Party Politics

Political parties and party systems exhibit widely varying degrees of nationalization, that is the extent to which a party receives similar levels of electoral support throughout the country. The level of party nationalization has a prominent effect on such important factors as the survival of democracy, the types of issues that dominate political competition, legislative behaviour and public policy. In spite of its importance, party nationalization has been neglected in the comparative politics literature. Our article makes two contributions. First, it provides a measure of party and party system nationalization, based on the Gini coefficient, that is superior for comparative analysis to those employed to date. Second, it utilizes these measures to analyse nationalization in 17 democracies in the Americas, the first time nationalization has been examined empirically outside the advanced industrial democracies. The measure underscores the widely varying degrees in nationalization across party systems, within party systems over time, across parties within countries and within parties over time.

While the literature already includes a large number of party typologies, they are increasingly incapable of capturing the great diversity of party types that have emerged worldwide in recent decades, largely because most typologies were based upon West European parties as they existed in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Some new party types have been advanced, but in an ad hoc manner and on the basis of widely varying and often inconsistent criteria. This article is an effort to set many of the commonly used conceptions of parties into a coherent framework, and to delineate new party types whenever the existing models are incapable of capturing important aspects of contemporary parties. We classify each of 15 ‘species’ of party into its proper ‘genus’ on the basis of three criteria: (1) the nature of the party’s organization (thick/thin, elite-based or mass-based, etc.); (2) the programmatic orientation of the party (ideological, particularistic-clientele-oriented, etc.); and (3) tolerant and pluralistic (or democratic) versus proto-hegemonic (or anti-system). While this typology lacks parsimony, we believe that it captures more accurately the diversity of the parties as they exist in the contemporary democratic world, and is more conducive to hypothesistesting and theory-building than others.

The national party leaders of Europe, sitting in separate national parliaments from their party’s Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), normally have difficulty influencing MEP policy decisions. This article, after pointing out the obstacles which minimize national party influence, analyzes a new and largely unacknowledged system of MEP coordination and control developed by the British Labour Party. Using data from interviews with Labour’s MEPs, the article concludes that Labour’s leaders have created an influential system of rewards and sanctions that have encouraged a closer and more disciplined relationship in this dualparliamentary setting.

In this article, we analyse changes, and the debates about changes, in the relationship between Norwegian political parties and their members. We ask whether parties develop from mass parties towards a ‘network model’, and whether such changes represent organizational convergence. The organizational diagnoses of the parties and their prescribed cures are similar. Thematic network structures, increased inclusiveness and membership ballots are debated within the parties, but actual change has been modest. While the Internet has brought about substantial change in the internal communication of parties, there is remarkable stability in Norwegian party organizations. Many of the structures and practices of the mass party remain, but network structures have emerged as an alternative ideal.

In discussions of party organization, scholars have generally assumed that such organizations operate exclusively on the domestic level, alter electoral results by raising votes and money from onstituencies at home. This research note shows that this assumption is outdated, because the US Democratic and Republican parties now maintain overseas branches in dozens of different countries. These branches seek through a variety of means to mobilize the votes and financial resources of Americans abroad in an attempt to change domestic political outcomes. An analysis of the rise of these groups demonstrates the value of the concept of globalization in an area where it is usually not considered relevant, and raises new normative and practical questions about how to regulate overseas political activity by US citizens and parties.