Species Of Political Parties PDF

PA RT Y P O L I T I C S V O L 9. N o. 2 pp. 167–199 Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications London Thousand Oaks New Delhi SPECIES OF POLITICAL PARTIES A New Typology Richard Gunther and L...

PA RT Y P O L I T I C S V O L 9. N o. 2 pp. 167–199 Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications London Thousand Oaks New Delhi SPECIES OF POLITICAL PARTIES A New Typology Richard Gunther and Larry Diamond ABSTRACT While the literature already includes a large number of party typologies, they are increasingly incapable of capturing the great diversity of party types that have emerged worldwide in recent decades, largely because most typologies were based upon West European parties as they existed in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Some new party types have been advanced, but in an ad hoc manner and on the basis of widely varying and often inconsistent criteria. This article is an effort to set many of the commonly used conceptions of parties into a coherent framework, and to delineate new party types whenever the existing models are incapable of capturing important aspects of contemporary parties. We classify each of 15 ‘species’ of party into its proper ‘genus’ on the basis of three criteria: (1) the nature of the party’s organization (thick/thin, elite-based or mass-based, etc.); (2) the programmatic orien- tation of the party (ideological, particularistic-clientele-oriented, etc.); and (3) tolerant and pluralistic (or democratic) versus proto-hegemonic (or anti-system). While this typology lacks parsimony, we believe that it captures more accurately the diversity of the parties as they exist in the contemporary democratic world, and is more conducive to hypothesis- testing and theory-building than others. KEY WORDS
party organization
party programmes
party systems
party types For nearly a century, political scientists have developed typologies and models of political parties in an effort to capture the essential features of the partisan organizations that were the objects of their analysis. The end result is that the literature today is rich with various categories of party types, some of which have acquired the status of ‘classics’ and have been used by scholars for decades (e.g. Duverger, 1954; Kirchheimer, 1966; Neumann, 1956). We believe, however, that the existing models of political parties do not adequately capture the full range of variation in party types found in 1354-0688(200303)9:2;167–199;030836  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) the world today, and that the various typologies of parties, based on a wide variety of definitional criteria, have not been conducive to cumulative theory- building. This article, therefore, is an attempt to re-evaluate the prevailing typologies of political parties, retaining widely used concepts and terminol- ogy wherever possible, consolidating and clarifying party models in some cases, and defining new party types in others. This is for several reasons. First, nearly all of the existing typologies of political parties were derived from studies of West European parties over the past century and a half. Accordingly, some of their distinguishing features are products of that particular temporal and geographical context. Parties that have emerged more recently, as well as those functioning in other parts of the world, have been substantially affected by greatly different social and technological environments. This is certainly true of parties in developing countries whose populations exhibit considerable ethnic, religious and/or linguistic diversity, upon which competitive parties have most commonly been based. It is even true of the United States, whose two highly decentralized parties fit uneasily with most existing party typologies (see Beck, 1997). Similarly, many of the parties that first emerged in the late twentieth century have prominent features that cannot be captured using classic party typologies developed a century earlier. In this later period of party develop- ment, television (which did not exist at the time the classic party typologies were formulated) had unequivocally become the most important medium of political communication between candidates and voters in nearly all modern democracies (see Gunther and Mughan, 2000). This medium systematically privileges the personalities of party leaders over presentation of party pro- grammes or ideology, at the same time as it greatly reduces the utility of mass membership as a vehicle for electoral mobilization. Also in the late twentieth century, public opinion polling and ‘focus groups’ have been increasingly employed, facilitating the crafting of ad hoc electoral appeals, at the expense of long-standing ideological principles, programmatic com- mitments and constituency interests. Finally, fundamental features of mass culture and social structure had also changed profoundly by the late twen- tieth century: extreme economic inequality and the high political salience of the class cleavage had declined in many countries, while new political con- flicts growing out of ‘post-materialist’ values had begun to affect partisan politics. In the absence of an expanded and updated typology of parties, the small number of party models that make up the most commonly used typologies has often led to an excessive ‘concept stretching’. Inappropriate labels have been applied to newly emerging parties whose characteristics depart markedly from those which went into the original definition of the party model. In effect, this represents an effort to cram square pegs into round holes. Both empirical studies and theory-building can be weakened by unwarranted assumptions of commonalities (if not uniformity) among parties that are, in fact, quite varied, and by the inappropriate application 168  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S of labels to parties whose organizational, ideological or strategic character- istics differ significantly from the original prototype. The term ‘catch-all’, for example, has been most frequently subjected to this kind of abuse (see Puhle, 2002), given its de facto status as a residual category that seems to be more flexible and adaptable to contemporary circumstances than the earlier classic party models. Thus, while we acknowledge the many valuable contributions of empirical studies of parties that have been based upon the traditional West European party models, we believe that the study of parties in other world regions, as well as efforts to better capture the dynamics of ‘the new campaign politics’ of recent decades (see Pasquino, 2001), would be greatly enhanced by a reassessment and broadening of these party models. A second problem with the existing typologies is that, in the aggregate, they have been based on a wide variety of criteria, and little or no effort has been invested in an attempt to make them more consistent and compatible with one another. These inconsistencies, as well as the lack of precision in defining certain types of parties, have hindered the capacity of research in this area to result in cumulative theory-building. Some typologies are based upon functionalist criteria, differentiating among parties on the basis of an organizational raison d’être or some specific goal that they pursue. Sigmund Neumann (1956), for example, distinguishes between ‘parties of individual representation’ (which articulate the demands of specific social groups) and ‘parties of social integration’ (which have well-developed organizations and provide a wide variety of services to members, encapsulating them within a partisan community, in exchange for which they count on financial contri- butions and volunteered services of members during election campaigns). In his typology, ‘parties of total integration’ have more ambitious goals of seizing power and radically transforming societies, demanding the full commitment and unquestioning obedience of members. Herbert Kitschelt (1989) differentiates parties that emphasize the ‘logic of electoral com- petition’ from those (such as the ‘left-libertarian’ type that he introduces) that place much greater stress on the ‘logic of constituency representation’. Wolinetz (2002) distinguishes among ‘vote-seeking’, ‘policy-seeking’ and ‘office-seeking’ parties. And Katz and Mair (1995) implicitly advance a functionalist logic in setting forth the model of the ‘cartel party’, in which public financing of parties and the expanded role of the state induce party leaders to restrain competition and seek primarily to perpetuate themselves in power to avail themselves of these new resources. Other classification schemes are organizational, distinguishing between parties that have thin organizational structures and those that have devel- oped large infrastructures and complex networks of collaborative relation- ships with other secondary organizations. The classic statement of this kind was by Maurice Duverger, who advanced a two-and-one-half category scheme separating ‘cadre’ parties (most commonly led by individuals with high socio-economic status) from ‘mass’ parties (which mobilize broad 169  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) segments of the electorate through the development of a large and complex organization), with the ‘devotee’ party alluded to but dismissed as ‘too vague to constitute a separate category’.1 Herbert Kitschelt (1994) posits a four-part classification system distinguishing among ‘centralist clubs’, ‘Leninist cadre’ parties, ‘decentralized clubs’ and ‘decentralized mass’ parties. And Angelo Panebianco (1988), in the most elaborate articulation of an organizational typology, contrasts ‘mass-bureaucratic’ parties with ‘electoral-professional’ parties. Some scholars of party politics implicitly or explicitly base their work on the notion that parties are the products of (and ought to represent the inter- ests of) various social groups. This sociological orientation characterizes the analyses of parties set forth by Samuel Eldersveld (1964) and Robert Michels (1915), as Panebianco (1988: 3) points out. Finally, there are some prominent scholars who indiscriminately mix all three of these sets of criteria, such as Otto Kirchheimer (1966), who posits four party models: bourgeois parties of individual representation; class-mass parties; denomi- national mass parties; and catch-all people’s parties. We do not object to the notion that several different criteria may be employed to differentiate one type of party from another. Indeed, as is apparent below, we use three criteria as the basis of our own integrative schema. However, we do believe that systematic hypothesis-testing and cumulative theory-building have been hindered by the tendency of pro- ponents of the various typologies to ‘talk past’ one another without systematically assessing the overlap or distinctiveness, not to mention the relative merits, of the various classification schema.2 This lack of concep- tual and terminological consistency stands in sharp contrast to some other subfields of political science, such as the closely related literature on party systems, within which a clear consensus has emerged concerning the meaning (and even specific operational indicators) of such core concepts as ‘fragmentation’, ‘volatility’ and ‘disproportionality’. Some (but by no means all) of these typologies, moreover, have been based on the selection of just one criterion as the basis of a typology (be it organiz- ational structure, principal organizational objective or social basis of representation). This has narrowed the focus of analysis excessively, while much variation within each party type is not systematically analysed. What is gained in terms of parsimony is lost in terms of the ability to capture theoretically significant variation among real-world parties. In addition, many of these studies are excessively deductive, positing at the outset