9 Drawing upon the concepts which political scientists have developed to study party–state relations, it analyses the historical conception and institutional development of parties as ‘public utilities’ in Germany and Italy. This article argues that this preoccupation with the effects of the ‘interpenetration between party and state’ has obscured the more fundamental question of how and why parties have acquired their position as ‘public utilities’. 7 It has even been argued that the contemporary party ‘due to its interpenetration with the state and the consequent acquisition of an unprecedented amount of resources, along with the expansion of patronage and clientelism, paradoxically shares one feature with the totalitarian party: the colonization of the state’. 6 Also, it has been posited that ‘as parties move away from society and occupy the state, they can more easily take advantage of their position as legislators and approve norms in their own favour’. Peter Mair, a classic proponent of this thesis, argued that because parties are more oriented towards the state than to society, ‘the citizens stay at home while parties get on with governing’. 4 It is held that it contributes to corruption, 5 that it undermines the representative function of parties, and that it contributes to the gap between state and people which is considered the root of the widely perceived crisis of democracy in Europe today. 3 While the agency of parties in the causal chain of democratic crisis in contemporary Europe is not universally agreed upon, it is generally assumed that the fact that parties are no longer civic organizations, but aim to be ‘part of the state’, contributes to the gap between the state and citizen.
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Yet while the ‘migration’ of parties to the state may have been intended as a democratic asset, it is increasingly being scrutinized in both public and academic debates. 2 Consequently, parties not only expand their influence over the state, but may also receive state funding, while they are increasingly susceptible to state control over their internal organization. Indeed, as ‘democracy requires elections contested by political parties, parties come to be conceived of as integral part of the democratic apparatus and democracy essentially as a service to society provided by the state’. 1 Thanks to their crucial role in the functioning of contemporary democracies, parties are increasingly considered what the political scientist Ingrid van Biezen calls ‘public utilities’. A major explanation for the resilience of parties lay in their ability to find a support base within the state. Although they suffer from declining confidence in the institutions of representative democracy and lose their support base in society, political scientists largely agree that this does not equate to the end of parties all together. The advent of parties as public utilities, even though fiercely criticized today, was therefore embedded in an ideological tradition that sanctioned the ‘party-state’ as crucial for the stability of modern democracy.ĭespite years of gloomy predictions about their imminent demise, political parties have proved to be very resilient. This became visible in the constitutionalization of political parties, as well as in the enactment and normative justification of party (finance) laws in the 1960s and 1970s.
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They deliberately constructed ‘party-state democracies’, in which parties influenced the state and the state managed individual parties and the party system. After 1945, politicians and constitutional judges drew upon this tradition in their efforts to stabilize mass democracy.
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The first notions on the ‘statist’ dimension of parties were put forward as an answer to the challenges of mass politics in the interwar era. It looks from an institutionalist perspective to the development of party–state relations in Germany and Italy since the Second World War, paying specific attention to how institutional reform corresponded to changing normative assumptions about the position of political parties in twentieth-century democracy. This article argues that the rise of parties as ‘public utilities’, that is, semi-state organs crucial in the functioning of democracy, which is currently observed by political scientists, has long historical roots.