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Experience of modern political parties during the last fifty years can be briefly summarized under two headlines: the rise of the catch‐all party (Volksparteien) after the Second World War (earlier in the US), and the ‘crisis’ and restructuring of the catch‐all parties under profound challenges and severe ‘stress’ since the late 1970s. Both processes have been interrelated as it often seems that the ‘crisis’ has been due in part to a number of inherent characteristics and weaknesses of catch‐all parties, and that the ‘pure type’ of catch‐all party has been somewhat transitory in structure despite its apparent longevity. The analysis presented in this chapter of the character and the potential outcome of the perceived present ‘crisis’ begins with a description of the principal dimensions of the problem at hand. The next section, ‘Catch‐all parties and the Parteienstaat’ discusses the definition, characteristics, constellations, and the historical context and organizational modernization of the catch‐all party, which cannot be separated from the respective constellations of party systems and from the emergence of the European invention of the party state (Parteienstaat). The last main section of the chapter looks at the various symptoms of the perceived crisis of the catch‐all party, and the implications of the ‘third wave’ of politico‐organizational modernization of the final decades of the twentieth century, which is shown to have led to tentative new types of party, including numerous ‘catch‐all plus’ phenomena and a search for new terms to describe a ‘fourth’ type of party.

There are good reasons for re‐examining existing classifications of parties and seeing if others can be developed. However, reworking categories is a complex process, requiring further research and interaction between theory and data. This chapter is a preliminary effort, and focuses primarily on parties in established liberal democracies. The first half examines the adequacy of existing party categories in light of the literature in sections entitled: Categories and concepts in the comparative literature; Cadre versus mass parties; and Parties of mass integration, catch‐all parties, and beyond’ (to the cartel party). The second half considers ways in which contemporary parties might be compared in sections entitled: New bases for classification? Vote‐seeking, office‐seeking, and policy‐seeking parties; and Patterns of change in Western European parties.

Political parties are such a fundamental part of democratic political life that they take on an appearance of stability and solidity that is rarely questioned—hence, when a political party collapses, political scientists are usually taken by surprise. In this context, the remarkable collapse in 1982 of Spain's governing party, the Union de Centro Democrático (UCD), long regarded as an exception to the rule of party stability, may provide some clues as to the causes of recent cases of party crisis. The catastrophic defeat of the UCD in the 1982 general election was primarily the result of a reaction by the electorate against the highly visible internal struggles and schisms, which beset the party during the preceding two years, and in many respects, represented a ‘punishment vote’ by an electorate that had become fed up with squabbles that had even reached the point (in an attempted military coup in 1981) of threatening the survival of the new democratic regime itself. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the origins of these destructive intra‐party conflicts, for which several different explanations have been set forth by scholars and journalists, and by UCD leaders themselves, the most important being that the UCD was insufficiently ‘institutionalized’. The first part looks at the concept of institutionalization, and further sections look at: the creation of the UCD—factions, incompatibilities, and the transition to democracy; the cost of constitutional consensus; the model of the party—catch‐all, factional or holding‐company; and internal conflict and external opportunities—a discussion of rational exits (defections) from the UCD.

Concerned with the development of party organizations in twentieth‐century democracies, and deals specifically with the shifting balance of power between what has earlier been termed the three organizational ‘faces’ of party: the party on the ground, the party in central office, and the party in public office. An evaluation is made of the changing balance among these three faces in the context of four models of party organization: the cadre (or elite) party, which was the dominant form of party organization prior to mass suffrage; the mass party, which emerged with, or in anticipation of and to militate for, mass suffrage, and which was widely regarded, particularly in Europe, as the ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’ form of party organization for most of the twentieth century; the catch‐all party, development towards which was first commented upon in the literature in the 1960s, and which has come to rival the mass party not only in prominence but also in the affections of many analysts; and finally, what is called here the cartel party, a new and emerging model of party organization, which Katz and Mair believe to be increasingly evident among established democracies in recent years. In tracing the shifting balance of power among the three faces and across the four models of party organization, the authors contend that the most recent stage of development has resulted in the ascendancy of the party in public office, and the concomitant ‘relegation’ or subordination of the other two faces. Moreover, while parties on the ground sometimes continue to flourish, they suggest that the ostensible empowerment of party memberships, or even their greater autonomy, may nevertheless, be compatible with an increased privileging of the party in public office. Finally, both the sources and implications of party organizational change are briefly discussed, and it is suggested that there is an association between the most recent shifts in the internal balance of intra‐party power, on the one hand, and the apparent growth in popular feelings of alienation from parties, on the other.

