How Parties Organize: Change and Adaptation in Party Organizations in Western Democracies

385 Pages·1995·22.6 MB·English

by  Richard S Katz

HOW PARTIES
ORGANIZE
Change and Adaptation in Party Organizations
in Western Democracies
Edited by
Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair
SAGE Publications
London · Thousand Oaks · New Delhi
In memory of
Rudolf Wildenmann
Editorial arrangement © Richard S. Katz and
Peter Mair 1994
Chapter 1 © Peter Mair
Chapter 2 © Richard S. Katz and Robin Kolodny 1994
Chapter 3 © Wolfgang C. Muller
Chapter 4 © Kris Deschouwer
Chapter 5 © Paul D. Webb
Chapter 6 © Lars Bille
Chapter 7 © Jan Sundberg
Chapter 8 © Thomas Poguntke
Chapter 9 © David M. Farrell
Chapter 10 © Luciano Bardi and Leonardo Morlino
Chapter 11 © Ruud A. Koole
Chapter 12 © Lars Sv&sand
Chapter 13 © Jon Pierre and Anders Widfeldt
Chapter 14 © Luciano Bardi
First published 1994
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 8039 7960 6
ISBN 0 8039 7961 4 (pbk)
Library of Congress catalog card number 94-068658
Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay, S. Devon
Contents
Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 Party Organizations: From Civil Society to the State
Peter Mair
2 Party Organization as an Empty Vessel: Parties in
American Politics
Richard S. Katz and Robin Kolodny
3 The Development of Austrian Party Organizations in the
Post-war Period
Wolfgang C. Muller
4 The Decline of Consociationalism and the Reluctant
Modernization of Belgian Mass Parties
Kris Deschouwer
5 Party Organizational Change in Britain: The Iron Law of
Centralization?
Paul D. Webb
6 Denmark: The Decline of the Membership Party?
Lars Bille
7 Finland: Nationalized Parties, Professionalized
Organizations
Jan Sundberg
8 Parties in a Legalistic Culture: The Case of Germany
Thomas Poguntke
9 Ireland: Centralization, Professionalization and Competitive
Pressures
David M. Farrell
10 Italy: Tracing the Roots of the Great Transformation
Luciano Bardi and Leonardo Morlino
iv How Parties Organize
11 The Vulnerability of the Modern Cadre Party in the
Netherlands 278
Ruud A. Koole
12 Change and Adaptation in Norwegian Party Organizations 304
Lars Svasand
13 Party Organizations in Sweden: Colossuses with Feet of
Clay or Flexible Pillars of Government? 332
Jon Pierre and Anders Widfeldt
14 Transnational Party Federations, European Parliamentary
Party Groups and the Building of Europarties 357
Luciano Bardi
Index 373
Contributors
Luciano Bardi Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni e Storia, University
di Bologna
Lars Bille Institute of Political Science, University of Copenhagen
Kris Deschouwer Centrum voor Politicologie, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
David M. Farrell Department of Government, University of Manchester
Richard S. Katz Department of Political Science, The Johns Hopkins
University
Robin Kolodny Department of Political Science, Temple University
Ruud A. Koole Department of Political Science, University of Leiden
Peter Mair Department of Political Science, University of Leiden
Leonardo Morlino Facolt& di Scienze Politiche, University di Firenze
Wolfgang C. Muller Institut fur Staats- und Politikwissenschaft,
Universitat Wien
Jon Pierre Department of Political Science, Goteborgs Universitet
Thomas Poguntke Fakult&t fur Sozialwissenschaft, Universitat
Mannheim
Jan Sundberg Department of Political Science, University of Helsinki
Lars Sv&sand Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen
Paul D. Webb Department of Government, Brunei, University of West
London
Anders Widfeldt Department of Political Science, Goteborgs Universitet
Preface and Acknowledgements
This volume emerges from a long-standing international research project
on party organizational change and adaptation. The project was devised
with two principal goals. The first was simply to document the nuts and
bolts of organizational developments since 1960 in twelve Western democ-
racies, and thereby to fill what had been a major gap in the data base from
which analysts of party politics have been able to develop their ideas. This
goal was largely accomplished in the first volume of the project series,
Party Organizations: A Data Handbook on Party Organizations in Western
Democracies, 1960-90 (Sage, 1992), which focused almost exclusively on
what we called 'the official story', drawing primarily on party and party-
related documents and reports in order to outline party rules and structures
as well as to record data concerning membership and finance.
The second goal of the project, once having established the official story,
was to move beyond it by adding politics to the raw data, and hence to
understand the contexts in which parties develop their organizational
structures and the reasons why they change or why they remain the same.
There are two complementary ways in which this problem can be
addressed. One is on the basis of a country-by-country analysis, which is
the approach adopted in this, the second volume of the series; the other is
on the basis of a cross-national analysis, which is the focus of a projected
third volume in the series.
There are a number of reasons why it is useful to begin with a country-
by-country approach. The authors of these chapters were themselves
responsible for the original data collection, and so they are particularly
sensitive to what these data mean within the different national contexts and
to how they should be interpreted. In this sense they are very well placed to
offer what might be called the 'real [national] story'. Moreover, while the
unit of analysis throughout this project has always been the individual
political party, we are also very much aware that each party is part of a
party system, and that these party systems are structured on a national
basis. Thus while some adaptations in party organizations might be
expected to derive from factors which affect most, if not all, Western
democracies, such as the mass media revolution or the peculiarities of post-
industrial society, and while other adaptations may be specific to individual
parties, there nevertheless remain many stimuli to which parties must
respond which differ across countries but which are shared by all parties
within the same country. In this sense, the national context clearly matters,
