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Chapter 5 Parties: How the past affects the present, and an uncertain future 

• Chapter Summary
• Useful websites 
• Discussion questions
• Updates
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Chapter Summary

The way parties organize themselves varies over time and, to some extent, according to ideology.

Parties perform a range of crucial tasks in all European democracies: representing and packaging interests and values so that alternatives are simplified and meaningful; recruiting and supporting candidates; and forming governments with coherent programmes.

Countries’ party systems – and the parties themselves can usefully be categorised into ‘ideal types’ to facilitate comparison and contrast: systems vary in the extent to which they are fragmented and polarized, or open to innovation; parties vary according to ideology and organization.

A country’s party system is influenced not only on historical and contemporary social and value conflicts, but also by institutions like the electoral system.

Party systems are changing: in the west there are more new parties and the fortunes of (and the alliances put together by) parties fluctuate more than they used to; further east, things will not necessarily ‘settle down’. But change should be expected and is rarely wholesale: left and right score about the same as they ever did.

Parties may not be popular but there is no better alternative: partly because of this they are increasingly publicly funded and are likely to be with us for the foreseeable future.

Parties are adapting to European integration but it has not undermined their primary ‘domestic focus’, although its indirect effects may pose problems as time goes on.

Useful websites

(For general web materials on European Politics see Tim Bale's Internet Guide)

www.wikipedia.org 
Type in ‘politics’ plus the name of the country for links to parties

www.europarl.eu.int/groups/default.htm 
European party groups

www.idea.int  
Party funding plus more besides

www.parties-and-elections.de 
Links to parties’ websites

Discussion questions

1. What roles are political parties supposed to play in Europe’s representative democracies? In your opinion, are there any conflicts and contradictions between those roles?

2. How has the way parties organize varied over time? Should we expect a party’s ideology to relate to the way it organizes itself?

3. Why do you think some countries’ party systems are more fragmented and/or more polarized than others’?

4. Do you think the ‘party families’ dreamed up by political scientists are useful guides to understanding European parties? What do you see as the pros and cons of categorizing parties in this way?

5. Why are there not representatives of each and every ‘party family’ in each and every European country? What is the relative importance of sociology, on the one hand, and institutions, on the other?

6. What are the symptoms and causes of party system change in Europe?

7. Are there any arguments and evidence that suggest to you that some observers might be overstating the degree of change in Europe’s party systems?

8. Do you think that parties are dinosaurs on their way to extinction or are they destined to be around for some time still to come? If so, why?

9. Why is it easy to play down the impact of European integration on parties and party systems, and would be right to do so?
    

Updates

Italian Election Update

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