Exceptionalism may be defined as any account of a social or political phenomenon which denies that explanations for it can be constructed by comparing it with seemingly similar phenomena evident in other contexts. Attempts to engage in comparison will be unhelpful, at best, and at worst wholly misleading. The allegedly ‘exceptional’ case involves either causal factors not present in apparently comparable cases, or an interaction of causal factors that are common to the ‘exceptional’ and other cases, but with the links between those factors being radically different in the former. The claim made by its proponents is that such an instance can be understood only in its own terms. In some countries exceptionalism was one of the core ideas with which political science had to contend when that discipline emerged during the late 1940s from the legalistic tradition of analysis that had hitherto predominated. It had been especially influential among historians in the United States and France; in both countries there is a long-standing, and widely accepted, set of beliefs among intellectuals that theirs was not just different but wholly different from seemingly similar democracies. The main problem posed by exceptionalism is not the absence of exceptional cases: most surely they exist. Rather the claim that an instance is exceptional tends to act as an ab initio barrier to other forms of analysis that could demonstrate whether, and, if so, how and why there is this exception. Ultimately it tends to lead to the generation of a whole series of particularistic, and sometimes misleading, accounts of phenomena.
As it developed, political science rapidly tried to move beyond these explanations of a phenomenon (institution, process or pattern of behaviour) within a single country to more general explanations that could embrace different countries or different eras in a given country. The evolution of the sub-field of comparative politics was crucial in the discipline's transformation. In the early years – that is in the 1950s – it was unclear, though, whether it was more useful to make comparisons across all types of regimes, or to focus more on comparisons where there were some similarities in the incentives and constraints facing political actors. For proponents of the latter, representative democracies became an obvious unit of analysis. While broader comparative studies were still conducted in some sub-fields, with respect to political behaviour, institutions, and processes it was democracies that eventually became the main focus for much comparative analysis during the 1960s.
The subject of this article is a rather odd variant of exceptionalism that has subsequently developed in political science – models of party structures. It is peculiar partly because, although major comparative works were published early on, quite separate modes of analysis were to develop on the two sides of the Atlantic. To this day, the study of political parties remains a sub-field of the discipline in which scholars who work on American parties continue to conduct research as if parties elsewhere had little relevance to their own work. Similarly, scholars in other democracies, and especially Western Europe, treat American parties as sui generis, about which their own analytic frameworks can reveal little. In Europe a way of thinking about parties has developed that, while not truly ‘exceptionalist’, is certainly ‘regionalist’ in that it focuses on party change largely with respect to the operation of parties within just the European continent. Neither side – Americanist nor Europeanist – believes that it has that much to learn from the other. The object of this article is to examine how a bifurcation in this particular sub-field of political science developed and whether it is possible to bridge the gap between two isolated arenas of scholarship.
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PARTY ORGANIZATIONS SINCE THE 1950s
The systematic comparative study of politics began in the decade immediately after 1945, and in its early development confronted two main problems. One was that there were a number of states about which relatively little was known, partly because – and this was true of some Western European countries – the study of political phenomena there was still concentrated in university law departments. In producing a strong bias towards research on narrowly constitutional issues, this skewed understandings of how political institutions actually operated in many democracies outside the Anglo-American universe. A second problem was how to engage in comparative analysis, given that the political world seemed to contain radically different kinds of regimes: liberal democracies, authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships, states prone to extended periods of military intervention and military rule, and so on. Institutions seemed to vary so much between different types of regime that even those that had been given the same name (such as ‘party’) could differ radically in purpose and in operation; this was a point Alasdair MacIntyre was later to seize on in a famous essay in which he produced a devastating critique of the possibility of there being a comparative science of politics.Footnote 2
Ironically, in hindsight, the comparative study of party organizations, as well as of party systems, started quite rapidly. This was largely due to the publication of a book that, in many respects, was a ‘one-off’– Maurice Duverger's Political Parties.Footnote 3 First published in French in 1951, this book was to have remarkably little influence on the development of political science in France, which for decades continued to be influenced heavily by a legalistic tradition, and later by sociological frameworks of analysis. However, Political Parties was translated into English speedily (by the normal standards of academic works) and was published in London just three years later. There had been nothing quite like it. Duverger's book was of broad scope and put forward challenging arguments – precisely the kind of work that should have launched a ‘thousand ripostes’ from critics.Footnote 4 Part of the problem in countering the book, though, was that there were few other scholars who had Duverger's range of knowledge of party politics in a wide variety of countries. The American political scientist Leon Epstein was one of the few who could take up the challenge.Footnote 5 Epstein's explicit assumption, which was implicit in Duverger's book but not one around which the latter organized his work, was that electoral competition shaped how parties had to organize themselves. While recognizing that other institutional variables intervened to affect the overall form of particular party structures, Duverger, like Epstein, had seen the presence of electoral competition as something that necessarily influenced all parties in democratic polities. Only those with goals other than the winning of public office could afford to ignore the imperative of organizing themselves in the way that would maximize their effectiveness in the electoral market.
