Abstract
This ECPR classic assembles some of Hans Daalder’s most important papers and provides an overview of the work of one of the leading figures of European comparative politics. As Peter Mair observes in his preface to this volume, Hans Daalder represents a generation of comparative political scientists whose work is characterized by a particular style and academic culture, who addressed big questions, had enormous historical knowledge and produced the more idiosyncratic, lengthy, exploratory and sometimes speculative writing that is characteristic of the papers in this volume. Today’s comparativists, who are much more data-driven, Daalder would characterize as ‘cross-nationalists’, scholars who do not look in depth, but, more widely, who do not generalize but specify.
As indicated in the title, the papers in this volume cover three broad issues organized in three corresponding parts: state formation, parties and the model of consociational democracy. The three parts are suitably introduced by a reflection of the author on his life in comparative politics, and concluded by his remarks on the development of this field. The introduction shows him firmly rooted in the great debates among the leading figures of comparative politics in the 1950s and 1960s, personalities whom he met as a young man and who influenced his work to a large extent. Stein Rokkan, in particular, is present throughout the papers assembled in this volume, as a model and as a mentor asking inspiring questions which Daalder then pursues – as in his paired comparison of Switzerland and The Netherlands. He is in constant conversation with the great comparativists of his time – Giovanni Sartori, Maurice Duverger and, of course, Arend Lijphart are among the colleagues whom he engages with throughout the volume.
Daalder’s style is, as he once remarks himself (p. 124), eclectic. His papers often have the character of miscellaneous comments which are not tested by his own empirical work, but which are full of brilliant ideas and promising suggestions. His papers are often programmatic, present the state of the art of the discipline, raise puzzles, ask a series of questions, sketch the lines for further study and conclude with ‘some lessons’. Daalder is a cautious, circumspect scholar who hesitates to generalize. History is key and always reminding him that there is variation from one party and from one country to the next. Thus, his enormously stimulating search for the centre of European party systems is ‘far from conclusive’ (p. 164): ‘Our most difficult problem has been that of the inevitable multiplicity of issues, dimensions, and cleavages in political life which stubbornly resist attempts to reduce them to one dominant underlying dimension’, i.e. the dimension of ‘left versus right’. He deplores the lack of evidence in several papers, which prevents him from grounding his speculations in firm empirical knowledge.
Since the time most of these papers were published (from the 1960s to the 1980s), the cross-nationalists have collected a large amount of empirical data to support Daalder’s hunches, but the extended empirical evidence does not diminish their importance; on the contrary. His careful, dense reasoning remains highly relevant and his perceptive insights are still important for today’s practitioners of the discipline. Let me just give some examples from the various parts of the volume to illustrate this point. First, in his study of state formation, Daalder presents a stimulating distinction between five paths of state formation in Europe and the United States (Ch. 3): state formation by absolutist kings (France, Prussia), by kings facing strong judges and representative bodies (UK, Denmark, Sweden), by confederations (Netherlands, Switzerland), by conquest and by secession (Belgium, Norway, Finland). In addition, against this background, he distinguishes between four different political situations of the bureaucracies in the corresponding states: the bureaucracy as a custodian of the state; as a service, subordinate to the political authorities; as fusing with pluralist party politics; and as instrumentalized by parties. The richness of these distinctions contrasts with more recent typologies (e.g. by Charles Tilly or Bernard Silberman) that do less justice to the variety of European developments.
Next, Daalder’s search for the centre of European party systems is very useful for present-day discussions of the dimensionality of the European party space, which would benefit from remembering his incisive arguments against one-dimensionality. Another example, his ‘initial mapping’ of parties and political mobilization is full of insights which we should still take seriously: he points to the increased importance of the media and plebiscitary politics, to the increasing role of experts and international decision-making, to the increasing mass of routinized decision-making, which inevitably escapes party control – in sum, to a set of developments that imply ‘the possible weakening of party as the major agency in articulation and actual policy decisions’ (p. 142).
Finally, we learn a lot about the consociational model, its applicability to different countries, and about Lijphart’s interpretation of the Dutch case. I found the discussions of alternative interpretations of the Dutch verzuiling, which Daalder originally presented as part of his 1989 Erasmus Lectures at Harvard University and which are re-printed in this volume as Chapter 11, particularly inspiring. Here we learn about three alternative interpretations of the paradigmatic Dutch case: the emancipationist approach, the social control perspective and the perspective of persistent pluralism. The last perspective, Daalder’s own, insists on the stepwise ‘pluralization’ of Dutch society in religious terms and on the traditional elite culture of accommodation. Thus, according to this interpretation, consociationalism was not adopted as an answer to real dangers in the 1910s (as argued by Lijphart), but an older pluralism proved fully compatible with the increasing pluralization and organization which occurred in Dutch society at the time: ‘Lijphart’s picture of separate elites coming together ad hoc in the second decade of the 20th century to save the system, does insufficient justice to the pre-existence of a pragmatic, pluralist elite culture which provided common forums, which had long arranged partial compromises, and which did much to socialize newcomers in traditional modes of decision-making’ (p. 242).
At the very end of his reflections on the development of the study of comparative politics, Daalder concludes (p. 281) that comparative politics ‘stands before its greatest challenge yet. Never before were so many fundamental questions raised at one and the same time about the development of democracy, democratic governance and related performances’. And he adds with characteristic caution: ‘In all honesty one should acknowledge that it provides few definite answers.’