Irish Political Studies
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The End of Party Democracy as We Know It? A
Tribute to Peter Mair
Ingrid van Biezen
To cite this article: Ingrid van Biezen (2014) The End of Party Democracy as
We Know It? A Tribute to Peter Mair, Irish Political Studies, 29:2, 177-193, DOI:
10.1080/07907184.2014.897944
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2014.897944
Published online: 06 May 2014.
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Date: 09 September 2016, At: 09:37
Irish Political Studies, 2014
Vol. 29, No. 2, 177 –193, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2014.897944
The End of Party Democracy as We
Know It? A Tribute to Peter Mair
INGRID VAN BIEZEN1
Leiden University, The Netherlands
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers of the Political Studies
Association of Ireland (PSAI) for inviting me to their annual conference. I am
delighted that the association has decided to pay tribute to Peter Mair and his
legacy for the discipline of political science by establishing an annual memorial
lecture. It is an immense honour and privilege for me to be here and deliver the
very first one. Having said that, I should perhaps bracket my enthusiasm by emphasizing that – it probably goes without saying – I would rather wish that the sad circumstances that have prompted the organization of this lecture series had not arisen in
the first place.
I first met Peter Mair at Leiden University in 1990, where I was an undergraduate
student and he a newly appointed senior lecturer. I registered for his course on Parties
and Party Systems. We were all captivated by both its substantive content and the
engaging course instructor, and so inspired that we tended to continue our conversations also outside the classroom. I particularly remember one New Year’s Eve, when
we were startled by the fireworks announcing the arrival of the New Year. We had
completely missed the countdown to midnight, absorbed as we were debating the varieties of moderate and polarized pluralism, discussing how frozen cleavage structures
were now beginning to thaw, and mass parties were transforming into catch-all
parties. At our disposal were the selected writings of intellectual giants such as
Sartori, Lipset and Rokkan, Duverger, and Kirchheimer, brought together in a
book that Mair had compiled shortly before (Mair, 1990). Mortified that others
might think that our idea of entertainment consisted of discussing compulsory
course readings when others were partying, for a long time we were too embarrassed
to tell anyone.
It thus was Peter Mair who first introduced me to the study of political parties and
party systems, and who instigated my interest in comparative politics. Little did I
Correspondence Address: Ingrid van Biezen, Leiden University, Political Science, PO Box 9555, 2300 RB
Leiden, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]
# 2014 Political Studies Association of Ireland
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I. van Biezen
know that I myself would become so enthusiastic about the parties and party systems
that they would also come to define my own professional career. It is not too much of
an exaggeration to state that, if it were not for Peter, who later became my mentor and
supervisor, I would not be here today. But although mine is a personal story of indebtedness and gratitude, the sense of obligation and appreciation is one that is more
broadly shared across the academic community. As students of political parties,
party systems and democracy, and regardless of how well or how long we had
known him, we are all in one way or another beholden to his insights.
In a recent article on which Peter Mair and I collaborated together with Thomas
Poguntke, and which is probably among the last of his publications that he saw
appear ‘in print’ (van Biezen et al., 2012),2 we observe a continuous decline in
party membership levels in the large majority of European democracies, both in
absolute numbers and as a percentage of the electorate. We also conclude that
party memberships have now fallen to such a low level that the size of the membership organization itself no longer offers a meaningful indicator of party organizational capacity. Our discussion is embedded in a long-standing debate over the
decline or crisis of parties (e.g. Lawson & Merkel, 1988; Selle & Svåsand, 1991;
Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000). Have the organizational transformations of parties progressed to such an extent that we can now consider the party to be over? (cf. Whiteley, 2011). The UK Political Studies Association even chose this as the main theme
for its annual conference in 2013, aiming to speak to ‘a number of senses in which
assumptions and modalities that have hitherto underpinned political life, and political analysis, may no longer be sustainable’. What future is there, it was asked rhetorically, for representative politics, given ‘the apparent inability of mainstream
politics to provide solutions, beyond endless austerity, to current problems’,
which ‘offers to contribute further to the long-term decline in the popularity and
social reach of leading political parties’.
According to many party scholars, as well as several democratic audits, the problematic performance of the parties has made the quality of representative democracy
deteriorate over the last decades, in particular because parties continue to lose
members, the levels of party activism are dwindling, and provisions for internal
democracy generally remain weak. Evidence suggests that apparently ‘democratizing’ reforms may in fact have increased the power of party leaders while they
appear to have reduced the scope for members to exert influence, which is
accompanied by a decay of ‘public faith in democratic institutions’, a widening
gap in the participation rates of different social classes of voters, and an ‘unprecedented growth in corporate power’, all of which suggest that the reality of representative democracy is ‘pretty catastrophically in decline’, as the authors of the recent
democratic audit in the UK conclude (Wilks-Heeg et al., 2012).3 These observations
resonate with Mair’s long-standing interest in the transformation of political parties
and echo his concerns, which grew more pronounced towards later stages of his
career, about the quality of their democratic performance and the implications this
may have for the future of the representative democracy.
