European Journal of Political Research 37: 149–179, 2000.
© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Citizens, politicians, and party cartellization: Political
representation and state failure in post-industrial democracies
HERBERT KITSCHELT
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
Abstract. This paper critiques what can be interpreted as an application of the literature on
state failure in current political economy and political science to the changing role of political
parties in advanced post-industrial democracies, Katz and Mair’s theory of cartel parties. It
develops an alternative set of hypotheses about the dynamics of parties and party systems with
the objective to clarify empirical terms according to which rival propositions can be tested.
Specifically, the paper rejects three propositions in the theory of cartel parties and advances
the following alternatives. First, party leaders are not divorced from their members and voting constituencies, but become ever more sensitive to their preferences. Second, inter-party
cooperation generates a prisoner’s dilemma in the competitive arena that ultimately prevents
the emergence of cartels. Ideological convergence of rival parties has causes external to the
competitive arena, not internal to it. Third, conventional parties cannot marginalize or coopt
new challengers, but must adjust to their demands and electoral appeals. The age of cartel
parties, if it ever existed, is not at its beginning, but its end.
Introduction
The idea of ‘state failure’ has provided the dominant new interpretive framework to characterize politics in the advanced post-industrial democracies
of the 1980s and 1990s. The intellectual proponents of state failure theory
cite rising unemployment, slowing economic growth and increasing social
inequality as indications of a weakening capacity of democratic polities to
manage social change and act on citizens’ preferences. What is worse, according to such analysts the main cause of these unsatisfactory outcomes is
the opportunistic conduct of politicians and bureaucrats who exploit or rewrite the rules of the political game so as to suit their selfish interests in the
acquisition and maintenance of wealth and power. In the language of state
failure theory, the citizens as democratic ‘principals’ have ever less control
over what are nominally their ‘agents’ in electoral political office or in the
professional career bureaucracy.
Since political parties are an essential and indispensable component of
contemporary democracy, theorists of state failure have laid much of the
responsibility for the declining effectiveness of political systems at their door-
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steps. These charges have given rise to a chorus of voices complaining about
the irreversible entrenchment of a ‘political class’ recruited primarily from
the parties whose main operatives are intent on pursuing their own personal
material or organizational interests rather than those of their electoral constituencies in society at large.1 Political leaders, such voices conclude, are
‘out of touch’ with their voters and attend only to their own advancement.
Moreover, these voices blame the cynicism about democracy that public
opinion polls detect among citizens in contemporary democracies on the
increasingly self-centered strategies of politicians.
In this paper, I wish to argue that the state failure interpretation of party
organization and competition lacks adequate micro-foundations of political
action that would accurately characterize the relations between voters, elected politicians, and appointed government officials within the institutional
constraints set by democratic constitutions, party systems, and bureaucracy.
It therefore remains unclear why politicians are supposed to become increasingly independent from their electoral constituencies. Given the analytical
weakness of the micro-foundations implied by a ‘state-centered’ analysis
of politicians’ changing strategies, I advance a more society-centered set
of hypotheses stipulating how new political-economic challenges, mediated
by the institutions of democracy, may yield new organizational forms and
competitive strategies of parties in post-industrial democracies.
I take my cues from Donald Wittman’s (1995) penetrating analysis of the
‘state failure’ literature, as it applies to a variety of aspects of modern political
governance relations. His message is loud and clear: ‘State failure’ arguments
usually assume that politicians and/or bureaucrats operate in a monopoly situation in which constituencies and voters have no option to ‘exit’ and therefore
are also incapable of mobilizing more than feeble ‘voice’. Societal constituencies and voters, as the principals of the democratic game, helplessly stand
by and watch how their purported agents skim off ‘rents’ derived from their
unchecked powers. Wittman persuasively shows, however, that monopoly
conditions rarely prevail in contemporary politics and that agents’ rents are
seriously squeezed by the competitive openness of the political market place.
Wittman discusses an impressively broad menu of theorems and applications
of state failure theories to prove his point, but he does not address the governance of political parties and party system competition. I would presume
his choice of subjects heavily relies on the context of American politics where
according to many, but not all observers parties play a comparatively feeble
role in the process of interest aggregation and authoritative decision making.2
With this article I would like to take a step toward filling this lacunae in
Wittman’s critique of ‘state failure’ interpretations and confront that literature in the area of party politics with an eye to empirical developments in
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Western Europe. State failure here concerns the behavior of parties and their
leaders. Have the latter managed to detach themselves from the demands of
their voters and party members in order to exploit their privileged position to
their own advantage’?
My article is not meant to test a set of rival theoretical propositions about
the presence or absence of state failure in the arena of party competition
empirically, but to develop them and to identify empirical terms on which
the claims of rival hypotheses can be settled. I develop these hypotheses by
way of a critique of a rather influential recent article by Richard Katz and
Peter Mair (1995, cited from the reprint in Mair 1997) on the emergence of
‘cartel parties’ as the dominant constitutive elements within a new dynamic of
Western democratic polities. While they do not explicitly situate their article
within the ‘state failure’ literature, it exhibits all the major idioms common
to that literature. In contrast to the prevailing theoretical technique in much
of that literature, however, Katz and Mair make little effort to work out the
rational micro-foundations state failure theorists presume to exist in order
to bring about the collective outcome that agents dominate their own principals. I will argue below that it remains unclear how politicians devise their
preferences, calculate their strategies under varying external constraints, and
in these settings can dissociate themselves from their principals and become
closely affiliated with what the authors call the ‘state’.
Katz and Mair’s article has already been subjected to an able and penetrating critique by one of their collaborators, Ruud Koole (1996), and the two
authors took this opportunity to clarify some of their propositions (Katz &
Mair 1996). Rather than repeating Koole’s points, I wish to organize my critical discussion and alternative propositions around three topics. Some of these
topics overlap with Koole’s concerns, but most of them aim at the problem of
micro-foundations, arguing that plausible specifications of the missing microfoundations in Katz and Mair’s (1995) argument show that their hypotheses
are theoretically incoherent and/or empirically implausible.
The three topics I will focus on have in common that they concern relationships of representation between principals (voters, party members) and
agents (party leaders) in the democratic political game. What is at stake in the
debate about party democracy is whether new relations between parties and
“state” have stifled relations of representation (accountability and responsiveness) between principals and agents. Let me state the three major contentious
propositions driving Katz and Mair’s work which I take up sequentially in the
following three sections in a simple fashion:
(1) Party leaders have become divorced from internal principals (members, activists) and external principals (voters).
(2) Because party leaders in all established parties share common in-
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terests in maintaining their privileged position, such politicians undercut
competition through practices of ‘cartellization’.
(3) Cartel parties can marginalize, overwhelm or “coopt” challengers
who try to undercut their dominant position and to re-establish relations
of representation with external and internal constituencies.
From my critique of these three propositions, I will derive an alternative
scenario of competitive party democracy in post-industrial polities that incorporates the crucial role of political institutions and politicians’ strategic
deliberation, but insists on the continuing vitality of relations of representation. For the sake of discussion, I will overstate some points of disagreement
with the state failure literature, in general, and with Katz and Mair’s rendering
of party competition in particular. This does not imply that I distort their position, but I set a somewhat overdrawn alternative developmental perspective
against what they treat as a new ideal-type of ‘cartel parties’ (Mair 1997: 109)
toward which an evolution of state-party-society relations is supposed to have
taken place (Mair 1997: 102).
Given that exploring the empirical accuracy of either scenario still requires
much empirical research, let me conclude my introduction with a disclaimer.
My hypotheses amount to a possible scenario for the development of political parties in advanced industrial democracies, based on what I take to be
empirical tendencies observable in recent decades. It is well possible that I
am wrong. In a similar vein, Richard Katz and Peter Mair (1995) lay out a
scenario that serves the debate in the comparative study of party politics by
supplying a reference point to guide empirical investigations. While I argue
that their scenario of party (system) development does not prevail empirically,
I find it important to engage in the kind of concept and hypothesis building
they undertake in their work. My paper focuses on the disagreements I have
with specific points of their analysis. At the same time, I find myself in broad
agreement with much of what Peter Mair (1997) has written about the nature
and change of party systems in advanced industrial democracies.
