Abstract

There is widespread concern that the nature of mass politics changed during the late twentieth century, and indeed changed largely for the worse, in most post-industrial societies. The standard arguments are familiar and widely rehearsed. You can hear them echoed everyday, whether in simple or sophisticated versions, in the press, scattered in political speeches, and published in academe. Some arguments are cast in strictly empirical terms, but many popular accounts have strongly normative overtones.The intellectual roots lie in the classics of political sociology from the late 1950s and mid-1960s, captured perhaps just as the era of traditional party campaigns was passing, notably the work of Maurice Duverger on mass-branch political parties and Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset on social cleavages and electoral behaviour.The standard view emphasizes the consequences of the significant shift from direct party-oriented linkages between citizens and the state towards indirect media-oriented linkages in representative democracies. In the traditional model of election campaigns that characterized the ‘golden age’ of West European party politics, running from the expansion of the mass franchise in the late nineteenth century until at least the mid-twentieth century, party loyalists characteristically selected parliamentary representatives based on long-standing social cleavages and stable ideological cues.The core cleavages of class, religion, region, and language gave a collective meaning to party support and united people with shared identities and social roots who strived for broadly similar political ideals. As illustrated in Figure 1, in traditional campaigns political leaders communicated with grass-roots party loyalists via elected representatives and core party activists, using direct face-to-face channels of persuasion, organization and mobilization, such as local meetings, party newsletters, candidate pamphlets, doorstep canvassing, and town-hall speeches, supplemented by partisan newspapers.Collective organizations and traditional interest groups such as unions and churches, local cooperatives, community groups, and workers’ clubs, mobilized many citizens at the margins of political power and linked their interests to political parties. Support by party loyalists was regarded as a sign of trust in the ability of elected leaders to translate their programmatic principles into concrete policy actions