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Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications London Thousand Oaks New Delhi

THE PROBLEM OF CANDIDATE

SELECTION AND MODELS OF PARTY
DEMOCRACY
Richard S. Katz

ABSTRACT

Candidate selection is vital to political parties but it also poses a

dilemma, which is particularly acute in the cartel party, stemming from
the position of MPs as both the base of the party in public office and
the delegates of the party on the ground. One response is for leaders to
democratize candidate selection in form, while centralizing control in
practice. An inclusive but unorganized selectorate may give the appear-
ance of democracy without the substance.

KEY WORDS ! Cartel Party ! democracy ! nomination

Candidate selection is a vital activity in the life of any political party. It is

the primary screening device in the process through which the party in
public office is reproduced. As such, it raises central questions about the
ideological and sociological identities of the party as a whole. Moreover,
because different modes of selection are likely to privilege different elements
of the party and different types of candidates, they may raise questions
about the nature of the party as an organization as well.
Candidate selection has the potential to raise significant problems in all
parties, or in the context of all major models of party, in large measure
because of the location of candidates and MPs (as successful, and generally
would-be repeat, candidates) midway between the party on the ground and
the core leadership of the party in public office. As argued below, however,
these problems should be especially sharply focused in the context of the
cartel party model. This article therefore focuses on the puzzle of candidate
selection in the cartel party as a window onto the problems of candidate
selection in the development and functioning of party organizational types
more generally.

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The Centrality of Candidate Selection

Political parties are among the principal channels for popular political par-
ticipation in democratic polities. Like the physical channels from which the
metaphor is derived, however, they not only concentrate and direct popular
input, but also constrict or even restrict popular input. Thus it is not surpris-
ing if feelings that government is insensitive to the demands of the citizenry
are translated into calls for more open and democratic parties. There are
many aspects of party life that might be democratized. Members, or sup-
porters more generally, could be given a larger role in the selection of party
leaders, both within government and without. They could be given more
influence over party manifesto pledges or coalition decisions. Perhaps most
aptly, given the tendency to personalize politics even in parliamentary systems
and against the popular image of important decisions being made in ‘smoke-
filled rooms’, the process of candidate selection could be democratized.
Candidate selection is one of the central defining functions of a political
party in a democracy. This is true not only in the sense that selection of
candidates to contest elections is one of the functions that separates parties
from other organizations that may try to influence electoral outcomes and
governmental decisions, but also in the sense that the candidates it nomi-
nates play an important role in defining what the party is. More particu-
larly, candidates as persons, and candidacies as roles or positions, serve at
least four interrelated functions within contemporary political parties as
organizations and contemporary democracies as systems of governance.
First, a party’s candidates in large measure define and constitute its public
face in elections. Collectively, they manifest the demographic, geographic,
and ideological dimensions of the party. They articulate and interpret the
party’s record from the past and its program and promises for the future.
Obviously, not all candidates are equal in these regards. A candidate nomi-
nated to the bottom of a closed party list or to contest a hopeless single
member district will count for less than one whose ultimate election is highly
likely or even certain; a candidate who is likely to achieve ministerial office
counts for more than a candidate destined for the back benches. Nonethe-
less, the nomination of more women or more minority group members or
more members of some religious sect or more workers or more farmers
signals something about the party as a whole, as do the nominations of more
ecologically sensitive candidates or more individuals associated with the
economic left wing of the party.
Second, as indicated by the distinction between selection and election as
two separate phases of recruitment (Norris, 1997), candidates are one of the
main recruitment pools, and candidacy is one of the main recruitment
routes, for membership in the face of the party that Katz and Mair (1993)
identified as the ‘party in public office’. This is particularly so where an
intraparty electoral choice allows voters to contribute to the choice among
a party’s nominees. Moreover, although some members of the party in public
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office may owe their positions to appointment rather than election, it is a

hallmark of democracy that elected officials occupy the dominant roles.
Clearly, one can debate the degree to which individual MPs in any particu-
lar political system, party, or circumstance are simply ‘lobby fodder’.1 Often,
however, they are considerably more. Particularly in parliamentary systems,
one generally cannot become either party leader or Prime Minister without
first having served in parliament, and one cannot serve in parliament
without first having been a candidate. Thus, even if individual MPs (that is
successful candidates) have relatively little power, collectively they form a
large portion of the recruitment pool from which holders of more import-
ant offices are drawn. Further, given the nature of democratic political
parties as voluntary organizations, and the general constitutionalization of
the principle that MPs hold a personal mandate even if they were elected
from closed party lists (e.g. Article 38 of the German Basic Law; see also
Müller, 1994), party leaders can lead only to the extent that their followers
are willing to follow. Indeed, not only are party leaders generally chosen
from among members of the parliamentary party, they often are chosen and
removable by members of the parliamentary party. In this sense, successful
candidates in their subsequent roles as MPs can impose significant con-
straints on higher and ostensibly more powerful party leaders. Also in their
role as MPs, successful candidates, even more than they did when they were
‘merely’ candidates, occupy a ‘bully pulpit’ for influencing public opinion,
and through that route for influencing their leaders in a positive way as well.
Even if, in the words of British satirists Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn
(1990), backbench MPs are only ‘a bunch of self-opinionated windbags and
busybodies, [they do] suddenly find people taking them seriously because
they’ve got the letters “MP” after their names’.
Third, MPs, and the candidates that they were before they were elected,
are not simply interchangeable parts of the party in public office as a collec-
tivity. They are also representatives of individual constituencies. Con-
stituencies generally have significant local ties, even in systems like The
Netherlands, where the nominally single national electoral district actually
is divided into 19 local kieskringen. Without even this public institutional
device, Israeli parties have created territorial constituencies as units entitled
to reserved places on their lists of candidates (Hazan, 1999). While a party’s
candidates collectively contribute to its image as for example ‘regional’ or
‘national’ (the first function cited above), its individual candidates are part
of the linkage between center and particular elements of the periphery, both
at the governmental and at the party-internal levels. The ‘psychological con-
stituency’ of a candidate (the group of people who believe they are rep-
resented by the candidate and whom the candidate believes himself or
herself to represent) may also be defined sectorally, and indeed in the Israeli
case there have been sectoral constituencies defined within the parties’
candidate selection rules alongside the territorial ones. Such institutionaliz-
ation is not necessary, however, for a female candidate to represent the
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constituency of women, a Sami candidate to represent the constituency of

