Party and Society E-Book

Cedric de Leon

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PPSS - Polity Political Sociology series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 333

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Political parties are central to democratic life, yet there is no standard definition to describe them or the role they occupy. "Voter-centered" theoretical approaches suggest that parties are the mere recipients of voter interests and loyalties. "Party-centered" approaches, by contrast, envision parties that polarize, democratize, or dominate society. In addition to offering isolated and competing notions of democratic politics, such approaches are also silent on the role of the state and are unable to account for organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the African National Congress, which exhibit characteristics of parties, states, and social movements simultaneously.

In this timely book, Cedric de Leon examines the ways in which social scientists and other observers have imagined the relationship between parties and society. He introduces and critiques the full range of approaches, using enlivening comparative examples from across the globe. Cutting through a vast body of research, de Leon offers a succinct and lively analysis that outlines the key thinking in the field, placing it in historical and contemporary context. The resulting book will appeal to students of sociology, political science, social psychology, and related fields.

Leseprobe

Party & Society

Political Sociology series

Daniel Béland, What is Social Policy? Understanding the Welfare State

Cedric de Leon, Party & Society

Nina Eliasoph, The Politics of Volunteering

Hank Johnston, States & Social Movements

Richard Lachmann, States and Power

Siniša Malešević, Nation-States and Nationalisms

Andrew J. Perrin, American Democracy

Party & Society

Reconstructing a Sociology of Democratic Party Politics

Cedric de Leon

polity

Copyright © Cedric de Leon 2014

The right of Cedric de Leon to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-5984-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

For Emily, Ellis, and Attie

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Voter-Centered Approaches

1.  The Social

2.  The Partisan Voter

3.  The Issue Voter

Part II: Party-Centered Approaches

4.  The Oligarchical Party

5.  The Functional Party

6.  The Exclusive Party

7.  Party, State, and Society

Notes

References

Index

Introduction

The orienting objects of inquiry in contemporary political sociology are the state and civil society. The prevailing definition of the state is Max Weber’s notion of an actor or institution that “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1946: 78; emphasis in original). The state is distinguished, therefore, by its military sovereignty, although it is also widely acknowledged to be the principal steward of social services (e.g., unemployment insurance, old age pensions) and infrastructure (e.g., roads and bridges). The accepted definition of civil society is the space between the state and the market, which includes interest groups, social movements, religious organizations, and other voluntary groups (Cohen and Arato 1992; Habermas 1991). Of the latter, social movements loom largest in the political sociological imagination.

Political parties are distinct from these other entities because of their control of the system of nominations, elections, and appointments to political office (e.g., president, secretary of defense, city councilperson). They preside, in other words, over the formal institutional machinery that many of us associate with the democratic process. Further, political parties that prevail at the polls assume the reins of state power. This phenomenon of “party government” means that politicians direct the foreign and domestic policy of their respective communities. Accordingly, political parties have been key players in the most significant and painful social transformations of our times. The rise and fall of the Bush administration and the Blair government, for instance, are important for understanding not only American and British politics, but also the War on Terror and the recent recession, the knock-on effects of which continue to impact the lives of millions of people around the world. Parties are also implicated in the troubled advent of electoral competition in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet bloc, as well as the rise of Islamism and socialism in the Middle East and Latin America respectively.

Despite the centrality of political parties in democratic life and their influence on current affairs, the formal parties literature is paradoxically ill-equipped to grasp the complexity and dynamism of their subject. In practice, parties stand in a fluid continuum with the state and civil society, such that it is sometimes difficult to discern where one of these three entities begins and another ends. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood, which rose to power in Egypt after the Arab Spring democratic revolution, is a political party and social movement at once that found itself exercising formal state power. Yet the scholarship on political parties tends to proceed as if little to no such fluidity exists. In voter-centered approaches, which supply the dominant1 theories in the field, the state is almost entirely absent, and the remaining relationship between party and society is lopsided, with voters inexplicably bearing most of the responsibility for running democratic party politics, and parties playing a passive role. Parties are implicitly defined as remote organizations that reflect the social divisions, familial loyalties, or policy preferences of a given community. Party-centered approaches, which are older and less prominent than their voter-centered counterparts, are more open to the fluidity described above. Party, state, and society interact and sometimes fuse on these accounts, but in ways not fully applicable to the contemporary political scene. Here parties are implicitly defined as organizations that are to varying degrees autonomous from their constituents and thus pursue their own motives and objectives.