Epstein's approach, emphasizing the absolute primacy of the electoral incentive for parties in liberal democracies, fitted well with how comparative politics had started to develop in the previous decade or so. However, it was not so much Epstein's exclusive focus on party structures in electorally competitive regimes that was to be noticed by the political science community, as the fact that he drew opposing conclusions to Duverger's. Duverger had seen American parties as political fossils – survivors of an earlier era of party mobilization – that had been able to survive because they had not had to face competition from ‘modern’ parties. By contrast, Epstein argued that it was American parties that were the most advanced, because they had adapted themselves to the demands of contemporary political campaigning. European parties, he argued, would themselves have to adapt in order to develop the degree of flexibility needed to organize campaigns based on television and so on. The mass membership party model lacked the flexibility required by political leaders, and, in time, European parties would become more like their American counterparts. Consequently, with respect to party structure, change in Europe would involve contagion not from the left, but from the right.
Today most scholars would agree that neither conclusion was correct, but what Duverger and Epstein had done was set out frameworks for analysing political parties on a broadly comparative basis. Why, though, did Epstein's rebuttal of Duverger fail to become a core debate in political science? It was a matter of central concern in the discipline, involving two leading scholars who had mastered knowledge of a wide range of political systems, and there was a direct conflict between them with respect to their conclusions. Epstein would seem to be Locke to Duverger's Hobbes, but instead of helping to shape the academic agenda for the next generation there was little debate, as the study of party organizations moved off in separate directions in the two continents. These early attempts to develop a comparative analysis of parties that incorporated, at the very least, all democracies were still-born.
In the following decades in Europe party structures came to be studied mainly from an ‘area studies’ perspective, rather than from the broader approach of Duverger and Epstein. Five main reasons are relevant in explaining why this ‘regionalization’ road was now to be taken. One was that, for the first time, it was possible for political science to undertake systematic intra-European comparisons; by the mid-1960s considerably more studies about European polities other than Britain, France and pre-war Germany came to be available in the English language. Robert Dahl, then the most famous political scientist in the world, had edited Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, in which essays on countries such as the Netherlands brought detailed knowledge about ‘other’ regimes to a wider political science community, although even then much of the research focus was on party systems rather than on the internal operations of parties.Footnote 6 Comparative analysis centred on the democratic regimes of Western Europe became not just a possibility, but seemingly an important way forward for political science using comparative methodologies.
This move to treat Western Europe as a distinctive region was aided by a second factor that was to contribute to the marginalization of the Duverger–Epstein approach: the growth of political science institutions promoting such studies. A decade later (in 1977) the publication of the journal West European Politics confirmed the region's status as an area of study – in much the same way that the Communist world, Latin America and Africa had become (or were rapidly becoming) such areas, with much research involving intra-area comparisons. West European Politics made its debut at the end of this process. Far more important, in terms of facilitating research between Europeanists, had been the establishment of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR). Initial discussions between leading and well-known political scientists in Europe about the formation of such a body had begun before its foundation in 1970, although it was not until 1973 that the ECPR held the first of its annual workshops.Footnote 7 There can be little doubt that one of the most immediate and lasting effects of the ECPR was to aid the development of intra-European comparative studies. In bringing together European scholars the ECPR helped to create a ‘Europeanist’-oriented political science on that continent.
Nevertheless, neither this first nor second factor did more than facilitate the shift away from the broader comparative approach; they do not really explain why a major Duverger–Epstein debate failed to emerge after 1967, or why such a putative debate did not help fix the research agenda for the study of party structure change. The remaining three reasons help us to understand that. Not surprisingly, one factor was that Epstein's substantive conclusion – that American parties were in some sense more advanced than those in Europe, and that the latter would come to resemble the former – did not play especially well in European circles. It was on a par with the reception to Duverger in the United States; someone who thought that American parties were merely some kind of ‘living fossil’ was never going to set the terms of the debate as to why, in some respects at least, American party organization seemed to be different. Whatever insights Duverger's view seemed to offer it was always likely to be sidelined in America, given that there were aspects of American party structure for which it appeared to fail to account. Yet European scholars could not have avoided the challenge that Epstein had thrown down, had it not been for the nearly simultaneous appearance of another work of scholarship that deflected attention away from Epstein's. It was a work that was both to gain the attention in Europe that Epstein's would have otherwise commanded, and which was also to become recognized as one of the landmark pieces on the study of change in party structures.