that one particular criterion is of paramount importance without sustaining that assertion through a careful assessment of relevant evidence. As a result, some such studies fall victim to reductionist argumentation, in which several structural or behavioural characteristics of parties are assumed to have been caused by one privileged variable. Duverger (1954), for example, sets forth an organization-based typology, but also acknowledges the great import- ance of social class-linking cadre parties with the middle and upper strata, 170  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S and the working class with mass-based parties. He explains this relationship by contending that these organizational forms are dictated by varying levels of resources and constraints faced by party-builders in their efforts to secure funding necessary to support their activities. We believe (with Koole, 1996) that it is premature to attempt to build elaborate theories on the basis of what may be inadequate typologies. A more open and ultimately productive line of empirical analysis should begin with a more theoretically modest but empirically more comprehensive and accurate set of party types that are more truly reflective of real-world vari- ations among parties. This is particularly necessary in an effort to include countries outside of Western Europe within a preliminary comparative analysis. Thus, we shall increase the number of party types, building whenever possible on models and terminology previously advanced by other scholars, while at the same time imposing some semblance of order on some of the criteria most commonly used as the basis of party typologies. Specific- ally, we try to avoid the common temptation to introduce a new party type on ad hoc grounds, based simply on a conclusion that a particular case cannot be adequately explained using the existing typologies. Our typology of parties is based upon three criteria. The first of these involves the nature of the formal organization of the party. Some parties are organizationally thin, while others develop large mass-membership bases with allied or ancillary institutions engaged in distinct but related spheres of social life; some rely on particularistic networks of personal interaction or exchange, while others are open and universalistic in member- ship and appeal; and some rely heavily, if not exclusively, on modern tech- niques of mass communication and ignore the development of primary, face-to-face channels of communication or secondary associations. The second classificatory criterion involves the nature of the party’s program- matic commitments. Accordingly, some parties derive programmatic stands from well-articulated ideologies rooted in political philosophies, religious beliefs or nationalistic sentiments; others are either pragmatic or have no well-defined ideological or programmatic commitments; still others are committed to advance the interests of a particular ethnic, religious or socio- economic group, or geographically defined constituency, in contrast to those that are heterogeneous if not promiscuously eclectic in their electoral appeals to groups in society. The third criterion involves the strategy and behavioural norms of the party, specifically, whether the party is tolerant and pluralistic or proto-hegemonic in its objectives and behavioural style: some parties are fully committed to democratic rules-of-the-game, are tolerant and respectful towards their opponents, and are pluralistic in their views of polity and society; others are semi-loyal to democratic norms and institutions, or are explicitly anti-system, favouring the replacement of the existing pluralistic democracy with a regime that would be more uniformly committed to the achievement of their programmatic objectives. In our more detailed discussion of parties that are characteristic of each 171  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) party model, we also deal with two other dimensions of party life that are significant and have been extensively dealt with in the existing literature on parties. One of these is sociological, i.e. the nature of the clientele towards which the party pitches its appeals, and whose interests it purports to defend or advance. The second involves the internal dynamics of party decision- making, particularly the nature and degree of prominence of the party’s leader, ranging from a dominant charismatic figure, at one extreme, to more collective forms of party leadership, at the other. We hypothesize that party types (defined by the organizational, programmatic and strategic criteria listed above) are often associated with particular social clienteles and/or leadership patterns, but not in a deterministic manner, and certainly not to the extent that these sociological and leadership dimensions are built into the definition of the party type. It is important to note that the models of political parties that we describe below are ideal types, in the strictest Weberian sense of that term. As such, they are heuristically useful insofar as they give easily understandable labels that will help the reader more easily comprehend otherwise complex, multi- dimensional concepts. Moreover, they facilitate analysis insofar as they serve as baselines for comparisons involving real-world cases, or as extreme end- points of evolutionary processes that might never be fully attained. As with all ideal types, however, one should not expect that real-world political parties fully conform to all of the criteria that define each party model; simi- larly, some parties may include elements of more than one ideal type. Perhaps most importantly, individual parties may evolve over time, such that they may have most closely approximated one party type in an earlier period, but shift in the direction of a different type later on. Types of Political Parties On the basis of these three criteria, we identify 15 different ‘species’ of party that we believe better capture the basic essence of political parties around the world, and during various historical eras, than do most of the estab- lished party typologies. We also recognize, however, a negative trade-off that is implicit in this approach: the obvious lack of parsimony may confuse the reader or make it difficult to appreciate the most crucial differences among these numerous party types. We therefore privilege one of our three classi- ficatory dimensions – the type of party organization. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we regard the type of party organization as defining as a genus which, in turn, encompasses several species of political party. These genera are: elite-based parties, mass-based parties, ethnicity-based parties, elec- toralist parties and movement parties. These can be seen in Figure 1, which displays these party types in a two-dimensional array with ‘organizationally thin’ parties towards the left and ‘organizationally thick’ parties towards the right side of the diagram, and with party types that emerged in earlier 172  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S YEAR THIN THICK 1850 Elite-based Tradit. Local Mass-based Notable Socialism Clientelistic Class-mass Nationalism Religion Pluralist- Ethnicity-based Nationalist Denominational Leninist Congress Ultranationalist Ethnic Electoralist Catch-all Programmatic Personalistic Movement/Parties Fundamentalist Left-Libertarian Post-industrial Extreme-Right 2000 Figure 1. Extent of organization historical periods towards the top of the diagram, and more recent entrants on the scene appearing towards the bottom. The correlation between the degree of organizational thinness/thickness of the party and the temporal dimension is not accidental. A political party comes into existence within a specific social and technological context that may evolve over time, and this ‘founding context’ can leave a lasting imprint on the basic nature of the party’s organization for decades to come. Parties are channels of intermediation between political elites and voters, and a particular organizational type ability to mobilize voters effectively is highly contingent upon that context. As we argue, in the nineteenth century in most Western (especially Southern) European countries and well into the twenti- eth century in most Latin American countries, ‘politically unmobilized’ peasants, many of whom were illiterate and lived in isolated rural areas, made up a sizeable segment of the electorate. Within these sectors of society, traditional elites, or ‘local notables’, exercised considerable influence. Hence, organizationally thin elite-based parties emerged. A few decades later, urbanization, industrialization, the political mobilization of the working class and the expansion of suffrage required the development of different kinds of parties. The electoral mobilization of these newly enfran- chised voters was most effectively performed by parties with large mass- membership bases and an extensive organizational infrastructure. By the 173  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) final four decades of the twentieth century, however, the advent of television had made it possible for political elites to communicate with voters directly, and massive party organizations appeared to be relatively less effective as the principal vehicle for electoral mobilization. At the same time, seculariz- ation and decreases in trade-union membership in several countries shrank many of the allied secondary associations upon which the classic mass-based party had so heavily relied. In short, one could advance an argument that the social/technological context within which parties function has a direct bearing on the effectiveness of different types of partisan organizations, and the dominant features of this context will systematically evolve over time. This helps to explain both the emergence of the mass-based party and the decline of elite-based parties in the early twentieth century, as well as the subsequent displacement of mass-based parties by organizationally thinner parties as the dominant organizational type towards the end of that century. It also fits well with empirical studies showing that membership in political parties has been declining in most established democracies in recent years (see Mair and van Biezen, 2001). This general relationship between the historical dimension and the appearance of different types of party organization does not imply, however, that we are asserting or implying that any one type of party was, is, or will be dominant within any particular period of time. Instead, we are impressed with the persistence and diversity of party types that exist today, even when many of the social or cultural circumstances that originally gave birth to them have long since disappeared. Neither do we assert that one party type is likely to follow a predictable trajectory, evolving into another type. This is for two reasons. First, once a party has become institutionalized in accord with a particular organizational type, the basic nature of the party’s organiz- ational structure may be ‘frozen’ and therefore become resistant to pressures for change. Thus, parties founded when local notables were politically powerful (such as the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party) may remain under the domination of elite factions well past the time when a majority of voters ceased to be deferential to notable elites; similarly, parties may retain sizeable mass-membership bases and institutionalized ties to secondary associations even after the party has adopted a predominantly catch-all elec- toral strategy and internal decision-making style (e.g. the German SPD under Gerhard Schröder or British Labour under Tony Blair). Secondly, while the social/technological context may evolve systematically over time (accounting for general trends in recent decades from organizational thick- ness to parties in which less