Species of Political Parties

Abstract

A B S T R A C TWhile the literature already includes a large number of party typologies, they are increasingly incapable of capturing the great diversity of party types that have emerged worldwide in recent decades, largely because most typologies were based upon West European parties as they existed in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Some new party types have been advanced, but in an ad hoc manner and on the basis of widely varying and often inconsistent criteria. This article is an effort to set many of the commonly used conceptions of parties into a coherent framework, and to delineate new party types whenever the existing models are incapable of capturing important aspects of contemporary parties. We classify each of 15 'species' of party into its proper 'genus' on the basis of three criteria: (1) the nature of the party's organization (thick/thin, elite-based or mass-based, etc.); (2) the programmatic orientation of the party (ideological, particularistic-clientele-oriented, etc.); and (3) tolerant and pluralistic (or democratic) versus proto-hegemonic (or anti-system). While this typology lacks parsimony, we believe that it captures more accurately the diversity of the parties as they exist in the contemporary democratic world, and is more conducive to hypothesistesting and theory-building than others.KEY WORDS Ⅲ party organization Ⅲ party programmes Ⅲ party systems Ⅲ party types For nearly a century, political scientists have developed typologies and models of political parties in an effort to capture the essential features of the partisan organizations that were the objects of their analysis. The end result is that the literature today is rich with various categories of party types, some of which have acquired the status of 'classics' and have been used by scholars for decades (e.g. Duverger, 1954;Kirchheimer, 1966;Neumann, 1956). We believe, however, that the existing models of political parties do not adequately capture the full range of variation in party types found in P A R T Y P O L I T I C S

Organization as an Impediment to Effective Ict Campaigning

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“Is this the peace of Santos?”: the Centro Democrático party and the construction of meanings around peace negotiations

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“…Na realidade, os estudos comparativos deram contribuições muito limita-das para a compreensão de quais fatores afetam a natureza da organização partidária de cada país, e sobretudo para a avaliação do impacto específico produzido pelos sistemas eleitorais (Gallaguer, 2005). A variedade de tipos de partidos no interior de um mesmo país mostra queos efeitos dos sistemas eleitorais devem ser matizados (Gunther e Diamond, 2003). No Brasil, por exemplo, mesmo com um sistema altamente centrado no candidato, um partido (PT) conseguiu desenvolver mecanismos de reforço da reputação partidária (Samuels, 1999;Leal, 2005).…”