Book Review The Study of Party Politics in the Twenty-First Century John Aldrich * . Handbook of Party Politics, edited by Richard S. Katz and William Crotty Sage Publications, London, 2006 pp. ix – 550, $130.00 The editors of the Handbook of Party Politics open this volume by noting that “[p]olitical parties have repeatedly been acknowledged as the critical link to democratic governance.” 1 They seem to agree with the slightly different claim, moreover, that political parties are ubiquitous in democracies.
2 It is this pair of related points that not only provides one of the major impetuses to study political parties, but also motivates the potential reader. This volume addresses a great number of questions but also leaves a number of questions open for future consideration. My commentary on this Handbook will use the opportunity not [only?] to assess the volume as a whole but to assess where party theory is now and where it is most likely to move forward fruitfully in developing a coherent body of work to answer the question about the ubiquity and criticality of the link between parties and democratic governance. But let me first make a few introductory comments about this volume.
The Scope of the Handbook
* John H. Aldrich is Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science, Duke University. This review essay was written while in residence at the Social and Political Theory Program, Research School in the Social Sciences, Australian National University 1 Katz and Crotty, Introduction, p. 1. Hereafter, Handbook references will be cited in the text with a parenthetical noting the pageor chapter number. 2 They are ubiquitous in nations with large electorates, at any rate, but that includes essentially every nation that claims to be democratic. Parties even occur commonly in non-democratic regimes, although I will ignore that point for here, just as the authors and editors did for the most part in this volume. It is my opinion and perhaps that of the editors that, even though political organizations in non-democratic regimes call themselves political parties, they are actually a different species, or perhaps even a different genus, from organizations with the same name in democracies. 1

According to the editors, this handbook has the following rationale and purposes (p. 3): The widely acknowledged centrality of parties, coupled with the obvious scope and pace of party change, makes political parties both an important and an exciting field for research. As with any rapidly developing and substantively broad field, the parties literature is itself both broad and rapidly developing – and, moreover, in many respects, quite fragmented. In this context, we had two objectives in inviting many of the world’s leading scholars in the field of political parties to contribute to this Handbook. The first objective is to provide a reliable and thorough summary of the major theories and approaches that have been, and continue to be, prominent in the development of the field…. The other, and complementary, objective is to identify the theories, approaches, and research efforts that define the current “cutting edge” of the field. What do these scholars understand to be the most important questions that need to be addressed and what do they see as the most promising avenues for addressing them? They made manifest these objectives by taking the 45 chapters into 6 substantive units, that thereby provide greater specification of their objectives: the definition of party; the functions of party; party organization; party and society; parties and the 2

state; and parties in the future. It seems to me that the purpose of a reviewer is to assess whether these are the right questions for such a volume, and, if so, whether the authors and editors achieved their stated objectives. Let me begin this task with two major points – they will not occupy a great deal of this review—indeed only the rest of this paragraph—but they should be understood as this reviewer complimenting the editors on achieving a great success. First, these are fine and worthy objectives. Only with a dramatically different intended audience would one want anything other than these as the objectives. I readily acknowledge that some of my comments are, indeed, unfair, because I will be asking them to address questions they did not ask - and to ask questions that I just said that I agreed it appropriate not to ask! Second, they did in fact convince many of the world’s leading party scholars to contribute to this Handbook. Even if the editors did no more than turn loose the leading scholars of the subject onto blank pages, something valuable would result. But, in fact, they turned them loose with just enough constraint to make a reasonable degree of coherence to the enterprise. The result of these two points is that there is great value in this Handbook.
Questions Asked about Political Parties and Democracy
So, let me now return to the assessment of the role of political parties in democracies and on how this volume led me to ask some questions about this “critical linkage between parties and democratic governance.” 3 This volume, with a few exceptions, provides the state-of-the-art account about where we are now in that quest. Its strengths and weaknesses, or perhaps the strengths and weaknesses of the literature, have also helped me better understand what particular research questions are ripe for asking and in which particular directions we still need to go. 3 As you will soon see, the volume also proposes answers to some of the questions. 3

