WORKSHOP: Voter-centred vs Politician-centred Perspectives on Democracy

The organization of political parties presents a serious puzzle for democratic theory. The organization of political parties presents a serious puzzle for democratic theory. On the one hand, nearly everyone recognizes their essential role in supporting collective decision-making and popular accountability. No matter how we understand the goals of modern democracy, in short, parties make it possible. On the other hand, however, most real parties are quite undemocratic in themselves, inviting little popular input on their internal affairs. Since parties first came into being, indeed, their leaders have often been accused of preventing democratic progress. Many advocate greater intra-party democracy IPD), connecting common activist concerns to broader theories of deliberation, public reason, and participatory democracy. Yet others criticize this decentralizing agenda as naïve. In this view, if democracy is really about the instrumental benefits of competition among elites, then strong and centralized parties may be its very essence. We argue that neither account takes the puzzle of political parties seriously enough. For advocates motivated by deliberative and participatory ideals, IPD is a straightforward requirement of democratic legitimacy, and thus, the only “puzzle” that remains is how to achieve it. For critics motivated by the benefits of inter-party competition, meanwhile, democratic ideals make no demand for IPD to begin with—again leaving no genuine puzzle to speak of. In this paper, we argue that both groups have important insights about IPD, but that neither perspective is complete on its own. We then propose a contextual framework that seeks to integrate the most important concerns of both. In response to this dilemma, we argue that the democratic value of IPD practices in any particular case depends crucially on the broader political context. On the novel framework we develop, the advisability and urgency of IPD within a given party will turn on the rigidity of the surrounding party system. Where it is relatively easy to pursue political change by founding new parties, for one, IPD may be redundant or even harmful to broader democratic goals. Where this is not a viable option, by contrast, it would seriously threaten democratic values to let party elites shut down dissenting voices, since this effectively locks them out of the political system entirely. Further, we argue that a baseline level of IPD will often be necessary to facilitate realist goals of accountability and resisting capture.