Catch-all party

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Catch-all party ( English catch-all party ; translated / translated) collection party , “ all-world party ” or “people 's party ”, especially the latter, however, is criticized) describes in political science a strategic and organizational orientation of political parties. It is characterized by de-ideologization , turning away from a class or denominational electorate (and thus turning away from the strategy of the “milieu” or “ ideological party ”"), Strengthening the party leadership and at the same time devaluing the role of the individual party members (and thus a development away from the" mass integration party ") as well as striving for connections to interest groups . With programs that are kept as general as possible, as many votes as possible should be won outside of a specific clientele.

Developing the theory

The term and the theory were introduced into the specialist discourse by Otto Kirchheimer in 1965. He cited the development of the two major parties in what was then West Germany around 1960 as an example. The reasons for the development of catch-all parties were given by Kirchheimer and the supporters of his thesis socio-economic and socio-cultural changes - weakening of class differences and other social lines of conflict ( cleavages ) , loss of the voters' ties to the mainstream parties, growth of the Middle class - as well as the increasing spread of mass media, which made it possible for the parties' leadership levels to address potential voters directly without activating the intermediate structures of the traditional member parties.

As a result, Kirchheimer expected an ideological convergence of the parties, a decline in the proportion of regular voters and an increase in the number of alternate voters, the restriction of politics to the management of the status quo and increasing apathy among the electorate. In preparation for the election campaign, the parties would investigate the current preferences of the voters through surveys instead of mobilizing them for specific goals; they are chosen as one chooses consumer goods. This increases the importance of the central strategic election campaigning compared to the local mobilization of the electorate.

Examples and consequences

A similar tendency was observed in the party systems of other western industrialized countries. B. for Switzerland, where the ideological rapprochement of the big parties did not go very far, and for Great Britain (for example for the Labor Party under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ). In Turkey, the AKP was an example of catch-all parties in its early phase. Many Eastern European parties have been catching up with this development since 1990.

In the US, the catch-all parties are called the big tent ; Examples are the Democratic Party during the New Deal of the 1930s or, to a lesser extent, the Republican Party of the 1980s. In Canada, the Liberal Party is considered a catch-all party or big tent .

The demarcation of the catch-all party to the next stage of party development postulated by Mair and Katz, the cartel party , which tries to marginalize small and new parties and thus to immunize itself against electoral defeat, is controversial.

The increasing weight of socio-cultural conflicts (e.g. about abortion, immigration or ecological issues) since 1979 (after Franz Walter the year of the breakthrough of the Greens) or 1989/90 was initially interpreted as an expression of the increasing importance of post-material values; these were subsequently accentuated more strongly by the catch-all parties. But after the financial crisis in 2008 it became clear that this reorientation was not understood by some of the membership, which led to the party leadership becoming alienated from the base of the popular parties. The catch-all principle of the “post-ideological” parties also excludes radical cultural populism because many voters shy away from extremist and culturalist slogans.

Since around 2010 at the latest, the catch-all parties in Europe seem to have been losing ground in favor of parties with a sharper ideological profile, the unifying element of which is enemy images (e.g. Islam or genderism ) or a reference to one's own religious identities . Since sociocultural and moral lines of conflict versus material interests, at least in middle and upper class milieus, are gaining importance in the long term, the individual preferences of voters are drifting apart and, in the opinion of many experts, can hardly be pooled through catch-all parties. As an alternative to the classic catch-all party, there have recently been strongly personal collection movements such as Emmanuel Macron's La République en Marche in France, which (reacts) to the new "conflict axis between global / cosmopolitan and national / community-oriented, which is currently breaking the usual camp boundaries" by combining the protection of minority rights with the demand for free trade.