The chain of questioning goes something like this. The first and perhaps most basic question about the critical linkage is to ask whether political parties are necessary for successful democratic governance. That is, does the presence of a sufficiently successful democracy imply the presence of political parties? And, of course, the negation is perhaps even more interesting: If parties are absent is there no successful democratic governance? Second, we need to ask a question about timing. Can parties exist before democracy is effective? Might parties even be the forces that initiate a transition to democracy? What I take to be the answer implied in this volume is that parties are a marker of progress along the transition. That is, it is the transition itself that initiates the creation of political parties. Given some sense of the causal relationship between parties and democracy, we then come to a series of questions that flow almost immediately from one to another. It is not uncommon to imagine that the excesses of competition can be averted if there were but a single party in national unity. Not only have communist nations particularly those going by titles such as the “democratic people’s republic” so assumed, but so have others thought so. James Monroe, for instance, sought to create a single party for national unity, and he was successful in the short run, albeit in what turned out be a very short run. Would a single party satisfy the requisite condition? The answer offered here seems to be a quite clear “No.” And if that is so, we thus need to have at least two competitive parties to satisfy the necessary condition linking parties and democracy.
4 This question then raises what I think is the crux of the matter – which is to raise questions unanswered as of today, but questions that must be addressed to 4 Of course, that still leaves open the question of sufficiency. 4

develop a satisfactory theory to account for the parties-democracy linkage. Is it necessary only that there be at least two parties, or is it necessary that there be a system of parties? And, if the latter, just what is a party system? Whether intentionally or not, this volume reveals that the field is cleanly divided into two groups, those engaged in the study of particular parties (even if studying very many particular parties at once) and those who study party systems. If it is the case that democracy can flourish so long as there are at least two political parties, then some other rationale must be given for studying party systems. Similarly, if it is necessary to have a system of parties to make democratic governance successful, then the study of particular parties is unhelpful to this question, as doing so seriously misspecifies the equation between parties-in-a-system and democratic governance. That is, particular parties take on meaning for democracy only in relationship to the full party system in which they are embedded. This literature reveals another confounding distinction. It appears that there are two quite unrelated understandings of what we mean by the term “party systems,” but this division is often overlooked in favor of seeing the distinction as one of “American exceptionalism,” which happens to be coterminous with the two definitions of party systems. So, the answer to the question of just what is a party system is that its definition varies, and this variance reveals more than just the differences that certainly do exist between American and other nations’ political parties.
5 The first sense of “party systems” looks at differences in parties and democratic institutions in the cross-section, asking the comparative question of how one nation is similar to or different from some other(s)? The second sense of “party system” draws from the way the American literature looks at party systems over time 5 While not germane to the central issue, it may also be that the distinction of American exceptionalism is not really between American and all other political parties, but between American and specifically European (or advanced industrial nations’) political parties. 5

and thus compares parties and institutions in dynamic and in historical terms. Both the cross-sectional and the historical or cross-time ways of viewing party systems have important methodological limitations, but both offer crucial perspectives, such that each is incomplete in the absence of consideration of the other. Considering the contributions and limitations in the literature, as revealed in this volume, to our understanding of these questions prepares us for the assessment of what seems to me to be the best path for progressing from this point towards a better understanding of democracy and of the role of political parties in it. That progress will come, I believe, from offering a more compelling theory that unites the study of a particular party or particular parties with the study of party systems. Were we to succeed in that task, we would, I further believe, not only offer a way to solve specific problems raised by, and close specific gaps left in, the literature on political parties, but we would also provide leverage on the content of that critical linkage between political parties and democratic governance. And so doing offers at least some prospect for developing a rich enough understanding of party system to encompass both comparative and historical dynamics. I conclude therefore by proposing how to proceed by drawing from a literature that, while not absent from this volume, has apparently not been able to seep fully through the literatures that compose the central content of the field of political parties, and thus be assimilated into the main thrust of the field.
Answers Offered
We think of democracy primarily in its liberal version, in which its very definition is of open, free competition for control of government. Hence follows the 6

