Family issues: conceptualizing party family at the issue level

This article was submitted to the ‘The Legacy of Giovanni Sartori’ symposium on IPSR/RISP – Italian Political Science Review. The goal of this note is to suggest an alternative approach to the of party family. The literature agrees that individual party families should be ideologically distinct and cohesive but maintains a broad understanding of ‘ideology’. This comes with conceptual and operational complications, including rarely explicit definitions of party family and frequently inconclusive empirical evidence. Instead, I suggest that the historically rooted ideological distinctiveness and uniqueness of party families should be conceived at the issue level. Accordingly, an alternative conceptualisation of party family is proposed: groups of parties whose patterns of issue salience ideologically reflect their historical origins. Importantly, this approach revolves around the identification of party families’ core issues, based on their cleavage/historical origins. Parties belonging to a party family will be the most consistent emphasizers of their core issues within their party system. This note provides a first discussion of how this alternative approach may provide party family scholars with greater clarity, both conceptually and in proposed empirical applications.