Over the past few years, a number of political theorists have begun to examine the normative dimensions of partisanship and the pivotal role that political parties play in representative democracy. Within this growing body of literature, however, little if any attention has been devoted to the role of language and linguistic diversity in democratic party systems. And yet in deeply multilingual polities such as the EU, where most citizens do not speak the languages of other groups, multilingualism is a potentially significant obstacle for the formation of polity-wide political parties and, thus, can hinder democratic stability. Hence, in this paper we focus on multilingual political parties in deeply multilingual polities, i.e. parties that exist and operate across linguistic boundaries, both within and across nation-states, and do so by using different languages. For the sake of argument, we take it for granted that multilingual parties are desirable for a functioning democracy and focus on institutional conditions that facilitate their formation and stability over time. By drawing on evidence from Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and the European Union (EU), we argue that the presence of multilingual parties is facilitated in democracies that rely on “centripetal” political institutions: majoritarian electoral systems, country-wide electoral districts, presidentialism, and direct democracy.
