ABSTRACT
From the last decades of the twentieth century, the ‘classical’ explanation put forward to account for the relationship between parties and citizens in Western Europe began to experience serious problems, although that explanation had seemed so realistic in the 1950s and 1960s. A central position had been given to parties, but that central position came to be in question, for parties were no longer as solidly anchored in the society as they had been in previous decades. This was in turn because ‘social cleavages’ such as class, religious or regional appartenance, which tied citizens to parties, no longer had the same hold over the European population as had been the case previously. At a minimum, there was some loosening of the links between citizens and the political system which had prevailed for a generation and even more, at least in the countries which had escaped the political turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s.
