we need a more complex model if we are to understand how
parties develop (Panebianco, 1988, p. 50).
Panebianco develops what he calls a ‘genetic model’ for party emer-
gence, which can then be applied to analyse and understand specific
parties (Panebianco, 1988, p. 50). The genetic model consists of two
parts. The first part focuses on how a party first emerged and the forces
involved in its creation. This in turn affects how the party ‘institution-
alised’ – that is, how the party settled into a regular pattern of organisa-
tional activity.
There are three issues we need to consider when investigating the
emergence of a political party (Panebianco, 1988, pp. 50–3). The first
issue is whether the party was created through territorial penetration or
territorial diffusion. Territorial penetration involves a pre-existing centre
controlling, stimulating or directing the creation of the ‘periphery – local
and regional party organisations. Territorial diffusion on the other hand
is when local elites create party organisations in their locality which are
then later merged into a national organisation. A combination of the two
can also take place. Local parties emerge in some areas and eventually
form a national organisation (diffusion). This national organisation then
goes on to create local party organisation where there were none before
(penetration). However, there will more often than not be a prevailing
tendency in that a party is created mainly by one or the other method.
Panebianco argues that liberal parties have tended to emerge through a
mixture of the two. Many socialist parties and religious parties have
tended to be formed through diffusion. Conservative and communist
parties have typically been created through penetration.
These two forms of origins will have an effect on how the party is
structured. A party created through penetration will by definition have a
sufficiently strong centre to stimulate the creation of local party organisa-
tions. Such parties therefore tend to be highly centralised. By contrast
parties created by diffusion will be based on the merger of many local ele-
ments with their own elites and power centres. These parties therefore
48 Contemporary Party Politics
The issue of how a party has emerged and its degree of institutionalisa-
tion can be combined to analyse and understand how a party has devel-
oped, and the importance of its origins in that development (see Figure
3.1).
The parties that most resemble Type 1 are the communist parties of
the Cold War period. They were often created by territorial penetration,
and although many had an external sponsor, the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, this sponsor was ‘extra-national’ and therefore had a some-
what indirect impact. They, therefore, tended to be highly institution-
alised. Type 2 is represented by labour and social democratic parties,
such as the British Labour Party and some religious parties. The fact that
these parties were created by territorial diffusion and were dependent on
external sponsoring organisations, in many cases trade unions, meant
that they were dependent on their external sponsor and based on local
semi-autonomous units. This tended to lead to low levels of institutionali-
sation.
Type 3 consists of parties created from a pre-existing centre, such as a
parliamentary group, and with no sponsoring organisation. They are
therefore highly institutionalised as they are controlled from the centre
and are much less dependent on their external environment, in contrast
to some social democratic parties’ dependency on the trade unions that
helped create them. One could mention the British Conservative Party as
an example of this type of party.
Finally there are Type 4 parties. While there is no external sponsoring
organisation these parties were still created by territorial diffusion. They
were, therefore, federations of existing groups, which slows institutionali-
sation. One example is the German CDU.
This leaves the issue of charisma, which Panebianco refers to as a
‘deviant case’ since it does not fit into the above schema (Panebianco,
1988, p. 65). Parties based on charisma can go one of two ways. Either
they simply melt away once the original leader leaves the stage – or they
50 Contemporary Party Politics
manage to live on after his or her departure. If the party dies then institu-
tionalisation is not relevant. If the party continues then it will most likely
end up as a highly institutionalised party. A party created by a single
charismatic leader will be highly centralised as all decisions, ideology and
purpose flow from that person. If the party survives the departure of the
founding leader the organisation will more than likely retain that highly
centralised structure.
These two different ways of looking at the origins of parties are pow-
erful tools in understanding the current organisational state of a party.
Duverger’s approach has the benefit of simplicity, but is perhaps also a little
lacking in detail. Panebianco gives a far more detailed tool for analysing
parties, but one that is also more complicated to apply, exactly because of
the extra detail. However, both approaches show the importance of taking
into account a party’s origins when trying to understand its current state.
In addition to analysing how parties have emerged and how this affects
their current situation, a lot of effort has gone into categorising different
ways that parties have organised themselves internally. Indeed, one of the
most active areas of party politics research is the development, opera-
tionalisation, critiquing and re-development of party types. There is not a
single commonly agreed definition of what a party type is – which is a
problem we will return to at the end of this section. However, the party
type debate has still dominated our understanding of how parties have
changed over time. Various authors have described party types as illustra-
tions of how parties currently behave, how they used to behave and how
they might behave in the future. Often the development of a new party
type comes as a response to parties, or a particular group of parties,
doing something in a new way. Each party type describes how parties
behave, their central characteristics and motivating forces. In the fol-
lowing we will examine the most important party types and show how
this approach to our understanding of parties has helped us to see how
parties have changed over time. The following will also deal with some
problems which have become apparent regarding the ‘party types’
approach to analysing party life.
The idea that mass parties were the party type of the future, either in its
‘pure’ form in left-wing parties, or as imitations in cadre parties with extra-
parliamentary membership organisation add-ons, was quickly challenged
by Kirchheimer (1966). In an incomplete article published shortly after his
death, Kirchheimer argued that the evolved cadre parties were in fact better
suited to the post-war environment with its more diverse electorates and
reduced class antagonism than was the traditional mass party based on
class representation. The old cadre parties, having imitated some of the fea-
tures of the mass party, most notably the presence of fairly large member-
ship organisations, were becoming ‘catch-all people’s parties’ (Kirchheimer,
1966, p. 184). As the electorate grew, the cadre parties were not able to
rely for their electoral survival on the small societal elite they had previ-
ously been based on. They, therefore, needed to reach out beyond their tra-
ditional privileged audience and as a result turned more fully to the
electoral area. The mass parties were based on the mobilisations of a spe-
cific, albeit large, group of voters. The evolving cadre parties based their
new electoral strategy on attracting as many voters as they could from
whatever groups in society they were able to tap, hence the term ‘catch-all’.
Theories of Party Development 53
As with the success of the mass party model in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, so the success of the catch-all party model
in the post-1945 era became a contagion which spread from the right-
wing of politics to the left (Epstein, 1967, p. 257). By the 1970s the
catch-all party, rather than the mass party, looked like the model of the
future.
The catch-all party has a number of key characteristics, including:
It is important to note that becoming a catch-all party does not mean that
a party is so ‘heterogeneous as to represent the whole social spectrum and
whose connection with its original classe gardée had completely disap-
peared’ (Panebianco, 1988, p. 263). Rather what the catch-all party is
trying to do is simply to open its doors to different social groups ‘whose
interests do not adamantly conflict’ (Kirchheimer, 1966, p. 186). A catch-
all party is, therefore, not a party which has no ideological or societal
connections what-so-ever. No party could survive long without any
coherence or predictability to its policy preferences or legislative actions.
The main difference between the mass party and the catch-all party
models is that the mass party focus was primarily on the representation
of the interests of one particular group, whereas the catch-all party is
trying to open up to new electoral markets that do not fundamentally
clash with its old position.
As we shall see later in the book, when it comes to party ideology; the
role of party members; the balance of power in parties; and campaigning,
Kirchheimer’s description of the catch-all party seems to fit with a lot of
what has been happening in modern political parties.
The catch-all party model focused very heavily on the ideological aspects
of political parties, especially the idea of not targeting one specific class,
but rather casting one’s net as wide as possible. Hence, one criticism of
54 Contemporary Party Politics
the catch-all party model was its strong focus on the ideological changes
and moderation that went into becoming a catch-all party and how that
affected the catch-all party’s relations with other political actors such as
interest groups (Panebianco, 1988, p. 263). Panebianco argued that this
focus overlooked important organisational implications of the catch-all
party model. The solution was the idea of the electoral-professional
party.
The electoral-professional party type does not reject the idea of the
catch-all model. Rather, what it does is develop the catch-all type with a
focus on organisational issues and in particular the professionalization of
the party. In the classic mass party ‘a crucial role is played by the appa-
ratus, the party bureaucracy: the “representative bureaucracy” [...] is
used by the mass party leaders to maintain close ties with the members,
and, through the members, with the classe gardée’ (Panebianco, 1988, p.
264). By ‘representative bureaucracy’ is meant a system where local party
members (the party on the ground as described in Chapter 1) interact
with voters at the local level and thereby get an idea of the wishes and
demands of the population. Party members then elect representatives and
party officers to serve higher up in the party in local, regional and
national executives and as delegates to the party conference (the party in
central office). These party officers and delegates carry the wishes and
demands from the voters to the party’s parliamentarians (the party in
public office) to deal with in the form of legislation. The representative
bureaucracy, therefore, acts as an unbroken chain from people to parlia-
ment.
In the electoral-professional party this organising principle is replaced
with an increasingly professionalized approach to running the party. The
electoral-professional party makes far greater use of ‘so-called experts,
technicians with specialist knowledge’ (Panebianco, 1988, p. 264) such as
pollsters and what would now be called spin-doctors, instead of relying
on members as the main source of information about what voters are
demanding. Overall there are five key differences between mass parties
and electoral-professional parties:
1 Where the mass party relied on party bureaucrats to run the party
and foster links with the electorate, the electoral-professional party
relies on experts.
2 The mass party is a membership-based party with strong vertical ties
between members and leaders. The party appeals to a sense of
belonging (class or group association). In the electoral-professional
party the vertical link is weakened and the party appeals to the
‘opinion electorate’ rather than the ‘electorate of belonging’ – the
Theories of Party Development 55
It is important to note that few if any parties fit perfectly into either the
mass party or the electoral-professional party categories. They are what
we might call ‘ideal types’ which help us to analyse real-life party
organisations (Panebianco, 1988, pp. 264–5). What the two types do is
show that there is a tendency for parties to go from having primarily
mass-party characteristics to having primarily electoral-professional
characteristics.
The extent to which a party has moved from one type to another
depends on several factors, relating both to the internal life of a party and
its external environment. According to Kirchheimer only major parties
are likely to move in a catch-all direction. Large parties are by definition
parties that have managed to attract a fairly large vote share, something
which would presumably be easier to achieve and maintain with a catch-
all stance. Parties with a very specific and narrow focus are also by defi-
nition likely to be small and are more likely to stay away from a catch-all
position. Parties not expected to reach catch-all status included organisa-
tions such as the post-War German Refugee Party, the Danish anti-tax
Justice Party and the Swedish Agrarians (Kirchheimer, 1966, pp. 187–8)
as their purpose is too narrow or their clientele very small. In addition
even major parties in fairly small democracies, such as the Scandinavian
countries, are unlikely to become catch-all parties (Kirchheimer, 1966, p.
188). Parties well entrenched in small homogeneous democracies, such as
the Norwegian and Swedish Social Democrats have little incentive to
move in a catch-all direction (Kirchheimer, 1966, p. 188). In addition
Kirchheimer argues that ‘conversion to catch-all constitutes a competitive
phenomenon’ (Kirchhermer, 1966, p. 188). If one party has successfully
adopted a catch-all position other parties in the system are likely to
follow suit, either in the hope of electoral gains or out of fear of losing to
a competitor.
56 Contemporary Party Politics
Two key factors are central to understanding ‘the speed and intensity
of transformation’: the level of institutionalisation of a party and the
party’s environment (Panebianco, 1988, p. 265). A move from mass
party to electoral-professional status is more likely to happen before a
party has institutionalised, or if the level of institutionalisation is very
low. A highly institutionalised party is more likely to resist pressure for
organisational reform, be it from internal or external forces. In addition
the argument that large parties are more like to undergo transforma-
tions than smaller ones suggests that we are more likely to see electoral-
professional parties emerge in less fragmented party systems than highly
fragmented ones (Panebianco, 1988, p. 265). If a political system is
dominated by a few large parties ‘change will take place sooner and
[take] place more quickly’ (Panebianco, 1988, p. 265). A political
system characterised by many small parties each with a very specific
electoral market is less likely to see change. It makes sense that in, for
example, the United Kingdom where the electoral system punishes small
parties, parties with a desire for power have an incentive to broaden
their appeal as much as possible. Conversely, in countries with very
proportional electoral system, such as in Scandinavia, Italy or Israel, the
incentive to widen one’s appeal and professionalise is much less intense.
Smaller parties can and do lead very productive lives, participating in
coalitions or supporting minority governments and, therefore, have less
reason to professionalise.
Finally Panebianco argues that changes in two major environmental
factors are important in affecting party change. The first factor is related
to changes to the socioeconomic structure of a country (Panebianco,
1988, p. 265). In other words the rise of a large middle class and the
simultaneous decline in working class voters will encourage party change.
Electorates have ‘become more socially and culturally heterogeneous’
(Panebianco, 1988, p. 266) meaning that focusing on just one (possibly
shrinking and certainly changing) social group is not electorally viable.
This will have a major impact on parties and spur them in a catch-
all/electoral professional direction.
Further, technological change will have an impact on the professionali-
sation of party organisations. As new ways of communicating develop,
the need for experts to tap these new communication channels increases.
In the context of technological change Panebianco writes about the rise
of television campaigning, but in the current communication environment
the rise of increasingly mobile and high-speed Internet connections is a
major factor as illustrated by Barak Obama’s skilled use of Internet net-
working in both his primary campaign and presidential victories. Clearly,
Theories of Party Development 57
The idea of the cartel party is linked to the claim that parties are
becoming increasingly separated from the people they were originally
designed to represent. Becoming ever more dependent on state resources,
and thus independent of civil society resources, they lose contact with the
ideas, demands and lives of voters. The rise of the cartel party could
therefore be seen as a negative development.
Since Katz and Mair’s work on the cartel party in 1995, the work on
party types has continued apace. Examples of party types to emerge in
the literature since 1995 include the post-cartel party (Yishai, 2001) the
franchise party (Carty, 2004); the media and the communitarian party
types as a suggestion for two alternative paths of development (Richards,
2000); the cyber party (Margetts, 2001); the business firm party (Hopkin
and Paolucci, 1999); modern cadre parties and leader-centred parties
(Wolinetz, 2002); catch-all party plus (Puhle, 2002); and the grassroots
party.
This plethora of supposed new party organisational forms illustrates a
number of problems with the party type approach to the study of polit-
ical parties. While the cadre to catch-all party evolution is more or less
accepted, there seems to be no consensus on what has happened since.
The competition to be Kirchheimer’s successor is certainly fierce and has
not necessarily served to help us get a clear picture of what the overall
trends in party organisational change actually are, apart from suggesting
that change is indeed happening.
The reasons for this proliferation of new types since the mid-1990s
compared to the relatively straight forward cadre to catch-all develop-
ment are not entirely clear. One option is that the study of parties has
experienced an increase in popularity in recent decades. Hence, what we
are seeing is not a sudden proliferation of new types compared to the
late 1800s and early 1900s, but rather an awareness of the complexity
of party organisational change. A complexity perhaps hidden by the rel-
atively narrow field of scholars previously engaged in party organisa-
tional research, leading to an equally narrow field of theories related to
how parties are changing. In other words the relatively simple cadre to
catch-all theory may in fact hide a picture as complex as our current
one.
On the other hand it is also possible that democracy and, therefore,
party politics may have become more complicated than was previously
the case, although most generations seem to view their own age as more
developed or complex than the previous age. Whichever is the case, what
Theories of Party Development 59
is clear is that we are faced with a very confusing picture of party organi-
sational development.
This would suggest that there is a need to go beyond the party types
literature, important as it is, to get a clearer understanding of what the
overall trends in party organisational development are. The following
chapters will do just that.
Chapter4
Ideology
One of the most important and influential ideas of what political parties
are or should be is that they are the organisational embodiment of an ide-
ology. It is a common assumption that the whole point of a party is that
it has a vision of ‘the good society’ and its main purpose is to make that
vision a reality. Indeed, a common criticism of modern political parties is
that many of them, especially those that manage to get into government,
have lost their ideological foundations and are interested in power and
government perks not to change things, but for the personal benefits that
such power brings. In other words, having an ideology is assumed to be
at the core of what a party should be, and the absence of ideology is a
key criticism of (some) political parties.
This chapter will deal with the issue of ideology, and what will in some
places take the place of ideology as the guiding force of party action. The
chapter will first explore the meaning of ideology in the context of party
politics. It will then look at what drives ideology – that is political cleav-
ages. Having done that the chapter will present the key ways in which
parties are grouped when it comes to their ideological position that is
into ‘party families’. The chapter will then look at party ideology in
Western Europe, the United States, India and Africa.
60
Ideology 61
and Republican parties of the Unites States are not named after ideologies
and indeed the Democratic Party started out as the Republican Party,
then became the Democratic-Republican Party and eventually The
Democratic Party (Witcover, 2003). Nevertheless, the fact that so many
parties name themselves after an ideology is an indication of the formal
importance of ideology in the life of political parties.
The most prominent version of what party ideology is based on is the
classical left–right spectrum inherited from the French Revolution. In the
National Assembly created after the revolution in 1789, supporters of the
monarchy would congregate on the right-hand side of the chamber.
Opponents of the monarchy and the old order would congregate on the
left-hand side of the chamber. This division continued through several
changes and reforms of the French legislative assembly – to the point
where ‘left’ became associated with the desire for change and opposition
to the old and traditional; and ‘right’ became associated with tradition
and maintaining existing structures. On this simple scale social demo-
cratic, socialist and communist parties on the left are opposed by liberal,
conservative and fascist parties on the right. Indeed, the idea of a left–
right spectrum is so ingrained in discourse on political parties that
Laponce (1981) referred to it as ‘political esperanto’, a simple and uni-
versal language which helps structure a very complex world of overlap-
ping policies and options. In short, the left–right spectrum helps
politicians, the media and voters to understand where different parties
and candidates are located both in relation to each other and in relation
to the position of the observer (Freire, 2008).
It is worth noting that the ‘left/right’ seating of the French National
Assembly of 1789 is continued in the European Parliament. The cross-
national party groups in the European parliament are seated such that
members of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, commonly seen
as the most radical socialist group in the European Parliament, sits on the
far left of the chamber. To their right is the left-of-centre Alliance of
Socialists and Democrats. Broadly in the centre is the Alliance of Liberals
and Democrats and to their right the right-of-centre European People’s
Party which is broadly conservative and Christian democrat in character.
On their right are several smaller right wing groups. Clearly, the idea of a
left–right spectrum is very much alive today.
