ABSTRACT
Sometimes the closest seat offers the poorest view. Just as people sit back from a wide-screen motion picture to gain perspective, students of political science seeking to understand political parties need a broader view. They must raise their thinking to an abstract level by generalising about parties.1 They do so by asking questions such as: What do particular parties have in common? What are their distinguishing characteristics? How many of these parties have these characteristics? These questions aim at ‘learning’ from the experience of parties in other countries by looking for certain consistencies that can be observed, measured and then generalised. The generalisations are often simple descriptive summaries of a given situation, an approximate quantitative measure of the numbers of objects belonging to a class, or a statement about common properties of objects: e.g. ‘most parties in advanced industrial democracies depend on state funding for their electoral campaigns; ‘25 per cent of Labour Party members are low-paid workers’. Sometimes they incorporate the ambiguous term ‘tend’ as in ‘American parties tend to be élitist and loosely-organised’, which might suggest a causal link.
