Political Parties and their Civil Society Connections: The Cartel Thesis Revisited?

In their seminal 1995 essay introducing the Cartel Party, Katz and Mair suggest that one of its distinguishing characteristics is the interpenetration of party and state. In large part this is attributed to an increased reliance on state funding for party activities and acts of collusion among party elites reducing their need to maintain strong roots within civil society. While considerable quantitative data have been collected and analyzed illuminating the degree of state funding, less empirical evidence exists concerning parties’ connections with civil society. This is particularly true when recalling a second Katz and Mair argument that parties are complex organizations organized in stratarchical fashion across three dimensions: on the ground, in central office and in public/elected office. While there is considerable scholarly analysis on party members (declining in number and generally unrepresentative, see, for example, van Haute and Gauja 2015), and some on political candidates and office holders, there is little that probes the civil society connections holistically across these different cohorts. Instead, there is a general assumption that parties’ roots in civil society are declining. (Some recent work on their connections to interest groups is a promising exception, Allern’s PAIRDEM project). We propose a paper that examines civil society memberships and activism across all the principal cohorts of party personnel: members, local activists, financial donors, candidates, public office holders and central party personnel. Using the Canadian case, we have collected data through numerous recent surveys, biographical reviews, and interviews that allow us to document the degree and type of civil society activism found in each of these groups. Our preliminary analysis suggests that those participating in party activity, for the most part, have high levels of attachment and involvement in their communities’ public affairs. Indeed, the assumption that parties are increasingly removed from civil society may be overstated, and it may instead have simply shifted in form. We plan to also mine the available data from member and candidate surveys in other countries to provide, at minimum, some suggestion as to whether our Canadian findings might have general applicability and to encourage similar studies in other jurisdictions.