Political Parties

Political parties are key institutions in contemporary democracies. As E. E. Schattschneider famously asserted more than half a century ago, "Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties" (Schattschneider 1941). With etymological origins dating back to the Latin pars (meaning "part"), parties naturally represent only part of the general interest. Because they unite people on the basis of different ideological principles and opposing interests, parties were initially viewed with suspicion because they were perceived as a threat to the rights of other citizens and the aggregate interest of the community.

The United States in particular has a long-standing tradition of distrust of parties, but antiparty sentiments also existed in Europe. Essentially, political parties when they first emerged were seen as incompatible with the liberal democratic tradition rooted in the political philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704) and the radical democratic tradition inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Both traditions are difficult to marry with partisan institutions, which by nature transcend individual interests and refute the existence of a general will.

The introduction of universal suffrage and the advent of mass democracy made direct links between the state and individual citizens increasingly unrealistic and thus served to legitimize the existence of parties as intermediary institutions. After World War II (1939–1945), beginning with the restoration of democracy in Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany, parties were increasingly given a formal place in liberal democratic constitutions as key institutions for democracy. Despite the recent challenges of declining party memberships and weakening levels of party identification, parties of the twenty-first century are firmly rooted in the established democracies and have also rapidly acquired relevance in the more recently established democracies in Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere in the world. In most contemporary democracies, policies are decided within parties, legislative decisions are made by elected party officials, and these officials are recruited and held accountable through parties. Political parties have put such a strong mark on twentieth-century politics and democracy that it can be best described as party democracy.

party functions and goals

Political parties perform a number of functions essential to a healthy performance of democracy. On the one hand, these functions are procedural or institutional in nature. One of their key functions is recruitment, which means that parties are responsible for the selection and nomination of potential candidates for public office. Their electoral function consists of proposing their candidates to the public, providing citizens with a choice between alternatives and thereby structuring the electoral process, and campaigning for popular support. Another crucial institutional function is that of the organization of government and parliament and of democracy as whole. Parties furthermore formulate and implement public policy and act as a channel of communication between politicians and the public. Parties also perform a number of representative functions. They are vehicles of interest representation and channels of interest articulation and aggregation (i.e., they articulate popular demands into the decision-making arena and aggregate these demands into more or less coherent policy packages). Parties also serve to integrate citizens into the political system and to mobilize political awareness and popular support. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the representative functions of parties declined substantially, whereas their procedural role is still intact and might even have been enhanced.

Parties may pursue a variety of objectives. One common approach suggests that their principal goal is one of the three following: office-seeking, policy-seeking, or vote-seeking. That is, they are ultimately mainly interested in the spoils of office and government power, in implementing their preferred policies, or in acquiring as many votes (and seats) as possible. In practice, they may pursue multiple goals and a combination of these three primary objectives.

party families

A commonly used approach in the comparative study of political parties is based on the notion of party families. Following common classifications, key examples of major party families can be said to include liberal parties, conservative parties, socialist and social democratic workers' or labor parties, Christian democratic parties, communist parties, agrarian parties, regional parties, right-wing extremist parties, and green parties. Parties belonging to the same family often carry the same party label. Parties may be members of the same family because of their shared origins, having first emerged and mobilized in similar historical circumstances with the intention of representing similar interests. Furthermore, parties belonging to one family tend to pursue similar policies and may profess similar ideologies. Finally, the members of a particular family can be identified on the basis of their international links, as they join together in organizations such as the Liberal International or the Socialist International. The cooperation between like-minded political parties in the European Parliament has stimulated the institutionalization of transnational party federations and "Europarties."

Social democratic parties are the strongest and most enduring of Western Europe's political families. The majority of social democratic parties first entered electoral politics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They were initially mobilized to represent the interests of the working class, and it was largely as a result of their intervention that most West European welfare states were expanded during the 1950s and 1960s. Although they were created as a challenge to the existing political and economic order, their radical impulse waned with time as they came to settle for a political role based on managing a mixed economy. Their drift toward moderation has become more accentuated from the 1990s onward, as social democratic parties throughout Europe have had to come to terms with the constraints of state intervention determined by the process of European integration and increased globalization. Despite their increasingly neo-liberal course, the policy emphasis of most social democratic parties maintains a commitment to welfarism and egalitarianism.