The traditional view of the left–right spectrum is based on socioeco-
nomic issues principally centred on the role of the state in the operation
of the free market and the extent of support offered by the state to those
who have fallen on hard times. The common assumption is that ‘left
wing’ means advocating state intervention in the free-market and gen-
erous support for those unable to work, be it due to disability or lack of
available work. The right wing tends to be associated with small state,
62 Contemporary Party Politics
A B
Voter X Voter Y
A
B
Benoit and Laver (2006, p. 13) point out that while many liberals and
conservatives may agree, more or less, on a fairly minimal role of the
state in the economy, there can be a great difference between liberals and
conservatives when it comes to the role of the individual in society. At
one end we find conservative ideas of loyalty to the nation, and the need
for conformity to certain cultural and social values often founded on reli-
gious beliefs. At the other end we find liberal ideas associated with the
freedom of the individual to adhere to their own cultural and social
values independent from what ‘the nation’, the state, organised religion
or other institutions might think. So, while conservatives and liberals may
agree on promoting a free market economy, they might well disagree
strongly over issues such as abortion, gay rights and censorship. There
64 Contemporary Party Politics
Political cleavages
The question then is what these other dimensions are that parties relate
to. The most well known and most cited approach to dealing with this
issue was developed by Lipset and Rokkan (1967). They argue that
parties are driven by and are expressions of underlying conflicts and
divides, or political cleavages, in society. Each party will represent the
people on one side of some major political conflict. Their main argument
is that the ideology of parties is shaped by two key societal revolutions:
Ideology 65
the national and the industrial. These two revolutions have been the
source of four political cleavages or conflicts.
The national revolution refers to the creation of the modern nation
state. The idea of the nation state is, relatively speaking, a recent phe-
nomenon, emerging from the treaties that ended the 30 Years War in
1648. Before this time the loyalty of an individual might be to the Pope in
Rome on religious matters and to a local aristocrat on political matters,
rather than to a central authority (such as a monarch). From around the
middle of the seventeenth century the idea that each country would have
a single political centre to which all the population owed loyalty on all
matters started to emerge. In short the national revolution saw a process
of unification of all power, both spiritual and political, in a single
national centre. In the study of the nation state and international rela-
tions this is referred to as the rise of the Westphalian System, named after
‘The Peace of Westphalia’ – that is, the treaties that ended the 30 Years
War. This gradual unification of power in modern states created two
counter-trends which eventually led to the emergence of political organi-
sations, including parties.
The first counter-trend was territorial and was driven by local and
regional opposition to nation building, what has been referred to as the
‘centre-periphery’ cleavage. As modern nation states consolidated their
power, ‘subject peoples’ or minorities within the emerging states
mobilised to try to retain or regain political independence. In other
words, there were those who did not want to be part of the new nation
states. This problem of incomplete ‘nation building’ is often associated
with former European colonies, especially in Africa (Clapham, 1996).
When former colonies gained their independence their borders were
based on the old colonial borders. These in turn were based on agree-
ments between European powers. They thus ignored traditional tribal
and national feelings that colonial populations might have. This meant
that people on either side of a border between two former colonies might
have more in common with each other than with people in the state they
found themselves in. This then led to internal conflict as groups within a
state sought independence. Sometimes the struggle for independence was
done though political means (that is, a political party), but often via mili-
tary means when political means failed.
However, while often associated with former colonies, this issue has
also affected European states. There are numerous examples of how this
‘centre vs. periphery’ cleavage has affected the creation and ideological
stance of political parties: The Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and
Sinn Fein in the United Kingdom; both the Basque Country and
Catalonia in Spain have left and right wing nationalist parties arguing for
further autonomy or even independence; the Belgian party system is
66 Contemporary Party Politics
Party families
The concern with ideologies has led to the development of one of the key
comparative tools in party politics: the idea of party families. Party fami-
lies are one of the most important ways in which parties are categorised
and compared both within countries and cross-nationally. Like the idea
of party types, the party family framework allows us to categorise parties
and thus helps us provide structure to the often fractured and confusing
party politics of democratic countries. However, a party family is dif-
ferent from a party type. Where a party type focuses mainly on organisa-
tional concerns, a party family is based primarily on ideology.
The party family is a way of grouping parties, principally according to
their links with one or more societal conflicts or cleavages. So, most
Christian Democratic parties are based on both religion and ‘anti-
socialist’ conservatism – that is, they are shaped by both the class-
cleavage and the church-state cleavage. Regional and separatist parties
such as those found in Scotland and Catalonia are affected by both the
centre-periphery and the class cleavages.
One of the main contributors to the party family approach is von
Beyme (1985). While von Beyme does not agree entirely with Lipset and
Rokkan’s view of political cleavages, the idea of party ideology being
68 Contemporary Party Politics
grown beyond the agrarian origins into broad centre-right parties. Very
few specific agrarian parties survive, with a few exceptions in Eastern
Europe.
A party family closely linked to the national revolution is made up of
regional and ethnic parties based very much on Lipset and Rokkan’s
centre–periphery cleavage. These emerged to defend the rights of minori-
ties against the national political centre in places such as Scotland, Wales,
the Basque Country and Catalonia. These parties are to be found on both
sides of the traditional left–right spectrum, albeit perhaps more often on
the left than the right. Wanting to loosen the ties of one part of a country
from central control, or even create a new country out of one part of an
exciting one, is a serious challenge to the status quo. Such a challenge
lends it self more easily to the left wing than the right wing.
One party family which has seen considerable fluctuations in support
are right wing extremist parties. These rose to particular (and cata-
strophic) prominence in the lead up to the Second World War, especially
in Germany, Italy and several East European states. This party family has
seen a re-emergence since the 1970s, mainly as protest parties against the
main-stream governing parties of the centre-right and centre-left. In
Scandinavia some emerged as a protest against what was seen as exces-
sively high taxes, which then morphed into protest against immigration.
The anti-immigration stance is common to many organisations in the far-
right party family.
Finally there is what von Beyme refers to as the ecology movement (or
Green Parties). These parties mobilised in protest against the growth-ori-
ented society, what they saw as excessive use of natural resources and the
environmental damage caused by modern industrial societies. At the time
when von Beyme was writing global warming and climate change were
not yet on the agenda, but have since become a central concern for this
party family.
The next big question is the extent to which the traditional views of ide-
ology, most notable the idea of fast frozen political cleavages, are still rel-
evant for the context, that is Europe politics, they were originally based
on. Can these four ideological divides still adequately explain party ide-
ology?
One of the key areas of debate in the context of European party ide-
ology is whether and to what extent we are seeing the rise of a ‘new’,
‘post-material’ or ‘post-industrial’ politics. This has been an ongoing
debate since at least 1977 when Inglehart published his Silent Revolution:
Ideology 71
40
35
30
Social Democrats
Communists
25 New Left
Percent
Greens
20 Christian Democrats
Conservatives
15 Liberals
Agrarian
10 Far Right
Other
0
1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
competition, or use the state to protect it from world markets. The cul-
tural dimension will take on a distinct national and ethnic character: the
protection of ‘national values’ against multiculturalism brought on by,
among other things, immigration.
In essence, it has been argued that existing parties have a very large
‘adaptive capacity’ (Kriesi et al., 2006, p. 924). It is suggested that main-
stream parties of both the left and the right will adopt moderate ‘global
integration’ positions (Kriesi et al., 2006, p. 926). This also suggests that
globalisation has created a powerful new demand from the ‘losers’ for
protection against the effects of globalisation. Those parties that are able
to meet that demand best will be a driving force for change in existing
party systems. So, just as the demands of the ‘losers’ of industrialisation –
the working class – created a long-standing struggle between left-wing
and right-wing parties, so the ‘losers’ from globalisation will create a new
dynamic between ‘integrators’ and ‘demarcators’ – that is, between those
who want to embrace globalisation and those who want to impose limits
on it. What we are seeing at the moment is that the far right has been
most efficient in putting together a ‘highly attractive ideological package’
for the ‘losers’ (Kriesi et al., 2006, p. 929).
So, the new politics emerging from the 1960s onwards forced existing
parties to change their ideological makeup to cope with new versions of
old conflicts. Globalisation created the need to adjust ideological offer-
ings to appeal to the ‘losers’ from the globalisation process. While the
‘new politics’ wave meant principally positioning oneself on issues of
morality (gay rights, abortion and minority rights), so globalisation has
meant dealing with the clash between integration and demarcation. So far
the extreme right has taken the lead in a demarcation direction, forcing
both the moderate left and right to take on demarcation positions to
answer that challenge, often in the form of moderate anti-immigration
policies.
Kriesi’s idea that the mainstream centre right and centre left parties are
adopting a moderate integrationist approach hints at another popular
argument when it comes to the ideological development of parties, or at
least the main moderate centrist parties: that of convergence on a neo-
liberal free market agenda. Some suggest that the traditional cleavages
have not just thawed from their previously frozen state to be replaced by
new conflicts, but that by and large we have seen ‘the successful resolu-
tion of the societal conflicts which had been embodied in the traditional
cleavages’ (Kriesi, 1998, p. 165). That is, the old conflicts have been
solved, or perhaps rather won by the supporters of the free market, and
now all that is left is a disagreement over who is best able to manage the
day-to-day running of the state. This is also reflected in the idea of the
‘third way’ taken by some social democratic parties, most notably ‘New’
Ideology 75
Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and to a lesser extent the
SDP under Gerhard Schroder (Giddens, 1998, 2000; Gould, 1998). The
third way is seen by its supporters as achieving traditional social demo-
cratic ends, but to a greater or lesser extent using the free market to do so
– and by its critics simply as selling out to the neoliberal dogma. At the
heart of this view of convergence is the popular refrain that ‘they are all
the same now.’
While this point of view is popular there are many who argue that the
convergence theory is in fact somewhat exaggerated. Some (for example,
Haupt, 2010) argue that the main parties of the centre left and the centre
right are in fact not converging but are keeping in tandem and main-
taining their ideological distance – if one party moves to the middle it is
usually because the other has vacated that political space. Others, such as
Kriesi (et al., 2006, see above; Kriesi, 1998) have argued that while the
societal conflicts that spawned parties may have been modified by suc-
ceeding waves of societal change, they are still more or less intact, if in
somewhat changed forms. Finally, there are those who argue that the
level of working class socialism on the centre-left has long been exagger-
ated and that the ‘third way’ is in fact not so radically different from tra-
ditional social democratic positions (see, for example, Hinnfors, 2006).
A final possibility when it comes to how parties have reacted to soci-
etal change is that they have to a large extent ignored it. Williams (2009)
in her study of the catch-all phenomenon in France found that while the
main parties had indeed taken up a catch-all position, including moder-
ating their ideology as expected from the catch-all approach (see Chapter
3) this had not in fact been driven by ideological changes in society.
Rather, the institutional structure of French politics has pushed parties in
a catch-all direction. The main parties need to attract a wide range of
voters to win a presidential election and gain enough seats to control a
majority in the National Assembly. This is driven by a very dispropor-
tional electoral system and has forced the main parties to develop a polit-
ical stance designed to be as inoffensive as possible. The name of the
game is to avoid scaring anyone away – which means avoiding strong
ideological positions. This does not mean that voters do not want ideo-
logically committed parties, but for parties to win they have to attract
people from a wide range of ideological positions. To do that, parties
need to adopt moderate ideological positions. One of Williams’ conclu-
sions is, therefore, that in France ‘One implication of these findings may
be that for France ideology exists rather independently of the party
system. The importance placed on parties by Kirchheimer as the vessels
and perpetuators of ideology may have been misplaced in the French
case’ (Williams, 2009, p. 610). In other words, at least in the case of
France, the ideological position of parties seems not to be related to
76 Contemporary Party Politics
‘demand side’ factors – what the voters want – but to the structure of the
political system. The demands of the electorate are, therefore, less of a
deciding factor in the ideological position of parties than might otherwise
have been expected.
That this may indeed be the case in a wider context beyond France has
been suggested before. Ware (1979) has argued that partly due to the lack
of internal democracy in most political parties (see Chapter 7) and the
fact that new parties find it difficult to survive, the leaders of older more
established parties are able to ignore new political divisions and keep to
tried and tested ideological positions. The problem is that these positions
‘by their very nature hark back to a vision of political reality that is prob-
ably obsolete’ (Ware, 1979, p. 51). Because demands from the electorate
are not filtered through to the party leaderships, and because new parties
are unable to effectively challenge old parties, leaders of established
parties are able to keep to ideological positions which may no longer
reflect the underlying tensions and conflicts in society. Party leaders are
able to both ignore internal demands for change and exclude most chal-
lenger parties from competing effectively. The result may be that parties
and the electorate are drifting further and further apart, leading to dissat-
isfaction with the political system.
United States
First, we will look at the United States. The United States is one of the
oldest democracies in the world and is also the home to some of the
oldest continuously existing parties. However, the United States is in
many ways different from the traditional European heartland of party
politics, not least so when it comes to the matter of ideology. The first
thing to note is that the two parties, Democrats and Republicans tend to
be seen, at least from the European perspective, as remarkably similar. In
his analysis of party families across a range of countries Ware (1996, p.
Ideology 77
25) put both parties in the liberal party family. It is however, worth
remembering that ‘liberal’ has different connotations in the United States
than it does in most of the rest of the world. In the context of US politics
liberal is commonly seen as indicating left of centre. Very few
Republicans would identify themselves as ‘liberal’. Indeed, ‘liberal’ is
regarded by some parts of the political right in the United States as a term
of abuse.
Looking at the United States in the early post-war years Hofstadter
(1948, p. xxxvii) expressed a commonly held view when he wrote that
‘the fierceness of the political struggle has often been misleading for the
range of vision embraced has always been bounded by the horizons of
property and enterprise.’ This very much supports the idea that both the
Republicans and Democrats are in essence liberal parties. While Gerring
(1998) has argued that the Republicans are sometimes seen as conserva-
tive and the Democrats liberal, he also points out that it is not entirely
clear what this means in European terms. Ware flatly states that the
Republican Party simply cannot be seen as a conservative party. The
problem according to Ware is that the terms liberal and conservative have
taken on different meanings in the American context (Ware, 1996, p. 26).
He argues that Roosevelt ‘hi-jacked’ the term liberal as a label for his
‘New Deal’ which was in essence a massive intervention by the state in
the market to deal with the problems of the Great Depression in the
1930s. As a result of this usurpation of a term usually associated with
small state politics, those opposed to state intervention was left without a
label. Hence in the 1960s ‘conservative’ eventually became to be associ-
ated with the anti-state position taken by the Republican Party. In the
European context ‘conservative’ is most associated with an adherence to
traditional values. A small state position may also be found in many con-
servative parties, especially since Thatcher added a strong element of neo-
liberal laissez faire to the conservative position. However, traditionally in
Europe ‘conservatism’ is not synonymous with ‘small-state’ or unfettered
free market (see, for example, Gray, 1997).
In short, ideological terms do not have the same associations in the
American context as they do in the European. The ideological differences
between the Republicans and the Democrats are not as easy to under-
stand as is the case when looking at the traditional divide between
socialist/social democrats and conservatives/liberals in the European
party politics context. However, that is not to say that there are no differ-
ences between the two parties. There clearly are. In his comprehensive
overview of ideology in the American context Gerring (1998) argues that
the two parties have been based on long-standing differences and two rel-
atively continuous standpoints, even if those standpoints have been
expressed in very different ways over time.
78 Contemporary Party Politics
India
The second party system outside of Europe we will look at is India. India
is in many ways a remarkable case and is notable for, among many other
things, being the world’s largest democracy. That alone makes it worthy
of attention. However, it is also worthy of attention because, unlike so
many other post-colonial countries, it has managed to maintain a rela-
tively well functioning democracy – no mean feat considering its sheer
size and diversity. The question is then how the European notions of ide-
ology fit within the Indian party political system – and the answer is, as
with the United States, not all that well.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, for a considerable time after it gained its
independence in 1947, India was dominated by the Indian National
Congress (INC) in a predominant party system. The INC won elections
by massive majorities and controlled both national and local government
until the 1960s. To understand the role of ideology in the INC it is neces-
sary to keep in mind this dominance. No party achieves such dominance
in a democratic system, relatively free of fraud and corruption, without
sacrificing a good deal of ideological coherence. As Krishna (1967, p. 29)
writes, the INC engaged in ‘promiscuous accommodation of divergent
elements’ in order to maintain its dominance.
This means that thinking in terms of ideology does not necessarily
make much sense when looking at the INC as a whole. It is true that the
INC did adopt socialism as its official ideology in 1955 (Hardgrave and
Kochanek, 2008, p. 271). However, this was, at most, the official line of
80 Contemporary Party Politics
the national leadership and certainly a very poor reflection of the party’s
actual stance, especially the further towards local politics one got. The
INC was for a significant length of time successful at politicising and
integrating large sections of the electorate which had previously not had a
great involvement in politics. However, while these newly politicised ele-
ments of society might have been integrated into the party organisation,
their integration into the party’s official stance of socialism, economic
development and democracy was less successful. Often, newly integrated
segments of the electorate were ‘caste conscious and parochial in orienta-
tion’ (Hardgrave and Kochanek, 2008, p. 273). In short, as the electorate
was politicised by the INC, so the INC was traditionalised by the elec-
torate (Brass, 1966, p. 2; Hardgrave and Kochanek, 2008, p. 273).
As the INC’s dominance started to fade in the 1960s so new parties
emerged – often based on issues not directly related to the traditional
left–right spectrum. Especially religious and regional concerns started to
dominate rather than traditional socioeconomic positions in the tradi-
tional European sense. According to Verney (2004) there are five types of
parties in the Indian party system each with different approaches to ide-
ology (taken in a very broad sense).
One group is made up of various communist parties. While these
parties are not based on caste or religion, their support tends to be con-
centrated in a few regions, especially West Bengal. After the end of the
Cold War these parties have suffered from the general decline in support
and ideological confusion common to many communist parties
throughout the world. Most of them have moved away from revolu-
tionary rhetoric in a more reformist direction.
Another group is the so-called transitional parties which rarely survive
from one election to the next. They tend to be focused on a very specific
and often local issues or the personal appeal of an individual politician.
Then there are parties that are based on fairly narrow religious, caste
or tribe appeal. These parties tend to be geographically concentrated,
neither able nor willing to expand their appeal beyond a fairly specific
group.
The fourth group is similar to the third, but instead of religious, caste,
or tribal foundations they are based on ethnic and regional identities such
as the Tamil population in the south east.
The final group is made up of parties which try to be or actually are
‘national’ parties. In other words, they approach the catch-all model by
trying to have a presence throughout the country and attract a wide
range of voters. The only two parties to really achieve this position are
the INC and the BJP. The BJP is very much based on Hindu nationalism
and as described above the INC has been increasingly taken over by a
plethora of local caste, religious and tribal concerns.
Ideology 81
Africa
The final area we will look at is Africa. It is probably fair to say that suc-
cessful, stable multiparty democracies have not been a regular feature of
post-colonial African politics. Early attempts at multi-party democracy in
the years immediately after independence very quickly descended into
single-party-ism or military dictatorship. However, the 1990s, in what
has been called the ‘third wave of democratisation’, saw a ‘dramatic’
move away from single-party and military rule (Manning, 2005, p. 715).
