Party Building and Party Collapse: a Framework for Analysis

Abstract

Lipset and Rokkan, in their classic study of party formation (1967), lamented that ‘we know much less about the internal management and the organisational functioning of political parties than we do about their sociocultural base and their… participation in public decision-making’ (51), identifying this asymmetry as ‘one of the great lacunae in empirical political sociology’ (53). Thirty years later, there have still been few systematic attempts to establish the conditions under which political parties succeed in building an organisational structure capable of securing their survival. Hauss and Rayside (1978), in a largely impressionistic overview of cases of new parties, emphasise the importance of ‘political facilitators’ such as parties’ organisational base and leadership. Rose and Mackie (1988) find a high correlation between party institutionalisation and four factors: the party’s origin at the founding of competitive elections, proportional representation, the party being based upon an organised social group, and initial electoral success (537).