Wolinetz, Steven. "Beyond the Catch-All Party: Approaches to the Study of Parties and Party Organization in Contemporary Democracies". In Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, edited by Richard Gunther, Jose Ramon, and Juan Litz. 136-164, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Wolinetz, Steven. "Beyond the Catch-All Party: Approaches to the Study of Parties and Party Organization in Contemporary Democracies". In Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, edited by Richard Gunther, Jose Ramon, and Juan Litz. 136-164, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

• The literature working on classifying party systems is often from the 1950s, and does not fully encompass the range of forms that contemporary political parties can take. It both fails to account for political parties in new democracies and new political movements in older democracies, like the rise of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia in Italy (137).
• One of the sources of this issue is that scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on Western European political parties, sometimes looking at America, Canadian, or Australian examples. This has left the literature skewed towards a number of distinctly Western European ideological divides and issues, leaving it less suited to classify or analyse political parties in other parts of the world (138).
• The distinction between 'cadre' parties and 'mass' parties derives from Maurice Duverger, who established the distinction in his 1954 book, 'Political Parties'. Cadre parties are loosely structured parties driven by elites with limited presence outside of legislation, while Mass parties have highly developed structures outside of government that encompass many voters (140).
• This dichotomy was useful for observing the differences between the establishment parties of the middle and upper classes and the 'upstart' parties, like the Socialists, who needed to organize before elections, in post-war France, but it is not particularly useful for contemporary parties, which blend elements of both ideal types (141).
• Some scholars have attempted to update the division by differentiating between elite-centered parties and mass membership parties, which do not pay attention to number of members, but to the degree to which party policy is determined by elites or the party base (143-144).
• The salience of this dichotomy has been particularly damaged by the decline in party membership over years, especially the decline in active membership. Even parties with expansive structures, Mass parties, struggle to maintain active participation, and function in a similar manner to Cadre parties (141).
• Although the distinction made by this dichotomy has uses, "Not included are [...] the presence or absence of multiple centres of power, [...] or the ways in which parties assemble resources, conduct election campaigns, or present themselves to the public. Any of these could provide a basis for differentiating political parties" (145).
• The idea of a 'Catch-all party' was developed by Otto Kirchheimer in 1966, explaining that Mass parties would gradually abandon their ideology and instead focus on running campaigns and emphasizing strong leadership. The logic was that such an ideologically bland approach would be so electorally successful that it would force other parties to adopt the strategy (145-146).
• The term 'Catch-all party' remains poorly defined, with it potentially referring to any political party without strong connection to voters, that focus on leaders, that is tied to interest groups, or opportunistic and ideologically ambiguous parties (146).
• The ideal type of the 'Cartel party' was developed by Robert Katz and Peter Mair in a 1995 article. It exists in the same political situation as ideologically vague Catch-all parties, but only comes into existence as a result of state subsidization of party funds. It does not desire strong electoral success, and only exists to extract state resources and exert pressure on issues of importance to major backers (148).
• Distinguishing which political parties in a given system as Cartel parties is extremely difficult, and they are often identical to Catch-all parties in form and organization. This severely weakens their use as an analytical tool (149).
• The author proposes a new categorization of political parties into three categories: policy-seeking parties, vote-seeking parties, and office-seeking parties. Political parties in these categories try to ensure their policies are past, secure votes in election, or achieve the patronage benefits of public office, respectively (149).
• Rather than placing political parties into firm categories, the author proposes a triangular continuum of party goals, where a party's position on that continuum depends on how highly it prioritizing votes, policies, or public office (150).
• There essentially cannot exist a pure form of any of the three party categories, as votes as necessary to both other party goals, and parties need some policy platform to win elections. Instead, telling towards which side of the triangle a party is located requires analysis of their organizational structure, its platform, and its history (153-154).
• One of the major problems with contemporary model of political party classification is that by adjusting to more recent political developments, they fail to distinguish between modern parties. Theories of Catch-all parties and Cartel parties imply that nearly all Western European political parties fit this model, hobbling the analytical usefulness of these terms (159).