Although party-based democracies are now becoming more common
on the African continent, the party systems in the new democracies have
tended not to be based on socioeconomic cleavages – in contrast to
European party politics (Burnell, 2001, p. 251; Manning, 2005, p. 715).
The key socioeconomic cleavages in Europe, in particular the class
cleavage, have been based on how the proceeds of economic growth,
especially growth created by the industrial revolution, should be distrib-
uted. This also implied that there were a range of social and economic
policies to choose from – that is, whether and to what extent the state
should be involved in the management of the economy and the extent of
the freedom of the market. As Manning (2005, p. 720) argues:
Conclusion
about ideology only really apply in the European context where they
emerged in the first place. Here it still makes sense to talk about tradi-
tional ideologies even if they have changed considerable from their early
origins. However, as soon as we move outside the European party
systems, ideology based on socioeconomic cleavages decreases signifi-
cantly as the basis for policy choices in political parties.
In short, it seems that party politics in the European context can still
be understood in ideological and party family terms. This is significantly
less the case in the other three cases we have looked at. In the United
States terms such as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ certainly have real
meaning, but a meaning very different from the European context. In
India, tribal, religious and ethnic ties have been rapidly replacing ide-
ology as a mobilising force. In many African democracies personal ties
ensuring access to the resources of the state are more important than
either ideology or ethnicity in explaining party allegiance and mobilisa-
tion. Hence, when considering the issue of party ‘ideology’ in a given
region is seems advisable to focus on local issues, rather than using pre-
existing models and assumptions derived from different contexts. Indeed,
in many cases, such as India and African democracies, the very idea of
ideology is difficult to apply as other concerns are of greater importance
in determining party action.
Chapter 5
84
Party Members, Activists and Supporters 85
303–3) argues that there are three ways in which one can be a formal
member of a party: individual; auxiliary and collective. The individual
member is the person who has paid a membership fee directly to the
party, and may well have been issued with a membership card (although
not all parties issue them anymore). Auxiliary membership is gained
through organisations attached to the party, such as its youth organisa-
tion. A party’s youth organisation may formally speaking be a semi-inde-
pendent organisation and, therefore, be separate from the national party.
So, being a member of the youth organisation makes you an auxiliary
member, but not automatically a direct member of the party. However,
someone who is a member of, for example, the party’s youth organiza-
tion might also at the same time be an ‘individual’ member – that is, be
paying a membership fee to both the youth organisation and the national
party. This somewhat blurs the boundary between the two. Finally, col-
lective membership is through an organisation, such as a trade union,
which is formally associated with the party in question. The trade union’s
members are at the same time collectively members of the party. As with
auxiliary members, a fees-paying member of an affiliated trade union
may also be a direct member of the national party.
The most notable example of such ‘multiple memberships’ is the
British Labour Party. A person can be a direct fees paying member of the
national party; a member of, say, UNISON, a trade union affiliated to the
party; of Young Labour – the party’s youth organisation; of the Fabian
society – a think tank affiliated to the party; and of the Co-operative
Party – an organisation which is affiliated to the Labour Party and sup-
ports candidates for public office. This way one would be a member of
the party five times, but in slightly different ways. It would also give such
a person five votes in electing the party’s leader.
The exact definitional boundary between ‘member’ and ‘supporter’ is,
therefore, far from clear, and there is a considerable grey area between
the two categories. It also makes calculating the membership strength of
political parties very difficult, something which will be considered further
later.
As mentioned earlier, being a member gives certain privileges.
However, depending on the party’s culture, becoming a member may
demand meeting certain requirements. Especially in the early to mid-
twentieth century some socialist parties had very stringent membership
requirements. So, the Argentinean Socialist Party in the 1930s required a
new member to formally and in writing declare his or her support for the
party’s goals, rules and methods. In addition, the applicant needed the
support of two existing members with at least six months membership
(Heidar, 2006, p. 302). Up until the middle of the twentieth century it
was not unusual for British political parties to tell applicants that their
Party Members, Activists and Supporters 87
local branch was ‘full’ and that they would have to wait until a place
became available. In addition, many parties have requirements for how
long a person has to be a member before acquiring the full privileges of
membership, that is the right to stand and vote in internal elections. It is
probably fair to say that as many parties (although not all) have seen a
serious decline in their membership numbers the requirements for joining
and the time it would take to acquire the full privileges of membership
have declined significantly (Heidar, 2006, p. 301).
There are also considerable differences in the level of loyalty that
parties try to instil in their members. There was a longstanding tradition,
especially among some major European social democratic and socialist
parties, to encourage very strong links between party members and the
party organisation. This connection was so strong in some parties that
they were referred to as ‘cradle-to-grave’ parties, a term sometimes par-
ticularly associated with Austria. However, the idea is also to be found
elsewhere. In the context of Denmark, Pedersen (1989) describes how
membership of the Social Democrats could be an all-embracing experi-
ence. A party member might have his or her money with the Workers’
Bank; buy the workers’ co-operative’s beer, bread and milk and ‘when
one had popped one’s (workers’ co-operatives’) clogs, and could not be
resuscitated by the workers’ Samaritans, then the Workers’ Burial
Association would deal with the final arrangements’ (Pedersen, 1989, pp.
56–7). For some, the party was almost literally from cradle to grave. This
though is no longer the reality of membership for the vast majority of
members. For most members of contemporary parties, membership
means little more than paying their membership fee.
However, regardless of whether one is a member or a supporter, one
may or may not also be an activist. As with ‘member’ and ‘supporter’
how to define an ‘activist’ is not clear. Clearly, an activist is someone who
is active in the party. There is though no clear definition of how active
one has to be to be regarded as an activist. Some people spend a signifi-
cant proportion of their free time doing voluntary work for their party –
campaigning on the doorstep, sitting on committees, and attending con-
ferences. Others limit themselves to displaying a poster for the party in
their window at election time. However, regardless of how formal a
person’s attachment is to a party, it is very clear that many modern
parties are very keen on encouraging their members and supporters to
also be activists. As we shall see in Chapter 8 local volunteer activist-
based campaigning plays an important part in election campaigning.
What should be clear by now is that a very significant element of a
political party, the so called party on the ground, is a very amorphous
entity. The party on the ground is, in some form, a key element in the
vast majority of parties and carries out very important tasks. However, it
88 Contemporary Party Politics
is clearly not an easy entity to define in precise terms. The changes that
the party on the ground is undergoing and the consequences of these
changes will be considered next.
One of the key pillars of the argument that parties are in crisis is that
party membership is in decline. This then assumes that a mass-member-
ship organisation is something a party ought to have. Clearly political
parties have not always had membership organisations.
Duverger claimed that the mass-membership organisation was
invented by socialist and social democratic parties in the mid-to late
1800s. There is some evidence that this may not be entirely accurate. For
example, in the United Kingdom both the Conservative Party and the
Liberal Party had already started organising their supporters well before
the time the Labour Party was set up in 1900 (Scarrow, 1996, p. 5). Also,
some religious parties had mass-membership organisations by the time
the left wing and trade union-based mass parties described by Duverger
emerged (Ware, 1996, p. 66). Whatever is the case, the main argument in
much of the literature is that the idea of mass-membership organisations
emerged in the late 1800s and by the mid-1950s had become the stan-
dard way of organising political parties. Indeed, as was described in
Chapter 3, the mass-membership party was briefly regarded as the party
of the future and was seen as a new step on the party evolutionary ladder,
superior to its predecessors (Scarrow, 1996, p. 5). However, this view did
not last long and was soon replaced by arguments surrounding the prob-
able and even inevitable decline of membership organisations.
In considering the accuracy of the claim that party membership organi-
sations are declining we are faced with several problems. As we saw
earlier, the nature of the party on the ground is somewhat amorphous,
which makes it difficult to establish how many members a party has.
First, and as we saw earlier, it is not always clear what counts as a ‘party
member’. It is usual to separate a ‘member’ from a mere ‘supporter’ –
that is, someone who votes for the party on a regular basis, and may even
sometimes volunteer during elections, although the distinction is not
always very clear (Duverger, 1964, p. 62). Perhaps, the easiest way to dis-
tinguish between a member and a supporter is that a member has signed
a membership form and agreed to pay regular fees for their membership
(Duverger, 1964, p. 71). However, particularly in the United States, this
kind of fees-paying, card-carrying member is not the norm. By Duverger’s
definition US parties are largely made up of supporters rather than
members in this sense.
Party Members, Activists and Supporters 89
slightly different ways of presenting the data. This makes direct compar-
ison difficult.
However, some issues still stand out. Van Biezen et al.’s data shows
that party membership has fallen dramatically in Slovakia in the period
2000–7. Whiteley’s data shows a slight increase in 1989–99 to 1999–
2004 which are the periods during which the surveys he uses were carried
out. In France van Biezen et al. see an increase in membership in the same
period as above. Whiteley’s data shows a decline. Van Biezen et al. (2011,
p. 28) note that Austria is a country with continuing high levels of party
membership. Whiteley points to Austria as a West European country with
a high level of decline (2011, p. 25). There are several similar discrepan-
cies between the data in the two papers. This is not to criticise either of
the papers, but to illustrate the difficulties in analysing party membership
numbers.
However, both papers agree that party membership is generally in
decline. Looking at 23 European countries (East and West), van Biezen et
al. (2011, p. 32) find that in all but six of them, membership numbers
had declined, sometimes quite dramatically. They note that several
former Communist countries have seen very dramatic declines which they
ascribe to Communist Parties losing their dominant position in society.
Whiteley (2011, p. 25) makes a similar observation. Both articles also
note that several West European countries have seen major declines
including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Finland – something that
can clearly not be ascribed to the sudden change in the political system as
in the case of former Communist Eastern Europe. Whiteley also finds
that membership numbers have declined outside Europe. His data shows
decline in Chile, South Korea, Mexico and Canada. He does find a small
increase in Japan (Whiteley, 2011, p. 26). The overall conclusions are
fairly clear: Whiteley (2011, p. 36) writes that ‘party activism and mem-
bership have been declining across most of the democratic world.’ Van
Biezen et al. (2011, p. 42) likewise conclude that ‘while political parties
continue to play a major role in the elections and institutions of modern
European democracies, it seems that they have all but abandoned any
pretensions to being mass organisations.’
The argument that party membership organisations are in decline
raises the question of what they are declining from. Presumably, there
was a time when they were in a better condition than now, and it is from
this former state that they are declining. There is sometimes a suggestion
that there was some form of a ‘golden age’ of mass membership organisa-
tions – and that this golden age was located sometime in the middle of
the twentieth century. The golden-age argument is closely tied with the
mass-party model and the idea that parties ought to match that model of
party organisation – that is, large membership organisations that help
Party Members, Activists and Supporters 91
politicians stay in touch with the electorate via local branches as part of a
healthy democracy of politically active citizens. In other words, the mass-
membership organisation is not only what parties used to look like, but
also what they ought to look like.
However, the mass-membership ‘golden age’ may be more imagined
than real. Scarrow (2002, pp. 92–5) suggests that mass-membership
organisations have in fact never been the norm in democratic states. She
argues that the 1950s and 1960s constituted a fairly brief period of wide-
spread mass-membership mobilisation: ‘Before and after this period,
parties exhibited an uneven pattern of commitment to, and success in,
enlisting supporters in permanent organizations’ (Scarrow, 2002, p. 94).
This would suggest that parties based on mass membership should not
necessarily be seen as the default party organisational form. It would also
suggest that talking about ‘decline’ may not be entirely accurate. The talk
of decline suggests that parties used to be stable mass-membership organ-
isations, and what we are seeing is a change away from this norm.
Scarrow suggests that the high membership numbers in some parties in
the 1950s and 1960s were in fact somewhat unusual, rather than the
norm (Scarrow, 2002, p. 94). The changes we are seeing in party mem-
bership numbers should perhaps, therefore, not be seen as a change away
from a pre-existing ‘normal’ state of affairs. Rather, parties are ever
changing organisations that are in a process of continuous adaptation to
the dynamic political environment in which they operate. Hence, when
we analyse changes in political parties we should do so from the perspec-
tive that change itself is normal, and any pre-existing state of affairs that
parties are moving away from was itself inherently temporary. It could,
therefore, be argued that mass-membership parties were an organisa-
tional form that fitted with a fairly brief moment in the development of
modern democracies.
Why members?
have an equal interest in avoiding paying for them through party mem-
bership (Olson, 1965, p. 21). Consequently, in order to explain party
membership we need some reward or incentive that is available only
through membership of a political party.
Clark and Wilson (1961) identify three groups of selective incentives –
that is, incentives that are available only to members. The first is material
incentives – tangible incentives of monetary value, or things that can
easily be translated into monetary value (Clark and Wilson, 1961, p.
134). In this category they include ‘the improvement in property values
for a neighbourhood redevelopment association or the increase in wages
and other tangible “fringe” benefits obtained by a labor [sic] union’
(Clark and Wilson, 1961, p. 134).
Their second group of incentives they call soldiery incentives. These
include the enjoyment derived from socialising with likeminded people,
and from being part of a group (Clark and Wilson, 1961, p. 134) as well
as any feelings of loyalty to the organisation itself (Clark and Wilson,
1961, p. 136 n8).
Finally there are purposive incentives. These are incentives that are tied
to the stated purposes of the organisation itself (Clark and Wilson, 1961,
pp. 135–6). That is, people are drawn to a party because they believe in
its goals.
Clarke and Wilson’s selective incentives as a solution to the problem of
free riding identified by Olsen has been generally accepted as a reason-
able explanation of party membership (Ware, 1996, pp. 67–8). However,
there are problems with their model, most notably in their view of mate-
rial incentives. Their examples of material rewards include, for example,
wage rises secured by a trade union and property value increases from
neighbourhood redevelopment. These examples are exactly the kind of
benefits that are subject to free-rider problems – a wage increase would
be enjoyed by all workers whether unionised or not. It, therefore, seems
necessary to develop Clark and Wilson’s model a little, which is exactly
what Seyd and Whiteley have done. Seyd and Whiteley explain party
membership through their general incentives model (Seyd and Whiteley,
2002, pp. 89–93). They argue that five issues influence the decision to
join a party:
The other side of the coin is the extent to which party leaders want to
encourage people to join. This will depend on whether they see party
members as an asset or a liability.
There are a number of reasons why a large membership might be
regarded as an asset. First, having a large membership can be seen to add
legitimacy to the party. If a lot of people want to join, the party will
appear popular and well anchored in the community, with party
members acting as ‘ambassadors’ for the party spreading its message
(Seyd and Whiteley, 2004, p. 361). Further, if a party is able to claim that
it has a large membership that is actively involved in deliberation and
debate about the big issues facing society, the party will have a certain
level of democratic legitimacy (Scarrow, 1996, p. 42).
There will also be a direct electoral benefit from having party
members. While party members make up a fairly small, and shrinking,
part of the electorate they can usually be relied on to turn out to vote for
the party whatever the circumstances (Scarrow, 1996, p. 43). This could
potentially ‘provide a crucial margin of victory’ especially if turnout is
low or the race tight (Scarrow, 1996, p. 43). However, while party
members turning out to vote could help clinch victory for the party they
also perform an important role following defeats. In bad times having a
solid membership organisation can be essential for a party’s survival and
eventual recovery (Seyd and Whiteley, 2004, pp. 360–1).
In addition to being able to rely on party members to turn out on elec-
tion day, the leadership also gain important benefits from party members
as local campaigners. There is a tendency to see party members and
labour intensive campaigning at the local level as somewhat old fash-
ioned and less effective than modern high-tech capital intensive cam-
paigning. This is one of the central aspects in the rise of the electoral
Party Members, Activists and Supporters 95
Cowley argues that people like the ones described in this quote are much
less likely to rebel against the leadership than some fair weather friend
brought in from outside the party who has not proven their commitment
to the organisation. Indeed, as was mentioned above, many parties require
both candidates for internal positions and would be candidates for public
office to have been a paid up member of the party for a certain length of
time before they are allowed to put their name forward. In short, having a
substantial membership organisation allows parties to ‘reproduce’ them-
selves (Seyd and Whiteley, 2004, p. 361) at all levels including in parlia-
ment. A party with few members may find that difficult, especially in bad
times when outsiders with little commitment to the party will be less
willing to be recruited and more likely to withdraw their support.
A final reason why party leaders might want a membership organisa-
tion is the funding it provides. As mentioned above, the typical definition
of a party member is someone who has signed a membership form which
includes paying a regular fee to the party. Indeed, as Duverger points out
this was one of the main reasons why mass parties emerged in the first
place:
This lesson still holds today. Seyd and Whiteley (2004, p. 361) point out
that membership funding is ‘less tied to the whims, pressures and partic-
ular policy preferences of large financial donors’. Big private donations
also cause problems for parties in that questions will be raised about
what donors are getting in return for their money: ‘accusations that a
party is selling influence are much harder to make when its funds come
from a wide variety of voluntary actors, rather than from a small number
of rich supporters’ (Seyd and Whiteley, 2004, p. 361). An additional
problem with reliance on a few large donors is that the party and its can-
didates run the risk of losing touch with the daily concerns of the people
they are there to represent. Addressing the issue of the need for large
funds to run election campaigns Obama wrote:
the top lobbying shops – starts to look awfully tempting, and if the
opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held,
you learn to rationalise the change as a matter of realism, of compro-
mise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the
voices of the Rust Belt town of the dwindling heartland, become a
distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed
rather than battles to be fought. (Obama, 2006, p. 115)
It is true that large donations do hold a very big place in the life of
modern politics and it seems the lessons of Duverger have been forgotten
or abandoned under the pressure of running capital hungry election cam-
paigns. However, for parties with mass memberships, membership fees
still play a large role. For example in 2011 out of a total budget of just
over £31 million the British Labour Party got over £5 million from mem-
bership fees. While other sources of funding were clearly very important,
membership fees still accounted for about 17 per cent of the Labour
Party’s resources – money it would have to find elsewhere in the absence
of a membership organisation.
The final question this chapter will deal with is whether there are any
wider reasons why parties should be encouraged to have members. As we
saw above, whether party leaders want members or not seems to depend
on a cost–benefit analysis based on what priorities the leaders have.
However, there are more fundamental reasons why parties ought to have
members.