A Tribute to Peter Mair 179
The Cartel Party
Throughout his scholarly career, Peter Mair was guided by a strong interest in adaptation and change: evidence for change, its sources, and its possible future impact
(Mair, 1983: 428), with a particular emphasis on party system change and party
organizational transformation and adaptation. The notion of the ‘cartel party’,
which was developed together with Richard Katz and advanced in the maiden
issue of Party Politics, is arguably among the most influential in the discipline of
comparative politics. Indeed, according to a recent assessment by Alan Ware
(2011: 420), the cartel party, advanced by Katz and Mair (1995), represents ‘the
most important “European” development in the analysis of party structures in the
last 20 years’. Until then, most of the existing literature on party organizational
models had been built on relatively simple dichotomies: between primarily electoralist and elite-centred party organizations, on the one hand, and more popular and
expressive organizations, on the other. Thus, Duverger (1954) contrasted the cadre
party with the mass party, for example, and Kirchheimer (1966) and Panebianco
(1988) the mass party with the catch-all and electoral-professional parties, respectively. Rather than juxtaposing two parties of different types, Katz and Mair went
beyond these dichotomies and analysed developments over time, identifying the
various shifts from one party model to another.
Adopting a long-term dynamic perspective, they observed that the process of party
organizational transformation since the heyday of the mass party is best characterized
as a movement of parties away from civil society and towards the state. They were
among the first to point out that the notion of a decline of political parties tout
court was misconceived, as there are few signs of any deterioration in their procedural
or institutional functions (cf. Bartolini & Mair, 2001), If anything, the linkages
between parties and the state have grown stronger over time.4 If attention is paid
to both the (weakening) linkages between parties and society and the (strengthening)
linkages between parties and the state, the evolution and the survival of party organizations become more readily understandable, as parties respond to changes in the
environment in which they operate and to shifts in the available opportunity structure.
While the linkages between parties and civil society may thus have been weakened,
those between parties and the state have become stronger, to the point that parties no
longer act as the representative agents of civil society but have become instead
absorbed by the state and begin to act as semi-state agencies. The cartel party is
characterized, organizationally, by the interpenetration of party and state and, at
the level of the party system, by a pattern of inter-party collusion rather than competition. In the era of the cartel party, the main parties work together and use the
resources of the state – such as public subsidies, state-regulated media access, or
party patronage – to ensure their collective survival.
The argument has since been criticized on various counts, not least because of the
label ‘cartel’ and the conspiratorial connotations it invokes, but also for conflating the
analytical level of the party organization with that of the party system (e.g. Koole,
1996; Detterbeck, 2005). Important elements of the cartel party, moreover, remain
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I. van Biezen
to be corroborated empirically. The jury is still out on the question, for example, of
whether the availability of state funding actually hinders or helps the prospects of new
parties challenging the status quo (e.g. Bischoff, 2006; Scarrow, 2006), although
recent research suggests – counter to the cartel thesis – that countries which
provide subsidies to parties below the electoral threshold may actually help facilitate
their organizational survival (Casal Bértoa & Spirova, 2013). More regulation, on the
other hand, does indeed appear to decrease the number of successful new party entries
(e.g. van Biezen & Rashkova, 2012).
The broader parameters of the cartel thesis, however, have quickly acquired a wide
acceptance, as the tendencies they describe – as so much with Mair’s work – resonated with familiarity. The Katz and Mair conjecture, as it is perhaps most accurately
described, reminds us that the so-called decline of party stems from a one-sided and
thus biased view on parties, both empirically and normatively. In fact, political parties
are as strong as ever before, if not stronger, and have access to far greater resources.
As representative organizations, however, as Schmitter (2001) recalls, they may no
longer be what they once were. Their linkages with society have become more contingent, temporal and loose, as a consequence of which they are less capable of fulfilling their representative functions. At the same time, and in part as a response to
their increased vulnerability, parties have ‘migrated to the safety of the institutions
of the state’, facilitating their own survival by exchanging or extracting resources
from it in the form of public funds, favourable legal rules, or patronage appointments.