Otto Kirchheimer's essay ‘The Transformation of the Western European Party Systems’ was published shortly before Epstein's book (in 1966), and despite its title was primarily about party strategies and structures change rather than about change in party systems.Footnote 8 Kirchheimer's and Epstein's research was, as far as I know, conducted wholly independently of each other, and the possibility of a debate between them would never be realized because the former had died before the essay's publication. In fact, they had reached conclusions that were certainly compatible, and in some ways rather similar. Epstein saw electoral competition as driving parties to establish organizational structures that would enable them to be flexible in their communications with mass electorates; membership-based parties imposed constraints on that flexibility. Many European parties would therefore have to change, and move closer to the American model. Kirchheimer saw these parties as having made substantial changes already, with the emergence of what were called ‘catch-all parties’. The older European party model, in which parties represented distinct social interests, was being replaced by parties that had to seek votes from broader constituencies in order to retain or expand their own support in the legislature. Rather than research focusing on an ‘Epstein–Kirchheimer’ hypothesis, it was Kirchheimer's idea, article and phrase (‘catch-all’) that was to carry the day. Its specific European focus, and the fact that it did not make American parties seem more ‘advanced’ than those in Europe helped both to sideline Epstein's work in the emerging European political science community and to develop a comparative study of party organizations that was centred on Western Europe. Kirchheimer became the ‘patron saint’ of that branch of research.
Finally, Kirchheimer's status in this regard was consolidated because the political science ‘giants’ of the era who might have offered a broader comparative approach than his did not do so – and for varying reasons. Giovanni Sartori had long been working on a two-volume study of parties and party systems. The first volume (on party systems) was published in 1976, with its publishers advertising the second (on party organizations) on its back cover. In that first volume Sartori had explicitly adopted a wide-ranging comparative perspective, including non-democratic as well as democratic regimes, and the expectation was that the second would follow suit. Tragically, the only copy of this second volume was lost (stolen from a car in Milan, I understand) and the work never appeared.Footnote 9 The other scholar who might have prevented a complete ‘Europeanization’ of the comparative study of party organizations was Klaus von Beyme. His impressive book, which has the same title as Epstein's and was published in English in 1985, deals mainly with ‘party families’– that is with the range of ideas and interests parties embrace – rather than with party structures.Footnote 10 Like Epstein, though, von Beyme had an approach that was not ‘Europeanist’, and he sought to embrace the United States and Canada. More typical of the era, though, was Angelo Panebianco's Political Parties, which was completed by the early 1980s, although an abridged version in English did not appear until 1988. This imaginative and provocative study of the constraints on party organizational change is limited in scope because the author discusses only European parties, and explicitly notes at the beginning that he is excluding the United States from the study because its parties' origins are so different.Footnote 11 Here was the ‘regionalist’ analysis par excellence in which American ‘exceptionalism’ was explicitly conceded.
Before turning to more recent developments in the ‘Europeanized’ approach to the comparative study of party organizations, it is necessary to discuss briefly developments in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. While European scholars were developing comparative models and engaged in comparative research on parties focused on their continent, American scholars were retreating into the ‘exceptionalism’ of their own homeland. In some respects this development was paradoxical because in the 1960s senior American scholars had been at the forefront of major studies that included both the United States and the European democracies.Footnote 12 However, the study of American party organizations not only resisted these developments, but there was now an increasing tendency to use the individual, and not the party, as the unit of analysis. By the mid-1960s the older, party-centred approach of someone such as Schattschneider was being replaced by analytic frameworks, such as ambition theory, which saw the individual politician as the appropriate unit of analysis.Footnote 13 Moreover, what became a dominant argument on American party organization from the mid-1970s onwards drew explicitly on an ‘exceptionalist’ view of the American polity. As I have noted in The American Direct Primary, a major strand of argument developed, beginning with Austin Ranney's Curing the Mischiefs of Faction, that explained changes in American party organizations as the product of the peculiar strength of anti-partyism in the United States – something that allegedly is less evident elsewhere and which has led to the use of the law to control parties.Footnote 14 This is curious because as far as I am aware there is actually no systematic empirical evidence covering the relevant periods demonstrating that anti-partyism among mass publics was stronger in the United States than in particular European countries. Indeed, I went on to argue that the advent of that most distinctive reform of American party structures, the introduction of the direct primary, was more the result of party elites trying to manage their political environment than the result of it being imposed on them by anti-party activists.Footnote 15
For my purposes here the important point is that, just as in Europe, in America the study of party organizations moved into an ‘area studies’ tradition – largely self-referential, and with a pronounced slant in the literature for the institutions to be understood within a restricted framework. This is not to deny that major advances in our understanding of how party organizations work, and how they change, have been made over the last 30 to 40 years, but I now want to suggest that perhaps the time has come for us to move back and re-develop the broader comparative approach that Duverger and Epstein were propounding decades ago. To make this case I want to begin with the most important ‘European’ development in the analysis of party structures in the last 20 years: Katz and Mair's model of the ‘cartel party’.Footnote 16
There are two main elements to the Katz–Mair argument. First they argue that in recent decades the relationship between parties and the state had changed in several ways. States now typically controlled access to many of the resources that parties needed in order to function; various forms of public funding of party and electoral activities had been introduced, and then greatly expanded, and many states regulated access to television and radio (in the public interest) in ways that earlier mediums of communication had not been controlled. Moreover, there had been a decline in the number of irrelevant parties, ones always ‘outside’ government. There were now hardly any parties, beyond the very smallest ones, that at some point had not taken part in government; not only did parties as a whole come to have a stake in obtaining resources for which the state was the gatekeeper, but most were in a position at some point to shape what the state did for parties. The ‘cartel’, as it was conceived by Katz and Mair, was not a conspiracy, but rather reflected the interaction of shared interests between organizations that were at the same time also competitors: all parties used the state to make their own operations secure, and did so by increasing the access of most parties to such resources, thereby blurring the traditional boundary between a public body and a private one.
