Party Linkage

The concept of party linkage refers to the ways in which political parties provide linkage to the state. In democratic theory, parties link citizens to the state, but linkage theory encompasses as well how parties link specific entities such as special interests and campaign donors to the state and how they sometimes develop stronger linkages to the state for themselves alone rather than for any other entities. Depending on what kind of linkage they provide, parties contribute to participatory democracy, responsive democracy, responsive oligarchic government, or coercive authoritarian government. They may also serve as agencies of prerevolutionary linkage or of market linkage. It is often possible to find various kinds of linkage by party within the same nation-state. This entry briefly examines each form of linkage by party in [Page 1812]turn and then examines work that helps explain why certain forms have become increasingly common while others seem to be falling into decline.

The use of the term party linkage is relatively new but is in fact an elaboration of the older concept of the party as a broker between citizens and the state, capable of aggregating specific interests, forming programs, and, when successful in electoral competition, placing representatives in office to carry them out. A similar approach conceived of parties as transmission belts, moving ideas through the body politic, transforming them into proposals for legislation and eventually into laws for implementation in the halls of governance.

These early metaphors, drawn from the boisterous world of industrial finance and production in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, presented a uniquely positive and American point of view. It was not until after World War II that the term linkage was developed to extend the idea of parties as connectors to the state and to make it possible to consider the wider range of the kinds of connections that can be made by parties. The first effort to do so systematically was made in 1980 and identified four kinds of linkage by party: (1) participatory linkage, in which parties serve as agencies through which citizens can participate in government; (2) responsive linkage, in which parties serve as agencies that strive to ensure that government officials will be responsive to the views of rank-and-file voters; (3) clientelistic linkage, in which parties serve as channels for the exchange of votes for favors; and (4) coercive linkage, where parties help authoritarian governments maintain coercive control over their subjects.

Over time, research on parties as agencies of linkage has explored the applicability of this typology, often concentrating on the extent to which either participatory or responsive linkage is in fact being provided. Other studies have elaborated the typology, pointing out, for example, that parties may engage in selective linkage rather than collective linkage, may offer representative linkage to other organizations in exchange for electoral support, and may develop different forms and processes of linkage within complex and multilayered polities.

A particularly modern form of these kinds of linkage is market linkage. Market linkage is linkage for sale. In one sense, it is not new: Once in power, parties in government have always favored those who helped them to office and rewarded them for doing so. What makes market linkage different today is the overwhelming power of advertising and the consequent need for vast sums of money to win votes. In this form of linkage, parties link groups to the state by collecting funds and waging campaigns on behalf of the candidates selected by those groups; they seek to place their patrons' candidates in office and thus become indispensable partners in power. Ordinary citizens are encouraged to believe that they will be the beneficiaries of responsive linkage, but their hopes and needs will be attended to, if at all, only after those of the patrons have been met. Their only hope in a system where market linkage is well entrenched is to form well-financed mass movements, that is, for citizens to become patrons themselves and for movements to take the place of parties as agencies of linkage (although movements never themselves move into positions of governance as parties successful in elections do).

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