Reflections on Political Parties and Political Development, four decades later

Several generalizations about political parties that appear in the symposium volume, Political Parties and Political Development (1966), seem to be equally valid 40 years later, while some others do not. The decline of the political party as perhaps the chief instrument for integrating previously excluded groups into political participatory modes was already apparent then. Similarly, it was predictable that universal suffrage and elections would not necessarily lead to democracy. Less apparent back then was that a proliferation of political parties would both reflect and also radically change the cleavage structure of society and, consequently, attenuate the tendency of parties and party systems to 'freeze' into predictable and enduring patterns. Above all, it was not imagined that revolutionary technological changes of the past several decades would so profoundly affect the nature of elections, and the role of political parties in them, as to raise disturbing questions regarding the future of representative democratic polities.