centrality of elections to liberal democracies.
6 Indeed, it is generally agreed that, at least in any large society, elections of some sort are practically required even though they may not be logically necessary nor are they sufficient for successful democratic governance. It is in this light that Susan Scarrow makes a compelling argument that the connection between parties and democracies is, at least in the historical sense, necessary and that it was the instantiation of democracy that led to the invention of political parties in nineteenth century democracies.
7 This view echoes Richard Hofstadter’s well-known essays on American political parties, 8 but she greatly extends his claims and emphasizes with great effect their inadvertent beginnings in the U.S. and elsewhere. Hofstadter, by contrast, emphasized the rationalization by their inventors of the value of their creations. In any case, this argument is one that helps cement one step in the chain of linkage between party and democracy, by stating the claim for the necessity of political parties in a democracy. Hers is an empirical claim, of course, but adds a compelling account to a claim that has been justified more typically by the more brutish versions of empiricism, that is by merely counting. An immediate question follows, which is whether a nation with one political party can be considered to be truly democratic? That is, what specifically is necessary in the necessary condition? There is, of course, a range of one-party-dominant states to observe. From Israel’s founding in 1948 until the Likud formed (1973) and captured office (1977), only the Labor party could win control of the government. 6 This compares with deliberative democracies, for instance, where their definition focuses less on control of office and more on democracy as a means to policy selection. Thus if all are able to engage in meaningful deliberation, then the outcome might be considered democratic even if the definition of a democracy in the liberal democracy sense were not strictly met. 7 8 “The nineteenth-century origins of modern political parties: The unwanted emergence of party-based politics,” Chapter 2. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Cal: University of California Press, 1969). 7

Because that quarter-century electoral dominance extended from Israel’s modern founding, one can forgive the scholar at that time (let alone an anti-Labor politician) for wondering if the political system was so designed that no other party actually could win. At least in this and other comparable cases, we can see in retrospect that it was merely the electoral strength of the dominant party, an appeal able to be undone in time simply by another party or coalition winning election via successfully countering and appealing to more voters in their own right. This obviously contrasts with what are known as the “state parties,” such as the communist party in the USSR and those surviving in China, Cuba, and North Korea, at the other end of the one party continuum.
9 No one mistakes the latter cases for democracies or even for systems transforming into democracies. But some hard (and therefore theoretically interesting) cases remain in between. One claim about Venezuela today, for instance, is that it is transforming out of democracy, precisely by disallowing free competition for office. Whether that will happen is speculative forecast, but reveals the theoretical role ascribed to political parties. Somewhat less speculative is the question of whether, say, Mexico was truly democratic during the years when only the PRI was able to win office. In other words, does democracy require, at least two parties with serous chances to win office? Most, perhaps all, party scholars would answer in the affirmative. Thus, Mexico would not be considered democratic until there was at least one viable alternative to the dominant party.
10 How might we know that it is actually true that at 9 These are discussed in Paul G. Lewis’ Chapter 40, “Party states and state parties.” 10 It is almost a measurement rather than theoretical issue to note that many, myself included, claim that we cannot be sure that there are at least two competitive parties until the erstwhile dominant party is defeated and until they accept their defeat and a peaceful change in power ensues. But it does have theoretical overtones. Thus, the Mexican dominant party, the PRI, “permitted” a second party, the PAN, to exist for many years even though they won few offices and those minor ones. It is instructive that it was the PAN that became the party to unseat the PRI once elections were allowed to be more open and competitive. These points are developed in “When Hegemonic Parties Lose: The 2000 8

least two parties is necessary? The key to most investigations of necessity is to look at the negation. In this case, we would want to examine whether one party cases are not democratic. This part of the argument is not included in this volume Granted, the argument is the now-aged one made by Key, but his is nonetheless still a magisterial account of politics in America’s one-party South during the era known as Jim Crow.
11 His crucial insight was to show that one-party political systems, even those embedded within a putatively two-party democratic nation, led to extraordinarily non-democratic outcomes. The extensive literature on the emergence of a competitive Republican party in the South following the end of Jim Crow may disagree on many things, but they all appear to agree that a two-party South has become a viable democracy in state (and nation).
12 These works then demonstrate for at least one major set of empirical cases that the negative form of the necessary condition of “parties imply democracy” – that the absence of at least two competitive parties implies the absence of democratic governance – holds empirically and thus greatly fortifies the theoretical claim of necessity. This great question of the necessity of multiple political parties for democracy leads to a second: Just what is the relationship between competitive political parties and the transition to democracy? Was, for example, the year 2000 famous in electoral terms not just for the embarrassment of the U.S. presidential election that year, but Elections in Mexico and Taiwan,” by John H. Aldrich, Beatriz Magaloni, and Elizabeth Zechmeister, unpublished manuscript, Duke University, 2006. 11 The Jim Crow era covers slightly more than the first half of the twentieth century, the time in which southern states legally and illegally removed African-Americans (and others) from political, social, and economic citizenship.
12 For illustrative readings, see Aistrup, Joseph A. 1996. The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press; Black, Earl and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Aldrich, John H. “Southern Parties in State and Nation,” Journal of Politics, August, 2000., pp. 643 670; and Mickey, Robert W., “Paths out of Dixie," Ph.D. thesis, Government Department, Harvard University, 2005. 9

