Mair, Peter

by Turlough O'Riordan

Mair, Peter (1951–2011), political scientist, was born 3 March 1951 in Rosses Point, Co. Sligo, one of three children (two boys and a girl) of Major Moray Mair, OBE, an officer in the Indian army originally from Scotland, and his wife Billy (née Kenny), a British army nurse from Co. Longford. His parents met in north Africa during the second world war and married in 1946; while honeymooning in Sligo, they decided to settle in Rosses Point. After attending national school locally, Mair boarded at Castleknock College, Dublin (1963–9), and then studied history and politics at UCD, graduating BA (1972) and MA in political science (1973). He then undertook research work with the Institute of Public Administration, and was assistant lecturer in politics in the department of European studies at the National Institute for Higher Education, Limerick (1974–6). While lecturing in the department of government at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (1976–8), he commenced his doctorate at the recently opened European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, supervised by Hans Daalder of Leiden University. He was assistant and then assistant professor at the EUI (1979–84), and active in summer schools and seminars organised by the European Colloquium on Political Science (ECPR), establishing lasting contacts with leading practitioners and early-career researchers. Awarded his Ph.D. in political science by Leiden University (1987), he published his thesis that year as The changing Irish party system: organisation, ideology and electoral competition; it became the standard work on the subject. Nuancing the arguments of John Whyte (qv) and others, Mair assessed the Irish party system as sui generis within European comparative politics, attributing its exceptionalism to distinct social structures and an unusual electoral system. He became senior lecturer in the department of government, University of Manchester (1984–90), and then in the department of political science, Leiden University (1990–92), where he met Karin Tilmans, a medieval cultural historian from Groningen; they later married and had three children. Mair succeeded Daalder as departmental chair upon appointment as professor of political science and comparative politics at Leiden (1992–2008).

Mair's article 'The autonomy of the political: the development of the Irish party system' (Comparative Politics, xi, no. 4 (July 1979)) historically addressed Fianna Fáil's hegemony in Irish politics. Subsequent work, based on historical trends, presciently analysed the decline of the party's electoral success, which underpinned Irish electoral volatility from the early 1980s. The article 'Left–right political scales: some “expert” judgments' (European Journal of Political Research, xii (1984)), co-written with Francis G. Sales, sought empirically to ground comparative analysis of ideological polarisation, surveying experts on relative party positions in various countries, and is regarded as a classic paper in comparative political science.

The emphasis of the Italian political sociologist Giovanni Sartori on concept formation was crucial for Mair. Isolating the dependent and independent variables of any concept under consideration, then proceeding to quantification and systematic comparison, Mair reified Sartori's Parties and party systems (1976). Distinguishing a party (an organisation) from a party system (a network of relationships and interactions among parties), it guided Mair's examination of the form and dimensions of such interactions. Mair later edited some of Sartori's previously unpublished work. A pragmatic and open-minded scholar, Mair was expert in data collection, and continually revised and refined conclusions as new evidence, approaches or theory suggested. He was careful to ground his analysis historically, and rigorously deployed his data to test theoretical approaches.

Working through a nexus of EUI and ECPR collaborators, Mair co-wrote, with Stefano Bartolini, Identity, competition and electoral availability (1990), historically contextualising the institutionalisation of stable European party systems from 1885 to 1985; it won the 1990 Stein Rokkan prize, awarded by UNESCO. With Richard S. Katz, Mair published Party organisations: a data handbook on party organisations in western democracies, 1960–90 (1990), which served their analysis in How parties organise: change and adaptation in party organisations in western democracies (1994). Disaggregating parties into their constituent parts, they laid the foundations for their influential and widely cited article 'Changing models of party organisation and party democracy: the emergence of the cartel party' (Party Politics, i, no. 1 (1995)). Positing a tendency for the local structures of parties to atrophy over time, they delineated a novel form of elite political party defined by its enhanced relationship with the state, dislocated from its ordinary members and supporters. Such 'cartel parties' and their homogenised leaders rely on state funding, guide state control of ballot access and the allocation of public broadcast media time, control candidate selection, and (perhaps uniquely) set their own salaries. Operating more as governing agencies than representative agents, they engender opposition from small, populist and fringe parties. Their increasing reliance on depoliticised, non-majoritarian regulatory and administrative agencies – lacking popular control or democratic legitimacy – spurred Mair's later work on democratic responsiveness and accountability.

