Political parties and democracy: A mutual murder?

European Journal of Political Research 29: 263-278 (April 1996)

01996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Political parties and democracy: A mutual murder? KRIS DESCHOUWER Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium Democracy is good at generating demands and bad at satisfying them. Autocracy, on the other hand, is in a position to stifle demands and is better placed to meet them. (Bobbio 1987: 39)

Abstract. According to the classical Eastonian approach a political system faces stress when it is not able to respond to an acceptable number of demands. The support for the system then drops. In this article we use this conceptual tool to attempt to explain in very general terms the existing anti-party sentiment in Western democracies. We try to show how democracy itself produces substantial stress for the system that could however be contained as long as political parties were able to act as collective identities between the citizens and the state. The adaptation and change of the traditional parties has made democratic systems more vulnerable to the erosion of support, and the parties themselves, as central actors in the systems, are the target of the protest.

This little sentence by Norbert0 Bobbio describes perfectly the most fundamental built-in problem with which democratic regimes are bound to be confronted. The wave of political protest and distrust that has rolled over the western world these last few decades might be considered as a symptom of this problem, as an indicator of the fact that democracies have reached a point - which should certainly not be a point of no return - at which they seem to be caught in a trap: they have been boosting political demands, and as a result of that they are now unable to answer them. In other words, and to sharpen the paradoxical element, the most serious threat to democracy is not autocracy, but rather, too much democracy. This idea, already developed in a very different context one and a half centuries ago by Alexis de Tocqueville, will be the leading theme of this article. I would like to explore the hypothesis that anti-party sentiment, and more generally anti-political sentiment, can be (at least partially) explained by this paradox of democracy. I would like to explain it by pointing at the further democratization of western society, both in its structures and in its value system. It is the democratization that can be held accountable for the decline of political legitimacy, and for the rise and success of various kinds of protest parties: Green and alternative parties, regionalist parties, poujadist parties, populist parties, right-wing extremist parties, nonsense parties, and so on. I will simply assume here that there is indeed an increasing political dis-

264 trust. I will not measure it or discuss the ways in which in could be measured. This is an important assumption, because one might also simply question the accepted standard labelling of what is happening as ‘political distrust’ and ‘anti-party sentiment’. One might indeed question the indicators (like voting turnout, success of new parties), and one might question the concept of decline that is put forward without having measures for the past. But this is another discussion (see Poguntke this issue; Taggart 1994). I assume that something is indeed on the move, and I try to understand why it moves, and why it moves now. First I will develop a general conceptual framework for dealing with degrees of political legitimacy and/or distrust. This framework does not need to be invented. I suggest going back to David Easton’s systems analysis (Easton 1965). He deals with the problem of the survival of systems, and especially with the mechanics and procedures that are used to deal with the lack of support for the different aspects of the system, and with the mechanics and procedures to deal with many and varied demands. Although Easton succeeded in his attempt to produce a very general analytical framework, the book is slightly biased. It was written in the early sixties, a period in which the question of the conditions for the survival of democracies was very intensively discussed. It is a bias however, that makes it extremely attractive for those who today want to grasp the logic of the ongoing political changes. The second part of the article will then fill in the analytical framework by looking at those aspects of democracy that produce the pressure on the system and on the actors in the system. Finally I will bring in the political parties, and try to explain why they are at the centre of the problem, why they are the actors at which the political distrust is oriented. I will show that the parties are caught right in the middle of the democratic pitfall.

