The Three Waves of Party System Institutionalisation Studies: A Multi- or Uni-Dimensional Concept?

Abstract

Since Mainwaring and Scully’s resurrection of the concept in 1995, party system institutionalisation has become something of a buzzword to which many refer without a proper definition. Indeed, most scholars simply assume that its meaning is clear and unproblematic, focusing all subsequent efforts on developing operational indicators, but without really concerning themselves with its conceptual refinement. However, an in-depth literature review of all major works dealing with the concept reveals that in reality there is very little agreement on what party system institutionalisation actually is or how it should be measured. In fact, since Huntington introduced the notion of institutionalisation some 50 years ago, party system institutionalisation has been characterised as a multi-dimensional (mostly four, but also three and two) as well as a uni-dimensional (around stability) concept. Now that half a century has passed, the time has come to look back and, with the benefit of hindsight, take stock of the way party system institutionalisation has been conceptualised and operationalised, trying to distinguish both commonalities and discordances, while looking at what still needs to be done. In order to do so, we will distinguish three different (both discrete and thematic) waves of party system institutionalisation studies.

Keywords

institutionalisation party systems waves

Since Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully’s resurrection of the concept in 1995, party system institutionalisation (PSI) has become something of a buzzword to which many refer without a proper definition. Indeed, most scholars simply assume that its meaning is clear and unproblematic, focusing all subsequent efforts on developing operational indicators, but without really concerning themselves with its conceptual refinement.

However, an in-depth literature review of all major works dealing with the concept reveals that in reality there is very little agreement on what PSI actually is or how it should be measured. In fact, and as we will have the opportunity to see in the present review, PSI has been characterised not only as a multi-dimensional notion, as when the notion of institutionalisation – germane to the concept of PSI itself – was first introduced by Huntington more than 50 years ago, but also as a tri-, bi- or even a one-dimensional concept.

Now, half a century after the introduction of the concept of institutionalisation, the time has come to look back and, with the benefit of hindsight, take stock of the way PSI has been conceptualised and operationalised, trying to distinguish both commonalities and discordances, while looking at what still needs to be done. In order to do so, we will distinguish three different (both discrete and thematic) waves of PSI studies. The first one (1965–1995), mostly characterised by descriptive and developmental works, defended a multi-dimensional approach in terms of both conceptualisation and operationalisation. The second (1995–2007), in clear contrast, not only popularised the concept worldwide, with a special focus on new ‘Third Wave’ democracies (mainly Latin America and post-communist Europe), but also started to question such a multi- or four-dimensional approach, adding an analytical aspect into the process and ending up with some form of convergence on what the main dimension and indicator of PSI should be. The third wave (since 2007), which has been characterised by a mixture of both descriptive and analytical studies in different regions of the world (including Western Europe), challenges these two features.

The First Wave: A Four-Dimensional Concept

Although a concern with the notion had been implicit in many comparative works of political science (e.g. Parsons, 1951; Eisenstadt, 1964), it was only in 1965 that ‘institutionalisation’ was isolated as a concept worthy of special treatment. Indeed, it was Samuel Huntington’s seminal article titled ‘Political Development and Political Decay’ that:

[f]or the first time in political science, […] explicitly emphasized the importance of political institutions for a modern society […] arguing that his theory [of institutionalization] may be used to explore diverse social organizations and procedures [e.g. parties and party systems] (Meleshevich, 2007: 9).

Trying to explain why developed polities were politically stable in contrast to transitional societies, which were characterised by political decay, Huntington found that the main difference lay in the existence of strong political institutions. Such strength depended, on the one hand, on the scope of the support they enjoy (i.e. the degree to which they encompass activity in society) and, on the other, on their level of institutionalisation which, defined as ‘the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability’ (Huntington, 1965: 394), was considered to have FOUR different dimensions, namely:

Adaptability/rigidity, measured by chronological and generational age as well as by changes in the functions that an institution performs;

Complexity/simplicity, that is, the number and sub-units of the different political organisations within a polity;

