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1. INTRODUCTION
Is a critique of political parties written 100 years ago able to foster our understanding of today's parties and today's crisis of democracy? And, conversely, what can modem theories of political parties learn by re-reading Michels' harsh criticism? Revisiting Michels and confronting his work with modem theories has the advantage of being able to look at the phenomenon of political parties from two different points of the historical time axis. Michels penned his thoughts at the beginning of the century of mass democracy and formulated his famous 'iron law of oligarchy', which describes a systematic crisis of political parties and of modem democracies. Modem party theories look back from the end of the century at the developmental stages of political parties and identify a new type of party, the 'professional electoral party'. Although there are major differences between Michels and modem theories of political parties, one is struck by four common problems with which both are faced:
(i) Political parties are defined not by substantial ideologies and/or programs reflecting the interests or identities of various social groups, but rather by their organizational structure. Political parties are characterized by a specific organizational anatomy, meaning that a study of the theory of political parties unavoidably involves organization analysis. Michels established party the- ory as organizational sociology, and more recent schools of thought on this topic have followed him in that respect.
(ii) Inextricably connected to this is the interpretation by both of the crisis of parties and of democracy as the result of an unresolvable paradox of delegation, which has found its way into today's fields of (institutional) economics and political science as the Principal Agent Theory.
(in) Both then formulate an underlying fundamental problem of democracy: the systematic and unavoidable alienation between the masses, or citizens, and their political representatives. Michels radicalizes this as the "iron law of oligarchy", (Michels, 1962), meaning the fundamental alienation of the political leaders of a mass party from the members organized within it. Modem party theory formulates this as a systematic breach between the parties organized within the state apparatus and the social and political groupings within society.
(iv) Finally, the organizational analysis of the phenomenon of political parties, both in the writings of Michels and in more...