also for the transition of two major nations, Taiwan as well as Mexico, to become democratic in this sense? The volume is a bit lighter than might be expected on democratic transition. I think that this reflects the shared assumption that one-party systems are not democratic. Certainly Paul Lewis’ “Party states and state parties” (Chap. 40) takes that line, and the chapters on new democracies are a bit less about the transition itself than the role of parties, given that democratization was already underway.
13 The interesting thing to learn from Mexico and Taiwan is that in each the dominant and essentially singular (and erstwhile authoritarian and clearly non-democratic) party choose to reform both the state and itself as part of the democratization effort.
14 Whether there are many cases or only these two, then, Mexico and Taiwan serve as an “existence proof” that one-party states may internally reform, through the agency of the party, as part of the process of democratization. In this case, then, the inadvertency and the implied causal claim of democracy to parties is at least potentially reversed (or, worse, it is reciprocal).
Parties and Party Systems
Suppose that we are agreed, then, that to be truly democratic requires at least two political parties, what then is the relationship between having two or more particular political parties and having a system of political parties? Is it having a party system that is the necessary condition? This after all is what Hofstadter indicated by entitling his book The Idea of a Party System. Or is it the existence of political parties 13 14 These are primarily found in Scott Mainwaring and Mariano Torcal’s “Party system institutionalization and party system theory after the third wave of democratization,” Zsolf Enyedi, “Party politics in post-communist transition,” and Shaheen Mozaffar’s “Party, ethnicity and democratization in Africa,” chapters 18-20, respectively. Let me note at this point, where I have written a particularly egregious example of a shorthand in writing that should not be allowed to blur into a shorthand in thinking. Political parties do not decide things, people do, and thus it is not that the singular party chose anything, rather the people making it up so chose. In much the same logic, a political party is not an “it” but a “they,” which is oft overlooked in some cases, but in the study of, say, candidate selection, that the party is a “they” is painfully obvious. 10

that is necessary, but not that of a system? That instance presumes that, in fact, parties can exist in a democracy without being in a party system. At least one major political historian claims that the first American political parties, those about which Hofstadter wrote, were parties but they did not form a system.
15 So, it is an open question as to whether it is the existence of competing parties or the existence of a competitive party system that is necessary for a democracy. But to get to that point we must consider what the term “party system” might mean. This, too, is a contentious question, although many might not see it as such. In practice there are two versions of the term. “Party system” is ordinarily used in comparing across polities, most commonly through examining the (effective) number of parties, but sometimes by other facets as well.
16 In the study of American political parties, however, where there have by now been the same two dominant parties for very close to 150 years, the term is used to refer to changes in the political coalitions and policy stances of the Democratic and Republican parties, in so called realignments or other forms of change within the set of existing political parties.
17 At times, this has led America’s two parties to reverse positions on issues. Republicans originally formed as the party to advance civil rights for minorities, and now the Democrats instead do so, for only one illustration among many. Is that one single party system that has lasted for nearly 150 years, as it would be in the comparative politics sense, or is it several party systems in the American politics, realignment sense? 15 Ronald P. Formisano. 1981. "Federalists and Republicans: Parties, Yes--System, No." In The Evolution of American Electoral Systems, ed. Paul Kleppner, Walter Dean Burnham, Ronald P. Formisano, Samuel P. Hays, Richard Jensen, and William G. Shade. Westport CT: Greenwood Press. 16 Types.” 17 The latter is urged effectively by Steven B. Wolinetz, Chapter 6, “Party Systems and Party System The American version of party system is discussed in William Crotty”s chapter 43, “Party Transformations: The United States and Western Europe.” In that chapter, he does juxtapose the two versions of the term, but his purpose is not to compare or integrate the two meanings, but to assess the weakening role of party and party system in all of its senses and consider future prospects. 11

