ABSTRACT
Political parties are conventionally thought of in societal terms. They are tra-
ditionally seen as representative agencies, giving a voice to well-established
constituencies, and deriving legitimacy from their capacity to articulate
their voters’ interests and to aggregate their demands. This can easily be
seen when we look at some initial categorization of party organizational
types – cadre parties, mass parties, or catch-all parties – almost all of
which derive from an analysis of the parties’ linkage with the wider society.
Most of the traditional party literature, especially that devoted to Western
Europe, also compares parties on the basis of competing patterns of represen-
tation: workers’ parties, religious parties, farmers’ parties, or people’s parties.
