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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.

The changing circumstances in which parties compete in contemporary democracies, coupled with the changing circumstances in which governments now govern, have led to a widening of the traditional gap between representative and responsible government. Although it is generally seen as desirable that parties in government are both representative and responsible, these two characteristics are now becoming increasingly incompatible. Prudence and consistency in government, as well as accountability, require conformity to external constraints and legacies. This means more than just answering to public opinion. While these external constraints and legacies have become weightier in recent years, public opinion, in its turn, has become harder and harder for governments to read. Hence we see the growing incompatibility. Meanwhile, because of changes in their organizations and in their relationship with civil society, parties 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 growing incompatibility is one of the principal sources of the democratic malaise that confronts many Western democracies today. ; Die sich wandelnden Rahmenbedingungen für Regierungen und für den Parteienwettbewerb in modernen Demokratien haben zu einer Verbreiterung der traditionellen Kluft zwischen repräsentativem und responsivem Regieren geführt. Obgleich von regierenden Parteien erwartet wird, dass sie sowohl repräsentativ als auch responsiv handeln, lassen sich diese beiden Vorgehensweisen immer schwerer miteinander vereinbaren. Eine umsichtig und nachhaltig handelnde Regierung, die ihrer Rechenschaftspflicht gegenüber dem Bürger nachkommt, darf sich nicht nur an der öffentlichen Meinung orientieren, sondern muss externe Sachzwänge ebenso berücksichtigen wie die Vermächtnisse vorhergehender Regierungen - zwei Faktoren, die in den letzten Jahren an Bedeutung gewonnen haben. Hinzu kommt, dass die öffentliche Meinung für Regierungen immer schwieriger zu deuten ist. Aufgrund von strukturellen Veränderungen sowie Veränderungen in ihrem Verhältnis zu den Bürgern sind die Parteien inzwischen nicht mehr in der Lage, die entstandene Kluft zu überbrücken beziehungsweise zu handhaben oder gar ihre Wähler davon zu überzeugen, sie als unverzichtbaren Bestandteil des politischen Lebens zu akzeptieren. Die zunehmende Unvereinbarkeit repräsentativen und responsiven Regierens ist eine der Hauptursachen für die 'Politikverdrossenheit', mit der sich viele westliche Demokratien heute konfrontiert sehen.

At a time when the literature on political parties is brimming with health and vitality, the parties themselves seem to be experiencing potentially severe legitimacy problems and to be suffering from a quite massive withdrawal of popular support and affection. This paper addresses one key aspect of the problems facing contemporary parties in Europe, which is the challenge to party government. I begin by reviewing the changing pattern of party competition, in which I discuss the decline of partisanship in policymaking and the convergence of parties into a mainstream consensus. I then look again at the familiar 'parties-do-matter' thesis and at the evidence for declining partisanship within the electorate. In the third section of the paper I explore the various attempts to specify the conditions for party government, before going on in the final section to argue that these conditions have been undermined in such a way that it is now almost impossible to imagine party government in contemporary Europe either functioning effectively or sustaining complete legitimacy.

This paper is concerned primarily with the way in which the changing character of political parties impacts upon their standing, legitimacy, and effectiveness. We see an emerging notion of democracy that is being steadily stripped of its popular component–a notion of democracy without a demos. As I try to show in this paper, much of this has to do with the failings of political parties. I am not suggesting that there has been a wholesale failure of parties; rather, I am seeking to draw attention to an ongoing process in which there are party failings, and in which democracy itself tends to adapt and change to these failings. This process then provokes its own momentum, in which parties become steadily weaker, and in which democracy becomes even more stripped down.

This paper is concerned primarily with the way in which the changing character of political parties impacts upon their standing, legitimacy, and effectiveness. We see an emerging notion of democracy that is being steadily stripped of its popular component–a notion of democracy without a demos. As I try to show in this paper, much of this has to do with the failings of political parties. I am not suggesting that there has been a wholesale failure of parties; rather, I am seeking to draw attention to an ongoing process in which there are party failings, and in which democracy itself tends to adapt and change to these failings. This process then provokes its own momentum, in which parties become steadily weaker, and in which democracy becomes even more stripped down.

In the 1969 General Election the Labour Party received more votes than at any other time in its electoral history. Nevertheless, despite this success, Labour continues to be one of the smallest social democratic parties in contemporary Europe. While many different reasons have been advanced to explain Labour's persistent weakness, there is general acceptance that the party's low level of electoral strength can be related both to the traditionally small industrial sector in Ireland ? and so to the absence of significant working-class population ? and to the apparently impregnable dominance of a nationalist political cleavage which has resolutely discouraged the emergence of an influential capital-labour opposition. In this sense, Labour's weakness can be seen in terms of its inability to compete with the larger parties which have organised their support in terms of variations on a nationalist/republican theme, and which have effectively rendered irrelevant the Labour demand that the electorate mobilise around strictly social and economic issues.

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.

In a paper published soon after the transition to democracy in East Central Europe, it was suggested that post-communist party systems were expected to be characterized by an unstable and unpredictable structure of competition (Mair 1996). Returning to that original hypothesis, this paper attempts to make a first systematic mapping of the patterns of inter-party competition which have characterised post-communist party systems over the past two decades. Because the main arena of inter-party competition (or cooperation) is the competition for government, we analyse here the way in which government is contested by the various political parties, and how such patterns of interaction vary both over time and across fifteen different post-communist polities. This allows us to derive a much clearer sense of the differences between party systems.

