This paper examines the issues that are raised when party elites defer to ordinary party members to directly make consequential decisions about policy or the party’s more general direction. Intra-party democracy seems legitimate when it is limited to candidate selection procedures, but not when the membership can make decisions that potentially outweigh the choice of the voters. As a critical case, the paper considers the German Social Democrats’ intra-party referendum of 2013, in which the party base voted on whether or not the coalition government with the centre- right CDU/CSU will materialise. It examines two grounds on which such a referendum could be opposed: (1) the constraints it imposes on the autonomy of MPs, and (2) that it undermines the authority of the voters. It argues that the autonomy of MPs is in any case constrained by their partisanship, and that the will of the membership may well be in tension with the demands of the voters, without it following that this be democratically suspect. However tensions between the demands of the members and the voters must not be ignored by the party, but be subjected to intra-party deliberation. If such deliberations take place, as it was the case in the German example, intra-party referenda are, contrary to what critics suggest, normatively legitimate and, indeed, desirable.