Katz and Mair also remind us that there is no natural end point to this dialectic
process of organizational development and adaptation. They surmise that the cartel
party will generate its own opposition, such as from extremist and populist parties,
which constitute one of the most powerful challenges to cartelized political
systems as they seek to break the status quo of established politics (Katz & Mair,
1995: 24). They thus echo Arend Lijphart’s earlier observations about the dangers
of so-called ‘depoliticized democracy’ (which he called karteldemocratie in
Dutch): systems in which there no longer is any meaningful opposition are likely
to generate distrust of politicians and opposition to the political system itself (Lijphart, 1975; see also Koole, 1996). In contemporary party systems, populist parties
are often seen as the most evident reification of such anti-establishment opposition.
Populist parties, in particular of the radical right, often share a number of organizational idiosyncrasies, most notably a charismatic and populist leader who claims to
possess a direct and unmediated relationship with the people (e.g. Zaslove, 2008).
However, the variety in organizational forms among such parties is probably too
large to identify a distinctive populist mode of political mobilization or organization
(cf. Mudde, 2004). Take the Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, for instance,
which is a party that revolves entirely around its founder and leader Geert Wilders. It
has no formal party organization and it eschews party membership completely. That
is, there is simply no ‘party on the ground’ or ‘party central office’. Other populist
parties, by contrast, remain highly committed to having real membership organizations, and seek to engage their members in policy formulation, leadership selection,
and so on. The Italian Lega Nord offers a powerful example in this regard, as it
A Tribute to Peter Mair 181
deliberately seeks to build a tight and highly disciplined mass organization on the
model of the former Italian Communist Party, and, in the process, has marked up
one electoral success after another (e.g. Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2010). While
new challengers such as populist parties may thus form a powerful challenge to
the ‘cosy arrangements’ formed by existing party cartels, they are less likely to
provide an alternative mode of organization to the cartel party. In challenging the
status quo, populist parties claim to represent the interests of the people, which
they claim are being neglected by the established elites, thus accentuating the emerging divide, which I shall discuss in more detail later on, between what Mair subsequently called responsible and responsive government (Mair, 2009). In modern
democracies, the roles of parties by which they are responsive to their supporters
and public opinion, while at the same time responsible towards internal and external
systemic constraints, have become increasingly incompatible and difficult to
reconcile.
The Return of the Party in Public Office
Although Katz and Mair do not necessarily claim a unilinear trend, there is a ‘distinctively developmental aspect to their approach in which European party structures and
processes have changed over time in response to changed external circumstances’
(Ware, 2011: 421). Indeed, Katz and Mair famously contend that ‘the development
of parties in western democracies has been reflective of a dialectical process in
which each new party type generates a reaction that stimulates further development,
thus leading to yet another new party type, and to another set of reactions, and so on’
(Katz & Mair, 1995: 6).
In terms of the internal balance of power, they had contended earlier, the organizational development of political parties can best be described as a transformation of
the power constellation between the three ‘faces’ of party organization: the party on
the ground, the party central office and the party in public office (Katz & Mair, 1993).
At the risk of oversimplification, it could be stated that there are three essential
internal power configurations: there may be a dominant party central office and subordinate party in public office, as in the case of the classic mass party; a state of relative equilibrium between the party central office and the party in public office, as in
the case of the catch-all party; or a dominant party in public office and a subordinate
central office, as in the case of the modern cartel party. The relative importance of the
third face, the party on the ground, may vary, but it is itself unlikely to exert a dominant position, as it always needs an agent to embody and represent it.
Hybrid forms of party organization may exist, of course, such as in many of the
newer democracies where the party central office and the party in public office are
largely fused horizontally, and ‘party organizations are controlled from a small
center of power located at the interstices of the extra-parliamentary party and the
party in public office’ (van Biezen, 2003: 218). The faces of parties may also
become vertically fused. The continuing decline in party members, for example,
implies that the number of grass-roots activists within parties decreases while the
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I. van Biezen
share of those who at some level also hold public office goes up. It thus may happen,
and for some of the parties in the younger democracies of Southern and Eastern
Europe this indeed appears to be the case, that the large majority of party members
are also public office holders for the party (van Biezen, 2003). This also suggests
that contemporary party memberships – in terms of social profile, education and
employment – may have less and less in common with the traditional party on the
ground and progressively more with the party in central or even public office, such
that it might be more reasonable ‘to regard them not as constituting part of civil
society – with which party membership has traditionally been associated – but
rather as constituting the outer ring of an extended political class’ (van Biezen
et al., 2012: 39).
If, however, we understand the historical development of political parties in terms
of changing power relations between the three faces of party organization, only a
limited number of permutations appears possible. This is not to suggest that, with
the advent of the cartel party, we have reached the end point of the process of organizational development. Katz and Mair were right to caution against any notion of
stasis in political reality. However, rather than understanding the process of organizational change and adaptation as a dialectical process, which does not place any limits
on the number of theoretically possible syntheses, the process is perhaps better conceived as one of temporal movements around a longer-term equilibrium, in which the
party in public office is (by default) the predominant face of the party, while the
central party office is the agent of the party in public office in organizing and directing
the party on the ground – to the extent that indeed there is one – as well as the party’s
myriad of supporters, adherents, sympathizers and voters.
