Political parties and the study of political development: New insights from the postcommunist democracies

World Politics

Volumn 56, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 608-633

  Kreuzer, Marcus ^a   Pettai, Vello ^b  

^a VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TARTU   (Estonia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEMOCRACY; PARTY POLITICS; POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT; POST-COMMUNISM;

EID: 18044397122     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/wp.2005.0006     Document Type: Review

References (64)

1. To keep our analysis more focused, we only selected books that deal with political parties and party systems and excluded books that focus solely on votes, such as election studies. For a good review of this literature, see Joshua A. Tucker, "The First Decade of Post-Communist Elections and Voting: What Have We Studied, and How Have We Studied It?" Annual Review of Political Science 5 (June 2002).
2. Other authors stressing the importance of history include Jeffrey Kopstein, "Post-Communist Democracy: Legacies and Outcomes," Comparative Politics 35, no. 2 (2003);
3. and Lucan A. Way, "Understanding the Role of Historical Constraint in Post-Communist Development," Studies in Comparative International Development 37, no. 2 (2002).
4. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschmeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
5. The importance of agency formation is stressed by Barbara Geddes, "A Comparative Perspective on the Leninist Legacy in Eastern Europe," Comparative Political Studies 28, no. 2 (1995);
6. Michael McFaul, "Explaining Party Formation and Nonformation in Russia: Actors, Institutions, and Chance," Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 10 (2001);
7. and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, "The Limited Reach of Russia's Party System: Underinstitutionalization in Dual Transition," Politics and Society 29, no. 3 (2001).
8. Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
9. Thomas Carothers, "The End of the Transition Paradigm," Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002).
10. I b i d.
11. Paul Pierson, "Big, Slow-Moving, and Invisible: Macrosocial Processes in the Study of Comparative Politics," in Mahoney and Rueschmeyer (fn. 3), 178-79.
12. For a stimulating intellectual history of different models of political development as well as a good assessment of how effectively they each deal with continuity and change, see Andrew Janos, Politics and Paradigm: Changing Theories of Change in Social Science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), esp. 44-64.
13. Pierson (fn. 8);
14. Ronald Aminzade, "Historical Sociology and Time," Sociological Methods and Research 20, no. 4 (1992);
15. Peter Knapp, "Can Social Science Escape from History: Views of History in Social Science," History and Theory 23, no. 1 (1984);
16. Terrence J. McDonald, "What We Talk about When We Talk about History: The Conversations of History and Sociology," in McDonald, ed., The Historical Turn in the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1996);
17. Pierson, "Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes," Studies in American Political Development 14 (Spring 2000);
18. and William Sewell, "Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology," also in McDonald.
19. See also the exchange with Jonathan Sperber and Kenneth Ledford in Marcus Kreuzer, "Reply to Sperber and Ledford," Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003);
20. Ledford, "Comparing Comparisons: Disciplines and the Sonderweg," Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003);
21. and Sperber, "Comments on Marcus Kreuzer's Article," Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003).
22. Sewell (fn. 10), 262-65.
23. Sewell (fn. 10), 259
24. Kopstein (fn. 2), 233.
25. Mahoney and Rueschmeyer (fn. 3).
26. It seems as if in Elster, Offe, and Preuss's analysis the most recent stage of the triple past-the postcommunist transition-and the tabula rasa or macrochange are one and the same, and hence, overlap. This raises the question of whether or not to consider the transition's proximate impact as a historical legacy. Because of their chronological contemporaneity with the explained outcomes, we exclude transition effects as a historical factor.
27. Mainwaring (fn. 5), 3-14.
28. Mainwaring (fn. 5), 3-4.
29. Giovanni Sartori, "From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology," in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 69, 87-88.
30. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignment: An Introduction," in Lipset and Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967).
31. Sartori praises Lipset and Rokkan for marking a big step away from sociologically reductionist arguments because they analyzed nonclass cleavages and paid attention to historical sequences; see Sartori (fn. 18), 87-91. By the standards of the time, these were indeed marked improvements, but they do not alter the fact that the Lipset-Rokkan model is still actorless and structural.
32. Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996);
33. Richard Katz, A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980);
34. Kreuzer, Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy-France and Germany, 1870-1939 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2001);
35. and Susan Scarrow, Parties and their Members: Organizing for Victory in Britain and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
36. James March and Johan Olsen, "The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors of Political Life," American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984), 740.
37. John Aldrich, Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Party Politics in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
38. Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins, Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
39. Sartori (fn. 18);
40. Kalyvas (fn. 20).
41. This issue is taken up by McFaul (fn. 4).
42. This criticism also applies to their explanation of voters' and parties' programmatic orientations. Here too the theoretical sections emphasize the importance of actors and their choices, yet in their actual empirical analysis, structural factors and historical legacies-rather than historical efficiency-dominate to such an extent that actors' choices in effect are predetermined.
43. They briefly discuss the internal organizational characteristics of programmatic and clientelistic parties. According to the authors (45), these organizational characteristics are so closely tied to these parties' programmatic orientations that they do not constitute a distinct dimension and thus never become an important focus of their analysis.
44. Kreuzer and Vello Pettai, "Patterns of Political Instability: Affiliation Patterns of Politicians and Voters in Postcommunist Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania," Studies in Comparative International Development 38, no. 2 (2003);
45. Goldie Shabad and Kazimierz Slomczynski, "Interparty Mobility among Political Elites in Post-Communist East Central Europe," Party Politics 10, no. 2 (2004).
46. Mainwaring (fn. 5), 4.
47. It should be pointed out that underinstitutionalization is not the only problem associated with party development, since many scholars going back to Robert Michels have argued that parties also can restrict political representation by virtue of their overinstitutionalization. Thus, there seems to be a curvilinear relationship between levels of party institutionalization and political representation. Parties have to cross a minimal level of institutionalization before they can become channels of representation; beyond this threshold, however, party institutionalization can reach levels at which parties no longer are agents of popular expression but instead become agents of social control. On this, see Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary Citizens in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 14-19;
48. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 397-448;
49. and Andreas Schedler, "Under- and Overinstitutionalization: Some Ideal Typical Propositions Concerning New and Old Party Systems," Working Paper, no. 213 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, 1995).
50. Mainwaring (fn. 5), 3.
51. Jakub Zielinski, "Translating Social Cleavages into Party Systems: The Significance of New Democracies," World Politics 54 (January 2002).
52. Such organizational reaffiliation strategies are so rare in established democracies that they have received almost no attention. See Peter Mair, "The Electoral Payoffs of Fission and Fusion," British Journal of Political Science 20, no. 1 (1990).
53. For a more detailed definition and discussion of these six affiliation strategies, see Kreuzer and Pettai (fn. 27), 75-76.
54. For some first efforts in this direction, see Kreuzer and Pettai (fn. 27);
55. Shabad and Slomczynski (fn. 27);
56. Scott Desposato, "Party Switching in Brazil's 49th Chamber of Deputies" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 16, 1997);
57. and Carol Mershon and William B. Heller, "Party Fluidity and Legislators' Vote Choices: The Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996-2000" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 30-September 2, 2001).
58. See Kreuzer and Pettai (fn. 27).
59. Kreuzer and Pettai, "Party Switching: How Disloyal Politicians Structure Party Organization, Popular Representation and Political Change" (Manuscript, Villanova University, 2004).
60. Carothers (fn. 6).
61. Pierson (fn. 8).
62. Peter Hall, "Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics," in Mahoney and Rueschmeyer (fn. 3).
63. On this point, see also Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski, and Tóka, 1-3.
64. The distinction between splitters and lumpers is owed to Jack Hexter, "On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 241-42.