Seyd and Whiteley (2004, p. 364) argue very strongly that a general
decline in membership organisations would have the effect of under-
mining democracy. Without members parties cease to be linked to civil
society. This is a theme also found in the cartel party model (see Chapter
3). Further, it is view backed up by Mair who argues that what we have
seen in recent years is a mutual withdrawal by both citizens and politi-
cians into separate spheres of activity:
Party Members, Activists and Supporters 101
Citizens retreat into private life or more specialized and often ad hoc
forms of representation, while party leaderships retreat into institu-
tions, drawing their terms of reference ever more readily from their
roles as governors or public-office holders. The traditional world of
party democracy – as a zone of engagement in which citizens interacted
with their political leaders – is being evacuated. (Mair, 2006, p. 33)
This is a key element of Lawson’s (1988) claim that parties are failing in
one of their chief roles – to provide ‘linkage’ between voters and politi-
cians. Indeed, this failure of parties to fulfil their representative function
makes Mair question the sustainability of our current conception of
democracy as involving some form of mass participation. Mair sees a
worrying trend in the arguments about democracy where the popular
(that is, voter-based) element is being stripped away, thereby ending up
with a democracy without a demos (Mair, 2006, p. 29). This does not
necessarily mean the end of democracy, but perhaps the rise of a much
less meaningful version of it where the role of voters is radically reduced.
However, as we have seen, while Seyd and Whiteley (2004, pp. 364–5)
acknowledge that recruitment has become more difficult it is far from
impossible provided the right incentives are offered. Indeed, it has been
suggested that there is an increasing desire among the public to participate
in decision making (Kittilson and Scarrow, 2003, p. 63) – hence part of the
reason why citizens are withdrawing from parties into alternative methods
of engagement may be because many, if not all, parties do not provide ade-
quate opportunities for engagement. As Russell (2005, pp. 47, 48) writes:
This theme will be picked up again in Chapter 7 where the issue of policy
making and in particular membership influence on this process will be
addressed.
Conclusion
It should by now be clear that party members are a central, but also
much debated part of party political life. Despite disagreement and uncer-
102 Contemporary Party Politics
Candidate Selection
The last few weeks before an election usually receive inordinate levels of
attention from the media. However, in many respects this part of the elec-
toral process is to some extent the least important in terms of deciding
who gets to run the country. It is widely recognised that the ‘long cam-
paign’ – basically, the period of time from the morning after an election
until the next one – is what decides elections, not the last few weeks that
make up the ‘short campaign’. The problem is that even the long cam-
paign is only half the story when it comes to deciding which specific indi-
viduals get to run the country. The other half is the process of selecting
the candidates for election.
When compared to the excitement of an election campaign or the
passion of ideological debate, the importance of candidate selection is
often under appreciated. Candidate selection is indeed something often
carried out by small groups of dedicated party activists, behind closed
doors, out of view of the general public. It is often a private process
carried out more or less in secret. This is problematic because selecting
candidates for public office is arguably one of the most important ele-
ments of a party’s life. If the definition of a party is an organisation
fielding candidates for public office (see Chapter 1), then the selection of
those candidates clearly lies at the very heart of what a political party is.
Hence, the first part of this chapter will explore the wider importance
of candidate selection before moving on to examining key elements in the
selection process itself. The chapter will look at the impact that different
processes have on those finally selected; it will explore two key areas of
variation between parties in the selection process: territorial (de-)centrali-
sation and the in/exclusiveness of the selectorate; it will finish by looking
at two explanations for the under-representation of women in parlia-
ments: the supply of and demand for candidates.
Regular, free and fair elections are seen as one of the foundations of a
functioning democracy and are, rightly, given an enormous amount of
attention in political debate and study. However, when it comes to deter-
103
104 Contemporary Party Politics
Selecting candidates
Eligible
Aspire
Selected
Elected
Political system
Selection process
the political system; the formal recruitment process; the supply of candi-
dates (those who aspire for office) and the demands of the people with
the power to select candidates (see Figure 6.2). The rest of the chapter
will examine each of these areas in turn.
tant. In federations such as Germany and the United States, regional and
local legislative assemblies have far more power than in more centralised
countries such as the United Kingdom. Hence getting a seat in a sub-
national assembly will be more attractive, and therefore more highly
sought after, in the United States and Germany than in the United
Kingdom.
It is also argued that the political system of a given country will affect
how centralised the selection process of a party is likely to be. First, the
electoral system may affect the degree of centralisation in the candidate
selection process. In essence, the argument runs that local election means
local selection. Hence, in systems with relatively small, single member
constituencies, candidate selection is more likely to be decentralised than
in a List Proportional Representation system with much larger multi-
member constituencies (Gallagher, 1988, p. 9; Lundell, 2004, p. 26).
Second, it has been argued out that a party’s organization tends to
mirror the political structure of the country it is operating in (Epstein,
1980). In other words, in a country where most political decisions are
taken at the centre, parties are also more likely to be highly centralised.
Duverger (1964, p. 398) did argue that the effect is the other way around
in that the ‘internal structure of parties [...] exercises a fundamental influ-
ence on the degree of separation or concentration of powers’ in a
country. However, most writers see the effect running from wider polit-
ical structure to party structure (Gallagher, 1988, p. 8). So, the argument
is that candidate selection in federal countries tends to be de-centralised,
where as in unitary countries it is more centralised (Lundell, 2004, p. 26).
However, the empirical evidence for the connection between the polit-
ical system in a country and the internal selection processes of a party is
mixed. It has been suggested that a more important issue is whether a
party cares that much about elections, or is more focused on ideological
purity. In radical parties focused on ideology rather than electoral
success, candidate selection is more likely to be centralised than in elec-
tion-oriented parties (Duverger 1964, p. 60). In highly ideological parties,
the leadership will want to ensure that all candidates meet a strict
measure of ideological purity. At the same time, if no-one in the party is
particularly interested in winning elections then there will be less resist-
ance to the leadership controlling candidate selections. On the other hand
if elections are seen as important – and winning seats a route to power
and influence – then there will be many in the party with an interest in
influencing the process. As a result, local elements of the party will want
to have a say.
Further, in his study of West European countries Lundell (2004) finds
no statistical connection between the degree of centralisation in candidate
selection processes and either the electoral system of a given country or
108 Contemporary Party Politics
National legislation
Much more indisputable is the impact that national legislation has on the
selection of candidates. It is true that candidate selection is generally
speaking relatively unencumbered by national legislation (Hazan and
Rahat, 2010, pp. 3–4, 7). Parties are by and large left to do their own
thing when it comes to selecting candidates for public office.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to ignore national legislation completely.
Particularly in the United States, state level legislation has a huge impact.
For the vast majority of legislative bodies, that is, the Senate, House of
Candidate Selection 109
Europe
Austria • • •
Denmark • •
Estonia • •
France • •
Germany • • •
Greece • • • •
Hungary • •
Italy • •
Poland • •
Romania • • •
Spain • •
Americas
Argentina • • • •
Brazil • • • • • • •
Canada • • •
Chile • • • • • •
Ecuador • • • • •
Mexico • • • • •
Paraguay • • • •
Suriname • • •
Uruguay • • •
USA • • •
Country Age Citizenship Country Residence Minimum level Minimum level Registration Other
of birth of education of literacy
Africa
Botswana • • • • •
Cameroon • • • •
Chad • • • • •
Ghana • •
Kenya • • • • •
Madagascar • • • •
Mozambique • • •
Nigeria • • • •
Tanzania • • • • •
South Africa • • •
Candidate Selection
Bangladesh • •
India • • •
Indonesia • • • • •
Japan • •
Korea, Republic of • • •
Malaysia • • • •
Nepal • •
New Zealand • • •
Thailand • • • • •
111
112 Contemporary Party Politics
control and the MP went from rebel to loyalist. As Hazan and Rahat
point out this is not a one off example.
The British Conservative Party has been experiencing similar problems
after the 2010 election. In the aftermath of a major political scandal that
broke out in the United Kingdom in 2009 involving dozens of MPs from
all the major parties, the Conservative Party under David Cameron
attempted to show they wanted a new politics. One way of doing that
was by inviting people not associated with traditional political career
paths to apply to become candidates, and have them selected through
new methods, including open primaries. This certainly created a new
kind of MP – one not loyal to the party leadership, but to their con-
stituency and/or personal causes.
The problem of independently minded legislators is taken to the
extreme in the United States, where the party leadership have far less
control than in many other countries. Even the rules are not determined
by the parties themselves. This can be seen as part of the reason for the
notoriously undisciplined politicians of American parties. In short, candi-
date selection processes may often be hidden away from the general
public, but they are of vital importance to how political parties, and
therefore politics in general, function.
What should be clear by now is that the variations in the way that candi-
dates are selected have important consequences for politics. It would,
therefore, be worth looking at some of the key ways in which selection
processes vary. The following will focus on two crucial areas where varia-
tions can occur: territorial (de-)centralisation and in/exclusiveness of the
selectorate.
Territorial (de-)centralisation is concerned with where the selection is
done. For example, is it the party’s national head office that is respon-
sible, or a regional head quarters, or local branches? In/exclusiveness is
concerned with how many people are involved. Is it a small group of
people in the party’s top leadership, or the wider membership? Arguably
there is a link between the two issues. There is tendency to see decentrali-
sation as also involving increased inclusivity – that is, if candidate selec-
tion is done locally it will involve more people than if it is done centrally:
‘Generally the more decentralized candidate selection is, the greater the
possibility for individual party members to play a role’ (Hazan and
Rahat, 2010, p. 55). However, it has also been pointed out that ‘this is an
inclination, not a rule’ (Hazan and Rahat, 2010, p. 55). If all candidates
114 Contemporary Party Politics
Most centralised
All the party’s All the party’s All the party’s All the party’s All the party’s
National
candidates candidates candidates candidates candidates
selected by all selected by all selected by a selected by party selected by the
voters. members. national delegate executive. party leader.
conference
Territorial centralisation
The party’s The party’s The party’s The party’s The party’s
Regional candidates in candidates in candidates in candidates in candidates in
each region each region each region each region each region
selected by all selected by all selected by a selected by the selected by the
voters in that members in that regional regional party regional party
region. region. delegate executive. leader.
conference.
The party’s The party’s The party’s The party’s The party’s
Most decentralised
Candidate Selection
Local
115
Table 6.2 Illustrations of candidate selection procedures
Parti Socialist Two-round A call is issued for members to put themselves forward as candidates. In a small number of cases a
(France) single prominent personality may be asked to stand in a particular constituency. Members then vote on all
member aspirants within a constituency. National committee must validate choice and can reject a candidate.
seats Due to constitutional parity law some seats are designated as all-women shortlists.
Union pour un Two-round Party members select candidates within their constituency. Chosen candidates are scrutinised and validated
Mouvement single by a national selection committee. The national selection committee then reports to the Political Bureau for
Populaire member final approval, although the latter body is seen as too large and unwieldy, and meeting too infrequently to
(France) seats have significant input.
African National Closed list Local branches make nominations and select delegates for Provincial List Conference. Candidate
Congress (South PR, two tiers, nominations submitted to provincial level. Provincial List Committee, appointed by Provincial Executive
Africa) national and Committee, screen nominations and draft consolidated list. To be on consolidated list candidates most have
by province been nominated by at least five branches. Provincial List Conference votes on consolidated list and select
delegates to National List Conference. National List Committee drafts national list based on candidate
popularity. National List Committee vote on draft national and provincial lists. Provincial lists opened up for
appeal, decided on by an Appeals Committee. Nation List Committee finalizes lists.
The Single National party creates approved list (includes training of applicants for national list). National list regularly
Conservative Member replenished and contains more candidates than there are seats. Local branch members select candidate from
Party (UK) Plurality national lists. Some recent experiments to increase number of ethnic minority and women candidate by
requiring some constituencies to select candidate from ‘A-list’ containing higher proportion of desired
candidates. Also some experiments with open primaries.
Party National Brief overview of process
electoral
system
The Labour Single Would be candidates fill in application form for National Parliamentary Panel (NPP) of preapproved
Party (UK) Member aspirants (encouraged but optional). Regional Assessment teams interview candidates for NPP. Constituency
Plurality Parties advertise vacancies and potential candidate contact the constituency parties to declare an interest.
Local branches and affiliated organisations (e.g., trade union branches) within constituency nominate
individuals for constituency short list. Membership wide vote selects candidate from short list. Selected
candidate submitted to National Executive Committee (NEC) for endorsement. Candidate not on the NPP
must attend NEC endorsement interview. Some constituencies designated as all-women shortlists.
The New Single National Executive Committee (NEC) instructs constituency executive committee to invite applications from
Patriotic Party Member aspirants. National level officials vet applicants and NEC approves list of candidates for next stage.
(Ghana) Plurality Constituency delegate conference convened consisting of constituency executive and chair of each polling
district within constituency (typically about 100 delegates) and selects candidate from list by secret ballot.
Source: Murray (2010), Conservative Party (2012), Labour Party (2013), African National Congress (2012); New Patriotic Party (2009).
Candidate Selection
117
118 Contemporary Party Politics
The last issue this chapter will deal with is ‘supply’ and ‘demand’. In this
context supply is about who are willing to put themselves forward as
potential candidates. Demand is about is what the selectorate is looking
for in would-be candidates. The study of supply and demand springs
Candidate Selection 119
Supply
One of the reasons given by party leaders for why there are so few female
candidates, and therefore MPs, is that women simply do not put them-
selves forward for political office – an idea reflected in several publica-
tions on women’s under-representation (for example ‘If only more
candidates came forward’ (Norris and Lovenduski, 1993) and ‘Men kvin-
derne vil jo ikke selv’ (‘But, the women themselves don’t want to’)
(Dahlerup, 2001)). In short, parties would like to select more women
candidates, but there is simply a lack of aspiring women putting them-
selves forward.
There are two key factors that influence supply: ambition and
resources. When it comes to ambition several studies have found that
education is a key predictor of political activism. Education increases
‘political knowledge, interest, confidence and skills’ (Norris and
Lovenduski, 1993, p. 388). This may not affect women unduly in much
of the Western world where women’s educational attainment often
matches and sometimes outdoes that of men. However, it is a factor in
many parts of the world, especially developing countries, where boys’
education is given priority over that of girls’.
In addition, research has found that gender itself has a major impact
on ambition, quite apart from any differences in educational attainment
(Lawless and Fox, 2005; 2010). According to Krook (2010b, p. 158) this
can be explained by ‘long-standing patterns of traditional socialisation
120 Contemporary Party Politics
which associate men with the public realm and women with private’. Put
slightly bluntly, men are raised to be ambitious and encouraged to build
careers for themselves, whereas women are encouraged to think of them-
selves primarily as wives and mothers. This may not be overt and delib-
erate but is displayed in simple things such as buying girls a cookery set
and boys a home chemistry set.
This difference is also found in survey studies. Lawless and Fox (2005)
found that women were twice as likely as men to believe themselves not
to be qualified for public office. In addition they also routinely underplay
their chances of winning compared to men. Hence, this argument sug-
gests that ambition and confidence is about gendered socialisation which
drives women to underestimate their skills and chances and men to over-
estimate theirs, regardless of their actual skills and chances. As one senior
female business women said about the private sector ‘I believe that we
will only have true equality when we have as many incompetent women
in positions of power as incompetent men’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
business-12518277) a sentiment which could equally well be applied to
politics.
In addition to ambition, resources also play a role. Simply being
unable to pay to be a candidate can prevent people from standing. Even
where campaigns are not as capital intensive as for example in the United
States it can be expensive to even attempt to be selected as a candidate
(Norris and Lovenduski, 1993). With a high proportion of women being
concentrated in low paid and part time jobs compared to men, the lack of
financial resources is likely to affect women more than men. In many
countries once an aspirant has been selected as a candidate, the party will
step in and support their election campaign. However, there is rarely any
outside financial support available for becoming a candidate. This early
cost has to be borne by the aspirants themselves. Indeed, in the United
States the issue of financial barriers to women candidates has led to the
creation of several groups aimed at supporting and encouraging women
to put themselves forward as would be candidates (Krook, 2010b, p.
158). Two examples of this are the National Women’s Political Caucus
(www.nwpc.org) and The Wish List (www.thewishlist.org). In addition to
raising funding these organisations also provide training and encourage-
ment for women to enter politics.
Another resource issue is time. Becoming a candidate is a time con-
suming business and can take up a lot of free time as well as require
working time flexibility. Such flexibility is not available in many jobs.
The issue of job types is important beyond finding enough time to
become a candidate. Jacobs (1962) argues that what he calls ‘brokerage
occupations’, such barristers, teachers, trade-union officials, journalists,
and political researchers, often provide not only the necessary time and
Candidate Selection 121
helps illuminate not just the class disparity, but also why women and
ethnic minorities are under-represented in Parliament since they are
often concentrated in low-paying skilled and semi-skilled occupations,
or in family businesses, with inflexible schedules and long hours, in
sectors which do not provide traditional routes to political life.
Hence, parties may have a point when they say that they would like to
select more female (and other under-represented) candidates, but the
supply is just not great enough.
Demand
Conclusion
Candidate selection may not appear to have the same importance as ide-
ology or campaigning. However, as the above has illustrated it is a key
battle ground in intra-party power struggles, and has a critical role to
play in who gets the opportunity to run the country. Hence, candidate
selection processes have a major impact on how parties operate and who
make it to parliament. If elected assemblies do not look like the popula-
tions they are elected to represent, the most likely explanations are to
be found within parties. In short, if we are to understand who gets to
represent us in modern democracies we need to understand candidate
selection processes.
Chapter 7
Policy Making
Ideology is often seen as sitting at the heart of what a party is, or at least
should be – that is, a body of people united by the pursuit of a common
vision of the ideal society. As we saw in Chapter 1, this was Edmund
Burke’s definition of a political party. Chapter 4 also illustrated that ide-
ology is not necessarily the prime motivating force behind a political
party. However, regardless of what drives the people behind a political
party – an ideology, ethnic or religious loyalties or the desire to control
the resources of the state for the benefit of themselves and their followers
– this driving force will have to be turned into practical action. In a dem-
ocratic society such practical action will usually take the form of policy
proposals. Policy making is therefore an important part of what a party
does – it is the process through which the driving force of a party is
turned into practical real life action.
This chapter will explore four key issues related to policy making. The
first is related to the question of who should be involved in the making of
party policy. The chapter will consider both the normative and pragmatic
arguments for and against inclusive and even democratic policy making
processes. The chapter will then look at some of the practical obstacles to
open and inclusive policy making processes. Having looked at the back-
ground to this debate, the chapter will consider the extent to which there
is a demand to be involved from the party on the ground – that is, from
party members and supporters. Finally, the chapter will look at who are
actually involved in the making of party policy.
124
Policy Making 125
then these party organs would supplant the legislature and the execu-
tive as the ultimate decision-making bodies of the polity. The organs of
party would transcend in importance the organs of government, as is
usually the case in totalitarian regimes. (McKenzie, 1982, p. 196)
parliamentary leaders that the electorate will be given the periodic oppor-
tunity to choose between by casting their vote in elections.