These considerations raise even more foundational questions for any theory of party and democracy. First, how flexible is the theoretical understanding of “party system” with respect to the identity and number of political parties? Does, for example, Israel have (or is apparently on the way to having) a different party system, if it is in transition from being a multi-party system dominated by two parties, Labor and Likud, to a new system, either one with two dominant parties, Kadima and Labor, or a party system with all three as “dominant” parties?
18 Or what are we to make of Canada in these terms? It was a nation with two national parties, the Progressive Conservative (PC) and Liberal parties, dominating the parliament and office of prime minister from Canada’s founding in 1867 for the next 120 years. The PC’s collapsed when PM Brian Mulroney’s coalition fragmented in the late 1980s, and fell from majority status to holding only 15 (of 301) seats in parliament in a single election.
19 They remerged only as the weaker member of a new alliance and then more permanent party coalition, with all traces of “progressive” removed in title and in content. The stability of even the identity of Canadian political parties has thus been seriously at issue over these last 15 or so years. Is it the same party system? And, what about the dramatic changes in the identity and makeup of political parties in, say, Italy, or other erstwhile stable advanced industrial democracies? There seems to be a dramatic increase in the shifting fortunes and even existence of political parties in 18 “Dominant” here refers to the fact that only Labor and Likud have formed governing coalitions and only their leaders have served as Prime Minister in the modern history of Israel, until sitting PM Ariel Sharon defected from Likud and founded Kadima. His debilitating illness meant that a Kadima member, Ehud Olmert, succeeded him as acting PM and then, upon Kadima’s success in the 2006 election, became the first PM to form a government and to be prime minister due to electoral results who was not a member of either Labor or Likud at the time. See Paul R. Abramson, et al., “Coalition Considerations and the Vote,” in Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, eds., The Elections in Israel, 2006 (forthcoming). 19 In more recent decades, Canadian parties included a Quebec-centered party (now the Bloc Quebecois) and a western progressive party (NPD), until the events described in the text. The PCs collapsed over the failure of the Meech Lake Accords (completed in 1987), revisions to the Canadian constitution designed, inter alia, to secure Quebec’s agreement to be a full part of Canada. 12

the heretofore seemingly stable party systems of many of the advanced industrial democracies. What are we to make of these twists and turns? Peter Mair tackles the question of party system change most directly (indeed, the title of his Chapter 7 is “Party system change”). He raises a lot of interesting and worthwhile points. Among them are the importance of looking at changes in the control of the executive to measure change in party systems, and his effort helped me think about examples other than these noted above. I suggest, however, that these questions should have been taken up by others, as well, and with more specificity in the context of their applied contexts. Mair also does not attempt to answer the questions posed above. While I agree with Mair that there is more good work to be done in the conventional way party systems have been defined, what seems to remain an open question throughout this book and, more importantly, the literature on which it is based is the relationship between any given particular parties and party systems. The question should be posed not just on particular parties, but on the scope of competition. Thus, is a system similar if all ethnicities have partisan representation of some viable sort, if all policy configurations favored by reasonable proportions of the electorate have a partisan home, is it the number or is it the type of party consequential for defining the system? How variable can the identity of parties be over a short period of time and retain sufficient similarity to call it the “same” system? If it is highly variable, then of what use is so flexible a term as party system? Were it not for such dramatic changes in partisan makeup of systems we have long thought of as the most stable, then these questions would not have arise, but they have. 13

Another question so raised is what to make of the difference between political parties in the U.S. and elsewhere. This seems on first consideration to be a question about particular parties, but it merges into a party systems question also (as indicated above). The first of these questions arises from the copious literature (echoed in this volume) of so called “American exceptionalism.” Indeed, there are two chapters in this volume with exceptionalism in their title.
20 Even more are a mixture of chapters about American political parties, per se, and then chapters about parties in other nations, sometimes explicitly excepting the American case from consideration. This long-running question has frequently been seen to be asking why there were no truly socialist or social democratic parties in the U.S. (further defined as asking why there was no real left-wing social welfare state policies either advanced seriously or actually put into place to close the parties-governance linkage). But are American and others parties really that non-comparable, in what ways and why? One standard answer to the first part of the question is that American working class males, at least, got the right to vote long before the industrial revolution in the U.S.
21 In Europe, industrialization led to protests from a disenfranchised working class that formed such identities and struggled for economic justice and also and essentially simultaneously political rights, especially the vote. The notion of exceptionalism is that the U.S. is the odd case, but maybe this is an instance of European exceptionalism, and parties in the U.S., Latin America, Asia, the former Soviet empire, and Africa may differ from the seemingly standard European case. This is based on the idea that it was exceptional to Europe that the working class formed in industrialization and sought both economic and political power nearly 20 21 These two are Nicol Rae’s “Exceptionalism in the United States” (Chapter 17 )and Alan Ware’s “American exceptionalism” (Chapter 22). Rae’s chapter illustrates this line of argument (among others). Ware argues for other sorts of exceptionalisms. 14