Samis, or an Irish-speaking candidate to represent the constituency of Irish
speakers, and so to contribute to the linkage of these social segments to
government and party.
Fourth, in part for the reasons just suggested, candidacy for an individual
– and candidacies for members of a group – is a token in intraparty poli-
tics. Candidacy is valuable because of the constraints, influence, and power
that can be exercised by candidates, and even more because of the con-
straints, influence, and power that they will be able to deploy if they are
elected. Candidacy also is valuable because changes in the party’s public
face, and in the degree to which various constituencies are or feel connected
to the party, are likely to produce as well as reflect changes in its policy pro-
posals and in its behavior in office. Candidacies may also be valued, and
therefore usable as a medium of exchange within the party, for reasons that
are irrelevant or irrational to politics in strictly Downsian terms, even as
they play an important role in the ‘internal economics’ of a party.2 Examples
of such reasons why candidacies might be demanded or accepted in
exchange for other things include private ego gratification or personal
aggrandizement (e.g. personal publicity that is valuable in some other sphere
of life).

MPs Between the Party on the Ground

and the Party in Public Office

As an important means through which the party in public office reproduces

itself, as a key arena for intraparty politics, and as a prominent reflection of
the public face of the party, candidate selection is an important function in
all political parties. As it is about the allocation of a scarce and valuable
‘commodity’, candidate selection will often be a point of conflict within a
party. This conflict can take either or both of two forms. On one hand, it
can focus narrowly on the question of who should be selected within the
framework of agreed procedures. This often will extend beyond the purely
personal to touch on questions of ideology and policy, but while it may
involve strong conflicts among groups within the party, it raises the ques-
tion of who will make the candidate selection decisions only in the sense of
asking which groups will be strongest in the arenas where the decisions are
made. On the other hand, recognizing that different procedures are likely to
be to the advantages of different candidates or types of candidates, conflict
over candidate selection can focus on the selection procedures themselves.
Given the importance of candidate selection, such procedural conflicts can
raise dilemmas touching on the very nature of the party.
While potentially contentious in all types of parties, candidate selection
is a particular theoretical problem for the cartel party because the model
suggests two potentially contradictory hypotheses or ideas. While these
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ideas may come into conflict in many venues, the most significant is parlia-
ment. The source of the conflict is the position of MPs (i.e. successful candi-
dates) on one hand as the representatives of the party on the ground and
of party voters more generally, but on the other hand as the ‘base’ of the
party in public office. The puzzle of candidate selection arises when, and to
the extent that, these two positions imply contradictory pressures.
The pattern of interparty relationships postulated to exist among the
parties forming the eponymous cartel, like the pattern of relationships
among social segments and the political parties that represent them
postulated in Arend Lijphart’s (1968) model of consociational democracy,
assumes and requires a considerable degree of elite autonomy. With regard
to parliament, this means either that ordinary MPs must be relatively mar-
ginalized or else must be considered and behave as part of the deal-doing
elite. The hypothesis of marginalization, however, conflicts with the obvious
potential power that the parliamentary party exercises over its leadership.
Thus one horn of the dilemma is that fleshing out the cartel party model
appears to require one to think about the parliamentary party as a core con-
stituent of the party in public office, and so as part of the relatively uncon-
strained party elite.
The cartel model suggests that one strategy used by party leaders in order
to gain the necessary autonomy to participate effectively in a cross-party
cartel is formally to empower the ordinary party members, or an even
broader range of party supporters (Mair, 1997: 149–50). The suggestion is
that this increase in the nominal power of the base of the party on the
ground comes at the expense of the power or influence of middle-level
activists, who might be able to coordinate an effective challenge to their top
leaders, rather than at the expense of their (i.e. the top leaders’) own power.
Coupled with this was a suggestion that parties would move toward a
stratarchical form of internal power relations (see Eldersveld, 1964), in
which the central leadership would gain autonomy at the national level in
part by ceding autonomy to the local branches or their equivalents with
regard to local affairs. Traditionally, selection of candidates has been
regarded as one of the essential prerogatives of local party organizations
(e.g. Gallagher, 1988: 245; Obler, 1973; Ranney, 1965). This, then, raises
the other horn of the dilemma: that the careers of individual MPs poten-
tially are in the firm grip of the party on the ground. On one hand, MPs are
assumed to require and have autonomy from the party on the ground, while,
on the other, selection of candidates, who are the future MPs, is ostensibly
in the hands of the party on the ground.
Of course the contradiction may be more apparent than real, as my con-
stant use of terms like ‘ostensibly’ and ‘nominally’ to qualify the power
‘apparently’ being ceded to the rank-and-file of party members or support-
ers indicates. Nor is the problem potential of the locations of MPs, both as
representatives/agents of the party on the ground and as a core element of
the party in public office, unique to the cartel party. Nonetheless, it suggests
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that MPs, as once and future candidates, are in a nexus that is worth further
exploration, and that this is likely to be a particularly sensitive nexus in the
case of the cartel party. Before returning to this, however, it will be helpful
briefly to elaborate the key relevant features of the cartel party argument,
particularly as they bear on the problem of candidate selection and the
relationship between the party in public office and the rest of the party
organization in the models of party that preceded the cartel party.

