autonomous (e.g. from narrow socio-economic interests), and coherent
(Dix, 1992). Comparing Korea, Taiwan and 12 Latin American countries
Stockton found that democracy requires strong parties as well as institu-
tionalized party systems (Stockton, 2001). Consequently, the sustaining
organizational characteristics of parties have become a topic of scientific
interest. This is a very difficult task because it is hard to know whether
something that a party does to its internal organization is crucial to its long-
term existence.
Analysis of parties in French-speaking West Africa in the early 1960s led
R. S. Morgenthau to distinguish between ‘mass’ and ‘patron’ parties
(Morgenthau, 1964, pp. 336–41). This distinction, ‘less neat in fact than in
definition’, indicated differences in organizational structure (particularly at
the local level), size of membership (including its social composition),
finances, functions, methods and patterns of authority. All such organizational
factors reflected the way in which party leaders related to the rest of the pop-
ulation. Mass parties, such as the Democratic Parties of the Ivory Coast and
Guinea or the Union Soudanaise, sought the adherence of all individuals,
whereas patron parties such as Niger’s Union Nigerienne ‘usually terminated
their structure simply with the adherence of influential notables or patrons’
(p. 337). Patron parties were weakly organized, undisciplined with little direct
membership participation. Local patrons were relied upon to reach the local
community. The individual was of interest to patron parties ‘only insofar as he
happened to be included in the franchise, provided candidates for election and
the minimum machinery for bringing the voter to the polls’(p. 340). Mass par-
ties in contrast had extensive organizations, performed the function of ‘social
integration’ through their mass membership and were interested in all aspects
of their members’ lives, not just their voting choices. Organizational strength
thus requires a mass membership. Parties become stronger the more they can
institutionalize mass support and develop a complex organization linked to
socio-economic bodies such as trade unions.
Ensuring survival does seem to require an elaborate internal apparatus to
mobilize society, and penetrate it through a mass membership involved in a
local as well as a central organization. Then it becomes easier for the party to
create a sense of national legitimacy. It becomes a more successful instru-
ment of political recruitment. Parties survive, it may be hypothesized,
because they have firm grass roots. Where parties have failed to create a
machinery for transmitting interests, opinions and needs upwards to the
policy-making élite and have only created channels of communication and
coercion downwards from the leadership to the masses they have experi-
enced difficulty surviving. A local organization has significance beyond
Political Parties and Party Systems 151