The fourteen contributors to this book have taken on a large and difficult task: to survey and systematically compare the performance of political parties in most advanced industrial democracies without neglecting to discuss the distinctive features, endemic problems, and recent developments attaching to the party systems of the many individual countries discussed.

The organization of the book is straightforward. An introductory chapter by the editors briefly describes its aims and plan. In a broad sense, the goal is to determine whether some variant of a “decline of parties” argument holds up under close comparative scrutiny. Thirteen separate chapters written by various scholars then follow; most are devoted to a single country (one deals with Scandinavia, another with the Low Countries). The country experts were free to emphasize whatever salient features of the party systems they thought appropriate, but they all also tried to adhere to a common plan to include sections relating to certain more or less specific themes: the popular legitimacy of the parties, their organizational strength, and their performance, with specific reference to governance and political recruitment, interest articulation and aggregation, and political participation. Japan is unaccountably excluded from the roster. A less constrained chapter is devoted to the parties that populate the European Parliament, for which the comparative design is not appropriate. In a final chapter, the editors sum up the findings, concentrating on the themes designated in advance for comparative analysis but not exploiting the idiosyncratic contributions from the country studies.

There is a considerable disconnect between the comparative design and the separate, more or less country-specific studies in which the strength of the book lies. These studies are of higher caliber than such collections often are, and their occasional sorties into historical analysis, major party system transformations, and organizational particularities far out-weigh in interest (and potential for comparative analysis) their semiobligatory contributions to the preselected comparative categories that sometimes narrowly skirt tabular tedium.

There are, I believe, two main reasons that the particular contributions of the country chapters are more penetrating than the comparative design. One reason relates to the weakness of the design; the other relates to the richness of the country studies.

The first reason is that the comparative design is not grounded in a clear and coherent theoretical conception of what parties are and do. Political parties in a democratic society, operating through the elections with which they are inevitably associated, are instruments of competition for the exercise of power. Parties are both arenas within which competition occurs and agencies that compete with one another within other constitutionally defined arenas, according to rules that are themselves objects of partisan conflict. An understanding of parties needs to start from a recognition that they are the latter-day counterparts of warring baronies, for which the key concept is rivalry.

There is little if any recognition of this in the introductory chapter. Instead, the emphasis is placed on “the functions that any stable and effective democracy might expect of [parties],” including representing citizens effectively, translating wants and needs into effective governmental outputs, and fostering democratic involvement (p. 1).

Parties may, of course, fulfill such functions, and there is certainly nothing wrong with investigating whether and the extent to which they do. Such an investigation, however, requires some conception of why one would expect them to do so. If parties do produce the benign results cited, they must do so in the service of satisfying their primary, competitive urges. Rather like the general economic benefits produced by Adam Smith's self-interested entrepreneurs, the social benefits highlighted in this book are by-products of otherwise motivated partisan activities. One would think that a comparative analysis of the extent to which such benefits are produced would profit from some specification of why and how they might be expected to emerge from alternate forms of partisan competition.

The authors of the country studies do a heroic job of trying to satisfy the terms of the comparative design, and readers will find these chapters a useful source of data about such matters as public attitudes toward parties; electoral turnout and results; political participation; and party organization, membership, and finance. Their great strength, however, lies in their constant awareness of what parties purposefully do. Parties compete with one another. The country chapters show how the parties with which they are concerned adapt to and interact with their environments, with the formal institutions of government, and with both organized and latent social forces. But they do not lose sight of the fact that that activity takes place within the context of the parties' perpetual pursuit of their selfish ends.

The ceaseless maneuvering that can be involved in this process is skillfully captured—often dramatically—in chapter after chapter. Space limitations permit me to cite but a few illustrations. R. Kenneth Carty's chapter on Canadian parties treats the “electoral earthquake” of 1993 (p. 344) as the latest stage of a cyclical pattern of successive transformations of the Canadian party system, dating from World War I, that have been linked to the nation's still unsolved sectional issues.

Andrew Knapp's chapter on France skillfully describes the recombinant configurations of interaction between polarization and fragmentation among the multiple parties, specifies policies typical of right and left that have moved from party platform to government policy, and describes well the complex routes of political recruitment and the competition among parties, movements, and ad hoc groups for control of the political agenda.

Luciano Bardi discusses an Italian party system that, against a background of near-universal scandal and corruption, was almost wholly transformed within little more than a decade. Between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, the main governing parties of earlier years—the Christian Democrats and the Socialists—virtually disappeared, the Communist Party tried to remake itself, and new parties were formed, including tycoon Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the separatist-inclined Northern League. During that same period, there was virtually a complete turnover in parliamentary personnel (p. 67).

By way of contrast, the German party system, discussed by Susan Scarrow in a chapter that is particularly sensitive to the basic theoretical issue that I raised earlier in this review (see esp. p. 102), appears to have been highly resistant to change, despite being the spawning ground of the Greens and suffering the shock of the large, potentially destabilizing forces unleashed by reunification.

That sampling of important themes that are treated in the country studies is almost criminally brief. I hope, however, that it suggests the huge potential for illuminating comparative analysis of political parties that can be extracted from a careful reading of Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Societies.