The second distinctive feature of the Katz–Mair argument is that they identify a shift over time from one party model to another: from cadre parties, to mass parties, to catch-all parties, and then to cartel parties. Of course, their argument is a subtle one, and they do not claim that features of earlier party models are no longer present. Far from it. Nevertheless, there is a distinctly developmental aspect to their approach in which European party structures and processes have changed over time in response to changed external circumstances.
I am in no doubt whatsoever that the Katz–Mair analysis has helped to provide political scientists with many important insights into the working of contemporary parties, and that it has contributed greatly to our understanding of internal party politics, especially in Europe; my subsequent comments must be seen in that light. For some years I have been concerned that conceptualizing parties in terms of mass, catch-all or cartel parties pushes the comparative study of party structures into an overly Europeanist framework that is often less appropriate for democratic polities in other regions. This point was brought home to me when I was asked to write a short essay on ‘American Exceptionalism’ that was to be published alongside a longer essay on party models, both of which were to form part of The Handbook of Party Politics.Footnote 17 Written by the Dutch political scientist, Andre Krouwel, the excellent main article on party models naturally had at its heart the essentially Europeanist models that have been predominant in recent years. Much of my task was relatively easy – to expose particular ways in which American party structures were different. Relating any of the American experience to these models was virtually impossible, however, because, although it is possible to expose similarities between some features of each model and aspects of the structure of American parties, systematic comparison on this basis can be highly misleading. The developmental sequence of organizational change posited in the Europeanist account really has no counterpart in the United States. My main concern was that, if the Handbook had aimed to be truly comprehensive it might also have had to include essays on Japanese exceptionalism, Latin American exceptionalism and probably Canadian exceptionalism – among others. The United States is far from being the only country where the different development of party structures makes a European-centred framework inappropriate.
Why was there no common analytic framework capable of embracing the parties of the entire liberal democratic world, so that there could be more connection between Krouwel's essay and mine? Certainly no blame could be attached to the editors, whose framework for the Handbook accurately reflected how research had been conducted in recent years. The fact is that there has been a major contrast between how scholars of party structures have been affected by nearly two decades of both re-democratization in Latin America and democratization in the former Soviet bloc and the response of scholars in other sub-fields of electoral and party politics to this transformation. Students of voting behaviour, for example, rapidly started to incorporate Central and Eastern European states in their studies, and the literature on party systems also took advantage of this development.Footnote 18
It is this kind of broader comparative framework that has so far been lacking in the case of scholars of party organization, although there is some evidence, such as R. Kenneth Carty's article on parties as franchise systems, that students of systems outside the United States and Western Europe are starting to press for the development of frameworks more appropriate for their purposes.Footnote 19 It seems to me that one useful way of moving on is to return to the broader comparative approach that Epstein was advocating 40 years ago, and to see how that might be taken forward in the light of what we now know. No doubt we will continue to expand our knowledge should we persist with the exceptionalist and regionalist frameworks that have dominated for four decades, but I would argue that there is much to be gained by supplementing them with a comparative analysis of the scope that Duverger and Epstein helped to pioneer. The rest of this article is an attempt to sketch out how we might approach the subject of explaining change in party structures in the whole liberal democratic political world. My argument is that there are four kinds of variables that, between them, are the key to understanding how party structures develop and change, first in democratizing regimes and then in consolidated democracies. They could form the basis of a new approach.
INSTITUTIONAL VARIABLES AND PARTY ORGANIZATION CHANGE
The Electoral Constraint
It is surely correct to assume that, ceteris paribus, how parties organize themselves internally will be affected by the need to compete in an electoral market. External factors, such as major changes in election campaign technology or in the availability of resources used by party organizations, are likely to create pressures to modify party organizations so that advantage can be taken of the changed circumstances, or disadvantages avoided.Footnote 20 Consequently, where these external factors are present in a number of countries we might expect party responses that are not too dissimilar. Both Duverger's and Epstein's accounts of the role of competitive factors in organizational ‘contagion’ were too simplistic, but contagion there is.
