The four knights of intra-party democracy: A rescue for party delegitimation
Abstract
This article discusses the state of agony parties are experiencing today. In a nutshell, I argue that parties are now at pains to retain their linkages with society, and that the compensation they envisaged has further damaged them. To respond to sociocultural and economic changes which had weakened parties both in their organizational standing and in their public reputation, parties took a dual route: They went to the state to acquire financial resources and profit in other ways; and they introduced direct democracy practices inside the parties themselves. After discussing how parties have reacted to the changing environment, the article concentrates on intra-party organizational modifications and deals with three basic questions: (a) Why did parties attempt to democratize? (b) What outcome did the democratization, in terms of members’ direct intervention, produce? (c) Is democracy at stake because of the negative impact of the parties’ change and their consequent, persisting, crisis of legitimacy?
Introduction
The political party has reached its lowest level of trust and reputation. In this article, I will deal with the outcome of parties delinking from society and their encroaching into the state. This feature, quite unanimously acknowledged today, raises relevant questions regarding the functions and roles of political parties in advanced democratic societies. Particular attention will be paid to the modifications induced by this process in:
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the party’s public image (how parties are perceived and considered by the mass public);
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the party’s internal working (how parties are organized); and
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the party position in the political system (how they connect society to the state and how they perform the representative function).
Are parties unfit for postmodern society?
The starting point of this investigation posits a sort of primacy of the societal contingencies on the political domain. At the risk of sociological reductionism, I will state that different cultural and socio-economic configurations of society have – and have had in the past – a decisive impact on party development. Institutions do play a role, and they force parties to comply with their principles, but the history of political parties indicates that they emerged presenting similar internal structuring irrespective of the different institutional and political connotations of the systems in which they have operated: The two cases in point are the German Social Democratic Party and British Labour Party (Berger, 2000) which developed as mass parties (beyond their different – corporate or non-corporate – origin (Bartolini, 2000)) in two radically divergent political systems.
Taking a risk and following this ‘sociological approach’, I can state that parties reached their apex when they were in tune with society. This occurred at the time of the full deployment of the industrial society, when parties took the format of mass parties. Standardization, massification and well-defined group loyalties and identification were all byproducts of the industrial society that parties of the early 20th century embodied (Daalder, 1966). For better or worse – for the angst produced by the ‘entry of the masses’ as described by Ortega y Gasset and Gustave Le Bon, or for the idea of progress advanced by positivists, radicals and socialists – that society was embodied by mass parties. The first two post-WWII decades realized the perfect match between society and state, even better than the beginning of the 20th century. According to the image of Katz and Mair (1994, 1995), the brokering function of the parties between state and society worked at its best in that period.
By the end of the 20th century, parties became unfit for post-industrial and postmodern society. This unsuitability derives from the incompatibility between the cultural and socio-economic developments that characterize contemporary society, and party structuring which has retained many of its original traits – and, even in instances where they have changed, problematic counter-effects have been produced. The globalized economy coupled with the triumph of the neo-liberal credo and the technological revolution, and the ‘liquidity’ of values, attitudes and lifestyles, altered the context in which parties operated, that is, an environment of solid, uncontested, traditional group loyalty whose partisan alignments had been realized and crystallized in the 1920s – as Lipset and Rokkan (1967) first stated, and Bartolini and Mair (1990) later confirmed for the post-war decades until the mid-1980s. But since then, that environment has been withering away.
It is impossible to resume here the debate on the sociocultural and economic changes affecting Western societies. On the former aspect, reflexive modernity (Beck, Giddens and Lash), post-traditional order (Giddens), risk society (Beck) and liquid modernity (Bauman) are mere catchwords of the most reputed analyses on the epochal transformation undergone in the West in recent years. On the latter aspect, new configurations of globalization, neo-liberalism, job markets and welfare operate to design a new setting for socio-economic relations.
Focusing our attention on the cultural–societal aspect, the most dramatic change affecting party politics is in the process of individualization which ‘has become the social structure of the modern society’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: xiii, emphasis added). Individualization made inroads into European societies under the species of secularization, as Berger (1990) and Dobbeleare (1981) stressed. People abandoned the belonging to a church and its strict rules and chose a personal menu from the religious offer: They became bricoleur in the religious domain (Hervieu-Léger, 1999).
The process of individualization affected also the political domain, ‘eroding the social structure conditions which have made possible collective political action’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 29). As a consequence, the collective, even sociable, connotation of political parties shrank because it was unfit for the main trends of contemporary, postmodern society. The decay and erosion of linkages between parties and social constituencies provoked a ‘disembedding’ which was not recovered by any ‘reembedding’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: xii). No collective structures, nor even social movements, have replaced what post-industrialism and postmodernism through the process of individualization sent to the wall.
