leadership crises and decline of opposition parties in

logic of ‘’catch-all’’ competition (Kircheimer1996).So do a number of spectacularly
unsuccessful hard-line Stalinist parties across the Western world.
The Office-seeking model has been criticized by proponents of policy-oriented
coalition theory. Evidently, many parties willingly forgo the benefits of holding office.
Participants in coalition governments frequently resign in the middle of a parliamentary
term, even when there is no chance of joining an alternative government. The lay centrist
parties in Italy, for example, have often engaged in such behaviour (Marradi 1982).More
generally, the high incidence of minority governments in many parliamentary
democracies indicates office-shyness.
On the policy-seeking party, since the model is less developed than the other two,
it is also more difficult to refute. However, no party can join a government without
effecting policy in its favour.Political systems with policy oriented political parties
should exhibit high degrees of party government (Castles and Wildenmann 1986; Katz
1987). A pure policy-seeking party should not condone, much less promote, the
institutionalization of corporatism, disaggregated pluralism, or referendum democracy
(Katz 1987), as these practices generally reduce the policy influence of parties.
However, the problems with the three models of party behaviour extend beyond
empirical fit. In their basic forms, they share three unrealistic but consequential
assumptions:
1. Except for some promising recent work (Auste-Smith and Banks 1988; Laver and
Shepsle 1989; Schlesinger 1985), models of party behaviour are generally static.
Each election and each process of government formation is analyzed separately;
as if parties had no history and no future (see Laver and Budge, 1990). Moreover,
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