Catch-all Parties Research Articles

Joining the Nazi Party

The relative strength of competing explanations of Nazism is examined by using a sample of Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) members joining from 1925 to 1933, culled from the Berlin Document Center. Results of a national multivariate model, regressing NSDAP membership rate at the Kreise (county) level on key indicators of competing theories, lends support to what recent analysts have concluded about the Nazi electorate. The NSDAP is best characterized as a catchall party with strongest membership support found in Bavaria and Northwest Germany. Tests for spatial autocorrelation reveal spatial clustering. A spatial-effects model is estimated and results support the political-confessionalism thesis, with mass-society and lower-middle-class explanations invalidated. The spatial lag term is significant, which may represent the importance of preexisting networks to Nazi mobilization and the likelihood that the joining process was one of hierarchical diffusion. Finally, results from regional models emphasize the varied political geography of Nazi membership.

`From Two into One'

This article discusses the nature of Italy's major post-war government party, Christian Democracy (recently collapsed, after almost half a century in power), and its local power structures. Its main thesis is that, for a series of historical and socio-economic reasons, it was constituted initially of two types of party - a notables' party in southern Italy and a mass party in northern Italy - held together by generic anti-communism and state patronage. Moreover, as a result of a succession of crucial developments (party reorganization in the 1950s, Vatican II in the 1960s), it became a sort of catch-all party ante litteram, or more accurately a national `syndicate of political machines'. The second part of the article documents the various mechanisms employed to ensure political consensus in two contrasting regions (Naples and Vicenza) in the two major periods (1950s-1960s and 1970s-1980s). It concludes with an indictment of the party in the current Italian political crisis.

Cadre, Catch-All or Cartel?

In response to Koole's criticisms of our cartel party argument, we suggest that the relationship between participation in an inter-party cartel (a systemic characteristic) and the characteristics of the individual parties participating in the cartel is strong enough to generate a `cartel party' as a party type. While the boundaries between interest organizations and the state have blurred, this is a generalization of the blurring of boundaries between parties and the state to which we referred, and only means that more of the traditional linkages between society and the state are becoming problematic. Precursors of the cartel party phenomenon can be traced to the 1950s or before, but in recent years it has become increasingly typical rather than aberrational. While there are no fully fledged cartel parties (as there never were fully fledged mass or catch-all parties), the type has developed sufficiently as to justify the specification of an additional `corner' in space, relative to which real-world cases can be anchored.

The Business Politicians: Reflections from a Study of Political Corruption

Political corruption has not disappeared with modernization, as some scholars believed would happen. On the contrary, corruption in Western democracies is often described as 'systemic', 'institutionalized' or 'diffuse'. At the same time, the political class is said to have undergone considerable change: catch-all parties and 'media power' have changed the structure of political careers and created new types of professional politician. Little thought, however, has been given to the specific consequences of corruption for the political class. How do the careers of corrupt politicians evolve? What are the capabilities required of a politician who participates systematically in corrupt exchange? What are the motivations which push individuals, in situations of widespread corruption, in the direction of politics? These are the questions with which the present article proposes to deal. In the first section some hypotheses will be presented on the alterations caused in representative democratic regimes by corruption. In particular, the idealtype of the 'business politician' will be defined as one possessing the abilities necessary for the functioning of the system of corruption. Thereafter, an application of these hypotheses to empirical research will be proposed. The results of an investigation of a number cases of political corruption in local government in Italy will be used to illustrate some of the attributes of the 'business politician': in particular the skills in illegality enabling the organization of corrupt exchange (part II), the networking abilities corrupt politicians utilize to create support and complicity (part III) and, lastly, the fact that politics is their only available route to upward mobility (part IV). In part V, a contribution to the theory of political corruption will be offered, starting from the concept of 'moral cost'. Proceeding deductively, we will discuss the conditions which reduce the moral cost of participation in illegal activities and therefore increase willingness to participate in corrupt dealings.

Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya: un «partit de gent» i nacionalista en l'etapa de «fer govern»

Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) és un partit que, des del punt de vista ideològic, s'ha d'etiquetar com a partit nacionalista, ja que allò que el defineix, tant des d'una òptica interna com des de l'exterior del partit, és el nacionalisme. Els orígens i els fonaments del nacionalisme de CDC cal buscar-los en el nacionalisme personalista de Jordi Pujol i, en general, en el seu pensament polític, l'aplicació del qual s'ha fet en quatre fases acumulatives: la de «fer país», la de «fer política», la de «fer partit» (aquestes dues explicitades pel mateix Jordi Pujol) i la que l'autor anomena «fer govern». I pel que fa al concepte de nació que defensa CDC, s'hi pot percebre la influència de Rovira i Virgili i de Prat de la Riba. CDC i Jordi Pujol no defensen un nacionalisme ideològic, sinó un nacionalisme entès com una ètica i, a més, globalitzador, és a dir, sense exclusions prèvies i integrador. Sovint s'ha considerat que CDC més que un partit és un moviment, però l'autor s'inclina per qualificar CDC com un catch-all-party o partit d'arreplega o, com el mateix Jordi Pujol diu, un «partit de gent».

