Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Volume I by Giovanni Sartori Review by: Leon D.

Epstein The American Political Science Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 766-767 Published by: American Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1954229 . Accessed: 04/04/2014 07:42
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766

The American Political Science Review

Vol. 72

"if the small political class in Kenya continues to enrich itself while adopting a policy of wage restraint and union restriction, workers will feel increasingly deprived relative to this elite. Any violent industrial and political action in the future might thus put a small section of 'haves,' supported perhaps by urban unemployed, against a much smaller group of 'have-mores.' " This conclusion may well be correct, but it can hardly be said to have flowed from the intervening analysis. Not that the intervening analysis and data are uninteresting. They are a useful addition to the growing body of literature on Kenya's trade unions. But the hopes raised by chapter one of an analytical breakthrough are not fulfilled.
MARTIN GODFREY

University of Sussex, England Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Volume I. By Giovanni Sartori. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pp. xiii + 370. $32.50, cloth; $10.95, paper.) We have waited a long time for Sartori's major work on political parties. Judging by the distinguished scholarly book at hand, the first of two projected volumes, the work has been well worth the wait. Sartori has refined and extended a book-draft circulated in 1967, and he has also recast an important essay published during the last decade. He now provides, in volume one, a full, careful, and penetrating analysis of party systems. This analysis follows several rigorous definitional chapters establishing the frame of reference for the whole work. Promised for the second volume are party types, organization, and functions, plus the relationship of party to other variables and to the political system. Plainly, much of the subject-matter remains for the later publication. Nevertheless the first volume itself is a most significant addition to the field of comparative politics, and it should quickly be recognized as the leading study of the number, the ideological positioning, and the competitive relations of parties. Now at Stanford, but long an Italian professor with an admirable international reputation, Sartori has a scholarly scope well beyond Western Europe and the United States. He is not content to write about parties only in Western democratic nations. Rather Sartori wants to develop a framework for understanding parties generally and everywhere. So he takes into account the experience of many non-Western and non-democratic nations. It is

true that he refrains from claiming world-wide applicability for his typology of party systems; specifically, he believes that the "fluid polities" of certain African states do not so far have parties fitting categories derived mainly from Western experience. But whether it is to include or exclude from the typology, Sartori's discussion displays a staggering range as well as a depth of scholarship. His knowledge of the parties literature is massive. Although many national specialists can probably find grounds for disagreement, readily discernible mistakes seem so few and so minor that it would be ungenerous even to note them here. Worth more attention is a difficulty inherent in the broad scope of the book, or in any book that attempts to integrate American experience in a perspective derived primarily from European parliamentary politics. Americans may wonder how our system's development is comprehended when the author emphasizes the transition from responsible parliamentary government to party government (pp. 19-21). Or we may think that Sartori is somehow excluding a separation-of-powers regime when he measures party strength in terms of parliamentary seats (pp. 122-23). But the author is aware of the terminological difficulty. Thus when he distinguishes two-partism as a system in which each major party can have enough seats to govern alone (p. 186). He adds in a footnote (p. 211) that the argument must be rephrased and adjusted for the American-type presidential system. In this as in other respects, there should be little doubt that Sartori understands American politics even if he starts from a perspective different from our own. That perspective, incidentally, leads to a proposed change in specifically American terminology. Sartori would not treat the historical patterns of southern state politics as one-party cases. Unlike a genuinely sovereign nation that has only one party, our old "one-party" states really belong, he argues, to his "predominant party" category (pp. 83-87). The last point suggests the rigor with which Sartori defines and classified so as accurately to embrace the many cases in his large universe. The result, for some readers, could well be impatience especially with the first four chapters. But one should persevere. The definitions of faction, fraction, and party are conceptually important, and particularly for Sartori's purposes. Moreover, he reveals, in the course of defining, something about those purposes. For instance, his emphasis on the expressive function of parties relates to his belief that a single party cannot adequately replace a repressed interparty competition. And his basic definition

