Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, "Cadre, Catch-All or Cartel?: A Rejoinder," Party Politics, 2 (October 1996), 527-536.

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Rudd Koole (1996) has raised a number of interesting points and criticisms concerning the cartel party argument that we originally advanced in the pages of this journal (Katz and Mair, 1995).Although some of these points are, in our view, based on misinterpretations of our argument, and although some raise concerns that we have already anticipated in other contexts, Koole does nevertheless also highlight errors of commission or omission that we have made, and therefore offers us an opportunity to clarify and improve our understanding of contemporary developments in party politics. Koole has, of course, also been a highly valued collaborator of ours in the research project out of which the cartel party argument developed, and we have profited greatly from his comments and criticisms as that research project has developed. Challenge and response are crucial steps in the refinement of theory and in definition of research questions, and we are therefore pleased to have this opportunity to respond to what is an interesting and sometimes valuable critique.

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Since the space available for this rejoinder is necessarily limited, let us conclude with two brief observations.First, Koole's comments on the question of stratarchic and federalist modes of intra-party organization are both insightful and well taken. This is a difficult and problematic area, which probably demands more careful thinking through than any of us have allowed for up to now. Our own sense, but it is little more than that, is that the stratarchic model is perhaps the most appropriate, even when higher party bodies are actually composed of delegates - indeed, this was exactly how the Wayne County Democratic Party was actually structured (Eldersveld, 1964: 36-7). Moreover, while local parties might well wield considerable power when acting together, as Koole suggests, our sense is that they simply don't usually act together, hence allowing the party in public office to remain effectively autonomous in practice (see also Katz and Mair, forthcoming). Second, notwithstanding Koole's concluding remarks, we never in fact intended to suggest that there existed some single evolutionary model with a single dominant party type. Our point would be simply that the development of party organizations reflects a stimulus-response dynamic, and while a sequence can be discerned - not least as a result of the sequential development of favourable and unfavourable conditions - this does not necessarily characterize the trajectory of every specific party.On the contrary, and echoing Koole's belief in the existence of a plurality of party types, we would see each model as representing one of a series of organizational 'inventions' which then becomes part of the available repertoire, or menu, from which political actors may draw (see also Katz and Mair, forthcoming), but where ceteris paribus, the existence of particular circumstances (state funding, a newly enfranchised electorate, or whatever) will tend to favour the adoption of one model rather than another. It must also be added, of course, that there are in fact no fully fledged cartel parties, just as there are, or were, no fully fledged mass parties, catch-all parties, or cadre parties; what we have sought to do is to draw attention to what we believe to be an important development in the on-going evolution of party politics, and to anchor a 'corner' in space relative to which real-world cases can be attempted to be located (see, for example, the attempted applications in the recent papers of Agh, 1995; Hoskin, 1995; MacIvor,1995). In the end, therefore, we are not trying to think of this discussion as one in which we are right and Koole is wrong, or vice versa; rather we would see ourselves as engaged in placing different emphases - and rhetorics - on what we believe to be a basically agreed phenomenon.