A History of Social Democracy in Postwar Europe

Part 1 Social democratic ideology: working class socialism and programmatic social democracy the road to ideological revision the era of managed growth and the challenge of the New Left the transformation of socialism in France and Italy social democracy in the recession social democratic ideology on the southern European periphery. Part 2 The internal life of social democratic parties: the solidarity community the victory of the catch-all party? the revival of factions the passing of the solidarity community the southern European parties. Part 3 The electoral history of social democracy: social democracy and the electoral route post 1945 the southern European parties. Part 4 Social democracy in power: post-war reconstruction and the challenge to laissez faire the hegemony of social democracy in the era of managed growth government social democracy in the recession the impact of social democracy in power. Part 5 Relations with organized labour and business: relations with organized labour social democracy and organized business social democracy and corporatism the ebbing of social democratic corporatism. Part 6 Foreign policy: the Socialist International defence and security in post-war Europe East/West relations decolonization and the Third World social democratic parties and European integration.

Public Party Funding and Party Transformation in Multiparty Systems

This article analyzes the changes in the Israeli party system since the inception of public party funding in 1969 and compares them with party transformations elsewhere with a view to comparing the intended and the actual impacts of such funding on multiparty systems. Although the overall effect is in line with the catch-all thesis of Kirchheimer, Epstein, and others, there are important potential consequences that run counter to it. Chief among them is the greater facility of ideological and sectional new parties to establish themselves. The result can be a far-reaching structural transformation of the party system, with voters presented with a wide choice of competing ideological and catch-all parties.

Voter Perceptions and Party Strategies: An Empirical Approach

Over thirty years ago Duverger set a paradox which still stands. find ourselves in a vicious circle: a general theory of parties will eventually be constructed only upon the preliminary work of many profound studies, but these studies cannot be truly profound so long as there exists no general theory of I In large part the academic attack on this problem has been piecemeal; very few authors have attempted to consider a general theory of parties. Those who have attempted such a study-and who we will consider in a moment-have tended to focus upon party competition as the main problem to be attacked. Even here, however, the approach has been piecemeal in that the majority of writers on party competition only inadequately consider the important other half of the coin, namely, electoral behavior. In this paper we seek to examine a more complete conception of party competition. The plan of attack is to develop an explicit model of voting behavior and a set of consequences for party behavior. After this we turn to empirical evidence of both the voting model and party behavior. We begin, however, by elaborating upon our contention that inadequate attention to voters has been a downfall of models of party competition. In order to make this task manageable, we will divide the literature somewhat arbitrarily into formal and nonformal or comparativist, beginning our discussion with the latter. To a fairly large extent the traditional comparativist models of party competition have been grounded in implicit, and often idiosyncratic, models of voting behavior, the general impact of which is to build up a picture of political parties as either being unable to move policy positions or being able to move almost at will. A few examples will serve to illustrate this point. First let us examine those who see parties as being able to move freely throughout a policy space. The earliest examples of this view are expressed by Michels and Kirchheimer who see the old socialist or class-mass parties as being able to abandon their old, radical positions and move to become centrist or catch-all parties.2 Objections to this sell out are seen to come mainly from within the party organizations themselves and not from the voters. That is to say, for example, Socialist and Communist parties, once they manage to overcome internal opposition, can move to become centrist parties with little or no electoral penalty, a picture that is clearly at odds with the difficulties postwar Communist parties have experienced in selling their belief in the parliamentary road to socialism to European voters.

