The Challenge to Party Government

By P. Mair. 2008

291 citations recorded by the source corpus.

At a time when the literature on political parties is brimming with health and vitality, the parties themselves seem to be experiencing potentially severe legitimacy problems and to be suffering from a quite massive withdrawal of popular support and affection. This article addresses one key aspect of the problems facing contemporary parties in Europe, which is the challenge to party government. I begin by reviewing the changing pattern of party competition, in which I discuss the decline of partisanship in policy-making and the convergence of parties into a mainstream consensus. I then look again at the familiar ‘parties-do-matter’ thesis and at the evidence for declining partisanship within the electorate. In the third section of the paper I explore the various attempts to specify the conditions for party government, before going on in the final section to argue that these conditions have been undermined in such a way that it is now almost impossible to imagine party government in contemporary Europe either functioning effectively or sustaining complete legitimacy.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a7be6faf5f9a7d89d6676baa52d574c862d1e6f

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In Political Science and International Relations

Citations in the corpus

Accountability and Multi-level Governance: More Accountability, Less Democracy? (2010, background): “Under highly mediatised and ‘audience’ democracies, ‘image and style increasingly [push] policies and substance aside’ (Farrell and Webb 2002 : 122); or, as formulated by Mair ( 2008 : 227):”
The Politicization of Regulatory Agencies: Between Partisan Influence and Formal Independence (2016, result): “On the other hand, the results also give some reason for optimism to those scholars of party government who are worried about the extent to which partisan governments can still produce policy outcomes in line with their democratic mandates (Mair 2008).”
Does government ideology influence deregulation of product markets? Empirical evidence from OECD countries (2010, background): “The constituencies of the political parties became less polarized over time, and class-specific voting patterns began to disappear towards the end of the 1970s (see, e.g., Mair 2008: 218 ff.).”
The New Intergovernmentalism: European Integration in the Post‐Maastricht Era (2015, unknown): “A key claim of the new intergovernmentalism is that preference formation at the national level has succumbed to difficulties in the articulation of interests and to a more generalized crisis of representative politics (Mair, 2008; Papadopoulos, 2013).”
A Giant Fast Asleep? Party Incentives and the Politicisation of European Integration (2012, background): “…have a structure that organises party competition, and the left–right dimension with its origin in the economic class cleavage continues to be the dominant organisational principle (Van der Brug and Van Spanje, 2009), though its ideological content has become less coherent (Mair, 2008, pp. 228–30).”