Parties adapt primarily in response to their changing environment. The mode of
party organization is therefore a product of decisions made by party actors in selective
contexts. Although actors may develop different strategic responses to the opportunity structure of mobilization in which they operate, their structural environment
favours certain strategies over others (Hellmann, 2011). Thus we find that the increasingly standardized conditions prevailing in post-industrial societies, globalized economies and electoral democracies encourage a convergence of organizational styles
‘across different polities in which the evolutionary trajectory of parties in established
democracies . . . meets with that of the parties in new democracies as they begin to
settle into roles that, at least initially, were forged almost exclusively by the exigencies of public office’ (Bartolini & Mair, 2001: 338).
The emergence of parties as strong movements of society is thus an exception to
the norm, unlikely to be repeated in modern times or in different institutional contexts
of party formation. On this view, the European mass party does not merely represent
one stage in an ongoing process of organizational development; rather, it is a unique
product of a historically contingent institutional structure. It is not so much the child
of mass democracy and universal franchise emerging to ‘woo and organize the
masses’, as Weber (1948 [1918]) put it, but rather the product of the particular
context of nineteenth century Western Europe of what Dahl (1971) has called an
‘competitive oligarchy’. Mass parties emerged as a response to a particular
A Tribute to Peter Mair 183
institutional order in which large segments of society were excluded politically (and
indeed economically) and from a sequence of development in which organization
building came prior to mass electoral competition and executive power (van
Biezen, 2003). The mass party is thus a temporary deviation from a longer-term equilibrium. Once the conditions that fostered its development ceased to prevail, the subsequent catch-all and cartel parties returned to it.
Such a perspective demonstrates that, despite the fact that Katz and Mair acknowledge the contingent nature of the mass party, in their description of the process they
very much take it as the empirical – if not normative and ideal typical – reference
point. However, if we take the classic cadre parties of the nineteenth century as
our point of departure, it would appear to be more accurate to speak of the return
rather than the ascendancy of the party in public office (Katz & Mair, 2002). As a
rule, linkages with society are driven primarily by a short-term electoral rather than
a long-term partisan logic. Linkages with the state can become part of the party,
and can be used by the party as an element of its strategy of adaptation.
State Intervention in Party Politics
In this context, it is important to observe the increased propensity of modern states to
intervene in the area of party politics. In this context, two key developments should be
emphasized in particular: on the one hand, parties have become more dependent on
the state; on the other, they are also increasingly managed by the state (van Biezen &
Kopecký, 2007). First of all, the introduction of public subsidies has made parties
increasingly dependent on public money and state support. Indeed, for Katz and
Mair (1995) the availability of state support for the parties constituted a preeminent indicator of cartelization. While parties in Western Europe had traditionally
relied on membership subscriptions, contributions from donors and affiliated organizations, and other forms of grass-roots funding, in most countries today state subventions have become beyond any doubt the single most important financial resource.
First introduced in Germany in 1959, state subsidies are now available to national
political parties in virtually every European democracy, Switzerland and Malta
being the only exceptions.
Public subsidies have indeed become a widespread phenomenon across the globe,
in both old and new democracies, although perhaps somewhat more prominently in
the latter. In the newer democracies of Southern and East-Central Europe, for
example, state funding was often made available at an early stage of the democratization process – in some countries even before the first democratic elections – and
without much debate on the role public money should play in the financing of political parties.5 In the older democracies, public funding was inevitably introduced at a
much later stage in the process of party organizational development. The widespread
availability of state funding underscores that the predominant conception of democracy currently is one in which parties are both procedurally necessary and democratically desirable institutions, even amidst increasing concern that their actual
functioning may not always contribute to the quality of democratic representation.
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I. van Biezen
While the pervasiveness of public funding might in itself be taken as an indication
of the parties’ growing financial dependence on the state, the more interesting question is of course how important these public subsidies are in relation to the total party
incomes. Although reliable cross-national data are hard to obtain, recent evaluations
by GRECO – the Group of States against Corruption established by the Council of
Europe to monitor member state compliance with the existing anti-corruption standards – show that the parties’ financial dependence on the state is quite staggering
(see Piccio, 2012; van Biezen & Kopecký, 2014), to the point that state subventions
are effectively crowding out other sources of income. It is only in Germany and the
Netherlands that public subsidies are estimated to contribute to less than half of the
total party income, while in the majority of countries the state contributes to at
least two-thirds of party income. In countries on the high end of the spectrum,
such as Belgium, Italy or Spain, state subsidies are estimated to account for no less
than 80– 95 per cent of the total income.