Party organization: Have party leaders become divorced from
principals in electorate and the parties’ rank and file?
The idea that voters or party activists cannot constrain party leaders even
in those parties that explicitly subscribe to norms of intra-party democracy
goes back to one of the most celebrated texts in political science, Robert
Michels’s Political Parties (1911/62). Its argument essentially boils down to
three hypotheses (cf. Kitschelt & Hellemans 1990: 159–61). First, because
of transaction costs in large organizations, parties can achieve coordination
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only by functional differentiation and hierarchical relations of organizational
control by designated leaders (‘weak oligarchy thesis’). Second, a party’s
mass following does not have the resources and inclinations to govern the
organization and is psychologically craving for strong leaders and charismatic authority (‘membership lethargy thesis’). Third, leaders are political
professionals who live ‘off’ politics rather than ‘for’ politics. Therefore they
exploit their structural position to advance their own ambitions to gain wealth
and power to the detriment of the preferences of their followers. This implies
that they usually prefer the status quo, if it advances their personal goals, even
if policies preserving that status quo run counter to their constituencies quest
for social change (‘strong oligarchy thesis’).
There is little question that Michels is right on the first count (weak
oligarchy thesis). Furthermore, it is quite clear that most citizens and rankand-file party members have too few disposable resources (e.g., time) to
become effective players in party decision making processes. Michels’ argument from mass psychology, however, is dated and historically contingent
when viewed from the perspective of the late 20th century. Only few parties
establish strong charismatic leadership and many constituencies would be put
off by party leaders’ efforts to establish charismatic relations of authority and
dependence.
The critical issue with regard to Michels’ theory is the strong oligarchy
thesis. What is the extent to which party leaders can pursue ‘their own’
interests, as divorced from those of their following? Michels falls short of
proving his own thesis in at least three respects. First of all, he assumes
an idealized image of radicalized mass preferences for societal change,
primarily in socialist parties, that lacks any empirical grounding. In the historical context of pre-World War I politics, the strategies of moderate social
democratic leaders may most likely have served the maintenance of their
leadership positions precisely because that strategy also reflected the overwhelming rank-and-file sentiment (Lenin’s ‘trade unionist’ consciousness). It
may therefore be a matter of historical contingency whether a party constituency’s substantive policy and strategic interests coincide or conflict with their
leaders’ personal interests in office and power.
Second, Michels sees only the possibility of intra-party conflicts as a
vertical stratification of interests, dividing leaders from followers. Thus he belittles internal competition and factionalism in parties expressing segmental,
cross-cutting divides between coalitions of leaders and followers opposed to
other leader-follower coalitions with different political viewpoints and strategic preferences. Competing intra-party leader-activist coalitions appeal to
different electoral constituencies. In order to implement their strategies, such
coalitions have to win party office first and oust their competitors. In that pro-
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cess, sometimes leaders and internal constituencies may prevail that subscribe
to ‘radical’ strategies which aim at making voter preferences for revolutionary
change more intense, even if such strategies end up alienating more moderate
electoral audiences. There certainly is no ‘law’ that party leaders always tend
to be more moderate than internal activists.3
Third, Michels does not discuss the power of exit from political parties, a
weapon rank-and-file members and activists, but also leaders who have been
marginalized, can employ to rein in on self-serving leaders in multi-party
systems. He wrote his book just on the eve of a giant wave of party fragmentation, particularly on the socialist left that divided into social democratic, left
socialist and communist parties during and in the immediate aftermath of
World War I. Had he written his book ten years later, he probably would have
realized that leaders and activists can act on the threat to exit from parties
and establish a new competitor. This threat is a powerful resource to shape a
party’s strategy and keep leaders in line with activists’ preferences or those
of external electoral constituencies.
In Katz and Mair’s recent article, we encounter a number of the hypotheses originally advanced by Robert Michels, as well as an amplifications of
Michels’ strong oligarchy thesis based on what they identify as critical more
recent developments in democratic party systems. In the spirit of Michels, the
authors see contemporary parties ‘as partnerships of professionals, not associations of and for the citizens’ (Mair 1997: 115). What is most important,
they endorse Michels’s strong oligarchy thesis by claiming that parties in contemporary Western democracies tend to be venues of societal representation
to a lesser and lesser extent. As Mair concludes. ‘the relevance of linkages
which are based on trust, accountability, and above all, representation, tends
to become eroded, both inside and outside the parties’ (Mair 1997: 153). The
claim that accountability and representation fade implies that party leaders increasingly act on different political preference schedules than those endorsed
by their voters. What is it that permits politicians to detach themselves from
their external principals (voters) and their internal principals (party members
and activists) and move ‘towards an anchoring of parties within the state’
(Mair 1997: 105)?
On the one hand, citizens’ participation in and material contributions to
parties have declined as citizens choose other modes of interest mobilization (Mair 1997: 107). On the other, a principal reason for the insulation
of parties from their electorates is the increasing provision and regulation
of state subvention to political parties’ (Mair 1997: 105), ‘one of the most
significant changes in the environment within which parties act’ (Mair 1997:
106). Because state-financed parties make it difficult for new alternatives to
emerge, a proposition to which I will return later, established parties can
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155
form ‘cartels’ allowing them to dissociate the policies and preferences the
parties pursue from those of their voters. Where cartel parties dominate, they
‘prevent elections from performing even the minimal feedback functions that
the new model of democracy assigns to them’ (Mair 1997: 117). The growth
in party finance is thus a major device undercutting political representation.
Presumably, new challenging parties can be only a threat to incumbents, if
they can appeal to interests not represented by the established parties. A preemptive strike against new challengers through exclusive party financing for
established parties derives its importance from politicians’ intent to abandon
their voters, yet make it impossible for the latter to defect from the existing
parties.
But why do parties wish to abandon their voters’ preferences and how
does party finance enable this process to take its course? Would not voteand office-seeking politicians attempt to realize their goals by being more responsive to a greater share of the electorate than their competitors? And what
are politicians’ unique preferences that undermine relations of representation
and guide politicians’ strategies in legislatures or government executives?
Katz and Mair do not provide entirely unambiguous answers to these crucial
questions, but their logic of reasoning can be reconstructed from a number of
propositions in their articles.
First of all, by inserting themselves in the ‘state’, based on public party
financing for parliamentary and party staff positions (Mair 1997: 140–2)
and party patronage in the civil service (Mair 1997: 142–3), parties become
more dependent on the state and state regulation of party organization (ibid.).
In other words, the ‘state’ becomes the principal that complements, if not
replaces, electorates and party activists as determinant of politicians’ preferences in their competitive struggle for survival. As Katz and Mair (1996: 527)
elaborate in their response to Koole, state subsidies facilitate the creation of
distance between party leadership and ‘society’, as represented by principals
inside and outside the parties. Who these new state principals are, surfaces in
the following statement, where Katz and Mair assert an ‘essentially Janus-like
existence’ of parties in the transition to the “cartel party” form of organization
that results from the parties’ insertion in the state apparatus:
On one hand, parties aggregate and present demands from civil society
to the state bureaucracy, while on the other they are the agents of that
bureaucracy in defending policies to the public. (Mair 1997: 103)
This proposition indicates that in the third stage of evolution (Mair 1997: 102)
of civil society/party/state relations, it is the bureaucrats who increasingly set
the agenda for politicians. But what are the interests of bureaucrats that make
politicians systematically violate the preferences of electoral constituencies?
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Do the bureaucrats have an ‘interest in themselves’, such as the maximization of administrative overhead (Niskanen 1971) that enables them to instruct
politicians to endorse policies the parties’ voters would not? Katz and Mair
do not tell us how they conceive of bureaucratic interests and the interplay
between bureaucrats and politicians. The more recent public choice literature,
and particularly the critics of ‘state failure’ theory, would cast serious doubt
on the existence of a unified bureaucratic interest and the ability of bureaucrats to impose whatever interests they might have on elected politicians (cf.
