parties and introduction by Peter Mair party systems

parties and introduction by Peter Mair party systems Some five or six years ago, I was asked by the editor of the then ECPR News, James Newell, to contribute to a series of short articles about volumes of influence a series in which contemporary scholars would reflect on the volume that most influenced their intellectual development. In my case, the choice of volume was not difficult. Despite having been schooled in and suitably impressed by the traditional classics of comparative politics and political behaviour, there was really only one volume which I felt to have been intellectually unmissable, and without which my own work would probably have followed a very different trajectory: Giovanni Sartori s Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Volume 1, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1976, and, until now, long out of print. 1 I first discovered Sartori s work on parties and party systems in the early 1970s, when I was beginning my academic career. An earlier version of his typology of party systems had already appeared in English in Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner s very influential and standard-setting volume, Political Parties and Political Development, alongside equally path-breaking chapters by Daalder, Kirchheimer and Rokkan. 2 Another version had appeared somewhat later in Erik Allardt and Stein Rokkan s Mass Politics, 3 and the eventual 1976 volume had long been promised. I bought it as soon as it appeared, and was simply bowled over. This was an extraordinarily comprehensive work wide-ranging, tightly argued, and solidly grounded in empirical reality. It was also developed with an exceptionally high degree of conceptual clarity and rigour. As I grew to know Sartori s work more generally, I came to realise that this sort of conceptual rigour was his trademark. When first encountered, however, it was an eye-opener, as well as a great stimulus. The volume also proved of great benefit in a more instrumental sense. I was then doing some research on the development of the Irish party system, and Sartori s framework offered an ideal way of approaching the topic. Once I read his book, I quickly applied it to a lengthy paper on Ireland that I was preparing for my first ECPR Joint Sessions, scheduled to take place in Berlin in 1977. A version of that paper was later published in Comparative Politics 4 and it did me no end of good; for that reason also I think fondly of Parties and Party Systems. Although first published in 1976, Parties and Party Systems originally dates

4 parties and party systems back to at least the early 1960s. At that time, Sartori, who was then Professor of Political Science at the University of Florence, had begun to develop a new framework for the analysis of parties and party systems, and he had already published a short book on the topic in Italian in 1965. 5 In 1967, while a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale University, he completed and then circulated a lengthier English-language manuscript on the topic, which he then cited in his LaPolambara and Weiner chapter as forthcoming (1967) from Harper and Row. In the end, though, the book never appeared in this format, but was withdrawn by Sartori for further theoretical development and more empirical testing and application. As time passed, and as his work on the subject accumulated, the project itself expanded. In place of the original single volume, Sartori began instead to plan a two-volume work that would build on the approach in the 1967 text, but that would also take it a lot further. The first of these two volumes would deal with a much more elaborated version of what had been dealt with in Parts One and Two of the 1967 manuscript, including an analysis of the origin and rationale of political parties, as well as a classification and typology of party systems. It would also deal with the issue of party competition. The second volume would develop Parts Three and Four of the 1967 manuscript, and would include a framework for the study of party types, organisation and functions, as well as an analysis of the sociology of parties and the influence of electoral systems. The proposed new twovolume work would then conclude with an analysis of the relationship between the party system and the political system, with particular reference to the theory of coalitions and coalition government. This latter topic was wholly new, and had not been included in the 1967 draft. In the event, while the first volume was eventually published in 1976 by Cambridge University Press, and is now being reprinted by the ECPR Press, the planned second volume never appeared. The first volume ran to 370 pages, and dealt with what had been covered in just ninety-three pages in the original 1967 manuscript; what was actually published in 1976 therefore marked a very substantial development and expansion of the original text from a decade before. Presumably, the same would have been true for Volume 2 had it ever been published. In fact, the draft of the second volume was lost, in that the file containing all the notes, index cards, and the various supplementary texts that had been intended to fill out the original 1967 version of Parts Three and Four disappeared when the car in which it had been left was stolen and never recovered. Sartori never went back to Volume 2, and party scholarship is poorer as a result. That said, the volume was not a complete write-off. The proposed sections on the sociology of parties and the influence of electoral laws had already been published in article form at the end of the 1960s. This work was also partially incorporated in Sartori s later book dealing with constitutional engineering. 6 The sections on party types, organisation and function were never developed, however, and it is this loss which has proved particularly regrettable. For this reason, the journal West European Politics recently approached Sartori with the suggestion that the relevant unpublished sections from the original 1967 manuscript now

