Abstract
This is the third volume in a series sponsored by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) group of elections study scholars. Recognizing the wide-ranging changes re-shaping contemporary political life, the authors’ ask whether the long-standing ‘party government’ model is still a valid characterization of the core linkage functions in modern democracies. They do so by bringing the considerable resources of the electoral surveys of 36 (established and new) democracies to bear on the series of propositions that they suggest define the classic party government model.
If parties are the principal organization linking citizens and the state, the authors’ argument is that they can be seen as performing five distinct linkage functions – campaign, participatory, ideological, representative and policy linkages – that together constitute a ‘chain of democratic linkage’. The book is organized in a series of crisp chapters that seek to unravel the place of partisanship in systematically structuring each step in the temporal chain. Two map the place of parties in the formal electoral process and as agents of popular mobilization; three then identify the extent to which parties are able to structure voting choices to reflect citizens’ preferences; and the last two take us to the end of the chain by identifying the extent to which governments and their policy outputs reflect voters’ choices.
In a set of separate analyses that build a case for each link in the hypothesized chain, the authors find:
Parties’ place in the electoral process has been strengthened.
Parties remain important agencies of voter mobilization.
Voters do have preferences that can be construed in Left–Right terms.
Voters are able to recognize parties’ place on a Left–Right spectrum.
Voters’ Left–Right orientations shape their vote choices.
Government creation is a dynamic process of adjusting to the place of the median voter.
Parties do matter in shaping policy.
It must be admitted that some of the relationships in this chain are clearer, and more convincing, than others. However, it is the total package, laid out in this way, that leads to the claim that ‘parties maintain their monopoly on carrying out their linkage function’ (p. 216) and the book concludes with the assertion that despite the challenges political parties or whatever new forms they may evolve, ‘they are here for the long haul’ (p. 231).
With a sub-title like How Parties Organize Democracy, and a promise of focusing ‘on the actions of political parties as organizations’ (p. 12), one might have expected to learn how political parties act to control and manage the electoral and governmental processes. While some attention is given to examining party activity in the discussion of their place in the electoral process, evidence for most of the analyses comes from the CSES voter surveys done during the first decade of this century. So, for instance, party mobilization is understood in terms of voter accounts, not party practices; party positioning in terms of voter perceptions, not party claims. While this reliance on survey data opens new and rich perspectives on the linkage chain, it does not say much about what political parties actually do and how they operate. It might have been fairer to subtitle the book How Partisanship Shapes Democracy.
Analysing the relative ability of political parties to successfully ‘fulfil their basic functions’ is notoriously difficult given the shifting notion of just how we define a party. In Political Parties and Democratic Linkage, the authors appear to adopt different perspectives depending on the linkage function they are concerned with. Thus it appears to be the party on the ground that is crucial for local mobilization activity (chapter 3), the party in public office that positions the party on the Left–Right spectrum (chapter 5), and the party in central office that negotiates coalitions and agrees to public policy (chapter 7). While all of this is seen indirectly through the survey responses of voters, a comprehensive account of the party government model would want to consider the ways in which these distinctive dimensions of party life are connected and with what consequence for the central issue of democratic accountability.
It is no small challenge to use the evidence of 36 democracies to measure the implicit capacity of political parties to dominate and integrate the linkages that knit together contemporary practice in electoral democracies. Dalton, Farrell and McAllister have managed to do it in a relatively short, clear and accessible fashion that is bound to become a new starting point for debates about the role and importance of political parties. This is a book for scholars, students and citizens.