Parties Party Systems - Sartori

Parties Party Systems
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Autor: Sartori

 Wydawnictwo: ECPR Central Service University of Essex
ISBN: 9780954796617
EAN:
Format: ...
Oprawa: miękka
Stron: 368
Data wydania: 2005-03-01
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In this rich and broad-ranging volume, Giovanni Sartori outlines what is now recognised to be the most comprehensive and authoritative approach to the classification of party systems. He also offers an extensive review of the concept and rationale of the political party, and develops a sharp critique of various spatial models of party competition. This is political science at its best - combining the intelligent use of theory with sophisticated analytic arguments, and grounding all of this on a substantial cross-national empirical base. Parties and Party Systems is one of the classics of postwar political science, and is now established as the foremost work in its field. Giovanni Sartori's Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, was a work of exceptional conceptual clarity and has a curious history. An intended second volume - the draft notes and index card - was stolen along with the author's car and never retrieved. Sartori deliberately decided to allow the first volume to go out of print to encourage him to produce an abridged version together with an abridgement of the lost classificatory discussion of party types, organisation and function in a single volume. Was the second volume or conflation never rewritten partly because by the end of the 1960s structural functionalism, to which more attention was to be devoted, was already on the wane? Although this former fashionable political science methodology was abandoned, Sartori's book demonstrates that, when used circumspectly, its strengths yield both insight and systemisation. Sartori uses English with the sensitivity of a person who has thought carefully about the connotations and nuances of the words he uses from a foreign language. Linked with his early philosophical reading, his resort to the history of ideas provides a temporal extension that was neglected to their cost by his more positivist/presentist contemporaries. As a result, Sartori's writings have a cutting edge of exceptional sharpness, combined with a scrupulous respect for complexity that embraces both abstract categorisation and empirical verification. Asserting unapologetically that 'pedantry is necessary at a typological level of discussion whenever we tend to forget that the road of comparative politics is marked with pitfalls' (p. 227), Sartori's analysis of parties and party systems is characterised by subtlety and sophistication, eschewing oversimplifying generalisations. He does so by qualifying his judgements with penetrating distinctions arrived at after years of reflection, sometimes pursued obsessively into sub-distinctions with self-indulgent delectation. He occasionally recalls Jeremy Bentham's The Handbook of Political Fallacies, with its castigation of 'vague generalities', 'sweeping classifications' and 'sham distinctions'. Sartori's great enemy is conceptual confusion. What makes his book a classic is that apart from what it has to teach us about its subject matter, its obiter dicta on how to undertake political analysis are of timeless significance. Consider his discussion on the logic of classification and how it relates to measurement. 'How does the "qualitative science" dealing with what questions, relate to the "quantitative science" dealing with how much questions? Bluntly put, how do differences in kind relate to differences in degree?' (p. 263). Sartori rejected 'the assumption that the logic of classification was obstructive of, if not inimical to, the quantitative turn of the discipline' and that 'quantitative science [was] deemed capable of proceeding without or outside of, the qualitative science includes the quasi-totality of our theory' (pp. 263 - 4). Concepts were 'data containers', so he asks, 'what turns a concept into a valid fact-finding container?' (p. 264). Classification alone combines standardisation and discriminating power that avoids mis-gathering facts leading to misinformation. Because 'we must beware of a precision that is nothing but an oper

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