Transplanting this conceptualization into the political science sphere, we can state that political dealignment has not been replaced by any realignment. A disjunction between group, collective identification and voting behaviour has occurred (see, contra, Achen and Bartels, 2016). The collapse of ascribed and traditional loyalties tied up by group membership has left voters free to change their choice at any time, and party members able to leave without pain or regret.
But no alternative realignment is round the corner. New political offers from Podemos or the Five Star Movement (M5S) apparently do not present, nor do they intend to, a stable, enduring alignment with specific constituencies. On the other hand, populist extreme right parties such as the French Front National seem to be more in tune with some, mainly underprivileged, sectors of the society, but their dimension and geographical spreading is (still?) limited.
Party reaction to societal changes
What have been the parties’ reactions to these cultural–societal changes? Parties moved in two different directions. On the one hand, they turned to the state to compensate for the deficits that emerged by their delinking with society. They needed to move in that direction because they had to substitute general and symbolic rewards with material benefits – acquired by and through the state – which they distributed, more or less selectively, to their electoral constituency and partisan membership.1
The parties encroaching into the state ‘saved’ them, in a sense: This passage reinforced their hold on the state structure thanks to a resilient partyness of government, provided them with more material resources (especially thanks to public subsidies) and projected them into the opaque area of patronage and clientelism. In this way, parties remained the masters of the play in the democratic representative chain, but they ‘lost their soul’ in the eyes of public opinion. The parties’ disconnection from society and their state-centric stance encouraged disaffection and a sense of loathing in the eyes of the public. Citizens came to perceive parties as self-referential and distant, affluent and privileged (Dalton, 1999; Kriesi, 2014; Mair, 2013). The shift in this perception, further reinforced by generally increasing corruption, sleaze and malpractice,2 nurtured anti-political and populist sentiments.
On the other hand, parties opened up their structures offering more opportunity to members and/or supporters to participate in intra-party decision-making processes by selecting candidates and leaders and, more rarely, by intervening in some policy issues. Party leadership all over Europe realized that the stateward movement of their organizations, while strengthening and enriching them (party budgets have exploded in the last 20 years, see van Biezen and Kopecky, 2017: 100), also depressed their legitimacy to operate in the name of, and for, the citizenry (Farrell, 2014; Ignazi, 2014, 2017; Keman, 2014). For quite some time, all the empirical data assessing party confidence and trust in EU and other democratic countries (see Eurobarometer, 2015; European Social Survey, 2012) have not indicated any reversal of this negative trend. In sum, the representative claim of parties at the turn of the century was at stake.
Under pressure from mounting disaffection, parties initiated some changes (Bolleyer, 2012; Bolleyer et al., 2015; Gauja, 2015). Their organizational and functional ‘logic of appropriateness’ had not changed for decades: Until the end of the 20th century, parties had remained stuck to the goal of recruiting and mobilizing large segments of the population for the conquest of collective goods, as ‘the claim of generalised principles’ is a common feature of any and all parties (White and Ypi, 2016: 21).
Moreover, it is important to note when this logic of appropriateness arose and was affirmed: The fact that it emerged at the two critical moments of the parties’ development in the guise of mass parties – at their first surge in the early years of the 20th century, and at their apogee in the initial post-WWII period – made the mass party template, with all of its functions, the standard reference, to the extent that even the notables’ type of party sooner or later abided by that model. The ‘norm’ to follow for the party organization and functions was set at that time and proved enormously resilient.
The mould of that original imprint is so strong that parties are now at pain at conceiving themselves in a different fashion. Mainstream parties, in particular, while struggling to interpret and implement a different organizational layout and internal modus operandi, are bogged down by their formal by-laws that still reiterate the mass party model, with few exceptions. Only new parties are experiencing original organizational formulae, from the M5S to the brand new La République En Marche! (and Podemos, to a lesser extent). However, the innovations introduced by these parties are not at the centre of the present analysis. Instead, in this article, the focus is on what the mainstream parties have attempted to implement in order to react to the muted environment and whether their attempts have effectively ‘democratised’ them and (consequently) recovered their relationship with society.
The intricacies of party democratization
Thus, which modifications did parties envisage making? In general, they saw the remedy to their problems in ‘opening up’ the decision-making process to members and even supporters: The unheard calls for basisdemokratie put forward by the Greens (Müller-Rommel and Poguntke, 1989; Poguntke, 1993) and the ‘critical citizens’ (Dalton, 1996; Norris, 1999) were finally acknowledged, at least to some extent. According to a standard interpretation, parties moved their internal organization towards ‘greater inclusiveness and openness’ (Cain et al., 2003: 253). The reformist wave – whose forerunner had already appeared by the early 1990s (see Mair, 1994: 15–18 for a preliminary account) – was hailed as ‘a global trend […] that transfers new powers to individual party members’ (Scarrow and Gezgor, 2010: 826).