Autonomy/subordination, understood as the degree to which such organisations can survive independently of other groups and be measured by the ‘distinctiveness of norms and values of the former compared with the latter as well as by the personnel controls established between the two’;

Coherence/disunity, measured: by the ratio of contested successions to total successions, by the cumulation or non-cumulation of cleavages among leaders and members, by the incidence of overt alienation and dissent within the organisation, and, conceivably, by opinion surveys of the loyalties and preferences of organisation members (Huntington, 1965: 405).¹

Applying this four-dimensional framework to the study of political institutions, Huntington found that for a polity to be developed, (its) political parties needed to be particularly strong.² Unfortunately, however, he never explained why institutionalisation should be measured by those four dimensions (and not others), or to what extent they needed to hang together.³ The model has also been criticised on the one hand for being ‘tautological’ as it clearly conflates both ‘causes and effects’ (Randall and Svåsand, 2002: 12), and on the other for its vague operationalisation (Meleshevich, 2007: 13).

Notwithstanding this (justified) criticism, Huntington’s theoretical framework soon became popular and started to be applied to the study of elections, regimes, political parties and, of course, party systems. Mary Welfling (1973) was the first scholar to apply Huntington’s concept to measure the level of institutionalisation in young African party systems.⁴ However, echoing some of the above-cited criticism and considering some of Huntington’s dimensions ‘unnecessary’ (Welfling, 1973: 13), she disagreed in terms of the dimensions of PSI involved. Thus, for Welfling, a party system was institutionalised when it displayed:

Boundary or how the system is different from its environment. She tried to capture this feature with the percentage of seats held by independents;

Stable patterns of interaction. Here, she distinguished between intra- and extra-system interactions: while the former were those taking place among systemic entities, the second related the party system with other relevant systems (e.g. the public and the government);⁵

Scope, that is, the impact a system has on its environment. This dimension was measured by the geographical patterns of voting and electoral turnout;

Adaptability, operationalised by the indicators of ‘electoral discrimination’, ‘arrests’, ‘registration and refusals’ and ‘single legal party’.

Consequently, PSI was defined by Welfling (1973: 13) as ‘a process which occurs as elements continue to interact in some relatively stable pattern, and in their interactions create and elaborate structures and develop boundaries, which distinguish them from their environments’.

The advantage of Welfling’s work over Huntington was that it not only discussed each of the dimensions at length but also provided a detailed outline of the conceptual development of institutionalisation, offering at the same time a useful guide for political and sociological discussions/applications of the notion. Unfortunately, not only was her conceptualisation too broad⁶ but also some of the indicators she proposed measured party rather than systemic institutionalisation. Moreover, her model was far from perfect and – as she herself had the courage to recognise – ‘the resulting set of indicators [wa]s offered [… only …] as the best feasible’ (Welfling, 1973: 26) due to the limited documentation and statistics.⁷

The Second Wave: Between Multi- and Uni-dimensionality

Although it may seem incredible nowadays (probably also due to the abovementioned operational fuzziness), the issue of PSI was basically neglected for more than 20 years. Indeed, it was not until Mainwaring and Scully’s seminal study of the process of institutionalisation in 12 Latin American party systems that a new definition of PSI, together with a new ‘dimensional kit’, was provided. In particular, they defined PSI as ‘the process by which a practice or organization becomes well established and widely known, if not universally accepted’ (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995: 4), again distinguishing FOUR (but different) dimensions:

Stability in the patterns of party competition, which was measured by Mogens Pedersen’s electoral volatility index.⁸ Thus, party systems were considered to be institutionalised when parties tended to enjoy the same vote shares from election to election. In contrast, if parties usually appeared and disappeared, leaving voters without a clear idea as to which force they will choose at the next election, systemic institutionalisation was considered unattainable.

Stable roots in society, that is, in the ‘linkages between parties, citizens, and organized interests’ (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995: 9). Even if this dimension could be seen as closely related to the first, in the opinion of these authors, they should nonetheless be clearly separated (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995: 9). With this aim in mind, three main indicators were proposed to measure party identification within the electorate: (1) the similarity of voting patterns in both presidential and legislative elections, (2) public opinion polls and (3) party longevity.

