Studies on Political Parties: A Critical Review

Abstract

For a first group of skeptics, new empirical studies on parties are unnecessary because parties are inexorably in decline. For a second group, academic research on parties has not managed to develop convincing, rigorous theory. The article shows that these views are unjustified. It argues that political parties face a series of new challenges, many of which have neither been anticipated nor correctly addressed in the existing bibliography on parties. Although the authors recognize the general weakness of efforts to construct a theory of parties, they maintain that the continued importance of parties in democratic systems, in combination with the urgent empirical research required by the new questions that existing problems have raised, confers particular relevance to the task of formulating and testing more sophisticated and empirically grounded hypotheses with the ultimate objective of developing a set of middle-range theories.