Indeed, membership has been empowered in many parties (Scarrow, 2015: 178). This process has taken place in two ways: with direct involvement in the selection and nomination processes of party officials and candidates, and – to a lesser extent – in the definition of some party policies. Candidate and leadership selection moved out of the ‘smoking rooms’ or internal multistep procedures and went directly to the members and, in a few cases, to the larger audience of supporters. The same opening occurred, although in limited cases, by calling members to decide on specific issues or policies via referendums.
Have these changes had only a straight positive effect? Or, instead, are they double-edged with some unaccounted outcomes too, as Cross and Katz (2013b) argue? The bright side of the moon in terms of ‘opening up’ voting for party offices and representative assemblies to members has also a dark counterpart in terms of ‘less relevance and effectiveness’ of party membership, militants and middle-level elites (Aylott and Bolin, 2017).
The idea that direct democracy was the way to democratize and revitalize parties revealed a negative consideration of the traditional multistage internal decision-making process, that is, delegate democracy. This opinion was supported by factual arguments deriving from internal party practices and by a solid intellectual background tracing back to Michels’ [1911] (1962) criticism of the intra-party oligarchic drives. However, other, diverging insights by Michels himself were minimized, precisely when he warned against the Bonapartist tendency: A leader directly legitimated by the popular vote would discard any criticism and contestation because of his/her popular legitimacy; even more, ‘the weight of an oligarchy is rarely felt when the rights of the masses are codified and when each member may in abstract participate in power’ (1962: 216). This direct and popular investiture, together with a profound dedication to a political cause, led leaders (and party bureaucrats) to identify themselves with the party as such: ‘there is not a single leader who fails to think and to act […], and to say Le Parti c’est moi’ (1962: 221; emphasis in original). Taking into consideration Michels’ still valid warnings, I will devote particular attention to the turn to direct democracy within the political party, which is termed here ‘inclusion’.3
Inclusion: The bright side
The bright side of the party reforms regards the direct involvement of the members in the decision-making process. The accounts provided by Pilet and Cross (2014), Cross and Pilet (2015a), Sandri, Seddone, and Venturino (2015b) and Cross et al. (2016) on a number of European and extra-European countries are quite significant: Parties move out of the established modalities of internal selection and provide ampler opportunities for direct participation. In addition, members have been called also to express their choice on a number of relevant issues, as the members of the French Socialist Party did on the EU constitution issue in 2005, or the German SPD’s decision to enter into a Grosse Koalition in 2013, to mention just two examples.
In principle, the opportunity to play a role in the intra-party chain of decision-making increases the relevance (or the perception of relevance) of the membership. However, what is the effective significance of the members’ empowerment? Indeed, with regard to the leadership selection, Cross and Pilet (2015b: 172) tend to downsize the importance of these innovations, in terms both of the number of cases affected by the changes, and of the improvement of ‘democracy’: In fact, the two authors write that ‘when it comes to leadership races, the magnitude of the changes and transformations observed is not yet very large’ (2015b: 166). Thus, even if parties have opened up the process of leadership selection, ‘[t]he evolution is very careful and the changes appear modest’ (2015b: 174). On the other hand, Sandri and Seddone (2015: 9–10), who include also candidate selection in addition to leadership selection, are more confident about the expansion of intra-party direct members’ intervention, as in 30 countries around the world, leadership or candidates are selected in this way.
In the end, beyond the real dimension of party leader and candidate selection dynamics, the question remains: did members’ empowerment really democratize the parties? And, is this the main, master way to revitalize the linkage between party and society?
Inclusion: The dark side
Intra-party democratization via membership direct voting presents a series of counter-effects. The hypothesis that members and even supporters’ direct intervention in the personnel selection process reflects a ‘desire to reduce the oligarchic tendencies of parties by creating a participatory revolution [in order to] overcome an intra-party democratic deficit’ (Kenig, 2008: 241) runs counter to the dynamics of power relations within the political party (Panebianco, 1988; Rye, 2014). I assume instead that this move was inspired by the possibility of a more stringent grip on party dynamics by the leadership itself. On this point I am in tune with Cross and Pilet (2015b: 173, emphasis added) when they state that, while the selectorate has been enlarged, ‘party elites are often able to control the process and to limit the actual competitiveness of the contests’; with Pilet and Wauters (2014: 45) who argue that the Belgian ‘party elite have built-in control mechanisms allowing them to push the selection process in their preferred direction’; and with Aylott and Bolin’s warning on the crafting of selection processes by the leadership in the preselection phase that operate by ‘actively encouraging, discouraging and perhaps blocking particular candidates who meet formal candidate requirements, and […] controlling information about the preferences of various actors’ (2017: 57, 62). I thus finally concur with Carty’s (2013: 19) bitter consideration on the ‘ability to manipulate a formally popular decision-making process, by ensuring that members’ choices are constrained and limited to alternatives acceptable to the existing elite’.
