Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond
be strong in many countries, these data may be interpreted in very different ways. One might contend that the manifestations of party decline reflect more a shift from one type of party to another.3 By this logic, the declining levels of affiliation with political parties may simply be due to the progressive displacement of mass-based parties by party organizations that are structured in different ways, pursuing different objectives, or pursuing the same objectives through different means.
Similarly, the fact that parties emerging in new democracies may depart substantially from party models that emerged in Western Europe in the early twentieth century may imply that newly emerging organizational forms are more quickly adapting to dominant features of the contemporary socioeconomic and technological environments than are older parties that institutionalized in an earlier era.
Even if this “evolution of party” explanation is valid, however, it would not necessarily imply that all of the functions performed by older types of parties are being adequately fulfilled by new types of parties.
Conversely, it is possible that new types of parties are better suited to meet the demands and expectations of today’s citizens than those that were established by previous generations of political elites. In either case, the performance capabilities of different types of parties have important implications for the quality of democracy in new and old democracies alike.
Given these substantial questions concerning the interpretation of these findings, it is important to systematically survey the types of parties that exist in today’s democracies, and to examine the kinds of functions that are performed or privileged by each party type. It is not unreasonable to expect that no single party type can simultaneously achieve a number of often incompatible political and social objectives, and that the dis-placement of one party type by another may have a substantial impact on the character and quality of democracy in the world today.
A Typology of Parties
Some students of political parties may not welcome the introduction of yet another typology of parties. Indeed, the literature is already rich with various categories of party types that have been in use for decades.
However, we have not found the existing models of parties sufficient to capture all of the important characteristics of parties dealt with in this volume. This is for several reasons.
First, all of the existing typologies of political parties were derived from studies of West European parties over the past century-and-a-half.
Accordingly, they fail to capture important distinguishing features of parties in other parts of the world. This is certainly true of parties that have emerged in developing countries whose populations exhibit considerable ethnic, religious, or linguistic diversity, upon which
competitive parties have most commonly been based. It is even true of the United States, whose two highly decentralized parties fit uneasily with most existing party typologies.4 Thus while we acknowledge the many contributions of empirical studies of parties that have been based upon these traditional West European party models, we believe that the study of parties in other world regions would be greatly enhanced by a reassessment and broadening of these typologies.
Second, the existing party types have been based on a wide variety of criteria, and little or no effort has been invested in an attempt to make the resulting party types consistent with one another. Some typologies are functionalist, classifying parties on the basis of some specific goal or organizational raison d’^etre that they pursue. Sigmund Neumann, for example, distinguishes between three types of parties: “Parties of individual representation” articulate the demands of specific social groups. “Parties of social integration” have well-developed organizations and provide a wide variety of services to members, encapsulating them within a partisan community, in exchange for which they count on financial contributions and volunteered services of members during election campaigns. “Parties of total integration” have more ambitious goals of seizing power and radically transforming societies, demanding the full commitment and unquestioning obedience of members.5 Herbert Kitschelt differentiates parties that emphasize the “logic of electoral competition” from those (such as his “left libertarian” type) that place much greater stress on the “logic of constituency representation.”6 And Richard Katz and Peter Mair implicitly advance a functionalist logic in setting forth the model of the “cartel party,” in which public financing of parties and the expanded role of the state induce party leaders to restrain competition and seek primarily to perpetuate themselves in power in order to avail themselves of these new resources.7
Other classification schemes are organizational, distinguishing between parties that have thin organizational structures and those that have developed large infrastructures and complex networks of collaborative relationships with other secondary organizations. The classic statement of this kind was by Maurice Duverger, who advanced a two-and-a-half-category scheme separating “cadre” parties (most commonly led by individuals with high socioeconomic status) from
“mass” parties (which mobilize broad segments of the electorate through the development of a large and complex organization), with the Leninist
“devotee” party alluded to but dismissed as “too vague to constitute a separate category.”8 Kitschelt posits a four-part classification system distinguishing between “centralist clubs,” “Leninist cadre” parties,
“decentralized clubs,” and “decentralized mass” parties.9 And Angelo Panebianco, in the most elaborate articulation of an organizational typo-logy, contrasts “mass-bureaucratic” parties with “electoral-professional”
parties.10
Some scholars of party politics implicitly or explicitly base their work on the notion that parties are the products of (and ought to represent the interests of) various social groups. This sociological orientation characterizes the analysis of parties set forth by Samuel Eldersveld and Robert Michels, as Panebianco points out.11 Finally, there are some prominent scholars who indiscriminately mix all three of these sets of criteria, such as Otto Kirchheimer, who posits four party models:
