Diversification and reconfiguration of party systems in postindustrial democracies

rand theories of social and political change in advanced capitalism, such as those originally proposed by Daniel Bell or Alain Touraine in the 1960s, were right in predicting a sea change in the alignment of political interests and the pra ctices of political participation in the transition from industrial to postindustrial societies. With the benefit of hindsight provided by another forty years of technological innovation, economic growth, and political battle, of course, many details of their original visions have become implausible. Nevertheless, two predictions stand up to the test of time. First, we do observe the end of class politics, conceived in a Marxist binary class framework, though not the end of distributive conflict in the politics of postindustrial capita lism. Second, as predicted by Bell and especially Touraine, politics is no longer just about distributive arrangements of who gets what when and how, but also about the governance structures of social organization and cultural life styles. Postindustrial politics is indeed shot through with conflict about the control of individual and group conduct what sort of authorities with what kind of regulatory powers are entitled to determine individuals’ life styles and how citizens can exercise capacities and rights to participate in binding collective decisions. All this has contributed to a reconfiguration, if not a crumbling of traditional party systems certainly in the sense that established parties had to redefine their programmatic appeals and often enough with the successful appearance of new partisan labels in the electoral competition. In this process, parties geared to the interests of the “working class” have vanished. On the theoretical plane, conventional conceptions of social structure dividing the population hierarchically into a manual blue-collar working class and a white collar middle stratum have lost their analytical significance for the study of political mobilization. Political parties, however, have not become “catch-all” parties in the sense a melancholic, Frankfurt School influenced critique of pluralist democracy envisioned (Kirchheimer 1965), but express, enact, and exacerbate new lines of issue divides concerned with economic distribution and political-cultural governance structures that call for precise analytical characterization and explanation. At the same time, political participation has vastly expanded beyond the realm of the party-dominated domain. The same set of societal and political mechanisms that drive the reconfiguration of the party systems has also promoted the differentiation of modes of political action. On the following pages, I try to offer some sketchy justifications for this barrage of bald assertions. I begin with a sociological view of political preference formation in postindustrial society as exogenous to the current political process and policy formation, but endogenous to the cumulative consequences of past political decisions, and here primarily the development of welfare states. Based on this exogenously constituted space of salient preference distributions, I then discuss the strategic programmatic options parties advertising under different labels may face contingent upon the configuration of competitors they encounter in individual polities. The third section outlines why I believe that it is unhelpful to characterize the current transformation of postindustrial party systems as a decoupling of the political agents from their principals, electoral constituencies. I addressed this subject in my critique of Katz and Mair’s (1995) influential and often cited article on the rise of “cartel parties” (Kitschelt 2000a). I will argue here that, if anything, the responsiveness of political parties to citizens’ demands has increased in recent decades, as can be inferred from the decline of clientelistic citizen-politician linkages in advanced capitalist democracies, a topic I have also dealt with before (Kitschelt 2000b; 2002; 2003b). In fact, we have evidence that even in the recent era of “globa lization” partisan responsiveness continues to affect policy making. I provide an incomplete literature review to illustrate this point in section four. In the final section, I briefly dwell on the issue of differentiation of political modes of action.