Cadre, Catch-all or Cartel?

Abstract

The recently proposed (ideal) type of a modern political party, the `cartel party', evokes questions both about the conceptual clarity of the new type and about its empirical validity. The analysis of the relationship between civil society and the state, which constitutes a central element in Katz and Mair's concept of the cartel party, is considered to be too static to grasp the increased intervention by the state in society. The application of a term derived from the level of the party system (`cartel') to individual parties does not seem to be a happy choice, while the reality of western party systems does not show an effective cartel of parties. It is argued that, instead of trying to formulate (again) an alleged dominant party type for the present time, it seems more fruitful to develop a classification scheme of parties that allows for different types of parties to co-exist at the same time, without considering one of them as the most up to date.