with different parties within each country being subject to the same
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
national regulations, operating within the same constitutional and social
structures, and sharing the same electoral market.
Given that the studies in this volume are the first to use the wealth of
systematic empirical data which has been gathered by this project, they
offer a unique insight into party development over the past thirty years. It
is for this reason that we felt it inappropriate to tie the contributions down
by means of strict preconceptions or models. Rather, each of the authors
was given a free hand to organize their contribution as they saw fit, and
each was encouraged to emphasize whatever was deemed most central to
an understanding of the individual cases. For reasons of space, the authors
were also asked to avoid reporting details of the data which are already
available in the data handbook. At the same time, however, regardless of
the individual emphases, a common purpose was asserted by requiring
each author to address a number of key questions or themes. Thus the
authors were asked to assess the prevailing conceptions of party, both from
the points of view of the parties themselves as well as from the point of
view of the state, and were also asked to assess the development of parties
as membership organizations, which involved looking at the extent of party
membership, at the role of ordinary members in party decision-making,
and at the relative importance of members to the organization as a whole.
Other common themes concerned the development of party as a pro-
fessional organization, including the size and organization of party staff
and the role of professional advisers and consultants; the development of
party finance, with particular reference to the relative importance of the
members and of the state as sources of party revenue; and the relationships
between the various components of party, with particular reference to the
standing of the parliamentary party. More generally, authors were also
asked to address the problem of changes, if any, in the relationship
between the parties, civil society and the state.
The project from which this volume derives was first developed within a
Research Group of the European Consortium for Political Research
(ECPR), and subsequent meetings of the project members in both the
University of Limerick and the University of Leiden were held on the
fringes of the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops. For both of these
reasons, we would like to thank the ECPR for its long-term support. The
project was funded primarily by the American National Science Founda-
tion under grant number SES-8818439, with additional financial support
being provided by the Forschungsstelle fur Gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen
(FGE) of the University of Mannheim, as well as by various national
foundations. We are grateful to all of these organizations for their
generous help. Thanks are also due to our departments in Johns Hopkins
and Leiden, which wittingly or unwittingly provided much of the material
infrastructure and support which was required to link researchers from so
many different countries.
Finally, we would also like to record a special thanks for the help which
we received from Rudolf Wildenmann, who, in his various capacities as
viii How Parties Organize
chairman of the ECPR executive, as director of the FGE and as a long-
term friend and adviser to us both, offered this project his constant
support, both practically and intellectually. Rudolf saw and seemed
pleased with our first volume, the data handbook, but sadly died before
this particular volume was completed. Like many other political scientists
throughout Europe, we owe much to Rudolf, and we now dedicate this
book to his memory.
Richard S. Katz
Peter Mair
1
Party Organizations: From Civil Society
to the State
Peter Mair
Party organizations and the problem of party decline
The study of parties and party systems still constitutes one of the largest
and most active subfields within comparative politics (for example, Janda,
1993). It is also a study which continues to present an immensely varied
landscape, ranging from work which explores the relationship of parties to
the wider society, through work which is concerned with the role of parties
in government, to work which, often at a more theoretical level, deals with
the interactions between parties and with the dynamics of party systems.
We now know a great deal, for example, about cross-national develop-
ments in the ties which bind, or fail to bind, parties to their voters, whether
this be expressed in terms of the stability and change of electoral
preferences (see, for example, Bartolini and Mair, 1990; Crewe and
Denver, 1985; Dalton et al., 1984), or in terms of the sociology of party
support (see, for example, Franklin et al., 1992; Rose, 1974). We also
know increasingly more about parties in office, both in terms of processes
of coalition formation (for example, Laver and Schofield, 1990; Pridham,
1986), and in terms of the role of parties in policy-making and in
government more generally (for example, Budge and Keman, 1990;
Castles and Wildenmann, 1986; Katz, 1987; Laver and Budge, 1992). Most
recently, comparative analysis has also been addressed to the question of
parties as strategic actors and as campaigners (for example, Bowler and
Farrell, 1992; Butler and Ranney, 1992). And to all of this work can be
added the more wide-ranging and ever-expanding volume of studies on
party families and party systems (see, for example, the now dated
bibliography in Mair, 1990: 353-60).
At the same time, however, there are also imbalances, with the ever-
growing cumulation of knowledge in some areas contrasting sharply with
surprisingly evident lacunae in others. The empirically grounded study of
parties as organizations, which provides the focus for this volume, has long
constituted one of the most obvious of these lacunae (see also Katz and
Mair, 1992b). This is notwithstanding the fact that much of the pioneering
work in the field of party research, by Michels and Ostrogorski in
particular, was focused precisely on this area, and also notwithstanding