Ruling the Void by Mair Peter

Author:Mair, Peter. [Mair, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78168-234-0
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

FROM CIVIL SOCIETY TO THE STATE: THE LOCATION OF PARTIES

Although there is some dispute among observers about how the recent transformation of parties may best be understood, and particularly the further develoment from the catch-all party to the cartel party (Katz and Mair, 1995), there is consensus about the two broadly defined underlying processes at work here.5 First, party organizations, however defined, are now less well rooted within the wider society; and second, they are also now more strongly oriented towards government and the state. Thus, if we conceive of parties as standing somewhere between society and the state – the most obvious approach to understanding their role and location within a democratic polity – then we can suggest that they have shifted along the continuum from one to the other, moving from a position in which they were primarily defined as social actors – as in the classic mass party model – to one where they might now be reasonably defined as state actors.

Evidence of the erosion of the parties’ social roots is relatively easily adduced, and incorporates most of the trends already discussed. Electoral identification with political parties is now almost universally in decline, and the sense of attachment to party has been substantially eroded. Levels of party membership are now markedly lower than was the case even twenty years ago, and other evidence suggests that those members who remain within the parties tend to be less active and engaged. At the same time, the former privileges of membership have also tended to disappear, in that considerations of electoral success are now encouraging party leaders to look beyond their shrinking memberships to take their cues – and sometimes even their candidates – from the electorate at large. The voice of the ordinary voter is seen to be at least as relevant to the party organization as that of the active party member, and the views of focus groups often count more than those of conference delegates.

A tendency to dissipation and fragmentation also marks the broader organizational environment within which the classic mass parties used to nest. As workers’ parties, or as religious parties, the mass organizations in Europe rarely stood on their own, but constituted just the core element within a wider and more complex organizational network of trade unions, churches and so on. Beyond the socialist and religious parties, additional networks of farming groups, business associations and even social clubs combined with political organizations to create a generalized pattern of social and political segmentation that helped to root the parties in the society and to stabilize and distinguish their electorates. Over at least the past thirty years, however, these broader networks have been breaking up. In part, this is because of a weakening of the sister organizations themselves, with churches, trade unions and other traditional forms of association losing both members and strength of engagement. With the increasingly individualization of society, traditional collective identities and organizational affiliations count for less, including those that once formed part of party-centred networks.

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