simultaneously, a coincidence many other nations did not experience. But then, maybe all these other nations differ from each other as well. Perhaps each is exceptional? The first set of the above questions are usually answered by something along the lines of “history matters.” This is a critical consideration in the study of political parties. We are all agreed that parties are organizations. Organizations have as one central rationale for organizing at all the rationale of durability over time. And that, I think, is the fundamental presumption behind historical explanations of political parties. Often in this volume are explanations about “dynamics,” although these are typically under-theorized. A related and perhaps more precise question is about path dependency, a particular type of dynamic. An organization forms at a particular historical moment. How much does that moment and resulting organizational form shape the dynamics of political parties (and hence democratic politics)? That seems to be the basis of the claim that America is exceptional in having gone through an industrial revolution without yielding “genuinely” social democratic parties. That question, in turn, allows us to re-raise the question of party system. Path dependency can be understood in several ways, but one important way is to see the specific point in time of origin as reflecting one equilibrium outcome, when there are almost invariably several equilibriums (if not an infinite number) at that time, or certainly there will be several or many in the fullness of time.
22 Path dependency, in this context, is the playing out of the consequences of starting in one equilibrium zone and watching the consequences as the outcome space changes over time. But this, in 22 The standard example to point to is W. Brian Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). An alternative view can be seen in Paul Pierson’s "Path Dependence, Increasing Returns, and the Study of Politics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, June, 2000, pp. 251-67. 15

turn, requires a system of political parties. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what “equilibrium” means if there is a single organization making up the “party system.” 23
An Agenda for Research on Party Systems and Democracy
I have now raised the questions, the answers to which would create, I believe, a deeper and richer understanding of the critical linkage between political parties and democratic governance. To get to that point of suggesting the way forward, I need, however, to raise a rather different critical point.. One of the intellectual trends in Political Science as a discipline over the last few decades has been the development of rational choice explanations. These have been particularly successful in explaining the actions of political elites acting in or upon institutional settings. Two branches of this literature can be found in the literature on political parties. One is the study of particular political parties. The Handbook has very nice reviews of much of this literature in Marjorie Randon Hershey’s “Political Parties as Mechanisms of Social Choice” (Chapter 8), for mostly American examples, and of the coalition formation/dissolution process in Lieven De Winter and Patrick Dumont’s “Parties into government: Still many puzzles” (Chapter 15). It struck me that other chapters drew little from this literature, and thus such literatures were more or less confined to be their own “special topic,” as it were. Even less apparent is the second strand of rational choice “new institutionalism” as applied to political parties, the literature on party systems. While a number of people cite the by-now classic book by Gary Cox, Making Votes Count, 24 few in this volume make use of the content of it, and other pertinent literature is ignored. This literature serves as a way of thinking about 23 It might mean that there is a monopolist-like party that creates and enforces high barriers to entry for any new party, which in turn may explain why a one-party system, with that party controlling the government with its monopoly on power, so often leads to violence as a way of holding on to that power, which is to say keeping the barriers to entry sufficiently high to remain the single party. 24 Gary W. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World’s Electoral Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 16

answers to the questions about the relationship between parties and party systems, by way of moving toward answering some still unanswered questions about the relationship between parties/party systems and democracy. Let me conclude by indicating why I think this literature can help answer the remaining questions, by way of suggesting where I think the literature should move in the coming years. Austen Smith and Banks (1988) presented a model of a PR democracy in which parties took positions in an ideological space, voters voted for them on the basis of their ideological positioning, the election selected a number of seats to be held by each party, and then a governing coalition formed on that basis, yielding policy outcomes. This model had the virtue of being a model of a “complete” democratic cycle, from choice of positions by parties through to tracing what policies resulted. It thus involves anticipated behavior by parties (looking ahead to the electoral and governing consequences in making their first choices) and by voters (voting for policy outcomes they anticipate). To be sure there are important limitations to this model; it is unidimensional, it is a single cycle of democracy, 25 and there are a fixed number of parties. But it had two lessons. The first is that the gulf so often observed between partisan accounts of voting in the electorate and partisan accounts of legislative or other forms of governing behavior had been closed at least in this specialized case. The second is that it was fully game theoretic in the sense that what one party chose to do depended not just on what voters but also on what the other parties chose to do. It is in this sense a model of a party system, in which the parties are integrally related to one another. 25 This is a particular weakness in terms of the rational choice literature, because it takes as assumption that parties in the government follow through with their promised positions, rather than deriving it, as a complete “general equilibrium” model would require and as the Nash revolution in game theory would maintain should be derived rather than assumed. 17