Wittman 1995: ch. 8; Moe 1997).
But Mair has doubts himself that bureaucrats are the politicians’ new
principals. In a later passage in his book, he withdraws from conceptualizing bureaucracy as the new ‘state’ principal that guides party politicians and
declares that
this increased dependence of parties on the state can also be interpreted
as the increased dependence of parties on themselves, since it is the
parties themselves which, to all intents and purposes, are the state, or
at least, are those who devise he rules and regulations promulgated by
the state, and who inevitably privilege their own position. (Mair 1997:
152)
Mair here rejects talking about the state as a reified actor outside political
party competition, but makes it even more mysterious why politicians would
systematically violate their constituencies’ interests. The claim that parties
are increasingly ‘anchored’ in the state now reads that parties are increasingly
becoming autonomous from any external principal. This is not quite a tautology, because it states that parties are independent, but makes it even harder to
conceive of a theory that would tell us how politicians form their preferences
and strategies, if external constraints, imposed by principals, do not count for
much. Wouldn’t it be easiest for politicians to protect their political survival
by allocating not only resources to their own parties, but by also responding
to citizens’ interests? If the ‘state’ is nothing but the politicians themselves,
there is no new principal guiding politicians. Then politicians may just as well
enact voters’ preferences in order to advance their own career fortunes. Why
is there any need to undercut relations of representation?
In Katz and Mair’s view, politicians are increasingly a self-referential
group of career professionals who, by way of fraternization, the common
milieu of political professionals, develop an independent understanding of
goals and objectives that unites politicians across parties and divorces them
from their voters (Mair 1997: 109, 112). Katz and Mair rely on a psychology
of face-to-face group dynamics among politicians that was already at the heart
of Michels’ elaboration of the “strong” oligarchy thesis where the desire for
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job security, political stability, and personal advancement made politicians
constitute a united political class with solidarity and identity across the individual parties. Even if we make the concession that this highly tenuous
proposition about a social psychological group identity among politicians is
valid, however, it is unclear (1) why this force compels politicians to violate
their constituencies’ interests systematically and (2) why this violation is
postulated to have become more serious in the recent evolution of Western
European party systems. If the psychological force leads politicians from different parties to agree to policy compromises, Katz and Mair’s presumption
of an increasing representational gap between voters and electorates would be
accurate only if we assume that most voters oppose compromise and support
radical policy alternatives. Moreover, for the representational gap to worsen,
this political polarization of public opinion must have progressively increased
over the past decades. In other words, Katz and Mair imply dual-peaked
voter preference distributions in any salient dimension of policy-making, with
progressively fewer voters clustered around the median voter position. This
proposition is quite implausible in light of all the available evidence about
voter preference distributions in advanced post-industrial democracies.4
The problems of logical and theoretical completeness and coherence as
well as of empirical plausibility in the Katz–Mair model of contemporary
party development further increase when they incorporate the relationship
between elected politicians and party members and activists (Mair 1997:
112–14; 146–52). Their model discusses the relationship among four groups,
voters, party members, party activists and party leaders (elected politicians).
According to Katz and Mair, parties in European institutional settings cannot
do without activists. They are necessary to fill a myriad of often unrewarding
positions within local and regional representative bodies with elected officials
and inside the state administration. They also represent an essential channel
of leadership socialization and selection. As an additional benefit to the party,
a large party membership creates an outside party image that legitimizes its
position in society. As a consequence, parties still try to attract members
and even provide new purposive incentives for participation, such as quasiprimaries on the selection of party leaders. But such participation is “safe” for
the leaders, because it atomizes membership participation through postal ballots and primaries rather than the collective experience of party conventions
and debates (Mair 1997: 113–14). The new techniques of participation keep
rank and file members disorganized, but confront them with an integrated national elite (Mair 1997: 146–52). National party leaders can discourage local
activists to challenge the national leadership, because the latter know that
the former can always thwart such attacks by appealing to the unmobilized
individual party members (Mair 1997: 114).
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Katz and Mair combine a number of propositions that are empirically
contentious, when examined one by one, and mutually inconsistent, when
considered together. First of all, the presumed systematic clash between
(moderate) unmobilized party members and leaders, on one side, and mobilized (radical) activists, bent on challenging the leadership, occurs only under
very specific conditions.5 For example, as long as there are opportunities for
leadership competition inside parties, no profound disparity of political orientations between activists and leaders is to be expected, as candidates for the
party leadership will compete for support by the median party activist or as
different currents may field their own candidates for the leadership and gain
representation in party executives and legislative groups (Kitschelt 1989b).
Next, if party activists have the exit option and can form new parties, a condition I explore in the third section, they either keep party leaders responsive
to their preferences or withdraw to other parties, thus realigning the political
convictions of leaders and activists within the same party through the exit of
dissenters. Furthermore, the leader-activist disparity depends on the format
of the party system (multi-party systems facilitate exit of dissenters) and
the societal polarization outside the parties (high polarization feeds radical
activists into politics).6
Second, Katz and Mair’s hypothesis asserting the empowerment of (generally passive) members at the expense of local party activists is inconsistent
with their claim that even contemporary parties value activists and therefore permit greater participation in strategic decision making. It is not the
passive party members politicians need to motivate in order to maintain the
political significance of their parties in public life but precisely the allegedly
radical local activists that are said to be troublesome for the strategic pursuits
of the elected party elites. Third, doubts about the coherence of Katz and
Mair’s model of principal-agent relations between politicians, voters, and
party activists are further fuelled by their declaration that ‘[l]eaders are no
longer primarily accountable to the members, but rather to the wider electorate’ (Mair 1997: 13). On one side, Katz and Mair proclaim that relations of
representation and accountability between elected politicians and voters are
waning (Mair 1997: 103–5; 153); on the other, they postulate increasing accountability between party electorates and party leaders, but as a consequence
decreasing influence of internal party principals (especially local activists)
to whom the attribute interests that systematically diverge from those of
electorates and party leaders. These two propositions cannot possibly be true
simultaneously.
Even if we disregard the logical inconsistencies that appear once we spell
out the micro-dynamics of party organization Katz and Mair lay out and
simply focus on the spirit of their argument that party leaders become more
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detached from all principals (voters, members, activists), we still must make
the strong and contentious assumption that politicians can take away the exist
option from the party’s voters, members and activists and force them to abide
by unwanted power relations. Katz and Mair conceive of parties either as
iron hierarchies with a monopolist leadership or as stratarchies in which the
leadership is more or less completely insulated from the rank and file (Mair
1997: 151). They deny the existence of exit and voice options, precisely the
mechanisms of leadership control critics of the state failure literature invoke
in order to assert that political agents remain responsive to their principals
(Wittman 1995). While it may be true hat contemporary political parties exhibit a stratarchal differentiation of levels of activism and decision-making,
exit and voice mechanisms rarely permit national leadership levels to become
entirely impervious to the control by a variety of external principals, be they
local activists, members, or voters. Moreover, empirical studies I cite below
provides no evidence of a declining relation of representation.
Mair claims that despite the increasingly stratarchal organization of
European parties, they do not adopt the ‘American’ decentralized, candidatecentered party model, but maintain more collective integration because
European parties rely more on the partyness of the ‘state’ than their American
counterparts (Mair 1997: 151). But it is entirely unnecessary to make strong
claims about elite collusion, the integration of party elites into an illusive
‘state’, and the decline of voter representation to develop a theoretically
crisp, elegant and consistent account of the continuing difference between
European and American parties. The main reason why European parties show
more hierarchical control and programmatic cohesiveness than their American counterparts has to do with the system of political representation and
competition itself, namely the electoral rules that channel party competition (Carey & Shugart 1995) and the organization of executive-legislative
relations (Harmel & Janda 1982; Linz & Valenzuela 1994).