The Cartel Party Model

The cartel party model postulates a process that has elements of a cyclical
pattern of development and elements of a stimulus-response or dialectical
pattern. In neither respect, however, does it suggest that the cartel party is
either the logical fulfillment or end state of a historical process. In this, it
contrasts quite markedly with many of the previous models of party. In par-
ticular, Duverger (1954) and Kirchheimer (1966) write as if they respectively
believed the ‘mass party of integration’ and the ‘catch-all party’ to represent
not only the wave of the future in the sense of being an increasingly common
type, but also a terminal state in the sense that the processes that they see
to have motivated the development of parties (expanding suffrage, develop-
ment of universal education, emergence of widely available mass media) had
in the late twentieth century reached their fulfillment. In contrast, whether
understood as a synthesis/thesis in a dialectic process or as the next stage in
a cyclical process, the cartel party argument not only suggests that the cartel
party does not represent a steady state, but also has suggested that the ‘anti-
party-system parties’, to use Bille’s term, are the natural reaction to the rise
of the cartel party. This suggests that just as there have never been fully
fledged mass parties or fully-fledged catch-all parties, because these models,
in effect, have been superceded before they have been fully achieved, so
the cartel party represents an ideal type toward which there are strong
pressures, but which also generates its own counter-pressures. Since the
closer reality comes to realization of the cartel model, the stronger these
counter-pressures become, the model suggests that the cartel party type is
self-limiting.
In historical terms, the cartel party argument begins with the cadre or elite
party typical of the stable and stratified (and largely rural) societies of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and also typical of the limited suffrage
of the contemporaneous régimes censitaires. Essentially a party of local
notables whose party leadership was at base an expression in the explicitly
political sphere of their more general position in civil society, the elite
party needed, and had, only limited formal organization. In terms of the
‘three faces of party organization’, the party on the ground was the per-
sonal following of the same individuals (or perhaps the following of the
patrons of the individuals) who formed the party in public office. (See, for
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example, Chubb, 1982: 19–20, describing southern Italy in the last decades
of the nineteenth century.) If there were any party central office at all, it
might perform some coordinating functions, but only to the extent that the
local elites who were the backbone of the party were interested in being
coordinated.
Candidates of the elite party generally were the leaders of the party on
the ground, or indeed, given that ‘membership’ in an elite party is ill-defined
but must be construed narrowly to be roughly co-terminus with the elite
itself, the local party ‘membership’ tout court. Because the elite party at
the national level is effectively a voluntary alliance of local parties on the
ground, candidate selection is naturally made at the local level; the only
potential exception would be when a single patron controls more than one
district, as was sometimes the case in Britain in the eighteenth century.
Where leaders chose someone other than one of themselves, the candidate’s
situation would have been like that of the nominated members of the British
House of Commons described in Beer (1969: 23): ‘If he does not obey the
instructions he receives, he is not to be considered a man of honour and a
gentleman’; he certainly would not be nominated or elected again at the next
election. The challenge confronting national party leaders was to establish
their authority over the parliamentary party rather than to secure their
autonomy from it. The problem of the autonomy of the parliamentary party
from the party on the ground was oxymoronic, given their effective fusion.
The mass party is the natural reaction to the elite party. The mass party
typically was the party form of the working class, initially agitating for the
right to vote and inclusion in full citizenship (Fitzmaurice, 1983: 28; De
Grand, 1996: 28; Irwin, 1980: 170; Hancock, 1980: 187), but it might also
be adopted by other groups who felt themselves shut out of or ignored by
the ruling elites in their societies, even if, as in France or Germany, they were
formally enfranchised (Guttsman, 1981: 15–74). (For example, the Dutch
Anti-Revolutionary Party was for committed Calvinists what labor parties
were for the working class [Irwin, 1980: 168; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967:
20].) The organizers of mass parties attempted to use numbers and organiz-
ational strength to substitute for the individual quality (wealth, position,
access to politically relevant resources like newspapers) of the ‘members’ of
the ruling elite parties. This, however, required a formally articulated party
organization on the ground as well as a strong central office to coordinate
the various local branches. As a party originally of the political ‘outs’, the
mass party formally privileged the party on the ground over the party in
public office; the former through its representative institutions was the party,
and the latter were merely its agents.
This was not only a matter of practical politics, but also reflected an inno-
vation in political theory. In contrast to the elite party, which may have
pursued narrow sectoral or personal interests, but which claimed to be
pursing the collective national interest, the mass party overtly claimed that
it represented the interest of only one segment of society, and touted this as
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a virtue rather than accepting that it was the vice of ‘faction’. But if the party
represented only one segment of society, then it could not be legitimated by
the electoral decisions of society as a whole – particularly in the era in which
its members could not vote in those elections. Hence accompanying the idea
of sectoral representation was the idea of internal party democracy, which
demanded and justified subservience of those elected to public office under
the party’s banner to the decisions made in the democratic, but extra-
governmental, organs of the party. In reality, of course, it was often the party
central office, theoretically the agent of the party on the ground but more
often its creator and master, that dominated – justifying Michels’s ‘iron law
of oligarchy’ (1962).
Although candidate selection theoretically rests with the party on the
ground, the basically hierarchical nature of a mass party often gives the
party central office significant influence – whether through pre-screening of
aspirants, post-selection approval procedures, or outright pre-emption of
the decision. So long as the central office is clearly perceived to be the agent
of the party on the ground, however, conflict over candidate selection is
more likely to reflect political conflict among the various groups and inter-
ests comprising the party or a tension between centralization and local
autonomy than about the proper balance between parliamentary and extra-
parliamentary wings of the party or the proper role of MPs within the
overall party political system. Whichever extra-parliamentary face were in
control in the mass party, selection (and potential deselection) of candidates
would be one of the devices through which control not only of the parlia-
mentary party, but of its leadership and cabinet members as well, would be
maintained.3
In some places, even the régime censitaire involved independent elec-
torates of sufficient size to make some organization of supporters worth-
while for some politicians associated with elite parties. For example, both
Liberal and Conservative parties in Britain had rudimentary central offices
by the 1870s, the Liberal Birmingham caucus and the Conservative Prim-
rose League both predate the Reform Act of 1884, which established a male
householder franchise. Even then, rather than becoming real mass parties,
these organizational efforts became the embryos of the next form to develop.
This transformation was stimulated by the electoral success of the mass
party as well as the exigencies of mass suffrage. These led to the catch-all
party, initially as a reaction from, or adaptation by, the interests represented
by the elite parties. These groups generally could not appeal to class inter-
est, because ‘their’ class was an obvious minority; their only chance of elec-
toral success was to attract substantial numbers of voters who were in the
natural clientele of the mass parties of the left. Neither were the organizers
of the catch-all party interested in internal party democracy or the domi-
nance of the extra-governmental wings of the party, given that the organ-
izers of these parties were already established in public office and wanted
organizations of supporters. Nonetheless, the catch-all parties did adopt and
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adapt many of the organizational features of the mass party, in particular

