Species of Political Parties

TLDR

Existing party typologies, largely based on late‑nineteenth‑to‑mid‑twentieth‑century West European parties, fail to capture the growing diversity of contemporary parties, and new types have been proposed inconsistently. The article seeks to integrate prevailing party conceptions into a coherent framework and to introduce new party types where current models are insufficient. The authors classify 15 party species into genera using three criteria—organizational structure, programmatic orientation, and tolerance/pluralism versus proto‑hegemonic stance. Although less parsimonious, the typology more accurately reflects contemporary party diversity and facilitates hypothesis testing and theory building.

Abstract

While the literature already includes a large number of party typologies, they are increasingly incapable of capturing the great diversity of party types that have emerged worldwide in recent decades, largely because most typologies were based upon West European parties as they existed in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Some new party types have been advanced, but in an ad hoc manner and on the basis of widely varying and often inconsistent criteria. This article is an effort to set many of the commonly used conceptions of parties into a coherent framework, and to delineate new party types whenever the existing models are incapable of capturing important aspects of contemporary parties. We classify each of 15 ‘species’ of party into its proper ‘genus’ on the basis of three criteria: (1) the nature of the party’s organization (thick/thin, elite-based or mass-based, etc. ); (2) the programmatic orientation of the party (ideological, particularistic-clientele-oriented, etc. ); and (3) tolerant and pluralistic (or democratic) versus proto-hegemonic (or anti-system). While this typology lacks parsimony, we believe that it captures more accurately the diversity of the parties as they exist in the contemporary democratic world, and is more conducive to hypothesistesting and theory-building than others.