new introduction 5 be published in their original form. Happily, Sartori agreed, and the material has just appeared in West European Politics vol. 28, no 1, January 2005. Although the text that is carried by the journal is inevitably dated, and although obviously no account is taken of subsequent scholarship in the field, this previously unpublished analysis of the organisation and functions of political parties includes much that is highly original and insightful, and it goes some way towards filling the gap left by the missing Volume 2. In the 1980s, Sartori had considered combining a shorter version of Volume 1 with a new version of the missing Volume 2 to produce a single integrated volume with the appealing title, The Party Polity. For this reason he also allowed the English-language version of Volume 1 to go out of print, although it has remained in print in a Spanish-language edition, and it is also now being published for the first time in Chinese. Unfortunately, the integrated volume was also never written, with the result that not only was the work on party organisations never published, but it also became more and more difficult to get hold of the out-of-print Volume 1, as I discovered to my regret in the 1990s. My own copy of the book, along with most of my library, had been destroyed in a fire in 1984, and although I managed to replace it, I gave the new copy away to a needy graduate student. By then, it had gone off the market, and it was only relatively recently that I managed to obtain a used copy via the internet. (As luck would have it, the edition I found turned out to be the hardback copy that had once belonged to R.T. McKenzie, and includes his annotations and underlinings.) This ECPR reprint is therefore now very welcome. What we have here, in fact, is an extraordinarily rich volume. Although it now tends to be read, or at least cited, as the source of what is probably the most influential approach to the classification of competitive party systems, it is actually much more than this. It is, for example, a wonderfully sustained example of how one puts into practice the highly valuable analytic guidelines which Sartori had earlier advocated in two very influential methodological essays on concept formation and political sociology. 7 It includes what is still the most extensive and learned discussion of the concept and rationale of the political party (Chapters one to four), as well as a very insightful but now neglected critique of the prevailing spatial models of party competition (Chapter ten). It also includes (on p. 39) the widely-cited and now authoritative definition of a party system the system of interactions resulting from inter-party competition etc. although in hindsight it is curious to note how little attention Sartori actually gives to this definition and to its development. In some respects, this should be the core concept in the volume, and yet it emerges almost as if by chance in the context of a wider discussion of the party-state system, and is included simply in order to differentiate between political systems with one party, which do not have party systems as such, and political systems with a plurality of parties, which do have, or may have, party systems. In other words, while Sartori devotes almost 200 pages to distinguishing between party systems, he offers only a very short albeit now authoritative paragraph on how to define a party system in the first place. This is also

