Much of what is now mainstream political science tends to be rather boring. Following the lead of American departments and journals, research on issues of real intrinsic interest, such as the changing character of political parties, seems to be stuck in endless attempts to model the choice between office-seeking and policy-seeking, the interaction between ‘vote-maximizing’ parties and ‘utility-maximizing’ voters, the organization of voter preferences or the dynamics of coalition formation—all in timelessly general property spaces, designed to lend themselves to representation by complex sets of formal equations.

There are, however, exceptions. Among the most remarkable of these, until his untimely death in the summer of 2011, was Peter Mair, professor of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence. Widely respected, especially on the European side of his profession, Mair preserved a keen understanding of both the history and the purpose of the study of democracy. Unlike many in the field, he never lost sight of the close relationship between mass political parties and democratic outcomes; his work always considered the development of the former firmly in the context of the latter, as the more important of the two. Moreover, his concern was unabashedly with popular democracy and the enfranchisement of ordinary people, rather than with the abstract rules of decision-making that have become the favourite subject of much of what today passes as democratic theory.

Ruling the Void is the latest and, sadly, the last of Mair’s books. It completes an oeuvre that began with The Changing Irish Party System (1987), a still unsurpassed study of his native land, and continued with the landmark Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability (1990), co-authored with Stefano Bartolini, which focused on the striking long-term stability of Western party systems, albeit eroded by growing electoral volatility from the 1970s. This was followed by the elegant Party System Change (1997), and a series of collaborative collections. Ruling the Void was still unfinished when Mair passed away, although the core arguments were all in place. It is the merit of Francis Mulhern, a friend since student days, to have organized what there was into an immensely readable and coherent sequence, drawing on additional material to compose the long chapter on the European Union with which the book concludes. Mair’s incisive style, in particular his ability to find clear and pointed formulations for what he had to say, is apparent from the opening lines:

The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.

In what follows, this premise is elaborated with the aid of an impressive array of empirical data, as Mair details the decline, from below, of voter turnout and party memberships, and, from above, the ‘withdrawal of the elites’ from democratic accountability. Though we cannot know what Ruling the Void might have looked like had Mair had time to finish it, we can be confident that the grand outlines would have stayed the same, not least the author’s steadfast refusal to retreat from the big questions in favour of methodological purity. Particularly striking is Mair’s deep appreciation for political parties as intermediary agencies between their voters and the political institutions of the state—two realms with very different dynamics and strategic contingencies. It counts among Mair’s great achievements as a political scientist that he resisted specializing in either one of these, though both require command of highly specific bodies of knowledge and research methodologies. For Mair, it was precisely their mediation between these two fields of action that defined the role of political parties; it was the way their responses in both zones were determined and combined that interested him most.

What, then, is the message of this important book? Going beyond the standard format of comparative politics, Mair looks less at national differences between party systems than at commonalities and shared historical trajectories. The ‘golden age’ of representative democracy is briefly sketched. With the advent of universal suffrage from around the 1900s, the earlier ‘parties of notables’ were supplanted by mass-membership organizations with strong, hierarchical structures, unifying voters on the basis of shared social experiences and collective hopes for what the party would achieve in government. The party’s role was to translate its voters’ interests into public policy, to recruit and promote political leaders capable of exercising executive power and to compete for control of the executive through national elections. The classic mass party, Mair writes, ‘gave voice to the people’, while also ensuring that the institutions of government were accountable. Mair describes the development of mainstream parties from around the mid-1960s towards what the social-democratic political scientist Otto Kirchheimer had described as a ‘catch-all’ model, seeking to scoop up votes far beyond their core constituencies and becoming ‘primarily office-seeking parties, with the desire to occupy government winning priority over any sense of representational integrity’. The next stage, gathering steam from the mid-1980s and 90s, is what Mair and Richard Katz, again following Kirchheimer, have called ‘government by cartel’, characterized by the elimination of effective opposition—the situation that prevails ‘when no meaningful differences divide the party protagonists, however vigorously they may at times compete with one another’.

The last decades of the twentieth century thus witnessed ‘a gradual but also inexorable withdrawal of the parties from the realm of civil society towards the realm of government and the state’. As Mair emphasizes, this ‘withdrawal of the elites’ has been paralleled by citizen disengagement, with steady falls in average turnout, decade by decade, and the ‘passing of popular involvement’ in political life. The process involved a downgrading of ‘the party on the ground’ in favour of ‘the party in parliament’, or in government, as leaders opted—to use another of Mair’s memorable pairs of concepts—for ‘responsibility’ at the expense of ‘responsiveness’. And while parties have drawn farther away from their voters, they have moved closer to each other: ‘What remains is a governing class.’