Mass Party Research Articles

Organisational Continuity and Electoral Endurance: The Communist Party of Cyprus

This article makes a contribution to the understanding of party organisation by examining one of the most successful West European communist parties, the Communist Party of Cyprus (AKEL). Defying the downward trend of its counterparts and the external shock of Soviet collapse, the AKEL has managed to sustain the support of nearly a third of the electorate. Using original archival evidence and interview data, the article attributes the electoral endurance of the AKEL to organisational continuity. Since its founding, the party has built a robust mass party structure, with an extensive network of auxiliary organisations and strong centralising mechanisms. During the crisis of the late 1980s, the party kept the basic features of this organisational model intact refusing to dismantle its Leninist organisational infrastructure. Organisational continuity has helped the AKEL sustain its electoral strength by signalling its ideological consistency. Organisational continuity might also account for the relative persistence of other communist parties in Western Europe.

The Cartel Model and Motions for the Agenda: Israel as a Case Study (2003-2009)

(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)During the last four decades, political scientists have posited various theories to explain the functioning of party systems and the evolutionary changes that take place in them. Descriptions of several types of parties have emerged from these theories including the elite party, the mass party, the catch-all party and the cartel model. Cox and McCubbins (2005) used the cartel model, originally devised by Katz and Mair (1995), to advance a theory about American political parties. They tested this theory by using the roll rate to measure the influence of each party. This paper uses the measurement of Cox and McCubbins' cartel theory in order to expand our knowledge about the ability of Israeli governments to set their agenda.Scholars argue that political parties evolve by becoming increasingly elitist and less ideological, and are dominated by money and professionals (e.g., Hopkin and Paolucci 1999; Panebianco 1988). In contrast, the mass party has an extensive organization and membership. Its main goal is to capture control of the state in order to expand the right to vote and enact social reforms that benefit its members (Duverger 1954). Similarly, the main goal of the catch-all model is to attract as many voters as possible (Kirchheimer 1966). Regardless of their goals, however, many political scientists believe that political parties are in decline.Katz and Mair (1995) disagree with this assessment. They argue the political parties have successfully adjusted to their present situation by forming cartel party systems, the next stage in party evolution after the mass and catch-all parties (Katz and Mair 1995). They use the term 'cartel' to describe the influence the party uses over the state to establish its own position in power by preventing others from entering the cartel.Since 1 995 there have been a wide variety of papers published in response to Katz and Mair' s cartel theory. Some of the works criticized it from a theoretical perspective (Kitschelt 2000; Koole 1996), some developed the theory (Blyth and Katz 2005; Katz and Mair 1996). Others have examined the theory using various countries as case studies (e.g., Bowler, Carter and Farrell 2003; Hopkin 2003; Pelizzo 2007; Yishai 2001; Young 1998). Cox and McCubbins (2005) later used the phrase 'cartel party' to advance a theory about American political parties they described as 'procedural cartels'. In their model the majority party in the House of Representatives acts as a cartel by controlling the key positions of power in the chamber and, by extension, the content and composition of the legislative agenda.Of what use are the procedures described by Cox and McCubbins and to what extent do they exist in other parliamentary bodies besides the American Congress? To answer these questions, we reviewed the major research on these procedures. First we established that parliaments worldwide have different procedures that serve the same purpose: blocking or delaying the ability of the opposition or the coalition to set its agenda. In the US Congress, blocking tactics including the use of the 'killer amendment' (Wilkerson 1999) can be used to make a bill fail. In the Israeli parliament (the Knesset), such a tactic is called the 'arrangement law', which allows the government to veto expenditure bills after they have been passed (Akirav, Cox and McCubbins 2010). France's National Assembly also has delaying tactics called the 'package vote' (Huber 1992). In Western and Eastern European parliaments such actions are called the 'successive procedure' (Rasch 2000). In sum, different parliaments have a variety of blocking and delaying tactics that they use to try to maintain a delicate balance between the power of the coalition or the majority party and the power of the opposition.In order to understand the effectiveness of the procedures, we must assume, as does Huber (1992), that institutional arrangements play important roles in structuring not only the relationship between the legislative and executive branches, but also the strategic interactions between the parties that are partners in coalitions, and between the government and the opposition parties in a minority government (Huber 1992:684-685). …

