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Political Cleavages and Party Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Peter H. Merkl
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Extract

The field of the comparative study of political party systems has been particularly fortunate to have been the focus of quite a number of substantial scholarly team efforts in recent years. Individual case studies are still appearing that follow Robert A. Dahl's model of the “patterns of opposition.” Terms such as “crisis of participation” or Sartori's “extreme pluralism,” from the book edited by Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner,2 are widely used in the description of party systems. Even the study of one-party systems and of national integration in developing areas is beginning to settle down to a common terminology that will increasingly allow comparison with the better-explored systems.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , April 1969 , pp. 469 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1969

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References

1 Political Opposition in Western Democracies (New Heaven 1966) chs. 2, 11–13. A panel with many papers was devoted to this topic at the Grenoble Round Table of the International Political Science Association in 1965. See also the paper by Robert H. Dix on “Oppositions and Development in Latin America” delivered at the 1967 APSA meeting, and the new quarterly, Government and Opposition, London.

2 Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton 1966)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, the tables in Coleman, James S. and Rosberg, Carl G. Jr., eds., Political Parties and National Integration in Tropical Africa (Berkeley 1966)Google Scholar, 5 and 657.

4 Stein Rokkan has already been at work exploring party systems from this angle for many years. See, for example, his illuminating table 3 in “The Comparative Study of Political Participation: Notes Toward a Perspective on Current Research,” in Ranney, Austin, ed., Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics (Urbana, Illinois 1962), 75Google Scholar.

5 See their World Revolutionary Elites (Cambridge, Mass. 1965), 252 ffGoogle Scholar. The point here is, of course, what was more significant about these protest movements—their economic interest or other motivations. It was not whether many of them could be classified as lower middle-class.

6 “The Changing Class Structure and Contemporary European Politics,” Daedalus (Winter 1964), 271–303. The Allardt and Littunen book even cites Lipset-Rokkan as a book in press scheduled to appear in 1965, which shows how close the two were in time.

7 See Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (London 1954), 231–32.

8 See his Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford 1959), 213–38Google Scholar.

9 See also n. 4, above.

10 See, for example, Zurcher, Arnold, ed., Constitutions and Constitutional Trends since World War II (New York 1955), 13–35Google Scholar, 191–224. The extensive Western literature on the merits of two-party as compared to multi-party systems could also be cited here in favor of not lowering the last two thresholds.

11 See also Yrjö Littunen, “Social Restraints and Ideological Pluralism,” in Allardt and Littunen, 70–77.

12 See, for example, Szymon Chodak, “The Societal Functions of Party Systems in Subsaharan Africa,” in Allardt-Littunen, 256–61.

13 For a good example of complex cleavage structure, see Roger Girod, “Geography of the Swiss Party System,” in Allardt-Littunen, 132–61.