These analyses suggest that the passage towards more openness and inclusion could not be considered as inspired by the sole drive of enlarging participation and democratizing the internal life of the party. Members’ empowerment is motivated also by internal pressures and power conflicts. In this occurrence, intra-party dynamics may spring from two different sources. The call to the membership could be advocated, on the one hand, by the desire of the leadership to write off any constraint from other party actors; or, on the other hand, by competing minority factions intended to show the leadership’s lack of consensus in the rank and file. In both cases, either when the leadership wants to reaffirm itself, or when a competing ‘dominant coalition’ (Panebianco, 1988) wants to get power and overthrow the leaders, the membership is employed as a masse de manoeuvre to be thrown against the contenders. The former occurrence – soliciting a plebiscitary confirmation by the leadership itself – appears more practised today.
From a different perspective, the opening to members is also consistent with a less deferential attitude which has pervaded contemporary political culture (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000: 11). The distance between members and leaders, founded on the perception of a huge differential in their respective political, social and even personal capitals (Michels, [1911] 1962; Offerlé, 1991; Panebianco, 1988; Rye, 2014), has been downsized by the personalization of politics (Calise, 2000; Poguntke and Webb, 2005). The exposure of leaders to the mass media has made them closer to the citizens and, a fortiori, to party members. The deference, esteem and respect once reserved for party leaders have been substituted by a sentiment of identification: The leader is no longer distant and unattainable given his/her ‘qualities’, but resembles the citizen–member, and he/she resonates with the public. Following this hint, this peculiar leaders’ perception by the members and the mass public has two potential, different, outcomes: either to reinforce leaders’ standing, profiling them as closer to the people and thus attentive to the citizen’s demands; or to downsize their persona and thus depress their status and professional role to the point of making them ‘redundant’ and thus discarded by the public.
As a matter of fact, the inclusion of larger numbers of members (and even supporters) in the selection process has not increased the attractiveness of the party, either in terms of membership, or in terms of higher involvement, or, finally, in terms of confidence. The simple, even simplistic, idea that just granting rights to vote to party members would have been enough to recast support, actually failed.
Katz and Mair, in many of their writings, both jointly and separately, have repeatedly warned of the risk of marginalizing militants and middle-level elites by empowering the membership only (in the same vein, see also Faucher, 2014; Gauja, 2015). In accordance with their speculations, I argue that the devolution to the membership entails a plebiscitary appeal. Calling the membership up (and, a fortiori, the sympathizers) directly bypasses intermediate party structures and middle-level elites. As a consequence, these intermediary components, traditionally considered the effective backbone of the party for their role as an aggregative clearing-house of bottom-up flows of demands, are now at pains to regain their function (see Saglie and Heidar, 2004).
Without indulging in the myths of the good old days, which sometimes peek out in accounts of internal party life by some scholars and practitioners, it could be stated that the intermediate party strata – at municipal, provincial/county, and regional level – were, at least formally, deeply involved in the decision-making process. All party by-laws and statutes granted these strata a role, either in the selection process or in policy formulation.
It is precisely within these territorial–functional intra-party strata that militants and middle-level elites would and should play a role in the internal decision-making process. Yet, the openness and inclusion of the membership play against them and tend to write them off. Members’ empowerment entails a dispossession of power of the intermediate levels of the party organization (Detterbeck, 2012: 84; see also Faucher, 2014; Ignazi and Pizzimenti, 2014; Rahat, 2009).
The appeal to the members eclipses the principle of delegated democracy in favour of a direct, unmediated and individual modality. This passage raises the question of the type of democracy the parties are instilling in their internal working and, in extenso, in the political system. The compliance to this direct modality fosters a plebiscitary approach to politics (as signalled in Canadian parties by Young and Cross (2002: 679)).
Leadership appeal gains an enormous attention and an easy leeway in front of the collective, multistage – and obviously slow and even cumbersome – decision-making process. Such competitive advantage the leaders avail themselves of was favoured by societal modifications in favour of personalization, velocity and efficacy, in spite of participation and collective involvement, and has now been further increased by the vacuum opened inside the party by the withdrawal and abandonment of militants and cadres. Leaders do not care about this trend because, according to quite a sombre vision, they use the party as a ‘sort of platform’ and ‘a stepping stone’ for their ambitions and careers (Mair, 2013: 16).