Partisan Moods: Polarization and the Dynamics of Mass Party Preferences

Inquiry into the origins of partisan polarization has generally treated polarization as a simple, symmetric phenomenon—the degree to which the worldviews of the mass Democratic and Republican parties have or have not diverged from one another. In this article, we disaggregate polarization into its constituent parts, the dynamic preferences of the mass Democratic and Republican Parties. This approach allows for the possibility that intraparty dynamics may influence interparty differences and for the integration of studies of polarization with literatures addressing other dynamics in aggregate public opinion. Building on individual-level research on partisan identities and macrolevel research on public mood, we argue that party polarization may be catalyzed, in part, by the mass parties’ differential responsiveness to changes in the macro political-economic context. We find support for this position, showing asymmetries in the dynamics of polarization that are associated with differential partisan responsiveness to domestic policy choices.

Iran's Tudeh Party: A History of Compromises and Betrayals

This article looks at Iran's Tudeh Party and its relationship with the Soviet Communist Party from the 1930s to 1980s. Russia's extensive geographical border with Iran and the influence of Russian communism on Iranian migrant workers gave a special significance to Soviet policy towards Iran. Studying the history of Iran's Tudeh Party gives an insight into the role of Stalinism in the region, the negative effects of which are still visible today. This article will explore Soviet instructions to abandon communism for the sake of ‘the survival of the Socialist camp’; the dismantling of Iran's Communist Party in favour of a broad front (the Tudeh or Mass Party); the imposition of socialism from above after a military invasion; the condemnation of Mossadegh as a CIA agent and the Tudeh Party's inactivity during the CIA's coup in 1953. The article also discusses the rebellion of students and intellectuals, especially the Fedayeen, against the Tudeh Party and the shortcomings of their courageous, although ultimately unsuccessful, efforts.

The fate of intra-party democracy

This article argues that the widespread hypothesis stating that intra-party democracy has declined since the glory days of the mass party is too sweeping and, largely, empirically groundless. In order to test it the article draws on a comparison between two internal policy-making processes within the Swedish social democratic party (SAP), one concerning an expansion of welfare benefits in the 1950s and the other concerning a retrenchment in the 1990s. If intra-party democracy is in a state of decline, the results of the comparison most likely should confirm this tendency. Yet the article concludes that party leaders exercised considerably less control, while activists were much more influential in the 1990s than in the days of mass party mobilization in the 1950s. Therefore, drawing on a single case study, the article casts doubts over the influential decline hypothesis and proposes new venues for research on the fate of intra-party democracy.

Ideological misfits

In this article, we identify a distinctive type of party member; namely, those who identify themselves as ideologically at odds with their party. Using survey evidence from nine parties in Belgium and Canada, we measure the prevalence of these ‘ideological misfits' and explore the characteristics that define them. While there appears to be no systematic cross-party pattern, it is striking that mass parties of the left have disproportionately large numbers of such members. To the extent that those parties pride themselves on intra-party democracy, this raises questions about their capacity to respond to Downsian drives towards the centre and suggests that May’s law may be one of left-wing disparity.

Two Patterns of Opposition: Party Group Interaction in the Bavarian State Parliament

Most research on parliamentary opposition focuses on constitutional and institutional aspects. This article argues that these approaches are limited in explaining differences between opposition parties. A case study of the Bavarian State Parliament supports the assumption that complex patterns of a number of factors, such as individual party groups’ ideology and history, their members’ socio-demographic background, and their informal rules of engagement, influence the way opposition parties behave. The study shows distinctive differences between the appearance and the strategies employed to influence the majority's decision-making. The Social Democrats, a traditional mass party with over 40 years in opposition, focused on a strategy of professional, subject-oriented cooperation within parliament. The Greens chose confrontational power policies that had their main effect outside parliament. This stands in line with the party's origin in grassroots movements and its culture of conflict resolution. The particular way of how party identities and policies coincide with the preference of one opposition strategy over another indicates that historic and socio-cultural factors are highly relevant for parliamentary behaviour.