Legitimacy of parties and elections as ‘the [only] means of determining who governs’ (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995: 14).

Party organisation, understood in the sense that political parties which display routinised procedures behave as relatively autonomous and cohesive entities, being also ‘territorially comprehensive’ (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995: 5).

Narrowing with just a few variables what Joseph LaPalombara (1968) called the ‘widening chasm’ between ‘macrotheories and microapplications in comparative politics’, and providing a systemic typology with which to tackle contemporary problems, Mainwaring and Scully’s original, elegant and lucid model soon became the most widely employed analytical framework in the study of party system development in post-transitional democracies from Latin America (Wallis, 2003) to Asia (Stockton, 2001) via Africa (Kuenzi and Lambright, 2001) and post-communist Europe (Stoner-Weiss, 2001). This was so even if:

Researchers equated behavioural (i.e. legitimacy), institutional (e.g. party organisation) and systemic (i.e. stable partisan competition) traits (Kuenzi and Lambright, 2005; Millard, 2009: 783; Wallis, 2003: 21);

Their propositions for the operationalisation of the last two dimensions (i.e. legitimacy and organisation) were almost non-existent (Meleshevich, 2007);⁹

It was unclear whether all or most of the dimensions/‘conditions […] must [be] obtain[ed]’ (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995: 4–5) for a party system to be institutionalised (Randall and Svåsand, 2002; Wolinetz, 2006).¹⁰

Just 3 years after Mainwaring and Scully’s influential volume was published, the institutional approach to the study of party systems received an additional boost with the publication of Leonardo Morlino’s (1998) Democracy between Consolidation and Crisis. Bearing in mind that PSI is a phenomenon characterised by stability both at the mass (voters and parties) and elite levels, Morlino did not spend much time on producing a definition of PSI and simply devised a series of broad indicators in order to measure what he considered to be its THREE dimensions:

Stability of electoral behaviour, measured by Pedersen’s volatility index and by the frequency of critical elections;

Stability in the patterns of partisan competition, operationalised by: the index of party fractionalisation [and] the ‘effective’ number of parties, in addition to the qualitative analysis of the emergence or non-emergence of new parties and movements, of the number and size of parties, and of other systemic features (i.e. stabilisation of cleavages).

Stability of the political class, especially when democratic institutions are first (re-)established, measured by the level of elite continuity and, in particular, by the ‘percentages of newly elected members and of senior members in the first legislatures following the re-establishment of democracy’ (Morlino,1998: 90, 104).¹¹

Inspired by the work of both Mainwaring and Scully and Morlino,¹² Gabor Tóka (1997) undertook the first analysis of PSI in the Visegrad states. Understanding PSI as a process which ‘entails the stabilization and social embeddedness of the major party alternatives and their relative policy positions, and thus regularity in the patterns of inter-party competition’ (Tóka, 1997: 8), Tóka followed Mainwaring and Scully’s example and, consequently, used the age and organisational style of parties as well as electoral volatility as indicators. Like Morlino, who as we have seen also employed the last two indicators, Tóka dealt with party fragmentation and the links between social groups and political parties. Other indicators were the stability of electoral institutions and the programmatic structuration of party competition.

Much in the same vein, Jack Bielasiak’s (2001) study of the institutionalisation of electoral and party systems in Eastern European and former Soviet states distinguished (again) THREE (but different) dimensions:¹³

Stability of electoral democracy, which ‘looks to the reliability of rules that govern party competition and political behaviour’ (Bielasiak, 2001: 7);

Stability of political contestation, which dealt with the structure of party competition and is evidenced by two ‘standard evaluations’ (Bielasiak, 2001: 16) – the number of political parties engaged in the political process and electoral volatility;

Stability of political representation, that is, access to and representation in party regimes, meaning that the extent of participation in the electoral process is high ‘allowing significant shares of the citizenry to buy into the representation offered by the […] parties’ (Bielasiak, 2001: 7). This last dimension was measured by ‘a composite index of effective participation’ (Bielasiak, 2001: 28–29), consisting of three different indicators, namely, voting turnout (calculated as a ratio of the adult voting population), invalid vote (i.e. blank and null votes) and excluded vote (measured as the ratio of votes for unrepresented parties over the total vote for all political parties).

