Campaigning and the Catch-All Party: The Process of Party Transformation in Britain
Abstract
Otto Kirchheimer’s well-known diagnosis of ‘catch-all’ partism in Western Europe rests on an implicit causal argument about the consequences of social change for political parties. This article takes up the causal story underlying Kirchheimer’s account and traces its implications for a specific, though central, party activity: campaigning. As Kirchheimer discerned, the transformation of advanced industrial societies radically altered the context of parties’ strategic decision-making. In the area of election campaigning, parties confronted heightened incentives to approach the electorate with ‘persuasive’ rather than more traditional ‘mobilizing’ appeals and developed a greatly increased demand for reliable information about voter preferences. These shifts, in turn, had consequences for party organization, promoting the centralization and marginalization of individual members Kirchheimer associates with the catch-all party type. Through the lens of campaign change, then, we can observe the causal processes that unite the diverse features Kirchheimer links to his catch-all party — although our attention is also drawn to ways in which party development has not conformed to Kirchheimer’s expectations. This article illustrates these intersecting processes with a discussion of Labour and Conservative campaigns in Britain.
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1.
I would like to thank participants at the conference ‘Kirchheimer Reconsidered: Applications and Implications of the Catch-All Thesis Forty Years Later’ (Iowa City, IA; July 2007) and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on previous drafts of this article.
2.
1 The final characteristic is a strengthening of ties to interest groups.
3.
2 Cross-national studies include Dalton et al. (1984) and Dogan (2001); sceptical rejoinders, Mair (1993) and Elff (2007). The contributions to Evans (1999) reveal interesting tensions between cross-national and single-country findings.
4.
3 Previous authors have made similar distinctions between campaign objectives and drawn similar conclusions about their relative utility (Denver and Hands, 1997; Farrell and Webb, 2000). Denver and Hands, for example, identify four ‘aims of campaigning’ — informing, persuading, reinforcing and mobilizing (p. 18) — although they, too, appear to give a basic primacy to persuading and mobilizing. They also anticipate the present argument in holding that, as ‘British voters have become less strongly committed to parties and more unstable in their voting behavior, the parties have been forced to . . . direct more effort to persuasion rather than relying on more traditional techniques of mobilizing supporters’ (p. 21).
5.
4 This understanding of polling was also reflected in resistance against it. Robert Worcester recalls being asked by a Labour staffer to bury an early finding that the public wanted ‘a political party that “represented all classes”’ on the grounds that ‘we [Labour] don’t want and don’t need middle-class support to win British elections’ (Worcester and Mortimore, 1999: 12).
6.
5 These data include the Liberal Democrats, although this party (with its constituency-campaign focus) seems unlikely to be reducing ‘traditional campaigning’ in the aggregate.
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Article first published online: August 26, 2009
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