It is now time to introduce a set of alternative testable propositions, I believe to be empirically more adequate and logically more coherent in order to
characterize and to account for the changing role of parties in post-industrial
democracies. I share with Katz and Mair the belief that parties are not ‘declining’ in post-industrial democracies, but facing new challenges. In contrast
to Katz and Mair, I propose, however, that new societal challenges, mediated
by the institutional system of representation, force vote- and office-seeking
politicians to develop new political strategies. While these new challenges
generate problems of representation, they have little to do with the increased
integration of the parties into the state. Instead, they derive from new politicaleconomic problems that undermine existing and durable relations of linking
political parties to the market economy in most European democracies.
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To begin with, it is important to assert that two unproved empirical assumptions in Katz and Mair’s work are incorrect and need to be replaced by
more accurate factual accounts. First, there is no dramatic surge of public
dissatisfaction with democratic institutions in Western Europe. While there
is a slow aggregate decline of satisfaction across all European democracies
since the 1960s (cf. Listhaug & Wiberg 1995: 304–6), the more important
phenomenon is the great variance in trends of political satisfaction among
European democracies. From 1976 to 1991, for example, satisfaction with the
working of democracy has increased in nine of thirteen West European polities (cf. Fuchs et al. 1995: 340). Second, trends in citizens’ satisfaction with
political democracy have nothing to do with the political representativeness
of parties which has remained high (cf. Widfeldt 1995: 168–71; Klingemann
1995: 193–200). And third, whatever gap there is between citizens’ political preferences and politicians’ preferences suggests not a fraternization of
politicians across all parties, but quite the reverse. Empirical evidence taken
from a wide range of countries shows that leading politicians tend to adopt
more extreme appeals than their electorates who tend to gravitate toward
centrist positions and even party activists are rarely more radical than the
party leadership (cf. Holmberg 1989; Iversen 1994).
Moving beyond description and developing hypotheses to account for
levels and change rates of satisfaction with democratic competition, the theoretical focus must be on two problems not adequately incorporated in Katz
and Mair’s analysis. Dissatisfaction with parties does not originate in their
new capacity to form cartels and dissociate themselves from their voters, but
(1) in the political-economic agenda of policy-making, confronting parties
with inevitable trade-offs among objectives voters would like to maximize
jointly, and (2) with the legacies of the institutional entrenchment and durable
privileges political parties have often enjoyed for many decades. Both of these
issues affect advanced post-industrial democracies in varying fashion and
thus can account for diverging levels and change rates of democratic satisfaction. In the 1970s and 1980s, democratic regime satisfaction was also affected
by the intensity of support for new and yet unrepresented ‘left-libertarian’
political demands, as manifested by ecological, feminist, or multi-cultural
currents. But as soon as these demands were met by new political parties or
the modified strategic appeal of existing parties, the democratic satisfaction
of left-libertarian voters has become virtually indistinguishable from that of
the established parties’ supporters.
Turning to the political-economic challenges, the critical problem of
democratic satisfaction in contemporary democracies has little to do with
the collusion among politicians and their integration in the state, but the
maturing of welfare states that have organized the class compromise and
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the disappearance of a radical socialist alternative to capitalism both in the
perception of political elites and of mass audiences. These changes may only
to a minor extent be due to the globalization of goods and capital markets and
to a major extent due to technological change, increasing the market premium
paid for human and financial capital while disadvantaging less skilled workers and employees, and the ageing demographic profile of Western societies
that has imposed extraordinary strains on social policy expenditures that
cannot be solved within the established welfare state frameworks.7 On the
one hand, these new problems occur in all democracies and raise problems for politicians that are destined to increase voter dissatisfaction. The
new political-economic challenges force politicians to cope with substantive
trade-offs among several policy objectives all of which voters would like to
see realized and with inter-temporal trade-offs compelling politicians in executive office to choose when to represent particular voter preferences best.
On the other hand, the political-economic challenges play themselves out
in unique ways in each country, contingent upon its demographic structure,
system of economic interest intermediation, and policy legacies, for example
in the design of social insurance systems (cf. Pierson 1994). I will sketch only
the general nature of the new challenges.
Politicians face difficult substantive policy trade-offs because majorities of
West European voters simultaneously wish to lower unemployment, improve
income equality, maintain a sound fiscal system with low public deficits, and
possibly even achieve all this with low taxes. This combination of objectives
may create unsolvable policy trilemmas where one objective must always be
traded off in order to achieve the others (Iversen & Wren 1998). In countries,
where successive governments composed of politicians from different parties
have faced particularly sharp economic policy trade-offs and have tackled
the trilemma by sacrificing one objective (employment, equality, or fiscal
austerity) in order to achieve the remaining two, popular satisfaction with
democracy lends to be lower than in countries where the trilemma has been
less sharp. For example, the rise of extreme rightist electorates voicing great
disaffection with all the democratic parties is fuelled in part, but not exclusively, by the dissatisfaction of less skilled labourers with declining labor
market opportunities and high structural unemployment, induced by comparatively high wages for unskilled labor combined with fiscal austerity in much
of continental Western Europe. Of course, whether or not these sources of
political unrest, however, translate into electorally successful new right-wing
parties depends on strategic alignments in the party system and the ability of
right-wing political entrepreneurs to rally a coalition of heterogeneous electoral constituencies, only some of which are economically motivated, behind
a new radical right party label (Kitschelt & McGann 1995).
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In the temporal dimension of policy trade-offs, politicians face a problem
of time inconsistency of democratic representation very similar to that of
democratic and market-liberal politicians who try to dismantle East European
socialist or Latin American import substituting closed economies (cf. Przeworski 1991: ch. 4). In order to win voters’ approval for a government’s
economic policy at the time of the next election and thus affirm the “representativeness” of the incumbent parties, those parties may have to deliver
policies earlier during the electoral term, and preferably right after the
preceding elections, that run directly counter to the expressed opinions of
their voters. For example, by pursuing neo-liberal economic policies of
deregulation and privatization, government parties may abandon the socialprotectionist preferences of their own voters in the short run not because they
are a ‘political class’ entrenched in cartel parties with preferences detached
from those of their constituencies. What makes them diverge from their voters
is precisely their vote- and office-seeking ambition that keeps politicians
responsive to voters’ future evaluation of their performance at the time of
the subsequent election when politicians anticipate to be held accountable
by their voters. Politicians in electoral office will therefore attempt to ‘time’
the delivery of good economic news in the run-up to the next election and
earlier on abstain from policies that gratify voters instantly (such as public
employment programs), but that are likely to produce unwanted outcomes in
the longer term (state deficits, inflation, trade imbalances, structural rigidities
of non-competitive industries).8
Popular dissatisfaction with parties appears to be particularly high in
countries where the established parties have failed to generate bold new
political-economic initiatives precisely because politicians have been unable
to solve the problem of temporal policy trade-offs and time inconsistencies
in the management of relations of representation. They cannot liberate themselves from direct, immediate accountability to electoral constituencies and
party activists in order to pursue economic policies that deliver longer-term
economic policy improvements by administering bitter economic medicine
in the short run (Kitschelt 1998). Examples are Austria, Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, and Japan. What these countries share in common is that
they have weak market-liberal parties and strong centrist parties that achieved
long periods of electoral hegemony by organizing a cross-class compromise among multiple segments of the electorate. In party systems with this
strategic configuration, centripetal competition prevails between center-right
parties and moderate social democrats that makes it difficult for politicians
to choose unpopular economic programs and fight off veto groups inside
the parties. Ironically, it is precisely in some of these countries where party
government has been particularly representative of public opinion to protect
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
163
existing welfare states, yet where disaffection with the political establishment
has skyrocketed because of rising structural unemployment.
The second problem of democratic dissatisfaction is also closely related to
the conduct of political parties. Directly, it concerns the institutional legacies
of clientelist party organization, intertwined with a patronage-based penetration of the civil service, publicly owned companies, and even private sector
companies closely linked to state agencies by the major political parties.