This process, centred on un-intermediated relations between leaders and followers, has had an unexpected, but unsurprising, outcome: the rise of right-wing populist parties which play the plebiscitary card unscrupulously. The naive hyper-democratic drive towards members and citizens’ empowerment in the party decision-making process has unwittingly promoted leaders and parties that legitimize their voice playing on a direct appeal to the undifferentiated, homogeneous, people, with a call which recasts the holistic imprint of politics (Rosenblum, 2008).
The attempt to counteract dissatisfaction and mistrust towards parties by opening them up and relying on the ‘resource leadership’ has proved unsuccessful and counterproductive. Membership shrinks and demobilizes, leaders go their own way and confidence plummets – and anti-democratic forces gain momentum. Democracy itself is under threat from a populist surge, because developments in intra-party dynamics have an effect on the external environment too. As Bardi et al. (2014: 249) have pointed out: ‘(t)he lack of satisfaction of party performance will spill over into dissatisfaction with democracy, into the development of ever more personalised politics, and into the birth of populist and irresponsible new parties and leaders’.
Party democracy and the state
The question of party democracy is thus at the core of the system democratic standing. While I acknowledge the claim that democracy entails inter-party free and equal competition rather than democratic intra-party working (see, inter alia, Sartori, 1957, 1976), at the same time the party internal rules and praxes have a crucial importance for the political system. It would sound odd that a democracy could work properly if its ideological foundation were denigrated within the organization which selects the representatives and elaborates the public policies.
Appropriately, Scarrow suggests that intra-party democracy ‘contribut[es] to the stability and legitimacy of the democracies in which these parties compete for power’ (2005: 3), and similarly, Harmel and Janda contend that, while competing for power, some parties seek to do so while pursuing intra-party democracy as a primary goal (1994: 269). Thus, the question of intra-party democracy has a primary importance for the working and legitimacy of the political system. Indeed, it is so salient that there is an ongoing tendency to impose legal provisions on internal party rules, either with constitutional norms and/or with ordinary laws.
Van Biezen and Piccio (2013), van Biezen and ten Napel (2014) and Borz (2016) have well illustrated the actual process of ‘constitutionalisation’ and ‘juridification’ of parties. In recent times, legal rules regulating the presence and the activities of parties have been introduced in many countries, especially in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and also, to some extent, in Latin America. The constitutionalization of parties in countries that had experienced an authoritarian regime, starting with Germany and Italy in the immediate post-war years, was motivated by the defence of pluralism. In other countries with a long democratic tradition like Sweden and Switzerland, different considerations have prompted them to insert political parties in their constitution in recent years: essentially, the growing role that parties have gained in the institutional setting. Party relevance in public life has led to the provision of a legal framework to manage it. This statutory recognition grants parties the role of ‘semi-public agencies’, along the lines of the considerations made by Leon Epstein (1986: 155) with regard to American parties, and later extended to the European context (Katz and Mair, 1995; van Biezen, 2012).
The party subjugation to state provisions could be worrying on a certain account, as Katz (2002: 90) pointed out: Parties could be more or less subtly controlled and restrained in their purposes and activities by the rulers.4 On the other hand, it offers a very important benefit: It provides a sort of warranty for the party existence. In a time of growing disrespect for parties, being constitutionalized and/or regulated by law provides a kind of guarantee. It attests to their essential role in the democratic process. The party is now so firmly entrenched in the institutional framework that it cannot be withered away in a fiat. Even if parties are at pains to assert themselves as legitimate actors in the delegation chain, they can now profit from the state shield. In sum, the intrusion of the law in the party domain has a positive side effect.
A quadrille for intra-party democracy
Having stated the increasing attention devoted to the inner life of parties by legislators, and having critically discussed the ‘democratising’ innovations pursued by parties under the species of inclusion, I turn again to the questions; in what way should parties be democratic? And what are the sufficient and necessary conditions?
Recently intra-party democracy has come back with vengeance in scholarly debate. Theoretical and empirically focused analyses are growing in number and quality. In particular, von dem Berge et al. (2013; see also von dem Berge and Poguntke, 2017) has provided a framework focused on two variables, inclusion and decentralization; and Rahat and Shapira (2017), expanding previous analyses by Hazan and Rahat (2010), have included in their index of intra-party democracy variables such as participation, competition, representation, responsiveness and transparency. Some of these hints resonate with the present one, while I follow a different approach.
As a first approximation, I could say that since democracy embodies not only decision-making but also the modality of decisions – decision by participation, according to Urbinati (2014) – voting for the leader and candidate selection, and on some policy proposals, is not a sufficient condition for democracy. Not even in the political system at large is electoral democracy synonymous with proper democracy. The emergence of political regimes defined as democratura or illiberal democracies express this inconsistency between presence of elections and absence of democracy (Collier and Levitsky, 1997; Zakaria, 1997).