the idea of a formal membership organized in local branches and rep-
resented in a regular party congress. The catch-all parties also organized
more elaborate central offices than their elite predecessors had maintained.
But while the form may closely resemble that of the mass party, the sub-
stance is quite different. The party central office serves as a locus of leader-
ship and as a coordinating body, but on behalf of the party in public office
rather than on behalf of the party on the ground. The party on the ground,
in turn, is organized to be a support mechanism for the party in public office
rather than to be its master.
With the advent of the catch-all party, the problem potential of candidate
selection increases. On one hand, the shift of dominance over the party
central office to the party in public office means that central involvement in
the selection process is likely to raise not just questions of local autonomy
but also questions of the ability of the party on the ground to control the
party in public office. This shift, moreover, is likely to be both imperfect and
contested. On the other hand, the catch-all model entails the weakening or
severing of organizational ties to some ancillary organizations, but groups
that no longer have a clear place in the formal party structure may nonethe-
less claim the right to influence the choice of candidates in return for their
electoral support. This raises the question of how privileged the position of
formal party members will be, and creates a pressure for the leadership of
the party in public office (as the primary beneficiaries of external electoral
support) to defer to groups outside of the formal party organization and
traditional party family. The result is that candidate selection becomes a
problem not just of persons or of policy lines, but of the fundamental nature
of the party and its place in the democratic order.
So long as the party on the ground can be satisfied with the prospect of
electoral victory – either because there are sufficiently great differences in
the policies that alternative governments would pursue or because party
loyalty remains strong – there may not be significant problems. If those con-
ditions erode, as in fact they appear to have done (Mair, 1997: Ch. 6), the
dilemma of the cartel party, alluded to above, is raised in heightened form.
Both the organization of the catch-all party, and the socio-economic
changes in Western democracies that accompanied the electoral success of
mass parties (whether or not brought about by the mass parties themselves)
created tensions, first within the mass party and then within the catch-all
party as well. A large part of the political program of many mass parties
involved demands for social provision of services like health care and edu-
cation; part of the organizational glue that strengthened the parties’ hold on
their members was that they were part of a network of organizations that
provided some of these services in the absence of state provision. Electoral
success, however, converted the parties from the relatively ‘easy’ position of
demanders to the much more ‘difficult’ position of responsible providers;
achievement of social provision made the services provided by the party and
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its allied organizations less necessary; trends like globalization, aging popu-
lations, lengthening periods of ‘normal’ or ‘necessary’ education, and
mounting public debts forced consideration of retrenchment even on the
parties that had built their support around expansion of public services. But
clearly, this necessity was far more obvious to leaders with personal
responsibility in government than it was to followers, especially ideologi-
cally committed followers, in the party on the ground.
The success of catch-all parties in appealing to members of the classes
gardées of the mass parties creates a political pressure for the mass parties
to attempt to broaden their appeal as well. One consequence is the weaken-
ing of the organizational linkages between the party and other organizations
within its clientele class, in particular the trade unions, suggested above. In
turn, this had the consequence of forcing the political career to stand more
clearly on its own – an out-of-office politician was less likely to find a
sinecure in a trade union, for example, while waiting for the next electoral
cycle. More generally, there has been a rise in the prominence of professional
politicians in the catch-all parties as well, in part driven by an increased
importance of technical expertise and in part by the decline in the economic
security of the upper middle classes and of the beneficiaries of inherited
wealth and position. More politicians are living from politics rather than
living for politics, and therefore needing to worry about such mundane
matters as their own job security.
Moreover, as society in general has become more capital-intensive rather
than labor-intensive, the costs of doing politics have increased, while with
the weakening of social ties associated with the idea of ‘mass society’, the
willingness of party members to contribute enough to meet those costs has
decreased.
The results can be summarized under three headings. First, governing
politicians are more constrained in what they can deliver, and thus need to
free themselves from the (unrealistic) expectations and demands of their
followers. Politicians increasingly need resources beyond the willingness or
ability of their followers to provide. Politicians are increasingly pro-
fessionals, for whom the personal stakes of failure are high. The result,
according to the Katz and Mair (1995) hypothesis, is the tacit formation of
a cartel among the ruling parties. As has been accurately pointed out (e.g.
Koole, 1996), the cartel hypothesis is as much a description of a party
system (a pattern of interactions among parties) as it is a description of a
type of party itself. The Katz and Mair contention, however, is that just as
firms in commercial cartels end up different in their internal organization
and behavior from firms that are engaged in free market competition, the
system level cartel has consequences for the internal dynamics of the parties
within it that are sufficiently strong and sufficiently pervasive to define a
new party type.
While this development has been couched in stimulus-response terms, it
can also be seen in cyclical terms. This idea comes particularly from noting
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the similarities of the elite or cadre party and the cartel party, especially from
the perspective of outsiders. (In this respect, Katz and Mair are basically in
agreement with Koole’s [1992] use of the descriptive term ‘modern cadre
party’.) These include: the ‘real’ issues are kept off the political agenda; there
is a limited and self-perpetuating (self-vetting) class of inside participants;
rules (e.g. electoral laws) are structured to disadvantage, if not to completely
shut out, challengers to that class of participants. In this sense, the anti-
party-system party is analogous to the newly rising mass parties of the late
nineteenth century, for example with their emphasis on internal democracy,
even when it is the ‘democracy’ of a charismatic leader rather than of equal
deliberation, or the idea of party as the organized political part of a way of
life rather than just an expression of political opinions.4

