Herbert Kitschelt: Unveiling the Dynamics of Democratic Party Systems

In the 2026 general election, political parties will clash and compete intensely for voters' favor. Law and order, defense, schools, integration, climate, health care will be intensely debated. The parties will give different answers on how to make Sweden better. The ties that are thus forged between parties and voters in Sweden are based on factual issues; citizens are looking for a party that is ideologically correct to vote for. Since this is how politics works in Sweden, it is easy to believe that it is the same everywhere. But no. If we look around the world, clientelist parties and party systems are at least as common. Parties compete with each other through, usually, personal connections between “patrons” (party bosses) and “clients” (voters). The patrons provide voters with coveted individual benefits such as housing, education and jobs, in exchange for their vote on election day. “Political machines” in American cities like Chicago or New York, influential and powerful during the great waves of immigration in the United States, operated according to such a logic. So too for many years the giant Congress Party in India, to name a few of many examples. In contrast to the idea-oriented, programmatic party systems, the central feature is that issues are not what drives politics, even if they exist, but an exchange, votes for individually distributed benefits. In such an exchange economy, the patrons, in the form of parties, aim for political power and the voters for some material security.

Parties are the life blood of modern politics. You can think what you like about it, for example the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau condemned parties on the grounds that they inevitably whipped up special interests. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a representative democracy in which parties do not coordinate decision-making, and thus provide essential links between the state and citizens. In a modern democracy, parties are central, and so is how they relate to each other, what ideological space they carve out for themselves, and whether they function in a fundamentally ideological or clientelist way. Someone who has never forgotten this but has persistently drilled into the role, space and significance of the parties both when they were the height of fashion in political science and when they almost fell into obscurity is Herbert Kitschelt. Herbert Kitschelt is the 2025 recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, the “Nobel Prize” of political science. He is awarded the prize for “having increased knowledge of the functioning of democratic party systems with exquisite theoretical acuity and impressive empirical breadth and depth”. Herbert Kitschelt is a professor at the prestigious Duke University in the US, but holds a PhD from Bielefeld in Germany. The prize is awarded this year for the 30th consecutive year, according to the statutes, to the person who has made the “most valuable contribution to political science”. The prize is awarded by the Johan Skytte Foundation, which administers the 1622 donation of the Privy Councilor Johan Skytte to a professorship in eloquence and political science at Uppsala University.

When Kitschelt was a young researcher in the 1970s and 1980s, the previously relatively stable party systems in Western and Northern Europe began to slowly shake up. Stein Rokkan and Seymor Martin Lipset, two scholars who famously theorized that party systems in Western Europe were “frozen”, stuck in the same mold since the dawn of democracy in the early 20th century, found themselves overtaken by reality. Green parties emerged, the Green Party in Sweden, for example, was formed in 1980. Herbert Kitschelt, perhaps because of his European background where parties had played a major role since the dawn of democracy, was one of the first to notice what was happening. A new kind of left was emerging in Europe, he argued, left-libertarian because it combined ultra-liberalism's strong belief in individual autonomy with the left's egalitarianism and critique of growth. In “Left-libertarian Parties”, published in 1988, he sets out to explain what makes such a thing possible in the previously frozen party systems. He predicts that this is not just a temporary change either, but the beginning of a reshaping of the European party landscape. In that, he was right.

About a decade earlier, Ronald Inglehart, who won the 2011 Skyttean Prize, had discovered that there was “a quiet revolution” among Europe's citizens. The spread of prosperity, resulting from the rise of the welfare state, peace since the Second World War and rising levels of education were shaping new generations with values that differed from those of their parents and grandparents. Self-fulfillment, equality and a reduced reliance on authority grew in importance. They replaced an earlier focus on survival, security and economics. While Kitschelt detected changing voting patterns during the 1980s in his research, Inglehart had seen the causes of these changes in the attitudinal data he collected from Europe. The latter laid the foundation for the World Value Surveys (WVS), a now worldwide survey of values and opinions, now in its seventh global survey.

