Collapse of the cartel: How a resilient competitive market for political representation stymied the age of the cartel party?

Despite analyses highlighting the contradictions and limitations of the concept of the cartel party (Krouwel, 2012; Yishai, 2001) it continues to exert considerable influence on the study of comparative party politics (e.g. Katz, 2022), and is the foundation on which new theories of the logic of party competition such as technopopulism (Bickerton and Accettii, 2021) are based. In the context in Western Europe of party fragmentation, the electoral collapse of the political centre (comprised of the very parties that were supposed to form the political cartel), and the rise of new radical and often populist parties, however, does it make sense to talk of cartel parties anymore? The descriptive characteristics of the cartel party and the evidence for its predominance are developed in three main contributions (Katz and Mair, 1995, Katz and Mair, 2009, and Mair, 2013). In these works a cartel party is one that colludes with established competitors to rig the electoral market and control access to government office, relies heavily for its funding on schemes of state subvention that it has itself legislated for, and withdraws from engagement with civil society. And the empirical context for the rise of the cartel party is one of increased electoral volatility, declining electoral turnout, falling party membership and partisan identification, and the absence of substantive difference in party programmes and political outcomes. In this paper we re-evaluate, for the contemporary political context, the criteria for designating a party as part of a cartel and assess the evidence for the prevalence or otherwise of such parties in Western Europe. We identify several necessary and sufficient conditions must be met to before designating a party as a cartel party. We conclude that no/very few parties satisfy these criteria and that the evidence adduced by cartel theorists for the cartelization of party systems is far from compelling. In consequence we suggest the utility of the notion of a cartel party is as a theoretical ideal type against which to compare the actual parties contesting elections in Western Europe. References: Bickerton, C.J. and Accetti, C.I. (2021) Technopopulism. The New Logic of Democratic Politics. Oxford: OUP. Katz, R.S. (2022) ‘The cartel party – the end of democratic party evolution?’, Irish Political Studies, 37:2, 266-284. Katz, R.S. and Mair, P. (1995) ‘ Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy. The Emergence of the Cartel Party’, Party Politics, 1:1, 5-28. Katz, R.S. and Mair, P (2009) ‘The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement’, Perspectives on Politics, &;4, 753-766. Krouwel, A. (2012) Party Transformations in European Democracies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mair, P. (2013) Ruling the Void. The Hollowing of Western Democracy. London: Verso. Yishai, Y. (2001) ‘Bringing Society Back in: Post-Cartel Parties in Israel’, Party Politics, 7:6, 667-687