Luciano Bardi

The Parameters of Party Systems

Despite the scepticism that increasingly surrounds their role and standing in contemporary democracies, scholarly interest in political parties continues unabated. But this interest is also proving uneven, with relatively little attention now being given to the study of party systems. More specifically, the level of theoretical interest in party systems remains limited, with almost no substantial innovations being made since the publication of Sartoris classic work of 1976. In this article, we seek to redress some of this neglect by identifying the relevant parameters that can be used in the definition of party systems and, possibly, in the explanation of party system change. We then go on to look at the minimum defining characteristics of a system of parties (as opposed to a set of parties) before finally arguing that party systems are best understood as multidimensional phenomena in which we identify and discuss the implications of three types of division — vertical, horizontal and functional.

Responsive and Responsible? The Role of Parties in Twenty-First Century Politics

This article focuses on a particular aspect dear to theories of democracy in general and theories of representation in particular: the tension between responsiveness and responsibility affecting political parties in modern, liberal democracies. In doing so, it engages with Peter Mair’s intellectual passion for this topic, which he developed over the years and intensively worked on until his premature death in 2011. He argued that this tension became ever more apparent, putting the very functioning and legitimacy of democratic government under great pressure. This contribution goes back in time, to the very beginning of the modern state, and argues that already the nascent parties and party systems were affected by the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. It then offers a synopsis, organised in a series of ‘pictures’ or ‘frames’ of the historical parcours along which this tension has impacted on the development of political parties. The article also presents and summarises the collective effort undertaken by a number of scholars, coming together to honour Peter Mair’s work, to shed further theoretical and empirical light on this fundamental tension.

Electoral change and its impact on the party system in Italy

The importance of electoral change as a factor of party system transformation in post-1992 Italy is evaluated by observing two distinct components of electoral change: changes in electoral behaviour and changes in the electoral law, and their impact in the different arenas (electoral, parliamentary, etc.) in which parties compete as individual independent actors or as components of more or less organic coalitions. The analysis of numerous party system indicators shows that electoral factors are not only responsible for most of the changes which occurred in the party system after the effects of Tangentopoli were exhausted, but also for the creation of a structural divergence between the electoral and the parliamentary party systems.

Transnational Trends in European Parties and the 1994 Elections of the European Parliament

The main objective of this report is to assess the impact of institutional factors and elections on the transnationalization of European parties and on the evolution of the European Unions (EU) party system. Institutional factors, which are effective during the European Parliaments (EP) legislative term, appear to favor the consolidation of the longerestablished and larger EP party groups (EPP, PES, LDR) and ultimately of the EU party system. By contrast, elections can be very disruptive, especially for the more recent and smaller EP groups, and are a negative factor in party system consolidation. The two combined effects appear to have contributed to the creation of a two-speed party system in the EU, characterized by an increasingly institutionalized core and by a mutable and unstable periphery.

Party organisational change in Italy (1991–2006)

This article analyses, adopting the well-known approach of Katz and Mair, the issue of organizational change within Italian political parties since 1990. In addition to an account of trends in membership, local units, finances, staff, and of changes in party statutes, the article aims at testing the widespread view in the literature that organizational resources–hence power–are becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of party and/or parliamentary leaders, and correspondingly that the territorial presence of parties is declining. The analysis of the change over time of Katz and Mairs party organisational ‘faces’ leads to the confirmation, to a large extent, of the overall hypothesis of a decline of the party at ground level, and a concentration of party resources in the central office, and above all in the party in public office.

Party adaptation and change and the crisis of democracy

This article is the introduction to a special issue of articles written in honour of Peter Mair. The general theme of the issue is party adaptation and change, which is traced here through an analysis of contributions by Peter Mair as an individual author or with co-authors. The result is an assessment of the current state of the art of what can be cumulatively considered Peter Mairs theory of party adaptation and of the debate it has generated up to and including the contributions included in the special issue itself.

MODELS OF PARTY ORGANIZATION AND EUROPARTIES

This chapter examines the development of political parties at the European level (henceforth referred to as Europarties) in relation to models developed to understand party organizations at the national level, with a particular focus on how such models affect the ability of parties to perform democratic functions (that is, linking citizens to policy-making institutions). Specifically, we argue that Europarties, in their current form, were created as an organizational response to changing systemic and societal conditions at the national and European levels. We conclude that Europarties appear to be elements and/or manifestations of the organizational development of political parties in European democracies’ multi-level political systems rather than organizations specifically created to perform democratic functions at the European Union (EU) level. In this sense, they exhibit deficiencies that are even more pronounced than those of contemporary national parties of the ‘cartel type’ (which are predominant in Europe and arguably in Canada), and thus fail to offer a realistic solution to Europe’s democratic deficit.

Old logics for new games: the appointment of the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

This article seeks to identify the main dimensions of the conflicts that arose around the choice of the European Union’s first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR). The article aims at developing a series of frames to describe systematically the nested games that surrounded the appointment and emphasise the interactions between party politics, institutional dynamics and intergovernmental bargaining. In the absence of an extensive literature, we have resolved to engage in a preliminary empirical exploration of the processes that led to the appointment of Catherine Ashton through an analysis of the Italian and British press on the different perceptions that prevailed in the two countries whose candidates were the main competitors in this highly controversial process. Our hypothesis is that, due to the relative lack of institutionalisation of the procedures and routines that characterised the HR’s appointment, member states would behave by following their institutionalised logics, based on intergovernmental bargaining.