Political parties, lecture 2 of 3

• Lecture 1:– Definitions. Party systems

• Lecture 2: – Party models. Catch-all, cartel, etc.

• Lecture 3:– Party organisations. Membership, internal

democracy

Origins of parties:

• Internal origin: from inside parliaments. Groups of like-minded parliamentarians who started to co-operate, first loosely and informally, then more institutionalised

• Most conservative and liberal parties are of internal origin

• External origin: from outside parliaments. Popular movements begin to put up candidates in elections

• Socialist/labour and agrarian parties tend to be of external origin

External and internal parties…

• …developed different characteristics. These differences remained, even though…

• …external parties, with the extension of suffrage, got representatives elected…

• …and internal parties were forced to develop organisations outside parliament, in response to the growth of new parties

Mass versus cadre parties

• Cadre parties:– Of internal origin. Groups of notabilities. No formal

membership. Basic organisational unit is the caucus, a meeting to nominate candidates. Number of members not as important as the quality of the members; prestige, technical skill, wealth. Financed by private donations.

– Tended to be liberal or conservative• Mass parties:

– Of external origin. Based on their members. Basic organisational unit is the local branch. Financed by membership dues. Number of members crucial.

– Tend to be socialist or social democratic

Mass and cadre parties…

• …have hardly ever existed in reality. They are ‘ideal types’, theoretical constructions, used as illustrative examples rather than depictions of reality

• The mass versus cadre parties dichotomy comes from the famous book ‘Partis Politiques’, by the French political scientist Maurice Duverger. First published in the early 1950s

Duverger’s party models…

• …reflected a situation in the early post-war period. The parties he was talking about had had their hey-day in the inter-war period

• In fact, the mass versus cadre dichotomy was almost obsolete already when Duverger’s book came out

• Enter the catch-all party

The catch-all thesis was presented…

• …by the German political scientist Otto Kirchheimer, in an article published in English in 1966 (in German a year earlier)

• English version published after his death (in November 1965)

• The concept soon caught on, and is still used frequently

• In German, Kirchheimer used the word “Allerweltspartei”

According to the catch-all thesis…

…two main changes have taken place in political parties:

1. Organisational– Parties have become more elitist

2. Ideological– Ideological differences between parties have

been reduced

• For the catch-all party, the top priority is vote maximising

After WWII…

• …the law of the political market took over• Extension of the right to vote and defeat of

authoritarian movements meant that political democracy was now firmly established

• At the same time, affluence and increased standard of living meant that traditional class boundaries eroded

• Socialist parties saw their core of support reduced, and also less loyal than before

• Meanwhile the non-socialist parties began to see their chance to make electoral inroads into previously unreachable groups

The nature of elections changed

• Earlier, elections were focused on mobilisation of the social groups that supported them. Little point in trying to convince other groups into voting for them

• The new development meant that elections were also about persuasion

• It had become possible to persuade people that traditionally had belonged to social groups that used to be unreachable for your party

The parties had to adapt to the new situation

• No longer any good for the traditional mass integration parties to portray themselves as the champions of a particular class, because…

• …it would mean that they disqualified themselves from competing for all the other, socially unattached, votes that were now up for grabs

Main characteristics of catch-all parties:

• Drastic reduction of ideological baggage • A strengthening of the top leadership groups

and, consequently…• …downgrading of individual party members• Less emphasis on parties' respective traditional

core class in favour of recruiting voters among the population at large

• Attempts to secure access to a wide range of interest groups

The catch-all thesis has been criticised

• Kirchheimer’s points of departure as well as his predictions for the future have been questioned

• Nevertheless, other writers (e.g. Leon D Epstein, 1967) presented quite similar arguments:

• Parties are increasingly focused on winning elections

• They care less about involving ordinary people in the political process…

• …and are less democratic internally

The catch-all thesis predicted…• …the melting of all parties, irrespective of origin,

into one form, the catch-all party• However, other writers followed, who were open

for the co-existence of two competing models, dichotomies (e.g. Duverger’s mass v cadre parties)

• These dichotomies tended to consist of one ‘mass democratic socialist’ type and one ‘vote-seeking bourgeois’ type

• W.E. Wright (1971): Party democracy v Rational-efficient parties

• Angelo Panebianco (1988): Mass bureaucratic v Electoral-professional parties

But then, in the 1990s…

• A new, unitary, model was presented

• The Cartel Party, in an article by Richard Katz and Peter Mair, first published 1995

• The cartel party thesis has not had the same impact in journalism or in the more general political debate, but has been very influential in the academic discourse about political parties

The Cartel Party is characterised by:

• interpenetration of party and state

• and

• collusion among parties

• Parties have:become part of the state colluded with each otherbecome distanced from society

Crucial in this development…

• …are three factors:• Parties have access to state patronage

appointments, meaning they can share out the spoils among each other

• Parties are increasingly funded by public subsidies. Their existence depends on the state

• Parties can themselves manipulate electoral rules, and make it more difficult for newcomers to enter the party system

Thus…

• …the established parties are dependent on the state…

• …dependent on each other, as the share of patronage ‘spoils’ reduces the impact of losing elections…

• …and at the same time they have distanced themselves from civil society

A cartel party is…

• capital intensive • professional • centralised • relies on subsidies and other benefits provided

by the state. • Its membership can be quite large, and is not

without influence, but it is split up into incoherent bits, unable to mount a joint challenge against the leadership

• Members mainly a legitimizing alibi for the leadership

The cartel thesis has been criticised

• The development has not gone equally far everywhere. Furthest in countries with high degree of party influence on state patronage appointments, and generous state subsidies, introduced early. E.g. Austria, Scandinavia

• The ‘cartels’ are hardly very effective, with lots of challenger parties having emerged in the past 20-30 years

• The core characteristics of the cartel party (last slide) do not stand to scrutiny

• The alleged changes in the relationship between parties, the state and civil society have been criticised

In fact…• Katz and Mair may have cooked quite a dense,

tasty broth on the basis of a rather thin nail• The one thing where they are clearly correct, is

the growth of state subsidies, which will have long-term consequences for the development parties

• Other than that, their evidence is somewhat thin• But there were similar problems with the catch-

all model, as well as the mass v cadre models• And the cartel party thesis raises many

important questions about the development of parties and their relationship with society