CADRE, CATCH-ALL OR CARTEL - A COMMENT ON THE NOTION OF THE CARTEL PARTY

The recently proposed (ideal) type of a modern political party, the 'c artel party', evokes questions both about the conceptual clarity of th e new type and about its empirical validity. The analysis of the relat ionship between civil society and the state, which constitutes a centr al element in Katz and Mair's concept of the cartel party, is consider ed to be too static to grasp the increased intervention by the state i n society. The application of a term derived from the level of the par ty system ('cartel') to individual parties does not seem to be a happy choice, while the reality of western party systems does not show an e ffective cartel of parties. It is argued that, instead of trying to fo rmulate (again) an alleged dominant party type for the present time, i t seems more fruitful to develop a classification scheme of parties th at allows for different types of parties to co-exist at the same time, without considering one of them as the most up to date.