Herbert Kitschelt

Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies

Since the 1960s, successive protest movements have challenged public policies, established modes of political participation and socio-economic institutions in advanced industrial democracies. Social scientists have responded by conducting case studies of such movements. Comparative analyses, particularly cross-national comparisons of social movements, however, remain rare, although opportunities abound to observe movements with similar objectives or forms of mobilization in diverse settings.

Continuity and change in contemporary capitalism

In the early 1980s, many observers, argued that powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties created successful mixed economies promoting economic growth, full employment, and a modicum of social equality. The present book assembles scholars with formidable expertise in the study of advanced capitalist politics and political economy to reexamine this account from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990s. The authors find that the conventional wisdom no longer adequately reflects the political and economic realities. Advanced democracies have responded in path-dependent fashion to such novel challenges as technological change, intensifying international competition, new social conflict, and the erosion of established patterns of political mobilization. The book rejects, however, the currently widespread expectation that ‘internationalization’ makes all democracies converge on similar political and economic institutions and power relations. Diversity among capitalist democracies persists, though in a different fashion than in the ‘Golden Age’ of rapid economic growth after World War II.

Linkages between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities

Research on democratic party competition in the formal spatial tradition of Downs and the comparative-historical tradition of Lipset and Rokkan assumes that linkages of accountability and responsiveness between voters and political elites work through politicians’ programmatic appeals and policy achievements. This ignores, however, alternative voter-elite linkages through the personal charisma of political leaders and, more important, selective material incentives in networks of direct exchange (clientelism). In light of the diversity of linkage mechanisms appearing in new democracies and changing linkages in established democracies, this article explores theories of linkage choice. It first develops conceptual definitions of charismatic, clientelist, and programmatic linkages between politicians and electoral constituencies. It then asks whether politicians face a trade-off or mutual reinforcement in employing linkage mechanisms. The core section of the article details developmentalist, statist, institutional, political-economic, and cultural-ideological theories of citizen-elite linkage formation in democracies, showing that none of the theories is fully encompassing. The final section considers empirical measurement problems in comparative research on linkage.

Left-Libertarian Parties: Explaining Innovation in Competitive Party Systems

Since the 1960s, new left-socialist or ecology parties have appeared in approximately half of the advanced Western democracies. These parties have a common set of egalitarian and libertarian tenets and appeal to younger, educated voters. The author uses macropolitical and economic data to explain the electoral success of these left-libertarian parties. While high levels of economic development are favorable preconditions for their emergence, they are best explained in terms of domestic political opportunity structures. There is little evidence that these parties are a reaction to economic and social crises in advanced democracies. The findings suggest that the rise of left-libertarian parties is the result of a new cleavage mobilized in democratic party systems rather than of transient protest.

Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Citizen–politician linkages: an introduction

Since the 1970s, the “Third Wave” of democratic transitions has, by greatly enlarging the number and type of democracies, raised a host of new research questions on the dynamics of democratic accountability and responsiveness. After an initial period of scholarly attention to the process of regime transition, there has recently been a major effort to explain the origin and effects of democratic institutions, such as electoral laws, federalism structure, or presidential and parliamentary systems. After more than a decades worth of research, however, it now seems that the explanatory power of formal democratic institutions for democratic process features is more limited than many had hoped. Party systems vary tremendously even among single member district plurality electoral systems. Furthermore, institutional arguments have little to say about the substantive alignments that rally citizens around rival contenders or the strategic appeals made by leading politicians in each camp. One important area that has not received sufficient attention is the wide variation in patterns of linkages between politicians, parties and citizens. The political science literature has, since the 1950s, been dominated by the “responsible party government” model, the logic of which forms the basis of both rational choice theories (Downs 1957) as well as historical-comparative approaches (e.g., Lipset and Rokkan 1967). This model sees politics as the result of interaction of principals (citizens, voters) and agents (candidates for electoral office, elected officials), characterized by five essential ingredients.

