The cartel party was introduced as an ‘organisational response’ to various environmental dilemmas faced by traditional mainstream parties (Blyth and Katz, 2005). Unable to procure the desired returns (assured governmental status) for the provision of goods (responsive policies), they professionalised and introduced a new type of inter-party relationship that stabilised competition and was in many respects, analogous to that of business cartels. Initially thought to occur in more consensual environments where patronage and inter-party relationships provided ‘fertile’ ground for such developments (Katz and Mair, 1995), the more recent version of the theory has suggested that party cartels are more likely to occur in systems prone to majoritarian politics (Blyth and Katz, 2005): clearly, the cartel model poses as many questions as it answers (Detterbeck, 2005: 173). This paper investigates a number of key factors associated with this unique form of competition. Following a brief introduction, the party cartel is conceptualised and issues relating to size, composition and terms of membership are considered. Adopting a systemic approach (Pelizzo, 2006), a measure of cartelisation based on policy positioning and access to office is then proposed and tested for across a number of westernised European countries, as is the extent to which cartelised environments coexist with institutional factors such as cartel-friendly subsidy laws and electoral systems. The final section of the paper establishes whether consensual or majoritarian (Lijphart, 1984) environments are most facilitative of party cartels.