“bourgeois parties of individual representation,” “class-mass parties,”
“denominational-mass parties,” and “catch-all people’s parties.”12 We do not object to the notion that several different criteria may be employed to differentiate one type of party from another. (Indeed, as is apparent below, we use three criteria as the basis of our own integrative schema.) Instead, we regard the current status of the literature on parties as unsatisfactory for several reasons: First, this typologizing has not been sufficiently “cumulative,” as proponents of the various typologies based on differing criteria “talk past” one another, and do not systematically assess the overlap or distinctiveness, not to mention the relative merits of the various classification schemes.13 Second, by selecting just one criterion as the basis of a typology (be it organizational structure, principal organizational objective, or social basis of representation), the focus of analysis is narrowed excessively, and much variation within each party type is not systematically analyzed. What is gained in terms of parsimony is lost in terms of the ability to capture theoretically significant variation among real-world parties. This weakness is compounded insofar as these typologies were based almost exclusively on the West European experience, and thus ignore important features of parties that have emerged elsewhere. Third, many of these studies are excessively deductive, positing at the outset that one particular criterion is of paramount importance without sustaining that assertion through a careful assessment of relevant evidence. Finally, in attempting to build theory on the basis of these thin, deductive schema, some studies fall victim to reductionist argumentation. Duverger, for example, sets forth an organization-based typology, but also acknow-ledges the great importance of social class—linking cadre parties with the middle and upper strata, and the working class with mass-based parties. He explains this relationship by contending that these organi-zational forms are dictated by varying levels of resources and constraints faced by party-builders in their efforts to secure the funding necessary to support their activities.
We believe that it is premature to attempt to build elaborate theories on the basis of what may be inadequate typologies, and that a more open and ultimately productive line of empirical analysis should begin with a theoretically more modest but empirically comprehensive and accu-rate set of party types that are better reflective of real-world variations among parties.14 This is particularly necessary in an effort (as represented
by this volume) to include countries outside of Western Europe within a preliminary comparative analysis. Thus we shall increase the number of party types, building on models and terminology previously advanced by other scholars, while at the same time imposing some semblance of order on some of the criteria most commonly used as the basis of party typologies. Specifically, we will try to avoid the common temptation to introduce a new party type on ad hoc grounds, simply on the basis of a conclusion that a particular case cannot be adequately explained using the existing typologies. Instead, we will systematically place all of our party models within a comprehensive framework constructed on the basis of three criteria: 1) the size of formal organization of the party and the extent of the functions they perform (ranging from thin, elite-based parties to extensive mass-based party organizations); 2) whether the party is tolerant and pluralistic or proto-hegemonic in its objectives and behavioral style; and 3) its distinguishing programmatic or ideo-logical commitments.
It is important to note that the models of political parties that we will describe below are ideal types, in the strictest Weberian sense of that term. As such, they are heuristically useful insofar as they give easily understandable labels that will help the reader better comprehend other-wise complex, multidimensional concepts. Moreover, they facilitate analysis insofar as they serve as baselines for comparisons involving real-world cases, or as extreme end-points of evolutionary processes that might never be fully attained. But like all ideal types, there will be no real-world cases that fully conform to all of the criteria that define each party model, and some parties may include elements of more than one ideal type.
Seven Functions of Parties
In order to achieve this objective and explore some of the implications of different party types for the character and quality of electoral democracy, it is first necessary to identify the various functions performed by political parties. While the following is not an exhaustive list of the functions performed by all parties (particularly in nondemo-cratic regimes, where a party-state may play a dominant role in the economy or in regulating the lives of individual citizens), the functions outlined below appear to represent a reasonable “common denominator”
that will assist in the comparison of parties crossnationally.
Clearly, the core function played by parties involves elite recruitment.
This, in turn, involves two distinct phases of the electoral process: 1) candidate nomination, in which the contestants representing each party in the following interparty election are designated; and 2) electoral mobilization, in which parties motivate their respective electoral clienteles to support their candidates and, in some instances, facilitate
their active participation in the electoral process. Over the short term, electoral outcomes may be dependent on a number of factors, some of them quite transient. Over the long term, however, depending on the electoral-mobilization strategy adopted by the party, repeated iterations of electoral campaigns may structure the vote in a relatively durable manner, as social groups may “freeze” their attachments to parties, or as individuals may come to “identify” with political parties. Whether they adopt electoral mobilization strategies primarily stressing questions of only transient relevance, or focusing on the more durable interests of various social groups, parties play a crucial role in structuring the choices and alternatives along different issue dimensions. We call this function 3) issue structuring.
