The Logic of Party Democracy

Abstract

This book began as an attempt to show the relevance of conceptual analysis to empirical political research. I had become worried that students were often categorising very rigidly the issues of politics into those belonging in the domain of political theory, those relating to methodology and positive theory, and those that were the concern of the political sociologist or the specialist in 'institutions'. It did not surprise me that this was occurring. There were great pressures, particularly in America, for political scientists to become both more specialised and more interested in methodology than their predecessors of a generation earlier. In the 1970s the reason for this was not, as it had perhaps been ten years before, that behaviouralists had defined the problem areas for the political scientist to exclude the traditional interests of, for example, historians of political ideas. On the contrary, by the mid 1970s many of the leading exponents of behaviouralism, including Robert Dahl, were arguing that the analysis of political concepts was of direct relevance to their own analyses. Rather what has been leading to the compartmentalisation of the different areas of the discipline, each having its own 'language', is the career structure of university teachers, especially in the United States. With tenure increasingly difficult to obtain, many American political scientists have to take as their prime objective the maximisation of their published research. As a result, they specialise in one field only and have less time to devote to the writing of more general or more speculative essays on politics. The final version of the book is rather different from my vision of it when I commenced work on it. As I proceeded there seemed less need to overtly emphasise the relevance of conceptual analysis and rationalchoice theory to the study of democracy within political parties. My purpose did not change - I still hoped it might enable students to understand the relevance of the study of 'theory' to the 'real world' of politics - but I felt there was less need to explain in a detailed way throughout the book that this was what I was doing.