While Austen-Smith and Banks were working in the European-style context of proportional representation voting systems with multiple parties, others were working in the other side of Lijphardt’s two types of democracies, the majoritarian style.
26 The great result would be to derive Duverger’s Law from rational choice premises, that is, the argument that in first-past-the-post systems, only two parties would form.
27 Palfrey provided the first such proof.
28 Feddersen provided a second that extended and improved upon the original.
29 In the latter, for example, Feddersen’s proof depended only upon the choices in the electorate (there was, that is, no need for parties themselves to be strategic). Thus, if voters cast votes strategically, they would reduce the field to no more than two alternatives, while the presence of positive costs to the act of voting increases the number of parties to more than one. Hence follows Duverger’s Law based on decisions made by the general public. At the other end, Shepsle summarized a variety of work, including his own, in which he studied the effects of parties as strategic actors, developing the analogy to the market failure cases of oligopoly to assess conditions under which existing parties would act to reduce the prospects of new political parties being able to form in any lasting way.
30 In these models, he was considering results about two and more-than two party systems simultaneously. These lead us to the afore-cited work by Cox, in which he derived a number of results, including what is now taken to be the actual status of Duvergerian style results. In the specific view of Duverger’s Law, he demonstrated that such results could flow in a more general sense than before from 26 Lijphart, Arend. 1984. Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press. 27 Duverger, Maurice. 1954. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activities in the Modern State. London: Methuen; New York: Wiley. 28 Palfrey, Thomas R. 1989. “A Mathematical Proof of Duverger’s Law,” in Models of Strategic Choice in Politics, Peter C. Ordeshook, ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press). 29 Feddersen, Timothy J. “A Voting Model Implying Duverger’s Law and Positive Turnout,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 36. No. 4, Nov., 1992, pp. 938-962. 30 Shepsle, Kenneth A. 1991. Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition. (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers). 18

the actions of the general public, and elite actors were not necessary to be able to derive the result. However, he also showed that two-party-ism results in each electoral district. The composition up to a national result is another matter. It is in principle possible that there could be two parties in district A and two different parties in district B, etc. Thus, how the party system, as it were, aggregated these district-by district results was a separate matter. Chhibber and Kollman studied this empirically in many of the major majoritarian systems with federal structures.
31 Given that fundamental result, Cox also argues that social cleavages are also central, and it is the combination of the electoral rules and its cleavage structure. In Amorim and Cox, for example, they test the plausibility of the implied interaction formulation between rules and cleavages. Their estimates of a statistical model run on a large number of democracies leads them to conclude that, “The intuitive formulation of this finding is that a polity can tend toward bipartism either because it has a strong electoral system or because it has few cleavages. Multipartism arises as the joint product of many exploitable cleavages and a permissive electoral system” (p.167).
32 These results and more serve as a way of developing general results both for two- and multi-party systems, and for first-past-the-post and for proportional electoral systems. Finally (although actually earliest), at least one specific formal result derived conditions for what we call a realignment in party systems. I developed a model of activists entering or leaving party activity as the key component to explain divergent party positions in a two-party system. In this sense it was a model of particular 31 Chhibber, Pradeep and Ken Kollman. 2004. The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 32 Amorim Neva, Octavio and Gary W. Cox. “Electoral Institutions, Cleavage Structures, and the Number of Parties,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 41, No. 1 (January, 1997), pp. 149 174 19