well-developed organizational bases have been observed), the relationship between social or technological change and the programmatic or strategic motivations of party leaders is much more tenuous or non-existent. We shall present a more extensive discussion of this indeterminacy at the end of this article. With regard to the individual species that make up these broader genera, it should be noted that, whenever possible, the names we have chosen for 174  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S each party type were derived from the existing literature: this is true of Kirchheimer’s Class-mass, Denominational and Catch-all parties, as well as Kitschelt’s Left-libertarian, Ignazi’s Post-industrial Extreme-right move- ment/parties and the Programmatic party of Wolinetz. In other instances, we either gave a name to a party type that was implicit in a large body of literature (such as the Traditional Local Notable and Clientelistic parties), or we renamed and more fully developed the party model, such as the Leninist party (which Duverger referred to as the ‘devotee’ party), the Ethnic party (the ‘particularistic sociocultural party’, in Kitschelt’s terminology), and the Personalistic party (called the ‘non-partisan party’ by Ignazi). In one prominent case, we found that a commonly used party-type label really referred to a particular genus of party: Panebianco’s ‘electoral-professional party’ roughly corresponds to our genus of Electoralist parties, within which we delineate three more specific ‘species’ or party types. Finally, there were some party labels that simply did not fit within this typological scheme (such as the cartel party3), and there were some types of party (the Religious Fundamentalist, Ethnicity-based and Nationalist parties) for which no clear conceptual definition had previously appeared in the literature. Elite Parties ‘Elite-based’ parties are those whose principal organizational structures are minimal and based upon established elites and related interpersonal networks within a specific geographic area. Deference to the authority of these elites is a feature shared by the two species of parties that fall within this ‘genus’. Whatever national-level party structure exists is based upon an alliance among locally based elites. In programmatic terms, these parties are not ideological. At the lowest level within the party (i.e. the linkage between voters and the local candidate) the principal electoral commitment involves the distribution of particularistic benefits to residents of a geographically defined constituency or to ‘clients’ at the bottom of a patron–client hier- archy. Such parties do not have ambitions of hegemony, and are tolerant and collaborative towards one another within a parliamentary (but not necessarily democratic) regime.4 Historically (see Chambers and Burnham, 1967; Daalder, 2001; Katz and Mair, 2002; LaPalombara and Weiner, 1966), the first party type to emerge was what we call the traditional local notable party. This early-to-mid- nineteenth century development emerged at a time of sharply limited suffrage in semi-democratic regimes. Given that the right to vote and hold office was restricted in most of these countries to males owning substantial property, this competitive game was limited to the upper socio-economic strata. And given that election to office required appeals to a small number of enfranchised voters, campaigns did not require an extensive organiz- ational effort. Local notables could often count on their traditionally-based prestige or personal relationships with their few and socially homogeneous 175  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) constituents to secure office. Central party bureaucracies did not exist, and national-level ‘party’ organizations consisted of relatively loose alliances or cliques linking elected members of parliament on the basis of shared inter- ests or bonds of mutual respect. The parliamentary factions that dominated the British House of Commons in the first half of the nineteenth century, French conservative parties in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and several conservative parties in Brazil today are examples of this variety of elite party. Expansion of suffrage and socio-economic moderniz- ation (which entailed the political mobilization of formerly excluded sectors of society) progressively limited the electoral effectiveness of such poorly institutionalized and resource-poor parties, while urbanization made the predominantly rural traditional notables increasingly irrelevant to most voters. The clientelistic party began to emerge just as the traditional local notable party was subjected to challenges from newly enfranchised segments of the electorate within societies undergoing industrialization and urbanization.5 Indeed, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the emergence of the clientelis- tic party was a direct response by local elites to the challenges posed by the political mobilization of formerly ‘subject’ populations: as traditional def- erence to local elites began to break down, electoral mobilization relied increasingly on an exchange of favours or overt coercion. The clientelistic party, as we shall define it, is a confederation of notables (either traditional or of the newly emerging liberal-professional or economic elite), each with his own geographically, functionally or personalistically based support, organized internally as particularistic factions. Such a party typically has a weak organization and places little or no stress on programme or ideology. Its principal function is to coordinate the individual campaign efforts of notables, usually indirectly or loosely, for the purpose of securing power at the national level. Their campaign activities, in turn, are based on hierar- chical chains of interpersonal relationships of a quasi-feudal variety, in which relatively durable patterns of loyalty are linked with the exchange of services and obligations. While all clientelistic parties are characterized by particularistic factional organization, in their heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies – in Southern Europe (a classic description of which is Carr, 1966, chapter 9), Latin America (see, for example, Hagopian, 1996) and North American big-city machines and southern rural politics (Beck, 1997, 73–7; Gosnell, 1939; Key, 1949) – the exchange of personalistic favours also served as a principal tool for electoral mobilization at the mass level. Such relationships are most common in rural, premodern societies: under con- ditions of geographical isolation from a dominant centre of government, coupled with low levels of functional literacy and poorly developed trans- portation and communications media, a localized patron–client relationship can be mutually beneficial to both the patron and the client.6 In the United States, this variety of politics focused on immigrant populations that lacked 176  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S political resources, and even some basic skills (such as command of the English language) or personal connections necessary to thrive economically (see Erie, 1988). As socio-economic modernization proceeds – as shrinking rural populations become increasingly literate, exposed to mass communi- cations media, and ‘mobilized’ politically (or as immigrant populations in the United States learned English, became educated and assimilated into American society) – the utility of the patron to the citizen declines, and the patron’s attempts to influence voting decisions are increasingly resisted. Under these circumstances, more coercive forms of patron–client exchanges tended to emerge, often involving the threat to withhold economic benefits from the client unless his/her political support is pledged, or overt vote- buying displaces the exchange of favours. Over the long run, however, socio- economic modernization and the increasing ‘cognitive mobilization’ of the mass public greatly reduce the utility of clientelism as a vehicle for electoral mobilization (see Huntington and Nelson, 1976: 7–10 and 125–30). Once institutionalized and embedded within the structure of political parties, however, these patron–client relationships may take on a life of their own, independent of the socio-economic conditions that had given rise to them originally. In both Italy and Japan, whose post-war party systems were established in less modernized societies (particularly in the south of Italy and rural parts of Japan), clientelism was embedded into the very structure of the dominant parties (the Christian Democratic Party and the Liberal Demo- cratic Party, respectively). Once established, these factional networks became the principal bases of elite recruitment within the governing parties of both party systems, and were perpetuated well beyond the time when the socio-economic conditions that had given birth to them had largely dis- appeared. While these organizations survived for decades, it is interesting to note that the clientelistic exchanges on which they were based may contain the seeds of their own eventual destruction. Particularism and the distri- bution of rewards based upon faction membership easily evolve into overt corruption. Not surprisingly, clientelistic parties in both of these systems ultimately suffered serious – and in the case of the Italian parties, fatal – electoral setbacks as part of a popular reaction against corruption scandals. (The same has happened more recently in Thailand and the Philippines, although some parties in each of these countries retain features of the clien- telistic model.) Since social change had made these kinds of exchanges increasingly repugnant to ever larger numbers of voters, when high-level scandals were exposed, a series of defections from the once dominant governing parties drastically undermined their organizational unity and strength. Mass-based Parties The second genus of party has deep roots in the literature, as well as in the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of Europe. The quintessential 177  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) ‘externally created party’, the mass-based party, emerged as a manifestation of the political mobilization of the working class in many European polities.7 Organizationally, it is characterized by a large base of dues-paying members who remain active in party affairs even during periods between elections. In an effort to disseminate the party’s ideology and establish an active membership base, the party seeks to penetrate into a number of spheres of social life. Affiliated trade union, religious and other social organizations serve not only as political allies (helping to mobilize support- ers at election time), but for the projection of the programmatic objectives of the party from the electoral-parliamentary arena into a variety of spheres of social life. Extensive arrays of supportive organizations are established, including party newspapers and recreational clubs, and networks of local party branches are established nationwide. These organizational networks not only serve as a framework for mobilization at election time, but also provide side benefits for party members, such as opportunities for frater- nization and recreation (see Barnes, 1967). Two types of distinctions further divide this genus into six different species of party. The first involves the basic thrust of the party’s program- matic commitments, ideology, and/or unifying belief system. Most commonly, these have involved varying types of commitment to (1) social- ism, (2) nationalism or (3) religion. The second dimension involves the extent to which each of these is either tolerant and pluralistic, on the one hand, or is committed to securing a hegemonic position within the political system and imposing its radical programmatic commitments on society. Plu- ralist parties assume that they will