Are catchall strategies bound to fail? The catchall conundrum and the case of a niche agrarian-class party

Abstract

When viewed as a response to long-term decline in a party’s core constituency – whether class, religion or language-based – catchall strategies involve the inherent risk of marginalising the party’s core voter without achieving significant and/or sustained electoral renewal. The risk of core shrinkage will not be offset by a durable electoral dividend and the catchall strategy may well feed the very decline it is designed to arrest. Whilst catchall strategies are not the exclusive preserve of any one type of party, the type of party may well affect the likelihood of achieving a catchall performance. Following Kirchheimer, parties based on a ‘specific professional category’s claims’, such as the Swedish Agrarians, cannot realistically aspire to a ‘successful transformation’. Accordingly, this paper considers whether the pursuit of a catchall strategy by an historic, niche agrarian-class party with exceptional regional strength in neighbouring Finland could hope to achieve a ‘catchall performance’. More widely it considers whether a catchall strategy is a realistic option in multiparty systems in which ‘new politics’ parties squeeze the available policy space and multi-dimensional cleavage structures cannot readily be accommodated within a single party.