Common to all of these views is that the role of the people is not to do
the deciding themselves, but rather to chose those who are to do the
deciding. Parliamentary leaders need not be responsive to public opinion
in between elections, as long as they remain responsible to the electorate
by giving the voters the opportunity to pass judgement of their record in
regular elections (McKenzie, 1982, p. 200). It is though argued that this
system will most likely have the result that parliamentary leaders will
indeed be responsive to the voters in order to attract their vote
(McKenzie, 1982, p. 200).
A further central element of this view of democracy is that those
chosen to lead must be given time and independence to enact their pro-
gramme for the country:
In the context of the United Kingdom, Amery further argued that: ‘[the
British] system is one of democracy, but of democracy by consent and not
by delegation, of government of the people, for the people, with, but not
by, the people’ (Amery, 1964, pp. 20–1). This is what has been defined as
‘Tory democracy’ (Beer, 1965, p. 91). The key concern of this approach
to democracy is:
to put those who are best able to identify and pursue the national
interest into office with sufficient independence to do so. The system is
democratic because the authority of the government rests on the
consent of the people, but it is not government by the people. (Katz,
1997, p. 30).
Once the best people to lead the country have been identified, they
should be left in peace to get on with doing their job until the next elec-
tion. Clearly, intra-party democracy would disrupt the work of the great
and the good we have selected to lead us.
only the leaders of big parties can set the parameters for political compe-
tition and it is in their interest to stick to tried and tested issues.
Hence, even if the actual wants and needs of voters change, they
cannot articulate those wants and needs through the ballot box since
parties define which issues they compete on. In other words, if none of
the main parties presents policies reflecting new wants and needs then
voters are not able to express a desire for such policies since their only
choice is voting for existing policies. Because of the oligopolistic nature of
the electoral market, new parties with policies outside the accepted
parameter of normal politics find it difficult to successfully challenge the
existing parties. Indeed, if we are to believe Katz and Mair’s (1995) cartel
party thesis as explored in Chapter 3, this is an increasing problem as
existing parties actively cooperate to exclude challengers. This means that
if voters want a new set of policies to challenge ‘normal’ politics, they
will struggle to make that clear if their only option is the ballot box.
When parties lack internal democracy, the agenda is controlled by the
leadership, who more often than not prefer to compete on long-estab-
lished issues they are comfortable with, but which ‘by their very nature
[...] hark back to a vision of political reality that is probably obsolete’
(Ware, 1979, p. 51).
Ware’s solution is intra-party democracy: ‘the argument being pre-
sented here is that parties that provided for real control over policy goals
by their activists would come to have a leadership that took account of
new conflicts’ (Ware, 1979, p. 78). By having intra-party democracy,
parties will provide voters with a direct influence on policy to supplement
the often ineffective option of merely voting for another party. This will
deal with the problem that ‘the pressure to search for a new conception
of political reality [...] is most easily rejected when the party organisation
is least open to mass movements’ (Ware, 1979, p. 51). In parties with
intra-party democracy members will be able to bring onto the agenda
issues that the leadership might not otherwise have wanted to deal with.
Echoes of this argument are found elsewhere as well. John Stuart Mill
wrote that ‘a democratic constitution, not supported by democratic insti-
tutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not
political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse’ (Mill,
1994, p. 334). Sartori (2005, p. 28) argues that while parties have many
functions, their most important is that of ‘expression’. Expression
involves ‘the party as the agency which typically communicates the
demands of the society to the state, as the basic link or connector
between a society and its government’ and the ‘expressive function is a
continuous flow which outlasts electoral intervals’ (Sartori, 2005, p. 24).
Hence parties ought to work as conduits between citizens and govern-
ments not just at election time, but continuously. This is clearly linked to
Policy Making 129
This argument also finds support from the ‘deliberative’ view of democ-
racy (Teorell, 1999). It has been argued that the view of democracy as a
competitive marketplace where voters ‘buy’ a party product, erroneously
assumes that voters have a set of well-established preferences. Instead, it
is better to think of voters as having an ‘empirical’ and a ‘hypothetical’
standpoint. The empirical standpoint is what they would come up with if
they were stopped on the street and asked to give an instant response to
an issue. The hypothetical standpoint is what people would come up with
if they had had time to consider all the facts and to deliberate with
others. The argument is that the hypothetical standpoint is a more con-
structive one than the empirical one, and that intra-party democracy is a
good way of getting to the ‘hypothetical popular will’.
The desirability of membership influence is further strengthened by the
concern over the breakdown of the representative function of parties. As
was outlined in Chapter 5, there is a strong argument that parties are
being separated from their voters because membership organisations are
shrinking. Bringing party members in to policymaking could help rebuild
those membership organisations because this increase in influence would
provide greater incentive for membership. In addition, strengthening the
role of members would help rebuild party linkage. As was argued by
Miliband ‘whatever contributes to the growth of [the non-professional
politically interested individual’s] significance also contributes to the
vitality of democratic politics’ (Miliband, 1958, p. 172).
In many ways, the pro intra-party democracy camp can be seen as
having won the argument – at least when it comes to the official position
taken by many parties and widely held views of with what counts as
‘good practice’ in terms of how to run a party organisation. Mill’s view
of the need for ‘democratic institutions in detail’ has been taken up by
projects dealing with advising emerging democracies on the best way to
build good democratic structures. So, The Netherlands Institute for
Multiparty Democracy (NIMD, 2004) writes that there are a number of
‘institutional guarantees’ parties need to meet in order to be able to play
130 Contemporary Party Politics
This view rests on the idea that these ‘assiduous attenders of branch and
constituency meetings’ (Seyd, 1999, p. 388) are active not because of the
trappings of public office, but because of their commitment to a partic-
ular view of society often based on strong ideological foundations. They
are, therefore, more extreme than both the broad electorate and the elec-
torally conscious party elite.
Policy Making 131
High
Organisational status
Low
Left Centre Right
Policy position
This argument has found its most popular and elegant expression in
May’s so called ‘law of curvilinear disparity’ (May, 1973; see Figure 7.1).
The idea is that parties are stratified, with an upper, middle and a
lower layer (May, 1973, pp. 135–6). The main components of the upper
layer are a party’s members of publically elected assemblies and members
of executive bodies (ministers). The middle layer consists of a party’s
membership base: active and inactive members and those who express
strong loyalty for a party without necessarily being members. This also
includes US style registered supporters. The lower layer is made up of
lukewarm and occasional supporters – ‘ordinary’ voters with only a low
level of party political attachment (or indeed political interest). It is
argued that while each layer will be very diverse in its opinions, there will
still be an overall trend (May, 1973, p. 136). That trend will vary
markedly between the three layers. The most important variation is that
the middle layer will be relatively more extreme in their political stance
than the other two layers. The bottom layer will tend to be moderates,
and the top layer will be somewhere between the two (as indicated by the
vertical dashed lines in Figure 7.1), although closer to the lower layer
than the middle layer. Hence, there is a curvilinear disparity between the
ideological trends of the three groups.
This disparity is caused to a large extent by the different patterns of
recruitment to the three layers. Activists without leadership ambitions are
132 Contemporary Party Politics
not required to follow anything other than their own ideological fervour,
which is likely to be strong. Indeed, the tangible rewards for party mem-
bership and activism are few and far between (May, 1973, p. 149).
Hence, the only reason why someone would want to be active in a party
is the fire of their own convictions. If as an activist you want to get
elected to internal positions in the party you will have to appeal to fellow
activists and their strong ideological views. In short, people in the middle
layer tend to be driven by strong ideological views, or required to appeal
to such views.
People in the top layer on the other hand do get substantial tangible
rewards for their position in the form of a salary and all the trappings of
power that come with reaching high political office. At the same time,
people in the top layer of a party are highly dependent on the bottom
layer (or voters) to remain in their position. Hence ‘legislators whose
opinions deviate from those of many of their constituents stand to gain
from discarding such opinions’ (May, 1973, p. 149). Even if politicians
have radical opinions that deviate from the ideological centre of gravity
of their voters, they are more likely to succeed if they moderate those
opinions.
All told this means that when it comes to determining a party’s policy
position, the top layer of the party is better off ignoring the middle layer
as much as possible.
However, while this view of party member extremism has a long tradi-
tion, there is good evidence to suggest that things may not be as simple as
May’s model makes it look.
The first issue is that May’s law has been subjected to extensive
testing, and the results have been weakly supportive of the law at best,
outright against it at worst. One key criticism is that each layer in a party
is far too heterogeneous in terms of motivations and ideological positions
to make general statements about them Kitschelt (1989, p. 403). Others
have found general trends, but as opposed to May concluded that in fact
the top layer is more radical than the middle layer (Norris, 1995). Some
have found limited support for May’s law, but only under very specific
circumstances (Kennedy, Lyons and Fitzgerald, 2006, p. 802). In other
words, the law was not necessarily generally applicable.
Hence, while May’s law seems plausible and has the strength of sim-
plicity on its side, there is little evidence to show that it is actually an
accurate reflection of the opinion structure of political parties. Indeed, it
would seem that there is little in the way of structure in the opinions of
Policy Making 133
p. 42) and hence in political parties, ‘democracy is not for home con-
sumption’ (Michels, 1915, p. 42). In other words, to be effective fighting
machines, parties have to be organised along oligarchic rather than dem-
ocratic lines. In making this argument Michels is supported by Duverger:
‘Democratic principles demand that leadership at all levels be elective,
that it be frequently renewed, collective in character, weak in authority.
Organized in this fashion, a party is not well armed for the struggles of
politics’ (Duverger, 1964, p. 134).
Michels and Duverger are not the only ones to make this assertion.
Explaining some of the reasons for the oligarchic nature of parties Bille
writes that:
There are however reasons to believe that the ‘laws of tactics’ would not
be such a problem when it comes to the making of some aspect of a party’s
policy platform. While it may be true that politicians are often required to
take policy decisions very quickly – sometimes, as Bille argues, in a matter
of hours – this is not necessarily the case on all issues. When talking about
policy it is important to keep in mind that the policy concerns of a party
exist on several levels in terms of details and timeframes. Party policies
obviously have to cover a vast range of issues over the full spectrum of
government, from international to national to local. Party policy also has
to be dealt with in temporal terms, from grand long-term ideological foun-
dations of a party, to day-to-day issues. It is this latter consideration that
will be the topic of the following discussion. Temporally it is possible to
divide party policy into four levels (see Table 7.1):
The question, then, is if the laws of tactics are equally relevant at all
levels. The problems of involving the wider party membership in the day-
to-day struggle of politics are obvious, as exemplified by the quote from
Bille above. However, when it comes to deciding on the party’s basic ide-
ological foundations, the contents of the election manifesto and even the
plans for a parliamentary year it is a lot less obvious why a need for
speed should automatically exclude widespread consultation. Especially
in countries with fixed-term parliaments there really should be little
problem in organising a process of consultation over broad themes for
the election and even more specific drafts of a manifestos.
It is true that there may be other costs than loss of speed associated
with a democratic policy making process. It has been argued that
‘a united party is more likely to do well at the ballot box’ (Katz, 1986,
p. 63) and while the connection between party unity and electoral success
is not entirely straightforward, party unity is certainly perceived to be of
importance by party leaders (Dominguez, 2005). This is supported by
Laffin, Shaw and Taylor (2005, p. 3) who write that ‘the assumption
among the party leadership is that a party must present an image of unity
to succeed electorally’. This is a problem when it comes to policy making.
Policy making is often seen as a very ‘messy’ process and one which is
better not done in public. As Spirer and Spirer (1991, p. 347) write:
‘Bismarck, the 19th century German chancellor, is supposed to have said
that there are two things you don’t want to watch being made, sausages
and policy’. Hence one of the reasons intra-party democracy is problem-
atic for party leaders is that it is associated with (seemingly electorally
damaging) disunity (Hoffman, 1961, p. 233).
However, as was argued above, there are also benefits in terms of the
incentives for activism generated through the sharing of ownership of the
136 Contemporary Party Politics
leaders tend naturally to retain power and to increase it, because their
members scarcely hinder this tendency and on the contrary even
strengthen it by hero-worshipping the leaders: on all these points the
analysis of Roberto Michels continues to hold true. (Duverger, 1964,
p. 134)
When it comes to who actually makes party policy one view has a very
wide following: some parties, especially the mass parties of the left used
to be internally democratic, but with the rise of the catch-all, electoral
professional and cartel party models, policy making is now firmly con-
centrated in the hands of the leadership. The changes wrought by the
catch-all party engendered conflict between the party in public office and
the party on the ground. In the mass party, the membership organisation
existed before the party in public office and therefore felt a sense of own-
ership of the party in public office. With the catch-all party came an
‘increased assertiveness of the party in public office’ which brought it into
conflict with the party on the ground and the traditional view of member-
ship supremacy (Katz and Mair, 2002, p. 121). A similar conflict
138 Contemporary Party Politics
occurred in the old cadre parties. Here the membership organisation was
created to maintain the party in public office. However,
However, it is argued that this period of conflict has come to an end and
we have witnessed the ‘victory’ of the party in public office over the party
on the ground:
There is, then, a widely accepted view that party members have gone
from having a significant level of influence on the organisation, to being
virtually completely side-lined. As Carty (2004, p.13) writes, most
modern theories on party organisations ‘appear to agree that the impera-
tives of modern electoral competition have worked to consolidate control
of [decision-making on policy and programmatic issues] in the hands of
the party in public office, and often the party leadership more narrowly
defined’. So, it is widely believed that party members have seen a decline
in influence.
However, there is an alternative view – that members have never had,
nor can they ever have, influence on policy. This is because organisations
are inherently oligarchic:
sations, have always been and will always remain oligarchies. Still, in
both views the result is the same: policy making is concentrated in the
hands of the leadership.
The extent to which this view of policy making is accurate is difficult
to ascertain with certainty. Policy making in political parties, and espe-
cially the issue of membership influence is not a very well researched
area. Research to date has served only to expose how little is known
about the role of party democracy in the making of policy (Scarrow,
Webb and Farrell, 2002, p. 144). Studies of membership influence have
not gone much beyond candidate and leadership selection. There is no
separate investigation of policy making in Bille’s study of Danish parties’
organisations, only a reference to the ‘regrettable lacuna’ in our knowl-
edge of the field (Bille, 1997, p. 45). Scarrow et al. (2002) do deal with
the role of the members in policy making but are forced to rely heavily on
feedback from subject specialists rather than ‘hard data’ (Scarrow et al.,
2002, p. 144). The issue is not central to Katz and Mair’s data set based
on party rule books (Katz and Mair, 1992; Scarrow et al., 2002: 144),
nor to the 1993 collection of essays based on those data (Katz and Mair,
1993). The one place where such rule book data have been used to
explore membership influence is as part of a study by Widfeldt of parties
as instruments of linkage (Widfeldt, 1997, pp. 41–51). Even here it only
merits a subsection of one chapter. This lack of attention to policy
making may be explained by the fact that it is generally assumed to be
absent.
There are however some exceptions and also some evidence that policy
making is becoming more widely studied. McKenzie’s (1963) work on the
Labour Party and the Conservatives in the United Kingdom is an excep-
tion to the traditional silence on policy making. He finds that regardless
of the very big differences in official rhetoric on the matter, Labour
claiming loudly and proudly to be more internally democratic than the
Conservatives (Attlee, 1937) both parties were in fact very similar in
being highly oligarchic.
In a study of the Swedish Social Democrats, a party that fits neatly
with the ‘mass party evolving into catch-all party’ idea, it was found that
membership influence on policy had not declined (Loxbo, 2013). Rather,
compared to the 1950s and 1960s membership influence had in fact
increased. This would then very much be a deviation from the decline
idea. Further, in a study of the rule books of Danish parties it was found
that, as opposed to what might have been expected from the decline
argument, Danish party organisations had in fact seen very little change
(Pedersen, 2010). There was certainly no sign that they were moving
towards an oligarchic convergence. Further it was found that Danish
parties afforded their members with very different levels of influence –
140 Contemporary Party Politics
from firm oligarchies to much more open and even democratic organisa-
tions. This would then go against both the decline argument and Michels’
view of permanent and unavoidable oligarchy.
One the other hand, in a study of Malawian parties, it was found that
all were more or less firm oligarchies (Svåsand, 2008). There was some
variation, but only in the severity of the oligarchic practices. On the other
hand, considering the limits put on the policy options of many African
governments (see Chapter 4) having internally democratic policy making
processes, even in a governing or potentially governing party, may to a
certain extent be of limited use.
Whilt the idea of ‘party member’ is somewhat more complicated in the
United States than elsewhere, and the idea of intra-party democracy,
therefore, somewhat difficult to apply, researchers there have still found
variations in how open the processes are. Reinhardt and Victor’s (2008)
study of the making of the Democratic platform for the 2004 election
found a process which involved hearings in several cities and written and
well as oral submissions from both individuals and groups. By contrast,
Weinberg (1977) found the Republican process in 1976 to be very much
more secretive and limited to a relatively small elite.
This suggests that rather than general decline or longstanding oli-
gopoly, membership influence in facts varies from party to party
depending on a number of factors (Pettitt 2012b). It has been argued that
left-wing parties tend to have more rebellious members than parties of
the right. There is, therefore, more likely to be a demand for intra-party
democracy on the left. Further, the challenges of getting into and staying
in government may make it less likely for intra-party democracy to
flourish. Government-seeking parties have to be more internally disci-
plined than those without government ambition. This is what is suggested
by Michels’ idea of the ‘laws of tactics’. Finally, it has been suggested that
intra-party democracy has a greater chance of survival in consensus-style
democracies than majoritarian-style democracies. Consensus-style democ-
racies have a greater tradition of negotiation and compromise, and even
when a party is not in government it can often still have influence on leg-
islation. By contrast majoritarian democracies are dominated by con-
frontation, and any party which is not in government has very little, if
any, influence. This means that parties operating in a consensus democ-
racy can more easily afford to pay the costs of a democratic decision-
making process (it being slower and will potentially make the party look
divided). This is a lot less so in majoritarian democracies where the
margin between victory and defeat is tiny and both victory and defeat
tends to be total. Anything that impairs efficiency is less easily accepted
in majoritarian than consensus democracies. In short, the ability of
members to influence policy may not be in terminal decline or perpetually
Policy Making 141
absent. Rather, it will vary depending on the context that each party finds
itself in.
Conclusion
Campaigning
142
Table 8.1 Eras of campaigning
Eras Characteristics
First ‘Propaganda’ approach; De-centralised local Local canvassing Heavy emphasis of Party press, posters,
rallying the ‘masses’ campaigning by volunteer returns. specific class (class- billboards, pamphlets, word
behind a pre-existing activists. Impressions and mass party). of mouth via volunteers.
product. ‘gut instincts’. Little if any focus on press
management.