parties. One result I discovered in working with this model was that it implied that there was often a set of cases in which the two parties were divergent along one line of policy division, but there were conditions that would cause this stable equilibrium to disappear and, upon perturbation from this now-unstable equilibrium, the two parties would rapidly move to a newly stable equilibrium, dividing entirely along a different set of policy divisions. Moreover, it turned out that the conditions that led to this rapid shift in equilibrium positions were exactly the mathematical representation of a subset of empirical conditions for critical realignments that James Sundquist had outlined in his highly regarded historical account of American party history, focusing especially on critical realignments.
33 The point of this accounting is not that the rational choice tradition has resolved all issues in the parties-democratic governance linkage. Indeed, not only does each particular model have its limitations and specific strong assumptions that affect generalizability, but also this literature leaves important problems unaddressed and it is often not easy to see quite how to put these individual pieces into a theoretically coherent whole. What it does provide is an answer to one set of questions I have posed above, and it provides an illustration and possible roadmap for how to proceed in answering others. This literature provides a precise answer to the question about the relationship between particular parties and party systems. This answer is that the parties make up a party system when, first, the actions of one party’s members, i.e., their candidates, officeholders, or activists, depends upon the actions of their peers in other parties, and second when the result is in equilibrium. When this is the case, we call the result a 33 See Aldrich, John H., "A Spatial Model with Party Activists: Implications for Electoral Dynamics," Public Choice, 1983 and Sundquist, James L. 1983. Dynamics of the Party System. Rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution. For a more general formulation of the basic structure of the party activist model, see Aldrich, John H., and Michael McGinnis. 1989. "A Model of Party Constraints on Optimal Candidate Positions." Mathematical and Computer Modelling, 12:437 50. 20

party system. Thus, in one of Cox’s formulations (1997), he models parties in a one dimensional policy space (and thus one in which parties should be expected to converge to the center) and finds that there is an equilibrium (a Duvergerian equilibrium as he calls it) in which there are two parties but ones that have diverged equally from the center to the left and right, respectively, for the twofold purpose of ensuring that each retains its equilibrium value for any individual election of an expected of a tie while also ensuring by just the right amount of divergence that there is no “room” for a third party to enter and upset this equilibrium.
34 Thus, we would call this a two party system in which each party’s actions depend upon those of the other party that actually exists and the anticipation of what others might do should they fail to follow their equilibrium strategies and leave an opening for a third party to form and succeed. If we think of this as akin to the U.S., then two of our particular parties, the Democrats and Republicans, form the party system. The minor parties that we call third parties are also particular parties but are not part of the party system, because their actions are irrelevant to the equilibrium the major parties have struck and can maintain on their own. To be sure, the equilibrium is such as it is because of the potential that, otherwise, a third party (perhaps one of the current minor parties but perhaps a new one) might be able to succeed. In which case a new party system would result, whether it is the third party replacing one of the first two or a new equilibrium based on a new interaction between rules and cleavages would support all three parties forming this new party system. Similarly, the threat that Perot and the Reform party offered to the U.S. party system illustrates both that equilibrium can be given a shock that, at the time, left it unclear whether the current equilibrium could be sustained or whether a new party system would emerge at a new and different 34 Note that his results in this specific case are consistent with the divergence and two-party-ism of Aldrich (1983). It is at least possible that the multi-dimensional formulation of Aldrich offers a way to generalize Cox’s result to two or more dimensions. 21

equilibrium “zone.” Similarly, the Aldrich “realignment” result provides an account of two parties whose actions depend upon each other and who collectively define an equilibrium and thus they form a party system. The central result here is the development of the logic of changing equilibrium positions, thus providing the theoretical structure on which to understand Sundquist’s and others’ historical evidence about realignments. And it seems that there is no reason that the model could not simultaneously be consistent with the “comparative” and “historical” sense of party system (perhaps along the lines suggested in note 36). Finally, while the specific examples reported here are from the U.S., note that most of this theoretical literature applies most directly to the “comparative” form of party system. Indeed, American exceptionalism does not apply in these formulations, at least with respect to the understanding of the linkage between parties and democratic governance. Certainly, the rational choice literature has not resolved all of the questions about the parties-democratic governance linkage. Large blocks of this turf remain to be explored in this fashion. I close with two general points about how to proceed, however. First, what makes particular parties into a system is that the actions each party takes depend upon the actions of all other parties (and such actions are determinative in the sense that they resolve into an equilibrium outcome). In that sense, this is a truly game theoretic understanding of how parties compose a party system. Second, one set of actors that feeds in exactly the same fashion into this game theoretic definition is the set of members of the general public. That is, the actions of the public and of each party are integrated and mutually dependent, and it is the mutual dependency of one’s choices on what one expects of all others that defines the party system and that also determines the political outcomes. But it is precisely this interaction that we mean when we speak of democratic governance. It is how 22

each member of the public and of each consequential party decide interactively and, thus, collectively determine the outcome that both defines a party system and defines a democratic outcome. I believe it is this direction that seems most promising to serve as the way to further our understanding of just how political parties form a party system and thus become the crucial actors in a system of democratic governance.
Address reprint requests to: John Aldrich Box 90204 Department of Political Science Duke University Durham, NC 27708-0204
E-mail: aldrich@duke.edu 23