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Exceptionalism, Political Science and the Comparative Analysis of Political Parties1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Alan Ware
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Abstract

For more than four decades the analysis of party organizations in the European democracies has been completely separated from analyses of American party structures. The first part of this article examines how and why such a separation was to emerge in the aftermath of Duverger's and Epstein's path-breaking original work. It then goes on to outline how an analytic framework might be developed so that more wide-ranging comparative studies of party organizations in democratic regimes can be undertaken in future. Only with such research can the limitations of ‘exceptionalist’ and ‘regionalist’ explanations of party structure development and change be overcome.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , 2011 , pp. 411 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011.

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this article was prepared for delivery at the Western Political Science Association conference, San Francisco, April 2010; I am grateful to Steven Wolinetz for his helpful comments on that draft and to an anonymous referee for Government and Opposition for similarly useful comments on a later draft.

References

2 MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?’, in Laslett, Peter, Runciman, W. G. and Skinner, Quentin (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society, 4th series, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1972, p. 14 Google Scholar.

3 Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties, London, Methuen, 1954 Google Scholar.

4 Not least because, as Daalder would argue much later, Durverger's generalizations fit the French case much better than they do other countries. This is part of a more general argument by Daalder that, even in the early 1980s, typologies of party systems tended to reflect reasoning from specific countries. It is true also of Duverger's analysis of party structures. Hans Daalder, ‘The Comparative Study of European Parties and Party Systems: An Overview’, in Hans Daalder and Peter Mair (eds), West European Party Systems: Continuity and Change, London, Sage, 1983, pp. 8 and 11.

5 He did so first in Epstein, Leon D., ‘A Comparative Study of Canadian Political Parties’, American Political Science Review, 58 (1964), pp. 46–59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, later, in Political Parties in Western Democracies, London, Pall Mall, 1967.

6 Robert A. Dahl, Political Opposition in Western Democracies, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1966 (the essay on the Netherlands was by Hans Daalder, ‘The Netherlands: Opposition in a Segmented Society’, pp. 188–236). This was to be followed in the immediately subsequent years by many other edited works that included previously little-studied (outside their own borders, that is) European polities, as well as major monographs on such states. For example, the first edition of Arendt Lijphart's The Politics of Accommodation appeared in 1968 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968). The year that Epstein published Political Parties in Western Democracies, 1967, also saw the publication of Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan's Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York, Free Press, 1967), a work that was to have immense influence on political science in Europe. Of course, like Dahl's volume, it was not a study that focused solely on the European political experience – far from it – but it helped to expose how fruitful intra-European comparisons might be in the study of political processes.

7 Of course, its advent reflected a broader expansion of European political science, particularly in Britain, at that time – another major development being the launching of the British Journal of Political Science (BJPS) in 1971. But whereas the BJPS was largely trans-Atlantic in its orientation, the ECPR helped especially to develop intra-European comparative analysis.

8 Kirchheimer, Otto, ‘The Transformation of the Western European Party System’, in LaPalombara, Joseph and Weiner, Myron (eds), Political Parties and Political Development, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966, pp. 177–200 Google Scholar.

9 Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976, republished (with a new introduction by Peter Mair) Colchester, ECPR Press, 2005. Although Sartori continued to publish on the impact of institutional factors of parties, he did not publish an analysis of why parties may develop particular kinds of internal structures until a previously unpublished paper from 1967 was published in 2005; ‘Party Types, Organization and Functions’, West European Politics, 28 (2005), pp. 5–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Klaus von Beyme, Political Parties in Western Democracies, Aldershot, Gower, 1985; originally published in German in 1982.

11 Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. xvi. The original was published as Modelli di Partito: Organizzazione e Potere nei Partiti Politici, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1982.

12 As well as Dahl's and Lipset's works (already mentioned), this era had also seen the publication of Almond and Verba's work (Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963), and during the 1970s other distinguished scholars of American institutions – including Richard Neustadt, Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky – were engaged on major research projects outside the United States.