Second ‘Selling’ approach; research Highly centralised Extensive Catch-all approach; Heavy focus on national
to find out which voters campaign organised by nationwide attempting to attract media, especially television.
might be interested in pre- internal media and polling. voters from across Decreased emphasis on local
existing product and explore polling experts; heavy society irrespective channels. Rise of media
which elements of the focus on a leadership of social management; building
product might resonate driven national media background. relationship with journalists.
with the potential voters campaign.
at a given time.
Third ‘Marketing’ approach; less Highly centralised Increasingly Continued use of Targeted direct mail to
about attracting voters to a campaign making increased advanced polling catch-all approach; carefully selected sectors of
pre-existing product and use of external campaign and use of focus also increased use the electorate; return of
Campaigning 143
more about discovering professionals contracted in groups. of detailed voter volunteer driven word of
voter needs and designing a on an ad-hoc basis. Return segmentation mouth; increasingly intense
product accordingly. of the local campaign according to array media management
relying on volunteer of social and ‘spinning’ the message.
activists to sell the product demographic factors.
door to door, but local
campaign co-ordinated
from the centre.
Sources: Farrell (1996); Norris (1995); Blulmer and Kavanagh (1999); and Farrell and Webb (2002). Table amended from Pettitt (2012a).
144 Contemporary Party Politics
inevitably one day be necessary to add a fourth era, and rather than
having to find a name for whatever is beyond the ‘postmodern’ stage,
being able to call it the ‘fourth era’ is considerably more straightforward.
Despite the differences in terminology, there is a great deal of overlap
between the different views of campaigning eras and the following will
seek to summarise the overall view of each era based on Farrell (1996),
Norris (2002), Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) and Farrell and Webb
(2002). One feature of many of these explorations of ‘eras of cam-
paigning’ is that they are not always very well defined temporally – or
put differently, it is not always very clear when each stage is supposed to
have started and finished. Nevertheless, this approach does help give
some structure to changes in campaigning. The following will look at the
general features of each era.
First era
little sign of the electoral earthquake that was about to erupt, with the
Labour Party securing a firm majority for the first time in its history.
Indeed, the polls that were available were mistrusted and regarded as
inaccurate: ‘Support for Gallup Polls declined when they made an incor-
rect calculation about the 1944 American presidential elections’
(Howard, 2005, p. 5).
In addition, campaigning and party appeal was based on entrenched
social cleavages (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999, p. 211; Farrell and Webb,
2002, p. 105). This is perhaps the most important feature of the first era.
Social cleavages were seen as the basis of the parties’ self-identification
and ideology as described in Chapter 4. Parties were linked to specific
socioeconomic classes and could rely, more or less, on getting the votes of
that class. The first era is, therefore, very much the age of the class-mass
party (see Chapter 3). Hence, according to Blumler and Kavanagh (1999,
p. 212): ‘few citizens appeared to sift the arguments concerned, tending
to vote instead on group-based loyalties’. This meant that campaigning
was less about persuading voters of the attractiveness of a party’s poli-
cies, and more about mobilising those already sympathetic to the party’s
‘product’. By ‘product’ is meant the overall image that a party is trying to
convey to voters. This includes its ideology, specific policies, and
symbols, as well as the behaviour and public utterances of members, par-
liamentarians and the party leader.
Lees-Marshment (2001, p. 28) refers to ‘product oriented’ parties and
describes such a party as arguing ‘for what it stands for and believes in. It
assumes that voters will realise that its ideas are the right ones and there-
fore vote for it’. In short, in the first era, campaigning is about the mobil-
isation of existing sympathisers rather than the persuasion of swing
voters, of which there is assumed to be very few. The campaign message
is, therefore, based on propaganda and even rabble rousing, what Wring
(1996, p. 102) refers to as ‘the sometimes manipulative appeals of polit-
ical elites’.
Second Era
The second era, as indicated by Farrell’s (1996) term the ‘television revo-
lution’, was dominated by the rise of television as a common feature in
most people’s homes in the industrialised world. The centrality of televi-
sion to this era would suggest that it commenced sometime in the late
1950s and into the 1960s. The rise of television had a number of effects.
First, it saw the early rise of specialists to help parties and individual
politicians – party leaders in particular – cope with the new demands of
television. A new style of communication was required for television-
146 Contemporary Party Politics
Webb, 2002, p. 105). Hence, the message was more or less the same as in
the first era, but there was a new belief in the idea that people beyond the
traditional audience could be persuaded to ‘buy’ into the product. This
fits with Lees-Marshment’s idea of the sales-oriented party which:
Third Era
The third era is marked by a number of features. The first is the rise of
the Internet. Much has been written about the impact of the Internet on
campaigning, but the Internet is still so relatively new and constantly
changing that its impact is far from clear. Considering how fast the tools
available through the Internet are developing it is uncertain whether there
will ever be complete clarity on this issue.
In addition, the third era has seen the rise of the permanent campaign.
Parties are now not merely starting to prepare for the campaign some
time before the election is called. Rather, they are permanently viewing all
their activities through the lens of campaigning demands. Two further
features are the continuous rise of campaign professionals and the
increasing malleability of the product.
The continuing rise of campaign professionals is said to be having pro-
found effects on party organisations. In the second era external experts
were called in to deal with the challenge of new forms of media in the
form of television. This has continued with the rise of the Internet.
However, with increasingly sophisticated ways of gauging the public
mood in the forms of ever more detailed polling techniques, focus groups,
and advanced analysis of the relationship between social factors and
voting, the external expert has become ever more critical to the success of
a party’s election campaign. Indeed, the need of parties for highly
148 Contemporary Party Politics
The idea that parties have moved through three eras of development has
gained a considerable amount of currency. A lot of writings on cam-
paigning have at least made a nod in the direction of this view. However,
while the three eras view is popular, widely accepted and also has some
considerable empirical support, there exist a significant amount of variation
and counter trends. The most notable counter trend is the rising awareness
of the importance of local campaigning. As we saw above, one of the key
trends in the move from the first era through the second to the third is the
nationalisation of campaigning, brought about in particular by the rise of
national television. Because of this nationalisation it is the national leader-
ship that is important and the local campaign is seen as of secondary impor-
tance. However, there is increasing evidence of a continuing and indeed
growing awareness of the importance of the local campaign.
One notable contribution to this literature is Marsh’s (2004) article
‘None of that Post-modern Stuff around Here’ which, as the title sug-
gests, is a direct challenge to the themes of the third-era literature. In his
article Marsh concludes that:
Some of the same trends can be identified in the United Kingdom, nor-
mally a country seen as being first when it comes to follow the path of
‘Americanisation’ – the United States most often being cited as the prime
example of third-era campaigning. The counter trend in the United
Kingdom is illustrated by a comment made by the former cabinet min-
ister Hazel Blears. In a dig at the then Labour leader and prime minster
Gordon Brown’s unsuccessful attempt at embracing Internet campaigning
through a YouTube video, Blears wrote: ‘I’m not against new media.
YouTube if you want to. But it’s no substitute for knocking on doors or
setting up a stall in the town centre.’ While Blears’ comment was very
much part of her personal struggle with a party leader with whom she
did not get on, her comment is backed up by a lot of research. It has been
argued that the image of the modern electoral professional party as a cen-
trally organized ‘army’ with local activists taking orders from the
national headquarters is misleading when it comes to local campaigning.
There is considerable local reluctance to simply follow orders from the
centre. Further, it has been suggested that campaigns are more effective
when they are locally organized (Whiteley and Seyd, 2003).
Others have also stressed the importance of local campaigning, but
have also pointed to the importance of coordination from the centre
(Fisher et al., 2005). This is especially the case in the key target seats that
a party needs to win or hold in order to win the election overall. It is
argued that the national leadership is fully aware of the importance of
careful use of local activists in certain key areas and spend a great deal of
efforts to get the local campaigning right. Indeed, Fisher and colleagues
go so far as to argue that the centrally coordinated local campaign – with
activists doing traditional, that is first era, door to door campaigning – is
as, or even more, important than the national media campaign that has
received so much attention in the third era literature:
strategy. The battles that matter are those in the target seats, not the
one played out in the national media. (Fisher et al., 2005, p. 18)
Our grassroots supporters again deserve the lion’s share of credit. The
farther we got from Iowa, the more important our volunteers were.
The campaigns in the states were shorter and we had fewer staffers on
the ground. The volunteers built our campaigns in the February states
and executed incredibly well in the closing weeks. They recruited more
help, identified supporters, and made sure people knew where to vote
and caucus. (Plouffe, 2009, p. 181)
Later he writes: ‘Our secret weapon, day in and day out, was our army of
volunteers, real people who brought Obama’s message and ideas to their
neighbors, co-workers, and fellow citizens, guided by our extraordinary
staff’ (Plouffe, 2009, pp. 379–80). Plouffe is obviously writing as a firm
believer in Obama’s message and as someone intimately involved in the
campaign, but even ignoring phrases such as ‘secret army’ and ‘extraordi-
nary staff’ this seems to be an excellent example of what Fisher and col-
leagues describe in their work on the importance of centrally coordinated
local activism (‘army of volunteers’ ‘guided by our extraordinary staff’).
It is true that Obama’s campaigns became known for their innovative
use of the Internet. However, it is worth noting that it also seems that
their use of the Internet was to a large extent about facilitating the
growth of a local activists base which could then be encouraged to go out
and do the traditional ‘shoe leather’ work of knocking on doors and
getting out the vote. For example, Plouffe notes that ‘our website and its
social-networking component were heavily trafficked and becoming a
real resource for our supporters’ (Plouffe, 2009, p. 55).
An appreciation of the importance of local campaigning can also be
found in work on Australian elections. In surveys of campaign profes-
sionals it was found that such professionals certainly wanted to conduct a
modern campaign, but at the same time valued the ability of party organ-
isations to do indispensible local work: ‘The Australian example shows
152 Contemporary Party Politics
Drivers of change
It is now worth considering what drives change. Three driving forces will
be considered. First, as is discussed in both Chapter 3 and Chapter 4,
underlying societal changes have had a major impact on the life of
parties, and are also an important factor in understanding campaigning
change. Second, technology has played a major role. As was observed
earlier, one of the main causes of the rise of campaign professionals was
the appearance of new communications technologies which parties
needed help utilising. However, it has also been pointed out that some-
times parties operating in similar social and technological environments
will adopt modern campaign techniques to different degrees (Gibson and
Rommele, 2001). Hence, as a third issue we need to look at party-specific
factors.
Social changes
Technological change
Party-specific issues
There are clearly major factors that have encouraged and sometimes
forced changes in how parties operate. However, not all parties react the
same way to these outside forces. At a national level it may be possible to
explain variations between countries based on their relative technological
and social context. Hence, it is perhaps not surprising that for example
Africa and India should be using methods more associated with the first
and possibly second eras of campaigning compared to say the United
States or Europe. Considering the much lower level of technological pen-
etration in Africa and India – such as television and PC ownership and
access to the Internet – the availability of certain campaigning techniques
will simply be that much lower. However, these factors do not explain
why we sometimes find parties in the same political system adopting dif-
ferent campaigning techniques from across the three eras. In order to
understand such differences we need to look at party specific factors
(Gibson and Rommele, 2001). It has been suggested that a number of key
factors may help explain why a party becomes inclined to adopt new
approaches.
First, it is argued that a major motivating factor in adopting a new
approach to campaigning will be if the party’s primary goal is no-longer
being met (Gibson and Rommele, 2001, p. 36). If that is the case the
party will be motivated to change its behaviour to turn around its for-
tunes. Good examples of this would be the US Democrats under Bill
Clinton, the UK Labour Party in the mid-1990s when Tony Blair became
leader, and the UK Conservative Party under David Cameron. In this
context, suffering a string of heavy defeats is likely to trigger some
serious soul-searching in a party, which may lead to new campaigning
techniques being adopted. This is especially the case if such defeats lead
to a change of leadership bringing with it new approaches and ideas.
Another factor which is likely to have a significant impact on cam-
paign innovation is having a healthy bank balance (Gibson and
Rommele, 2001, p. 37). Hiring the professionals that are necessary for
utilising many modern campaign strategies is only likely to happen if
there are substantial resources in place – such help does not come cheap.
Intuitively this does make sense. If you do not have money to buy the
expensive equipment and services seen as necessary for modern cam-
paigning, then you will not get very far in that direction. However, at the
156 Contemporary Party Politics
Nevertheless, having said that, money does allow the use of certain
approaches that would not otherwise be possible. A major element in
Plouffe’s description of the first Obama campaign is how they built up of
a solid donor base and beat fundraising targets and records. Innovation
driven by scarce resources is fine, but having lots of resources is arguably
even better.
In addition, Gibson and Rommele (2001) argue that a party which has
‘existing norms of internal hierarchy’ – or in other words, a tradition of
strong leadership, will find it easier to adopt the top-down approach seen
as central to second- and third-era campaigning. Conversely, parties with
long histories of internal opposition to leadership control will find it
more difficult to accommodate the strategic swiftness and hierarchical
organisational structure associated with third-age modern profession-
alised campaigning. This is a theme also evident in connection with the
challenges of intra-party democracy in policy making as we saw in
Chapter 7. A good example of this issue is the UK Labour Party. One of
the reasons why Gould’s ‘single chain of command’ line (Gould, 1998, p.
240) was so controversial (‘This offended everybody’ (Gould, 1998, p.
240)) was the Labour Party’s long history of formal (if not actual) adher-
ence to internal democracy.
Finally, it is argued that a right-wing party is more likely to be sympa-
thetic to ‘the principles of marketing and use of outside consultancy firms
underpinning professionalized campaigning, than a left wing party’
(Gibson and Rommele, 2001, p. 37). Marketing, a quintessential free
market capitalist pursuit, perhaps comes easier to a party of the right
than the left.
The overall conclusion is, therefore, that the most likely adopter of
modern campaigning techniques is a ‘well-funded, mainstream, right-
wing party with significant resources and a centralized internal power
structure that has recently suffered a heavy electoral defeat and/or loss of
governing status’ (Gibson and Rommele, 2001, p. 37).
Campaigning 157
Impact of changes
From the above outline of the changes that have happened to election
campaigning, it should be fairly clear that these changes are likely to have
had significant organisational implications for the parties involved.
When looking at the changes wrought by the development in cam-
paigning it is worth noting that there seems to be a close connection
between the three eras of campaigning and party types. As Smith (2009,
pp. 557–8) points out there is a great deal of overlap between the descrip-
tion of campaigning in the first era – targeting specific social groups and
reliance on a mass membership organisation – and the literature on the
mass party. Similarly, second- and third-era campaigning overlaps with
the literature on the catch-all and electoral professional party types.
Hence, many of the changes associated with the move from first-, to
second- and to third-era campaigning are dealt with in Chapter 3 and
will not be repeated here. However, one issue will be dealt with here.
There is a potentially significant problem in combining three central
elements of third-era campaigning: 1) the increased centralisation of
the party organisation associated with campaign modernisation; 2) the
central role played by local campaigning in modern elections; and 3)
the challenge of retaining and incentivising members (see Pettitt, 2012a).
There is a significant debate over whether internal party democracy is
a good thing or not for political parties and democracy generally as we
saw in Chapter 7. However, there are reasons to believe that having influ-
ence on the direction of a party is a central motivating factor in party
member activism (Whiteley and Seyd, 2002). At the same time Lilleker
(2005) suggests that there are severe challenges in combining modern
political marketing with internal democracy. This is to some extent a
longstanding issue. As is described in Chapter 7, one of the key chal-
lenges of building internal party democracy is that while the wheels of
democracy often move slowly, the electoral market can move very
quickly indeed. There is, then, an unresolved paradox at the heart of
modern campaigning: Modern, third-era, campaigning requires a great
deal of speed, centralisation, and local participation. Yet there is a clash
between speed and centralisation on the one hand, and motivating people
to be not only members of a party, but also to be active, something which
requires giving them a sense of ownership of the organisation. How can
central control of an organisation be combined with, at the very least, a
feeling of widespread ownership?
This is a problem that does not seem to have been solved by any
modern party. The UK Labour Party saw both a significant increase in
centralisation and a rise in membership in the late 1990s. However, since
about 2001, the membership rise has turned into a massive decline. Once
158 Contemporary Party Politics
the Labour Party was in government and started doing things the sense of
ownership that was part of the 1990s rise very quickly dissipated. On the
other side of the Atlantic Obama was able to build an impressive grass-
roots organisation during his first presidential primary and general elec-
tion campaigns. Arguably though this was partly because he was a
relatively unknown quantity and people were, therefore, able to fill in the
blanks as they saw fit (Pettitt, 2012a). To some extent he was able to
repeat that feat in 2012, although the earlier enthusiasm has certainly
faded. There is currently no straightforward solution to this problem.
Only a growing awareness that modern campaigning requires local vol-
unteer participation and that such participation requires incentives –
ideally, it has been argued, through giving activists a sense of ownership
of the product being sold on the door step (Pettitt, 2012a). How this can
be achieved in a centralised organisation is currently an unanswered
question.
Financing
If there is one thing that most scholars and practitioners can agree on in
the rise of modern professionalised campaigning, then it is the fact that
such activities are expensive. Hence the last issue the chapter will deal
with is the issue of party financing. This is an area which, as Fisher and
Eisendtadt (2004, p. 619) point out, is somewhat under-researched. This
may be partly explained by the fact that apart from when it sparks a
major scandal, which party financing has a tendency to do, it is also an
area which it can be difficult to learn very much about.
Often parties are required by law to open their accounts to public
scrutiny, especially if, as is increasingly the case, the state has a role to
play in the funding of parties. Even so, parties tend to be reluctant to talk
too much about their finances and their donor base. Indeed, it has been
pointed out that one of the costs of a high level of accountability and
transparency in party financing is that it can scare off potential donors
(Fisher and Eisenstadt, 2004, p. 621). Parties are not popular and being
too closely associated with them could bring bad publicity for the donors
– and possible accusations of favouritism and even corruption.
However, money is central to the life of parties: The expense of
modern campaigning has already been mentioned. In addition, parties
need money to maintain their organisations in-between elections. This
will certainly cost less than the capital intensive weeks leading up to an
election, but as we saw above, one of the characteristics of third-age cam-
paigning is its permanency. In other words, even if the permanent cam-
paign may vary in intensity it will still consume money even at its less
Campaigning 159
active stages. Further, all but the most amorphous party organisations
will maintain some form of permanent presence in the form of national
and regional offices in-between elections. This is particularly the case the
closer a party is to the mass party model with is large membership base.
Hence, parties need money and the amount they have and the way they
get it is of key importance for how democracy operates.