Parties also 4) represent various social groups, either symbolically or in advancing specific interests. This societal representation function can be performed in the course of electoral competition, as parties bid for the support of various groups. Societal representation also takes place in the legislative arena, following the election, when bills are drafted and deliberated upon. This often, if not invariably, involves calculations of gain or loss on behalf of various social groups, whether parties openly acknowledge that fact or, according to their calculations of self-interest, downplay or completely conceal the potential impact of legislative proposals on social groups. 5) Interest aggregation is another function performed by political parties. Democratic systems vary in the extent to and the means by which they meld the separate interests of individual groups into broader, if not more universalistic, appeals. In the two-party presidential system of the United States, for example, parties perform the interest aggregation function during the electoral process itself (either formally, in drafting platforms at party conventions, or informally, as appeals are made to different groups in the course of the campaign). In parliamentary systems with fragmented multiparty systems, this aggregation process occurs after the election, when a gover-ning coalition is negotiated and formed. Success in the performance of this interest-aggregation process has important implications for the coherence of public policy and for “policy stability”15 over the long term. Similarly, the parties’ success in 6) forming and sustaining govern-ments in office represents a key performance dimension. Finally 7), parties may play a crucial social integration role, as they enable citizens to participate effectively in the political process and, if successful in that task, to feel that they have a vested interest in its perpetuation.16 In the following section, we identify the different ways in which and degrees to which our different types of parties perform these seven functions.
This listing of functions does not imply that all parties perform all of these functions, nor that they perform them equally well. Quite the contrary, the following discussion of various party types will make it
clear that a particular party type will stress one or a set of these functions over others. Thus we suggest that the character of electoral democracy may by substantially affected by the differential performance of these functions as one party type comes to prevail over the others.
Types of Political Parties
A typology of parties should explicitly deal with several different dimensions of party life involving the varying electoral strategies, social representation, principal objectives, and organizational capacities of parties. Some parties are organizationally thin while others are large and complex; some parties are exclusively based in a particular ethnic, religious, or socioeconomic group, while others are heterogeneous if not promiscuously eclectic. Some parties are clearly programmatic or ideo-logical, while others are pragmatic or even unprincipled. Some parties are intensely committed to securing some specific social objective, while others merely want to win elections. Our typology (summarized in Tables 1 and 2, and in Figure 1, with “organizationally thin” parties toward the left and “organizationally thick” parties towards the right side of the diagram) identifies 15 different “species” of party, each of which, in turn, belongs to a broader “genus” of party types: elite-based parties, mass-based parties, ethnicity-based parties, electoralist parties, and move-ment parties. Several of these genera are, in turn, separated into subcate-gories of “pluralistic” versus “proto-hegemonic” parties (separating loyal, democratic parties from semiloyal or antisystem parties within democratic regimes), or into subcategories based on their level of commitment to an ideology or program.
We must stress at the outset that, although we shall order our presentation of party types in rough accord with the timing of their respective initial appearances on the scene, we do not assert or imply
TABLE 1—SUMMARY TYPOLOGYOF PARTY TYPES
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TABLE 2—TYPESOF PARTIESAND THEIR FEATURES
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TABLE 2—TYPESOF PARTIESAND THEIR FEATURES (CONT’D) organizations
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that any one type of party was, is, or will be dominant within any particular period of time. Instead, we are impressed with the diversity of party types that exist today, even when many of the social or cultural circumstances that gave birth to them have long since disappeared.
Neither do we assert that one party type is likely to follow a predictable trajectory, evolving into another type. At the same time, however, it is clear that there is a general trend (noted in several chapters of this book and elsewhere in the literature on parties) away from organizationally thick parties, be they mass-based or ethnicity-based, and towards organizationally thin “electoralist” parties. This is in part because socioeconomic modernization and technological development, such as the spread of mass communications, and particularly television, have fundamentally transformed the channels linking party organizations and elites to citizens, interests, and organized groups. This has tended to make the survival of some archaic party types (for example, the traditional local notable and clientelistic parties) much more problematic, while at the same time laying the groundwork for the emergence of new party types (for example, electoralist and left-libertarian parties) that may require a certain type of communications medium or a relatively high level of citizen education.
Elite parties. “Elite-based” parties are those whose principal organizational structures are minimal and based upon established elites within a specific geographic area. Deference to the authority of these elites is a feature shared by the two species of parties that fall within this genus. Whatever national-level party structure exists is based upon an alliance among locally based elites.
Historically, as Hans Daalder points out in this volume, the first party type to emerge was the traditional local notable party.17 This early-to-mid nineteenth century development emerged at a time of sharply limited suffrage in semidemocratic regimes.18 Given that the right to vote and hold office was restricted in most of these countries to males owning substantial property, this competitive game was limited to the upper socioeconomic strata. And given that election to office required appeals to a small number of enfranchised voters, campaigns did not require an extensive organizational effort. Local notables could often count on their traditionally based prestige or personal relationships with their few and socially homogeneous constituents to secure office.
