SARTORI - SISTEME DE PARTIDE

Party systems would therefore be classified according to the number of parties in the
system, in which there was a distinction between formats with two parties, those with up to
some five parties (limited pluralism) and those with some six parties or more (extreme
pluralism); and according to the ideological distance separating the relevant extreme parties
in the system, which would either be small (‘moderate’) or large (‘polarised’).

the format of the system contained ‘mechanical predispositions’, such that extreme
pluralism could lead to polarisation.

The combination of both criteria resulted in three principal types of party system:

1. two-party systems, characterised by a lim- ited format and a small ideological distance
(e.g., the United Kingdom);

2. systems of moderate pluralism, characterised by limited pluralism and a relatively small

ideological distance (e.g., Denmark);

3. polarised pluralism, characterised by extreme pluralism and a large ideological distance

(e.g., Italy in the 1960s and 1970s).

also: a ‘predominant-party system’, a system in which one particular party, such as the
Liberal Democrats in Japan

Hume establishes a typology of partisanship that begins with a basic distinc- tion between
(i) personal and (ii) real groups – the latter being the factions and/or parties “founded on
some real difference of sentiment or interest.”

Robespierre stated that what brings about a plurality of parties is only the “per- sonal
interest”; and that “wherever I perceive ambition, intrigue, cunningness and
Machiavellianism, there I recognise a faction; and it is in the nature of all factions to
sacrifice the general interest.”

Faction remains equal to the ‘spirit of party’

in 1815 that the major French constitutional thinker, Benjamin Constant, recognised that
“one cannot hope to exclude factions from a political organisation, where the advantages of
liberty are wont to be preserved.” But he immediately added: “We must therefore labor to
make factions as harmless as possible

party pluralism was preceded by constitutional pluralism - The term pluralism can be
conceptualised at three levels, namely, (i) cultural, (ii) societal, and (iii) political.

- political pluralism points to “the diversification of power” and, more precisely, to the
existence of a “plural- ity of groups that are both independent and noninclusive.

multiple affiliations – the latter being the crucial distinguishing trait of a pluralistic
structuring.67 The presence of a large number of identifiable groups by no means testifies to
the existence of pluralism but only to a developed state of articulation and/or fragmentation.
Multigroup societies are ‘pluralistic’ if, and only if, the groups are associational (not
customary or institutional) and, moreover, only where it can be found that associations have
developed naturally, that they are not ‘imposed’.

parties as: (i) representa- tive agencies and (ii) expressive instruments. Correlatively, their
major activities can be referred to as a representative function and an expressive function.100
But my emphasis is on the latter.

Parties do not only express; they also channel. In Neumann’s wording, par- ties “organize
the chaotic public will.”105 They aggregate, select, and, eventually, deviate and distort.

To say that a party system is a pluralistic system of ‘parts’ that forcibly ‘express’ the
opinions of the governed does leave a great deal unsaid – granted.

According to the rationale of party pluralism, if a party is not a part, it is a pseudo-party; and
if the whole is identified with just one party, it is a pseudo-whole. We are thus peremptorily
con- fronted with the sui generis nature of the one party.

As Huntington puts it: “The no-party state is the natu- ral state for a traditional society. As a
society modernizes, however, the no-party state becomes increasingly the anti-party state.”5
What remains to be added is that the more modernised and/or developed the society, the
more antipartism yields to unipartism – at least in the sense that the latter solution proves to
be far less fragile and far more effective than the former. The one-party state is, in other
words, the end solution that, when party pluralism fails, characterises the politically devel-
oped societies.

With respect to party pluralism the major circumstance was the extension of the suffrage.
With universal suffrage, then, the party system acquires a new property. parties become
channelling agencies, and the party system becomes the system of political canalisation of
the society.

No parties at all leaves a society out of reach, out of control, and no modernised regime can
afford, in the long run, to settle on this unsafe and unproductive solu- tion.

the one party cannot produce a party system. Parties make for a ‘system’, then, only when
they are parts (in the plural); and a party system is precisely the system of interactions
resulting from inter-party competition.

Duverger - one-party pluralisms - “To the extent that factions develop freely inside a single
party. . . pluralism is reborn within the party and there it can play the same part. . . . It is
therefore conceivable that a sin- gle party may coincide with some kind of political
democracy. Competition among leaders within the single party is a struggle among power
holders confronting each other directly. The essence of party pluralism is, then, that party
leaders confront one another indirectly: They vie with each other with an eye to the voters –
and this entails far-reaching consequences. In the party-state systems, state and party
reinforce and duplicate each other, while in the pluralistic systems they split and are
disjoined.

The pluralistic polities contain two units:

1. the parties taken one by one - here we have, at best, only one (internal) electoral-
competitive process,

2. the inter-party system. - here we have two (internal and external) electoral- competitive
processes.
Virtually all parties have now become coalitionable, with the result that it is more and more
difficult to find any sustained cases of polarised pluralism. In sum, with ‘pure’ twoparty
systems being hard to find, and with cases of polarised pluralism becoming thin on the
ground, most systems inevitably end up by being classified as variants of moderate
pluralism, and this clearly reduces the contemporary discriminating power of Sartori’s
typology.