Another three contemporaneous studies incorporating the dimension of stability were the discussions of institutionalisation in Central and Eastern European party systems by Algis Krupavičius (1999), Sarah Birch (2003) and Richard Rose and Neil Munro (2003). Krupavičius (1999: 2–4) did not attempt to conceptualise institutionalisation but merely enumerated a series of quantitative indicators which reflect the electoral bases and structural causes of party system stability, namely, voter turnout, electoral volatility and proportionality, on the one hand; and the number of effective parties, party aggregation and electoral exclusion, the ideological distribution of political parties and the relative strength of different groups, on the other. As far as Birch (2003: 100) is concerned, after adopting a very broad definition of institutionalisation as ‘a combination of consolidation, regularization, and nationalization (as well as autonomy from the state)’, she then went on to operationalise it according to the size (measured by means of the effective – as well as absolute – number of parties) and shape of the party system, assessed by the vote shape of the largest party and the difference in vote share between the latter and the second largest party (Birch, 2003: 99–103). This was also the first study that wondered about the causes of systemic stability, even if only in post-communist Europe (Birch, 2003: 130–135). Finally, Rose and Munro (2003: 71), for whom a party system was only completely institutionalised ‘when there is a stable equilibrium between supply and demand, in which the same parties compete at successive elections and votes change only a few percentage points from one election to the next’ (Rose and Munro, 2003: 71; emphasis in the original), also employed electoral volatility and fragmentation as major indicators.¹⁴

This almost unanimous consensus (see Table 1) on the assimilation between PSI and systemic stability – or at least different aspects/dimensions of it – was broken with Vicky Randall and Lars Svåsand’s (2002) study of the institutionalisation of ‘Third World’ party systems. Making it clear that PSI and the institutionalisation of (individual) political parties are two totally different phenomena, these authors considered that PSI comprises FOUR different dimensions addressing two distinct elements (structural/attitudinal) and aspects (internal/external). The internal aspect refers to the relationship between parties themselves, and includes both

1. Continuity and stability (structural), which refers both to the continuation of partisan alternatives as well as the steadiness of electoral support for political parties;

2. Mutual acceptance (attitudinal), which requires that the different political forces acknowledge one another as legitimate competitors.

The second aspect (external) deals with the relationship between the party system and other parts of the polity itself, and calls for both

3. a sufficient degree of autonomy from the state, in terms of funding and recruitment, etc.;

4. Appreciation by the electorate, that is, a certain degree of partisan trust and commitment to the electoral process by the electorate.

Table 1.

PSI Dimensions According to Selected Scholars.

Scholar(s)	PSI dimensions
	Complexity and coherence	Adaptability	Autonomy/Boundary	Stability	Scope/Stable roots	Legitimacy	Party organisation	Mutual acceptance
First Wave
Huntington, (1965)	X	X	X
Welfling, (1973)		X	X	X	X
Second Wave
Mainwaring and Scully, (1995)				X	X	X	X
Tóka, (1997)				X
Morlino, (1998)				X
Krupavičius, (1999)				X
Bielasiak, (2001)				X
Randall and Svåsand, (2002)			X	X		X		X
Birch, (2003)				X
Rose and Munro, (2003)				X
Meleshevich, (2007)			X	X
Lindberg, (2007)				X
Third Wave
Casal Bértoa and Mair, (2012)				X
Luna, (2014)				X	X
Chiaramonte and Emanuele, (2015)				X

Source: Adapted from Casal Bértoa, (2016a).

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding their unquestionable originality, Randall and Svåsand’s (2002: 15) model remains a thoughtful theoretical framework because, as they themselves clearly recognised, ‘the elements […] identified cannot be directly measured; this would require the further step of funding appropriate indicators’.