Inside the Cartel Party

Just as the catch-all party is in some senses (particular emphasized by Kirch-

heimer) a development or fulfillment of the mass party model and in other
senses (particularly emphasized in the Katz and Mair articles) an alternative
or response to it, so the cartel party is in some senses the fulfillment of the
catch-all party model and in other senses a response to it. Whether seen as
fulfillment or response, however, the cartel model has several implications
concerning the internal organization of parties.
The cartel party is a party headed by leaders who are professional poli-
ticians in two senses. In the first place, party leadership in the age of the
cartel party requires a variety of specialized skills and a range of technical
expertise at a level normally associated with other professions. While a
variety of jobs in the ‘chattering classes’ or ‘brokerage occupations’ (Norris
and Lovenduski, 1995) may help to develop some of these skills, it is increas-
ingly the case that the requisite honing of skills, the forging of the requisite
personal relationships, and the acquisition of the requisite knowledge both
of government and of politics can be achieved only through experience in
politics. In a sense, the rapid rise to political prominence of such outsiders
as Ross Perot or Silvio Berlusconi are the exceptions that prove the rule; on
one hand, both headed movements that were distinctly outside whatever
party cartel there is in their countries, and on the other hand neither is in
high office, and while Berlusconi remains important in Italian politics and
may yet return to power, Perot appears to have no such prospects.
Especially within a cartel party, positions of leadership are reached over
time from below, not by immediate lateral transfer from some other hier-
archy; the leaders of cartel parties have made careers as party politicians.
And this, as suggested above, is the other sense in which cartel party leader-
ship is professionalized. While politics may be a passion, it is also a job. In
the terms classically elaborated by Weber (1958), the leaders of cartel parties
are professionals who live from politics rather than merely amateurs who
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live for politics. Indeed, this process of professionalization reaches below