Particularly in countries such as Austria, Italy, Japan and Belgium, and to a
lesser extent in a range of other European countries, a patronage-driven state
regulated economic sector arose in the aftermath of World War II that has
become increasingly inefficient and costly for taxpayers in an economic environment that requires constant technological innovation and responsiveness
to competitive pressures in order to stay at the frontier of economic efficiency.
The spearhead of attack against patronage arrangements is constituted by a
growing middle class of professionals who find that patronage parties neither
serve their economic interests nor their participatory style of interest articulation. Low-skill jobs in public administration or state industries or public
housing are obviously much less attractive for an educated and affluent electorate seeking superior goods and professional opportunities in new economic
sectors than for the shrinking core electorates of the entrenched patronage
parties.
In contrast to Katz and Mair’s assertions, it is not new practices of stateparty interpenetration politicians devise to insulate themselves from voters
that generate dissatisfaction. To the contrary, the problem is the long established political operating mode of patronage parties that contribute to
declining citizens’ satisfaction with the democratic polity in a new politicaleconomic environment. On balance, the eroding acceptance of patronage
politics has faced parties with declining, not increasing control over public
and quasi-public funds. What were legitimate uses of public funds through
parties in the past, have now become the object of ‘scandals’ and populist anti-party campaigns, fuelled by a press and other mass communication
channels increasingly independent of political parties.
Parties now have lesser capacities to control voters through direct material inducements associated with membership in the party’s organizational
networks (public housing, jobs, party-based social insurance systems, etc.).
Because voters become more ‘non-partisan’ and available to parties only
based on convincing policy appeals, the parties are compelled to spend much
of their new or remaining public subsidies to slavishly track their voters’
every preference move through opinion polls (cf. Mair 1997: 113). They must
constantly monitor voters’ willingness to permit policy trade-offs, but also the
mobilization of anti-party sentiments related to the administration of public
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HERBERT KITSCHELT
funds by political parties. Politicians today face much greater pressures to
remain representative of their electoral constituencies than in the past and
they have much fewer degrees of freedom to interpret their representative
task as a ‘trustee’ rather than a “mandate” relationship. Instead of being increasingly anchored in the ‘state’, parties are more at the mercy of exogenous
political preferences, whether emerging spontaneously in the electorate or
manufactured by autonomous mass media and political entrepreneurs situated outside the arena of party competition. The increasing convergence of
the main parties’ policy positions, as documented by Mair (1997: 133) is
not a sign of the politicians’ ability to undercut representation and to detach
themselves from the preferences of their electoral constituencies, but a sign
of a fierce struggle to represent voters in a post-industrial capitalism, after
the end of the Cold War, when few electoral constituencies believe in the
feasibility of radical socio-economic alternatives to the existing social order.
The new societal challenges may also cast a different light on intra-party
dynamics than proposed in Katz and Mair’s theoretical framework. Even if
fewer people are actively involved in contemporary political parties and even
if the range of policy alternatives aired in intra-party debates has become narrower, this does not necessarily imply that the intensity of policy and strategic
deliberation inside parties has decreased and that leaders have more leverage
vis-à-vis members and activists than in the past. The inducements to join
mass parties often had little to do with the entrants’ purposive-programmatic
incentives and aspirations, but with material incentives and socio-cultural reinforcement within a social network. Although Christian and working class
mass parties started out as counter-models to the patronage-oriented bourgeois cadre parties in parliament (Shefter 1978), their electoral ascent gave
them access to public resources, often long before they were permitted into
national government coalitions (cf. Hellemans 1990). Particularly municipal
government provided the organizational basis for socialist mass parties to
seize state resources for party purposes. The construction of organizational
pillars, configured around political parties, in many European democracies
would have been inconceivable without the interpenetration between party
and local administration, often combined with a principle of ‘subsidiarity’
that delegated public policy implementation to associations intimately affiliated with political parties. The Ghent system of administering unemployment
insurance by party-affiliated labor unions is one of the best known examples
of the parties’ capacities to build organizational empires through affiliated
economic interest groups through the administration of public funds. Today’s
public party financing, even in the countries with the most generous schemes,
pales by comparison with the public funds traditional mass parties could
bring to bear on reinforcing political mobilization. Moreover, even Mair’s
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
165
(1997: 137) data show that only in two of the eleven countries for which
he reports quantitative figures, central party office income growth from the
mid-1970s to the late 1980s significantly exceeded the country’s real GDP
growth rate (in Austria and the USA). Mair (1997: 140–41) invokes the much
higher growth rate of political parties’ legislative staff support as a sign of
party cartellization. But these trends result precisely from politicians’ efforts
to counteract voters’ dissatisfaction with entrenched party machines and to
undercut machine power by increasing the personal profile of legislators in
order to enable them to exercise more oversight of the government executive
and be more responsive to their voters.
While it is difficult to develop firm empirical measures of the intensity of
intra-party debates across parties, countries, and over time, for all the reasons
enumerated it is not terribly plausible to presume that political debates inside
parties were more lively in the past than they are today. Party leaders today
may in fact be more vulnerable to rank and file sentiments and demands
than they ever were because of the greater scarcity of party activists and
their greater sophistication and programmatic motivation. While Mair is probably right that there is an increasingly stratarchal dissociation of party levels
in contemporary Western party systems,9 important linkages between local
and national politicians remain, precisely because the number of activists is
shrinking and the pool of contenders for electoral office becomes smaller, but
parties still recruit leaders internally. Of course, in light of the new sociocultural and economic challenges, the character of these debates is quite
different today than in the past. Given the multiple trade-offs of economic
policy-making and the complexity of electoral constituencies in advanced
welfare states, debates no longer translate into lean and consistent ideological alternatives, but into a muddle of overlapping and contradictory policy
programs and appeals that make it often difficult for voters to understand
differences between parties.
The upshot of my alternative account of evolving relations between party
politicians and their principals (voters, party members, party activists) in
advanced post-industrial democracies is that political-economic and sociocultural change has contributed to the transformation of parties, but hardly
to a greater integration of parties and ‘state’. Neither the empirical evidence
nor theoretical models make it plausible to presume that elected politicians
have engineered an increasing rift with the electorate and a decline of relations of representation. Whatever increasing dissatisfaction among voters
with existing parties and the operation of democracy more generally exists
has more to do with the long established practices according to which parties
have operated and which they are sometimes unable or unwilling to shed than
the new resources that are supposed to strengthen contemporary party leaders
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vis-à-vis voters and party activists. Party politicians find it indispensable to
organize relations of representation to electoral constituencies now just as in
the past. But due to new political-economic challenges and the policy dilemmas they create, politicians have a harder time to satisfy their electorates than
was possible in the Golden Age of the post-World War II economic recovery
and Cold War era.
Party systems: Cartellization of political competition
So far, I have examined the propositions Katz and Mair advance about the
principal-agent relations in individual cartel parties, although I have alluded
to the importance of exit mechanisms that permit individual citizens as voters,
party members, and activists to abandon one party and move on to another
that is closer aligned to their interests. This process imposes constraints on
the ability of parties to attenuate relations of representation. ‘Cartel parties’
can only exist as members of a ‘party cartel’ that makes exit difficult. Katz and
Mair’s theory stands and falls with the argument that parties can ‘close’ the
market place of electoral competition in two ways. First, the existing parties
band together and constrain the voters’ choice among alternatives. Second,
existing parties can discourage the entry of new parties (e.g., through public
party finance only to existing parties) or neutralize, coopt, or marginalize all
those parties unwilling to join the cartel. In this section, I examine the first
proposition, in the final section the second proposition.