Following the same reasoning, inclusion is just one element of intra-party democracy – and also quite problematic itself. Beyond inclusion, three more elements should be taken into account: (a) the guarantee of minority rights within the party, thus securing internal pluralism; (b) the involvement in the elaboration of party policies, that is, the enforcement of a (sort of) internal process of deliberation; and (c) the horizontal and vertical diffusion of the decision-making power among different intra-party layers and actors. In sum, together with inclusion, deliberation, diffusion and pluralism complete the quadrille of the intra-party democracy’s knights.
As inclusion has been discussed at length above, I concentrate here on the other three elements.
Pluralism
It might be odd to include pluralism in this context. However, since parties are micropolitical systems (Sartori, 1976), freedom for dissenting opinions within political parties has encountered the same difficulties faced by the parties at system level. Opponents, inside and outside an organization, have been always stigmatized as factitious. Any division within any political ‘body’ (to recall the organicist metaphor of the past) was considered harmful for its general well-being. Faction had – and still has – a negative meaning. The cultural monist and holist imprint in Western societies has raised a barrier to pluralism and demonized whatever dissidence (Ignazi, 2017).
The history of political parties overflows with examples where minority groups have been smashed by the leadership. One can think of the waves of expulsions of dissenters and factional groups in socialist and communist parties, not to mention the more brutal means adopted by the German Nazi Party and the Soviet Communist Party against, respectively, the SA brown shirts, and the Trotskyists and other deviationist groups.
Beyond these extreme cases, as political parties are arenas where power struggles represent the routine of their life (Panebianco, 1988; Rye, 2014), competing groups, overtly or more cautiously, strive one against the other, resulting in a situation of eventual winners and losers. Defeated group(s) obviously seek ‘protection’ by advocating a series of rights to ensure their voice is still heard and to keep some avenue of representation, whereas the leadership is tempted to get rid of it/them. Therefore, recognition of the right to organized dissent in the form of intra-party tendencies or structured factions, and to avail oneself of fair representation in the party’s organs, are the necessary requirements to certify the democratic features of a party.
This point brings back the question of unity versus plurality both within and outside parties. As the quest for holism and monism remains a powerful drive in the public mind, this imprint may harm the party reception and legitimation of factions. The charge of creating a division – a faction – within a party is as old as politics itself. Even today, parties tend either to inhibit or downsize internal conflicts because their outward display is considered harmful for the party’s image. Actually, this was the reason for the radical change of the British Labour Party conferences organization in the 1990s (Quinn, 2004).
The concentration and verticalization of power in the hands of central elites and the leader – a feature inherent in cartel party logic – reduces room for dissenting opinions. Moreover, personalization/presidentialization of the leadership is designed to maximize consent for itself and stigmatizes any internal contestation as a danger to party fortunes. Indeed, there is nothing new under the sky of intra-party politics: The old demons of monism and holism tend to surface again and again. This is why, in the end, the level of pluralism, that is, the room guaranteed to internal factions and, more generally, the warranty of minority rights, provides the minimal requirement for intra-party democracy.
Deliberation
Another element of the intra-party democratic quadrille concerns the involvement of party actors and structures in the policy elaboration, that is, the enforcement of a deliberative dimension. As previously discussed, direct calls by membership for a referendum bypass any collective arena for discussion and deliberation: This modality of decision-making implies the atomization of internal relations. Such an individualization of the democratic process is perfectly congruent with the neo-liberal dominant cultural paradigm as it guarantees individual access to the decision-making process: but, at the same time, it isolates party members from each other.
The emphasis on party members’ individual rights, and the call for members’ direct intervention, leaves no room for deliberation: The model of the leader–mass unmediated relationship transposed into political parties shrinks the setting for discussion and impoverishes the debate (Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein, 2017; Muirhead, 2006, 2014; Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2012).
The dyadic, un-intermediated leadership–audience relationship is detrimental to intra-party democracy. On the contrary, parties have to provide a ‘vertical linkage between different deliberating spheres and a horizontal linkage between competing issues’ (Teorell, 1999: 363) in order to assure internal democracy, alongside a suitable linkage with civil society. Today, parties follow a different route. They discard that modality of decision-making which would involve active members and middle-level elites through a delegated and decentralized process.
The introduction of horizontal and vertical deliberation forums where members interact with each other would subtract parties from the ‘atomised cage’ in which they are trapped. Members would be involved in the elaboration of policies and in the definition of the agenda interacting with peers and possibly with the leaders too. The de-emphasis on individual inclusion and the fostering of numerous loci for deliberation would reinstate and re-enforce the collective dimension of participation.
A note of caution should, however, be addressed here. The introduction of deliberative elements within political parties is not a panacea; and, from a different perspective, it is not a substitute for political parties themselves as Saward implicitly argues, wondering ‘what forms of party claims, if any, are appropriate’ in the context of a deliberative process (2010: 137, emphasis added).
