Suchergebnisse

Adapted from the source document.

Although it is generally seen as desirable that parties in government are both responsive and responsible, these two characteristics are now in increasing tension with one another. Prudence and consistency in government, as well as accountability, requires that governments conform to external constraints and past legacies, and not just answer to public opinion, and while these external constraints and legacies have grown in weight in recent years, public opinion, in its turn, has become harder and harder for governments to read and process. Meanwhile, because of changes in their organizations and in their relationship with civil society, parties in government are no longer in a position to bridge or 'manage' this gap, or even to persuade voters to accept it as a necessary element in political life. This problem is illustrated by extensive reference to the current fiscal crisis in Ireland, and is also used to question some of the assumptions that are involved in principal-agent treatments of the parliamentary chain of delegation.

This paper is based on the concluding chapter of a forthcoming volume reporting the results of a research project that has investigated the principles and practices of party patronage in contemporary European democracies on a systematic cross-national basis. Despite sometimes substantial theoretical interest in this topic in the past, there has been a persistent lack of comparable data with which to gauge its extent, and hence also a persistent shortfall in cross-national empirical research efforts. At the same time, much of the theoretical work in this area has also been limited by virtue of the tendency to link the concept of patronage to exchange politics, thus ignoring its potential relevance as a party organizational resource in contemporary systems of multi-level governance. This project has aimed to fill an important empirical void in the literature on contemporary European polities. It has also aimed to use this new robust empirical evidence to theorize about party patronage within the context of party organisational development and transformation, on the one hand, and political-institutional transformations of modern state, on the other.