The empirically most direct indicator of a narrowing field of party
competition is the convergence of all significant political parties in their
programmatic concerns, as measured by the distance of the parties in the
left-right space that often serves as a short-cut to mapping complex programmatic party positions (Mair 1997: 133). Katz and Mair (1996: 530)
correctly observe that the parties’ intense efforts in the electoral competition
may coincide with declining stakes of competition, measured in terms of the
difference between alternative policy packages competing parties announce
in their quest to win votes and government office. It is not difficult to spell
out a political-economic argument to explain why the programmatic distance between major parties has in fact generally declined in post-industrial
democracies. As the performance of existing socialist planned economies
has made this alternative implausible and as flexible production systems and
competitive market arrangements that stimulate the economic actors’ performance through financial incentives show their superiority, public opinion
has withdrawn from radical alternatives to a basically capitalist economy. The
political-economic explanation of this process of strategic choice in political
parties is external to the arena of party competition itself. The causal mech-
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
167
anism works from (1) the exogenous preference distribution among voters
whose economic experience and perception orients their policy evaluations
via (2) the competitive configuration of vote-seeking parties with different
programmatic reputations to (3) the strategic appeals of the party elites in a
particular electoral campaign. In this world, parties may programmatically
converge, but remain responsive to and representative of their constituencies.
Radical party programs simply cannot attract many voters.
But there are also internal explanations of strategic convergence among
party programs that do not rely on voter moderation, induced by politicaleconomic changes. The best known argument is that of Downs (1957) who
shows that in two-party systems characterized by (1) compulsory voting,
(2) spatial voting such that each voter supports the party closest to her in
a single dimension of competition, and (3) rational office-seeking politicians
who have to belong to one of the two parties, but cannot build their own
party, the programmatic appeal of the parties will converge toward the median
voter preference schedule, no matter whether most voters are concentrated on
centrist positions or dispersed around the polar opposite poles of the political space. But this result collapses once we permit the entry of new parties,
strategic voter abstention, and sophisticated voting with long time horizons,
for example when voters punish moderate parties by supporting a radical alternative that has no chance to win legislative seats in the short run. Once we
are in the world of multi-party systems, there are usually numerous electoral
incentives for parties to fan out over the competitive space and attempt to
control limited market segments by non-converging strategic appeals (Cox
1990; Shepsle 1991).
Regardless of the specific scenario, all spatial models assume that parties
remain accountable and responsive to voters and therefore choose converging
or diverging strategies. By drawing on the ‘cartellization’ of parties, Katz
and Mair, however, seek to develop a second ‘internal’ explanatory account
for a programmatic convergence of political parties that relies neither on
centripetal changes of voter sentiments nor spatial theory of party competition. Economic cartellization implies a narrowing of the competitive space
populated by multiple suppliers of a good by means of an active collusion among market participants to determine the price, the quantity, and the
quality of goods offered to customers. In this sense, Katz and Mair talk
about increasing ‘interparty collusion’ (Mair 1997: 108) and an increasing
propensity of all parties, including those formally sitting on the opposition
benches, to participate in the ‘spoils of the state’ (ibid. 107). Policy convergence and ‘allgemeine Koalitionsfähigkeit’ (generalized readiness/capacity
to participate in coalitions) are the correlates of this process.
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It is not clear, however, how and why such ‘party cartels’ come about
through an internal process of party competition and what keeps them in
place, once politicians have managed to create cartels. As is well-known from
the economic theory of oligopolies, cartels involve a prisoner’s dilemma.
Each participant has an incentive to defect from the cooperative arrangement all participants wish to maintain. Applied to parties, the further the
cartel obliges parties to distance themselves from their voters, the more its
members realize an incentive to defect from the cartel in order to reap extraordinary electoral success by catering to voters’ preferences rather than
those of the cartel members. Even if we treat the maintenance of a cartel
as an iterative prisoner’s dilemma game, undisturbed by the entry of new
actors, collaboration among the parties in the division of spoils would be
only one of many long-term equilibrium outcomes. It would take extremely
powerful sanctions to keep parties in the cartel. Public party finance, by itself,
is unlikely to achieve this at the present time. Moreover, since much of the
spoils of the political process in addition to public finance, party patronage
in the administration, etc.) is allocated in proportion to the electoral success
of parties, politicians would still have an overriding incentive to outperform
their competitors. Weaker parties would always want to embrace popular
policy positions in order to grow at the expense of stronger competitors. Party
financing in proportion to electoral market share thus creates a powerful lure
for parties to defect from a non-representative cartel and embrace popular
policy positions. Katz and Mair make a weak effort to provide a socialpsychological base for the convergence of party elites that relies on fraternal
feelings through group interaction and a common interest in preserving the
status quo (e.g., Mair 1997: 116). But politicians’ quest for power and the
scarcity of leadership positions create a strong antidote to group psychology.
Moreover, the gain and preservation of the most desirable offices is still associated with electoral success. Just as in Michels’s work, the argument from
group psychology remains unconvincing.
Because Katz and Mair cannot find a satisfactory ‘internal’ argument
for party cartellization, they tend to fall back on path dependency as the
prime mechanism to produce cooperative arrangements. Inter-party collusion is particularly strong in those democracies where there has been a
tradition of inter-party cooperation and accommodation, such as Austria,
Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway and Sweden (Mair 1997: 108). While
this argument explains cross-sectional diversity more than a common trend,
they maintain that the presence of such ‘depoliticized democracies’ (Lijphart
1977) is spreading beyond the core countries (Katz & Mair 1996: 529). Setting aside that such convergence may be a result of the political-economic
mechanisms invoked earlier, arguments from path dependency also generate
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
169
problems of comparative statics and dynamics for Katz and Mair’s theory.
In a dynamic perspective, ‘consensual’ and ‘depoliticized’ democracies often
experienced spells of increased polarization in the last twenty years and show
little tendency toward a closed cartel, such as in Scandinavian countries or
the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s. In a comparative-static perspective,
there remain vast differences in the practices of state financing for established parties and other techniques that may ‘close’ the electoral market
place against unwanted competitors. The Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
party systems display rather little convergence according to Mair’s (1997:
133) data. Also parties that have for some time displayed great propensities toward collusion and centripetalism through patronage, such as the main
Italian parties (Mair 1997: 112), encounter great difficulties to maintain the
system of cartellization. Italy is the only country in Mair’s (1993: 133)
analysis, where the left-right distance between the two major parties, the
(post)-communists and the Christian Democrats, grew between 1983 and
1993.10
If neither path dependency nor party finance nor the competitive structure
of the electoral game itself predict the cross-nationally variable nature and
extent of policy convergence among parties in the 1980s and 1990s, maybe
it is not cartellization after all that drives whatever tendencies toward convergence are detectable in established democracies. Katz and Mair provide
several clues for an ‘external’ explanation that has little to do with their core
argument about cartellization. Mair (1997: 131) invokes the increasing openness of the political economy as cause for the declining capacity of parties
to present credible policy alternatives and act upon them. Furthermore, the
process of European integration after Maastricht has bound politicians’ hands
to pursue diverse political economic strategies (ibid., 132). Katz and Mair
(1996: 528) also suggest in a rather more cryptic fashion that the ‘increased
scope and complexity of state power have reduced the capacity of parties
(or anyone else) to steer society and produce results’. Maybe this sentence
hints at the existence of political-economic policy trade-offs in contemporary
welfare states as I sketched them earlier.
Regardless of how accurate the claim is that the opening of economies removes domestic degrees of freedom in policy-making, none of these
political-economic explanations of policy convergence suggests an active
process of ‘cartellization’ among parties. All of them point toward politicaleconomic developments that affect citizens’ preference distribution over
policy alternatives and impose constraints on the ability of parties to choose
innovate policies, no more and no less. Parties modify their strategic positions
in unique ways that vary from polity to polity, contingent upon the parties’
intra-organizational decision making processes and the parties’ electoral op-
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HERBERT KITSCHELT
portunity structure (cf. Kitschelt 1998). The cartellization hypothesis sheds
little light on these diverse and complicated processes.
Entry into party competition: How established parties coopt new
challengers into the party cartel
Let us finally permit entry into the political game. The threat of entry has an
impact on parties even if it is never realized. Established politicians anticipate
challenges and adjust their positions accordingly (Mair 1997: 45–90). But
there is a limit up to which the anticipation of new competition is feasible.