always be functioning within a demo- cratic system; they therefore accept its institutions and rules of the game. Proto-hegemonic parties, in contrast, strive over the long term towards the replacement of the existing pluralist society and democratic system with one that is better suited for the achievement of their radical transformative objectives. Accordingly, they accept existing institutions and rules only insofar as they are expedient and cannot be replaced over the short run, and their behaviour is, at best, semi-loyal (see Linz, 1978: 28–45). Pluralist mass-based parties seek to win elections as the principal avenue towards achieving their programmatic objectives, and their vote-mobiliza- tional strategy relies heavily on the development and activation of a mass- membership base. Party militants perform a variety of tasks, ranging from proselytizing to distribution of printed propaganda to escorting voters to the polls. The party’s allied secondary organizations (trade unions, religious groups and/or fraternal organizations) urge their members to support the party, and if the party has succeeded in establishing its own communications media, its newspaper and/or radio and television broadcasts are flooded with partisan messages. Recruitment of militants to the party is open, although some re-socialization of new party members is required. Proto-hegemonic mass-based parties, by contrast, place greater emphasis on discipline, constant active commitment and loyalty on the part of party 178  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S members for the conduct of political conflict in both electoral and extra- parliamentary arenas. Thus, recruitment of members is highly selective, indoctrination is intensive, and acceptance of the ideology and short-term party line is demanded of all members. In some instances (particularly when the proto-hegemonic party exists clandestinely), a secret, conspiratorial cell structure is adopted, in contrast to the open ‘branch’ organization that char- acterizes pluralist mass-based parties. In the aggregate, the distinction between pluralist and proto-hegemonic mass-based parties comes close to Duverger’s differentiation between branch-based mass parties and cell-based ‘devotee’ parties (1954: 63–71), as well as Neumann’s (1956) separation of parties of ‘social integration’ from parties of ‘total integration’. Parties with socialist ideological commitments have taken the form of either democratic socialist (or social-democratic) ‘class-mass’ parties,8 or have adopted the proto-hegemonic stance of the ‘Leninist’ party. In the typical class-mass party (to use Kirchheimer’s terminology), the centre of power and authority in the party is located in the executive com- mittee of its secretariat, although formally the ultimate source of legitimate authority is the full party congress. In addition, the parliamentary leader- ship of the party occasionally challenges the party secretariat for control of the programmatic agenda and the nomination of candidates. Invariably, the open, tolerant stance of these parties has made possible considerable intra- party conflict, particularly between pragmatists whose primary concern is electoral victory and ideologues who place much higher value on ‘con- stituency representation’ and ideological consistency with a more orthodox reading of the party’s ideology (see Michels, 1915). In some cases, this may give rise to a split of the party into two separate organizations (such as the former Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano and Partito Socialista Italiano of Italy’s ‘first republic’). Much more commonly, this has culminated in the gradual conversion of more maximalist socialist parties into more moderate and pragmatic parties. Class-mass parties establish bases within their class constituency through groups organized both geographically (the local ‘branch’) and functionally (trade unions). While they seek to proselytize prospective members or voters, indoctrination and the demand for ideological conformity are minimal. While social integration through the activities of party and trade union allies is a significant objective, the party is primarily concerned with winning elections and taking part in the formation of governments. Recruit- ment of members is quite open, and the larger the party’s mass base, the better, given the party’s primary concern with securing electoral majorities and its traditional reliance on electoral mobilization through the activities of members. The social-democratic parties of Germany, Sweden and Chile are good examples of this party type. Leninist parties (as we define them, based on a class ideology and proto- hegemonic) have as their objective the overthrow of the existing political system and the implementation of revolutionary change in society. Given 179  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) that their revolutionary goals are likely to be vigorously opposed if not repressed by their opponents, the party adopts a closed structure based on the semi-secret cell (rather than the open branch, which characterizes plu- ralist class-mass parties). Membership is highly selective, and the party demands strict loyalty and obedience on the part of members. Ideological indoctrination of party members is intense and uncompromising, and the party penetrates into key sectors of society (especially trade unions and the intellectual middle class in Western countries, and the peasantry in Asia) in an effort to secure tactical allies over the short term and converts over the long term. Decision-making within the party is highly centralized and authoritarian, even if ‘democratic centralism’ often allows for open debate prior to the taking of an official stand. The party sees itself as the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat, and even though the party portrays itself as representing the working class, it performs an explicitly directive and top-down role of leading the class that it represents and defining its interests. While the initial stand of the prototypical Leninist parties – those belonging to the Comintern – was to reject ‘bourgeois’ representative institutions and parliaments, most communist parties participated as anti-system or semi-loyal contenders in electoral politics in Western democracies. The ultimate objective of the party is the seizure of power, by force if necessary. In Western democracies, parties that were originally Leninist have either undergone gradual transformations – generally in the direction of becoming pluralist class-mass parties – or schisms, separating moderate, democratic parties (such as the Italian Partito Democratico della Sinistra, now Democratici della Sinistra) from more orthodox rump parties (such as Rifondazione Comunista). If the party succeeds in coming to power, as it did in Central and Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, it modifies its self-defined role and its behaviour towards other social and political groups. It sees itself as nothing less than the ‘organized expression of the will of society’. In the former Soviet Union, ‘it is the expression “of the interests of the entire nation;” for the Chinese it represents “the interests of the people” ’ (Schurmann, 1966: 100). As such, it establishes hegemonic control over the political and economic system, abolishing or taking over established secondary organizations, and using virtually all organized social groups as arenas for the social integration of individuals into the new society which it hopes to create. The party will direct the activities of the state and preside over the recruitment of govern- ing elites. While the classic Leninist parties were those belonging to the Comintern and embracing Lenin’s 21 Points (which differentiated communist parties from other Marxist parties), some non-communist parties (such as the Kuomintang prior to Taiwan’s democratization in the late 1980s and 1990s) conformed to many of these organizational and operational characteristics.9 Pluralist nationalist parties, such as the Basque Partido Nacionalista Vasco and, until the late 1990s, the Taiwanese Democratic Progressive Party, have taken on a variety of forms. Most of these involve mass-membership 180  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S bases, extensive party organizations and collaboration with ancillary secondary groups usually including cultural organizations and sometimes trade unions. The electoral clientele of these parties will be those individuals who subjectively define themselves as belonging to a distinct national group. While most commonly these national identities will revolve around some objective social characteristic (especially involving language and culture), the boundaries of the electoral clientele will be quite malleable. Indeed, one of the key functions of nationalist parties is not only to convince citizens to cast ballots for the party, but also to use the party’s election campaign and its affiliated secondary organizations to foster and intensify their identifi- cation with the national group and its aspirations. Moreover, those aspir- ations, by definition, involve a demand for some level of territorial self-governance, ranging from autonomy within a multinational state to outright independence or the redrawing of international boundaries in response to an irredentist claim. Accordingly, even though these parties may be moderate in their policy preferences concerning economic, religious and most other issues on the left–right continuum, they may assume a semi-loyal or anti-system stand regarding issues of territorial governance. Internally, moreover, there will often be tension between those demanding a more militant stance in defence of the group’s nationalist demands and those stressing cooperation with other parties in forming government coalitions and pressing for the enactment of incrementally beneficial legislation. Ultranationalist parties are proto-hegemonic in their aspirations. They advance an ideology that exalts the nation or race above the individual, detests minorities and openly admires the use of force by a strong, quasi- military party often relying upon a uniformed party militia (see, e.g. Orlow 1969 and 1973). In some respects, they may share many organizational and behavioural characteristics with Leninist parties, especially the highly selective recruitment process, intensive indoctrination of members, strict internal discipline, the overriding objective of seizing power through force if necessary and anti-system or semi-loyal participation in parliament. Also like Leninist parties, if they come to power they seek hegemonic domination of polity and society through repression or cooptation of existing second- ary organizations, coupled with a broad penetration into society in an effort to resocialize all persons to actively support the regime. They differ from Leninist parties not only with regard to the content of their ideologies, but also insofar as these ideologies are less precisely stated and subject to reinterpretation by a charismatic national leader.10 In addition, the national leader will be the ultimate source of power and authority, and the party’s bureaucracy will be supportive if not servile. Hitler’s Nazi party and Mussolini’s fascists are good examples of such parties, with the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) under Franjo Tudjman and the Russian National Unity party of Aleksandr Barkashov as more recent manifestations of this party type. The striking frequency with which a charismatic leader domi- nates in this type of party suggests there is something about the 181  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) social/historical circumstances giving rise to ultranationalist and fascist parties, and something about the personalities drawn to such parties (Adorno et al., 1950) that generate intense and submissive devotion to an