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1978

Comparative Politics

767

of party excludes political groups incapable of electing candidates to public office. Sartori's classification and typology of party systems, well-polished revisions of earlier work, are at the center of the present volume. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are especially crucial and impressive. The number of parties is indeed important in Sartori's approach, and he uses an exacting numerical criterion to obtain seven classes rather than the traditional three. But for his typology, in contrast to classification, he adds an ideological criterion. Hence Sartori distinguishes "moderate pluralism" from "polarized pluralism" not just because the latter may have even more parties than the former but principally because a polarized system has greater ideological distance between its relevant parties. Such distance means a kind of competition that, while consistent with the existence of a center party, is so centrifugal that antisystem parties at opposite extremes of the ideological spectrum tend to gain at the expense of a center party and, at the same time, to be incapable of coalescing with each other. In other words, having a center party does not mean having a center tendency in electoral competition. A two-party system or a moderate pluralist system, without a large center party, is likelier to have a center tendency than is a polarized pluralism (of which contemporary Italy is an evident example). Understandably, in light of recent history, Sartori is by no means optimistic about the capacity of a polarized pluralism to endure. Nor is he at all certain that antisystem parties, like the Communist, can be absorbed into the political order. From his exposition, it is apparent that Sartori regards a noncompetitive system as the probable successor to a broken-down polarized pluralism. This still leaves a rich array of possibilities even among the one-party systems that he has separated from hegemonic-party patterns (as well as from predominant-party patterns, where competition remains). Sartori argues that there are meaningful differences, based on an ideological criterion, among totalitarian, authoritarian, and pragmatic patterns. Neither the richness of Sartori's materials nor the elegance of his thought are adequately displayed by these capsulated illustrations. They do, however, suggest Sartori's analytical method. In this volume, as in earlier work, he treats parties principally as independent variables. Indeed, in substantial portions of the book, he treats the number of parties, or the party system, as the independent variable (pp. As he says, "from the 191-92, 286-90). vantage point of a science of politics-in its difference from a sociological explanation or

reduction of politics-the question is precisely how the superstructure reacts upon the substructures" (p. 291). There can be no doubt about the brilliance with which Sartori supplies answers to that question. His refined typology and his analysis of the consequences of the several party systems are major intellectual achievements. They are undiminished by the observation that Sartori does not here tell us why one system rather than another has developed in certain nations. For example, he concentrates on the impact of polarized pluralism once it exists, and not on an explanation of the national circumstances that might have produced that party system in Italy or elsewhere. Perhaps we can look to the second volume for such an explanation.
LEON D. EPSTEIN

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Portugal's Struggle for Liberty. By Mario Soares. Translated by Mary Gawsworth. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975. Pp. 313. $21.00.) Mario Soares is the Portuguese socialist leader, politician, and lawyer by profession. This book is his autobiography, begun in 1968 on the former Portuguese African island of Sio Tome, to which the Salazar regime had deported him, and which he completed in exile in France. The author's life spans the years of dictatorship since military intervention in 1926, and appropriately his story covers that period, with concentration on the years after the Second World War up to April 1972 when he vowed to return to his country. Soares' account is significant for two reasons. First, it provides a self-portrait of the leader of the social democratic movement in Portugal today, his convictions and principles, his struggles, his successes. It does not cover his conspicuous activity in the period after April 1974 when progressive forces within Portugal's military overturned the old regime, allowing Soares to become Minister of Foreign Affairs when final arrangements for the independence of the Portuguese African colonies were set in motion. Second, its analysis of contemporary politics in Portugal is especially useful in light of the dearth of materials on the subject-the consequence of nearly a half century of censorship and repression of intellectual life under dictator Salazar and his successor, Marcelo Caetano. This analysis focuses, first, on the author's early formation and perspectives of Salazar; second, on his opposition activities

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