The Growth and Structuring of Mass Politics in Western Europe: Reflections on Possible Models of Explanation

Attempts to devise models for the explanation of the many striking diff's in the style & structure of mass pol within Europe have as their principal aim to account for variations in 2 sets of parallel processes of change in European pol'al systems since 1789: (1) the sequences of steps in the instit'ization of formal mass democracy; (2) the timing of the growth & the stabilization of org's for the mobilization of mass support through new channels, the formation & the "freezing" of org'ed party alternatives within each nat'l pol'al system. The real problem is the construction of a unified model for the interaction between the 2 processes of change to account for step-by-step changes in the pedigree of party alternatives from one phase of democratization/mo bilization to the next. A possible procedure is to work on paired comparisons of nat'l developments: to start out from the distinctions in the original models & then check through for each pair how many of the actual diff's in sequences & structures can be roughly accounted for in these terms & how many require further diff'iations. Illustrations of paired comparisons of steps in the development of mass democracy in Denmark & Sweden, & Finland & Ireland, help to establish one general conclusion: a unified model of explanation must work with sets of time-specified variables of which 4 basic categories can be distinguished--precondition variables, elite response variables, mobilizational context variables, dependent variables. The emphasis is on time-specified codings over several cent's of pol'al development, & on cyclical linkages over time within a unified model of possible paths of development. IPSA.