Abstract
Much has been written about the decline and transformation of political parties and the more or less devastating effects of these developments for the functioning of representative democracies. It is common knowledge to party scholars, reflected in a long-standing debate concerning party-type classification, that political parties come in differing shapes. However, as there is no standard measurement strategy allowing for the objective classification of parties, core assumptions of the literature cannot be tested—including a crisis of democracy as the result of changes in the realm of political parties.
To close this gap, we deduce such a measure from the classical literature on party types, utilizing party membership, and a new measure of parties’ programmatic clarity. We provide empirical party-type classifications for 16 Western European countries from 1960s to 2010s and use them to assess the validity of the “catch-all party” hypothesis. The results show that, although mass parties are indeed declining, catch-all parties are not nearly as prevalent and successful as widely claimed. In fact, programmatic parties are by far the most common party type. Finally, we show that disappearance and emergence of certain party types have an effect on the three key functions parties fulfill in democracy: mobilization, representation, and government stability. Our findings suggest that there is no crisis of democracy provoked by general developments of political parties.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature discusses a wealth of developments that is either deemed reason or indicator for the decline of parties. It is, however, important to distinguish between challenges to parties that they need to react to and signs of their decline. Therefore, we do not discuss developments like the decrease of party identification and partisanship (Dalton 2000; LaPalombara 2007), the emergence of sub- or supranational government (e.g., Strøm 2000), or the role of media and new technology (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; LaPalombara 2007) at this point.
- 2.
Scarrow (2000), for instance, discussed other reasons for a nominal decline of membership numbers, while scholars like Heidar and Saglie (2003) highlight that the raw numbers are under-complex indicators, and issues such as the ratio of active and passive members as well as the role of members need to be taken into account.
- 3.
The party development literature refers to the “role” of party members within the party organization, i.e., their involvement in candidate selection or program development. As the collection of such data is notoriously difficult, the “role” is usually substituted with the “number” of party members, assuming that members leave the party if their role diminishes. We follow this approach.
- 4.
However, other scholars such as Panebianco (1988) question just how good catch-all parties can be at electoral mobilization when they lack a clear societal base to mobilize.
- 5.
The information on electoral results is taken from the department’s database (WZB 2014).
- 6.
Beyond this psychological effect, their vote-to-seat translation rules mechanically favor larger parties to different degrees (Duverger 1963). As we are using vote shares, the latter effect is of no direct importance.
- 7.
The number of competing parties n has to be larger than one which, obviously, is a precondition for democratic elections.
- 8.
We subtract one in the equation to eliminate the party’s eigenvalue.
- 9.
Regarding the relevance of electoral manifestos, see also Merz and Regel (2013).
- 10.
In detail, they cover foreign special relationships, military, European Union, internationalism, constitutionalism, political centralization, economic protectionism, welfare state, national way of life, education, multiculturalism, morality, and labor groups.
- 11.
In this case, weighted refers to acknowledgment of the parties’ electoral size, measured as the RMPS.
- 12.
Unfortunately, we are not able to include Luxembourg (due to missing information on party membership), Belgium (due to the special nature of government formation and the electoral system), and microstates like Liechtenstein or Andorra.
- 13.
To calculate the values for each time period, we add the relative vote shares of all large parties in a country, calculate the total overall countries, and divide this number by the total number of countries.
- 14.
The shade of the dots does not carry information but is created by overlapping dots.
- 15.
The figure displays parties only when they meet the criterion of being a “large” party. There are two explanations for parties not being represented for the whole time frame: they might not have run during the respective election or they might have been/become a small party.
- 16.
Hence, the cases in this analysis are elections.
- 17.
The hierarchical data structure makes it necessary to calculate cluster-adjusted standard errors.
- 18.
As the controls are of no primary interest, we have omitted them from the table with the exception of the decade dummies.
- 19.
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is the largest comparative project dealing with election studies. A jointly developed questionnaire is used in a variety of national election studies. On this basis a comparable dataset covering multiple democracies was created (www.cses.org).
- 20.
In order to avoid the problem that the “left-right” dimension might have different meanings in different countries (Benoit and Laver 2006) and/or at different points in time, we use the method of Simon Franzmann and Andre Kaiser (2006) to calculate country- and time-specific party left-right positions from Manifesto data. We can then combine these positions with the respective country- and time-specific survey results and only need the much less comprehensive assumption that citizens and parties in one country, at one point in time, share the same understanding of the political competition.
- 21.
F(3, 181) = 2.56, p > F = 0.056.
- 22.
Similar to the other parts of our analysis, we use cluster-corrected regression analysis to test the impact of different party types.
- 23.
Consequently, governments containing more than one party type had to be excluded from the analysis. Fortunately, only nine governments were lost due to this restriction.
- 24.
Control variables are omitted from the table.
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Giebler, H., Lacewell, O.P., Regel, S., Werner, A. (2018). Decline or Change? Party Types and the Crisis of Representative Democracy. In: Merkel, W., Kneip, S. (eds) Democracy and Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72559-8_7
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