The Evolution of Party Organizations in Europe: The Three Faces of Party Organization

Authors

  • Richard S. Katz
  • Peter Mair

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2374-7781.1993.14.0.593-617

Abstract

At least since the beginning of the 1980s, much of the writing on the strategies, tactics, and policies of parties has explicitly cautioned against the treatment of party as a “unitary actor” (e.g., Daalder 1983; Laver and Schofield 1990). Party leaders, it is now argued, may differ from one another and from party followers with regard to the ends which they pursue and the resources which they employ; even within the leadership itself, it is suggested, the conflict between factions may be such as to militate against any theories taking the party as a whole as the relevant unit of analysis. Nonetheless, there is a striking lack of consensus regarding the number and type of different units into which a party may be disaggregated, and the extent to which this disaggregation may be applied to an understanding of processes of organizational change.

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Published

1994-01-01

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