Hmm. I think I misunderstood the sql above.
when I say in Oracle:
create table foo (
owner_id references parties
);
Oracle probably assumes that you mean the field parties.party_id, which is the primary key in table parties. Postgres doesn't assume as much, so you need to specify:
create table foo (
owner_id integer references parties(party_id)
);
Do I understand that correctly?