Political Party Systems

For a multitude of years, political scientists have attempted to answer the question of how political parties and party systems form across the globe. In his book, Political Parties and Party Systems, Alan Ware describes two possible theories that political scientists have used as answers: the sociological approach and the institutional approach. Though they both try their utmost to explain the reasoning behind the party systems our societies have formed, they each have advantages and disadvantages over the other. For instance, where the sociological approach has a greater explanatory power over the institutional approach, the institutional seems to be much better at explaining the rationale behind the creation of the American party system.

This approach zones in on patterns in a country that deal with social conflict. Here, institutions are considered “mere intermediaries” (Ware 9). In order to better their explanations in reference to social effects on party systems, the behavioral revolution was introduced. The behavioral revolution occurred in the mid-1900s, and the idea proposed was that studying the behavior of people, especially in regard to “mass behavior”, would help further the study of politics (Ware 11). In describing how this occurred, it could be seen that attitudes lead to orientations which lead to party policy preference that leads to the formation of political parties (Shaw lecture 9/14). This can be seen within groups among society in which similar attitudes lead to mass formations. According to Lipset and Rokkan, two political scientist, social changes and conflicts have been the main proponents of differences in political parties. They define four cleavages (center-periphery, state-church, land-industry, and owner-worker) whose arising conflicts and following solutions would lead to the creation of “distinctive patterns of social coalitions…that formed the basis of different party systems…” in the 20th century (Ware

In Professor Shaw’s lecture, he discussed how Dalton, in his evaluations, found that religion seemed to play one of the largest roles in political parties whether it be advocating for or against it. Shaw also discussed how the most common social cleavage was class and the most powerful being language (Shaw 9/19). Because religion, class, and language are a large part of our everyday lives, it gives sociological explanations a big advantage towards explaining why we think and act the way we do – and in turn what groups we form because of those opinions and actions. Additionally, the main argument against institutional structures not being the dominant explanation is that the sociological approach insists that institutional structures are just a “dependent variable”, they are merely changed by “social force” (Ware 189). Ware says sociologists explain it like this: the choices made by leaders do have an effect on parties, but social alliances are what ultimately cause change. His example is that when a social conflict arises and forces the leader of a country to react by making a decision regarding it, and this decision, in turn, ended up changing the party structure. The leader is only the linkage between political and social change (Ware 189). This gives the sociological approach an advantage, in theory, because the choices decided by political leaders regarding institutional structure have