But perhaps the most complete up-to-date study on the concept of PSI is Andrij Meleshevich’s (2007) analysis of the process of institutionalisation in five post-Soviet party systems (i.e. Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic States). There, and after an in-depth and critical review of seven of the most relevant works dealing with the concept, he arrives at the conclusion that just TWO are its essential dimensions, namely:

Autonomy, which deals mostly ‘with the interaction of the party system with its environment and state structures’ and is measured by three different types of operational indicators – the number of independents in parliament (in majoritarian systems) or the number of political ‘outsiders’ on party lists (in proportional representation systems); the role of political parties in the formation of government; and the ‘geographical patterns of voting’ (i.e. the strength and uniformity of party identification across the country);

Stability, which examines ‘the patterns of interaction between individual parties as elements of the system’ (Meleshevich, 2007: 20) and is measured by the percentage of the vote taken by ‘old’ parties as well as by Pedersen’s index of electoral volatility (Meleshevich, 2007: 27).

About the same time that Meleshevich tried to explain the different levels of institutionalisation in five post-Soviet party systems, Staffan Lindberg (2007: 222) published his analysis of the level of PSI in 21 African electoral democracies by stating that ‘the most important aspect of party-system institutionalization is interaction among the political parties’. As a result, he proposed eight systemic indicators according to which ‘institutionalization-cum-stabilization’ should be measured: namely, the number of parties (total, new and voted out), the share of new parties in the legislature, the share of parties voted out of the legislature, the share of seats occupied by the largest party in the legislature as well as the runner-up and, last but not least, Pedersen’s index of seat volatility. Such identification of PSI with stability in partisan interactions was confirmed that same year by Mainwaring himself in an article co-authored by Edurne Zoco (2007), where they analysed the determinants of electoral volatility in 47 world democracies.

The Third Wave: Challenging the Status Quo

And thus the second, and longest, wave of PSI studies ended with the first non-regional analysis of PSI which reflected a (almost) consensus in the following two aspects:

The main (but not necessarily unique) dimension of PSI is stability in the patterns of inter-party competition (Table 1);

Pedersen’s index of electoral volatility constitutes the most frequently used indicator when measuring systemic institutionalisation.¹⁵

While most scholars nowadays accept the first point, the use of Pedersen’s index as a proxy for PSI has been challenged on various counts. One of the first to do so was Peter Mair (2007) who, either alone or with Fernando Casal Bértoa (2012), proposed to measure the institutionalisation of Western or Eastern European party systems (respectively) by looking at the closure of partisan interactions at the time of government formation.¹⁶ For that he created a new quantitative indicator that, conflating Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan’s (1967) notion of ‘freezing’ with Giovanni Sartori’s (1976) notion of ‘systemness’, looked at the degree of stability and predictability of government alternations, formulae and access. Thus, and departing from a clear distinction between ‘electoral’ and ‘systemic’ change, party systems were considered to be institutionalised only when parties cooperate, collaborate and colligate in a standardised and structured way presenting voters with clearly stable political alliances and, therefore, predictable governmental alternatives. This way, party systems could be considered as institutionalised in spite of high electoral instability (e.g. Denmark in 1973; Czech Republic in 2006) and vice versa (e.g. throughout the First Republic in Italy; Poland in 2011).

A similar argument, although one which adopts a multi-dimensional approach, has been put forward more recently by Juan Pablo Luna (2014), both together with David Altman (2011) and alone. According to Luna, using electoral volatility as the lead indicator or – more frequently and in isolation – as a proxy for PSI is inadequate, as it may well hide a contradiction between the degree of stability in the structure of competition and other PSI dimensions à la Mainwaring. In other words, and on top of calling into question the linear relationship of Mainwaring’s (four) dimensions, what Luna really challenges is the identification between electoral and systemic stability found in most PSI studies to date. Proposing a PSI typology which would include ‘paradoxical configurations’ like ‘stable but uprooted’ or ‘volatile and rooted’ party systems (Luna and Altman, 2011: 24), what Luna (2014: 423) is clearly calling for is a ‘complete unpack[ing of] the different dimensions conflated in the concept’. And this is what, in a way, the most recent scholarship has been trying to do.