exceptional, all-powerful leader. A third programmatic basis for mass-based parties is religion. Again, two different variants can be identified. The first is pluralist, democratic and tolerant. While the origins of the denominational mass-party (again, using Kirchheimer’s terminology) can be traced back to the late nineteenth century (see Fogarty, 1957; Kalyvas, 1996), this type of party reached its maximum ascendancy in the aftermath of World War II. Examples of denominational parties include numerous Christian democratic parties in Western Europe that have played important political roles, particularly since World War II (in Italy, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and elsewhere), as well as, more recently, Christian Democracy in Poland (ZChM) and the Christian Democratic Union (KDU) in the Czech Republic. They share many of the organizational characteristics of the mass-based party, including the existence of a large base of dues-paying members, hierarchically structured party organizations linking the national and local levels, party newspapers and broadcasting outlets, allied secondary organizations (generally religious, but, in some instances, trade unions). Nonetheless, they differ in one important respect from parties based on secular ideologies: since the basis of the party’s programmes is a set of religious beliefs that are deter- mined by a combination of tradition and interpretation by clerics and/or a religious institution outside of the party itself, the party is not fully in control of its core ideological precepts whenever they are directly linked to religious values (such as those relating to abortion, divorce, sexual preference or some manifestations of artistic expression). This can lead to intraparty tensions whenever party leaders choose to modify the party’s electoral appeals or programmatic commitments in such a manner as to conflict with those values. The Italian Christian Democratic party, for example, experienced serious internal tensions in dealing with legalization of divorce, which was stoutly opposed by the Catholic church hierarchy. Insofar as religious beliefs may be subject to varying interpretations, considerable heterogeneity may exist within denominational-mass parties that can periodically give rise to such conflicts. The final mass-based party is the proto-hegemonic religious party, or religious fundamentalist party. The principal difference between this and the denominational-mass party is that the fundamentalist party seeks to reorganize state and society around a strict reading of religious doctrinal principles, while denominational-mass parties are pluralist and incremental in their agenda. For fundamentalist parties, there is little or no room for conflicting interpretations of the religious norms and scriptures that serve as the basis of the party’s programme and of laws which it seeks to impose on all of society. The authority of religious leaders to interpret that text and translate it into politically and socially relevant terms is unequivocally 182  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S acknowledged. In this theocratic party model, there is no separation between religion and the state, and religious norms are imposed on all citizens within the polity, irrespective of their own personal religious beliefs. Given the far-reaching objectives of these parties (which may verge on the totalitarian), the organizational development of these parties and the scope of their activities are extensive. Member involvement and identification is substantial and even intense, and ancillary organizations establish a presence at the local level throughout society. Given the religious funda- mentalist nature of these parties and their strict reading of religious texts, authority relations within the party are hierarchical, undemocratic and even absolutist, and members are disciplined and devoted. Religious funda- mentalist parties mobilize support not only by invoking religious doctrine and identity, and by proposing policies derived from those principles, but also through selective incentives; they often perform a wide range of social welfare functions which aid in recruiting and solidifying the loyalty of members. This web of organized activities and services encapsulates members within a distinct subculture. Although these are not class-based parties, they disproportionately attract support from the poor and down- trodden and the marginalized middle class, among whom denunciations of injustice and corruption have a particular resonance. Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front is one example of this kind of organization, with Turkey’s now-banned Welfare Party sharing some of these characteristics. Ethnicity-based Parties Parties based on ethnicity typically lack the extensive and elaborate organiz- ation of mass-based parties. What most distinguishes them, however, are their political and electoral logics. Unlike most mass-based parties, they do not advance a programme (whether incremental or transformative) for all of society. Their goals and strategies are narrower: to promote the interests of a particular ethnic group, or coalition of groups. And unlike nationalist parties, their programmatic objectives do not typically include secession or a high level of decision-making and administrative autonomy from the existing state. Instead, they are content to use existing state structures to channel benefits towards their particularistically defined electoral clientele. The purely ethnic party seeks only to mobilize the votes of its own ethnic group. Classic historical examples are the Northern People’s Congress and the Action Group of Nigeria’s First Republic, and, more recently, South Africa’s Inkatha Freedom Party, the Turkish minority party (DPS, Movement of Rights and Freedoms) in Bulgaria, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania and the (Sikh) Akali Dal in India’s Punjab state. Although it may run candidates in other geographic constituencies, or raise larger national or even ideological issues, these only thinly and half-heartedly mask its true ethnic (or regional) purpose. As Kitschelt (2001) argues, the defining feature of ethnic parties (which he refers to as ‘particularistic 183  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) sociocultural parties’) is that they limit their appeal to a particular sectional constituency, and ‘explicitly seek to draw boundaries’ between ethnic ‘friends’ and ‘foes’. The principal goal of the ethnic party is not any uni- versalistic programme or platform, but rather to secure material, cultural and political benefits (and protections) for the ethnic group in its com- petition with other groups. As such, ethnic parties have an extremely low level of ideological or programmatic commitment and coherence. Neither do they typically have a very developed organizational structure or formal membership base. Lacking any functional interests or ideological agenda, the ethnic party tends to mobilize pre-existing clientelistic relations, and as such its structure and internal authority relations resemble the clientelistic party. Given the fact that ethnic parties mobilize powerfully emotive symbolic issues of identity and even cultural survival, they are prone to be dominated by, and even organized around, a single charismatic leader (such as the NPC’s Ahmadu Bello, the Action Group’s Obafemi Awolowo and Inkatha’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi). The electoral logic of the ethnic party is to harden and mobilize its ethnic base with exclusive and often polarizing appeals to ethnic group opportunity and threat. Unlike virtually all other political parties (including nationalistic parties),11 electoral mobilization is not intended to attract additional sectors of society to support the party (see Horowitz, 1985: 294–7) whose interests are perceived as intrinsically in conflict with those of other ethnic groups. Thus, even more than the religious fundamentalist party, the potential electoral clientele of the party is strictly defined and limited by ethnicity, although within that definitional category cross-class electoral appeals may lead to the adoption of eclectic programmatic objectives. Because ethnic parties are, by definition, unable to expand significantly beyond their ethnic electoral base, they are unable to pursue hegemony unless they attain a demographic majority or quash democracy. Through electoral fraud and rigging of the census, Nigeria’s NPC sought to do both, and thereby to achieve ethnoregional domination during the First Republic. The pursuit of such domination by an ethnic party can lead to violent conflict, and was indeed a contributing factor to the Nigerian civil war. A congress party is a coalition, alliance or federation of ethnic parties or political machines, although it may take the form of a single, unified party structure. Hence, at the local level it may share some organizational features and programmatic commitments with the ethnic party (such as the distri- bution of benefits through a vast array of patron–client networks), but within the national political system it behaves dramatically differently. Its electoral appeal is to national unity and integration rather than division, to ethnic sharing and coexistence rather than domination and threat. Where a consociational system tries to share power and resources among, and assure the mutual security of, each group within a coalition government formed after the election, a congress party constructs the coalitional guarantees in advance, within the broad tent of its party organization. If the tent it builds 184  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S is broad enough, it can become a dominant party, like the archetype of this model, the Congress Party during India’s first two decades of independence; less democratic examples of the congress party are the Kenya African National Union under Jomo Kenyatta and the Barisan Nasional (National Front coalition) of Malaysia. If the coverage of the multi-ethnic tent is incomplete, the congress party may merely be the first among equals, as with the National Party of Nigeria during the Second Republic (1979–83) or Nigeria’s current ruling party, the People’s Democratic Party. In either case, the congress party allocates party posts and government offices, and dis- tributes patronage and other benefits in accord with proportional or other quasi-consociational formulas. Its social base is broad and heterogeneous, and the party’s goal is to make it as inclusive as possible. However, its very breadth renders it vulnerable to fracture along ethnic or regional lines. Electoralist Parties There are three party types in the broader genus of ‘electoralist parties’, the fundamental characteristics of which are similar to those upon which Panebianco (1988) developed his concept of the ‘electoral-professional party’.12 Parties belonging to this genus are organizationally thin, main- taining a relatively skeletal existence (the offices and staffs supporting their parliamentary groups notwithstanding). At election time, however, these parties spring into action to perform what is unequivocally their primary function, the conduct of the campaign. They utilize ‘modern’ campaign techniques (stressing television and the mass-communications media over the mobilization of party members and affiliated organizations), and they rely heavily on professionals who can skilfully carry out such campaigns (Farrell et al., 2000). The personal attractiveness of the party’s candidates is an important criterion for nomination at the expense of other consider- ations, such as length of service to, or formal organizational position within, the party. We resist the temptation to regard electoralist parties as of one type, however, because they differ in some important respects that signifi- cantly affect their behaviour and, in turn, the quality of