Abstract
What is the place of political parties within a democratic system of political economy? Parties are often described as intermediaries that lubricate the political process by facilitating the matching of voter preferences with candidate positions. This line of analysis flows from a bi-planar model of the political process where politicians appeal directly to voters. In this paper, we examine how construction of a meso level of analysis that lies between micro and macro levels might influence the relationship between candidates and voters. This meso level interjects such organizations as political parties between candidates and voters, with those organizations comprising interest groups within a democratic process, as against serving simply as neutral intermediaries. In this case, political parties can exert substantive effects on democratic outcomes as they take on characteristics of interest groups, bringing to mind Michels (Political parties: a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy, Hearst’s International Library, New York, 1915) analysis of the unavoidably oligopolistic nature of democratic political organization.
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Notes
See, for examples, Tirole (1996) for a discussion of party reputation, Alesina (2005), Roland and Zapata (2000) for an analysis of unfettered intraparty competition on electoral effectiveness in Colombia, and Caillaud and Tirole (2002) for a formal model of how political parties “regulate competition among like-minded factions so as to enhance reputation building by, and voter trust in, the politicians standing for a given cause.”.
There is nothing in Pareto’s treatment of non-logical action that is inconsistent with the treatment of expressive voting in Brennan and Lomasky (1993) or with Caplan’s (2007) rendition of voter irrationality, save that Pareto didn’t think irrationality was a useful scientific concept. To the contrary, Pareto was in line with Gigerenzer’s (2008) subsequent treatment of rationality as a product of interaction between an actor and the environment within which the action occurred.
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We wish to thank participants at the Public Choice Society meetings as well as two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. All remaining errors are our own.
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Hebert, D.J., Wagner, R.E. Political parties: insights from a tri-planar model of political economy. Const Polit Econ 29, 253–267 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-018-9256-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-018-9256-3
Keywords
- Political parties as interest groups
- Common versus specialized knowledge
- Agenda manipulation
- Divided knowledge
- Ideology
- Democratic oligarchy