Hence, party financing is important for a number of reasons. First,
while having local volunteer activists is important even, or perhaps
especially, in modern campaigning, there are few things that volunteers
can offer that cannot also be bought with money (Fisher and
Eisenstadt, 2004, p. 619). That means that unequal funding streams
have the potential to result in unequal power. Unequal power is not
necessarily a problem in democracy – after all, that is a normal aspect
of politics. However, if some parties are permanently better funded
than others that could be a problem for the fair competition between
them. In other words, money can result in an uneven playing field,
which has been one of the arguments for increased state funding (van
Biezen, 2004, p. 703).
Second, where parties get their money from has a significant impact on
politics. As described in Chapter 3 the mass party was defined by its close
relationship with civil society. Unlike the cadre party and its few but
wealthy supporters, the mass party relied on thousands of small contribu-
tions (Duverger, 1964, p. 63). In return for their membership subscription
the members were given a stake in the party, its ideological development
and policy stance (even if that stake was often more imagined than real –
see Chapters 3 and 7). Hence, the mass party was a key part of civil
society and served as a bridge between citizens and politicians. However,
one of the key issues in modern party politics is the decline of the mass-
party model. In its stead has come party organisational forms that are
defined more by their relationship with the state than the people (van
Biezen and Kopecky, 2007, pp. 236–7) and this is exemplified by the
changing nature of party funding. Rather than the multitude of many
small contributions, parties are increasingly relying on fewer big dona-
tions, in the manner of the cadre party, and state funding as exemplified
by the cartel party model. These two funding streams have profound
implications for the role of parties in democratic states.
One of the implications of fewer large donations is that the sources of
these donations, be they companies, organisations or rich individuals,
may want something in return for their largesse. Hence, there is a fear
that parties may favour those who fund them over other, less well-off ele-
ments in society (Fisher and Eisenstadt, 2004, p. 620; Hopkin, 2004,
pp. 632–4). There is, then, a fear that some people may buy influence for
their particular point of view, potentially to the detriment of the majority
160 Contemporary Party Politics
Research has shown that state funding for parties is steadily increasing,
and in new democracies has started out at a much higher level than in
more established democracies (see van Biezen 2004; van Biezen and
Kopecky, 2007). This means that the state has a much greater control
over the internal life of parties through the creation of monitoring mecha-
nisms for ensuring the legitimate use of state funds. In addition, parties
are increasingly cut off from society as they now have an alternative
source of income, as argued in the ‘cartel party’ literature (see Chapter 3).
State and special interest funding of political parties, therefore, seem to
have important implications for the functioning of democracy.
Indeed, Hopkin argues that the mass-party way of funding political
parties is normatively more attractive than the alternatives (such as state
funding or major donors – either external to the party or internal as with
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia). However, somewhat pessimistically, he also
Campaigning 161
argues that the mass party model of funding is ‘utopian’ (Hopkin, 2004,
p. 646).
Hence, the funding of political parties is an issue that is central to the
workings of democracy in many ways, and seems to be an area that
deserves much more attention that it is currently getting.
Conclusion
Even though there is some disagreement in the literature over the exact
nature of how campaigning has changed, there is no doubt that it is
changing under the accumulated pressure of social and technological
developments. It is equally clear that this change is having a major impact
on how parties operate and how they are funded. Hence, a concern with
how election campaigns are won is not just about understanding what
works and what does not, but also about understanding the changing
relationship between parties and wider civil society.
Chapter 9
Government
162
Government 163
and exclusively focused on acquiring office for their own benefits and for
the benefit of their local supporters. We are here primarily talking about
parties of relatively old origins such as liberal and conservative parties in
for example the United Kingdom, United States, France and Scandinavia.
These parties started out as office-seeking groups in parliament. Only as
a result of the extension of the franchise in the late 1800s and early
1900s were they forced to add on extra-parliamentary organisations to
assist with office seeking in a changed electoral environment. Such
parties, therefore, never really made a decision to pursue government
office, but rather were ‘born’ to do so.
Something similar can be said of traditional working-class centre-left
social democratic and labour parties. These parties were created specifi-
cally with the purpose of defending the interests of the working class.
They were also founded on the basic idea that government office would
be the best way of realising that goal. This is exemplified by the British
Labour party of which Attlee wrote in 1937 that a ‘further characteristic
of the British [socialist] movement has been its practicality [...] From the
first, British Socialists have taken their share wherever possible in the
responsibility of Government’ (Attlee, 1937, p. 30). In short, these parties
were also created with government office in mind from the very begin-
ning. Duverger notes of the French Socialist Party that ‘the party aims at
the political education of the working class, at picking out from it an elite
capable of taking over the government and the administration of the
country’ (Duverger, 1964, p. 63). As with the earlier liberal and conserva-
tive parties, government ambition was a written into these parties from
the beginning.
It is true that this government ambition has at times been less strong
for some social democratic parties. Several have at various times been
marked by the presence of strong radical socialists groupings within
them. These groupings frequently had far less government oriented prior-
ities than the rest of their party, and were instead much more focused on
ideological ends. The government-leaning orientation of social demo-
cratic leaders would lead to charges of ideological betrayal from the
radical elements in the party and bouts of internal struggle. Many of
these radical socialist elements left their mother parties to form commu-
nist parties in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Nevertheless,
despite the presence of such radicals, social democratic parties have, like
the older liberal and conservative parties, still tended to be government
oriented from birth.
However, the picture is much more varied and changeable for many,
often small, but frequently critically placed, newer parties. It has been
argued that party systems since the 1960s have been marked by the rise
of a large number of new parties (Deschouwer, 2008, p. 1). These parties
Government 165
were created to champion new political cleavages (see Chapter 4), revive
old allegedly neglected issues, ‘purify’ existing ideologies from the com-
promises of the old parties (Deschouwer, 2008; Lucardie, 2000) or were
guided by somewhat more amorphous ‘anti-establishment’ rhetoric
(Bolleyer, 2008, p. 31). In short, many of these parties had far more
policy oriented stances and, at least to start with, saw government ambi-
tion as selling out to the old establishment. These parties, therefore, have
a far more complicated relationship with government participation than
the older ‘built for office’ parties of the centre right and the centre left
that preceded them.
Many factors will have an impact on if and when a party, primarily
oriented towards policy realisation rather than office, will still at some
point decide to actively pursue government participation. One such factor
is how a party weighs the costs and benefits of being in government,
which are many and varied. The benefits of being in government are
pretty straightforward and can be summarised as ‘power’ and ‘resources’.
Governments usually hold the initiative when it comes to legislation.
Even in democracies with strong traditions of negotiation between gov-
ernment and opposition, it is usually the bills proposed by the executive
that get most of the attention and have the highest likelihood of making
it onto the statute books. The opposition is often limited to amending
government initiatives at best or impotent rhetoric at worst. Being in gov-
ernment also gives access to the many resources of the state which can be
used to strengthen a party’s organisation and as patronage for supporters.
Having civil servants to help with the details of policy proposals is also a
great boon for parties. Katz and Mair’s (1995) cartel thesis is an example
of the importance of access to government resources and is based on the
idea of certain parties trying to monopolise access to those resources (see
Chapter 3). In addition, as is explored in Chapter 4, in many African
democracies, having access to the resources of the state to be used as
patronage for supporters is far more important than ideology-driven
policy realisation. Finally, there are many smaller perks of being in gov-
ernment, including chauffeur driven cars, big offices in ministry build-
ings, and the prestige of representing one’s country at international
summits.
However, there are also many costs associated with being in govern-
ment. The primary cost is perhaps that with power comes responsibility.
Not necessarily meaning that there is an expectation that power should
be wielded responsibly (even if that is normatively desirable), but rather
in the sense that when things go wrong it is usually the government
which gets the blame. Indeed, even if things are not particularly going
wrong, being responsible for allocating limited resources will always
involve disappointing someone, somewhere which may then lead to the
166 Contemporary Party Politics
25
Social democrats
20
Percentage
15
10
0
Election Oct-11 Nov-11 Dec-11 Jan-12 Feb-12 Mar-12 Apr-12 May-12
2011
Figure 9.1 Support for the Social Democrats and the Socialist People’s Party in
Denmark after the 2011 election
A B C D E
8 21 26 12 33
Left Right
Winning ABCDE; ABCD; ABC; ABE; ACE; ACDE; ADE; BCD; BCE;
BCDE; BDE; BE; CE.
Median legislator C; BC; CD; AC; CE; ABC; ABCDE; ABCD; ACE; ACDE;
BCD; BCDE
the majority of coalitions contain the median party (De Winter and
Dumont, 2006, p. 185n3).
the seats and then acquiring exclusive control over the levers of govern-
ment. However, when it comes to minority and coalition governments the
link between electoral success and acquiring government power is much
less clear. Indeed, it has been found that electoral success is not a very
good predictor of who gets into government office (Mattila and Raunio,
2005, pp. 266–7). Gaining seats in an election does in fact not make it
more likely that a party will be able to enter government – quite the
opposite. In a study of 18 democracies between 1948 and 1979 Rose and
Mackie (1983) discovered that about 65 per cent of governing parties
had lost votes in the previous election. This was backed up by a study
conducted by Muller and Strøm (2000) who found that between 1945
and 2000 only about 36 per cent of governing parties had gained votes at
the most recent election. Finally, Budge and Keman (1990) showed that,
of the parties with the greatest electoral gains in an election, less than half
were subsequently able to join the governing coalition. Hence, being the
greatest ‘winner’ in electoral terms is not a good predictor of who would
be acquiring government office. This should not necessarily be a surprise
given what has been noted earlier about government office not neces-
sarily being a party’s primary goal and issues surrounding ‘government
potential’. The one area where gaining seats did seem to have an impact
was in becoming the formateur. It has been found that gaining seats in an
election had a positive impact on a party’s leader’s chances of becoming
formateur (Warwick, 1999).
What all this shows is that getting into government is not a straightfor-
ward process, and is dependent on much more than merely gaining seats
and making up the numbers for a majority.
Portfolio allocation
Once a group of parties are in a position to form a coalition the next step
will be to determine who get what posts in the new government – that is,
portfolio allocation. Clearly, the main point of getting into government is
getting to control government ministries – especially those covering issues
close to a party’s ideological heart. Exactly which positions go to which
parties will be a matter of negotiation and party preferences in each
country and at each election. That part is, therefore, not easy to generalise
about. What is possible to generalise about is how many ministries each
party gets to control – or in other words the share of portfolios each party
will get. One of the most important developments in this area is what has
been referred to as ‘Gamson’s law’ (Frecette, Kagel and Morelli, 2005).
Gamson wrote that: ‘any participant will expect others to demand
from a coalition a share of the payoffs proportional to the amount of
176 Contemporary Party Politics
Conclusion
racy, vote and seat shares still matter, but in very different ways to a
majoritarian democracy. In short, a party’s road to government can be
long and convoluted and will be affected by numerous factors, many
beyond its control.
Chapter10
This book has so far focused mainly on party politics as it has played out
on the national stage. However, to complete the picture it is worth
looking beyond the nation state. Indeed, political parties have long
endeavoured to engage with politics beyond the national. This is not just
in the sense that, to be credible all parties need to have something to say
about the foreign policy of the state in which they are operating. There is
more to it than that. Parties have in various ways tried to go beyond the
national, not just in terms of their policies, but also in how they work as
organisations. The internationalisation of party politics has a long
history. The creation of various international affiliations between parties
goes back to the 1800s. Further, in 1983 Goldman wrote (perhaps some-
what prematurely as we shall see) that there were tendencies in evidence
which ‘taken together, appear to predict the emergence of a transnational
or world party system’ (p. ix). This chapter will first look at the earliest
and longest running attempt at internationalising party politics: party
internationals. It will then consider Europarties in the context of the
European Union. Having looked at these two examples of organisational
internationalisation it will look at how parties have responded to the
issue of globalisation. Finally, it will look at the internationalisation of
campaign consultancy.
Party Internationals
178
The Internationalisation of Party Politics 179
The Liberal International was created in 1947 and serves much the same
purposes as the Socialist International. It seems to share the Socialist
International’s relatively limited practical impact on the day-to-day lives
of its membership parties. It functions mostly as a networking facility
with an additional think-tank function – that is, as with the Socialist
International, but from a liberal perspective, it has the purpose of devel-
oping and promoting a certain set of standpoints. It is also an interesting
example of the standard liberal reaction to globalisation (see Chapter 4):
‘Liberals believe that the poverty of large parts of the world can be allevi-
ated through freedom to travel and to trade and to this end are com-
mitted to the further opening of “western” markets for products from the
developing world.’ (http://www.liberal-international.org/editorial.asp?ia_
id=508). That is, a theoretical commitment to the view that globalization
is a good thing and greater openness and integration are beneficial for all
nations.
The Internationalisation of Party Politics 181
The Liberal International seems even more loosely organized than the
Socialist International. While the Socialist International has a set of
statutes available on their website, vague and unarticulated as they are,
there is no such equivalent for the Liberal International. So, the Liberal
International has an important symbolic role, but it shares the limited
practical role of the Socialist International.
the IDU provides a forum in which Parties holding similar beliefs can
come together and exchange views on matters of policy and organisa-
tional interest, so that they can learn from each other, act together,
establish contacts and speak with one strong voice to promote democ-
racy and centre-right policies around the globe.
The second problem was how to ensure that national parties followed
the line laid down by the Comintern leadership. Thorpe (1998) argues
that Comintern found it particularly difficult to keep national parties in
democratic countries under control. As long as national communist
leaders were beyond the physical grasp of the Soviet regime, Comintern
had to rely on other means of persuasion. Money was certainly a major
factor, particularly where the local party’s membership was relatively
modest. One good example of this was the Communist Party of Great
Britain (CPGB). In 1927 the CPGB’s membership was less than 8,000.
That year it received from Comintern £21,000 for running the organisa-
tion and a further £18,000 to support a newspaper project. In comparison
the Labour Party had a membership, direct and indirect (that is, trade
union members), of 3,293,615 and an income of £55,708. In short with a
tiny fraction of the Labour Party’s membership the CPGB had finances
equal to about 70 per cent of Labour’s. The threat to withdraw that sum
from the CPGB was a major leverage in the relationship between Moscow
and the British ‘branch’. However, in, for example, France where the com-
munist party membership was vastly bigger and local resources therefore
much greater, such a threat would be much less severe.
Ultimately, a party could be excluded from the Communist
International the way an individual member or a local branch can be
excluded from a national party. For an individual member or even a
whole branch in a national context such exclusion can be devastating in
terms of electoral success. There is virtually no place in electoral politics
for non-party independents and the loss of party affiliation will almost
invariably mean the loss of any electoral office previously held once the
next election comes around. However, for a national section of a ‘world
party’ that is much less relevant. Indeed, as was shown above, anti-
communists used Comintern connections as a rod with which to beat
Communist parties. Hence, apart from the loss of Comintern income,
exclusion was probably not a very effective threat. Indeed, it could be
argued that the European far left did much better outside the Comintern
than inside it as illustrated by the notable electoral successes of the so-
called Eurocommunists in the post-war period. Further, while Comintern
could offer little more than financial support to its ‘members’, the
national parties, at least where they were electorally successful, could
offer Comintern influence on the politics of non-Communist countries. It
might, therefore, be argued that Comintern needed the national parties
more than the national parties needed Comintern.
In short, this first experiment in building a world party was largely
unsuccessful, but provided it is given more non-partisan attention might
be able to yield useful insights into the challenges of managing transna-
tional parties.
The Internationalisation of Party Politics 185
Europarties
This does not mean that their development has been straightforward or
that there are now fully fledged EU wide political parties the way we see
them at a national level. The process is still very much ongoing and still
has a considerable way to go. The emergence of Europarties can be
traced back to at least the 1970s (see Table 10.1). A notable limiting
factor in the development of Europarties was that no European treaty
made mention of parties until the Maastricht Treaty of 1993. This ought
not in and of itself be an insurmountable factor. Many national constitu-
tions do not mention parties at all, although parties do then tend to be
recognised in ‘normal’ legislation. What is now the EU did not recognise
the existence of Europarties until 1993, and while the recognition in
1993 was rather vague and aspirational it did set in motion a series of
changes that brought into existence an embryonic Europe-wide party
system.
The Maastricht Treaty contains the so-called party article (Hertner,
2011, p. 326; Johansson and Raunio, 2005, p. 515), officially called
Article 138a, which reads: ‘Political parties at the European level are
important as a factor for integration within the Union. They contribute
to forming a European awareness and to expressing the political will of
the citizens of the Union’ (see http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/
11992M/htm/11992M.html#0001000001).
While this was a major advance from previous treaties, where no
mention of political parties is made at all, it should also be immediately
evident that Article 138a is almost entirely vacuous and of very little
Table 10.1 Brief description of existing Europarties
European 1976 The party is made up of the main centre-right conservative and Christian http://www.epp.eu/
People’s democratic parties in the EU member states. It has a strongly federal slant. As
Party of 2011 it has 75 full, associate or observer members across 39 EU and non-EU
countries.
Party of 1974 Represents the centre-left social democratic/labour tradition. PES allows members http://www.pes.org/
European of national parties to sign up as something akin to a individual membership PES,
Socialists labelled ‘PES Activists’ (http://www.pes.org/en/pes-activists). As of 2011 PES had
28 full members, 10 associate members, and 5 observer members).
European 1976 Is made up of centre-right liberal parties. The party consists of 55 national parties http://www.eldr.eu/en/index.php
Liberal from EU and non-EU countries. As with the PES individuals can join the party as
Democrats and an ‘associate member’ (http://www.eldr.eu/associate).
reform Party
European 1984 Is made up of 34 national Green parties. According to its website it is possible http://europeangreens.eu/
Green to join the European Green Party, although it is not entirely clear how.
Party
Party of the 2004 The Party of the European Left essentially consists of parties situated to the left http://www.european-left.org
European of the main centre-left social democratic and labour parties. It contains much of
Left what is left of European communism (e.g., the French Communist Party) as well
as some East European parties with their roots in the former Soviet Bloc
communist parties. It has 27 member parties and also allows for individual
party membership (http://www.european-left.org/english/about_the_el/
individual_members/)
European 2004 Is a pro-EU party situated on the centre-right. Its MEP co-operate with the http://www.pde-edp.net/main/_
Democratic MEPs from the Liberal Democrats and Reform Party, but the two Europarties pde/index.jsp
Party remain separate entities. It is a relatively small party with 12 national party
members (2011).
European 1994 The European Free Alliance is made up of 40 regionalist and separatist parties, http://www.e-f-a.org/home/
Free very much representing ‘the periphery’ in the ‘national revolution’ political
Alliance cleavage (see Chapter [ideology]).