Most communist parties emerged as the result of a split in the socialist movement after the Russian Revolution (1917–1919). They established themselves as radical alternatives to the parliamentarism of social democracy, advocating Marxist-Leninist principles and favoring a revolutionary road to socialism. Because of their alliance with the Soviet Communist Party and their evident radicalism, communist parties were typically regarded as antisystem oppositions and mere transmission belts of Moscow. In part as a response to their electoral stagnation and decline and in part as an attempt to end their political isolation, many Western European communist parties began to elaborate a distinctively non-Soviet strategy during the postwar period. This shift caused the emergence of so-called Eurocommunism in the 1970s, which was especially strong in southern Europe. After the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe communist parties effectively disappeared as independent political forces or engaged in a process of programmatic reform and dropped their ideological labels.

Liberal parties were the first to organize in Western European party systems, emerging in the nineteenth century. Historically, liberal parties have been associated with the promotion of individual rights, the impulse to extend the franchise, and the resistance to clerical influences on political life. Two basic strands of European liberalism can be distinguished. In the more right-wing strand, the emphasis on the individual has led to opposition to all but minimal state intervention in the economy. The more centrist, if not left-leaning, strand reflects a position in which a concern for individual rights and progressive politics has created an emphasis on social justice and egalitarianism.

Christian democracy has a basis in almost all established Western European democracies, although an ongoing process of secularization continues to erode its electoral support. The largest group within the Christian democratic family is Roman Catholic in origin. A second group comprises parties that draw cross-denominational support from both Catholics and Protestants, such as in post–World War II Germany and the Netherlands. The third and much smaller group is primarily Protestant and is typically found in the Scandinavian countries. The heritage of Christian democracy dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century, when Catholic mobilization took place in response to the secularizing tendencies of conservatives and liberals. This crystallized in an enduring conflict between the Church and the state over the question of the ultimate authority over policies of public morality and, above all, education. With regard to socioeconomic policy, Christian democratic parties have traditionally shared common ground with social democratic parties in their opposition to neo-liberal, and individualistic policies.

Conservative parties generally emerged in opposition to political changes proposed by the early nineteenth-century liberals such as the extensions of the franchise. They emerged largely to protect the interests of those who had a stake in the existing economic and political order, such as the landowners and the clergy. The policies of conservative parties typically are consistent with their long-standing opposition to general social change. They tend to underline the need to support private business, encourage fiscal austerity, emphasize government efficiency, as well as issues related to law and order. In many countries, conservative parties stress the importance of traditional national values, the family, and moral values. They can also be quite ambiguous in their attitude toward European integration.

Extreme right-wing parties have increased their electoral support considerably in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. At the core, there are

two principal appeals that characterize the extreme right. First, almost without exception, they mobilize against immigration and against those policies that are seen to promote multiculturalism. Right-wing extremist parties are often highly xenophobic (fearful of strangers and foreigners) and are sometimes extremely nationalist or racist. Second, as outsider and anti-establishment parties, they mobilize a populist appeal against what they see as the self-serving or corrupt character of the political class.

Green or environmental parties first emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s. Their policy emphasis is primarily on the need to protect the environment, which involves promoting policies that curb economic growth and require substantial regulation of industrial and commercial activity. Green parties also emphasize the need for international peace and disarmament and advocate an increase in the level of development aid. They often also call attention to social justice and the persisting political inequalities of women and ethnic minorities. Green parties also stress participation and democracy and sometimes attempt to structure their own organizations in such as way as to encourage maximum grassroots involvement. Typically "green" issues now rank high on the political agenda of all the parties, especially of the left.

party organization

The first parties to emerge were conservative and liberal parties, which appeared before the introduction of universal suffrage. These elite parties were primarily followings of the aristocracy or parties of notables, existing as federations of closed and relatively autonomous caucuses in which entrance tended to occur only through invitation or formal nomination. Until the extension of the franchise compelled them to create more permanent party structures, they were active only during periods of election and did not exist as organized associations between localities. Party cohesion existed only at the level of the parliamentary delegates.

