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This chapter results from a presentation made by the author in late 1995 at an occasional seminar series in the University of Bergen, with the overall theme of ‘Law and Structure’. The author’s task was to review the background and development, and discuss the question of the current validity and viability of the ‘classic law’ on ‘the freezing of party systems’, which had first been promulgated by S. M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan almost thirty years before, and which, even now, continues to be one of the most familiar and most frequently cited theses within the field of comparative party studies in western Europe: ‘The party systems of the 1960s,’ wrote Lipset and Rokkan in 1967, ‘reflect, with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s … [T]he party alternatives, and in remarkably many cases the party organizations, are older than the majorities of the national electorates.’ This thesis also recurs frequently in the subsequent chapters of this book, with the burden of most of the chapters in Part II being devoted to its defence. It is contended particularly in those first chapters that the freezing hypothesis remains largely valid, with the evidence of long-term continuities in party systems far outweighing the ostensibly more striking and more immediate evidence of change; in other words, and some three decades later, the long-standing party alternatives that had been instanced by Lipset and Rokkan are now even older. The discussion in this introductory chapter is presented in two sections: Laws and Structures; and Constraints, Control, and Adaptation.

This is the second of three chapters on persistence and change in political parties. Its theme is the problem of party system change in western Europe, and its purpose, rather than to propose some rigorous definition of it, is simply to identify some of the problems involved in the understanding of party system change, and, through this approach, to place some key questions on the agenda for future debate and future research. The discussion is presented in six sections: (1) Party Change versus Party System Change; (2) Party System Change; (3) Electoral Volatility and Cleavage Change –– a discussion of the role of ‘social’ cleavage change (resulting from changes in the cleavage structure or social make-up of support to individual parties) in electoral change and party system change in the context of Lipset–Rokkan ‘law’ on ‘the freezing of party systems’; (4) How Much Electoral Change?; (5) The Electoral Bias; and (6) Key Problems.

This is the second of three chapters on persistence and change in political parties, and discusses myths of electoral change and the survival of the ‘old’ parties in western Europe. It starts by presenting the three main sources of evidence (trends in aggregate electoral volatility; evidence of the mobilization and success of new parties; (imputed) evidence of the decline of party and the emergence of new forms of interest mediation) that are usually cited against the contemporary applicability of the Lipset–Rokkan ‘law’ on the ‘freezing of party systems’, showing that each of these three patterns of change is more or less rooted in varieties of electoral change. The author then contends in the rest of the chapter that this popular image of electoral change is largely mythical, and lacking in foundation (bearing little or no relation to the actual patterns of electoral alignments in contemporary Europe). It is argued that the empirical evidence suggests that European electorates continue to be stable, that alignments continue to be relatively frozen, and that the old parties continue to survive; in other words, that much of what Lipset and Rokkan contended in the late 1960s concerning freezing, ageing, and stability, still continues to be valid today. The argument is presented in four sections: (1) Levels of Electoral Volatility; (2) The Survival of Traditional Parties; (3) What Sustains the Myths of Electoral Change?; and (4) The Neglect of Party.