Cleavages and Intra-Party Coalition Maintenance: The Case of Poland

The central argument of this paper is that in order to get cleavages right, we must get parties right, which means acknowledging that parties are not all alike in terms of what they are and what they want. The hitherto dominant theoretical approaches to the study of parties have all assumed a commonality of goals as their point of departure, be it policy (with parties defined as the “political arms” of social groups), vote maximization (with parties defined as election-fighting machines), or the pursuit of office (with parties defined as devices for solving the collective action problems of office-seekers). Drawing upon the recent work in American politics by Bawn et al., this paper proposes that parties be conceptualized instead as broad coalitions whose nature and goals vary from party to party, and within each party over time. Each coalition includes office-seekers, organized interests, ideological activists, financial sponsors and media outlets, each with its own particularistic goals. In contrast to classic theories of interest group pluralism, which imagined societal actors as free to “shop around” for parties to lobby on ad hoc basis, in this approach the successful maintenance of a coalition requires that actors commit themselves to “invest” in a given political project for an extended period of time, contributing resources, ideas and personnel to the common cause. If this problem is solved successfully (usually through the development of an appropriate supporting ideology), a party becomes a device for stabilizing a particular coalition of “investors” and linking it to a particular segment of the electorate by defining “who stands with whom” and for what political purposes. After outlining the general logic of the argument, the paper proceeds to explore its “traveling capacity” outside of the American context, applying it to the case of Poland.