13 Joseph A. Schlesinger, Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States, Chicago, Rand McNally, 1966; E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government, New York, Rinehart, 1942. An especially good example of the analysis of party development without reference to theories and models that might apply to parties outside the United States is John H. Aldrich, Why Parties?, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

14 Ware, Alan, The American Direct Primary, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ranney, Austin, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in America, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975 Google Scholar.

15 Historians have been much less willing to explain the rise of the direct primary in terms of anti-partyism than have political scientists. Although he reaches rather different conclusions to my own, John F. Reynolds's excellent study also does not link their advent to supposed anti-partyism: The Demise of the American Convention System, 1880–1911, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

16 Katz, Richard S. and Mair, Peter, ‘Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy’, Party Politics, 1 (1995), pp. 5–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Andre Krouwel, ‘Party Models’ and Alan Ware, ‘American Exceptionalism’, in Richard S. Katz and William J. Crotty (eds), Handbook of Party Politics, London, Sage, 2006, pp. 249–77. One attempt to apply the concept of the cartel party to the United States is Blyth, Mark and Katz, Richard, ‘From Catch-All Politics to Cartelization: The Political Economy of the Cartel Party’, West European Politics, 28 (2005), pp. 33–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Another good example of the breaking-down of ‘regionalist’ barriers in the discipline is Kevin Casas-Zamora's prize-winning study of the impact of public funding on party behaviour, Paying for Democracy: Political Finance and State Funding for Parties, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2005.

19 Carty, R. Kenneth, ‘Parties as Franchise Systems: The Stratarchical Organizational Imperative’, Party Politics, 10 (2004), pp. 5–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Among the factors that might be prompting such responses in the contemporary era are: the increase in the incidence of earthquake elections, changes in social norms that prompt demands for slates of candidates that reflect social diversity, and the transference of political debate to the internet – a move that weakens earlier boundaries between private, intra-party discussions and public debate.

21 Enyedi, Zsolt and Linek, Lukáš, ‘Searching for the Right Organization: Ideology and Party Structure in East-/Central Europe’, Party Politics, 14 (2008), pp. 455–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 On this process of organizational reform see Meg Russell, Building New Labour: The Politics of Party Organization, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

23 Hopkin, J. and Paulucci, C., ‘The Business Firm Model of Party Organization’, European Journal of Political Research, 35 (1999), pp. 307–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Plurality formulas tend to lead to a much greater concentration of the vote in that first round, because in a genuinely national election of this kind, voters are more likely to see the value of voting for a candidate who has a chance of winning. See Mark P. Jones, Electoral Laws and the Survival of Presidential Democracies, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, p. 94, table 6.3.

25 Carey, Jim, ‘Strong Candidates for a Limited Office: Presidentialism and Political Parties in Costa Rica’, in Mainwaring, Scott and Shugart, Matthew Soberg (eds), Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 199 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 While there has been far more research on electoral politics and on party systems than on party organizations, there are exceptions, including van Biezen, Ingrid, ‘On the Internal Balance of Party Power: Party Organizations in New Democracies’, Party Politics, 6 (2000), pp. 395–417 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Ingrid van Biezen, ‘Party Regulation and Constitutionalization: A Comparative Overview’, in Per Nordlund and Ben Reilly (eds), Political Parties and Democracy in Conflict-Prone Societies: Regulation, Engineering and Democratic Development, Tokyo, UN University Press, 2008, pp. 25–47. The tradition of regulating parties in the United States is one of the main themes in Leon D. Epstein's last major work, Political Parties in the American Mold, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

28 For a brief discussion of the impact of US theoretical frameworks on parties in the EU Parliament so far see Hix, Simon, ‘Towards a Partisan Theory of EU Politics’, Journal of European Public Policy, 15 (2008), p. 1255 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 ‘The parties were able to develop a pervasive reach in society, with active local organizations spurred by hopes of local notables receiving rewards…The ability of the parties to be so culturally and socially significant and deliver rewards, and hope of rewards…were some of the bases for successful democracy in Canada’ ( Stewart, Gordon T., ‘The Poverty of Canadian Politics?’, Democratization, 3 (1996), p. 41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

30 See Ware, The American Direct Primary, esp. ch. 9.

31 Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold, ch. 6.

32 Schlesinger, Ambition and Politics.