This paper is intended to frame and describe a novel method of political party positioning within the European Union and beyond. Ever since the groundbreaking work by Downs in the 1950s, political scientists have derived a variety of methods to empirically determine the position of parties on dimensions measuring differences in policies or ideologies. Today, two sets of techniques dominate this research domain: expert surveys and manifesto/ programme coding. What is common to both techniques is that the positioning is done by qualified scholars and other experts outside the parties, and that it is not always possible to trace the grounds on which a party was coded in one way rather than another. The EU Profiler project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary and pan-European research endeavour, takes a step beyond these established methods by using party self-positioning and by offering full documentation. That is, and in addition to conventional expert coding, some 300 political parties in Europe have been invited to place themselves on 30 issue dimensions. Moreover, and in so far as it proved possible, each coded position for each party is fully documented with extracts from party manifestos, party leaders' speeches, or relevant press or policy statements. The resulting data offer unique opportunities for comparing the accuracy and efficiency among party positioning techniques, exploring for the first time and in a systematic way the auto-positioning of political parties throughout Europe, and offering close textual documentation for the positions taken on each issue dimension.

At least since the beginning of the 1980s, much of the writing on the strategies, tactics, and policies of parties has explicitly cautioned against the treatment of party as a "unitary actor"" (e.g., Daalder 1983; Laver and Schofield 1990). Party leaders, it is now argued, may differ from one another and from party followers with regard to the ends which they pursue and the resources which they employ; even within the leadership itself, it is suggested, the conflict between factions may be such as to militate against any theories taking the party as a whole as the relevant unit of analysis. Nonetheless, there is a striking lack of consensus regarding the number and type of different units into which a party may be disaggregated, and the extent to which this disaggregation may be applied to an understanding of processes of organizational change.

Recent decades have seen a wave of institutional changes of the core democratic rules in advanced democracies. These changes include reforms of electoral systems; decentralization of power to subnational governments; the creation or enhancement of direct-democratic institutions; a rise in public subsidies to political parties; and shifts in the balance of power between executive and legislature. Nevertheless, political science has developed a limited understanding of what explains institutional change in democracies that are already consolidated. This is partly due to the lack of comparative data on the subject, with most studies of institutional change focusing on a single country, or on a single type of reform (e.g. electoral system change). Our paper seeks to bridge this gap by presenting the preliminary findings of an international research project that compared seven dimensions of institutional change in 18 consolidated European democracies between 1990 and 2008, producing a unique dataset whose content has been fully verified by national experts. This dataset provides the empirical basis for evaluating the type and extent of institutional change in consolidated European democracies, as well as developing hypotheses about the motivations and calculations behind these reforms.

This Report is a follow-up study on "How to create a transnational party system" (2010); it illustrates recent challenges and opportunities at EU level concerning the emergence of: i) transnational parties and a transnational party system; ii) constraints and opportunities for representative democracy. The main areas addressed in the report are: (a) voting coherence of the EP Party Groups after the Euro-crisis; (b) regulation of political parties at European level (PPELs);(c) role of political foundations at European level (PFELs). ; Republished version of EP Study 2014/PE 509.983

This study has been prepared by the Observatory on Political Parties and Representation (OPPR), part of the European Democracy Observatory (EUDO) at the European University Institute (EUI). It covers four aspects: 1) An analysis of the political doctrine and programme of major political parties in several Member States. 2) An examination of current procedures applied to political parties to choose leaders for European Office. 3) The development of proposals on how to help a European political party system evolve from national structures strongly influenced by historical traditions and cultural factors. 4) Suggestions regarding the extent to which the European electoral system and different systems of party financing would have to be revised in order to facilitate the above objectives.

This study has been prepared by the Observatory on Political Parties and Representation (OPPR), part of the European Democracy Observatory (EUDO) at the European University Institute (EUI). It covers four aspects: 1) An analysis of the political doctrine and programme of major political parties in several Member States. 2) An examination of current procedures applied to political parties to choose leaders for European Office. 3) The development of proposals on how to help a European political party system evolve from national structures strongly influenced by historical traditions and cultural factors. 4) Suggestions regarding the extent to which the European electoral system and different systems of party financing would have to be revised in order to facilitate the above objectives.

This study has been prepared by the Observatory on Political Parties and Representation (OPPR), part of the European Democracy Observatory (EUDO) at the European University Institute (EUI). It covers four aspects: 1) An analysis of the political doctrine and programme of major political parties in several Member States. 2) An examination of current procedures applied to political parties to choose leaders for European Office. 3) The development of proposals on how to help a European political party system evolve from national structures strongly influenced by historical traditions and cultural factors. 4) Suggestions regarding the extent to which the European electoral system and different systems of party financing would have to be revised in order to facilitate the above objectives. ; This study is the response to a tender contract awarded in November 2009 by the Committee on Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament (contract n°IP/C/AFCO/IC/2009‐62), for the provision of a study on "How to Create a Trans‐National Party System?".