Do Parties Matter? The Impact of Parties on the Key Decisions in the Political System

Abstract

TO AN ORDINARY DEMOCRATIC CITIZEN THE QUESTION ‘DO parties matter’ might seem a typical pseudoproblem of scholars. Everybody knows that parties matter, otherwise nobody would leave home on election day and cast his vote. Even the enlightened politicians have hardly any doubts that parties matter. When Margaret Thatcher was asked before her first electoral victory what her access to power would change in Britain, she answered in one word: ‘everything’. This means that she firmly believed that parties almost exclusively matter in a political system. How did scholars come to ask such a stupid question – so contrary to democratic common sense? New and unfamiliar questions normally rise when a change of paradigm in science takes place. The change of aradigm in this case was the shift of attention from the study of politics to policy analysis.