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  • Decline or Change? Party Types and the Crisis of Representative Democracy

    Author(s)
    Giebler, Heiko
    Lacewell, Onawa
    Regel, Sven
    Werner, Annika
    Griffith University Author(s)
    Werner, Annika
    Year published
    2018
    Metadata
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    Abstract
    Much has been written about the decline and transformation of political parties and the more or less devastating effects of these developments for the functioning of representative democracies. It is common knowledge to party scholars, reflected in a long-standing debate concerning party-type classification, that political parties come in differing shapes. However, as there is no standard measurement strategy allowing for the objective classification of parties, core assumptions of the literature cannot be tested—including a crisis of democracy as the result of changes in the realm of political parties. To close this gap, ...
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    Much has been written about the decline and transformation of political parties and the more or less devastating effects of these developments for the functioning of representative democracies. It is common knowledge to party scholars, reflected in a long-standing debate concerning party-type classification, that political parties come in differing shapes. However, as there is no standard measurement strategy allowing for the objective classification of parties, core assumptions of the literature cannot be tested—including a crisis of democracy as the result of changes in the realm of political parties. To close this gap, we deduce such a measure from the classical literature on party types, utilizing party membership, and a new measure of parties’ programmatic clarity. We provide empirical party-type classifications for 16 Western European countries from 1960s to 2010s and use them to assess the validity of the “catch-all party” hypothesis. The results show that, although mass parties are indeed declining, catch-all parties are not nearly as prevalent and successful as widely claimed. In fact, programmatic parties are by far the most common party type. Finally, we show that disappearance and emergence of certain party types have an effect on the three key functions parties fulfill in democracy: mobilization, representation, and government stability. Our findings suggest that there is no crisis of democracy provoked by general developments of political parties.
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    Book Title
    Democracy and Crisis: Challenges in Turbulent Times
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72559-8_7
    Subject
    Comparative Government and Politics
    Publication URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10072/380775
    Collection
    • Book chapters

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