Politics of Resentment: Right-Wing Radicalism in West Germany

During the past several years, a number of West European countries have expenenced a serious challenge from right-wing populist parties. The French National Front, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Swiss Vigilants, Action National, and the Autopartei, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), and the various progressive parties in Scandinavia are among the most prominent examples of a rising tide of often radical right-wing populism which has raised concern among politicians and political commentators alike.' Referring to themselves as national-conservative or right-conservative parties they pursue a range of similar objectives: a tightening of strict law and order to combat rising crime rates associated with drugs; a return to traditional moral values in the face of a growing number of abortions and the AIDS threat; and, most important of all, the protection of national and cultural identity allegedly threatened by third world immigrants, foreign workers, and refugees. The latest addition to the list of right-wing parties has been the West German Republikaner. Founded in 1983 by Franz Sch6nhuber and disgruntled former members of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the Republikaner became the focus of attention in the wake of the 1989 elections in West Berlin, where they came literally out of nowhere to gain more than 90,000 votes (7.5 percent of the vote) and eleven seats in the city parliament. Despite attempts by political observers to play down the extent of support for the radical right, the Republikaner repeated their earlier local success on the federal level in the European elections in June 1989: capturing 7.1 percent of the popular vote, they were the main cause for the painful losses of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and particularly their Bavarian sister party, the CSU. In addition, the German People's Party (DVU), an extremist neo-Nazi party, received 1.6 percent of the vote, increasing the total vote for the far right to 9 percent. Successes in subsequent local elections in North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Wiirttemberg in the fall and a respectable 3.3 percent in the state elections in the Saarland in the spring of 1990 against a highly popular minister president, Oskar Lafontaine (Social Democratic Party, SPD), who embarked on a populist course of his own, were indications that the Republikaner might stand a chance to overcome the five percent hurdle in the federal elections at the end of the year. The fact that a right-wing party could rise almost over night to command national and international attention points to serious deficits in West German democracy. After the establishment of the left-libertarian Greens in the early 1980s the gains of radical parties on both sides of the political spectrum largely at the expense of the established catch-all parties expose above all the declining ability of the large parties to bind their respective electorates. As in other West European countries, the number of floating voters has increased considerably during the last decade, from 24 percent in 1980 to more than a third in 1989.2

Israel's Labor Alignment in the 1984 Elections: Catch-All Tactics in a Divided Society

Some two decades have passed since Otto Kirchheimer put forward his seminal thesis concerning transformations within western multiparty systems. Parties, he predicted, would respond to increasing affluence, welfare policies, and reduction of social tensions by jettisoning most of their ideological cargo and turning into catch-all parties. Programs that provided rose-colored glasses would offer previews of happy days for all and sundry among ... prospective customers and would concentrate on proposals sufficiently general to prevent their being turned from electoral weapons to engines of assault against the party which first mounted them. Parties which failed to adopt such means would suffer electoral losses and be obliged to review their strategy.' To no small degree, the prognosis reflected the optimism of the Europe of the 1960s, as yet unshaken by stagflation and large-scale unemployment with all their social ramifications. Of late, it would seem that a more pertinent question has posed itself. Irrespective of the degree to which conditions have verified Kirchheimer's theory, it may be asked whether the obverse holds and catch-all parties in western multiparty systems, however they have developed, will suffer electoral losses unless they retrieve their ideological cargo and advocate clear-cut proposals to deal with the fundamental problems confronting society. Underlying this is a further question. How far can political entrepreneurs control the climate of opinion of the electorate in times of tranquility and in times of storm, and how much leeway can they allow themselves in their choice of electoral tactics? The aim of this paper is to help illuminate these problems through an analysis of the dilemma faced by the Israeli Labor Alignment since 1981 regarding the choice of its electoral strategy, as well as the decisions it arrived at on the eve of the 1984 parliamentary electoral campaign and their consequences. In the latter 1960s and early 1970s, the use of catch-all tactics enabled the Alignment and its main rival, the Likud, to draw into their fold ideologically diverse groups and to extend their electoral appeal to the nonaligned voters and members of the smaller parties. However, in the early 1980s the new ideological thrust of the incumbent Likud and mounting sociopolitical and economic tensions forced the Alignment to reconsider its strategy. Would the continued use of catch-all tactics enable it to tap the large reserve of discontented voters? Would it rather straddle the party with a problem of credibility and put it at a disadvantage in the competition against ideologically oriented rivals? We shall try to show that the decision in favor of a nonideological strategy played a significant role in producing the two surprises that turned the 1984 parliamentary elections into a landmark in the country's politics. On the eve of the campaign, analysts were one in predicting that, coming as it did against the background of a costly and protracted war in Lebanon and a deepening economic crisis, the election would be a showdown between the opposing philosophies representing

Les groupes politiques marginaux en Israël. Caractéristiques et fonctions

Applying the marginality concept would appear particularly valid in the case of Israël, a pluralisme Society based on a wide consensus, but including many extremist groups with widely varying ideological stances. As the three main political forces in the countrv — socialist, anti-socialist and religious — have become " catch-all parties ", some of the small parties have become marginal and are no longer part of the consensus. The prEsent studv seeks first to classify these marginal forces (liminal and anti-system groups) according to the components of thé consensus against which they stand, and then to determine some of their main shared characteristics : ideological strength. length of existence, sociological base. As regards their role in relation to the Israeli political System, it seems that far from disturbing it, these small groups paradoxically contribute to ils stability.