Commissioned Book Review: Fernando Casal Bértoa and Zsolt Enyedi, Party System Closure: Party Alliances, Government Alternatives, and Democracy in Europe
| Author | Leonardo Puleo |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221076338 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(3) NP13 –NP14
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1076338PSW0010.1177/14789299221076338Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2022
Commissioned Book Review
Party System Closure: Party Alliances,
Government Alternatives, and
Democracy in Europe by Fernando Casal
Bértoa and Zsolt Enyedi. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2021. 320 pp., £75.00
(hardback). ISBN 9780198823605.
The new joint effort by Fernando Casal Bértoa
and Zsolt Enyedi aims to explore the factors
that enhance the stability of European party
systems. The authors argue that changes in the
patterns of competition for government (i.e.
closure) constitute the best proxy to assess the
degree of party system institutionalization.
Through the closure indicator, the authors show
the extent of change in party competition across
an impressive time frame (over 171 years) and
covering an extraordinary number of countries
and party systems. This grand design, including
all democratic countries from ‘the Atlantic to
the Urals’ (p. 28), increases the generalizability
of the analysis, which is not confined to a bunch
of proximate cases – in time and space – but
may also be applied to more distant political
experiences.
The concept of closure consists of three
components mapping the transformations in the
process of government formation: (1) alterna-
tion, indicating change in the partisan affiliation
of ministries; (2) the formula, signalling
whether a coalition is new compared to past
experiences; and finally (3) access, measuring
whether new parties are entering into govern-
ment for the very first time. The important
causal claim of the volume is that the degree of
party system institutionalization – measured
through closure – can be expressed as a function
of four crucial predictors: (1) the length of the
country’s democratic exposure, (2) the level of
parties’ institutionalization, (3) the fragmenta-
tion and (4) polarization of the party system.
The authors dedicate a chapter to each of these
predictors, which are treated as independent
variables both in a bivariate (from chapter 6 to
chapter 9) and in a multivariate (chapter 10)
fashion. The final chapter employs the theoreti-
cal and the methodological toolboxes of closure
in order to explore whether democratic break-
down is more likely to occur in open party sys-
tems, discussing also whether the degree of
closure influences the overall democratic qual-
ity of a political system.
In terms of theoretical embedding, the vol-
ume follows a reflection started with the works
of Gordon Smith (1989) and Peter Mair (1997)
that, since the late 1980s, has suggested shifting
the focus to the competition for government in
order to assess the patterns of evolution of
contemporary party systems. Furthermore, the
authors convincingly link the concept of closure
with the literature on party system institution-
alization, suggesting that the predictability of a
party system can be explained by the stability of
the inter-party relationships used to obtain cabi-
net control.
The inclusion of historical party systems
allows the authors to offer important advance-
ments to the literature on party system institu-
tionalization. Casal Bértoa and Enyedi show
that the length of democratic exposure, party
institutionalization, and the degree of party
system fragmentation and polarization are
clearly related to party system closure; how-
ever, these constitute distinct concepts that
cannot be employed alone as proxies for party
system institutionalization. None of these four
predictors represents a sufficient or necessary
condition for reaching high degrees of closure.
However, the bundle of strong party institu-
tionalization, long democratic exposure and
low fragmentation stimulates the predictability
of a party system. In contrast, highly frag-
mented and polarized party systems with
weakly institutionalized political parties are
deterministically linked to open patterns of
competition for government. Finally, in refer-
ring to the consequences of closure, the authors
To continue reading
Request your trial