Mair was particularly expert in the politics of Ireland and the Netherlands, and ranged across comparative approaches, methodologically examining systems, institutions, actors and processes. Addressing party systems (the interaction between parties) and party organisation (parties as representative and governing institutions), he identified clear links between forms of party organisation and the stability of party systems. Party system change: approaches and interpretations (1998) addressed the drivers of change and stability, stressing the capacity of parties to adapt, and included an assessment of emergent party systems in post-Communist European states. Mair adroitly analysed societal changes and fluctuations in voting behaviour, as well as alterations in internal party organisation, assessing how they affect political change. Examining how EU integration and 'Europeanisation' impacted upon national party politics, Mair posited closer integration as reinforcing existing national trends towards depoliticisation and popular disengagement. His later research addressed the democratic legitimacy of the EU in this light. In 2009 Mair was appointed co-director of the EU Observatory on Political Parties and Representation, one of the four sub-observatories of the European Union Democracy Observatory, undertaking research (2009–10) for the constitutional affairs committee of the European Parliament.

Assessing mass participatory democracy as declining party affiliation and organisational participation were manifest in increased electoral volatility, Mair delineated tensions between representative parties and responsible government. Identifying a consistent, though gradual, decline in voter turnout in national elections since the 1950s, in the article 'Ruling the void?: the hollowing of Western democracy' (New Left Review, xlii (November–December 2006)), Mair suggested that 'the citizenry are becoming effectively non-sovereign … democracy without a demos' (p. 25). He elucidated how western European elections from the early 1990s saw fewer voters participate (though turnout remains reasonably high), and identified an increased likelihood that voters will switch preferences from one election to the next. Discerning both a popular and elite withdrawal from mass electoral politics, he saw this as largely driven by the ongoing transformation of political parties and decline in various components of civil society, and concluded that with 'the increasing individualisation of society, traditional collective identities and organisational affiliations have become enfeebled' (p. 46.) Consistent with his belief in rigorous concept formation, he posited its cause as either being the increasing disengagement of voters in creating a new mode of politics, or, an emergent form of politics that encouraged voter withdrawal.

Mair was director of the Netherlands Graduate School for Political Science and International relations (1995–9), and in 2005 was appointed professor of comparative politics and chair of the department of political and social sciences at the EUI (2007–10), becoming dean of studies there in June 2011. He edited or co-edited over a dozen significant political science textbooks and collections, was on the editorial boards of numerous journals, was general editor of significant academic series, and published over 130 journal articles and book chapters, as well as numerous reviews, working papers and other professional publications. Widely regarded as one of the finest political scientists of his generation, he held a range of senior administrative and management positions, and was awarded numerous prestigious grants, fellowships and awards. A complete list of his professional distinctions is given in Bartolini and Daader, 'Peter Mair: an intellectual portrait' (2014). Despite his many achievements, he remained modest and personable, devoid of professional or intellectual arrogance, and strongly supportive of students and colleagues.

Addressing the McGill summer school, Glenties, Co. Donegal, in July 2011, Mair criticised the widespread disrespect for the state and its institutions found in Ireland. He argued that apathy (perhaps emanating from Ireland's long experience of democratic governance) combined with multi-seat electoral constituencies to create an 'immoral localism', which obscured the broader collective interest and created a vacuum filled by special interests. For Mair, the 2011 Irish general election, which delivered one of the greatest single defeats of a political hegemon (Fianna Fáil) in European electoral history and its replacement with its largely indistinguishable (in comparative terms) competitor Fine Gael, signalled the innate conservatism of Irish political culture. To inculcate considered and responsible governance, Mair urged transparent decision-making and improved citizen–representative dialogue, the abandonment of multi-seat constituencies, the rebalancing of executive–legislative relations in favour of the latter, and the empowering of local government to invigorate the citizenry.

A month later, Mair died of a heart attack on 15 August 2011 while fishing in Connemara, near Ballinahinch, Co. Galway. He had been holidaying with his family at Rosses Point, and was buried in the local cemetery.

Lamenting how, as parties became elite organisations, their popular composition and engagement was undermined, Mair's uncompleted later work on the interaction among democracy, representation, responsiveness and parties, embodying his profound concerns for the efficacy of representative democracy, was posthumously collected, edited and published as Ruling the void: the hollowing of western democracy (2013). His senior editorial roles with the journals West European Politics and Party Politics led both to publish special commemorative issues in tribute. The Political Studies Association of Ireland inaugurated the annual Peter Mair memorial lecture in 2012. Commemorative events and conferences organised by academic departments he was affiliated with, alongside memorial prizes and foundations established in his honour, are detailed in the introduction to Party politics and democracy in Europe: essays in honour of Peter Mair (2016). Mair's professional library, donated by his family, is held in the School of Politics and International Relations, UCD.