Political support and political protest Political support is considered by Easton to be a crucial input for any political system, If the level of support for the system falls below a critical level, the system faces heavy stress and might eventually collapse. A ‘normally’ functioning system receives enough support, although lack of support or potential lack of support is a constant matter of concern (Easton 1965: 153339). Political support can be either overt or covert, manifest or latent. The first consists of actions that express acceptance or rejection of certain aspects of the system (paying taxes, marching in a rally against the government’s policy, killing the prime minister). Covert or latent support is a set of attitudes that might eventually be translated into overt action. I suggest leaving the word ‘support’ for actions and attitudes that do support the system, and labelling the opposite as ‘protest’. This is only a matter of wording, but since it is lack

265 of support in which we are ultimately interested, ‘protest’ is an easier and more straightforward term. A further differentiation is to be made between diffuse support and specific support. Specific support is directly linked to political outputs, i.e. decisions and associated verbal statements. Specific support is exchanged for an output that has been appreciated. Diffuse support, on the contrary, is not connected directly to the concrete performance of the system. Diffuse support is more a reservoir of goodwill that allows the citizens in the system to tolerate for some time and to a certain extent the outputs that they do not like. From the point of view of the political elites, the presence of diffuse support allows them to frustrate - still for some time and to a certain extent - the citizens’ expectations. In many cases diffuse support may not even be oriented directly towards the political system. Frequently it is mediated by intermediate structures. This is a further ‘security’ for the system. The support of the citizens might be oriented to a subgroup of society, in which they experience a feeling of belonging, or in which they trust the leadership. If the elites of the subgroup then actively support the system, they will bring in the support of their rank and file, even if their support is not explicitly focussed on the system as such. It is clear that political parties and mass-membership pressure groups can and do fulfil this function of mediating diffuse support, as long as they are themselves able to gather support for their own organization. Political cleavages - and then also political parties - can be considered as a source of stress for the political system, because they divide the population, and foster the development of partial loyalties. It is a conventional wisdom that too many cleavages or too much conflict in general makes the survival of democratic systems problematic (Almond 1965; Lipset 1960). Two solutions can then be put forward. The first defends the idea that a certain degree of homogeneity is indispensable for the survival of the system. This is the classical pluralist view, The second - the consociational view - explains how survival can be assured if the political elites are loyal to the system and thus ready to accommodate each other (Lijphart 1968). This strategy is only possible however, if the elites are supported by their own members, in other words, if they normally accept elite decisions. The acceptance can be based on the presence of goodwill (i.e. diffuse support), or simply because the output is considered to be adequate. In the latter case we are dealing with specific support. The exchange between good decisions and specific support seems easy and straightforward at first sight. Yet this is a very complex set of mechanisms, in which communication and perception play a central role. The citizens will give support, if they perceive the output as being adequate. They will then communicate their conclusion to the elites, who will react on the base of what they perceive as being the popular response to their outputs (Easton 1965: 343-467). It is important then to know in the first place who communicates the messages and who mediates them. And in the second place it is important

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to know the cultural context in which the messages are received and perceived. This cultural context consists of a number of expectations, like what is to be expected from politics, or what is acceptable as a demand. The same political output can be appreciated differently in a different context. Absence of a policy dealing with environmental pollution, for instance, can mean today that some citizens will withdraw support, but fifty years ago this nondecision would not have been perceived as bad policy. Expectations are also present on a more latent level of basic values. I will develop this later on, but here I can already point at the very simple fact that an individualistic culture increases the number of demands for the political system, and increases the chances that outputs will be perceived as not meeting the demands. Another aspect of the context in which the messages are sent and received is the complexity of the society and of its political system. In a complex i.e. modem - society, the effects of political decisions (Easton calls them ‘outcomes’) are not easy to see and to communicate. There is a double reason for that. The first is the time lag between a decision and the visibility of its effect. If a government decides to set up a massive housing programme in order to answer the demands of the inhabitants of the inner cities, who already show their distrust by leaving their traditional left-wing parties and by electing right-wing populists, the real effect of the programme might only become visible after a decade. The period between decision and visibility of the result will often be longer than the term of the government. That is why political elites tend to use in a systematic way associated verbal outputs in order to convince the population of the fact that they are doing the right thing. If the real effect cannot be communicated, the presumed effect must be communicated in a convincing way. Politics in a complex society becomes increasingly a battle of words. And of course one must then also let the mass media of communication enter the picture (e.g. Calise 1994) The second problem is that in a complex society it is simply more difficult to change things in a visible way. One can change many things, but society as such, or at least its major characteristics, has become fairly rigid. Demands for real radical change can not easily be met, and can certainly not be met within an acceptable time range. Complexity of society therefore increases the chances for erosion of support, unless of course the diffuse support is large enough to enable the citizens to live with the absence of the wanted outputs. One can assume that political elites try to be responsive, i.e. try to answer the demands in order to avoid the decline of specific support. This assumption is certainly valid in democracies. But trying to be responsive is not enough. The responsiveness must first be perceived as such (the problem I just dealt with), and must furthermore be possible. This raises the matter of the available means of response. The first of these means is the most general: money. Most political decisions or changes require financial means to implement them. Easton points