Yet there are two obvious qualifications to be made to this conclusion about the role of the electoral market. First, in any given country other factors, including institutional ones to be discussed shortly, may counteract the effects of the ‘electoral incentive’, so that responses to the same external factor might turn out to be quite heterogeneous. One significant variable seems to be ideology. There is a strong tradition, which includes both Duverger and von Beyme, that posits that parties of the right tend to have looser and more leadership-dependent structures than those of the left. New evidence from democracies in East and Central Europe suggests that similar developments are present in right of centre parties there.Footnote 21 Secondly, external factors common to a number of countries are not the only ones that can drive change in existing party organizations or provide incentives for new parties to adopt rather different kinds of organizations from their older competitors. Specific kinds of failures – in the electoral arena, or as a result of corrupt practices, and so on – prompt particular parties to reform in particular ways. How and why the British Labour Party reorganized itself into New Labour was not a response merely to the competitive implications of (worldwide) changes in election technology but to specific organizational tensions that had developed within the party.Footnote 22 Similarly, a reformed party organization or an entirely new one reacts to competitive forces in light of the type of resources to which it has access. Thus, we can explain why Forza Italia took the form that it did partly because of how election campaigns could be conducted in the 1990s, partly because its ideology was centre right, and partly because of Silvio Berlusconi's unique access to mass communications. This version of the ‘business firm’ model of parties was appropriate in this case but is not a model to which all parties, even those on the centre right, are moving towards. (Some scholars, of course, are sceptical of just how stable these ‘business firm’ models of parties might prove to be.Footnote 23 )
Nevertheless, allowing for these qualifications, the evidence about party development in a wide range of countries does suggest that the advent of regular electoral competition and subsequent participation in public office does restrict how parties arrange their internal relations and structures. For example, the type of direct participation (in the form of Basis Demokratie) in the West German Greens that had characterized their early years had to be abandoned during the 1980s when low-level decision-making started to produce constantly changing party mandates. Some forms of decision-making and some types of organization simply create difficulties for a party once it is active in the electoral arena. To conclude: while we would not now expect there to be a single party model in liberal democracies, there are limits on the variations that we find.
The Political ‘Rules of the Game’ that Parties Face
In organizing to compete for the votes of mass electorates, parties will tend to devise structures that reflect the pattern of institutions that they face, so that they can interact with them effectively. Thus, a presidential system demands the capacity for coordination among local party units that some parliamentary systems may not; moreover, the precise relationship between president and legislative assembly, as well as the type of voting system (plurality or majoritarian) used for the presidency will similarly influence how important that coordination is. As is well known, French parties reformed themselves radically after 1962; before then (in both the Third and Fourth Republics) there were relatively few pressures to provide much coordination in the highly decentralized parties of the centre and right. With the advent of a directly elected presidency, the incentives facing all parties in France altered, and much greater coordination between the different units of the parties was required for them to be effective. The result was that over the next 15 years French parties of both left and right undertook internal reforms to make them better equipped to face the changed circumstances.
While a directly elected chief executive demands of a party organization the facility to select a candidate effectively, possibly to negotiate with other parties at the national level and to run a national campaign to win the presidency, the degree and precise form of centralization required will vary. These variations are related to more specific ‘rules of the game’, including whether the presidential electoral system is plurality or majoritarian. Majoritarian rules reduce the pressure on parties to merge into one of two large parties, but the multiple rounds of balloting they involve may require that party organizations be in a position to conclude binding alliances on later rounds of balloting.Footnote 24 Parties that cannot do this lose their influence. The kind of coordination required in a party also hinges on the institutional rules that shape relations between president and legislature, and these vary greatly between presidential systems. In the United States, for instance, the mutual interdependence between Congress and president, provided for by various checks and balances, makes some form of inter-branch cooperation essential. Nevertheless, that sort of cooperation does not demand a high degree of party centralization. On the other hand, there is the case of Costa Rica where – unlike many Latin American countries, but like the United States – the legislature ‘is largely independent of the president in debating and deciding on national policy’.Footnote 25 Yet in Costa Rica neither the serving president nor members of the Assembly can seek re-election, and so the political futures of the latter are not linked to those of a serving president, but to their party's candidate for the next presidential election. It is from that candidate, when successful, that a member of the Assembly hopes to secure the kind of executive appointment that helps continue a political career. This disadvantages very loosely structured parties, because a serving president might have few links to his or her putative successors, and hence less chance of exercising leverage over those members of the Assembly seeking to hitch their futures to the candidate's. The general point being made here is that, even within the category of relatively weak presidencies, such as the United States and Costa Rica, the variation in institutional rules substantially changes the incentives for parties with respect to their own internal structures.