In stark contrast with these cadre parties, mass parties are based on tightly organized and permanent party structures with dense and extensive networks of local branches and high levels of membership mobilization. Mass parties display a high level of vertical articulation, with a strong connection of the different organizational levels through the bottom–up representation of lower strata on the higher echelons. Their emphasis on internal cohesion has prompted concerns over their internal oligarchic structures and the lack of internal party democracy. Mass parties emerged on the eve of the franchise extension in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and usually represented the economically and politically underprivileged working class.

Traditionally, the classic mass party is the typical model of organization for social democratic and socialist workers' parties and communist parties, as well as some religious (especially Catholic) parties. They are characteristically parties of civil society, pursuing strategies of mass mobilization and relying on large numbers of members and supporters. In contrast with the earlier elite parties, which sought to pursue the common or national interest, mass parties were the first parties that explicitly claimed to represent the interests of only one specific and relatively clearly circumscribed segment of society.

In the era following World War II, the ideological differences among parties started to diminish, and parties began to broaden their appeal to the electorate at large. Parties transformed themselves into catch-all parties, for which the moral and intellectual encapsulation into the party organization of the masses was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Parties drastically reduced their ideological baggage and adopted offensive electoral strategies, attempting to appeal to a wider audience and aiming at more immediate electoral success. Parties strengthened the power of the top leadership groups and downgraded the role of the individual party member. From late 1960s and early 1970s, politics was seen to become increasingly about electoral competition among professional party elites rather than the mobilization and representation of socially distinct groups. Elections came to revolve primarily around the choice of leaders rather than the choice of policies or programs.

The late twentieth century saw the emergence of the cartel party, in which colluding parties become entrenched within the state and employ resources of the state (such as public funding and state-regulated media access) to facilitate their own survival. Parties have moved away from their traditionally strong linkages with society toward an intensification of their relation with the state, to the point that they have effectively become incorporated within the institutionalized structures of the state and have become agents of the state rather than the instruments of civil society. In the era of the cartel party, the goal of politics has become more self-referential, with politics itself having become a skilled profession. Electoral competition takes place on rival claims to efficient and effective management rather than representative capacity or policy effectiveness.

party systems

The study of party systems is concerned with the patterns of interactions between parties and relates to the processes of electoral competition and government formation. Two-party systems such as the United Kingdom's feature competition between two parties more or less equal in size and tend to offer the prospect of single-party cabinets and complete alteration in government. Two-party systems are often seen to encourage center-seeking electoral strategies with the two parties converging toward one another in the center of the ideological spectrum.

In multiparty systems, government formation usually requires a coalition of parties, and a wholesale alternation in government is not always possible. Two varieties of multiparty systems can be distinguished based on the ideological distance between parties as well as the number of relevant parties. The relatively stable systems of moderate pluralism show a limited degree of party fragmentation, feature a relatively small ideological distance between parties, and are characterized by moderate centripetal competition. The more unstable systems of polarized pluralism are highly fragmented and ideologically polarized, with anti-system parties located at the extreme ends of the political spectrum contributing to centrifugal patterns of electoral competition. In systems of polarized pluralism, the lack of prospect of government office encourages irresponsible opposition parties to engage in a politics of outbidding or overpromising. Typical examples of polarized pluralism include the Italian First Republic (1946–1992) and the French Fourth Republic (1946–1958).

See also: Political Party Systems.

bibliography

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Dalton, Russell J., and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds. Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Hix, Simon, and Christopher Lord. Political Parties in the European Union. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997.

Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. "Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party." Party Politics 1, no. 1(1995):5–28.

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Schattschneider, E. E. Party Government. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1942.

Ware, Alan. Political Parties and Party Systems. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Ingrid van Biezen