267 many times at the fact that the financial and economical inability to meet the high demands in the new democracies of the early sixties is at the centre of the explanation of their ultimate failure. Next, the elites do not always have the choice between real alternatives. The growing complexity of society, but also its internationalization, reduces dramatically the freedom of action of the political elites. The level of decision-making - the national state - that still attracts the bulk of the demands and still tries to answer them, is not necessarily the level at which this can indeed be done in the most acceptable or efficient way. Further the elites need to be capable of being responsive, and - keeping in mind the importance of the verbal outputs - they also need the ability of making believe that outputs are really dealing with the demands. It is a kind of ability that is very present in democratic regimes, since the elites are to a certain extent selected on their popularity, i.e. the degree in which the population believes that they are doing the right things or will do them in the near future. And, finally experience plays a role, not just the personal experience of the elites (including their ability) but also the experience of the system. Older systems have developed many routines with which they can easily and swiftly deal with a wide range of demands. New systems have to develop a new procedure for every new demand, and are therefore more easily confronted with the loss of patience among the population. But experience can also work in the other way. It can also account for the slow pace at which political systems adapt to deal with new types of demands.

Democracy as a source of political protest Having said all this, I have ended my overview of the Eastonian logic, at high speed and at high altitude, and therefore slightly superficially. But I have enough conceptual tools in my hands now to move to the heart of the matter. The questions to be answered are: how and why does democracy produce stress for political systems, i.e. produce the erosion of diffuse andor specific support? Once I have answered these questions, I can more intensively investigate the role of political parties in all this. I will discuss here five features of democracy that have direct effects on the political system, and that can be sources of reduction of support for the system. The value of freedom In the first place democracy defends and cherishes the value of freedom. In a democracy citizens are free to speak, free to move, free to form organizations. There are hardly any limits on what can be said and thought. A democracy obviously then tolerates a wide variety of demands. This is indeed

268 what Bobbio means when he states that a democracy is good at generating demands. Yet no political system can live without limits on the input of demands, and therefore some selection at least is needed. Because the value of political freedom lowers the thresholds for entry, a democracy - more than other regimes - needs procedures to avoid the overload of the system. Here Easton stresses the value of moderation, of being able to postpone, of being able to lose, of being able to accept that for the time being a number of demands will have to stay on the waiting list. New democracies, which have not yet had the time to develop these values thus tend to be confronted with loss of support. The people very close to the decision-making are very much aware of this need to select among demands even though this will frustrate at least a part of the public. Political elites in a democracy have to be able to play a subtle game, supporting the idea that demands can be sent to them, but also making clear that desired responses will not all come immediately. Political parties play an important role here. They are at the centre of this subtle game. By being there, by having a programme and an ideology, and by mobilizing the citizens to support them, they produce the political demands and they provoke them. And by being there, and especially by being a social group, they are the setting in which the people with common interests can be convinced of the fact that the demands are being processed. But they also provide a setting in which trust in elites can be based on other grounds than merely the evaluation of outputs. Strong parties, in other words, are the intermediate structures that allow democracies to live with the reality of not being able to answer the demands that they have allowed and even encouraged to be raised. I will pick up this point in the third part of this paper, but it is important to notice here that apparently the absence of mediation between citizens and elites makes democratic regimes quite vulnerable. They survive more easily when there is mediation, and especially when the mediation disconnects the otherwise direct relation between demands and outputs. As long as the intermediate structures, and especially the parties, are able to fulfil this function, the regime will not lose support. And its support will be based on support for the parties and trust of the party elites. This means very clearly that diffuse support for democratic regimes is produced mainly within the parties, and is produced as long as the parties themselves are able to attract this diffuse support. The very nature of diffuse support means that it needs to be based on other grounds than the positive evaluation of political outputs. At the heart of the debate about trust in democratic regimes is trust in parties.* By being central actors in democratic

