Democratic innovation without parties should be unthinkable

The title is a play on Schattschneider’s (1942) famous words, which referred to the symbiotic relationship between political parties and democracy. Much has been and is being written about the state of parties and democracy, one of the most noted pieces being Mair’s posthumous Beyond the Void (2013), which very directly framed the account of the state of democracy in terms of the state of parties. According to Mair, and many other party politics scholars, ‘parties are in trouble’ and, thus, so is democracy. There is some recognition (e.g. Bedock 2017; Bowler and Donovan 2013; Dalton et al. 2003) that democracies are innovating, but the general sense is that the reforms are not working: the signs of democratic erosion and backsliding continue to grow. A noted feature of these studies on democratic reform is that, for the most part (with the partial exception of Dalton et al.) the focus is on reforms to, rather than of, what Bedock refers to as, ‘electoral democracy’. Even among those scholars who pay attention to the recent ‘deliberative wave’ there is a tendency to dismiss such developments as limited (Achen and Bartels 2016), ‘scarce’ (Bedock 2017), ‘exclusive’ (Mair 2006), or ‘not integrated’ (Pateman 2012) – in other words, as largely insignificant. Meanwhile, in a parallel political science universe, one of the most vibrant new sub-disciplines, democratic innovations, operates with a very different premise about the role of parties, and about what is occurring to democracies. For many (possibly most?) scholars in this tradition, political parties, if anything, are ‘the problem’. The aim is to imagine a new form of democracy, one that is citizen-centred (Elstub and Escobar 2019; Smith 2009), at the heart of which are new participatory and deliberative institutions that enable direct, unmediated engagement in democratic processes by citizens. In this vision, there is ‘hope’ for a new form of democracy (Gastil and Knobloch 2020), but one without parties (e.g. Geissel 2022; Landemore 2020). In short, we have one pretty dismal view about the state of parties and democracy versus another view which sees hope for democracy, but one that does not include parties. Where the views differ is on the prospect for democracy; where there is some overlap is in how parties are being written out of the picture either because they’re in their death throes or because they simply should not have been there in the first place. The purpose of this paper is to review these debates about democratic innovation (which, clearly, are more nuanced then set out here) with a view to bringing political parties back into the picture. It starts from the classic position that parties are the key transmission belts in democracy (the “‘software” of mediating institutions’ as van Biezen and Saward 2008 put it). It recognises their key role, as parties-in-government, in innovating democracies. And it re-imagines a democracy that remains party-led, but much more citizen-oriented.