Sometimes parties encounter electoral trade-offs such that winning a new
constituency gets in the way of holding on to an old one. This predicament
creates an opening for the successful entry of new political parties (Kitschelt
1997). The effective threat of entry by a new party is thus contingent upon
(1) the salience of a new appeal for electoral groups, (2) the extent to which
existing party alignments are disorganized by trade-offs, if established parties
appropriate the appeals of the potential competitor, and (3) the severity of
the entry barriers constituted by electoral thresholds, financial resource requirements to wage an effective campaign and access to publicity in the mass
media. Katz and Mair, however, wish to argue that party cartels manage to
prevent entry and, failing to do so, are able to coopt new parties into the
existing cartel, except those that make the new party cartels themselves the
critical point of attack (Mair 1997: 118). Established parties thus ‘handicap’
outsiders and deny them access to public office, or incorporate them into
the cartel (Katz & Mair 1996: 531). Similar arguments are well known from
leftist critiques of the ‘party state’ in the 1960s and 1970s.11 I find both hypotheses underlying the older leftist and the newer populist critique of political
parties empirically unfounded.
Let us first turn to the ability of cartel parties to prevent entry. If Katz
and Mair are correct, in countries with stronger cartels, as measured by organizational properties, such as the growth in party finance and staff, or by
consociational/consensus democratic traditions, parties that dominated the
competitive field in the 1960s should have declined less than their counterparts in countries with more competitive democratic arrangements. Table 1
displays Mair’s (1997: 137) indicators of party apparatus and income growth
since the 1970s (columns A and B). Because Katz and Mair claim that the
state ‘becomes a fount of resources’ through which cartel parties ‘enhance
their capacity to resist challenges from newly mobilized alternatives’ (Mair
1997: 106), I would expect a linkage between the use of public funds in the
machinery of party organizations and the electoral resilience of the established parties. Next, I employ a judgmental dummy variable for consensus
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
171
democracy (column C) in order to tap path-dependent cartellization. I am coding as consensual those countries Mair and Katz classify accordingly in their
own study (Mair 1997: 108). Column D finally provides the actual change
of the support of incumbent parties from their average electoral performance
in the 1960s to most recent elections in the 1990s.12 Most of the decline of
‘old’ parties over the last thirty years is due to the rise of left-libertarian or
right-authoritarian parties.
None of Katz-Mair’s hypotheses is supported by this evidence. First, countries with consensual democracy certainly did not see a stronger growth of
party staff (r = −0.13) or growth in central office income (r = −0.01), when
compared to more competitive democracies. There is virtually no linkage
between the decline of electoral support in these countries and the growth
of party machines (column A/D, r = −0.003; column B/D: r = −0.05).
Moreover, what is striking is that in those countries where patronage party
machines and pillarization were most pronounced in the 1960s and 1970s,
Austria and Italy, the decline of parties in the late 1980s and 1990s has been
most precipitous. If we had complete data on Belgium and Japan, this association would most probably be even stronger. The organizational properties
of ‘cartel parties’ with broad access to state funding in patronage machines
is clearly correlated with electoral decline, not persistence. Public subsidies
of the day-to-day operation of party machines and electoral campaigns, by
comparison, are only the tip of the iceberg of state-party interpenetration
and have a comparatively weak impact. Moreover, as Katz and Mair (1996)
highlight themselves, public funding sometimes encourages and enables new
competitors to enter the electoral arena because the electoral threshold for
public support is so low.13
Why are parties and party systems to which Katz and Mair ascribe cartel quality so unsuccessful in retaining voters? It is precisely because such
polities have traditionally employed material incentives and administrative
instruments to instill voter loyalty, a technique that works with rapidly diminishing returns in societies characterized by more autonomous voters who
respond to issue packages and generally subscribe to the “progressivist” ethic
of separating politics and business. Moreover, ‘cartel’ party systems are less
successful, because they are strategically less mobile due to the many rentreceiving interest groups contributing to their electoral cause. These groups
exercise veto power over programmatic changes that call for a liberalization
of political-economic arrangements. The failure to embrace such programs,
however, alienates large constituencies of unaffiliated voters.
If party cartels cannot prevent the entry of newcomers, can they at least
‘coopt’ the new challengers into the existing cartels? Cooptation is a process by which actors gain procedural rights of participation in a decision
172
Table 1. organizational resources, democratic polity attributes, and the performance of political parties since the 1960s
B
Growth of income
of party central office
(% increase from mid-70s
to late 1980s)
C
Consensual or
consociational
democracy
(yes = 1)
D
Decline in electoral
support from the 1960–69
average to latest
(in %)
+61
+112
+55
+268
+330
+140
+17
+50
+55
+24
N.A.
+286
+50
+6
+35
+123
−25
+41
+14
−4
+46
+145
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
−30.2 (1995)
−9.0 (1994)
−13.2 (1995)
−10.1 (1994)
−6.7 (1989)
−49.6 (1996)
−3.8 (1994)
−0.5 (1991)
−10.6 (1994)
−13.8 (1997)
−4.8 (1996)
Source: column A and B from Mair (1997: 137); column C, judgmental, based on Mair (1997: 108); column D, electoral
reports, various sources, as reported in Kitschelt (1997).
HERBERT KITSCHELT
Austria
Denmark
Finland
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Sweden
UK
USA
A
Growth of number
of staff employed by
the party (from early 70s
to late 1980s)
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
173
making process without exercising substantive impact on the content of the
collective decision itself (Gamson 1975: 28–37). Cooptation thus implies a
counter-factual: Public polices would have been no different, had the new
actor not been entitled to participate in the decision making process. Counterfactuals are endemically difficult to test, but on the face of it, Katz and
Mair’s arguments have little plausibility. At least we can say that the arrival of
successful left-libertarian parties coincided with, and may even have caused,
changes in conventional parties’ positions on issues such as the environment,
women’s rights and life styles, or the participation of cultural minorities in
public life. Such new issue appeals appear to have shaped the policies of
left governments, whether or not left-libertarian parties have supported them.
Conversely, the rise of right-authoritarian parties has begun to leave its mark
on the immigration and economic policies of conservative governments, such
as in France or Germany.
It is difficult, therefore, to conceive the entry of left-libertarian and rightauthoritarian parties in terms of pure cooptation. Certainly these parties could
not fully impose their programs on existing parties or, while in coalition
governments, see their entire legislative agenda through to program implementation. But political competition usually results in policy compromises.
And it is nothing out of the ordinary that some recently arrived parties on
the political scene, such as many of the right-authoritarian alternatives, are
frozen out of the game of coalition politics, because other parties find them
incalculable and too extreme in their demands. Social democratic parties and
communist parties experienced a similar exclusion throughout much of the
twentieth century.
Katz and Mair emphasize that the electoral rise of the radical right in
Western Europe may be a genuine anti-cartel party phenomenon (Mair 1997:
118–9). But also this claim appears to me questionable. First of all, wherever
new parties arise, they rhetorically employ an underdog image that cultivates
the image of a bias in democratic party competition that works in favor of
the incumbents. The parties of the radical right are not unique in this regard.
Second, detailed empirical analysis shows that voters of the extreme right
have very distinct political opinions that characterize most of them as sociocultural authoritarians and economic free-marketeers (Kitschelt & McGann
1995). Moreover they over-proportionally recruit themselves from social
groups that suffer through the reorganization of advanced capitalism, such as
young unskilled blue collar workers or farmers/small businesspeople. If this
was a protest against cartel parties, we would expect an appeal of these parties
to a much broader socio-economic profile of voters, as well as to voters with
a broader spectrum of socio-cultural and economic issue preferences. In fact,
observations consistent with this expectation apply only to the two parties
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HERBERT KITSCHELT
that protest long established, but increasingly embattled patronage systems
linking state sector and established parties, the Austrian Freedom Party and
the Italian Northern League (cf. Kitschelt & McGann 1995: ch. 5). For this
reason, it is inappropriate to lump these two parties into the same general
category as radical rightist parties in France, Germany, Denmark, or Norway.