Central party bureaucracies did not exist, and national-level “party”
organizations consisted of relatively loose alliances or cliques linking elected members of parliament on the basis of shared interests or bonds of mutual respect. The parliamentary factions that dominated the British House of Commons in the first half of the nineteenth century, French conservative parties in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and several conservative parties in Brazil today are
FIGURE—EXTENTOF ORGANIZATION
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examples of this variety of elite party. Expansion of the suffrage and socioeconomic modernization (which entailed the political mobilization of formerly excluded sectors of society) progressively limited the electoral effectiveness of such poorly institutionalized and resource-poor parties, while urbanization made the predominantly rural traditional notables increasingly irrelevant to most voters.
The clientelistic party began to emerge just as the traditional local notable party was subjected to challenges from newly enfranchised segments of the electorate within societies undergoing industrialization and urbanization. Indeed, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the emergence of the clientelistic party was a direct response by local elites to the challenges posed by the political mobilization of formerly
“subject” populations: As traditional deference to local elites began to break down, electoral mobilization relied increasingly on an exchange of favors or overt coercion. The clientelistic party, as we shall define it, is a confederation of notables (either traditional or of the newly emerging liberal-professional or economic elite), each with his own geographically, functionally, or personalistically based support, organized internally as particularistic factions. Such a party typically has a weak organization and places little or no stress on program or ideology. Its principal function is to coordinate the individual campaign efforts of notables, usually indirectly or loosely, for the purpose of securing power at the national level. Their campaign activities, in turn, are based on hierarchical chains of interpersonal relationships of a quasi-feudal variety, in which relatively durable patterns of loyalty are linked with the exchange of services and obligations.
While all clientelistic parties are characterized by particularistic factional organization, in their heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—in Southern Europe,19 Latin America,20 and North American big-city machines and southern rural politics21—the exchange of personalistic favors also served as a principal tool for electoral mobilization at the mass level. Such relationships are most common in rural, premodern societies: Under conditions of geographical isolation from a dominant center of government, coupled with low levels of functional literacy and poorly developed transportation and com-munications media, a localized patron-client relationship can be mutually beneficial to both the patron and the client. (In the United States this variety of politics focused on immigrant populations,22 otherwise vulnerable and without political resources, particularly among those without adequate English-language skills.) As a party official in a socioeconomically lagging, rural part of Spain described it, “The citizen who is worried about resolving problems with the doctor or the school, or the problem of an unjust accusation before the courts, or of delinquency in paying his taxes to the state, etc., . . . has recourse to an intermediary . . . who can intercede on his behalf, but in exchange for
pledging his very conscience and his vote.”23 As socioeconomic modernization proceeds—as shrinking rural populations became increasingly literate, exposed to mass communications media, and
“mobilized” politically (or as immigrant populations in the United States learned English and became educated and assimilated into American society)—the utility of the patron to the citizen declines, and the patron’s attempts to influence voting decisions are increasingly perceived as objectionable interference. Under these circumstances, more coercive forms of patron-client exchanges tended to emerge, often involving the threat to withhold economic benefits from the client unless his or her political support is pledged, or overt vote-buying displaces the exchange of favors. Over the long run, however, socioeconomic modernization and the increasing “cognitive mobilization” of the mass public greatly reduce the utility of clientelism as a vehicle for electoral mobilization.24 Once institutionalized and embedded within the structure of political parties, however, these patron-client relationships may take on a life of their own, independent of the socioeconomic conditions that had given rise to them originally. It would appear that in both Italy and Japan, whose postwar party systems were established in less modernized societies (particularly in the south of Italy and rural parts of Japan), clientelism was embedded into the very structure of the dominant parties (the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Democratic Party, respectively).
Once established, these factional networks became the principal bases of elite recruitment within the governing parties of both party systems, and were perpetuated well beyond the time when the socioeconomic conditions that had given birth to them had largely disappeared. While these organizations survived for decades, it is interesting to note that the clientelistic exchanges on which they were based may contain the seeds of their own eventual destruction. Particularism and the distribution of rewards based upon faction membership easily evolve into overt corruption. Not surprisingly, clientelistic parties in both of these systems ultimately suffered serious (and in the case of the Italian parties, fatal) electoral setbacks as part of a popular reaction against corruption scandals. (The same has happened more recently in Thailand and the Philippines, although some parties in each of these countries retain features of the clientelistic model.) Since social change had made these kinds of exchanges increasingly repugnant to ever larger numbers of voters, when high-level scandals were exposed, a series of defections from the once dominant governing parties drastically undermined their organizational unity and strength.
With regard to the basic functions of these elite-based parties, and especially clientelistic parties, 1) candidate nomination is based largely or entirely on loyalty to faction leaders and bargaining among the principal faction leaders; 2) electoral mobilization is based upon the mobilization of vertical social networks; 3) the issues that are most