Industrial governance structures, innovation strategies, and the case of Japan: sectoral or cross-national comparative analysis?

In comparative research on industrial policy strategies, attention has shifted from national-level variables to sectoral variables in both the description and the explanation of policy. The sectoral literature, however, lacks analytic focus and has provided little systematic insight into the causes of cross-sectoral variance in governance structures and policy strategies. Based on recent contributions to the economics and sociology of formal organizations, this article attempts to sharpen the concept of “industrial sector” and to provide a rationale for why sectoral structures and strategies vary. Next, it develops a synthetic explanatory framework that combines sectoral analysis and national domestic structuralism in order to account for industrial innovation strategies in advanced capitalist countries. In the final section, the fruitfulness of this approach is illustrated by developing a new account of Japans success and failure in industrial innovation, an account that overcomes the contradictions among the main alternatives offered in the past. The key objective of the article, however, is to develop a new set of theoretical hypotheses for cross-national research, not a rigorous empirical test of its main propositions.

European Party Systems: Continuity and Change

The debate about the stability or change in contemporary Western European party systems is characterised by a cacophony of contradictory voices. On one side are those who see still the same old blocs of parties on the left and the right, large and small party machines, and dominance of parties’ parliamentary and government leaders over the party membership. On the other side, some see a dramatic process of restructuring in European party systems with new parties, profound shifts of power and strategy within established parties, and novel forms of party organisation. Many of the seemingly contradictory views can be explained by distinguishing different types of party system change. I will first provide a simplified sketch of conventional post-Second World War European party systems and then turn to the changes in European polities since the 1960s or 1970s.

Citizens, politicians, and party cartellization: Political representation and state failure in post-industrial democracies

This paper critiques what can be interpreted as an application of the literature on state failure in current political economy and political science to the changing role of political parties in advanced post-industrial democracies, Katz and Mairs theory of cartel parties. It develops an alternative set of hypotheses about the dynamics of parties and party systems with the objective to clarify empirical terms according to which rival propositions can be tested. Specifically, the paper rejects three propositions in the theory of cartel parties and advances the following alternatives. First, party leaders are not divorced from their members and voting constituencies, but become ever more sensitive to their preferences. Second, inter-party cooperation generates a prisoners dilemma in the competitive arena that ultimately prevents the emergence of cartels. Ideological convergence of rival parties has causes external to the competitive arena, not internal to it. Third, conventional parties cannot marginalize or coopt new challengers, but must adjust to their demands and electoral appeals. The age of cartel parties, if it ever existed, is not at its beginning, but its end.

The radical right in the Alps : evolution of support for the Swiss SVP and Austrian FPO

The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) in 1999 became the only far-right parties in post-war Western Europe to outpoll their mainstream conservative competitors. As such, they are limiting cases and yield a great deal of information about the development and prospects for the far-right in Europe. We analyze the evolution and success of these parties, using survey data to track their changing electorates. We find that the FPÖ and SVP have evolved into the typical profile of ‘new radical-right’ parties in terms of their appeal and supporters. However, they have also been able to appeal to a broader electorate, which in part explains their success.

The Left-Right Semantics and the New Politics Cleavage:

Since the 1960s, political scientists have debated the continued relevance of the left-right vocabulary for structuring policy choices and party affiliation in the mass publics of modern democracies. With the rise of “new politics” and “left-libertarian” movements and parties that try to redefine the political agenda of advanced democracies this issue has gained additional interest. In this article we first present four theories about the decline, persistence, transformation, or pluralization of the meaning new politics activists give to the left-right language. Then we explore how new politics activists in the Belgian ecology parties Agalev and Ecolo construct the meaning of left and right. For ecology party militants, this terminology still has an economic meaning, yet also gains a cultural significance that relates to the choice between a modern, highly centralized, and differentiated society and efforts to create a postmodern, decentralized, and more communitarian social order. Thus our data support the argument of pluralization theory that the meaning of left and right becomes multidimensional.