Once again, anti-system protest proves to be not directed against the ‘new’
phenomenon of party cartels, but the very old phenomenon of patronage and
clientelism particularly well-entrenched in Austria, Italy, Japan, and Belgium.
Overall, then, my brief review disconfirms Katz and Mair’s critical hypotheses. State funding does not protect established parties from new party
challenges and does not enable them to ignore relations of responsiveness and
accountability with the electorate. If party cartels come into being, they are
therefore ineffective against new entrants. New parties almost always employ
the rhetoric of unfair competition and accuse established parties of engaging
in cartellization but their electoral success is certainly based on other policy
concerns than the increasing proximity of state apparatus and established
parties. Finally, there is no evidence that patterns of party funding or cartelization affect the convergence of political parties. If Katz and Mair simply
wish to say that there are few radical revolutionary and anti-democratic party
alternatives on offer or electorally successful they are certainly correct. But
the absence of fundamental challenges to the democratic polity not necessarily is an indication that parties, as agents, ignore the interests and preferences
of their principals, the electoral constituencies. It may suggest only that under current political-economic conditions and given the changes of social
structure and life styles in advanced capitalist democracies over the past half
century, revolutionary challenges to the existing order cannot find support in
the population. Only if Katz and Mair could show that there exists a revolutionary potential in the population that is not served by any of the electorally
successful parties would there be reason to suspect institutional filters and
collusive arrangements that systematically distort the democratic process.
Rival scenarios of party system development
Both Katz and Mair’s and my own view of party system development require
extensive empirical testing that neither their paper could or intended to deliver
nor my own. I am confident, however, that the empirical evidence is likely to
bear out a different conception of the dynamics of party competition than that
suggested by the theory of cartel parties and party systems. Katz and Mair
caution that the notion of cartel party is a ‘heuristically convenient polar type’
(Mair 1997: 109), but nevertheless see it as a ‘stage of evolution’ (Mair 1997:
102) toward which parties and party systems in post-industrial democracies
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
175
have and still are moving (Mair 1997: 97–105). I cannot see this tendency.
Although the context and content of party competition has changed compared
to earlier eras of democratic party competition, that competition continues to
reflect voter preferences and their change. Competition among established
parties and with new entrants keeps the autonomy of the political agents visà-vis their principals in the electorate, and with party members and activists,
usually within quite narrow bounds. Moreover, there are no indications that
these constraints are loosening. Quite to the contrary, it is particularly those
parties and party systems, where patronage arrangements entrenched parties
in the ‘state’ that are in particularly deep electoral trouble and decline.
Contrary to the cartel party thesis, the novel development is that parties
have become ever more sensitive to voter preferences, as they can no longer
rely on material and solidary selective incentives that maintained voter loyalty
in the age of mass party organization or on lavish state patronage, administered through party subsidiaries and municipal governments penetrated by
party operatives. This tendency is reinforced by the increasing sophistication
and collective action capabilities of minorities in the electorate who can reward and punish parties by strategic vote switching, by intra-party activism
where fewer individuals make a greater difference in an age of reduced party
membership, and by collective mobilization in interest groups and social
movements. I find it therefore groundless to claim that ‘parties [are] now ever
better placed to adapt and to control’ (Mair 1997: 13).
This does not imply, however, that voters have become more satisfied with
the achievements of political parties as their representatives in the contemporary democratic order. Yet rather than attributing divers and declining levels
of citizens’ democratic satisfaction to the doings of party leaders, I seek the
causes for these problems in the political-economic challenges parties are
now facing and the difficult strategic trade-offs this generates for politicians
in the choice of voters’ policy preferences they prioritize and the temporal
trade-offs of tackling with policy problems. Whereas the cartel party theory
examines declining democratic satisfaction ‘from above’ through the lens of
an elite-centered political theory, my own political-economy perspective reverts to a perspective ‘from below’ that examines the societal challenges and
citizens’ preferences as determinants of politicians’ strategies. For sure, these
strategies are refracted through the specific democratic institutions of political
representation in each polity, above all the electoral system and executivelegislative relations in more parliamentary or more presidential democratic
constitutions. But nowhere would such an analysis rely on the increasing
autonomy of agents from their principals, let alone an integration of political
parties into an often nebulous ‘state’.
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HERBERT KITSCHELT
I agree with Katz and Mair that the role of parties is not declining,
yet changing in advanced post-industrial capitalism. Parties remain the key
collective actors that aggregate political interests within the given politicaleconomic settings and are charged with governing, a process that involves
working out policy compromises in order to assemble winning coalitions
according to democratic decision making criteria. Neither social movements
nor functionally specialized interest groups could ever hope to fill the void
parties would leave behind, if they ceased to serve as engines of interest
articulation and aggregation. But if there was ever an age of cartel parties and
party systems, the current societal challenges of post-industrial capitalism
provide the setting in which we experience not the dawn of that era, but its
dusk.
Notes
1. One of the more serious texts inspired by such arguments is Klaus v. Beyme’s Die
Politische Klasse im Parteienstaat (1993).
2. The most important book taken a contrary view and published before Wittman’s study
appeared, Cox and McCubbins (1993), is not referenced. For a more recent account of
parties in America, see Aldrich (1995).
3. Also this configuration, however, is historically contingent. As I have argued elsewhere
(Kitschelt 1989b), there is no universal law of curvilinear disparity (May 1973) according
to which middle level arty activists are always more “radical” than party leaders who
compete for political office. Whether or not such relations prevail, depend on (1) the
social mobilization of cleavages, (2) the format of the party system (two party or multiparty competition) and (3) processes of organizational learning from electoral victory and
defeat, to mention only a few of the factors impinging on this relation.
4. For a detailed empirical analysis of voter distributions, see the dissertation of Anthony
J. McGann (1999) based on World Value and Eurobarometer surveys. Voter distributions
are unanimously single-peaked, even though sometimes skewed toward one or the other
extreme.
5. The proposition that party activists are radicals whereas electoral leaders are moderates
has driven much modelling of internal party relations (cf. Robertson 1976 and Schlesinger
1984), without elaborating the highly constrained conditions under which this alignment
is likely to occur (Kitschelt 1989b).
6. Only in two-party systems, radical activists are forced into the same parties as moderate leaders, while in multi-party systems, each activist can choose a party close to
her own preference. Only if mass preference distribution is bi-polar (dual peaked) may
vote-seeking parties have more radical followers than leaders.
7. For a detailed discussion, see Krugman (1996) and the contributions to and especially the
concluding chapter in Kitschelt, Lange, Marks and Stephens (1999).
8. My statement only sketches a scenario. Modelling the time horizon of politicians’
economic policy choices requires consideration of the international environment, the
competitive structure of the party system, politicians’ expected office security in govern-
CITIZENS, POLITICIANS, AND PARTY CARTELLIZATION
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
177
ment, and the intra-party structures that may or may not enable them to pursue initially
unpopular economic policies.
In my own work, I have singled out left-libertarian parties as highlighting tendencies
toward stratarchal party organization (Kitschelt 1989a: chapters 5 and 6).
Furthermore, the change in the distance between major parties from 1983 to 1993 in
Mair’s data is statistically unrelated to the degree of polarization at the first measurement
point. In other words, knowing how far the major parties were apart on the left-right
dimension in 1983 does not help us to predict how much they converged until 1993 (r =
+0.21).
That this is not a new theme can be gleaned from twenty to thirty year old titles in German
political science, such as Der CDU Staat (1968) and Auf dcm Wege zum Einparteienstaat
(1977, On the Road to the Single-Party State).
The 1960s scores include all parties represented in the legislatures of their countries
throughout that period of time. For a list of these parties, see Kitschelt (1997: 147).
Germany is a case in point where parties receiving 0.5 percent of the vote or more are
eligible for public finance, whereas parties must garner 5 percent of the vote to obtain
parliamentary representation.
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Address for Offprints: Professor Herbert Kitschelt, Department of Political Science, Duke
University, P.O. Box 90204, Durham 27708-024, USA
Phone: (919) 660-4343; Fax: (919) 660-4330; E-mail: [email protected]