In most of the democracies that have relatively recently emerged out of what Huntington (1991) has called the ‘third wave’, the ratio of state funding has remained at a
high level since it was first introduced. In many of the older democracies, the relevance of public subsidies has increased considerably in recent decades. In
Denmark, the figure has gone up from approximately 20 per cent at the end of the
1980s to some 75 per cent at the end of the first decade of the ‘noughties’;
Sweden and Norway have seen an increase from around 45– 50 per cent to 70 – 75
per cent 20 years later.6 The general importance of public funding for parties has
thus become such that any cross-national variation that may have existed one or
two decades ago has now largely levelled out. The data and underlying trends convincingly support the assertions of Katz and Mair, at least at the party organization level.
The introduction of public subsidies has made political parties increasingly dependent
on the state, regardless of whether the democracy in question is relatively long-standing or not. As Alan Ware observes, by increasing the access of parties to state
resources, the traditional boundary between public body and private association
has become increasingly blurred (Ware, 2011: 421).
Second, political parties have not only become financially dependent on the state,
but also are increasingly managed by the state through public law and the constitution. Post-war democratic states have shown an increased propensity to intervene
in party politics, in that the activities, behaviour and internal organizational structures
of the parties are ever more closely defined or prescribed by external regulations and
state laws. Countries have begun formally to codify political parties in their national
constitutions and to adopt special party laws and finance laws to regulate the parties’
financial and other matters (van Biezen, 2012; van Biezen & Kopecký, 2014). Thus
the law may not only determine what formally constitutes a political party, who qualifies for ballot access, and who benefits from public subsidies, but may also regulate
the permissible types of activity and behaviour and prescribe the structures of the
party organization and internal party procedures. Over the course of the second
half of the twentieth century, we can observe a progressive codification of political
parties in public law, to the point that party structures have now become ‘legitimate
A Tribute to Peter Mair 185
objects of state regulation to a degree far exceeding what would normally be acceptable for private associations in a liberal society’ (Katz, 2002: 90).
The increased judicialization of party politics raises a number of important issues
and concerns, such as whether parties should in fact be regulated differently from
other types of (civil) organization, or whether the special regulation of parties
should be reconciled with basic democratic freedoms, such as the freedom of
speech and association. As the American lawyer Samuel Issacharoff (2007) has
argued, attempts to control the internal governance of the parties in particular may
bring the force of state authority too deep into the heart of the parties and may
thereby critically weaken their organizational autonomy and undermine their necessary independence from the state. In addition, the judicialization of party politics raises
concerns similar to those emerging from the expansion of judicial activism: these processes arguably undermine fundamental principles of democracy by effectively transferring powers from representative to non-representative institutions (e.g. Shapiro,
2003). Although the courts might sometimes act as a powerful constraint on the possibly undemocratic or anti-competitive behaviour of political parties, the legal regulation of parties evokes anxieties not only about the state centralization and control
of political participation and public life, but also about the democratic legitimacy
of transferring the ultimate decision-making authority on their behaviour and organization from the responsible organs of the party to a non-elected body of judges
(Avnon, 1995: 285).
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the legal codification of political parties has
strengthened both their material and their ideational position within the political
system. Their constitutionally enshrined position, for example, effectively gives
parties an official status as part of the state: by endowing them with a constitutional
status, political parties are granted explicit recognition with respect to the institutional
importance of democracy (van Biezen, 2012). According to the German constitutional lawyer and former Constitutional Court Justice, Gerhard Leibholz, this effectively legitimizes the existence of party democracy and transforms political parties
from sociopolitical organizations into institutions that form the integral and necessary
units of the democratic state (Leibholz, 1958: 92).
Their legal codification in various sources of party law implies that, although
parties may be bound by tighter restrictions in comparison with other (representative)
organizations, they are also being endowed with important privileges. The two clearest examples in this regard are the regular provision of public subsidies, which in
most countries is virtually unconditional except for an eligibility threshold in terms
of votes, seats and/or candidates, and access to the ballot, which in many countries
has become legally defined as the exclusive preserve of political parties, at the
expense of other forms of organization or independent candidates. In this context,
it is perhaps ironic that the parties’ privileges tend to be premised on their perceived
democratic significance, which is seen to lie primarily in the contribution they (ought
to) make to the realization of substantive democratic principles, such as political participation and representation, while their capacity to act as representative agents or
vehicles of participation is increasingly uncertain.
