Abstract
Political parties are regarded as traditional cornerstones of everyday political life in liberal democracies. Their importance is generally acknowledged because they represent the people: the basic element of any democratic regime.
It is also assumed that their function is primarily to aggregate and formulate demands on a political system, and thus to set the agenda by linking civil society and the state (cf. Katz and Mair, 1995).
This role of political parties in policymaking and agenda setting is recognized in the policy literature but the issue of political parties themselves is rather neglected therein (for example, Anderson, 1997; Howlett, Ramesh, and Perl, 2009; Jones, 1970). Moreover, parties are mostly viewed from a narrow perspective that reduces them to unitary collective actors represented by the party leadership.
This reduced perception has led to the underestimation of their role and influence in the policy process. It has also biased our understanding of the complexity of relations between political parties and agenda setting.
This chapter aims to correct such a bias by offering a more complex perspective of the study of political parties and policy agendas. We argue that political parties should be considered not only from the angle of policy actors, but also from the angle of institutions.
From this perspective, they represent arenas that link party-related actors and encompass party-related elements of political life (political ideology, election programs and so on) that both determine parties' goals and behavior. Thus, our overall aim is to give an overview of the debates and research positions in the area of political parties and policy agendas based on a literature review and our own experience researching political parties and policy relations (for example, Pola_ek et al., 2012; Pola_ek, Perottino, and Novotny, 2014).
We focus on exploring the specific role that political parties play in shaping the agenda.