Participation and Democracy: Dynamics, Causes ... - Jacobs University

education and information; elite recruitment; program development, to name only a few)
has led scholars to argue that modern democracy without political parties was
“unthinkable” (Schattschneider 1942: 1; see also Dalton and Wattenberg 2000a).
Recent literature on party politics, however, is more characterized by a depiction of
crisis than of enthusiasm: “Today, mounting evidence points to a declining role for
political parties in shaping the politics of advanced industrial democracies” (Dalton and
Wattenberg 2000a: 3). Summarizing a multitude of simultaneous processes, this trend of
decreasing importance of political parties has been described as “partisan dealignment”
(Dalton 1984; Dalton, Flanagan and Beck 1984; Schmitt and Holmberg 1995; Dalton
2000). Processes of individualization are the driving force behind this development
where organizational changes and the rise of elite-challenging activities are often seen as
two sides of the same coin. This has important and multifaceted consequences for
representative democracies, ranging from questions of political socialization and civic
disengagement to questions of social coherence and political accountability. But what do
organizational changes mean?
For one, the decreasing importance of ‘old’ mobilizing institutions such as political
parties (but also labor unions, churches, and alike) is mirrored in a shrinking basis of
support, suggesting that the linkage between citizens and political parties has weakened.
First empirical evidence for this comes from inspecting time-series data on party
membership:
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