EU 2004 This is a very small Euro-sceptic (or ‘Euro-realist’ according to their website) http://www.eudemocrats.org/
Alliance of 2009 Represents Euro-sceptic conservative parties, most notably the British http://aecr.eu/
European Conservative Party. It is made up mainly of East European parties with a very
Conservatives right wing and highly euro-sceptic profile. It is one of the smallest groups with
and Reformists only 11 national members.
European 2009 Is a Christian right wing and Euro-sceptic group to the right of the European http://www.ecpm.info/en/
Christian People’s Party. Unusually it is not associated with any of the groups in the
Political European parliament and according to their website seems to be made up
Movement largely of NGO (including one from the USA). Indeed, it does not even appear
to have any MEPs.
188 Contemporary Party Politics
practical value. It did however open the door for further developments,
by constituting what Johansson and Raunio (2005) call an ‘incomplete
contract’. Europarties were able to capitalise on the opening provided by
the party article in the Maastricht Treaty to develop an increasingly sig-
nificant role in the European Union system. Over the next 10 years after
the Maastricht Treaty the existing Europarties successfully argued for a
more prominent role. A major result of this was that the Nice Treaty,
signed in 2001 and coming into force in 2003, made provisions for
European funding of Europarties via the European Parliament’s budget
(see Siglas et al., 2010, p. 6). Because funding was now going to be made
available to Europarties it was necessary to define what a Europarty actu-
ally looks like in practice. According to a regulation issued in 2003 a
Europarty was defined as follows:
a) it must have legal personality in the Member State in which its seat
is located;
b) it must be represented, in at least one quarter of Member States, by
Members of the European Parliament or in the national
Parliaments or regional Parliaments or in the regional assemblies,
or it must have received, in at least one quarter of the Member
States, at least three per cent of the votes cast in each of those
Member States at the most recent European Parliament elections;
c) it must observe, in particular in its programme and in its activities,
the principles on which the European Union is founded, namely
the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and
fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law;
d) it must have participated in elections to the European Parliament,
or have expressed the intention to do so. (see http://eur-lex.europa.
eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32003R2004:EN:NOT)
Poiltical group
Europarty Cooperation in the European
Parliament
Send Send
delegates MEPs
National
political parties
Party of The congress – little detail of Membership can be suspended by ‘Efforts shall be made to establish broadest
European what that means in practices. the Presidency. Requests for lifting possible measure of agreement’. Administrative
Socialists of suspension can be made to the and organisational matters can be made by a
Presidency and rejections of such simple majority. Political decisions require a
requests appeal to the Congress. qualified majority of 75 per cent. A party is not
Members can be excluded by a bound by a decision made by qualified majority
qualified (75 per cent) majority of if it declares itself unable to do so before the
Congress. vote is taken.
European Not specified Members can be expelled by the Decisions at conference can be made with a
Liberal Council with ²⁄³ majority. simple majority and are binding on all
Democrats members, including those absent and
and Reform dissenting.
Party
European Not specified Membership of a national party Decisions in the Council requires ²⁄³ majority.
Green Party can be decided by ²⁄³ majority in
the Council. Expulsion requires
¾ majority.
European ‘The congress has the most Exclusion of a member party can Congress decisions are taken by a simple
Democratic extended powers for the happen by a ²⁄³ majority of the majority and a binding on all members
Party attainment of the purpose Council. including those who voted against or abstained.
of the association’ Changes to the statutes require ¾ majority.
European ‘The general assembly is the Exclusion possible but process Not specified.
Christian general meeting by law. All not specified.
Political powers in the association not
Movement conferred on the board by law
or in this charter shall vest in
Sources: European People’s Party http://www.epp.eu/; The Party of European Socialists (PES) http://www.pes.org/; Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe
Party http://www.eldr.eu/en/index.php; European Green Party http://europeangreens.eu/; European Left http://www.european-left.org/; European Democratic Party
http://www.pde-edp.net/main/_pde/index.jsp; European Free Alliance http://www.e-f-a.org/home/; EUD http://www.eudemocrats.org/eud/index.php; AECR (Alliance
of European Conservatives and Reformists) http://aecr.eu/;European Christian Political Movement http://www.ecpm.info/en/ (accessed 21 November 2013).
192 Contemporary Party Politics
national level. So, the European Union has a legislature, an executive and
a judiciary. However, unlike most parliamentary democracies there is
very little link between legislative elections and the formation of the exec-
utive (Day, 2005, p. 4; Gagatek, 2009, pp. 20–1; Lightfoot, 2006, p.
304). The executive office in the European Union, in the form of the
European Commission and the Council of Ministers, is only open to
national parties, not Europarties. The composition of the Commission
and the Council of Ministers is determined by the outcomes of national
elections, not election to the European Parliament. Europarties have very
little impact on the makeup of the Commission and none at all on the
Council of Ministers. European Commissioners are appointed by
national governments; and the Council of Ministers is made up of minis-
ters from national governments. It is true that the European Parliament
has a role in approving commissioners, but that is very far from the influ-
ence that a national parliament has on the composition of a national gov-
ernment. As a result, and in contrast to the national politics of European
states, there is very little in the way of a government/opposition dynamics
in the European Parliament. After a European Parliament election it may
be possible to say that either the left or the right has won or lost based on
how many seats the two wings won. However, ‘winning’ in this sense
does not give the winner the right to put their people on the Commission
or the Council of Ministers. Indeed, the Commission is supposed to be
non-partisan and is very little affected by European Parliament election
outcomes. Hence, unlike elections fought at the national level, European
Elections are not fought on the record of the incumbent executive. That
means that by default European Elections tend to be fought on the basis
of the performance of national governments, and therefore on national
issues, and in the context of national party politics. Europarties, and
indeed European Union issues, are, therefore, often largely ignored in
European Parliament elections. There is then little reason for national
parties to follow the lead of Europarties when it comes to deciding the
themes of the campaign. If Europarties cannot effectively control the
campaign themes of their national ‘branches’ they are never going to be
fully fledged parties.
Added to that is the problem of dealing with many different national
contexts. As was explored in the context of Comintern, the imposition of
a supranational set of policies from some distant centre, which is likely to
be ignorant or uncaring about local circumstances, is unlikely to be elec-
torally beneficial. This problem has affected the formation of Europarty
election manifestos. They have to avoid being too specific in order to not
render themselves irrelevant to local circumstances. However, this has
often meant that Europarty manifestos have been driven by the lowest
common denominator and have ended up being very vague and lacking
194 Contemporary Party Politics
It is clear from the above that party politics has a significant, if also very
under-developed international element. This under-development of the
international aspect of party politics is particularly noteworthy consid-
ering how much the study of so many other areas of politics has been
dominated by issues surrounding globalisation. It would be fair to say
that in most areas of politics the term globalisation has become a major,
if often also overhyped, area of concern and study. In both teaching and
research the idea that politics is becoming ever more interconnected
across national borders has gained a big following and has had a huge
impact on what is researched and taught. Degree courses with ‘interna-
tional’ and/or ‘global’ in the title have been attracting students in ever
greater numbers, which in turn has led many university departments to
focus greater and greater attention on this area in terms of teaching and
new hires.
It is obviously the study of international relations, and related fields,
such as national security and political economy, which have been the
most affected by this trend. However, it has also affected the study of
national politics. The national is increasingly seen as declining in impor-
tance compared to the global. Many civil society organisations, especially
those dealing with civil rights and environmental concerns, have
embraced globalisation in a major way. Political parties, however, have
remained relatively unaffected by this growing infatuation with globalisa-
tion. Both in their activities and in the academic study of them, parties
have remained steadfastly national: ‘Hardly anyone is talking about glob-
alization in the context of political parties. Political parties have, to a
large extent, remained limited to the national spheres’ (Sehm-Patomäki
and Ulvila, 2007, p. 1). This is not to say that parties have remained
completely ignorant of globalization. In terms of their policy, parties have
The Internationalisation of Party Politics 195
parties and few transnational parties, with the partial exception of the
Europarties.
According to some, this failure to react organisationally to globalisa-
tion represents a failure on behalf of parties to move with the times:
‘political parties have for the most part retained a now obsolete statist-
territorialist-nationalist modus operandi’ (Scholte, 2007, p. 12). This is in
sharp contrast with both state institutions and non-party civil society
organisations, both of which have made considerable strides in engaging
with globalised politics. According to some authors this is a deficiency
that is in urgent need of being rectified. What we need, according to
Scholte (2007, p. 13) is ‘more globally oriented political parties’. Scholte
suggest a number of things parties could do to rectify the lack of party
politics engagement with globalisation (2007, pp. 23–30):
• Educate the general public about the importance and impact of glob-
alisation.
• Use government power to improve the democratic elements in global
governance.
• Scrutinise state policies on global governance issues.
• Engage directly with global governance bodies, such as the WTO, the
World Bank and the IMF, the way many NGOs with a global slant
have done.
• Promote greater global equality on the basis that only people with a
certain minimum of resources can engage meaningfully in democratic
processes.
• Move beyond the idea that ‘the people’ to be represented are only the
people of a single territorial state. Instead parties should start to cater
to supraterritorial types of demos.
Leaving aside the issue of the pure practicality of doing these things, there
are two major issues with Scholt’s proposals for a globalisation of party
politics. The first problem is that some of the issues he raises are clearly of
a left-wing slant. It would not be too much to say that a significant section
of the political spectrum has no interest in a more equal redistribution of
global resources. Most parties of liberal, conservative or nationalist per-
suasion would see no benefit in such a project. His remedies, therefore,
speak to a particular normative position and not to ‘parties’ as a group. It
might well be argued that left-wing parties ought to think more about
global democracy and equality and have failed in properly promoting this
agenda by focusing on national rather than global governance. However,
many parties have as their main founding goals the promotion of national
and not global interests. Hence, his criticism of ‘parties’ as a whole are in
fact much more relevant for parties of the left than parties of the right.
The Internationalisation of Party Politics 197
‘Cutting
USA edge’
B USA
C B
A A
There are also several factors that limit the spread of American/new
techniques. One issue is that not all techniques ‘travel’ very well.
Especially techniques which rely on a certain level of technological pene-
tration, that is, access to the Internet or television ownership, will be vir-
tually useless in many developing countries. Hence, many of the lessons
from Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, which saw heavy use
of web sites to coordinate local volunteers, will not be relevant in many
new democracies in, for example, Africa. In addition, in countries where
the focus of campaigning is on parties rather than individual candidates,
the demand for consultants will be lower. Where individual candidates
are responsible for their own campaigning as it the case in the United
States, there will be a much larger demand for consultants than in coun-
tries where a single-party campaign headquarter hires consultants to
work on a fairly centralised national campaign. Imagine a country of 100
parliamentary seats and five parties. That will mean 500 candidates. In a
party-oriented system each party’s head office would be in charge of
hiring consultants. There would, therefore, be five clients. In a candidate-
focused system there would be 500 potential clients. Clearly, the political
system will make a difference to how much demand there is for the work
of consultants.
However, regardless of these limitations there can be no doubt that the
internationalisation of campaign consultancy is a trend that is likely to
continue. In ever-more-competitive electoral markets, parties will want to
make use of every trick to beat their opponents. Inspiration for such
tricks is likely to increasingly come from abroad.
Conclusion
This final chapter will look at the future of the academic study of party
politics and consider what the big areas of research are. It will also try to
evaluate one of the big questions in party politics: are parties as a collec-
tive in crisis?
The study of party politics is a very active and growing field. This section
will look briefly at what is going on in research in each of the areas
covered by this book.
There is little to suggest that Sartori’s model of party systems is about
to be challenged. It has, as could be expected, been criticised, but no one
has come up with a scheme that has seriously looked to undermine
Sartori’s dominance. The discipline seems relatively content with his
scheme and mostly uses it as the starting point for research, if not explic-
itly, at least implicitly. As Bardi and Mair write, there has been ‘almost no
substantial innovation since the publication of Sartori’s classic work in
1976’ (2008, p. 148). So, the main concern in the field of party systems is
not defining them. Instead the focus is on: a) what drives party system
formation and change; and b) developing better ways of calculating party
system fragmentation. As was explored in Chapter 2 what drives the for-
mation of one party system rather than another is not clear, and this lack
of clarity has had the effect of spawning a growing literature. This has
also been driven by the emergence of new democracies in Eastern Europe,
Africa and East and South East Asia since the end of the Cold War. These
areas have provided rich soil for examining how party systems emerge
and stabilise (or fail to stabilise). So, for example Croissant and Volkel
(2012) consider the formation of party systems in East and South East
Asia; Rose and Mishler (2010) explore the lack of stability in Russia’s
party system; Mozaffar and Scarritt (2005) examine the reason behind the
low fragmentation, yet high volatility in African party systems. Another
area that has received attention is calculating the fragmentation of party
systems. Laakso and Taagepera’s (1979) approach to calculating the effec-
tive number of parties is popular and widely accepted, but has also
201
202 Contemporary Party Politics
this topic at the moment. Women make up more than half of the world’s
population, yet are massively under-represented in almost all democrati-
cally elected parliaments. This is obviously a major problem for the dem-
ocratic world and more than warrants the attention devoted to this area
of research. This research agenda promises to continue to grow.
The issue of who controls policy making in political parties is a some-
what under-researched area. In 2002 Scarrow et al. (2002, p. 144) wrote
that ‘for all the importance of party programmes to democratic theory
and practice, we still know very little about where these programmes
come from, and particularly about the role of intra-party democracy in
the process’. Even now this still broadly holds true. There have been
several recent studies of intra-party democracy, including of Denmark
(Pedersen, 2010), Sweden (Loxbo, 2013) and comparing Denmark and
the United Kingdom (Pettitt, 2012b). However, there is still no major
comparative study to draw general conclusion across several cases about
wider patterns of who controls policy making. This is an area that holds
a lot of potential for further research. As was explored in Chapter 7, the
normative side of the argument, that is, should parties be internally dem-
ocratic, has been relatively settled on the ‘yes’ side. It seems that, gener-
ally speaking, democracy is seen as a ‘good thing’ and something to be
encouraged including within political parties.
One area that has received a lot of attention and that continues to be
very active is election campaigning and how this is affecting party organi-
sations. That this should receive as much attention as it does is hardly
surprising considering how important elections are to the very founda-
tions of what a party is about: the presenting of candidates in elections.
One area that has seen a lot of interest is the re-emergence of local cam-
paigning and with it the return in importance of having a local volunteer
base to rely on at election time. It is very likely that this will be a topic
that will continue to receive more attention as data becomes available
from future elections.
As we saw in Chapter 9 the research on coalition formation has a long
history and a steadily expanding literature. It has been argued that signif-
icant success in predicting coalition formation remains somewhat elusive,
but this will no doubt be an area where people will continue to refine the
predictive tools. One research agenda which has seen considerable
growth is recent years is how parties usually regarded as being on the
fringes of the political system cope with entering government for the first
time. A lot of attention has been focused on understanding the price that
the parties of the far right and the far left have to pay for government
participation. This is a research agenda that will no doubt continue for as
long as parties previously regarded as being beyond the pale are given the
opportunity to enter government.
The Future of Party Politics 205
It is possible to argue that political parties have never been more signifi-
cant than they are now. As a collective they constitute the most important
and powerful type of political organisation in the world. No democratic
country has been able to do without them, and with the rise of new
democracies in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia they have continued their
dominance. Modern democracy is and continues to be party democracy,
a fact confirmed in every single post-1989 democracy. Throughout the
democratic world the path to political power is exclusively through a
political party. Despite considerable anti-party feelings in most demo-
cratic countries, independents have nowhere made significant gains. For
anyone with political ambitions in democratic societies the means to real-
ising those ambitions was, is and is likely to continue to be a political
party. There is currently no viable alternative to party democracy, and
thus Schattschneider’s claim that democracy is unthinkable save in term
of political parties, cited at the very beginning of this book, holds as true
today as it did then.
However, there are also serious claims of party weakness both in the
academic literature and in the media. Broadly speaking these claims can
206 Contemporary Party Politics
208
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Index
activists, 12, 15, 38, 87, 103, 128, 130, conservative parties, 12, 44, 45, 47, 61, 62,
131–2, 143, 144, 150, 151, 152, 158, 63, 66, 68, 69, 73, 77, 164, 181, 195,
159 196
Africa, 30, 65, 109, 130, 140, 152, 165, Communist Party of Great Britain, 184
172, 202 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 13,
ideology, 81–2 69
cleavage, political
von Beyme, Klaus, 67–8 centre-perihpery, 65–6
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India, 11, 80 church-state, 66
blackmail potential, 27–8, 33 cultural, 72, 73–4
Blondel, Jean, 26–7 class, 66, 73
Botswana, 30–1 socio-economic, 72
Burke, Edmund, 5 Urban-rural, 67
clientilism, Africa, 82
cadre party, 50–2, 57, 138, 159, 163, 202, cordon sanitaire, 174
207 curvilinear disparity, law of, 131–2
campaign consultants, 144, 145–6, 147–8,
197–9 Democratic Party, USA, 11, 23, 24, 31,
Canada, 60, 90, 98, 106, 136 76–8, 140
candidate selection Denmark, 22, 23, 24, 32, 46, 48, 66, 85, 87,
context, 106 98, 114, 136, 152, 167
electoral systems, impact of, 106 Downs, Anthony, 6, 62, 92
funnel of, 105 Duverger, Maurice, 10, 12, 13, 25–6, 36–7,
gender, 118–123 44–7, 50–2, 88, 96, 107, 134, 136,
ideology, impact of, 107 159, 198, 206
political culture, impact of, 108
quotas in, 112 electoral-professional party, 53–6, 157
cartel party, 57–8, 128, 137, 159, 160, 165, Epstein, Leon, 6
202
catch-all party, 52–3, 75, 121, 137, 146, flawed democracies, 4
154, 157, 202 France, 7, 17, 28, 31, 32, 37, 41, 64, 75–6,
Chile, 66, 90, 122 90, 106, 112, 160, 164, 184
Christian Democratic parties, 66, 69, 67, 72, Freedom Party, Austria, 167
181 full democracies, 3
coalitions funding, 96–7, 120, 158–61, 185, 188
median legislator, 172–3 Fukuyama, Francis, 2
minimal connected winning, 172
minimal winning, 171
minimal range, 172 Gamson’s Law, 171, 175–6
minimum parties, 171–2 Germany, 30, 31, 32, 38, 41, 46, 66, 69, 70,
minimum seats, 171 90, 107, 137, 160, 183
winning, 170–1 Ghana, 11, 31, 81, 117
coalition potential, 27–8, 173 government potential, 173–4, 176
Conservative Party, Britain, 12, 13, 31, 113, government relevance, 173
139, 195 globalisation, 73, 74, 178, 180, 194–7, 202
221
222 Index