What is salient in this context is not the goal of the deliberation in its core, that is, the achievement of shared and consensual decisions, but rather the process, that is, the re-emphasizing of the role of argumentation and discussion in many layers of the party organization. Putting aside the mythology of an impartial and aseptic management of deliberative arenas (see Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2012, for a sharp criticism), the development of an informed and passionate environment is crucial in favouring an articulated set of opinions and an accurate elaboration of proposals.
The personalization and leader-centred drive which affect, and depress, the ‘democratic tone’ of political parties may be counteracted and mastered by elements of a deliberative praxis which enforces direct, face-to-face relations in spite of a sporadic call to raise a hand. The party, being a collective enterprise, needs collective involvement. This is a necessary condition for an intra-party ‘non-disfigured’ democracy (Urbinati, 2014).
Diffusion
The restriction of space for deliberation is connected with the concentration and verticalization of power in political parties. The activities of different party strata, both at territorial and functional levels, are constrained by the leadership’s dominant position. Collective organs of the party structure have lost much of their importance: They have been either downgraded in their role or inflated with members to become just celebrating assemblies. Central committees or other national deliberative/executive organs have been marginalized in front of the leadership. Similarly, intermediate layers have been deprived of a say, being bypassed by the direct address to the ‘people’, that is, the members. Both horizontal (on the same organizational level) and vertical (between different levels) dynamics favour a strengthening of the national-central elite and, in particular, dispossess collective organs of their function as seeds of deliberation and decision. In this way, the diffusion of power and the spread of arenas of deliberation are undermined (Detterbeck, 2012; Hopkin, 2001; von dem Berge et al., 2013).
The re-empowering of different loci of the political party organization would counteract the tendency to the reductio ad unum of intra-party power. In addition, it would provide means for keeping the leadership accountable. As voting is the ultimate weapon to express dissatisfaction with the leadership, other means should be introduced: Involvement through the diffusion of loci of discussion and deliberation provides further opportunities to keep a check on the leadership.
This plea for a re-empowerment of intra-party delegate democracy and intermediate party structures should overcome the stigma of the oligarchic tendency ‘inherent’ in the party organization. A way out of this trap is provided by a stratarchical move of parties (Bolleyer, 2012; Carty, 2013; Eldersveld, 1964). According to Eldersveld (1964: 9), the ‘proliferation of the ruling groups and the diffusion of power prerogatives’ at different party layers (see also Carty, 2013: 25) produce a sort of ‘reciprocal deference structure. […] Control from the top [i]s minimal and formal’ (Eldersveld, 1964: 100). The central party restrains itself from exercising direct and imposing control on the lower echelons, leaving the local strata with an ample degree of freedom in their activity. The local structures, thanks to their freedom to manoeuvre, develop and manage their own resources autonomously: Financial flows, membership recruitment and mobilization, relationships with local interests and local networking are run with an ample degree of freedom from above. This framework depicts a centre–periphery relation almost free of conflict because, in Eldersveld’s (1964: 10) terms, there is a relationship of ‘accommodation’ between centre and periphery. However, even in the stratarchical model, ‘hierarchical elements’ are present (Bolleyer, 2012: 318) and potential conflict may arise. This is why the diffusion of power involving the intermediate structures would enhance the democratic profile of parties.
In conclusion, inclusion, pluralism, deliberation and diffusion are the four basic elements of intra-party democracy. Against other analyses, and instead in accordance with Katz (2013) and Carty (2013), I do not share the enthusiasm for large-scale members’ inclusion. As already advanced, this sole element, not in conjunction with others, may have counter-effects because of (a) the populist potential inherent in the unmediated leader–follower relation; (b) the demobilization of all the party actors and strata beyond and between members and leaders; and (c) the tighter control on the lower party strata from above.
Opening up and individualizing decision-making does not suffice. Incentives for collective participation and an effective internal monitoring should be reintroduced inside political parties if ‘democracy’ is to be of importance. The participatory, collective activity in decentralized internal ‘polis’, where discussion and deliberation precede decision and ex-post control offers a new avenue for internal participation, would enhance a more shared and dialogic intra-party working.
This different avenue would empower not the ‘individual’ member as such, but rather the intra-party intermediate structures where members interact with each other. The discarding of delegated democracy in favour of a direct model (von dem Berge and Poguntke, 2017) implicit in individual member empowerment has its rationale: It descends from the long-held distortion (i.e. oligarchic tendencies), that was fashioned by delegated democracy within political parties – and denounced since Michels’ times. However, the alternative offered by the atomistic, direct, leader–member relationship is an incomplete, to say the least, remedy to an oligarchic tendency. It is also a counterproductive solution, since it favours intra-party centralization of power and plebiscitary temptation. In sum, the call-up of membership enforced by political parties in recent years seems to have missed one goal – re-energizing parties – while at the same time having achieved another aim, consciously or not, pursued by the party leaderships, that is, a tight control on internal party dynamics.