the top leadership ranks to include ordinary MPs as well (King, 1981; Mc-
Allister, 1997: 20; Roberts, 1988: 113; Wessels, 1997: 94–7) The willing-
ness of such leaders to trade public concerns like ideology or policy for
private needs like security of income and position is correspondingly
increased relative to previous party types.
Professionalization of party leadership in these twin senses then suggests
several more characteristics of party leadership. One is that party leaders,
like other professionals, come to ‘share certain characteristics in terms of
similar educational backgrounds, common standards regulating, qualifying
and restricting members for entry, and recognized hierarchical pathways for
career promotion. As a result there is a shared professional community so
that members can easily recognize who does, and does not, belong’ (Norris,
1999). The old French saw that two deputies have more in common, one of
whom is a Socialist, than two Socialists have in common, one of whom is a
deputy, rings increasingly true at the level of MPs, and even more at the level
of cabinet ministers. While this increasing commonality of situation and
orientation among leaders of different parties is a descriptive characteristic,
however, it is also a facilitating characteristic in that it provides a common
ground for understanding and accommodation across party lines.
Also like other professionals, party leaders increasingly see the questions
with which they must deal as problems of technical or professional exper-
tise (with regard to which they should play a privileged role) rather than as
problems of taste or preference (which ought to be resolved democratically).
Thus a second implication of professionalization is a desire for autonomy,
in particular from those who are more inclined to see the problems of
government in ideological rather than managerial terms. This autonomy is
also required for effective participation in a cartel. The members of the party
on the ground (of any party type except the elite party – for which the exist-
ence of the party on the ground as a distinct face is problematic) are gener-
ally motivated by solidary incentives such as group identification (we versus
they) or ideology (Panebianco, 1988). Compromise across party lines
necessarily debases these values. If leaders are to make compromises
nonetheless, they must limit the severity of the constraints imposed on them
from below. In the ultimate compromise of forming an all-inclusive cartel,
they might have to free themselves from such constraints altogether.
A third implication of the professionalization of party leadership is a need
for a secure and reliable font of resources, particularly financial resources.
This has several roots. There has been a ‘commercialization’ of politics in
the sense that the things needed both for internal organization and for elec-
toral campaigning increasingly are of a type that must be bought rather than
being volunteered; the labor of party members will not substitute for a good
media consultant or pollster or adequate office space. The separation of
parties from other organizations makes it harder to borrow these resources.
The costs of these requisites are rising more rapidly than the willingness of
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party members and other donors to pay, at least in part because a variety of
societal changes have made individuals less willing to join parties, and
joiners less willing to pay (Katz et al., 1992; Katz, 1990). At the same time,
the degree to which the ability to raise funds has personal as well as elec-
toral consequences for party leaders has increased; although electoral
victory clearly is one likely route to personal and resource security (direct
access to resources of the state and the prerequisites of office; groups con-
tributing in the hope of securing access or policy favors are more inclined
to support parties in office), access to resources may loom larger than policy,
and stability of resources may become more important than maximization.
That the leaders of all significant parties share a common orientation and
face the same needs furthers the conditions required for the formation of a
cartel, while their financial needs in particular provide a powerful incentive
to form a cartel. As in economic cartels, there are two sides to this. On one
hand, a cartel facilitates more effective rent-seeking; the parties in aggregate
do better with a cartel. On the other hand, it also provides security, by limit-
ing the consequences of electoral defeat – even while limiting the benefits of
victory. The most apt analogy is to a professional sports league. By forming
a cartel, the owners of the sports teams are able to increase their ability to
extract rents, from fans, broadcasters, and trade-mark franchisees for
example. There is real competition in the sport, but it is spectacle rather
than the point of the cartel which is profit. Sharing the revenue, particularly
of the latter two types, ensures the viability of all the teams and protects
them against the economic consequences of defeat on the field; even if teams
that win consistently do better financially, even the consistent losers are
guaranteed against real loss. Correspondingly, cartel parties engage in ‘real’
electoral competition – and winners do fare better than losers – but the com-
petition is more show than substance. Divisive issues are kept off the agenda,
and the organizational and personal costs of losing are contained.
Looking to the party on the ground, the observation above that its
members are ‘generally motivated by solidary incentives such as group
identification (we versus they) or ideology’ actually glossed over an import-
ant distinction. Especially as social divisions have tended to become blurred
and the connection between sociology and party has weakened, the group
identification that leads to party membership is more likely to be party
identification per se, rather than identification with a party as one of an
interconnected panoply of groups and organizations that collectively define
the member’s identity vis-a-vis the social world as a whole. Party identifi-
cation often is ‘content free’ – the party identifier does not expect his party
to agree with him, rather he takes his positions from his party. Party identifi-
cation is likely to lead to a personal identification with the party’s leader, as
the personal embodiment of a valued object, much as citizens may develop
a positive attachment to a king or queen as head of state and thus as the
embodiment of the nation.
In contrast, those whose membership is based on ideology are more likely
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to be loyal to policy than to person. Membership based on ideology is likely