* Parties are of course not the only targets. A fairly similar story could be told for other intermediate structures, like for instance trade unions, but I focus here only on parties. One good reason for that restriction is that the parties are indeed right at the heart of the debate.

269 politics they face the same problem as the regime. They actually represent the regime, and are therefore obviously blamed for what goes wrong. And one of the major things that can go wrong in a democracy is that the system is no longer able to meet the demands raised by its citizens. This brings me to a very straightforward conclusion: if parties are not able to disconnect the demands from the outputs by attracting a different kind of support, they will be confronted with a lack of goodwill both for themselves and for the political system as a whole. Thus one of my next tasks is to discuss the way in which parties attract support, the motivations to participate in parties and to vote for parties. Party theory has produced quite some insights on these matters, that might be used for further inquiry (see the section on parties below).

Individualization Democracy both defends and fosters freedom and equality. This is what makes modern liberal democracy so different from the ancient Greek democracy, where the freedom to participate was not a universal right. Yet there is one more striking difference between ancient and modem democracy, which also refers to political ethics. Greek political thinking stressed obligation to the polis as a collective body (Sartori 1987; Held 1987). Participation was not considered to be an individual right. Liberal democracy, on the other hand, is embedded in a political culture that stresses the inalienable rights of the individual citizens, including the right not to participate. Modem democracy has an individualist basis. That is exactly why it is called liberal (Talmon 1952). This value base has clear consequences for the functioning of democracy: it is a source of stress and disturbance. Actually I am close to the problem that I discussed in the previous section. The value of individual freedom shapes the way in which political performance is perceived and evaluated. The more the evaluation is done by comparing the outputs with individual wishes and demands, the more the performance will be evaluated as failing. If individualism is as old as democracy, one should be able to find the mechanisms with which democracy tries to deal with this problem. What is needed is a set of values functioning as a counterbalance to individualism. They will have to refer to limitation, restraint and moderation, to the notion of collectivity and the collective will of the people, to solidarity and to abiding by the rules that are binding for everybody. And these are values that clearly go against individualism, that conceive of the individual as part of a larger social body. Mass parties have mobilized with these kind of values, often latently but also often overtly. They have mobilized people by referring to them as social subgroups, as collectivities with common interests. By doing so, they have provided cultural frameworks that avoid an evaluation of the political outputs in strict individual terms. But at the same time their ideologies clearly re-