The same is true of the rules relating to the election of legislatures and how they conduct business, something that is especially important in parliamentary systems. For example, national party list and regional list systems of voting demand far more intra-party cohesion than systems based on single districts.
A similar argument can be made with respect to another major variable – federalism. In many cases the impact of federal arrangements is to make it desirable for parties to maintain or grant considerable autonomy to their respective sub-units. Conflicts of interest between, on the one side, federal and, on the other side, state/provincial governmental units is likely to produce similar stresses in the parties because of the divergent incentives faced by politicians at different levels. Canada is an extreme example of this, with the provincial wings of the federal parties (their ‘branches’ in the provinces) being completely separate from the parties that operate under the same name at the provincial level of politics. They are legally separate entities between which funds cannot be shifted, for instance. Canadian federalism incentivizes this high level of autonomy in its parties because of the autonomy the provinces themselves have in a system in which formal government-to-government bargaining, of a kind not seen in the United States, is prevalent. The more ‘cooperative’, and the less ‘confrontational’, the form of federalism is, the less pressure there will be to separate the different levels of the party. Not surprisingly, therefore, we find much greater integration between different levels of the various German parties than among their Canadian counterparts.
European scholars of parties have not been unaware of the differences that presidentialism, federalism and other institutional variables help to generate in party organizational structures – far from it. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the comparative models that they have tended to develop have been influenced by the kinds of institutions found in Western Europe, especially in the formative years of European political science, rather than elsewhere, and those countries are primarily parliamentary and unitary in form. Even by the later 1980s, and with the exception of France in periods when government was not divided, there were no fully presidential regimes in democratic Europe; only Germany and Switzerland were thoroughly federal in form – and, in rather different ways, their forms of federalism were quite distinctive. The remaining 14 states of Western Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) were both essentially parliamentary and unitary in form. Consequently, somewhat similar types of party structure had tended to develop in the continent, and this did provide the basis for one type of ‘most similar’ analysis. The utility of that approach is more limited in the now much larger democratic world in which, for example, most of the countries of mainland Latin America are presidential in form, and where many states in Eastern and Central Europe have also opted for this structure.
What of developments since 1989 and their impact on the ‘European’ research agenda? Generally, democratization in Eastern and Central Europe has indeed broadened the range of institutions that European scholars of parties have confronted, making its scholarship far less parochial. There are two caveats, though, to this optimistic prognosis. First, so far the work on party organizations in these countries has not really changed how we theorize party structures.Footnote 26 Secondly, the move to embrace the ‘east’ has not generally been matched by a similar enthusiasm for extending comparative analysis to the Americas south of the United States. Despite re-democratization in many countries there, its party politics tends to remain within the research tradition of ‘area studies’; European regionalism in political science has not dissolved, rather the boundaries of Europe have been extended. Nevertheless, other developments in the past 20 years do point to a future that is far less regionally focused in relation to how the rules of the game affect party structures. The proliferation of laws and regulations in relation to parties, especially in the expanded Europe, may make possible research that can embrace the long-regulated parties of the United States.Footnote 27 A similar coming-together of research agendas may also result from research centred on the operation of politicians and party groupings in the European Parliament, where comparisons between these parties and those in the United States have been drawn already.Footnote 28
The Organizational Origins of Particular Parties
If competition and rules matter, so does the past. The main theme developed in Panebianco's Political Parties is thus hugely significant: how a party was formed (from what kind of components) affects how it can change later. How is this compatible with the claim just outlined, that parties will tend to develop organizational forms reflecting the set of ‘rules’ they face? There are two answers to this.
First, some parties (including many European liberal and conservative parties) had their origins in political mobilization before the advent of a mass franchise. Their organizations required adaptation during the democratization era, but how they adapted was constrained by their original forms. The patterns of incentives established in earlier eras may preclude the possibility of particular types of reform later, because there are veto players who can block them. Panebianco's insight was that it is possible to identify specific categories of party formation, and within a given category party change is likely to occur in particular ways, or, rather, many of the ways open to other parties will not be available to it. The past influences the present because in each generation there are the same veto players who, irrespective of the individuals occupying such positions, can block changes that are not in their interests.
Secondly, in spite of the limited directions that change can take in a particular party, any party must seek to respond to a changed institutional environment, just as it must respond to external changes (such as new campaign technologies). Change may be slow; it might have to await cataclysmic events in the fortunes of the party – such as the British Labour Party's response to four consecutive election defeats after 1979; but for a party to survive it must do something to prevent deterioration in its competitive position. The lesson to be drawn from Panebianco is not so much that party structures cannot change in the same way as each other, but that they may have to produce different solutions to the same threat or opportunity. A crude form of ‘Panebiancoism’ (previous organizational forms always limit change) is as unsustainable as a crude version of ‘Epsteinism’ (parties are always responding to the electoral market).
