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24 | Zoltan Simon “these are all the same’, making them disinterested in, or even hostile to politics and political organisations. Falling membership fees also generate financial pressure on political parties. In most European countries, the only viable solution to compensate them in the long run seems to be through state funding, which, in turn, creates converging interests among party leaderships at the expense of their ties with party members. Richard Katz and Peter Mair call this a system of cartel parties (Katz and Mair 1995), transforming political parties into state agents as public service agencies (Mair 2013, 83-89). Party leaders, in particular those with solid media capital, may even come to the conclusion that party members are a useless disruptive factor in their political activities and are therefore to be avoided, resulting in taxi or couch parties (also called voicemail or virtual parties) —- referring to a membership so small that they can fit into a taxi or on a couch - selling a broad range of political messages and promises (products), mainly through mass media, to citizens as political consumers (supermarket parties; see also Gallagher et al. 2011, 349-358; Magone 2011, 346-355). In Mair’s well-formulated conclusion: “political competition has come to be characterised by the contestation of socially inclusive appeals in search of support from socially amorphous electorates” (Mair 2009, 220; also Mair 2013, 57). While the waning of social cleavages and coherent social constituencies, and the catch-all strategies embraced by mainstream political parties, undermine political-ideological differences in the political competition and public debates, this trend is reinforced by external pressures and constraints imposed by globalisation and European integration. These further narrow the spectrum of policy options and choices for leaders and parties in national political arenas. As Schmidt says: In fact, the very existence of the EU as a system of supranational governance above the nation-state alters the democratic properties of national institutions, along with their claims to legitimacy ... mainstream parties have had increasing difficulty in mediating between their responsibilities to govern (by the EU rules) and their need to be responsive to their electorates. National citizens often no longer feel that their political input matters. The resulting malaise has in turn fueled the rise of antisystemic parties given to populist extremism and Euroskepticism ... As a result, the national-level “politics without policy” that I had metaphorically identified in 2006 has only worsened. We now increasingly see “politics against policy” in contentious areas such as the euro, or even “politics against polity” as in the case of Brexit. (Schmidt 2020, 14, emphasis in the original) Should we accept this analysis, it does not come as a surprise that the recent and ongoing crises have further intensified these trends (Dinan et al. 2017, 369). They have also showcased the persisting differences between political systems and cultures in Western and in - even more volatile - Central and
