Bringing Agency Back In: A Note on Recent Developments in the Literature on Partisan Politics

The question of whether political parties affect public policies is one of the grand classics of comparative public policy research. Since the founding papers of this strand of the literature have been published, two intertwined developments have put the main theoretical mechanisms of partisan theory in question: First, the traditional cleavages yielding in stable constituencies for certain parties have weakened considerably. Second, parties have reacted to this tendency by changing their strategies, searching for other ways to secure electoral support. This development challenges the classic assumption of partisan theory, that parties represent a certain (and stable) group of voters and implement policies according to the preferences of this group. Against this backdrop, several recent studies have called for an “electoral turn” (Beramendi et al. 2015: 4) in partisan theory, maintaining that a voter-party-link has to be established on the micro level, depending on the policy area. In this paper, we propose a rather different view on partisan effects. We maintain that the electoral turn literature risks to black-box the political actors and their preferences, because they become mere agents of voter preferences. However, there is a growing literature that shows that political actors do have preferences and that these may or may not be coherent with those of the voters or the party members. If we take actors seriously, partisan effects on public policies are not necessarily dependent on a direct link to the electorate. Instead, the effect of partisan ideology on public policies may also be situated on the level of the parties or policy-makers themselves: If political actors decide on policies in line with their ideological view which has been formed during their long career in a political party, this results in policies which follow partisan differences, quite independently of the current distribution of voter preferences.