270 ferred to the individual rights, to the right of every citizen to be able to be really free and really equal to the others. By being quite successful in this emancipation of the masses, the mass parties have brought their rank and file into a situation in which it becomes more easy for them to reason in these individual terms. This is a situation in which the collective solution is not necessarily the most obvious solution. A further democratization of society means then a further emphasis on the values of individual freedom. Post-war society - as has often been argued - is different, for it provides finally for large groups of people the comfort of economic well-being and the comfort and the values of higher education (Inglehart 1977). This accounts for a general cultural individualization, both in material and post-material matters. One might differentiate between two types of individualism: instrumental and expressive (Elchardus 1990). The instrumental individualism is the individualism of self-interest. It becomes more obvious and normal when material well-being is present, and when at least a number of those who have attained a new a higher level of well-being move away from the traditional collective values to become more ‘liberal’ (Gregoire 1966). They keep the material expectations, but evaluate them in a more individualist way, and therefore place a higher load on the decisionmakers who try to provide the well-being. The expressive individualism is the kind of attitude that is associated with post-materialism. It is the search for societal (and party) structures that leave enough space for individual participation, for individual self-actualization. It is the kind of attitude that breeds the lack of confidence in large bureaucratic structures which reduce individuals to numbers or barcodes. It is the kind of individualism that tends to reject power and authority, that tends to defend the idea that forbidding should be forbidden. These new values have slowly but surely penetrated modern western democracies, and it can be argued that the recent success of right-wing extremism - with a lot of anti-party sentiment ventilated through it - is a reaction against that. In a society in which the dominant values tend to become those of the post-materialist elites, the lower classes might easily get the feeling that society is moving on without them, that the elites (especially the party elites) discuss matters and speak a language that is not theirs (Ignazi 1992). Democracy thus introduces individualism, and the further democratization of society has increased the importance of both the reality and the value of individualism. That is a problem, because it colours the way in which the political outputs are evaluated. Identical outputs will be evaluated as less adequate in a more individualist environment. Majoritarian decision-making

Democracy’s working principle is the idea that the majority of the population has the right to rule over the minority. That is a working principle and not a basic value. It is a working principle that tries to solve the very simple

27 1 problem: who are ‘the people’ and what do they want? An answer is needed if decisions are to be legitimated by referring to the will of the people. Finding an answer would be easier if freedom were not valued, because freedom permits the people to differ so widely, to come up with so many different questions and demands. As soon as two different solutions for one problem are put forward, it is necessary to choose between them. Democracy cannot go for what seems to be the most elegant or the cheapest or the easiest solution even if this is extremely tempting. It needs to go for the solution of the people. The generally accepted way out then is count heads and to consider the majority of the citizens to be genuinely ‘the people’. That will in any case frustrate those members of society not belonging to the majority. That is why democracy can only survive if one is prepared to accept this frustration as part of the game. But it is a risky procedure to first let everybody express their wishes, and then to stop counting these when 50% is reached. Democracy is a risky game. Democracy undermines its own support. There is of course an alternative, that is, a less far-reaching use of the majoritarian principle. The ideal democracy is the one that can work by consensus. On the other and, the presence of real consensus is the perfect indicator of the lack of democracy at the input-side. A second-best solution is trying to approach consensus, or trying to avoid frustrating significant and visible minorities. This is the ‘proportional’ solution, or in its extreme forms the consociational solution. All relevant groups are included and all relevant groups get their fair share. That avoids one kind of frustration, but produces another one among those who expect clear decisions. This type of democracy tends to constantly muddle through, never really coming to solutions. Hence, the idea that the people should at least support the decisions either leads to the alienation of significant minorities or to the fear, or impossibility, of clear solutions. Both are sources of protest, and that is perfectly normal in democracies. The competitive logic Democracy is a competition, where the people - or at least 50% of the people - decide who is the provisional winner. That is why political elites in democracies tend to be fairly responsive or at least pretend to be responsive, tend to be very sensitive to the demands and to the degree of support. But the competition easily makes the elites too responsive, which then has direct effects on the level of support. This relates to the general idea that everybody should be free to issue demands. Therefore, democracy as such already keeps alive the belief that the system can be responsive, that it can indeed produce solutions for the problems that have been raised. Democracy keeps very much alive the idea that politics really controls society, that politics can steer society in a given direction and stop it from going in another direction. In the previous para-

