Although Nancy Rosenblum explicitly notes that her book “is not a project in comparative politics” (p. 14), her work adds an interesting perspective to some basic issues about the state of political parties in countries of the world that attempt democratic transitions in the developing and postcommunist worlds.

The global wave of democracy of the past several decades brought with it an enormous surge of political party development. This surge has included the revival of scores of parties that existed prior to authoritarian interruptions, as well as the emergence of hundreds and even thousands of new parties. These parties have rushed headlong into the countless elections that have marked democracy's “Third Wave,” producing a broader tide of multiparty politics than ever seen before on the international stage.

This proliferation of political parties might be interpreted as a golden age for an institution that has experienced significant ups and downs since its birth in the eighteenth century. Yet a closer look at the state of parties in the more than hundred countries that have moved away from authoritarian rule in the past 30 years suggests that the opposite might in fact be true. In the vast majority of these countries, parties are highly troubled organizations, displaying such a discouraging welter of deficiencies and liabilities that they are held in extremely low regard by the public. In fact, parties in the developing and postcommunist worlds are, in most countries, the least respected of all public institutions. To take just one of many possible examples, in Morocco a poll earlier in this decade found that only 8.7% of citizens evinced any sympathy for any of the country's political parties.

A striking characteristic of this situation is that despite the tremendous diversity of political histories, trajectories, and current conditions in these countries, the attributes of parties that cause citizens to dislike them so much are notably similar across countries. As I argued in my recent book on parties and international party assistance, Confronting the Weakest Link (2006), these attributes include the fact that parties are corrupt, self-interested, and elite-dominated organizations, that they stand for little and tend to embrace ideologies only superficially, that parties waste endless time squabbling with one another over petty issues rather than trying to solve their countries' problems, and that parties are ill-prepared for governing and perform badly when they do gain power.

A natural question to ask is whether what I have called this “standard lament” about parties in developing and postcommunist countries is an outgrowth of certain characteristics of party development of Third Wave democracies, or instead has been characteristic of party development in what are now considered the established democracies, such as the United States. Rosenblum's thoughtful exegesis of antipartyism in the United States provides some useful clues.

The antipartyism that Rosenblum identifies bears some substantial relation to the standard lament about parties in struggling democracies in the developing and postcommunist worlds. What she writes about the United States sounds familiar from the perspective of new democracies: “[P]arties depress participation; parties ‘turn voters off’; parties are captured by special interest groups or rich donors; party positions are too centrist or too extremist; parties do not contribute to public understanding of men or measures; they are unresponsive to public opinion or to the public interest” (p. 456).

The early form of antipartyism that Rosenblum also highlights, which she says appeared in the United States when parties were emergent, has similar parallels in the developing and postcommunist world today. This is the antipartyism that objects to parties on the basis that they are parts, which contravenes the intrinsic holism of a society, and also that they are inherently divisive. These same two criticisms are heard today in parts of Africa, such as Uganda, as part of a long-running debate on the continent as to whether the very concept of political parties is suited to societies that are amalgamations of different tribes and prone to tribal conflict. They are also heard in the former Soviet Union, where power elites in Russia, Central Asia, and elsewhere argue that dividing countries along political party lines weakens the fundamental unity essential for state strength.

Moreover, the kinds of solutions that American political reformers have looked to as possible cures for the shortcomings of parties are distinctly similar to what one encounters in many new democracies as well. For example, the idea advanced by some U.S. reformers that vigorous civil society development can serve as a nonpartisan, virtuous counterweight to the partisan, corrupted world of political parties has also been a major theme in many new democracies. It has been taken up and underwritten in these countries by international aid agencies eager to help with political reform but wary of direct contact with the messy world of political parties.

The parallel between the liabilities of parties in new democracies with those in the United States could be taken either as good news or bad news for the new democracies. It might be seen as good news in the sense that it implies that their own problems are not insurmountable for the achievement of a stable democracy, given that the United States has managed such achievement despite its party problems. Or it might be viewed as bad news in the sense that the problems with parties that put off citizens so much in new democracies are unlikely to be solved anytime soon, given that a country with enormous economic resources and political strengths like the United States has not been able to do so.

The parallel also has potential implications for exceptionalist thinking about U.S. politics. U.S. political parties may indeed have some exceptional features, at least compared with European parties, such as in their lack of defined membership, their all-in nature, and their intensive use of primaries for candidate selection. The commonalities between their shortcomings and those of parties in the developing and postcommunist worlds, however, suggest that this exceptionalist character may not be all that deep.

Although the parallel between the standard lament about parties in the developing and postcommunist worlds and antipartyism in the United States is suggestive, it should not be taken as a simple equivalence. The problems of parties may be similar in nature but they may also be qualitatively more severe in many developing and postcommunist countries than in the United States. Corruption, for example, has certainly afflicted U.S. political parties. But has it been comparable in scale to the massive corruption of, say, parties in Nigeria or Mexico? Similarly, parties in the United States have sometimes been ideologically vague, but does this compare to the almost complete ideological incoherence of parties in Kazakhstan, Thailand, or Guatemala?

The causes underlying apparently similar problems may also be different. Some of the shortcomings in the United States and other established democracies that have led to talk of “a crisis of parties” in postmodern democracies, like citizen disengagement and ideological convergence, are the result of what can be considered societal successes that foster atomized individualism and boredom with partisan politics, such as rising affluence, higher levels of education, a lack of serious threats to citizens' well-being, and the widespread adoption of new communication technologies. In contrast, some of the shortcomings of political parties in new democracies are societal shortcomings, including the weak state of the rule of law, widespread poverty, and poor governmental performance generally.

Rosenblum's defense of partisanship is also quite pertinent to ongoing debates over the state of politics in the developing and postcommunist worlds. A central problem with democracy in many countries of these regions is that democratic transitions occurred just at the time when the scope for basic choices over socioeconomic policy was shrinking due to globalization and, in particular, the strong consensus coming from the international financial institutions around a particular economic model. Millions of citizens in these countries got the vote just at the time when there was, in effect, less to vote about: Whichever political parties came to office, the same market-driven economic policies were followed. This fact robbed nascent political parties of much of their basis for differentiation from one another. Partisanship became either a hollow or dangerous exercise, focusing either on mere symbols or on identity-based divisions, such as ethnicity and religion.

Rosenblum's insistence on the value of partisanship as being necessary to allow citizens real choices and, thus, real empowerment is very much applicable in these societies as well. With the global economic crisis undercutting the previous consensus on a single dominant economic model, voters all around the world, in both established and new democracies, are now facing and making more vital choices over basic economic policies and direction. The potential revitalization of political parties that may result is one silver lining of this daunting global economic situation.