to imply both greater information and sophistication, and greater commit-
ment. As a result, party activists, as opposed to ‘rank-and-file’ members, are
more likely to come from among those motivated by ideological solidarity.
But, while the show of electoral competition may be adequate for those
motivated by group identification, for those motivated by ideology – includ-
ing the core of activists within the party on the ground – it is much less likely
to be adequate. Because of their activism, however, these more ideologically
motivated members are in a position to be influential within the party as a
whole, to the extent that the party on the ground has influence. They, thus,
may impose constraints on the ability of the leaders of the party in public
office to pursue the cartel strategy.
Logically, the leaders of a cartel (or would-be cartel) party have two poten-
tial strategies to limit the impact of this constraint. On one hand, they can
attempt overtly to disempower the party on the ground. This strategy pre-
sents two disadvantages, however. First, it runs counter to the prevalent
democratic ideology and so is likely to be electorally costly (although this is
a price that most cartel party leaders probably would pay, if it were necessary
to cartel maintenance and were the only cost) and, more importantly,
given the proliferation of party laws that tended to accompany the intro-
duction of public subventions of parties it also often is illegal. On the other
hand, even if the relative value of party members has declined, they are by
no means worthless (e.g. Scarrow, 1996), and overt disempowerment is likely
to alienate not only ideologically motivated activists, but other members as
well.
The leaders of the party in public office can attempt to disempower the
party on the ground covertly, by decapitating it – that is by denying to the
ideologically motivated activists the opportunity to organize and speak for
the party identification motivated rank-and-file. The most prominent
example of this strategy is to have party decisions (e.g. the naming of the
party’s leader or the adoption of its election manifesto) made by direct postal
vote of the full membership, rather than allowing them to be made by the
party congress. More generally, compilation of full membership lists at the
center not only allows this kind of plebiscitarian decision-taking, but also
allows the central leadership to communicate directly with the membership
base, while cutting out the intermediary role (and power) of the local
activists.

Candidate Selection in the Cartel Party:

Hypotheses and Research Questions

These general strategies vis-à-vis the party on the ground have particular
resonance in the problem of candidate selection. Again, one possibility
would be to centralize control, thus marginalizing the party on the ground.
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Certainly there is some evidence of this both in Tony Blair’s decisions first
not to announce the list format or method of candidate selection for the
1999 election of the European Parliament until very late in the day, and then
to adopt a closed list system, and in the transfer of district allocation
decisions in Italy from the regional to the national level between 1994 and
1996 (di Virgilio, 1998). Suggestions of increased central ‘interference’ in
candidate selection also have been prominent in Ireland. Nonetheless, the
right of each local party organization to select its own candidates tends to
be so firmly entrenched (again sometimes in law) that this is not likely to be
a productive strategy. In this regard it is worth noting that both the British
and Italian examples represent attempted manipulation of new electoral
systems rather than the reduction of established local prerogatives within a
stable system, while the Irish interventions have been both limited and of
limited effectiveness.
As with such questions as national leadership or manifesto choice or ratifi-
cation, the alternative strategy would be to leave the selection of candidates
nominally in local hands, but to limit the range of options from which they
may choose and the possibilities for local organization to mobilize in oppo-
sition to the preferences of the central party. Again, direct democracy, which
‘benefits’ from the fact that the ‘vocabulary’ afforded to the voter is far more
limited than that available to the meeting attender (Schattschneider, 1942:
52) is a possibility. In this sense, the format of the decision (postal ballot
versus meeting) may be as significant as the locus of decision.
With a decision like candidate selection that is by its nature local, it may
be harder for the central party simply to set the alternatives upon which the
local members will vote. But there is a second strategy that both may give
the central party greater leverage and will further dilute the influence of
ideologically motivated and organizationally entrenched local activists. This
is to expand the selectorate beyond regular party members to include
sympathizers or even ordinary voters. The rationale would be that the less
consistently and intensively involved the participant in the candidate selec-
tion process, the more he or she will be swayed by name recognition and
the more likely he or she is to take cues from the highly visible central
leadership.
There is, of course, an accompanying danger to broadening the selectorate
beyond regular members, as has been observed in Canada – that local poli-
ticians will enroll large numbers of personal supporters immediately before
the candidate selection process for the sole purpose of having themselves
chosen as candidates. In this case, while local activists in the party on the
ground may be disempowered, so too is the central party. Even more in the
United States the use of the direct primary has the twin effects of disem-
powering the local party organization (indeed, in most cases one would be
hard pressed to find a local party organization as distinct from the personal
organizations of the various local office-holders, candidates, and aspiring
candidates, and in some cases such organization as there is is forbidden by
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law from taking sides in ‘its own’ candidate selection process), but also the
national party.
Nonetheless, this leads to two hypotheses, each of which can be expressed
in terms either as a comparison between cartel parties and non-cartel parties,
or (recognizing that the cartel party is an emerging rather than a fully devel-
oped type) as a comparison of cartel parties over time:
1 There will be increased involvement by the central party in candidate
recruitment and in setting and limiting the options among which local
selectorates will choose, at the same time broadening the range of groups
from which candidates may be recruited (greater categoric inclusiveness)
and limiting the choice of particular individuals from those categories
(what might be termed ‘personal exclusivity’).
2 There will be a movement of local candidate selection procedures and
selectorates toward greater inclusiveness, in particular away from choice
by local party officials and formal party meetings and toward selection
by broad-based ballots, and toward procedures that are increasingly open
to direct participation by party sympathizers rather than being restricted
to formal members.
In the terms employed by Rahat and Hazan in this issue, the second hypoth-
esis implies a democratization of the selection process by leading to more
inclusive selectorates, while the first might be seen as implying increased
democratization through a more categorically inclusive recruitment pool.
Whether this democratization also means substantial empowerment of the
base is another matter.
This process also suggests, and indeed I have argued above is intended to
produce, a reorientation on the part of elected members. The danger of
excessive local autonomy in the selection of candidates (from the perspec-
tive of the party in public office) is that MPs will force strategies on their
leaders that are electorally costly while at the same time undermining the
leadership’s ability to participate in a cartel-like arrangement to contain the
personal and organizational repercussions of those electoral costs. Whether
this arises because autonomous local parties select candidates whose per-
sonal views disincline them to play the cartel game, or because the threat of
deselection is adequate to force MPs who otherwise would play the cartel
game not to do so, the experience of the British Labour Party in the 1970s
and early 1980s and the disputes between fundis and realos in the German
Green Party illustrate the problem. The objective of the processes just
hypothesized would be to reorient MPs away from the local party on the
ground and toward the party in public office. In particular, the expectation
would be a kind of schizophrenia among MPs, mirroring the schizophrenic
character of a cartel party in general. In the local arena, one would expect
MPs to present a public face that contributed to the spectacle of party com-
petition, but in the governmental arena one would expect them to support
their leaders in playing the cartel game. Thus, there would be an increasing
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separation between the appearance and the substance of politics, with for
example an increase in the kind of activity that Mayhew (1974) describes
as ‘position taking’. While it is difficult to see exactly how the relevant
concepts might be operationalized, this can be expressed as a further
hypothesis:

