Minor Parties: The Relevancy Perspective

Minor parties exist in many multiparty systems. Yet there are relatively few systematic analyses or theoretical explanations of these phenomena.' An emerging interest in this subject has become noticeable in the last decade.2 Three main reasons lie behind this state of affairs. First, most of the literature on minor parties is derived from the classification of party systems and the analysis of their development.3 These studies focus on the large and dominant parties, not without reason, for they are the main actors in the political scene. Yet this does not justify neglecting the study of the minor political powers, unless there is, as Fisher claims, a presumption that minor parties are without any significant impact on government policy and other political phenomena and that at best they play dysfunctional roles in the political system.4 The second reason for the scant attention given to minor parties results from the predominance of electoral studies that analyze election results. These studies deal mainly with statistical data and analysis of the salient trends in voting behavior. Because minor parties usually fare very poorly in electoral terms, they are categorized in these studies as others and receive only marginal consideration. The third reason is one of logistics and practicality. Because minor parties are usually small and diverse, there is a lack of background information about them. By omitting minor parties from the analysis, data collection problems are avoided. Likewise, concentrating on the major parties that have a high proven level of support and stability makes the analysis more manageable.5 These three reasons have not only diminished the number of studies of minor parties, but have also dictated to a great extent researchers' bias. Assuming the insignificance of the minor parties, most of the studies that examine minor parties look only for the reasons behind their failure or their difficulty in widening their constituency.6 This poor state of the art can be changed by focusing on the minor parties as a separate phenomenon. A better understanding of minor parties may also contribute a new dimension to the analysis of the major parties, as well as of the political system as a whole. My main claim is that, although minor parties are usually very small,7 they play an active and significant role in the negotiations on the sociopolitical boundaries and rules of the game of a given political system. Comparative analysis within the Israeli political system with special emphasis on the 1984 elections serves to demonstrate this claim.8