literature

  • Otto Kirchheimer: The Change in the Western European Party System. In: Political quarterly. Volume 6, Issue 1, 1965, pp. 20–41.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Udo Zolleis: The CDU: The political model in the course of time . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-90837-3 , p. 19 .
  2. ^ Matthias Dilling: The CDU. Representation guarantees and deficits of a people's party . In: Elmar Wiesendahl (Ed.): Parties and social inequality . Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2017, ISBN 978-3-658-10390-3 , p. 92 .
  3. ^ Thomas Poguntke: International comparative party research . In: Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel (Hrsg.): Comparative Political Science . 4th, revised and expanded edition. Verlag Leske + Budrich GmbH, Opladen 2003, ISBN 978-3-8100-0564-9 , 2. Party typologies and social change, p. 193 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-322-86382-9 : "... 'Catch-All Party' (badly translated as 'All World Party' or 'People's Party') ..."
  4. ^ Elmar Wiesendahl: From the people's parties to the catch-all parties. Otto Kirchheimer revisited . In: Indes. Journal for Politics and Society . 7: Heimat, No. 4 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, March 2019, p. 106 - 123 : "... equating the People's Party with similar but not identical party variants ..."
  5. ^ Oskar Niedermeyer: The analysis of party systems. In: ders. (Ed.) Handbook on political parties research. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2013, pp. 83–118, on p. 105.
  6. ^ A b Andreas Ladner: Stability and Change of Parties and Party Systems. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, pp. 53-56.
  7. ^ Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Protest, parties, intervention state. Organized politics and democratic problems in transition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, pp. 68–77.
  8. ↑ Bernd Hofmann: Approaching the People's Party. A typological and party-sociological study. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2004, pp. 51-55.
  9. ^ Otto Kirchheimer: The change in the West German party system. In: Political quarterly. Volume 6, 1965, pp. 20–41.
  10. ^ Andrea Römmele: Political parties and professionalized election campaigns. In: Dieter Fuchs, Edeltraud Roller, Bernhard Weßels (eds.): Citizens and Democracy in East and West: Studies on Political Culture and Political Process. Festschrift for Hans-Dieter Klingemann. Opladen 2002, pp. 448-416, here: p. 455.
  11. ^ Andreas Ladner: The Swiss party system and its parties. In: Ulrich Klöti u. a. (Ed.): Handbook of Swiss Politics. Zurich 1999, pp. 213-260.
  12. ^ Jennifer K. Smith: Campaigning and the Catch-all Party. The Process of Party Transformation in Britain. In: Party Politics , Volume 15 (2009), No. 5.
  13. ^ David C. King: The Polarization of American Parties and Mistrust of Government , in: Why People Don't Trust Government , ed. by Joseph S. Nye, Philip Zelikow, David C. King. Harvard University Press, 1997.
  14. ↑ Bernard Grofman, Samuel Merrill, Thomas L. Brunell: The Potential Electoral Disadvantages of a Catch-All Party: Ideological variance among Republicans and Democrats in the 50 US States. In: Party Politics, Vol 5, Issue 2, 1999, doi: 10.1177 / 1354068899005002004
  15. ^ R. Kenneth Carty: Politics: The Liberal Party's Long Mastery of Canada's Public Life. University of British Columbia, 2015, p. 54.
  16. ^ Peter Mair, Richard S. Katz: Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party . In: Party Politics , Vol. 1 (1995), Issue 1, pp. 5-28.
  17. ^ Franz Walter: For the autumn of the people's parties. Bielefeld 2009, p. 10.
  18. ^ Eike-Christian Hornig: The late phase of the member parties in Western Europe. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 37th vol. (2008), no. 1, pp. 45–62. doi: 10.15203 / ozp.709.vol37iss1
  19. ↑ Michael Zürn, Peter de Wilde: Debating globalization, cosmopolitanism and communitarism as political ideologies. In: Journal of Political Ideologies , 2016, pp. 1–22.
  20. ↑ Timo Grunden: Dosed Americanization. Reform need and reform options of the popular parties. In: Ralf Thomas Baus (Ed.): Party system in change. Perspectives, strategies and potentials of the popular parties. Conference of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation from 19. – 21. August 2011, pp. 263-286 Online (PDF).
  21. ^ Robert Pausch: The hunter as a collector. ZEIT online , April 5, 2018.