ABSTRACT
Although the analysis of parties and party systems has proved an enduring concern within comparative European politics, the amount of attention that the topic has received has tended to ebb and flow over the decades. Just over 40 years ago, four path-breaking volumes were published that effectively defined the parameters of comparative party studies thereafter: Dahl’s Political Oppositions (1966), LaPalombara and Weiner’s Political Parties and Political Development (1966), Lipset and Rokkan’s Party Systems and Voter Alignments (1967) and Epstein’s Political Parties in Western Democracies (1967). These volumes represented a true explosion of capacity in the field, and effectively brought comparative party studies into the modern age. A decade later, and not long before the launch of this journal, this new wave of party literature reached the apogee marked by the publication of Sartori’s Parties and Party Systems (1976; 1 see also Sartori 2005), perhaps the most important single contribution to the field. Thereafter, despite occasional high points (e.g., Janda 1980; Panebianco 1988), attention faded, such that within the European political science literature of the 1980s, in what was otherwise a period of major scholarly development, political parties tended to be deemed passé. This was partly because of the priority then being accorded to other closely related themes, most notably the study of corporatism, on the one hand, and the new social movements, on the other, with both phenomena being seen as more interesting or more important modes of interest intermediation than parties, and partly because the interest in parties in government had become absorbed into the burgeoning literature on coalition formation and public policy processes (see Katz and Mair 1992: 1).
