From cartel to crusade: The politics of radical outbidding. Thirty years in the life of the party cartelisation thesis

The inaugural issue of Party Politics in January 1995 was led off by Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party. The article outlined a convincing and influential account of the evolution of party organisation from the late 19th century and of its consequences for representative democracy. The notion of party cartelisation, famously associated with the article, has since become one of the most common axioms of comparative party scholarship. In this article we revisit Katz and Mair’s core argument, clarifying what it did and did not say. We show how the article both shared common ground with earlier accounts of political cartelisation and innovated in important respects. We assess the critical reaction to the article, the core evidence on party cartelisation itself, and the article’s influence and legacy. And at a time of great political uncertainty, we evaluate what the thesis and its proponents have to say about future developments in party-based democracies and the future direction of scholarship on party politics.