272 graphs I have discussed the way in which this belief, if it is not tempered, leads to withdrawal of support for the system, because no system is able to answer all questions at the same time and is certainly unable to satisfy the demands when the outputs are evaluated in individual terms. Yet the competitive aspect of democracy does not reduce belief in the potential capacity of the system; it reinforces it. And this reinforcement is done by the political elites who compete with each other, i.e. by the party elites. They want to be the most popular, the most appreciated, and therefore will try to listen carefully to what the voters want. And they will themselves promise more and better, in order to outbid their opponents. In a nutshell, competition makes it almost impossible to reduce the expectations of the voters. This all looks like a very mechanical vote-maximizing strategy, not too close to the real world. That is right. Political elites competing with each other do not need to rely solely on this direct exchange of votes for promises and of votes for promises that have been kept. They can also rely on more general diffuse support for the ideas that they defend, for the social (sub)group for which they speak. But this is a real and strong tendency. And the more the parties are unable to keep loyal and trusting voters and members on the basis of diffuse support, as a result precisely of individualization, the more they will compete on concrete promises and issues, and the more they will be confronted with the problem that they cannot keep all their promises for everybody. Furthermore, individualization undermines the capacity of parties to rely on group loyalties. If everybody is expecting promise fulfilment in an individual way, support - both specific and diffuse - will further decline. So once again I have highlighted a logic within democracy that undermines support. And once again, as should be very obvious by now, I have shown that the failures of the parties are directly connected to the perceived failure of the political system. The complexity of modern society

This last feature - the complexity of society - is not really a feature of democracy. Other regimes can be complex too. But there is at least an empirical relation: the modern western society, which is a highly complex society, is also democratic. And therefore the complexity is important to look at. As mentioned already above, the effect of the complexity is mainly on the communication of outputs and of their effects. In the first place I can assume that a system - even if it is a democracy (with high demands and high expectations) - is able to be responsive, to react in an acceptable way to an acceptable number of demands. Specific support then should not go down. Yet the problem is the time-lag between the decision and the awareness of its effects among those who asked for the solution. Good decision will not be perceived as such if they take too long, and specific support will shrink. To avoid this, political elites must rely on verbal outputs, trying to

273 convince people that the right thing has been done, and will certainly be seen later. Needless to say, a firm dose of goodwill is needed to make the people believe this. When the goodwill is gone, nothing less than the real thing and not merely its name will be needed to keep the specific support. But that is very difficult in a complex society. The second problem is simply the inability to change society radically and quickly in a visible way. The complexity of society is very much in conflict with expectations that it should be changed. Democracy has both sides of this: high expectations and complexity. Internationalization of society confronts the political elites with the same kind of problem as complexity: the level at which they are in power is not the only level at which power is needed to make things move, and maybe it is not even the most important level. This is an experience that is very visible in countries belonging to the European Union. The European level is incrementally draining power from the national decision-makers, while the democratic control of decision-making is not at the European but at the national level. Distrust of a remote and abstract Europe is thus deflected towards national elites. The consequence is also that the elites will try to rely on words in order to explain what is going on, and in order to explain that they are doing the right job. And since it is extremely difficult to check whether they indeed do the right job, doing the easy wrong job and spreading a different message is another way of trying to avoid the problem.

The parties This list of built-in challenges to modern democracy is certainly not exhaustive. However it points specifically at problems that affect the level of support and raises questions that refer easily to the evolution of parties and to antiparty sentiment. It is now time to link the story of democracy to the story of parties. This has not often been done. There is much literature on democracy and on the pressures on democracy, but the role of parties and especially the changing role of parties in democracies is seldom linked to the general analysis of democracy (a notable exception is Pizzorno 1981). Since I have been describing the erosion of support as a result of the democratization of society, and as a result of the lack or erosion of structures that can help to deal with these disturbances, it is clear that I can not consider pressure on the parties to be a very recent phenomenon. The pressure is part of democracy and is therefore as old as democracy. But the role of parties as intermediate structures that might soothe or even reverse the disturbances is essential in this, and recent evolutions in parties might account for the increased pressure on the system and for the decreased level of support. The evolution of parties has generally been described and explained by referring to the societal context in which they act. This societal context might

