Political Parties and Party Systems (original) (raw)

On Political Parties in Contemporary Democracies: From the classic perspective to the current debate

The crisis of political parties in contemporary societies and democracies is composed of different points of views, that require a joint effort for social and political science to try to understand the changing relationship between citizens and parties. Compared to the political mass models, which are typical of the second half of the twentieth century, parties undergo deep processes of transformation. The beginning of a critical season for the traditional forms of political organization goes back to those years; and this critical season can be configured as ideological, organizational and institutional. Between the twentieth and twenty-first century, the political parties has strengthened the structure of their political organization and the weight of their parliamentary activities within the institutions, becoming more and more «state-centered parties», characterized by the progressive reduction of the forms of territorial settlement and the growth of the importance of central organisms and the representatives of the assemblies, especially those elected in national parliaments. This results in significant changes of the organizational model and their political functions. In the face of these changes, will the parties still remain a key player for the functioning of contemporary democracy? We will focus on three fundamental steps: the analysis of the creation process of parties and of their function; the description of the most recent perspectives in political parties; the analysis of the relationship between the personalisation of politics and the passage to leader democracy.

10Political parties and the party ‘system’

Routledge eBooks, 2009

What does democracy require for political parties and a party system? Parties (and now other forms of 'election fighting organisation', like referendum campaigns) are diverse, so four kinds of democratic evaluation criteria are needed: (i) Structuring competition and engagement ✦ The party system should provide citizens with a framework for simplifying and organising political ideas and discourses, providing coherent packages of policy proposals, so as to sustain vigorous and effective electoral competition between rival teams. ✦ Parties should provide enduring brands, able to sustain the engagement and trust of most citizens over long periods. Because they endure through time, parties should behave responsibly, knowing that citizens can hold them effectively to account in future. ✦ Main parties should help to recruit, socialise, select and promote talented individuals into elected public office, ranging from local council to national government levels. ✦ Party groups inside elected legislatures (such as MPs or councillors), and elites and members in the party's extra-parliamentary organisation, should help to sustain viable and accountable leadership teams. They should also be important channels for the scrutiny of public policies and the elected leadership's conduct in office and behaviour in the public interest.

Political Parties — Old Concepts and New Challenges (Comparative Politics Series)

Acta Politica, 2003

This edited volume focuses-as the title promises-on political parties. Essentially, the focus is mainly on European parties and aims at taking stock of where we are at present and where we should go in terms of theory and evidence as regards the study of political parties. Judging the result as recorded in this book, there is a positive and negative side to it. The positive side would be that we find a readable collection of essays that inform us about the nature, development, and role of political parties. Some are better in this respect than others (not unusual in a collection of essays), some are innovative, and a few can be considered as 'eye-opening'. On the negative side, one can observe that although there is-according to the Introductory Chapter by Gunther and Montero-a need for further development of 'theory' and a related urgency for methodological rigour that this-in my opinion-has not become visible in many of the contributions. There is precious little conceptual debate and elaboration of 'old' concepts. Nor much systematic 'evidence' is presented that can be linked to the more general debates in this field of comparative politics. For example, hardly any attention has been paid to other (rival?) approaches to study political parties (such as the debate on 'Do parties matter?', or the importance of electoral studies in relation to parties and their behaviour, or to the systematic analysis of the policy-making capacities of parties in government). In this sense, the volume appears rather as a collection of essays of like-minded researchers that do not relate their ideas in other debates in the field of comparative democracy and the role of parties. Only one part of the introduction is reserved to an 'outside' discussion. This is directed against those who challenge the 'natural' role of parties and who claim their demise or, at least, that political parties may well be decline at present. Hence my judgement of this volume (by the way crowded with established researchers in this field, like Bartolini, Blondel, Daalder, Katz, Mair, etc.) is that for three reasons its structure and contents is unbalanced and unfinished business. First, there is some theory but little systematic evidence to back it up. Second, there are good conceptual discussions but little elaboration on how it can be applied in actual (comparative) research. Third, there is an overall tendency of being critical

Are political parties really indispensable? An overview of the alternatives

ConstDelib Working Papers, 2022

Representative democracy is inconceivable without political parties, most scholars seem to agree. Parties are required to recruit political leaders, aggregate demands, organise government and opposition, and mobilise citizens. However, they also close the representative process, reduce citizens’ capacity for spontaneous action and impede open-minded deliberation. While parties suffer from public hostility, alternative democratic forms have been conceived and sometimes tried out either in historical regimes or in small-scale experiments: assembly democracy, individual representation, council democracy, referendum democracy, liquid democracy and sortition. Exploring these alternatives with open-mind challenges the path-dependent assumption that parties are indispensable, but also helps to re-appreciate their roles and value. Responding to a call for more dialogue between empirical research on political parties and contemporary democratic theory, this article widens the debate on the necessity of political parties by extending it to new theoretical proposals, and maps it by bringing together insights from both fields.

Political Parties and Global Democracy

2000

This paper examines the place of political parties and party systems in providing democracy for the more global world of the twenty-first century. It argues that recent intense globalisation has by no means rendered political parties and party systems irrelevant. However, political parties have lost substantial democratic impact by failing to move on with today's more global times. Parties could