Do parties remain central claim makers of social groups? A comparative analysis of parliamentary debates from 11 countries (1960-2024)

According to Rokkan & Lipset’s seminal approach of cleavages & party systems, parties are the political arms of social groups that mobilize to fix social injustices in a given polity. Yet, this central role of parties in representative democracies is disputed by the political sciences scholarship. Some scholars contend that this role has been declining – if not vanishing –since the ‘golden age’ of mass parties in the 1950-1960s due to a combination of interrelated phenomena, i.e. voters’ dealignment under modernization processes (Beck 2006), the waning of (traditional) ideological cleavages under socioeconomic development (Mair 2003, Kriesi 2012), demobilization of party organizations (Van haute & Gauja 2016), and the rise of personalized politics over party politics (Rahat & Kenig 2018) in the new media age (Croner 2003). In this context, our research aims to analyze to what extent parties remain central claim/representation makers in parliaments over time in a diverse set of democratic countries. Our research seeks to make two main contributions. First, we map party centrality over time to better describe its evolution (i.e. is it a linear decline, or does it show peaks and through). We posit that party centrality is responsive to endogenous and exogenous stimulus (e.g. economic crises as in 1973 and 2008), indicating a more complex trajectory over time. Second, we challenge the thesis that political parties are no longer key claim makers of social in-groups (against out-groups) for which they seek to defend specific issues interests. Although, the claim making role of political parties has been increasingly competitive, in a context of party system fragmentation and transformation of cleavages and new issues over time we argue that parties remain central claim-makers for in-group representation. For these goals, we mobilize parliamentary debates from 11 democracies from three continents (US and CA, in Americas, BE, UK, DE, ES, PT, SW in Europe, ZA and GH in Africa and Australia) to assess transformations over six decades (1960-2024). We use different NLP techniques to assess to what extent parties remain claim makers of ingroups, against outgroups, to defend specific issues interests. On the one hand, we utilize Named Entity Recognition (NER) algorithms to identify references to ingroups and outgroups. On the other hand, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to assign these references to the theoretically established ingroups and outgroups. We show that specific political and institutional factors moderate the transformation of party centrality over time and across countries.