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also be responsible for pressure on democracy. There can be a direct effect, when societal changes that affect the parties also produce a reduction of the support for the political system. There can also be an indirect effect, as Berger (1979) very convincingly argues, when societal changes affect the parties and therefore affect the role that they used to play as intermediate structures between citizens and elites, as structures able to mediate support. I will focus on the second aspect, on the indirect effect. That also means that I will deliberately ignore a conceptual differentiation the importance of which I do not at all deny. Support (or protest) can be oriented at the political authorities (the individuals) or at the regime. The difference is crucial, since protest against the incumbent authorities can be considered to be normal. The authorities can simply be replaced. Protest oriented at the system however is less normal, and produces stress for the system as such. Anti-party sentiment, which is my concern, is somewhere in the middle. It is expressed by a lack of confidence in the elites of the (traditional) political parties. Replacing them might solve the problem. Yet I believe that something more fundamental is at stake, and that distrust of the parties hurts the democratic regime as well. One might also put it the other way round: distrust of the system and the way in which it functions - because it is not responsive enough - is oriented at its major actors. And these are the parties. They are in the middle of the storm. The point I would like to make is that the democratization of society fosters the rise of specific anti-party sentiment, oriented at the traditional, established, governing parties. I do not have the space here to discuss all the details. I am more inclined to show how useful the idea can be. Therefore I will focus on two approaches that deal with the evolutions of parties during the last few decades. Both suggest the amval of a new type of party: the catch-all party (Kirchheimer 1966) and the cartel party (Katz & Mair 1995). Both stones start with the traditional mass party. That mass party (Duverger) is the result of mass democracy. It is a type of party well fit to meet the conditions of mass democracy. The mass party can be considered as very ‘societal’, because it originated from society and is deeply rooted in society. It is more than merely a political organization. It tends to embrace its members and followers, to organize them in a wide network of interconnected organizations, all recruiting in the same category of the population. This category is a well-defined and more or less ascriptive group. Kirchheimer has argued that this type of party will disappear because of the societal changes occurring since the Second World War. The erosion of traditional boundaries, both social and religious, confront the mass parties with a shrinking or at least shifting electorate. And this is why they will adapt, changing their organizational forms and strategies (Deschouwer 1992). By reducing its ideological baggage, strengthening the leadership, reducing the role of the individual members, leaving its ‘classe gardCe’ and securing access to a wider variety of pressure groups, the catch-all party is clearly

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becoming more political and less societal than the mass party. Its former strength, namely the direct links with a societal subgroup, becomes a weakness now, because the relevance of the subgroup itself is declining, because recruiting by referring to the old language of that subgroup no longer guarantees success. And because parties are in a competition for votes they feel the pressure to adapt in that direction. Another societal change that affects the parties is the amval of the welfare state. I already pointed at the fact that the presence of the welfare state influences societal values, and especially reduces the belief in collective action. The action needed to create the welfare state is not automatically, seen as important and relevant to keeping it. Keeping it becomes normal when one gets used to it. Kirchheimer uses this argument to explain why especially the leftist mass parties, the parties at which he looks in the first place, are confronted with the need to adapt. Of course this story needs quite a few nuances (Wolinetz 1979), and needs a warning against the pitfall of good-looking typologies (Deschouwer 1992, 1993) but for this purpose I can stick to the standard story. Katz & Mair (1995) stress the fact that the catch-all party is to be seen mainly as an organizational adaptation, which it is, but they also put forward the idea that the new organizational forms and strategies refer to a new or at least adapted concept of democracy. While the mass party serves as a representative of a well-defined societal subgroup, the logic of the catch-all party resembles a consumer-logic. The party acts as a broker between state and society, and tries to sell consumers the products that they have been ordering. Offering or promising the best products, with the best and most professional advertising, is believed to be the best strategy to success. As a result of societal changes, the success of the parties is no longer guaranteed by stability and trust within the group, but rather by the ability to deliver concrete results. What is making the parties so vulnerable, is the increasing inability to rely on collective social incentives (Clark & Wilson 1961; Panebianco 1988; Deschouwer 1990). This is something that has too often been neglected in party research. The incentives used by party organizations are mostly divided into selective material incentives and collective ideological incentives, while the kind of exchange that guarantees the most stability is exactly the possibility of relying on the feelings of belonging to a relevant social group (Luhmann 1964; Deschouwer 1990). This is exactly what mass parties could do, as long as they were indeed societal enough, as long as these social groups had clear boundaries. The erosion of the social base of the mass parties pushes them towards new strategies, but these strategies have, according to Katz & Mair, consequences for democracy. The ‘broker’ concept of democracy means, in Eastonian terms, that the support for the system and for the parties is now increasingly sought in specific terms. Because they are less able to rely on a long lasting diffuse support that is based on social definitions and on their being rooted in the social subgroups, the parties themselves encourage a

