1989/09/01 by Herbert Kitschelt · 269 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Competition (biology) #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Ideology #Law #Law and economics #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Political science #Politics #Social Policy and Reform Studies #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.1989.tb00279.x
published in Political Studies 37(3), 400-421 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 1989/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
One of the few efforts to link systemic and organizational determinants of party strategies is provided by what John May dubbed the ‘law of curvilinear disparity’. According to this law, voters, party activists and leaders have necessarily divergent political ideologies. These systematic differences are attributable to the activists' motivations and the constraints of party competition. This paper argues that the law is empirically valid only under distinctive behavioural, organizational and institutional conditions which are not specified in its general formulation. Thus, the law is only a special case in a broader theory reconstructing the interaction between constituencies, intra-party politics and party competition. This alternative theory is partially tested with survey data from party activists in the Belgian ecology parties Agalev and Ecolo.