David Farrell argues that the extent of the decline of political parties and democratic decline is at risk of being exaggerated, and that the role of parties in democratic innovation is often underappreciated. He concludes that political parties continue to make fundamental contributions to democracy, not least in driving processes of reform to both democracy and their own internal structures and policies.

In an open-access paper published recently in Party Politics I address a well-trodden debate in political science about the state of parties and democracy. For electoral democracy scholars, parties are in trouble and, thus, so is democracy. Meanwhile, democratic innovations’ scholars operate with a different premise about parties, which they see as ‘the problem’, and the state of democracies, which they see as being reimagined as citizen-centred. In short, we have a dystopian view about the state of parties and democracy versus a utopian view of a democracy that excludes parties. The first part of the paper reviews these conflicting views. It makes the case that the electoral democracy perspective is not giving enough credence to the potential of democratic reform and innovation, and thus risks over-exaggerating the extent of party and democratic decline. While democratic innovations scholars are at least more hopeful about the state of democracy, my criticism of this field is that it is too quick to dismiss (or, at least sideline) the role of parties.

Democratic innovations by parties

The paper then sets out a framework of democratic innovations centred on the agency of parties. This is summarised in Figure 1. We can conceive of a reform process as going through a series of phases, starting with the context in which a reform debate is embedded. This could include the following illustrative list: societal change (e.g. growing demands from more educated electorates), economic crisis (resulting in demands to reform processes so as to avoid a repetition: see for example Iceland and Ireland in the wake of the 2008-09 Great Recession), the growing perceptions of threats to democracy that demand a response of some sort (at the heart of reforms to protect the integrity of the electoral process, for instance), or, indeed, concerns about political parties (notably the tracking of declining party membership in established democracies). There is also an important role for motivators whose role is to educate on and/or promote areas of reform. These might include NGOs, lobby groups, and experts calling for particular reforms, or, perhaps more indirectly, pressures from international actors to resolve some problem or other, usually based on examples of best practice in other countries.

Figure 1: Political parties and democratic innovations

The context might favour reform and motivators may be clamouring for it, but in order for the reform to happen it needs action by political parties. The reforms can be grouped into three main forms, each affecting an arena that parties operate in. First, there are reforms to the electoral arena in which parties operate, including, for instance: the introduction of gender quotas, electoral reforms, changes to party funding rules, the abolition of second chambers, reductions in voting age, regional devolution, the establishment of election management bodies. A comprehensive analysis of trends over a 20-year period between 1990 and 2010 published by Camille Bedock in 2017 shows just how extensive this has been across Europe’s established democracies.

A second set of reforms arise beyond the arena of electoral politics and relate to the role of parties in government. These include the introduction of citizens’ petitions, freedom of information legislation and the open government agenda, participatory budgeting, and the growing use of deliberative mini-publics in the policy process as well as in debates over constitutional reform. In the case of mini-publics (such as citizens’ assemblies), in particular, their use has become so widespread that an influential OECD report refers to this as ‘a deliberative wave’.

In both instances – reforms to the electoral arena and those beyond electoral politics – the reforms would not occur without the agency of parties in driving them. The same applies to our final party arena – parties as organisations – although in this instance the reforms relate to the parties themselves.

Democratic innovations within parties

When it comes to organisational change within parties, there are two main sets of reforms: aggregative reforms, relating to how decisions are taken, and deliberative reforms, focused on the process preceding the point of decision. To date the bulk of party politics research in this area has been on the former. The general trend has seen members being given more say in key decisions, in the form of members’ ballots over such areas as candidate selection or the election of the party leader. The latest data from the Political Party Database project reveals that quite a large proportion of Europe’s parties have embraced such reforms. Reforms of this kind are, at least ostensibly, designed to re-engage party grassroots, with the aim of stemming the decline in membership numbers. The general consensus, however, is that this may not be working: membership numbers continue to decline across the board. In addition, there is a question over whether these reforms may have an opposite impact to the purported reason for introducing them by sidelining the more engaged party activists and not really addressing the underlying issue of how to re-engage party members generally.

