Leon D. Epstein - Political Parties in Western Democracies

Preface To Transaction Edition

Apart from this preface and a lengthy postscript, the present edition consists of a book published over a decade ago and largely conceived in the early 1960's. I have let the work stand despite the importance of later developments and of recent democratic self-doubts. I like to think that the earlier perspective remains useful, and that my own limitations have not been the sole deterrent to producing a completely new edition. Revising and updating, however, would have been a prodigious task. Confronting the last decade's vast scholarly literature on parties, I would have been even less able than earlier to write a comprehensive account of political parties in Wester democracies. For reasons noted in the first chapter, I rely most heavily on experience in English-speaking nations, and really on aspects of that experience which relate to certain major themes. The book's main purpose has always been to present these themes rather than to provide a full coverage of standard material, updated or not.

Verbatim reprinting should not suggest self-satisfaction. Although my basic approach remains largely unchanged, I would not now write the same book. Certainly the book's themes have to be reconsidered in light of knowledge available by the late 1970's. I undertake such reconsideration, selectively to be sure, in the postscript chapter. It is my most explicit but not my first reexamination of party developments since the 1960's. I shall refer to other published efforts in the postscript. Like the reconsideration here, those publications owe a good deal to discussions in my courses and seminars, and also to specific research opportunities in Finland, Great Britain, Australia, and the United States. For these opportunities, over the last eight years, I am grateful to the Graduate Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Helsinki, the Australian National University, the Australian-American Educational Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Learning more about Finnish and Australian parties had particular relevance for my concerns. I want also to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for its support of a seminar on political parties that I conducted for college teachers in 1976-77; the post-doctoral members of that seminar were most helpful and stimulating.

Preface

My work falls short of an attempt, originally considered, to assemble a great deal of information about political parties in all Western democratic nations. I have often relied very heavily on American and British material. In the introductory chapter, I describe the difficulties of the broader task for any author and notably for me. To these difficulties I should add that I took so long to write and revise the material, which I had collected mainly in 1963 and 1964, that there is by this time new information that would have been useful for my purposes. I have tried, while writing and revising, to note events and research of the last few years, but there are certain recent works that I have not been able to use. One example is Giovanni Sartori's insightful conceptual treatise on political parties. Thanks to his generosity, I had the opportunity to read his work in a mimeographed version, but only after I had completed my manuscript.

Material that I had previously included in articles written for various academic journals is indicated in footnote references. In one instance, "British Class Consciousness and the Labour Party," published in the Journal of British Studies, I have used here substantial portions of my original article, and for permission to reproduce them I am grateful to the Journal editor, Professor Willson H. Coates. I should also note that a preliminary sketch of the ideas for this book was given in a paper presented in the fall of 1964 at Indiana University, later published in a shortened version in Essays in Political Science, edited by Edward H. Buehrig (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), and then republished in its original length in Political Parties: Contemporary Trends and Ideas, edited by Roy Macridis (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). The ideas discussed in that paper were modified considerably in the process of writing the present book, and what appears here represents a more recent and revised judgment than does the paper in either of its published versions. The later judgment owes a good deal to critical suggestions of colleagues who read the original paper.