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The Road to Charleroi: The Comparative Candidates Survey and How the Chief of a UK Political Party Found Themselves Researching Political Elites and Civil Society in a Post-Industrial Landscape.

Civil Society
Elections
Interest Groups
Political Leadership
Political Parties
Campaign
Candidate
Nicholas Martin
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Nicholas Martin
Université Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract

The study of the relationships between political party elites and organized civil society has bifurcated in recent decades: on the one hand scholars of cartelization postulate a mutual divorce between party elites and civil society, and on the other hand other scholars have increasingly drawn attention to continuing patterns of contact between parties and interest groups. For more than two decades The Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS) has collected rich data on the backgrounds, political positions, campaign styles and affiliations of candidates at general elections in 30 democracies across three continents. This paper relates how a party political executive turned party scholar utilized the CCS to operationalize a new conceptualization – connective density - of the connections between political elites and organized civil society. It describes how the concept was then deployed to investigate the electoral importance of these connections and to test theories about why some parties have stronger connections. Data from the CCS next pointed the author to interesting cases of variation in the Federal state of Belgium and the completion of two comparative case studies of political parties. In turn these case studies led to the formulation of a further new concept, that of ecologies of connection, and to a post-doctoral research project that is exploring different ecologies of connection between parties and civil society at the meso level, starting with the post-industrial city of Charleroi in the French speaking region of Wallonia. Ultimately this paper is a celebration of the potential for the CCS to operationalize new concepts in political science and point the way to unexpected and exciting areas of research in political systems at different levels. It will describe the role of the survey in operationalizing new concepts and guiding the choice of qualitative case studies, and will present initial findings from fieldwork in Charleroi.