Party Politics

http://ppq.sagepub.com Book Review: Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East-Central Europe
Aleks Szczerbiak Party Politics 2006; 12; 771 DOI: 10.1177/1354068806068601 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ppq.sagepub.com

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Party Politics can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ppq.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ppq.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Downloaded from http://ppq.sagepub.com by Mihai Geamanu on March 21, 2009

BOOK REVIEWS

discussion of what party response is, what its researchable dimensions are, and how they could be studied. Furthermore, it is still not clear (to this reviewer at least) what the relationship is between party response and interest aggregation, and what the difference is between interest aggregation and interest collection. On reading the book, however, I have no doubt that these questions are important.

Knut Heidar University of Oslo

Ingrid van Biezen, Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East-Central Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xv + 255 pp. ISBN 0 5218 4692 7; 0 5216 0969 0. DOI: 10.1177/1354068806068601
With some notable exceptions, there have been very few attempts to undertake the empirically based comparative study of parties institutional characteristics. That is why this signicant, scholarly account of party organization in newly emerging democracies by Ingrid van Biezen is such a valuable and welcome addition to the party studies literature. Van Biezen identies the transformation bias that dominates contemporary party studies an over-concentration on party change in established democracies rather than party development in new ones which her book is attempting to overcome by focusing on party organizational dynamics in four of the so-called Third Wave democracies: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Portugal and Spain. She begins by discussing possible scenarios for party organizational development in these states and assessing why, given the different institutional contexts in which they emerged, one might expect parties in new democracies to be different from those in the West. The most important difference is identied as a preference for strategies based on electoral rather than partisan mobilization. In part two, she examines in detail the practice of organizational development within her four selected cases, with a particular emphasis on their party memberships and extra-parliamentary structures. She then moves on, in part three, to adopt a more explicitly cross-country approach, analysing the relationship between the extra-parliamentary party and the party in public ofce, and also the rules and practice of party nance. In the concluding section, van Biezen argues that although she nds large (and unpredictable) variations in party organizational features, some clearly discernible patterns can be identied in her four cases and that these largely conrm her expected hypotheses. In terms of intra-party relations, party organizations are dominated by leadership elites and paid professional consultants concerned

771

Downloaded from http://ppq.sagepub.com by Mihai Geamanu on March 21, 2009

PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 2 ( 6 )

primarily with electoral performance. Partysociety linkages are weak and membership levels low, especially in the post-communist states. Interestingly, at least in formal terms, organizational structures reect those of the mass party, but even in the exceptional cases where there are large party memberships these play no signicant role and are largely paper structure(s) devoid of substance (p. 208). Critically, van Biezen also nds the early introduction of state party funding which, in most cases, is (formally at least) the single most important nancer of party activity. This, in turn, encourages a strong state and electoral orientation and further centralizes the locus of power within parties. Van Biezen argues that it is the specic institutional and historical context in which these parties have emerged and not simply the newness of the democracies per se that has encouraged electorally expansive rather than organizationally penetrative strategies and the widespread incorporation of parties in the state. She is surely right to claim that this specic development path means that parties in these countries have not simply made a quick evolutionary leap towards contemporary Western models. In spite of the many similarities between parties in Third Wave democracies and the catch-all/electoralprofessional and cartel models, they have arrived at this stage from two completely different points of departure. Parties in established Western democracies began as mass party organizations rooted in society, retained residual legacies from this phase such as relatively loyal core electorates and large party memberships and acquired state funding and patronage subsequently. Parties in the Third Wave democracies, on the other hand, often start out as parties in the state and then expand (in a very minimal way) towards society. They also lack the patterns of stable interactions that have led analysts such as Katz and Mair to posit the cartel party model. Van Biezens most interesting and counter-intuitive (but also her most problematic) nding relates to the distribution of power within parties. Whereas she expected to nd the predominance of the party in public ofce, what her data actually reveal, at least as far as the formal rules are concerned, is a more signicant role for extra-parliamentary decision-making organs, particularly the party executive. The main problem with this is that the incumbents of many formally separate party ofces frequently overlap so that, particularly in the postcommunist states, representatives of the parliamentary party often end up dominating the extra-parliamentary organs to which they are supposed to be subordinate. To be fair, van Biezen acknowledges this problem, but rejects it as a major one on the grounds that parliamentarians are clearly able to distinguish the two bodies and because it fails to account for the provisions in the ofcial party rules that explicitly put the party in public ofce under the strict supervision of the executive, let alone the tendency for the control of the national executive over the party in public ofce to increase over time (p. 215). Rather, van Biezen claims that the predominance and strengthening of the party executive at the expense of the party in public ofce should be understood as a way of increasing intra-party cohesion and tackling underlying tensions between the party in parliament and its extra-parliamentary wing. Unfortunately this is very much left as a hypothesis and van Biezen does not provide any specic examples of the tensions between the two party faces. My own research, admittedly a single country case study of party organization in post-communist Poland, suggests that the most important intra-party tensions

772

Downloaded from http://ppq.sagepub.com by Mihai Geamanu on March 21, 2009

BOOK REVIEWS

actually cut across the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary elites rather than being between them. Moreover, while it is certainly an oversimplication to treat the two bodies (parliamentary and extra-parliamentary leaderships) as if they were entirely indistinguishable (p. 215), at the very least these high levels of elite overlap do make it much more difcult to identify the locus of power within these parties. But my most signicant concern is that van Biezen arrives at her conclusions solely on the basis of an examination of the formal rules, what Katz and Mair term the ofcial story. This needs to be balanced with consideration of the real story, how parties decision-making structures operate in practice, by focusing on actual cases of political conict that emerge in the course of policy-making and elite selection. My only other criticism is that I would have preferred some more explicit and detailed reection on the normative implications of her ndings, which she only starts to tease out at the very end. As van Biezen herself points out in developing her rationale for undertaking this study, the type of party that is developing in Third Wave democracies can have a crucial bearing on the quality of democracy in these states, and some more detailed elaboration of the particular organizational developments that she identies helps or hinders these parties in performing the normative functions that are ascribed to them would have been helpful. But perhaps this is a theme to be explored in another book and these critical comments should not detract from the fact that this is as theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich a comparative study of party organizational development in Third Wave democracies as one could hope to nd. Van Biezen has produced a very important and impressive monograph that should be read not just by those interested in party development in newly emerging European democracies, but by all serious party scholars.

Aleks Szczerbiak University of Sussex

James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht, Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. $75 (hbk); $27.95 (pbk), viii + 480 pp. ISBN 0 472 11314 3; 0 472 03030 2. DOI: 10.1177/1354068806068603
Despite the many claims for interdisciplinarity in the social sciences, the rhetoric is usually stronger than the reality. In addition, the transatlantic ows of ideas are asymmetric: UK political scientists are much more likely to cite the work of their US counterparts than vice versa. As a consequence, my adrenaline started

773

Downloaded from http://ppq.sagepub.com by Mihai Geamanu on March 21, 2009