Kitschelt concluded early on that the European - and now we are still talking about then Western Europe - party landscape would move away from the rather dominant, economically conditioned, right-left scale that had characterized the post-war period. This has also come true. One of the most discussed discoveries in political science in recent years is precisely that the economic right-left scale in many European countries—the first dimension of party competition—has been superseded or supplemented by a second GAL-TAN dimension. Green, alternative and liberal, as the acronym GAL stands for in English, has strong points of contact with Kitschelt's left-libertarianism, as he identified it already in the late 1980s. The GAL parties are ecological, green parties, they are left-wing parties without communist overtones, center parties like the Swedish Center Party, parties like the Feminist Initiative (FI). They are all formed around a relatively unorthodox combination of values of both individual freedom and equality.

The other pole of the second dimension of the new party landscape, traditional, authoritarian and nationalist (TAN), is now prominent in the large number of radical right-wing parties that have emerged in Europe since the late 1990s, with the Freedom Party in Austria being one of the earliest. The Sweden Democrats are among them. Donald Trump, whose nationalist movement Make America Great Again (MAGA) has now reintroduced protectionism on a large scale, is an obvious representative. But also in the European Parliament today, many parties of a radical right-wing nature have taken their place, challenging not only the left but also the broad center of European politics, manifested in social democracy in northern Europe and Christian democracy in central Europe.

Herbert Kitschelt, as he did with the left's new combination of freedom and equality, captured this development when it was still only the tip of an iceberg. If even that. In 'The Radical Right in Western Europe', published a few years after the New Left in 1994, it was the rise of the TAN parties that he was tracking, almost like Sherlock Holmes. In the book, which like most of Kitschelt's writing compares developments in different countries to provide greater explanatory power, he concludes that radical right-wing parties are gaining a foothold among voters as other, less extreme parties, move even more towards the center. One example is Sweden, where several of the established parties are competing for middle-of-the-road voters through policy reforms that suit this broad middle class, while leaving a void where the Sweden Democrats have stepped in. Radical right-wingers will be most successful when they defend the market economy but are authoritarian and have nationalist, even racist, messages, Kitschelt argued early on. France's Front National, the Dutch Freedom Party, Belgium's Vlaams Belang and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) all became parties to be reckoned with in the 21st century, built on this mix of economic pluralism, social dominance and fear of the Other.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, democratic Europe grew. Poland and Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Bulgaria and Estonia became democracies with multi-party systems and free elections. The same was true for many others. Armed with a deep historical knowledge and rare theoretical rigor, Herbert Kitschelt set out to explain how the new party systems in Central and Eastern Europe would take shape. His analysis was based on a combination of several explanatory factors, but all with historical roots. The countries' close history, that under the Soviet, communist, umbrella and how it had densified would be important. The interwar period and the progress of industrialization and the political mobilization it gave rise to would also have an impact. In the very first issue of the academic journal Party Politics, Kitschelt formulated his theory of post-communist party systems. It formed the basis of the book 'Post-Communist Party Systems', written with Gabor Toka, Zdenka Mansfeldova and Radoslaw Markowski in 1999. Unusual at the time, Kitschelt chose local co-authors, and not those from American universities. Western European party systems underwent dramatic changes in the 1980s and beyond, due to both rising living standards and marginalization. The dramatic history of the 20th century shaped the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Since then, many of the latter have also been incorporated into the European Union (EU) and into the major parliamentary groups, leading to greater similarities over time.

To return to where I started, in the fundamental difference between ideological and clientelist party systems, Herbert Kitschelt has dealt with this issue with great skill. In “Patrons, Clients and Policies” (2005), he returns to how parties and voters are linked. Contrary to what the research assumed fifty years ago, increased prosperity, a larger middle class or higher levels of education have not led to the disappearance of clientelist parties. Instead, it is clientelism that has adapted, becoming more sophisticated while the original building blocks remain in place. Is it the case, we might ask with Kitschelt's glasses on, that the Republican Party in the United States, under Donald Trump's leadership, is turning into a clientelist party? Where ideas will matter less and less in the future, and loyalty, vertical power with patrons and petty patrons and relatives in power more and more? The answer is not obvious, but Herbert Kitschelt helps us ask the question.

On behalf of the Prize Committee,

Li Bennich-Björkman, Johan Skytte Professor in Eloquence and Political Science

The original article in Swedish can be found here.