The emphasis on the act of voting has overshadowed fundamental aspects of accountability and participation by reducing the party to a plebiscitary locus for the idolizing of leaders, and bypassing intermediate structures and actors and opportunities for discussion and deliberation, dramatically shrinking the democratic quality of political parties. Even worse, the political system at large is inoculated with the virus of plebiscitarism. The rise of populist parties represents precisely the byproduct of this tendency.
Conclusions
The current legitimacy crisis experienced by parties, caused by being unfit for the demands of postmodern society, has been further aggravated by their dual response: a move towards the state, on the one hand, and the plebiscitary turn empowering members and demonizing and downsizing intermediate actors and delegated procedures, on the other.
The two responses are interrelated: The stateward movement of parties, originated by their delinking from society, worsened the parties standing in the eyes of the public at large; and when this detachment from public approval was finally perceived, party leaders activated some changes by ‘opening up’ the party organizations while, at the same time, emphasizing the role of leaders.
The direct involvement of members has been regarded as a step forward towards a more democratic practice within parties. As a matter of fact, this move has not been successful in revitalizing political parties, as membership either languishes or sometimes plummets, and confidence falls to unprecedentedly low levels. In addition, this opening embodies a series of risks, which might foster, instead of settle, the pitfalls mentioned above: in particular, the disregard of the collective dimension of politics. As Carty (2013:19) has written, ‘individuals are isolated from one another and engaged in direct communication only with the party centre, in a fashion that inhibits their ability to act in common with each other’.
The strategies adopted to counteract demobilization insisted in fact in individualizing the decision-making process. The reforms introduced by many political parties have produced more atomization (the negative outcome of the process of individualization) rather than sociability, more verticalization and concentration of power rather than participation and involvement and more plebiscitary fashion rather than critical and deliberative attitudes. Only the integration of members’ inclusion with the other ‘knights’ of party democracy – diffusion, pluralism, and deliberation – may foster an effective intra-party activity and revive partisan mobilization.
Parties have gone the wrong way to counteract the anti-party sentiment and regain full legitimacy. Uneasiness and dissatisfaction had already emerged before the new century, but they had remained limited, and did not find powerful outlets as the greens rapidly institutionalized, and the new, post-industrial extreme right did not spread. In the new century, instead, a breach has been opened. Now, party legitimacy is at stake. And as party and state have become increasingly intertwined, democracy is also endangered by the brutal loss of confidence in the parties. In a way, it was not just the parties that ‘intruded’ into the state as argued by Katz and Mair in the 1990s: The state itself embodied political parties when it formally acknowledged a crucial role for them in the political system through their constitutionalization and juridification. In this way, parties were granted the state shield – but at a cost.
The declining confidence and legitimacy of parties certainly affects the standing of democracy in the eyes of citizens, but the opposite also applies. The dissatisfaction for the working of democracy has projected a dark shadow on the party itself. The strong interrelationship between party and state indeed aggravates the party agony. In fact, as the nation state wanes and loses hold in the global setting, and citizens perceive its working as less and less satisfactory, especially in front to the economic ‘great crisis’, parties too are hit by this fatigue, precisely due to the firmer relationship between them and state.
This is only part of the story, however. As mentioned above, parties themselves are the cause of their own downfall; they are responsible for their negative image and for the lack of confidence by the mass public. In particular, their unprecedented affluence, contrary to the parsimonious life they had experienced for so long, and the highly questionable employment of their resources, has hollowed them out. Parties’ material resources have often been diverted in a way that has increased malpractice and corruption in recent times.
Parties are not recapturing their role as trusted agents of people’s needs and demands. Beyond any account of parties’ efficacy in policy advocacy and implementation, partial and contradictory intra-party democratic functioning has put their existence at stake. However, no other alternative is palatable for a democratic competitive setting, unless we want to reduce politics to pushing a button on the television remote control, or clicking on an electronic device.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Piero Ignazi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9015-7789
Footnotes
1. I will not explore this point in this article.
2. In 2014, 80% of EU citizens considered that corruption existed in their country (Eurobarometer, 2014).
3. In this article, I prefer to use the term ‘inclusion’ – the process of inclusion – rather than the more common ‘inclusiveness’, the property of being inclusive.
4. This is the concern that has inhibited Italian legislators from introducing a party law (Truffelli, 2003).
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Biographies
Piero Ignazi is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bologna, Italy. He has written on Italian and European parties, Italian foreign policy and on the relationship between religion and politics. His latest book is Party and Democracy: The Uneven Road to Party Legitimacy (2017).
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