democracy. Accord- ingly, we set forth three different ideal types of parties that fall within this genus. These three party types all share the organizational characteristics described above, but they differ with regard to our other two defining dimensions: two of them lack strong ideological or programmatic commit- ments, while one does seek to advance a distinct set of programmes; and two of them are decidedly pluralistic, while the third may or may not have hegemonic ambitions. The first of these is the catch-all party.13 This pluralistic and tolerant ideal type is primarily distinguished by the party’s shallow organization, super- ficial and vague ideology, and overwhelmingly electoral orientation, as well as by the prominent leadership and electoral roles of the party’s top-ranked national-level candidates. The overriding (if not sole) purpose of catch-all 185  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) parties is to maximize votes, win elections and govern. To do so, they seek to aggregate as wide a variety of social interests as possible. In societies where the distribution of public opinion (on a left–right continuum) is unimodal and centrist, catch-all parties will seek to maximize votes by positioning themselves toward the centre of the spectrum, appearing moderate in their policy preferences and behaviour. In an effort to expand their electoral appeal to a wide variety of groups, their policy orientations are eclectic and shift with the public mood. Lacking an explicit ideology, catch-all parties tend to emphasize the attractive personal attributes of their candidates, and nominations are largely determined by the electoral resources of the candidates rather than by such organizational criteria as years of experience in, or service to, the party, or position within key factions within the party. The Democratic Party of the United States, Labour under Tony Blair, the Hungarian Democratic Forum and Spain’s Socialist party (PSOE) and Partido Popular are clear examples of this party type, and Taiwan’s Kuomintang is completing its extremely long-term transformation from a quasi-Leninist to a catch-all party. Korea’s principal parties manifest many features of the catch-all party but remain heavily regional in their elec- toral bases and identities, giving them some of the flavour of ethnic parties (see Jaung, 2000; Kim, 2000). It should be noted that our conceptualization of the catch-all party departs from the classic party type described by Kirchheimer (1966) in some important respects. The first is based on the observation that Kirchheimer does not describe a stable ideal type; his vision of the catch-all party is one that is evolving away from an earlier type of party, and therefore is defined more by what it is not than by what it is. Specifically, Kirchheimer’s defi- nition lists several ways in which the catch-all party departs from the pre- viously dominant mass-integration model of party,14 and is therefore still within the long-term evolutionary trajectory of such parties.15 Our ideal type is a purer distillation of defining features that do not presuppose that the party has ‘ideological baggage’, a ‘classe gardée’ or a sizeable member- ship base. This has the result of shedding from our conceptualization a number of secondary consequences that we do not regard as necessary com- ponents of the model. Obviously basing his analysis on the experience of centralized West European socialist parties, Kirchheimer posited, for example, that, as the importance of party militants as vote mobilizers declines, control over the party and its nomination of candidates would increasingly fall into the hands of dominant national-level party leaders. The experience of American catch-all parties clearly indicates that this is not an essential component of the model: indeed, the increase in television- dominated, issue- or personality-oriented campaigns and the shifting or weakening of party alliances with the social groups serving as their tra- ditional electoral clienteles has gone hand-in-hand with the spread of primary elections as the principal form of candidate nomination and the commensurate decline of party bosses. By relaxing the organizational 186  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S determinism inherent in Kirchheimer’s model and eliminating this redun- dant feature, its applicability to a broader array of real-world cases is strengthened, and some other typologies in the comparative parties litera- ture can be more easily subsumed within this species of party. Like the catch-all party, the programmatic party (also see Wolinetz, 1991, 2002) is a modern-day, pluralist/tolerant, thinly organized political party whose main function is the conduct of election campaigns, and those cam- paigns often seek to capitalize on the personal attractiveness of its candi- dates. However, the programmatic party is closer to the classic model of a mass-based, ideological party in three respects. First, it has much more of a distinct, consistent and coherent programmatic or ideological agenda than does the ideal-type catch-all party, and it clearly incorporates those ideo- logical or programmatic appeals in its electoral campaigns and its legislative and government agenda. If it operates within a majoritarian electoral system, as in Britain, the United States or Mexico (e.g. the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, the Republicans since 1980 and the Partido de Acción Nacional), it must still broadly aggregate interests, but its issue appeals are less diffuse, vague and eclectic than those of the catch-all party. Thus, second, it seeks to win control of government (or a place in it) pre- cisely through this sharper definition of a party platform or vision. Third, while its organization and social base may, in a majoritarian system, resemble that of the catch-all party, in a highly proportional system, such as Israel’s, the programmatic party has a narrower, more clearly defined social base, and possibly some firmer linkages to like-minded organizations in civil society. In this case its electoral strategy is to mobilize its core constituency rather than to enlarge it through interest aggregation. Other examples of programmatic parties include the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) of Vaclav Klaus, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) and the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) in the Czech Republic, the Demo- cratic Union in Poland, and the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP), the Civic Democratic Party-Young Democrats (Fidesz, formerly the Alliance of Young Democrats) in Hungary, and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan. The most purely electoralist party is what we call the personalistic party (called the ‘non-partisan party’ by Ignazi [1996: 552]), as its only rationale is to provide a vehicle for the leader to win an election and exercise power. It is not derived from the traditional structure of local notable elites, but, rather, is an organization constructed or converted by an incumbent or aspiring national leader exclusively to advance his or her national political ambitions. Its electoral appeal is not based on any programme or ideology, but rather on the personal charisma of the leader/candidate, who is por- trayed as indispensable to the resolution of the country’s problems or crisis. While it may make use of clientelistic networks and/or broadly distribute particularistic benefits to party supporters, its organization is weak, shallow and opportunistic. Indeed, it may be so temporary that, even in the service 187  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) of an incumbent president, such as Alberto Fujimori in Peru, it may change its name and structure with every election. Numerous other twentieth century examples abound, including Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the Congress-I rump which defected from the rest of the Congress Party in support of Indira Gandhi, the Pakistan People’s Party that Benazir Bhutto inherited from her father (hence, with deeper roots than some personalistic parties), and the hastily established electoral vehicles created to support the electoral aspirations of Hugo Chávez Frias in Venezuela, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil and Joseph Estrada in the Philippines. A recent classic example is the Thai Rak Thai Party of the Thai business tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra, whose personality and vast personal fortune gained his party an unprecedented absolute majority of parliament even though it was formed only a few months before the November 2000 elections. Most of these parties are or were pluralist and tolerant in their behavioural styles, but this is not invariably true, as the proto-hegemonic behaviour of Peru’s Fujimori and Venezuela’s Chávez clearly reveal. Movement Parties Finally, there is a type of partisan organization that straddles the conceptual space between ‘party’ and ‘movement’. The prominent examples of the German Greens and the Austrian Freedom Party, however, make it clear that these types of organizations must be included in this comprehensive typology since they regularly field candidates, have been successful in electing members of parliament and, in Germany in 1999, in forming part of a coalition government at the national level and in several Länder. The most prominent examples of movement parties in Western Europe today are of two types: left-libertarian parties and post-industrial extreme right parties. However, this genus of party types should be regarded as ‘open- ended’, since its fluid organizational characteristics may be manifested in a wide variety of ways in other parts of the world or over the course of history. It is particularly appropriate for newly emerging parties prior to their insti- tutionalization (such as Labour in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century and the French Gaullists prior to 1958). Herbert Kitschelt presents the most detailed analysis of the ‘left- libertarian’ variety of the movement party. These he contrasts with ‘con- ventional parties’ in Western Europe, which are principally oriented towards winning government power through elected office; have a professional staff of party functionaries and an extensive party organization; represent economic interest groups (labour or business); and are mainly concerned with economic distributive issues (Kitschelt, 1989: 62). Instead, ‘left- libertarian’ parties are quintessentially ‘post-materialist’ in their attitudinal orientation and behaviour. They reject the paramount status of economic issues and are characterized by ‘a negative consensus that the predominance of markets and bureaucracies must be rolled back in favor of social 188  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S solidarity relations and participatory institutions’ (Kitschelt, 1989: 64). Indeed, since there is no consensus in support of a single comprehensive ideology or set of programmatic preferences, this ‘negative consensus’ func- tions as the very lowest common denominator shared by an otherwise hetero- geneous clientele, and the party’s agenda revolves around a multiplicity of issues not limited to a single arena. There are no barriers to membership in the group, which is open to all who wish to participate, making the social base and attitudinal orientation of activists even more diverse. The strong commitment to direct participation leads to the weakness (even rejection) of centralized organization and leadership, and a sometimes chaotic ‘assembly’ organizational style (as best illustrated by the water-balloon attack on Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer at the 1999 congress of the German Greens). Organizationally, the movement party is based on ‘loose networks of grass- roots support with little formal structure, hierarchy and central