6 parties and party systems in sharp contrast to the extensive discussion that he devotes to the definition of party. Parties and Party Systems is still most widely known, of course, for the typology which it develops, and for the distinctions which it draws between systems of polarised pluralism, systems of moderate pluralism, predominant-party systems, and so on. With this typology, Sartori carried the thinking on party systems to a wholly new level. For although he did emphasise the importance of party numbers, or format, in the classification of party systems, and in this sense remained in step with other scholars in the field, he also went beyond these other typologies by including as a second principal definitional criterion the ideological distance that separated the parties in the system. Sartori s typology was also different in that he was explicitly concerned with the interactions between the parties in any given system the mechanics of the system and hence with the differential patterns of competition, and in his view these were best understood by applying both criteria. Party systems would therefore be classified according to the number of parties in the system, in which there was a distinction between formats with two parties, those with up to some five parties (limited pluralism) and those with some six parties or more (extreme pluralism); and according to the ideological distance separating the relevant extreme parties in the system, which would either be small ( moderate ) or large ( polarised ). Nevertheless, the two criteria were not completely independent of one another, in that Sartori also crucially argued that the format of the system contained mechanical predispositions, such that extreme pluralism could lead to polarisation. The combination of both criteria resulted in three principal types of party system: two-party systems, characterised by a limited format and a small ideological distance (e.g., the United Kingdom); systems of moderate pluralism, characterised by limited pluralism and a relatively small ideological distance (e.g., Denmark); and, polarised pluralism, characterised by extreme pluralism and a large ideological distance (e.g., Italy in the 1960s and 1970s). Sartori also allowed for what he called a predominant-party system, a system in which one particular party, such as the Liberal Democrats in Japan or Fianna Fáil in Ireland, consistently won a winning majority of parliamentary seats. This was always a somewhat ad hoc category, however, since it bore no necessary relation to either party numbers or ideological distance. As I have suggested elsewhere, there are a number of reasons why Sartori s typology can be regarded as the most important to be developed to date. In the first place, it is the most comprehensive of all the available typologies, both in terms of the care with which it is developed, as well as in terms of the way in which it is applied to empirical cases. Second, it has subsequently been employed in a variety of sophisticated national and cross-national studies, yielding a degree of insight into the functioning of party systems which is simply incomparably better than that developed by any of the alternative typologies. Third, it is explicitly concerned with patterns of competition and with the interactions between parties, and in this sense it is much more directly concerned with the functioning of the party

new introduction 7 system as such. Finally, it underlines the influence exerted by systemic properties, and by the party system, on electoral behaviour and patterns of government formation. It therefore allows us to conceive of both the parties and the party system operating as independent variables, constraining or even directing electoral preferences. Incidentally, while this has been a persistent emphasis throughout Sartori s work since at least the 1960s, those who adopt a similar approach today often assume that they are doing something entirely novel. It is now close to thirty years since the first publication of Parties and Party Systems, and questions can inevitably be raised regarding the continued utility and discriminating capacity of the typology. This is not least because of what has now become potential overcrowding in the moderate pluralism category, a concern that is also noted by Steven Wolinetz in his important contribution to the forthcoming Sage Handbook on Political Parties. 8 One problem here is that it has become more difficult to find unequivocal examples of a real two-party system. The United States, which is often cited as a classic two-party model, can also be seen as a four-party congressional-presidential system, or as a fragmented set of fifty state-level party systems. Both New Zealand and the United Kingdom have become more fragmented, and the latter now seems to incline more closely to the features of a predominant party system. On the other hand, a number of the newer democracies in Latin America as well as in southern and east-central Europe do seem to be settling into a bipolar pattern, even though it is sometimes two blocs of parties rather than two individual parties that represent the key alternatives. Italy, Germany and Austria might be considered as moving into such a category. At the other extreme, the recent decline and/or eclipse of traditional communist parties has made it more difficult to find unambiguous examples of systems of polarised pluralism. Sartori s criteria for this latter system are very carefully elaborated in this volume, and require there to be a maximum spread of [ideological] opinion, bilateral oppositions, and hence, necessarily so, a relevant anti-system party (a party that undermines the legitimacy of the regime it opposes ) at both ends of the political spectrum. It follows that should either of these two anti-system alternatives become irrelevant or disappear, there would then be an inevitable attenuation of the spread of opinion, a reduction in the extent of polarisation, and a possible end to bilateral opposition, thus forcing the cases out of the category. It is precisely this which has been seen in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. There are now no longer any communist anti-system parties on the left, while their equivalents on the right are being steadily absorbed and incorporated into the conventional system. Virtually all parties have now become coalitionable, with the result that it is more and more difficult to find any sustained cases of polarised pluralism. In sum, with pure twoparty systems being hard to find, and with cases of polarised pluralism becoming thin on the ground, most systems inevitably end up by being classified as variants of moderate pluralism, and this clearly reduces the contemporary discriminating power of Sartori s typology. Indeed, my own impression is that a strict adherence to Sartori s definitional criteria would lead

