Programmatic Party Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Typological exercises to grasp the essential features of political parties are manifold in political science, and for nearly a century, new classification schemes evolved within the scholarly literature. Various criteria have been used to differentiate between worldwide party types. Among these, organizational, functionalist, and sociological types are the most prominent.

While the programmatic party has also been distinguished by its organizational structure, its social base of representation and the linkages it builds in its exchange relations with the citizenry to influence voters’ electoral conduct are the most decisive characteristic for its classification. Consequently, the programmatic party is a political party whose rationale and reputation is bound to a distinct, consistent, and coherent programmatic or ideological agenda; it works, campaigns, and competes on the basis of clearly articulated programs and positions on issues of broad public concern.

The programmatic party thus stands in contrast to political parties rooted in clientelist strategies. It also differentiates from parties dependent on the charisma of individual leaders whose electoral appeal and exchange relations with the citizenry depend on durable patterns of loyalty linked with targeted transfers of services and obligations, or relations dependent on the personal charisma of the leader or principal candidate, who is portrayed as indispensable to the solution of the country’s problems.

Often, the programmatic party commands a less elaborate and extensive party organization than the classical mass-based or the clientelist party, which have to invest heavily in their organizational structure to manage and monitor their exchange relations with the electorate. However, the programmatic party must work constantly and intensively to establish and maintain a common collective party program. This includes bundling the individual preferences of the party members with a view to changing preferences of their constituencies, seeking agreement on and compliance with its goals, and promoting its programmatic appeals and credibility in its electoral campaigning and government agenda. The programmatic party is primarily an elector list party, meaning that its objective is to win office through its programmatic platform or vision, mobilizing its strengths at election time and using modern campaign techniques. Its social base varies, not the least depending on the institutional framework and electoral system within which it operates. In majoritarian systems, programmatic parties tend to amalgamate their programmatic agenda with catchall electoral appeals, whereas in proportional systems they often focus on a core constituency receptive to its specific program and issue positions.

The Origins Of The Programmatic Party

The concept of the programmatic party closely ties to the idealized model of responsible party government. This model dominated the scholarly contributions to the study of political parties and party systems since the 1950s and was decisive for the formulation of both rational choice and, to a lesser extent, historical-sociological explanatory approaches to the emergence and development of party systems and party competition. The responsible party model is based on the premise that political parties are basically engaged in integrating issue positions into programs or electoral platforms to be enacted if elected to office. Voters, as well as parties, rationally weigh a given party’s issue position or voters’ preferences with their policy or programmatic preferences. Vote choice, parties’ programmatic orientation and, hence, the structuring of the party system, consequently depend on individual assessments of party performance, perception of variance in party position, and perception of voters’ preferences.

While useful in determining the basic rationale of a distinct party type, modes of citizen-party linkages and patterns of party competition, the responsible party model and the concomitant conceptualization of the programmatic party type ignores several political realities: the unpredictability of political and economic constraints on party resources; the crucial role of candidates’ personality attractiveness in electoral choice, reinforced by the advent of new campaign techniques and modern communication technologies, which have become the most important medium of political communication in all modern democracies; and the availability and persuasive power of alternative modes of citizen-party linkages, such as clientelist linkages.

The programmatic party is an ideal-type description of a political party derived from the study of West European parties. It’s closely tied to the normative thinking within liberal theory, built on the idealization of programmatic linkages as the essence of democratic responsiveness and accountability. It is rarely found in a pure manifestation without traces of personalistic, clientelist, or other characteristics. It basically reflects political parties’ functioning in established, affluent capitalist democracies. The concept is less able to grasp the logic of political parties’ functioning in other parts of the world as well as more recent trends in party competition and party system development.

Apart from the typological literature, research on the programmatic party type focuses on the conditions conducive to the emergence of programmatic parties and programmatic party competition, and on whether programmatic parties have a significant influence on party system institutionalization, democratic consolidation, and public policy. The former line of research identifies various factors, such as a historical legacy of programmatic parties, the wealth level prevailing in a given context, or the existence of a high-quality bureaucracy as main determinants for the emergence of programmatic parties. The latter is more inconsistent in its assessment of the putative benefits of programmatic party competition. While the correlation is relatively straightforward that the pluralist and tolerant nature of most programmatic parties favors party system institutionalization and centripetal party competition, the nexus between the prevalence of programmatic parties and a government’s public good orientation is less so. However, it seems that in the presence of programmatic parties, governments are less inclined to engage in rent-seeking and corruption.

Bibliography:

Gunther, Richard, and Larry Diamond. “Species of Political Parties: A New Typology.” Party Politics 9, no. 2 (2003): 167–199.
Kitschelt, Herbert, and Steven I.Wilkinson, eds. Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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