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I. van Biezen
The increased involvement of the state in internal party affairs, whereby parties
become subject to a regulatory framework that grants them an official status as
part of the democratic state and they are financially supported by the state in order
to fulfil their democratic functions, has contributed to a transformation of parties
from voluntary private association towards the party as a special type of public
utility (van Biezen, 2004). Whereas parties once drew their legitimacy from their
capacity to represent the key constituencies within civil society, they now justify
themselves by appealing to a conception of democracy in which parties are seen
an essential public good.
Unlike other factors that have contributed to the process of organizational change
and adaptation over the course of the twentieth century, the introduction of public
funding and the establishment of regulatory frameworks are processes that are not
exogenous to the parties. In other words, it is the parties themselves who have
played a major role in establishing the parameters of their own institutional
context, effectively privileging themselves over other forms of organization,
thereby facilitating their own survival as well as the continued existence of party
democracy. Thus, while the parties have firmly cemented their position as institutional actors, they no longer fulfil many of the traditional functions once assigned
to them. What remains of their linkage with society is gradually being transformed
into a predominantly electoral linkage, while as decision-making actors parties principally serve to enhance policy coordination (Bolleyer, 2011). In both capacities, it is
the party in public office that occupies a predominant position.
The End of Party Democracy (As We Know It)?
As parties become more disconnected from society, they are also losing relevance as
agents of representation. To be sure, parties still perform important democratic
linkage functions, as Dalton et al. (2011) have recently pointed out. Voters are
still able to distinguish between parties, for example, and the differences between
parties are still being translated into government policy. In other words, parties
still matter, although the differences between them matter less than they once did.
As Rohrschneider and Whitefield (2012: 31) argue, voter choices will become
‘less sharply defined as independent voters locate themselves more in the ideological
center than partisans and salient issues become more diverse’. Moreover, ‘programs
may become more fragmented as the social glue connecting parties and voters and
defining a common set of interests vanishes’. In addition, and partly as a consequence, the nature as well as the direction of representation are clearly changing.
Representation typically presupposes the existence of stable and meaningful social
or political collectivities, a condition that is progressively undermined as a result
of increased individualization, globalization and mediatization in modern democracies, as well as a horizontalization of relationships of authority. The ensuing uncertainty about citizen preferences and the transformation of political parties into
parastatal agents, coupled with the growing unpredictability and complexity of the
political agenda, have shifted modes of representation from bottom-up forms of ex
A Tribute to Peter Mair 187
ante mandates towards more top-down and ex post forms of accountability
(Andeweg, 2003).
The political theorist Michael Saward has made a similar point, by arguing that
political parties may in fact (claim to) represent in a variety of forms, and that
what we are witnessing is a shift from one form, the so-called popular mode, to
another, which he calls the statal mode of representation. The ‘popular’ mode is
characterized by parties claiming to speak as delegates of certain politicized interests
on the basis of a relatively fixed ideology. This understanding of representation
involves a bottom-up process of interest articulation and aggregation, and perhaps
resonates most deeply with dominant – but increasingly outdated – conceptions of
party democracy. The ‘statal’ mode is characterized by parties claiming to speak as
trustees of depoliticized and relatively flexible issue-based positions. This mode of
representation is more top-down and accentuates the public rather than the private
functions of the parties. In a similar vein, Mair (2009: 6) has argued that ‘the
parties have moved from representing interests of citizens to the state, to representing
interests of the state to the citizens’. The representation of citizens, then, to the extent
that it occurs at all is increasingly left to other, non-governing, organizations (Mair,
2011a). For Saward, such a shift in the mode of representation does ‘not necessarily
add up to a picture that is less democratic. It can, rather, be differently democratic’
(Saward, 2008: 283). Be that as it may, these developments do appear to entail a
change from a partisan mode of representation to a mode of representation that
centres more explicitly on some notion of the general or public interest, and which
is decidedly less partisan. The key problem being confronted by the parties, then,
is that of legitimizing their governance in the face of their weakening relevance as
channels of citizen representation.
It does not seem too much of an exaggeration to posit that much of the criticisms
of contemporary parties can be attributed to a legitimacy deficit. As a result, democratic polities are currently experiencing a variety of forms of opposition to the
established parties and political elites. In some political systems, anti-system and
anti-party sentiments are successfully channelled through emerging populist
parties, on both the left and right of the political spectrum, which combine an
anti-establishment rhetoric with claims of popular representation. Other varieties
of anti-establishment parties have also managed to break into the conventional
arenas of democratic representation. Interesting examples are the German Pirate
Party, which since 2011 has succeeded in entering four Land parliaments, although
it failed to cross the threshold in the 2013 general elections, or the Five Star Movement of the Italian comedian and actor turned political activist Beppe Grillo, which
managed to conquer the city of Parma in the recent mayoral elections, win the
largest share of the vote in the Sicilian regional elections, as well as coming in
third with about a quarter of the vote in the general elections in 2013. Outside
the electoral and parliamentary arenas, protest movements such as Occupy or the
Spanish indignados are creating identities that structure and polarize political attitudes above and beyond the direct impact of partisanship (e.g. Greene & Saunders,
2012). Despite some modest successes, however, as yet such forces largely remain
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I. van Biezen
outsider voices of dissent against what they perceive as a corrupted political (and
economic) system.
