Ruling the Void by Peter. Mair Page B

OF PARTY GOVERNMENT
    This also serves to undermine the notion of party government. Party government is a rather elusive concept that did not begin to receive attention in European political science until the late 1960s. By then, however, it was already a prominent theme in discussions of US politics, with the American Political Science Association’s 1950 report,
Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System
, at the centre of debates over political and institutional reform. This much-cited and later much-criticized report had been heavily influenced by the work of E.E. Schattschneider, who emphasized the need for effective choice and accountability in federal elections. As he argued in 1945: ‘The major party in a two-party system is typically and essentially a mobilizer of majorities for the purpose of taking control of the government; it is the most potent form of democratic political organization available for our use. The major party is the only political organization in American public life which is in a position to make a claim, upon any reasonable grounds whatsoever, that it can measure up to the requirements of modern public policy … It alone submits its claims to the nation in a general election in which the stakes are a mandate from the people to govern the country’ (Schattschneider, 1945: 1151). In US practice, however, these arguments fall rather flat, with many of the early responses to the APSA report suggesting that it was oriented towards a British-style of cabinet government and majoritarian democracy, a system that was anathema to many American observers (see Kirkpatrick, 1971). Nor did the arguments receive much support in Europe. In this case, it was again a British or perhaps Anglo-American two-party model that seemed to be favoured, with the result that the arguments themselves appeared largely irrelevant (see Daalder, 1987).
    The first substantial attempt to address the issue of party government in the European context was developed by Richard Rose (1969) and was also heavily biased towards the Anglo-American experience, although the analysis itself concluded with an attempt to draw more wide-ranging cross-national conclusions and to elaborate a series of hypotheses that could be tested in a wide variety of systems. 6 For Rose, party government is about the capacity of parties to ‘translate possession of the highest formal offices of a regime into operational control of government’ (1969: 413). And since this capacity varied from system to system, and also over time, his analysis sought to identify the more specific conditions that must be met for parties to influence government. These are listed in Box 1, overleaf, and may be summarized as requiring a winning party to have identifiable policies and the organizational and institutional capacity to carry them out through the people it appoints for that purpose. It is this that constitutes ‘operational control of government’ and hence what may be defined in these circumstances as the practice of ‘party government’. In the absence of these conditions, alternative forms of government may be identified, among which Rose lists government by charismatic leadership, traditional government, military government, government ‘by inertia’, and in particular ‘administrative government’, whereby ‘civil servants not only maintain routine services of government, but also try to formulate new policies’ (1969: 418).
    A similar but more parsimonious list of conditions for party government was later elaborated by Richard Katz (1986: 43–44) in a more abstract analysis that was intended for application to a wide variety of parliamentary and presidential systems. For Katz, party government required three conditions. First, all major governmental decisions were to be taken by people chosen in electoral contests conducted along party lines, or at least by individuals appointed by and responsible to such people. Second, policy was to be decided