control’ (Kitschelt, 1989: 66). Finally, the left-libertarian movement party stresses ‘constituency representation’ over the logic of electoral competition, making it a sometimes unpragmatic and unreliable coalition partner. Piero Ignazi (1996) presents a succinct overview of the post-industrial extreme right party, which he regards as a different kind of reaction against the conditions of post-industrial society. As he points out, where the left-libertarians place greatest emphasis on self-affirmation, informal- ity and libertarianism in their reaction against modern society and state institutions, supporters of the extreme right have been driven by their atomization and alienation to search for more order, tradition, identity and security, at the same time as they attack the state for its intervention in the economy and for its social welfare policies (Ignazi, 1996: 557). Like their fascist predecessors, they embrace the ‘leadership principle’ and do not question the directives of the party’s paramount leader (e.g. the Front National’s Le Pen or the Freedom Party’s Haider). However, they differ from fascists (who supported a strong, disciplined and militant party as a weapon to be used against their enemies, especially socialist and com- munist parties), in that they are hostile to ‘party’ and ‘the establishment’ more generally. Instead, xenophobic, racist hostility toward migrants is a highly salient line of conflict. In addition, where fascists favoured the con- struction of a strong state, neoconservative anti-state rhetoric and attacks on the social welfare state permeates the speeches and programme pro- posals of party leaders and candidates (see the various contributions to Betz and Immerfall ).16 Fifteen Ideal-type ‘Species’ of Parties and Theory-Building The typology developed here is certainly less parsimonious than the two-, three- or four-category frameworks that have dominated the comparative 189  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) literature on political parties to date. Scholars who prefer styles of theory- building based upon deduction from a simpler set of one-dimensional criteria may not welcome this contribution on the grounds that its com- plexity and multidimensionality may hinder theory-building. We respect- fully disagree. We believe that social science theories that purport to explain human behaviour or institutional performance must accurately reflect real- world conditions. As stated earlier, we have found most of the previously dominant typologies lacking insofar as they were based upon the historical experience of Western Europe from the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Accordingly, they do not adequately reflect the much more diverse reality of political parties in other parts of the world: as we have suggested, the deep ethnic cleavages that divide many societies in Africa and Asia have no counterpart in the much more ethnically, linguistically, religiously and culturally homogeneous context of Western Europe. Hence, in order for a typology of parties to be useful for broad, cross-regional comparative analysis it must allow for the emergence of distinct types in greatly different kinds of social contexts, such as the ethnic, congress and religious-funda- mentalist parties described above. Similarly, it cannot be assumed that typologies based on characteristics of West European parties in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries will be valid for all time even within that single region. The socio-economic context and communication technologies continue to evolve, and these have important implications for the structure, resources, objectives and behav- ioural styles of political parties. Accordingly, a dichotomous division of cadre-versus-mass parties, or parties of individual representation versus parties of social or total integration may have accurately reflected the reality of Western Europe throughout the first half of the twentieth century. However, by the second half of that century it had become clear that these classic party models were increasingly incapable of capturing the diversity of party types present within established democracies. Kirchheimer’s (1966) catch-all model certainly helped to address this shortcoming by identifying ways in which many parties were tending to deviate from the mass-based party model. Over the following decades, however, the catch-all label was being used to describe an excessively wide variety of parties whose electoral strategies and programmatic commitments differed substantially. Accord- ingly, we found it necessary to break down that classic but ‘overaggregated’ party type into three different kinds of electoralist party. Hypothesis-testing and theory-building are facilitated by ideal types that capture all of the defining elements of a concept, but at the same time do not ‘overaggregate’ by including elements that do not conceptually or empirically belong together. As Peter Mair (1989) has pointed out, for example, the catch-all party model as elaborated by Kirchheimer (1966) includes both an ideological and an organizational component: the down- grading of a party’s ideological commitment is integrally linked to the ‘thinning’ of the party’s organizational structure and an increased emphasis 190  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S (both electorally and organizationally) on the party’s national-level leader- ship. With Wolinetz (1991), we believe that it is necessary to separate the ideological and organizational dimensions (as we have in elaborating our catch-all, programmatic and personalistic party models) both in order to reflect reality more accurately and to facilitate analysis of the causes of party change. We regard this as desirable because the evolution of parties or the emerg- ence of new types of parties may be the product of several fundamentally distinct causal processes, not all of which would move the transformation of the party in the same direction, and not all of which are unilinear in their evolutionary implications. With regard to the organizational dimension of the classic catch-all party, Kirchheimer’s prediction (actually, lament) regarding the general decline of mass parties and their replacement by or evolution into what we have called electoralist parties has certainly come true. Numerous empirical studies have documented a decline in party membership (e.g. Mair and van Biezen, 2001; Scarrow, 2000) and the loos- ening or rupture of ties linking parties to communications media and secondary associations in most West European countries (Koole, 1994; van der Eijk, 2000), as well as the emergence of organizationally thin parties in the new democracies of the former Soviet Bloc (e.g. Kopecký, 1995). Indeed, since Kirchheimer was writing at a time that predated the emergence of television as by far the dominant medium of campaign communication throughout the world (Gunther and Mughan, 2000; Pasquino, 2001), he actually understated the extent to which electoral politics would be person- alized and freed of dependence on a mass base of party militants. But Kirchheimer’s prediction that these organizational changes would be accompanied by a progressive downgrading of parties’ ideological commit- ments has not come true, at least not in countries like the United States and Britain. Some electoralist parties, such as the British Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and the US Republicans at the national level17 since 1980, have adopted a much more intense ideological commitment and con- frontational style, at the same time as they have mastered ‘the new campaign politics’. Others, such as the Dutch Socialists, have gone full cycle over the past three decades, sharply shifting towards a more radical leftist posture in the late 1960s (Wolinetz, 1991: 121), then returning to the political center two decades later (Koole, 1994: 281). Thus, it is necessary to separate the organizational from the ideological/programmatic dimensions both in order to describe accurately these diverging evolutionary tendencies and to try to account for them. Thus, we have broken down overaggregated party models into leaner and more theoretically modest types in order to facilitate future analyses of the separate impacts of distinct causal processes which may be moving parties in different directions simultaneously. To be sure, much of the variation in party organizational forms and campaign modalities may be explained largely by long-term processes of socio-economic development (altering the 191  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) society within which campaigns will be conducted) and by technological advances. Technological change, for example, and especially the emergence of television as the dominant medium of political communication in nearly all democracies (and, more recently, the Internet as a new form of ‘narrow- casting’) has opened up more direct channels of party-elite access to voters, making older and less efficient vehicles for voter mobilization based on door- to-door campaigning by party militants unnecessary (see Farrell and Webb, 2000). But while these socio-economic and technological developments may create circumstances favourable to the development and progressive domi- nance of organizationally thin parties, they cannot predict precisely what kind of party is likely to emerge, let alone become a dominant model. Elite decisions to pursue different strategies of voter mobilization or different goals altogether (e.g. constituency representation instead of vote maximiz- ation) can lead to the adoption of a much more sharply defined ideological or programmatic stand. These latter decisions may be influenced by, but are not simply determined by, socio-economic or technological factors,18 and thus cannot be assumed to evolve in a unilinear fashion. Party ideologies, philosophies of representation and, to some extent, organizational styles may be affected by other societal trends that may have little to do with socio-economic or technological change. Rather than evolving in a unilinear manner, the defining characteristics of some partisan political subcultures appear to emerge, instead, through a dialectical process in reaction against certain features of the status quo. Indeed, one could hypothesize a chain of reactive changes in party ideologies whose temporal origins can be traced back to the earliest period covered in our survey of political parties, with the emergence of elite-based parties of individual representation in the early nineteenth century in Western Europe. These tended to be either traditionalist conservative or liberal in their ideological orientations. Traditionalist conservative parties defended various aspects of the ancien regime that were threatened by political and socio-economic change, while classical liberalism emerged as a reaction against that old order. Since the traditional, predemocratic social and political order in Western Europe was characterized by mercantilism, monarchy, aristocratic privilege and established state religions, it was not surprising that classical liberalism would stress free-market capitalism, individualism and religious freedom or anticlericalism. In the second half of the nineteenth century it was free-market capitalism that defined the status quo, with social polar- ization between the economically privileged and working classes fuelling the emergence of socialist parties, stressing class solidarity and economic equality. In turn, by the early twentieth century, conflict between free-market capitalism and socialist alternatives largely defined the parameters of insti- tutionalized political conflict, leading to the articulation of a corporatist ‘third way’ as an alternative. This advanced a view of society upon which both denominational parties and ultranationalist parties (twentieth-century West European examples of which were rooted in an integral