In the context of democratic renewal, we may also point to trials and experiments
with alternative modes of decision-making and the plethora of instances of institutional reform. There is a still growing interest in forms of direct, participatory
and deliberative democracy – referendums, citizen juries and assemblies, deliberative
polls, participatory budgeting, and so on. All of these aim to provide ordinary citizens
with more influence in the political process also outside the electoral cycle and separate from the hierarchical and aggregative channels of party politics. Leaving aside
the question whether the ordinary citizen actually wants to engage more frequently
and more intensively in the decision-making process (e.g. Hibbing & TheissMorse, 2002; Stoker, 2006), it should also be noted that the record of success of
these alternatives and reforms to date is not exactly impressive (cf. Farrell, 2012).
The fact that there are gradually more cases of citizen-oriented reform seems to
suggest that things are changing, but their restricted scope and agenda as well as
their ad hoc character make them unsuitable as structural alternatives to the established channels of party politics. In order to address the legitimacy crisis, parties
will have to integrate these alternatives with established institutional mechanisms.
More generally, they will have to find a way to close the gap between an increasingly
horizontalized public domain, on the one hand, in which critical citizens, societal
organizations and political actors operate on a relatively equitable footing in real
and virtual networks, and the vertical structures of electoral democracy and party government, on the other, which continue to be organized hierarchically and top-down
(Rob, 2010). It is not easy to see how this can be accomplished.
At the same time, and in the opposite direction of citizen-oriented reforms, we
appear to be witnessing a ‘technocratic challenge’ to democratically elected politicians. The counterweight of non-majoritarian institutions is considered necessary
by some to safeguard democratic goals ‘from the predatory inclinations of a transitory
political elite’ (Everson, 2000: 106). March and Olsen (1995: 136 – 137) even cast
doubt on the value of party competition itself, by suggesting that it is not selfevident that it ‘will necessarily produce leaders who represent the interests of the
people well or who are competent to govern’. In this context we may not only emphasize the continuing encroachment of the civil service on political decision-making,
but also highlight especially the recent events, such as in Greece and Italy, where
elected politicians were replaced by professional experts, and the Greek prime minister was ridiculed for even entertaining, however momentarily, the notion of a
popular referendum.
Some may herald the arrival of more specialist professional expertise as a solution
to the problems caused by Europe’s politicians.7 However, as Mair has pointed out in
the Irish context, where in the wake of the financial crisis the immediate constraints
imposed upon parties by external actors became particularly acute, the technocratic
solution is difficult to reconcile with the democratic process. Indeed, the imposition
of budget cuts for which millions of innocent citizens are having to suffer, imposed
by non-elected bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington, not only constitutes a social
A Tribute to Peter Mair 189
catastrophe but also signals a failure of elected governments and democracy (Mair,
2011b). Who can blame voters for turning to political entrepreneurs with quick
and easy solutions to their problems while the mainstream parties have – constrained
by external demands from the European Union and International Monetary Fund –
lost virtually all policy autonomy? The rational answer to the current financial
crisis appears to be an even closer fiscal and monetary union, but this is a technocratic
solution that will not make Europe more democratic. For the parties, the advent of
technocratic forms of decision-making undermines not only their policy autonomy
but also their policy coordination function.
According to Mair, it is the growing disequilibrium between the popular irrelevance of parties and their increased public privileges that lies at the heart of the
present discontent with political parties and that is difficult to remedy. He once
drew a powerful parallel with Tocqueville’s analysis of the nobility to make this
point: the more public functions passed out of their hands, the more uncalled for
their invidious rights and privileges appeared, ‘until at last their mere existence
seemed a meaningless anachronism’ (Mair, 1995). In the same vein, he argued that
the conditions for party government have now been undermined in such a way that
‘it is almost impossible to imagine [it] . . . sustaining complete legitimacy’ in the
long run (Mair, 2008). In the context of the euro crisis, Mair furthermore observed
a mismatch between the demands and preferences of citizens and the capacity of
their governments, such that public opinion effectively becomes divorced from
problem solving, and elections from political decision-making. This malaise is pathological rather than contingent.