The interplay between these two forces is well illustrated in the US Democratic Party's response to the changes Franklin Roosevelt brought about in the federal government from 1933 onwards – in providing for a more interventionist federal government, and one in which the presidency became the prime policy initiator. These innovations made it more important for parties both to select electable presidential candidates and to provide for coordination on policy between the parties in Congress and their own president. The Democrats were able, as early as 1936, to remove a long-standing obstacle to the former by eliminating the three-fifths rule in the nomination of a presidential candidate; a minority could no longer block an attractive candidate. Roosevelt's attempt to use his influence to prevent the re-nomination of anti-New Deal Democrats in 1938 was a failure, though. The power to nominate Congressional candidates had always been highly decentralized, and however much it might have benefited the interests of the party nationally to create a less heterogeneous party in Congress, there were players who could veto such moves. The nationalization of politics in the New Deal provided an incentive to centralize party structures, but the party's own ‘organizational past’ restricted that development; how it had been formed (from sub-units within each of the states) affected how it could now change.
State–Party Relations, Present and Past
The last set of variables that produces diversity in how different parties respond organizationally to similar external demands from the electoral arena has been the least discussed in the literature, and is arguably the most difficult to operationalize in any research project. It is crucial nonetheless. This is the relationship between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ in a given state, and how parties have operated within different conceptions of the ‘public sphere’. It is one of the respects in which it is possible to see why the European experience was so distinctive, and also to see why that set of relations has been incorporated into contemporary models of party organization. Although there were considerable variations, particularly in southern Europe, the dominant European experience exhibited the following features from the beginning of the democratic era:
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The state was conceived as having a distinct set of interests, and had a separate workforce (the professional civil service) whose role it was to help an elected government protect those interests. The state was not a ‘prize’, control of which would enable extensive benefits to be distributed by those elected into government to whomever they may wish to give them.
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To protect ‘state interests’ certain limited forms of regulation of private interests that might impact on the governmental process were justifiable.
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Political parties were merely one form of private interest, and not a special interest requiring distinctive forms of either protection or benefit.
With respect to all three of these features it is relatively easy to identify clear differences between most of the Western European democracies and many democratic regimes elsewhere. Consider (1) first: however imprecise the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ often were in Europe, for the most part the notion of a state that stood apart from society was well developed before the democratic era. Most of the northern European states had well-established bureaucracies that saw themselves as acting impartially, but in the interests of the state. This is not how state–business relations developed in post-war Japan, for example, nor has it been a feature evident for much of the history of Latin America. Most especially, in North America, using the resources of the state to promote the interests of a victorious party was evident in the early years of mass democracy. In Canada governmental patronage in the hands of the prime minister was the glue that held a party and the democracy together.Footnote 29 The longevity in office of Canadian prime ministers compared with their British counterparts has much to do with the use of judicial patronage in rewarding members of his or her own party. It was in the United States, however, that the idea that the state was a prize that could be used to reward supporters was perhaps most well developed.
The Jacksonian spoils regime built a relatively integrated (for such a decentralized polity) party system on the back of the use of government at all levels. That spoils system may have grown out of the earlier personalized spoils regime found in pre-democratic Britain, but by the time Britain was democratizing, in the late nineteenth century, a professionalized bureaucracy was already under construction there. Spoils shaped how American parties developed in the nineteenth century; without them it is unlikely that two relatively integrated parties would have emerged. There would have been no need for them. The experience of having had a spoils system that was then replaced by a different set of party–state relationships also shaped the possibility for future party developments in the United States. Although the spoils system seems to have functioned reasonably efficiently in an era of limited government activity, it became the proverbial ‘whipping boy’ when demands of government expanded. Consequently, how parties may now relate to the state in America is constrained by that experience. Whereas in Europe the blurring of the boundaries between state and parties – something that is implicit in the cartel party model – has been able to develop without much intense public reaction, in the United States the myth of the evils of party patronage would prevent any return to an ambiguous state–party relationship. The American state may still be exploited regularly for private benefit by companies associated with major public officials, but a return to similar penetration of the state by its political parties would expose such officials to much greater risks from adverse publicity.
