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Chapters 5 and 6 dealt with a central theme in the Western literature on postwar party change—the decline of the party of mass integration and its gradual replacement by the party of electoral contestation. There are a number of well‐known models of party transformation which share this broad perspective and highlight processes of change. The earliest of these are more than three decades old now, going back to Otto Kirchheimer's (1966) catch‐all prophecy, and to Leon Epstein's (1967) account of ‘contagion from the right’. Both Kirchheimer and Epstein foresaw the growing dominance of electorally driven parties which had only shallow ideological commitments. Such changes were perceived to follow from social transformations which weakened both social group identities and the role of parties as articulators of specific group interests. In place of its traditional role as an agent of social and political integration, the modern political party came to be regarded as a highly professional machine motivated primarily by the desire for electoral success. The implications of this for patterns of party competition in certain party systems quickly became well known: electoralism of this sort would most likely lead to policy convergence in pursuit of the median voter, meaning that citizens would be offered fewer real policy choices, and would have to make electoral choices based on such factors as short‐term issue, managerial competence, and candidate personality. Subsequent studies have largely confirmed these predictions, finding that the declining electoral salience of established political cleavages encourages parties to de‐emphasize long‐term …