3 There will be an increasing divergence between the rhetorical and the sub-
stantive behavior of MPs.

Candidate Selection, Party Types, and Democracy

More than one strand of democratic theory (e.g. what have been identified
[Katz, 1997] as socialist popular sovereignty, concurrent majorities, partic-
ipationist democracy, and developmental communitarian democracy) stress
the importance of democracy within parties, while others (especially other
forms of popular sovereignty and liberal democracy) stress the importance
of democratic competition between parties. On one side is the claim of John
Stuart Mill (1876, 2: 569) that ‘a democratic constitution, not supported by
democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not
only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse’,
while on the other is Giovanni Sartori’s (1965: 124) assertion that ‘democ-
racy on a large scale is not the sum of many little democracies’.
What would be the implications for this debate if these three hypotheses
were to prove accurate? Most obviously, this would suggest that there is
more to democracy than suffrage – in this case, that expanding the inclu-
siveness of the formal selectorate does not necessarily increase the real
control exercised by followers over their leaders. To the contrary, expansion
of the selectorate can be an elite strategy to defang the base.
This then raises a further question. The process hypothesized above has
much in common with Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’. Although it sug-
gests that there will be less popular control than advertised, is it the case, as
Michels (1962: 369) also suggests, that ‘the democratic principle carries
with it, if not a cure, at least a palliative, for the disease of oligarchy’ and
is likely to generate, ‘in virtue of the theoretical postulates it proclaims . . .
a certain number of free spirits who . . . desire to revise the base upon which
authority is established?’ In this case, the long run effect of empowering
while decapitating the membership might contribute to the self-limiting
nature of the cartel party model.
At the same time, the argument advanced here suggests that, contrary to
the ‘elitist’ models, one may not be able to rely on the desire of politicians
to win elections to induce them to perform their democratic functions. If
one could, then the additional constraints imposed on politicians by inter-
nal party democracy would be dysfunctional for the system as a whole. But
if, as the cartel party model suggests, politicians attempt to secure their own
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welfare through ‘restraint of trade’ rather than through competition, then

the constraints imposed by internal party democracy (such as limiting
strategic and ideological flexibility and ability to respond to changing
circumstances, but also forcing leaders to attend to salient issues and forcing
closer correspondence between rhetoric in campaigns and behavior in
office) may result in a ‘better’ democracy at the system level than any avail-
able alternative.

Notes

1 ‘Common harlots of the Treasury bench’ as British government MPs were once
described. Or in W. S. Gilbert’s words in the operetta Iolanthe:
When in that House, MPs divide
If they’ve a brain and cerebellum too
They have to leave that brain outside
And vote just as their leaders tell ’em to.
2 ‘The political function of elections in a democracy, we assume, is to select a
government. Therefore rational behavior in connection with elections is behavior
oriented toward this end and no other. Let us assume a certain man prefers party
A for political reasons, but his wife has a tantrum whenever he fails to vote for
party B. It is perfectly rational personally for this man to vote for party B if
preventing his wife’s tantrum is more important to him than having A win instead
of B’ (Downs, 1957: 7). Although Downs’ theory depends heavily on this assump-
tion about voters, the assumed use of policy by parties as an enticement to voters
rather than as an end in itself suggests that this distinction between private and
political rationality is not intended to apply to politicians.
3 As with the elite party, there is potential for oxymoron here, since the top parlia-
mentary party leaders and the top extra-parliamentary party leaders frequently
were the same people. This problem remains theoretically significant with the
catch-all party as well.
4 An obvious example, at least at the rhetorical level, is the Belgian Flemish ecology
party, Anders Gaan Leven, literally ‘another way of living’.

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RICHARD S. KATZ is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in

Baltimore, MD. He has published numerous books and articles on the subjects of
political parties, elections, and democracy.
ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
MD 21218–2065, USA [email: richard.katz@jhu.edu]
Paper submitted 4 December 1999; accepted for publication 23 June 2000.

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