La sociología de los partidos políticos bajo el prisma de la derecha francesa

In France, right wing political parties have been neglected by political science. Reasons are various. One of them results from the long-lasting supremacy of Maurice Duverger model based on cadre party versus mass party. However, it is worth for political parties theory to study what used to be considered as parties by default or parties without active members. This enables us to make evolve paradigms, as well as theories and concepts regarding political organisations. Therefore, this article aims at considering the French “not gaulliste” right wing (UDF) as a field of study. Keywords : Union for French Democracy - French right wing - partisan institution - centrist leaders - militancy.

La sociología de los partidos políticos bajo el prisma de la derecha francesa

In France, right wing political parties have been neglected by political science. Reasons are various. One of them results from the long-lasting supremacy of Maurice Duverger model based on cadre party versus mass party. However, it is worth for political parties theory to study what used to be considered as parties by default or parties without active members. This enables us to make evolve paradigms, as well as theories and concepts regarding political organisations. Therefore, this article aims at considering the French “not gaulliste” right wing (UDF) as a field of study. Keywords : Union for French Democracy - French right wing - partisan institution - centrist leaders - militancy.

An Obituary for the Third Way: The Financial Crisis and Social Democracy in Europe

Why has the financial crisis not served as an occasion for social democratic revival? It is because, with the ‘Third Way’, European social democracy became imbricated with the financial system in crisis to such an extent that it is in no position to offer an alternative to it. The financial crisis is the crisis of the Third Way. Furthermore, the Third Way was based on the faulty premise that it was possible to replicate USA's apparent success in the 1990s, which, however, was based on very particular conditions. The argument is pursued with reference to inter alia Third Way ideology, transatlantic relations, the political economy of capitalist variety, and the political sociology of mass parties.

Red Saints: Gendering the Cold War, Italy 1943–1953

The particular intensity of Italy's Cold War rivalries was subverted, critiqued, and even outright rejected by a coalition of women from both Left and Right. These women, brought together by their participation in the antifascist Resistance and held together by a particular vision of women's equal citizenship as the only guarantee of democracy in Italy, presented an ideal image of womanhood to the public endorsing both a Christian inspiration and a progressive militancy. Indeed, this conviction more accurately reflected the average Italian voter's own identity, in which Catholicism and communism were both thoroughly hybridised in local culture; and the real, if strategically complex, commitment in both mass parties' hierarchies to remain loyal to the new constitution rather than acquiesce to the covert sabotage constantly suggested to them by their interlocutors in Moscow or Washington. These women's success is a testament to an important women's movement before neofeminism, all too often forgotten; but it is also an important confirmation of our evolving understanding of the real significance of the Cold War as an interplay of forces which influenced, but could not determine, Italian and other local outcomes.

Structural and Ideological Voting in Age Cohorts

In most West European countries the effects of long-term determinants of the vote − in particular social class, religion and left–right ideology − have slowly weakened since the late 1980s. This paper first describes differences between the EU member states in the extent of structural and ideological voting in the period 1989–2004. It then focuses on the causes behind the changes over time. It is hypothesised that the decline is partially caused by generational replacement (H1). More specifically, it is assumed that structural voting is most important for the generation born before 1950, and politically socialised in the years of the mass party (H2) and that ideological voting is most important for the generation born between 1950 and 1970, who were politically socialised after the decline of cleavages and before the fall of the Berlin Wall (H3). To test these hypotheses, the study employs the European Elections Study 1989, 1994, 1999 and 2004. The country by year combination provides data from 62 political contexts. To analyse the determinants of party choice across different countries and years, a methodology is employed that was developed by Van der Eijk and Franklin in Choosing Europe (1996). The study provides support for all three hypotheses.