organic 192  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S corporatist vision of society) could be based. And by the late twentieth- century, widespread affluence, Keynesian interventionism and a large social welfare state defined a status quo against which both left-libertarian and post-industrial extreme-right parties would react.19 Accordingly, we can see that the defining features of important political ideologies emerged not as the product of unilinear evolutionary processes – such as long-term, con- tinuous processes of socio-economic modernization – but through a dis- continuous reactive process that was driven by political and social elites. While this dialectical interpretation of the emergence of ideologies and parties is speculative, it represents the kind of hypothesis that can be empiri- cally tested using a more fine-grained differentiation among political parties, such as we have proposed. Political parties have not emerged or evolved in a continuous, unilinear manner, and neither have they converged on a single model of party. Instead, we believe that changes in the organizational forms, electoral strategies, pro- grammatic objectives and ideological orientations of parties are the products of multiple causal processes – some of them related to broader, long-term processes of social or technological change, others involving the less pre- dictable innovative behaviour of political and social elites. If this is true, then it would be a mistake to rely on an excessively restricted number of party types. This would lead scholars to attempt to cram new parties into inappro- priate models, or to abort the theory-building process by concluding in frus- tration that existing theories and models simply do not fit with established party types. Accordingly, we believe that the typology presented here – less parsimonious but more fully reflective of the real variation in party types around the world – should facilitate the testing of numerous hypotheses about the origins, functions and evolutionary trajectories of political parties in widely varying social, political, technological and cultural contexts. Notes This article has drawn on earlier work published as ‘Types and Functions of Parties’, in Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther’s (eds) Political Parties and Democracy. We gratefully acknowledge the comments and criticisms of earlier drafts of this article by Hans Daalder, Peter Mair, Herbert Kitschelt, Jakub Zielinski, Bradley Richard- son and Anthony Mughan. 1 Duverger (1954: 71). We believe that this is a distinct party type (which we will refer to as the ‘Leninist’ party model) and develop that concept later in this article. 2 One exception, which does provide such a systematic overview, is Ware (1996). 3 As Koole (1996) persuasively argues, the description of the cartel party by Katz and Mair (1995) is imprecise, and is more relevant as a description of the dynamics of a party system (i.e. concerning patterns of interaction among parties) than of individual parties. If we were to place the cartel party within our typology, we would group it with the electoralist parties. 193  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) 4 In perhaps the most extreme example of this collaboration, the turno pacífico of late nineteenth-century Spain, the two dominant parties alternated with one another in power, according to pre-election agreements, in order to more evenly share government patronage over time (see Martínez Cuadrado, 1969; Tusell, 1976). 5 Katz and Mair (2002) set forth a similar distinction among two types of elite party. 6 As a party official in a socio-economically lagging, rural part of Spain described it: ‘The citizen who is worried about resolving problems with the doctor or the school..., or the problem of an unjust accusation before the courts, or of delin- quency in paying his taxes to the state, etc.,... has recourse to an intermediary... who can intercede on his behalf, but in exchange for pledging his very conscience and his vote’ (Gunther et al., 1986: 84–5). 7 It should be noted that some peasant parties shared many characteristics with the working-class mass party, including many organizational features and similar historical origins. We are restricting our attention here to the more widespread working-class variant of the mass-based party, which provides a fuller manifes- tation of the various characteristics of this model. 8 For excellent descriptions and analyses of these kinds of parties, see Barnes (1967) and Epstein (1967: ch. 6, ‘The Socialist Working-Class Party). 9 It is in these organizational respects that the Kuomintang has often been labelled a ‘Leninist’ party, from its founding on the Chinese mainland in the early twentieth century until its democratization in the 1990s. However, the Kuom- intang in power (on the mainland and in Taiwan) shed the revolutionary aspects of its ideology and became only ‘quasi-Leninist’ in nature. 10 As Mussolini once described his fellow fascists: ‘We allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocrats and democrats; conservatives and progressives; reactionaries and revolutionaries; legitimists and illegitimists; according to conditions of time, place and circumstance’ (quoted in Schmidt, 1939: 97). 11 This is the key factor which separates the ethnic party from nationalist parties. The latter seek to expand their electoral base by convincing ever larger numbers of citizens that they should identify with the national group and its mission, and often define the ‘nation’ in a flexible manner that facilitates this objective. The ethnic party takes the demographically defined boundaries of the group as ‘given’, and seeks to represent its interests exclusively. 12 Panebianco (1988: 264) summarized the dominant characteristics of electoral- professional parties as: (1) a central role of professionals with expertise in electoral mobilization; (2) weak vertical ties to social groups and broader appeals to the ‘opinion electorate’; (3) the pre-eminence of public representatives and personalized leadership; (4) financing through interest groups and public funds (as contrasted with past reliance on members’ dues); and (5) an emphasis on issues and leadership. 13 With Wolinetz, we have disaggregated Kirchheimer’s catch-all party into two distinct types, based on their differing levels of commitment to an ideology or stable set of programmatic commitments. Wolinetz (1991: 118) refers to what we call the catch-all party as the ‘issue/opportunistic’ party. We share his use of the term ‘programmatic party’ (1991) to refer to organizationally thin electoral parties which have reasonably strong ideological or programmatic commitments. 14 In Kirchheimer’s classic formulation (1966: 190), the defining features of the 194  G U N T H E R A N D D I A M O N D : S P E C I E S O F P O L I T I C A L PA RT I E S catch-all party include a ‘drastic reduction of the party’s ideological baggage... [a f]urther strengthening of top leadership groups, whose actions and omissions are now judged from the viewpoint of their contribution to the efficiency of the entire social system rather than identification with the goals of their particular organization... [d]owngrading of the role of the individual party member, a role considered a historical relic which may obscure the newly built-up catch-all party image... [d]eemphasis of the classe gardée, specific social-class or denomina- tionally clientele, in favor of recruiting voters among the population at large...[and s]ecuring access to a variety of interest groups’. It should be noted that all of these defining characteristics pertain to ways in which the catch-all party departs from the former mass-integration model of party. 15 It should be noted that this is also true of Koole’s (1994) concept of the ‘modern cadre party’. Although it bears more of a resemblance to our definition of the catch-all party, it, too, is a portrait of parties that are still in motion, evolving away from the more classic mass-integration party type. Koole’s modern cadre party is defined by highly professionalized leadership groups, a low member/voter ratio, a weakening or break in ties to a classe gardée, and an increasing personalization of television-dominated election campaigns. Consistent with our catch-all model (but diverging from Kirchheimer’s), it points out that party leadership has not become so dominant as to crush out internal democracy, particularly with regard to the nomination of candidates. It differs from our model insofar as its electoral appeals are more stable and focused than the more eclectic and shifting electoral appeals of catch-all parties. Thus, although Koole is not sufficiently precise regarding this point, his model may also apply to what we call ‘programmatic’ parties. It also differs insofar as a mass- based organizational structure is retained. This, we believe, may reflect the tran- sitional status of the Dutch parties studied by Koole, and may therefore not be a relevant defining feature of an ideal-type of political party. 16 One is tempted to speculate that this fundamental difference is the product of differences in the social and political status quo that the party is reacting against. In the 1920s, the state was ‘thin’, and the principal threat to the social order came from militant parties of the Marxist left. In the 1930s, the depression made the call for a more activist state a reasonable response to widespread unemploy- ment and poverty. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, the social welfare state had been fully developed in most West European countries (especially Austria and France, where these extreme right parties have had greatest political impact), so attack on the interventionist state represented the obvious ‘reaction’ in this dialectical process of ideology formation. In addition, the decline of militant Marxism and the mass-based class party, coupled with massive migration into many West European countries from Third World and post-soviet countries effectively created a new minority to be detested by these xenophobic parties. 17 It is exceedingly difficult to categorize American parties according to a single party type, since parties in the US are really confederations of state parties (see Beck, 1997) which may vary quite considerably (some approximating the catch- all or programmatic models, while others may still include strong clientelistic elements). Thus, at the same time as the Republican Party in Congress has become increasingly programmatic, many state governors and their supportive parties have remained centrist and pragmatic practitioners of catch-all politics. 18 Increased affluence and the growth of a sizeable middle class, for example, may 195  PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 9 ( 2 ) undercut the credibility and attractiveness of ideologies or programmes calling for radical socio-economic change. 19 For an excellent overview of the emergence of European political parties in conjunction with these ideological trends, see von Beyme (1985: 29–158). von Beyme’s classification scheme bears some resemblance to ours, it is based primarily on the ideological or programmatic orientations of parties (see Ware, 1996: 21–49). Accordingly, it overlooks some of the organizational features and behavioural characteristics that we regard as of considerable importance. References Adorno, T. W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford (1950) The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper. Barnes, Samuel H. (1967) Party Democracy: Politics in an Italian Socialist Feder- ation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Beck, Paul Allen (1997) Party Politics in America, 8th edn. New York: Longman. Betz, Hans-Georg and Stefan Immerfall (eds) (1998) The New Politics of the Right: Neo-Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Beyme, Klaus von (1985) Poli