The use of Pedersen’s index as a proxy for PSI has also been challenged by a third school of thought which considers that this classical indicator conflates two different phenomena, namely, demand-side versus supply-side volatility. Thus, while the former (also called ‘intra-system’, ‘Type B’, ‘within the equilibrium’ or ‘regeneration’ volatility) would measure the change in voters’ preferences among traditional parties, the latter (also called ‘extra-system’, ‘Type A’, ‘outside the equilibrium’ or ‘alteration volatility’) would capture the electoral change caused by the appearance of totally new parties (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2015; Torcal and Lago, 2015; Mainwaring et al., 2016; Weghorst and Bernard, 2014, respectively). And this difference is certainly important for two reasons. First, because it seems to capture two different dimensions of PSI (à la Mainwaring): stability in the structure of competition and stable roots in society (respectively). Second, because while the first type of volatility may simply be the product of a healthy and accountable system, the second type – caused by party instability – is clearly a sign of partisan de-alignment and systemic inchoateness (Mainwaring and Torcal, 2006). If, as Alessandro Chiaramonte and Vincenzo Emanuele have put it in the most recent contribution to the topic:

unstable elections with significant regeneration are not a one-off, but tend to be sequential or at least to cluster within a certain period of time (Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2015: 9)

then one can say that its assistance to ‘party system de-institutionalisation’ is inevitable.

Conclusion

Since it first appeared in Huntington’s work five decades ago, and especially after the publication of Mainwaring and Scully’s seminal work 20 years ago, the notion of institutionalisation in general, and PSI in particular, has become one of the most employed concepts in political science.¹⁷

During these 50 years, it has passed from being a rather abstract concept applied equally to parties, party systems and regimes in regional contexts (first Africa, then Latin America, then Asia and finally Europe) to a rather more concretely defined (yet still complex) notion employed in large-N studies and encompassing the whole world. Moreover, in this same time period, we have moved from using either Huntington’s or Mainwaring’s (long unchallenged) four-dimensional theoretical frameworks to consider stability in the patterns of inter-party competition as the main – sometimes even unique – dimension of PSI. In a similar fashion, we have passed from making use of multiple (and in many cases unrelated) indicators (e.g. turnout, fragmentation, wasted votes, etc.) to almost just one (i.e. Pedersen’s index of electoral volatility). Finally, while the first scholars were only interested in ranking party systems according to their level of institutionalisation, the study of the causes of PSI found its momentum almost at the end of the Second Wave (e.g. Birch, 2003; Birnir, 2005; Mainwaring and Zoco, 2007; Meleshevich, 2007), and has continued ever since (e.g. Booth and Robbins, 2010; Weghorst and Bernhard, 2014). Unfortunately, and notwithstanding Morlino’s (1998) or Hans Stockton’s (2001) works on the relationship between PSI and democratic consolidation, a systematic study of the consequences which PSI may have – on the quality of democracy, for instance – still seems to be lacking.

This analysis of the three waves of PSI studies reveals that we still do not have a consensual definition and operationalisation of the concept of PSI. With the exceptions of Randall and Svåsand and Meleshevich given above, the majority of authors have followed Huntington’s and Mainwaring’s examples and propose a range of dimensions (and indicators) of institutionalisation without spending much time on the concept itself. The publication of Allen Hicken and Erik Martinez Kuhonta’s (2014) study on the process of PSI in Asia and Luna’s critique of Mainwaring and Scully’s framework (used in their book) the very same year are both illustrative of how alive the debate is. Moreover, the above-cited revival of the debates about the way electoral volatility should be calculated clearly anticipates the inauguration of a new wave of PSI studies in the near future.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Fernando Casal Bértoa is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is also Director of the ‘Party Systems and Governments Observatory’ (PSGo) (whogoverns.eu). His work has been published in the European Journal of Political Research, Sociological Methods and Research, West European Politics, Party Politics, Democratization, Government and Opposition, International Political Science Review, South European Society and Politics and East European Politics. His most recent book (co-edited with Ferdinand Müller-Rommel) is Party Politics and Democracy in Europe: Essays in Honour of Peter Mair (Routledge, 2016).

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