Cadre party

A party run by a small circle of incumbent and professional politicians, which seeks mass support on election day but does not seek mass membership. It has supporters rather than members, and it has them only when it needs them.

What follows structurally is the whole point. A party with no members between elections has nobody to answer to between elections. It has no reason to develop a policy position, because a position is a promise and a promise can be checked later by the people it was made to. A distributed benefit cannot be checked. It has either arrived or it has not.

Source: David Wurfel’s characterisation of the Philippine parties of the Third Republic, that they “did not seek mass membership, only mass support on election day,” as carried in Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, p. 155, free PDF, citing Wurfel 1988.

First used in: 1.6 · Two parties, one class, sixteen elections