Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Seiler
The book is a study divided in two parts:
-in the first one the author is trying to establish a typology of the political parties,
classified in families, and which covers the entire Western Europe;
-the second part deals with Central Europe countries, which emerged from the "real
socialism" and built their way to a liberal democracy.
The political parties represent the basis for democracy. The pluralism of the parties
and their struggle for power, through the electoral process, are the key to liberal
democracy.
The typology of parties is founded on one of the following criteria: name, ideology,
organization.
- institutionalist
- of political development
Seiler presents the theory of Rokkan, a Norwegian political scientist and sociologist
of the 20th century, which describes the genesis of party systems in Western
Europe. According to Rokkan, the political evolution of Europe was affected from a
historical point of view by the three successive revolutions: the national revolution,
the industrial revolution, and the international revolution. The first two revolutions
defined the political system with the help of two conflictual axis : one functional,
one "territorial-cultural".
The international revolution affects the Workers side of the cleavage between
Capitalists/Workers, creating a sub-cleavage, which is divided in:
Communists/Neo-communists (reformists).
1
The four fundamental cleavages gave birth to the different political parties. The
high number of cleavages led to the emerging of the multi-party system
(pluripartidism) and the electoral system.
The author describes the typology of the party families from Western Europe
departing from these 4 cleavages. Each family corresponds to some political parties
expressing a particular side of a cleavage.
3
40 years the ‘single party’ and the state capitalism, based on
centralized planning.