The "Issue-Oriented Cartel": Mainstream Cartel over a Particular Policy Area?

Since Richard Katz and Peter Mair introduced it in 1995, the cartel party model has proven very popular in the analysis of political parties. Based on its two main characteristics, including interpenetration of the party and the state and inter-party collusion, this model has provided a novel insight into how parties have survived recent changes. Because of its theoretical and practical salience, the cartel party model has been discussed in terms of its various dimensions so far, including party organisation, political representation, and party systems. When it comes to the party political dimension, though, a new approach is required: As several instances have shown in recent decades, it may not always be possible for mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties to agree on every single policy issue when competing for votes in domestic politics. Therefore, the main argument of this paper is that although they may not always move together as part of an 'all-encompassing' cartel, mainstream parties can form cartels over particular policy issues, which can be conceptualised as the "issue-oriented cartel". By focusing on their collusive practices, this is exemplified by the two issue-oriented cartels between the Labour Party and the Conservatives in Britain and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) and the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany, CDU) in Germany over European integration. In an attempt to examine the operation of the EU-linked cartels in both national settings from the mid-1980s until the early-2010s, semi-structured qualitative interviews and archival research were employed to collect data with a particular focus on Labour and the SPD. As such, 32 senior political elites from Labour and the SPD (16 participants each) who served in the highest party, parliamentary, and governmental positions during the period in question were interviewed. In addition, several physical and digital archives on Labour and the SPD’s political competition with their centre-right partner/rivals on Europe were covered. The reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) method was used to analyse the collected data. In the first part, the issue-oriented cartel model is presented with its defining features and main motivators with reference to the two cases, drawing on Katz and Mair's cartel party model. Second, how the British and German EU-linked cartels operated is explained, based on producing certain patterns of inter-party competition over Europe as well as restraining political competition on and depoliticising the European question, not least against the anti-cartel 'outsiders'. Here, the focus is on that the issue-oriented cartel between Labour and the Tories rested on giving half-hearted support for Britain's EC/EU membership, whereas the SPD-CDU cartel fully supported (West) Germany's engagement with European integration. Finally, similarities and differences between the two issue-oriented cartels are examined, with the intention to show the relevance of this new concept.