Introduction to Special Issue: Political Writing and Literature 1800-1835

Introduction to Special Issue:Political Writing and Literature 1800-1835 Sandra M. Gustafson, Guest Editor (bio) The field of literary history has burgeoned in the last three decades, as historicism has become the predominant methodology in literary studies. In an academic form of sibling rivalry, relations between scholars who take literature as their object of inquiry and scholars who study "the past" (that is to say, historians) have grown somewhat strained, even as the two groups arguably share a larger number of assumptions and practices than at any moment in the life of the modern academy. This special issue of the Journal of the Early Republic developed out of an initiative by then-editor Roderick McDonald to bring scholars from the fields of literary studies and history into closer dialogue. 1 Politics and literature have provided important points of convergence between the disciplines in the past, notably in the protracted [End Page 171] debate about republican and liberal influences on the early American republic and in studies that build on the insights of Jürgen Habermas to track the emergence of a public sphere in the United States. The topic of this issue, "Political Writing and Literature 1800-1835," arose out of a sense that new developments in both history and literary studies made the topic ripe for reconsideration.2 An open call for papers netted a modest number of essays, a review process led to the selection of the four articles included here, and Roderick and I worked together to guide the authors toward a style and a method that could appeal to scholars in both disciplines. Three of the authors (White, Apap, and Miller) have their academic homes in literature departments, while Graham resides in a history department, as does Catherine O'Donnell, whose cross-disciplinary work makes her a helpful surveyor of recent scholarship in the field. The essays included here are notable for the suppleness with which they read their textual archives and relate them to concerns guiding recent scholarship. They revisit old debates and engage new ones by means of a close analysis of texts, which remains the trademark gesture of the literary scholar. Collectively they suggest how textured readings of specific works can open out into case studies that illuminate important general claims and engage theoretical concerns. The subjects addressed here include the robust persistence of republican ideology and its characteristic literary genre, the deliberative oration, after 1800; the importance of geographic thinking in the modern republic; the shifting dynamics of race, gender, class, and religion; and the rise of mass party politics that claimed to represent democracy while practicing many forms of exclusion. These essays extend several of the emphases in the revisionary historical scholarship included in the 2004 collection Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic.3 In a concluding comment to that volume, William G. Shade notes that it began as an initiative within SHEAR, which took shape on the H-SHEAR listserv and led to a 1998 panel at the SHEAR conference before [End Page 172] evolving into the essay collection. All of the contributors to the volume are historians, and they collectively aspire to create a "new cultural history of politics of the early republic" (388), drawing on the methodologies made current by the postmodern "linguistic turn" and neo-Marxist critical theory. The essays in the volume are divided into four parts whose titles share affinities with the concerns explored by the essays in this issue: "Democracy and Other Practices," "Gender, Race, and Other Identities," "Norms and Forms," and "Interests, Spaces, and Other Structures." By chance rather than plan, all of the essays included in this special issue fall into one or more of these rubrics. The coincidence suggests how certain motivating questions—such as the changing nature of power in the early republic and its institutional and normative embodiments—lead to similar explorations across disciplines. This issue extends the methodologies pursued in Beyond the Founders via a deeper engagement with specific texts and authors. This text-and-author focus is a characteristically "literary" gesture, and the accompanying emphasis on textual analysis can seem superficial or unrepresentative to historians trained to read...

Borgerplatformen – Et ungt parti med regeringsmagt

The Civic Platform - a Young Party in Power The Civic Platform is one of the new parties in Poland, being established less than 10 years ago as a liberal soft protest party with a fl at and decentralized institutional structure. This article starts with a brief overview of the development of parties and party systems in Central and Eastern Europe before proceeding to review the his- tory of the Civic Platform, with a special emphasis on its constituency, institutional structure, programmatic aspects and party type. Over time, the party's profi le has changed radically, in particular since the 2007 election, which brought the party into power. Step by step, it has become more hierarchically structured and has developed cartel and catch-all party characteristics institutionally reminiscent of a mass party. Currently, it enjoys a strong position: few voters want the Law and Justice Party to return to power, and the Left does not constitute a real challenge. The article nevertheless ends by discussing the prospects of fatigue from being in power, as well as the waning effect of the shock of two years of Kaczynski rule.

COMMUNISTS AND THE TRADE UNION LEFT REVISITED: THE CASE OF THE UK 1964-79

In the 1880s when Karl Marx lived in London and Frederick Engels worked in Manchester they wrote about the possibility of a socialist revolution in Great Britain. Much of their data collection and subsequent analysis was based on the Victorian Empire, and the class structure and struggle that emerged from the workings of capitalism in an advanced industrial state. Ever since then British communists have sought to decipher their predictions and turn them into concrete revolutionary action and organization based on a largely Leninist approach to state power and revolution. This has meant a heavy dependence on the trade unions as the mass expression of working-class solidarity and struggle, and a continuous battle with the right wing social democrats who control the minds and actions of many in the mass party of the workers, the Labour Party. This article examines the period in modern history when the CPCB came closest to realizing its revolutionary potential and program through a mixture of a left push within the labor movement at both official levels and among grass roots working class activists in the unions and elsewhere.