276 model of democracy in which support is mainly deserved in exchange for specific outputs. By adapting themselves in this way, the parties make the political system more vulnerable. They do not any more - or not to the same extent as before - aggregate demands and produce the reservoir of goodwill, the reservoir of diffuse support that a system needs, that especially a democracy needs when it must select some demands and reject others. Because of this change governing becomes extremely important for the parties, because governing parties are able to control state outputs, and to deliver the goods they have been promising. This is where Katz & Mair (1995) introduce the idea of ‘cartel’. They refer then to a kind of party that is part of a cartel, that not only adapts itself but also adapts the rules of the game and the rules of the state in order to be able to stay within the cartel. Winning office is crucial. This kind of party is more likely to be fully evident in systems such as consociational ones where there is some tradition of ‘arranging’ the situation in order to admit all relevant actors. However, the adaptation towards catch-all party and further towards cartel party, which is the result of an attempt to survive in a changing world, is not a guarantee for success. Actually, the adaptation has failed. It has failed because traditional parties are still vulnerable, and are indeed even more vulnerable than ever before. The reason for this is that the new organizational forms and strategies have made democracy a more individual game, less mediated by collective party organizations, and as a result of that the party elites - being the state elites - are blamed for not being responsive enough. They have lost touch with the public (Andeweg 1993). There is a wide gap of confidence between the elites of the established parties and the electorate. By using these new organizational forms and strategies, the parties have themselves participated - pressed also by the competitive democratic logic in which they act - in boosting expectations to levels that cannot be met. They can not be met because they are too high. They cannot be met because the power and the room to really change things is too narrow. They cannot even be met in a symbolic or verbal way, because the parties do not have their own media of communication any more, and because their communications over the mass media are received in an atmosphere that is already one of distrust. Conclusion

No political system, according to Easton, can survive only on specificsupport. Certainly no democracy can survive only on specific support, because democracy offers too many possibilities to express demands, and is therefore structurally overloaded by them (Bobbio 1987). A democracy also and especially needs diffuse support. This used to be provided and mediated mainly (although not only) by the parties. Their adaptation has pushed democracy into a direction in which it runs into trouble. In order to save themselves, the

277 parties have created and enforced a situation in which they are even more vulnerable than before. The protest against the system is oriented at the parties. But then the parties are to a great extent the system. Democracy is coming of age. It is confronted now with an electorate that takes the individual democratic freedom to choose very seriously, and that is not prepared to accept just any story. The parties have brought citizens to this point. And having come so far, the parties are the victims of their own success.

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Workshop ‘Antiparty sentiment’ at the Madrid Joint Sessions of the ECPR. I want to thank Thomas Poguntke and Susan Scarrow for their useful comments on an earlier version.

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