Are political parties an unavoidable component of liberal constitutionalism? A historical enquiry shows us how troubled was the perception of political parties among Western European liberals. In the mid nineteenth century, the understanding of them as inheritors of classical ‘demagogy’ was still competing with the Burkeian idea of parties as ‘honourable connexions’. What changed in subsequent years was the expansion of the franchise and the realization that what counted in politics was numbers not brains. A realistic approach then prevailed, which understood a constitution as a means of organized access to power based on popular consent. This raised the problems of ‘disciplining’ the popular vote, and parties became seen as a tool to organize democracy. After the Second World War, a party-based democracy became the accepted norm in Western Europe, but parties now transformed themselves from ‘Weltanschaaung’ into ‘catch-all’ parties.

Chapter 4 deals with the evolution of the party in the post-war period until the late 1960s. It suggests that because the recovery of democracy after the Second World War coincided with multi-partism, this credited parties with an unprecedented legitimation in the first post-war years. This general sentiment was built on the role parties played in all countries under Fascist or Nazi rule, and the more parties were active, the more confidence they gained. The positive reception of parties went hand in hand with their organizational development. However, precisely when parties deployed their full strength, they were tamed by societal and technological transformation. The chapter discusses how the parties’ response to 1960s’ post-industrialization by becoming catch-all structures depressed their legitimation. The post-war general consensus on the parties’ central role faded, opening the way for a new type of party criticism: parties now were considered not divisive enough but rather too consensual.

When they rose to prominence in the régimes censitaires of the nineteenth century, most political parties were based primarily in parliament and had little external organization. With the advent of mass suffrage, these elite parties were challenged by a new type of organization, the mass party ostensibly rooted in particular segments of society and with extensive extraparliamentary membership organizations that were, in theory, the authoritative voice of the party. By the second half of the twentieth century, both mass parties and the remaining elite parties were evolving into catch-all parties, with the party in public office more assertive of its independence and with parties increasingly working as brokers among competing interests rather than as the agents of particular interest. None of these any longer describes the nature of contemporary party politics, however.

In terms of an analogy to economic markets, the political market for parties has nearly always been an oligopoly. In recent decades, that oligopoly has transformed into a cartel, in which the parties share rather than compete over resources, and effectively conspire to protect their collective interests. The capacity of their leaders to maintain this cartel of parties depends, however, on their ability to control their own parties, giving rise to a new form of party organization, the cartel party. As with all ideal types, there are never any fully fledged cartel parties, just as there were never any fully fledged mass parties or catch-all parties, but the realities of modern politics are better understood as approaches to the cartel party ideal type than as perversions of the catch-all party.

This chapter briefly recaps the findings of this volume, then addresses more general questions concerning the types of organizational patterns that researchers should expect to find, and the most fruitful approaches to understanding the origins and implications of those patterns. The authors review the PPDB data in order to assess the empirical applicability of various well-known ideal-types of parties. They find that only a minority of the cases in the dataset fit into one of these ideal-type categories—even when the bar is set low for such classification. It is argued that the ideal-type approach, while it has its merits, is less useful as a practical guide for empirical research than analytical frameworks based on the key dimensions of party organization—resources, structures, and representational strategies. The chapter closes by emphasizing the very real consequences that the organizational choices made by parties can have for representative democracy.

This chapter analyses the factors that contributed to the limited electoral success of the Congress party in the 2009 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Three factors seem to stand out as important ones: (1) favourable voter evaluations of the performance of the central government as well as the State government, both run by the Congress party; (2) failure of any one opposition party or alliance of parties to present a credible alternative to the Congress party; and (3) the ability of the Congress party to retain its traditional support base. Over the past few years the state of Andhra Pradesh saw a quick evaporation of the apparent stability that marked the government and politics of the state during the years 2004-2008, partly due to agitations for and against the division of the State and the tragic death of its powerful Chief Minister that resulted in a condition of high voltage politics, radical political shifts, and increased electoral volatility.