Vicarious Revolutionaries: Martial Discourse and the Origins of Mass Party Competition in the United States, 1789–1848

Social scientists of democratic change have emphasized the role of class action in that process, neglecting the discursive shift that was necessary to legitimate mass party competition in the early American case. Although historians of U.S. party formation have emphasized the discursive dimension of this transition, they have focused on more formal theories of party and neglected the importance of martial discourse, which was perhaps more pedestrian, but had a distinctive mass appeal. Drawing on the papers of prominent politicians and the editorials of local party newspapers in Alabama and Illinois, I argue that incipient party elites used the language of wartime discipline to recruit national-level leaders, local operatives, and voters to the new form of elective politics. Martial discourse was therefore integral to the larger discourse of party, which ultimately helped to overcome the inherited antipartyism of the early Republic.

Why The New Deal Still Matters: Public Preferences, Elite Context, and American Mass Party Change, 1974–2006

This paper develops a model that relates changes in the macro‐political context to changes in the nature of individual‐level party identification, then uses this model to explain transformations in the size and issue bases of American mass party coalitions over the past 30 years. Elite party polarization over the past three decades has altered the relative importance that individuals attach to various factors when thinking about party identification, increasing the relevance of policy preferences – primarily on the scope‐of‐government dimension of conflict that has divided parties since at least the New Deal era – and decreasing the relevance of socialization and certain types of group identification. These effects, in turn, have led to changes in the size and scope of mass party coalitions, as citizens have become more likely to identify with the party that most closely represents their views on scope‐of‐government matters. Over the past 30 years, people with conservative scope‐of‐government preferences have become increasingly likely to identify with the Republican Party. Those with liberal scope‐of‐government preferences were, and remain, reliably Democratic. The substantive implication is that even amidst the long‐recognized decay of the “New Deal Coalition”, the American party system is defined more by the public’s preferences on traditional New Deal matters than at any time in recent history.

Reassessing the Communist Takeover in Romania

This article analyzes the communist takeover in Romania as the successful outcome of a long-term policy aiming to make the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) a national force. Such an attempt deserves a new analytical explanation of the highly controversial notions of institutional continuity and of “nationalization” of its membership. While mainstream explanations still focus on factors of change motivated by external (Soviet) pressure and stress that violence, coercion, and intimidation have been main instruments used by the Communist Party to implement its goals, the author argues that a reevaluation of the real extent of popular support is needed. PCR became a national mass party immediately after the coup d’état of 23 August 1944. At that time a marginal political force, traditionally ruled by non-Romanian elements and devoted to the strictest internationalism, turned national without falling into discrimination against minority groups, with the exception of the Germans. In multiethnic Transylvania the ethnic power balance consciously created by PCR with Soviet assistance helped the party to strengthen its political legitimacy among different national and social groups. Unlike the Romanian historical parties and the Hungarian nationalists, the PCR and the Petru Groza—led coalition government behaved as a transnational body and pursued integrative policies. In the troubled context of postwar reconstruction, this call for cooperation and peaceful ethnic coexistence distinguished the PCR and its allies from the opposition parties and significantly contributed to make early communist rule more acceptable to large masses of Romanians and non-Romanians, as well.

Nacionales y gremialistas: El “parto” de la nueva derecha política chilena, 1964 – 1973

Nacionales y gremialistas: El “parto” de la nueva derecha política chilena, 1964 – 1973

Har den interna demokratin i politiska partier försämrats över tid?

Has intra-party democracy deteriorated over time?A widely held view in contemporary party research is that intra-party democracy, especially in traditional mass parties, has deteriorated in the age of the cartel party. This common assessment, however, relies on insufficient empirical evidence, and is scrutinized in the article. The notion of a gradual progress towards the cartel party implicitly shares common characteristics with the classic theory of Michels. In order to investigate the actual fate of intra-party democracy, central aspects of Michels theory are explored over time in a critical case, namely the Swedish SAP. If intra-party democracy is declining, this tendency should be most likely to be observed in this case. Two internal decision-making processes, surrounding two major pension reforms – one expansion in the 1950’s and one retrenchment in the 1990’s – are compared based on criteria deducted from Michels. Instead of finding a decline in intraparty democracy, the results conclusively demonstrate major improvements.