8 parties and party systems contemporary scholars to place more and more real-world systems increasingly within the sort of mixed categories which Sartori himself alludes to in his final summary of his overall framework (see Table 41, pp. 310 312). But while the application of Sartori s typology may now prove problematic, the logic of his approach remains unchallenged. Indeed, it is precisely this logic that allows us to see how the relevant distinctions between party systems become eroded in the real world. What is equally important is that Sartori has here provided effectively the last word. As Steve Wolinetz has observed, attention to the theory of party systems, which had flourished so strongly in the 1960s and early 1970s, has now more or less faded away. There seems to be nothing new to be added. In the study of the practice of party systems, of course, there can be no last word, and the journals and bookshelves continue to be inundated with discussions of their ongoing dynamics, as well as with analyses of how they change and of how they function. In terms of classifications and typologies, however, as well as in terms of broad theory, there has really been nothing of note since Parties and Party Systems, and in this sense Sartori really did put a very lengthy debate to rest. 9 Sartori s major asset in Parties and Party Systems, as elsewhere in his broadranging work on parties, political systems, and political theory, is his power of reasoning. He is simply very sharp, and he is also very precise in his thinking. In this sense he remains an exceptional scholar in contemporary political science. The more sophisticated we become technically, he noted in the original preface to this volume, the more inept we become conceptually. This is one of his recurring concerns, but it is also justifiable, and perhaps even more so now than was the case in 1976. The great thing about Sartori, on the other hand, and about Parties and Party Systems, is that he is conceptually very apt. Indeed, to read Sartori is to be convinced again and again about the importance and utility of the famous ladder of abstraction that he sketched in his famous 1970 APSR article, and that had also figured prominently in his 1967 manuscript. My great strength, he once told me, is that I can go up and down the ladder. This volume shows how he does that to great effect. Despite any problems which might arise in the contemporary application of his typology, there are still countless valuable lessons to be learned from re-reading this volume. Not the least of these is the advice that is offered towards the end, and that seems particularly appropriate within the world of twenty-first century political science: We must beware of a precision that is nothing but an operational artefact, he warns (p. 319). Words alone beat numbers alone. Words with numbers beat words alone. And numbers make sense, or much greater sense, within verbal theory. In 1998, more than twenty years after its original publication, the APSA section on Political Organizations and Parties selected Parties and Party Systems for its Outstanding Book Award, an award that is intended to honor a book of outstanding, lasting significance to the field. This is certainly such a book, and it remains as vibrant and insightful as when it first came fresh off the Cambridge

new introduction 9 presses in 1976. Now it is rolling again, this time as one of the launch volumes of the ECPR Classics series. As a young scholar in 1976, I then found it a great inspiration. Now, thirty years on, I still find it a wonderful book, and it is an honour to be able to introduce it to a new generation of scholars. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 See Peter Mair, Volumes of Influence, ECPR News, Spring, 1999, pp. 30 31. This present text is an expanded version of that earlier assessment. Giovanni Sartori, European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism, in Joseph LaPalobara and Myron Weiner, eds., Political Parties and Political Development, Princeton University Press, 1966, pp. 137 76. Giovanni Sartori, The Typology of Party Systems: Proposals for Improvement, in Erik Allardt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Mass Politics: Studies in Political Sociology, Free Press, 1970, pp. 322-52. Peter Mair, The Autonomy of the Political: The Development of the Irish Party System, Comparative Politics, December 1979, pp. 445 65. Giovanni Sartori, Partiti e Sistemi di Partito, Firenze, Editrice Universitaria, 1965. Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering, 2nd ed., Macmillan, 1996. Giovanni Sartori, Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics, American Political Science Review, December 1970, pp. 1033 53; Giovanni Sartori, From the Sociology of Parties to Political Sociology, in S.M. Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 65 100. Steven B. Wolinetz, Party Systems, in William J. Crotty and Richard S. Katz, eds., Handbook on Political Parties, Sage, forthcoming. For a valuable restatement of the relevance of his approach, together with a cross-national application, see Giacomo Sani and Giovanni Sartori, Polarization, Fragmentation and Competition in Western Democracies, in Hans Daalder and Peter Mair, eds., Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change, Sage, 1983, pp. 307 40. Leiden, 2004. Peter Mair is Professor of Comparative Politics at Leiden University in the Netherlands and is co-editor of West European Politics.