Party Politics

This symposium marks the 30th anniversary of Party Politics, a leading journal in the study of political parties and organizations. Over three decades, the field has evolved in response to profound political and societal changes, including the rise of new parties, digitalization, judicialization, and personalization. The symposium invites critical self-reflection on the theories and methods that have shaped party scholarship. It revisits foundational contributions such as Katz and Mair’s cartel party thesis, and debates the continued centrality of parties in democratic politics and research. Contributions also examine the normative value of partisanship, the intellectual networks underpinning party research, and the limited convergence between academic and practitioner perspectives on party organization and regulation. By reassessing the field’s intellectual genealogy and its responsiveness to contemporary challenges, the symposium aims to reinvigorate scholarly debate and foster a more inclusive, interconnected future for party politics research.

The inaugural issue of Party Politics in January 1995 was led off by Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party. The article outlined a convincing and influential account of the evolution of party organisation from the late 19th century and of its consequences for representative democracy. The notion of party cartelisation, famously associated with the article, has since become one of the most common axioms of comparative party scholarship. In this article we revisit Katz and Mair’s core argument, clarifying what it did and did not say. We show how the article both shared common ground with earlier accounts of political cartelisation and innovated in important respects. We assess the critical reaction to the article, the core evidence on party cartelisation itself, and the article’s influence and legacy. And at a time of great political uncertainty, we evaluate what the thesis and its proponents have to say about future developments in party-based democracies and the future direction of scholarship on party politics.

For more than 70 years, scholars have taken Schattschneider’s renowned statement that ‘Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties’ as an axiom. But amid claims of party decline and evidence of political personalization, presidentialization, and the judicialization and digitization of politics, do parties still deserve to be treated as central actors in democratic politics, or are they treated as such because of a conservative bias? If so, should they be abandoned in favor of alternative heroes, or should we stick to the party perspective and continue to foreground parties as the central competitive units within a democratic system? The article starts with identifying the fields in which parties are perceived as central actors in democratic politics. After making the case for focusing on individual politicians as an alternative to the party perspective, it puts the party perspective on trial. It examines the current status of political parties in democracies using three general approaches: functional, sociological, and rational choice. Based on the analysis, it argues that the party perspective should not be abandoned, and that it should continue to respond to change in order to serve as an optimal framework for political analysis.

In advanced industrial democracies, politics has become heavily personalized. What are the implications of this process for research on, and the practice of, democracy? Some have called for a reconceptualization of the essence of modern democratic politics in a way that moves research away from the so-called party organization paradigm. We argue here for the continued relevance of (studying) party organizations. Shedding the theoretical baggage of the mass party ideal from the party organization paradigm, we maintain that, while political parties may structure elections less than in the past and have recently underperformed in safeguarding democratic norms and rules, personalization has actually increased their capacity in the parliamentary and governmental arenas. The party organization paradigm prompts us to problematize these contrasting developments and articulate normatively where exactly the shortcomings of current political parties lie when it comes to safeguarding liberal democracy.

People who value political parties are often worried about the decline of partisanship, understood as the sustained commitment by citizens to a political party. From a normative perspective, however, one does not imply the other, and the reasons to value parties seem stronger than the reasons to value partisanship. Although there is value in the joint and sustained commitment to a political cause, partisans are less likely than other citizens to adopt a critical attitude toward their party in case of betrayal of its basic principles, and they are less likely to see the truth in the opponents’ arguments. For a well-functioning democracy, it seems important to have citizens who are politically committed yet open-minded, capable of revising their political views, and willing to sanction their preferred party at the ballot box. And while partisan commitment certainly does not impede this, it is often in tension with the ethics of voting.

This paper produces a bibliometric analysis of the field of party politics, its structure, central authors and co-authors, and communities. Using bibliographical data from Party Politics (N = 1897 authors), combined with measures of symbolic (bibliometric data), cultural (role in data production), and social capital (role in international groups), we have mapped the contours of the field and identified the mechanisms through which hierarchies, communities, and research agendas are sustained. Three complementary network analyses, based on authorship, co-authorship, and sources, reveal distinct but interconnected communities of scholars, each contributing to different facets of party politics research. The study invites scholars to reflect on the social and institutional dynamics that shape the very conditions of knowledge production in the field. More generally, it raises normative questions that extend beyond the field of party politics on the role of capital, international associations, and collaboration between sub-fields in knowledge production.

Recent decades have witnessed substantial expansion in both international efforts to support the development of political parties as healthy organizations, and in academic comparative studies to understand how parties’ organizational choices affect political outcomes. Despite the similarities of the concerns, the overlap of these efforts has been modest. This article considers why these developments have failed to converge, pointing to different fundamental conceptions of how political parties function and what they are for. It then illustrates this gap by considering two areas of party operations (i.e. political party finance and intra-party democracy), showing the scarcity of research support for some major assumptions that justify specific party aid prescriptions. The article concludes by considering possible ways to bridge the practitioner-researcher gap in this field of study.