The potential of deliberative reforms has received less prominence among party politics scholars. Much of the empirical research on this has tended to focus on new parties that feature internal deliberation as part of their raison d’être. The ‘digital parties’ are probably the best known: they include Podemos in Spain, the Italian Five Star Movement, and the Pirate parties that sprang up across a range of different North European countries. The common trait is an emphasis on ‘going beyond’ traditional party members, and emphasising online deliberation. But as Gerbaudo reports in his authoritative book-length study of the phenomenon, ‘[d]espite the presence of deliberative, discussion-oriented and qualitative forms of online decision-making, the form of digital democracy that prevails… is clearly top-down: more concerned with balloting than discussing’.

Beyond the digital parties, there are other examples recently emerging that provide more promising evidence of the use of deliberative processes by parties. These include the following cases:

• Agora (Belgium, 2019-24): a party in the Brussels Parliament that used DMPs (2020s) to guide its MP on policy positions in parliament;
• Alternativet (Denmark, 2013): which established a series of ‘political laboratories’, including members of the public, to develop party politics;
• Les Engagés (Belgium, 2020-22): an initiative of the French-speaking Christian Democrats to stimulate party renewal through a series of DMPs, resulting in a remodelling of the party under a new name;
• Demos (Romania, 2018): which held a series of meetings involving party members and sympathisers to run the process of candidate selection;
• Die Linke (Germany, 2022): which established a ‘Feminist Commission’ to produce a new code of practice on women’s and LGBTQ+ matters, that was adopted by the party;
• Možemo! (Croatia, 2021): which used thematic groups which helped draft the party’s manifesto for the 2021 local elections; and
• PASOK (Greece, 2004): which used deliberative polling to select its candidate for mayor of a large municipality and the Athens area.

Common to all these cases is that they were consequential, influencing party-decision making processes; and in two cases their recommendations were mandatory (Agora and PASOK). However, their impacts have not been long-lasting. The Agora party is no longer represented in the Brussels parliament; the PASOK process was a one-off; the Demos experiment was judged to have been internally divisive. In other cases, the deliberative process eroded over time due to electoral successes and the need to adapt to being in power (Možemo!), or as a result of the emergence of a strong leader (Les Engagés), or simply due to the party’s membership base reaching a critical mass, making it difficult to continue with deliberative processes (Alternativet). In Die Linke’s case the use of deliberation has been episodic, which raises questions over how embedded this may become over time. In short, it is too early to draw firm conclusions on the degree to which deliberative reforms such as these are making a sustained difference. But, as Sergiu Gherghina has recently noted, at least they show that ‘deliberative democracy has entered the repertoire of political parties, both in rhetoric and in practice’.

The party isn’t over (yet)

Political parties get a bad rap. For some, they are the source of many of the problems in contemporary democracies, and even for those of a more sympathetic disposition, parties are seen as a shadow of their former selves as they, and democracies, decline. The aim of my paper and this blogpost was to offer a corrective to both perspectives. Political parties may face all sorts of challenges in the contemporary world, but they still have a future. Contrary to the pessimistic picture (or neglect) of parties that characterise the electoral democracy and democratic innovations literature, they continue to make fundamental contributions to democracy, not least in driving processes of reform (to democracy as well as to their internal operations).

In a much-quoted statement in his 1942 book on Party Government, E.E. Schattschneider noted that ‘modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties’. That view, of the symbiotic relationship between democracy and parties, remains as pertinent today as it did then. The primary purpose of my Party Politics piece and this blogpost has been to suggest a similar symbiotic relationship between democratic innovations and parties.

Democratic innovation without political parties should be unthinkable is available via open access.

About the author

Professor David Farrell MRIA holds the Chair of Political Science at University College Dublin. A specialist in the study of representation, electoral systems and parties, his recent books include Electoral Systems: A Global Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Deliberative Mini-Publics: Core Design Features (Bristol University Press, 2021).