Introduction

Abstract

All politics is in some sense a manifestation of power struggles. Max Weber argues that the importance of politics is that it strives ‘to share power or & to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state’ (Weber 1948, 78). In democratic states, the primary vehicle for these struggles is the political party, and it is therefore surprising that an obvious, and perhaps the most interesting, question about modern political parties has often been overlooked in the academic literature: what is their relationship with power? That is not to say that power has been ignored completely. From their very emergence as mass organisations, studies of political parties have been concerned with their problematic relationship to power, undermining both the deliberative freedom of parliamentary elites (Ostrogorski 1970 [1902]) and crushing the very democratic hopes that it makes possible (Michels 1962 [1915]). Later studies emphasise the increasing centralisation in political parties first in response to the mass franchise (Duverger 1959) and then the emergence of mass media (Kirchheimer 1966; Epstein 1967), until finally becoming interpenetrated with the state itself, diminishing the importance of the party on the ground even further (Katz and Mair 1995).