The study of political parties has long attracted the attention of social scientists with widely divergent interests and aims. Whether they have concentrated, for example, upon questions of internal party structure and organisation, the tasks of electoral mobilisation and interest aggregation or the overall effects of system change, it has invariably been assumed that parties have played and will continue to play indispensable roles in the political systems of Western democracies. This remains the case despite recent claims that parties are in ‘decline’ as a result of increasing bureaucratisation of the political process and the development of the ‘corporate’ state, doubts about the existence of genuine policy differences between parties and the increase in electoral volatility amongst the mass public.

Yet, whilst acknowledging the prominent place political parties have generally held in academic studies, liberal parties have been largely neglected as objects of such studies. Though liberal parties of four Western European countries are dealt with in the book by Morgan and Silvestri (1982), their analysis also contains conservative parties and they do not employ a systematic framework for comparing either type of liberal party. Similarly, though describing general features of liberal parties in terms of ideology, history and organisational features, the books by Stammen (1978) and von Beyme (1985) do not attempt a systematic comparison between liberal parties. There are no apparent reasons for the neglect of liberal party analysis although there are frequent references to liberal parties as ‘minor’ parties, presumably purely on the basis of size rather than influence or attraction over time.