At the final stages of his career, Mair had become more pessimistic about the future
of party democracy (cf. Andeweg, 2012), and increasingly convinced that unless
parties are seen to represent as well as to govern, their governments will find it
increasingly difficult to legitimize their governance. Democracy then becomes hollowed out (Mair, 2006). In an unpublished paper for the Max Planck Institute,
Mair, in 2009, emphasized further the tensions between representation and governance underlying the contemporary crises of governance and democracy, making
the compelling distinction between representative parties and responsible governments. Representative parties are those that are responsive to public opinion. Responsible government is ‘good government’, i.e. government that is prudent and
consistent, and follows accepted procedural norms and practices. The two are increasingly becoming incompatible, to the point that the party systems are bifurcating, with
the established parties acting responsibly, but not very responsively, and the populist
parties and other outside challengers acting responsively, but not very responsibly.
Although this situation is in large part a product of party adaptation to changes in
their external environment, for Mair the mainstream parties are also to blame for preferring strategies that are aimed first and foremost at ensuring their own organizational survival rather than safeguarding their representative linkages with society.
Mair intimated that the age of party democracy might be passing as both the
societal and governance functions of the parties eventually become hollowed out.
In practical terms, the end of parties and party democracy may be a matter of
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I. van Biezen
definition. If we adopt Sartori’s minimal definition,8 it is difficult to envisage an
alternative to parties as long as elections are the sine qua non of democracy. Such
a minimalist notion of parties is perfectly compatible with some – albeit equally
minimalist – theories of democracy. And even if we were to experiment with radically alternative forms of democracy – abolishing elections in favour of random
selection or sortition as a mechanism for the selection of public office holders, for
example – it is likely that some form of ‘party’ (or faction, or tendency, or whatever)
will emerge. Every political system of a certain magnitude knows or has known the
phenomenon of party formation, because in every political community there will be
conflicting interests and claims to power that can be mobilized (Tromp, 2003). ‘In the
end’, therefore, as Saward concludes, ‘whether democracy is unthinkable save for
political parties may no longer be the question we need to ask. Rather, we may
need to ask: what kinds of representative democracy are thinkable. And what
forms of party . . . if any, are appropriate to them?’ (Saward, 2008: 284). Whether
the glass is currently half full or half empty largely depends on our normative
assumptions. Among the many things that Mair has taught us is that we have to
pay attention to the trends over time and in comparative perspective if we are to
draw any conclusions about the past, present or future. For the moment, to paraphrase
Mark Twain, the reported death of the parties or party democracy appears to be an
exaggeration. But if we are serious about democracy, and especially if we embrace
a more substantive notion of what democracy is, we have to be serious about contemplating alternative and/or complementary forms of elite – mass linkages.
Let me conclude by saying that it is difficult to underestimate Peter Mair’s contributions to political science, which were intellectually ambitious and far-reaching,
while he himself would always remain modest about his own brilliance. In his
work he addressed the very big questions, amidst increasing volumes of more narrowly cast and specialized analysis that now flood the literature. In addition, the questions he studied were of obvious normative importance. His ideas often struck a chord
also because they have a clear bearing on the real world of politics and policymaking;9 and he possessed the enviable capacity to convey his ideas in a wonderfully
accessible and engaging manner, making his arguments all the more compelling. He
will be widely remembered not only for his many theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions to the scholarly debate, but also for the way in which his insights
were so often acutely in tune with political reality. As the crisis of party democracy
– or indeed the euro crisis – shows few signs of abating, he will also be greatly
missed for those same reasons.
Notes
1. Slightly revised and updated version of the inaugural Peter Mair memorial lecture, delivered at the
PSAI annual conference, 20 October 2012, Londonderry.
2. The digital ‘pre-print’ version of the article appeared a few months before Mair’s death; the printed
version appeared in 2012.
3. ‘British democracy in terminal decline, warns report’, The Guardian, 6 July 2012.
A Tribute to Peter Mair 191
4. In their later restatement of the cartel party thesis, Katz and Mair (2009: 755) pointed out that already in
the 1950s Kirchheimer had drawn attention to what he called the ‘state-party cartel’. This was not just
unbeknownst to them at the time, but did not have much traction in the wider political science community either.
5. The only exception to this pattern is Latvia, where public funding was not introduced until 2010.
6. The figures for the late 1980s are taken from the contributions in Katz and Mair (1992).
7. For example, ‘Don’t blame the technocrats – they’re just doing their job’, The Independent, 19
November 2011.
8. ‘A party is any political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections,
candidates for public office’ (Sartori, 1976: 64).
9. These qualifications are in fact Mair’s own, for his ‘doctor father’ Hans Daalder (Mair, 2011c: ix –x),
but could equally forcefully be attributed to his own work.
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