The relative autonomy of most European states, by comparison with most states in the Americas has also had an impact on party structures with respect to feature (2). Throughout the democratic era the European state has tended to regulate activities in which it might have an interest, or from which a threat to state autonomy might conceivably be forthcoming. Of particular significance here is that in the early to mid-twentieth century European states generally regulated the activities of, and access to, electronic media. Politicians could not have unrestricted access to radio and television broadcasting; strict rules were enacted, designed both to limit the amount of access and to regulate its distribution. In the cartel model of parties the state's regulation of electronic media is seen as one of the main incentives for parties later in the twentieth century to use the state for their own purposes. As a factor prompting a process of ‘cartelization’, this was very much a European phenomenon, although it was also present in the former British Dominions (Australia, Canada and New Zealand). By contrast, in the United States and much of Latin America, restrictions on access to media broadcasting were always much fewer, because there was a far weaker legacy of the state regulating private interests in order to protect its own autonomy.
A similar point can be made with respect to state regulation of the funding of political parties by individual persons, groups and companies. Effective regulation tended to have occurred earlier – sometimes, as in the case of Britain's Act of 1883, just as mass democracy was beginning. In the Americas regulation was much weaker in the early years, with effective financial control of federal election campaigns not commencing in the United States, for instance, until the 1974 reforms. When the cost of election campaigning started to rise in the second half of the twentieth century, European parties had a greater incentive to look towards the state for resources because of the more constrained framework that the state had earlier created for them.
Finally, when we turn to (3), we encounter a factor that is hugely significant in explaining some aspects of the distinctive organizational forms found in the United States. For the most part, parties elsewhere have largely been treated as no more than a particular type of private organization, and have been regulated (or not) by the state broadly in line with other forms of regulation in that country. Of course, there have been periods when the role of parties has been recognized as central, although not always welcome, to the operation of democracy – as in the partitocrazia era in post-war Italy. Nowhere, though, has there been anything to compare with the United States between the early 1830s and the 1890s. The Jacksonian model, which was dominant for 60 years, understood parties as the only vehicle for the practice of democratic politics. As I have argued elsewhere, when the transformation of the external political environment prompted party politicians to seek to change and reform their own party's structures, they were restricted in what they could do because of a widely accepted public value that ‘parties were different’.Footnote 30 This is why I believe that Epstein's later conception of ‘parties as public utilities’ is useful in understanding the distinctiveness of American parties.Footnote 31 Unlike Epstein, I regard the ‘public utility’ not as something that was imposed on the parties in the late nineteenth century by their opponents, but as something that was a direct consequence of the Jacksonian view of parties and which was fully accepted, and acted on, by party politicians themselves.
That most distinctive feature of American party structure, the direct primary, grew in usage from the mid-1880s because it was one of the few alternatives available to party elites who were grappling with the problems posed by the changing scale of the American polity, and with the disadvantages of informal party structures that had been introduced in earlier face-to-face societies. Because they were not merely private agencies, how the parties could respond to changed circumstances was considerably circumscribed; they were not free to introduce organizational changes that suited the party elites or activists alone – those changes had to be more widely acceptable in American society. This kind of constraint is one that other parties elsewhere have not had to encounter, and it is impossible to understand why American parties took the path they did after the 1890s without recognizing it. Of course, public attitudes to party then changed markedly in the twentieth century, but what happened at that earlier period affected how American parties could change later. Sequence matters.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Despite some developments noted earlier, the study of party organizations remains largely ‘regionalized’. One of the adverse consequences over the last four decades of this ‘regionalization’ of research on organizational change has been that it has tended to lead to regional differences in organizational responses by parties being exaggerated or misconceived. For example, it is sometimes said European parties are a ‘team sport’ whereas American parties are an ‘individual sport’, as if we were thereby dealing with very different kinds of entity. Some analytic frameworks, such as ‘ambition theory’, had specifically emphasized this aspect of American party politics, of course.Footnote 32 Two points may be made about this. First, American party politics, like party politics elsewhere, is a ‘team sport’, and one cannot make sense of American politics over the last two decades if one sees it purely as a conflict involving individuals. (Why were there federal budget crises in 1990 and 1995? Why was there an attempted impeachment of an American president in 1998? Were the 2006 and 2010 mid-term elections or the 2008 presidential election just about ambitious individual candidates? and so on.) Secondly, the real point about team sports is that different rules produce greater or lesser degrees of autonomy for the individual players, and correspondingly limit the ability of a coach or manager to dictate precisely what happens in play (at the plate the hitter in baseball has somewhat less autonomy than a batsman at the crease in cricket, for example; change the rules of either game in particular ways, and that difference could be eroded or reversed). The utility of returning to the kind of comparative framework Epstein, following Duverger, was developing four decades ago is that it enables us to look at how parties operating under different rules of the game respond to changes in their environments that are common to all of them. This is not to argue against the continuation of ‘regionalist’ studies, for they will surely remain an important source of our knowledge of party organizations. Rather it is to argue for supplementing such work by the development of analytic frameworks that recognize the significance of all factors that shape how all parties go about organizing their business in democracies. It is time to weaken the grip that ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘regionalism’ have had on research into party structures.
