Failures of Partisan Deliberation

Although the picture of intra-party deliberation that emerges in Chapters 4 and 5 is generally very positive, it is important to note that some of the party groups that were studied for this book proved to be less deliberative than others. Those groups provided good preconditions for deliberation, yet their actual deliberations displayed numerous shortcomings. This chapter examines these shortcomings, looking closely at three types of ‘deliberative failure’—(a) group splits and defection; (b) cases where deliberation does not arise, or only seldom arises; and (c) polarizing tendencies. The chapter also sketches a number of institutional devices for making deliberative failures tractable and concludes that even though deliberative failures will be difficult to avoid in an internally deliberative party, their most harmful effects can be limited through institutional design; so, the fact that deliberation sometimes fails does not speak against a deliberative model of intra-party democracy as a whole. This is important as the proposal of a more deliberative and thus democratic party the book advances is meant to be feasible and functional even under difficult conditions.

Partisan Activism in the Age of Individualization

This chapter addresses the following question: How do contemporary party members view themselves, their party, and their role in it? This question is important because the success of party reforms depends centrally on whether the newly-created channels of participation and engagement are recognized as meaningful and valuable by those who engage in parties (or are generally inclined to engage in them); and to find out what could be considered meaningful and valuable by these individuals we need to understand what they expect from a party in terms of participation and opportunities to make one’s agency felt. The basis of the study, as will be explained in detail, are focus group interviews held with party members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), two parties that were chosen as empirical cases because Social Democratic parties are arguably on top of the list of the parties that may be considered ‘victims’ of the trend of shifting participatory norms, having lost much of their once-great electoral support across most of Europe. An important finding the chapter presents is the tendency of party members to demand (not more direct participation like membership ballots or the like but) more face-to-face contact and two-way communication with party elites and their fellow activists—which strengthens the general case for a more deliberative understanding of parties that the book advances.

Introduction

In addition to summarizing the book’s main themes as described, this Introduction places special emphasis on connecting the problem animating the book—the apparent incapacity of contemporary parties to mediate between citizens and the state—to current political developments in established Western democracies, showing that the issues the book addresses are not only of academic interest but also directly relevant to ongoing public debates about the state and health of representative democracy. Chief amongst the themes foregrounded here is the rise of so-called ‘populist’ parties on the left and right of the political spectrum, as well as the re-branding of established political actors as ‘movements’ (think, e.g. of Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche). These phenomena are interpreted as part of a larger ‘revolt against intermediary bodies’—meaning first and foremost a rebellion against political parties. The Introduction suggests that this ‘revolt’ brings with it only a temporary shift in how representative politics looks, without actually reversing the disconnect between parties and voters or compelling established political parties to give up their privileges and de-colonize the institutions of the state. This argument sets the stage for the book’s core contention that more thought has to be put into finding ways to reconnect political parties with society.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book. It summarizes the arguments advanced in the book and reflects on three challenges facing the book’s argument: that parties are ultimately unreformable; that the institutional proposals put forward are too vague to be useful for practitioners; and that re-modelling parties with only the participatory preferences of those who seek self-expression and self-actualization in politics in mind risks excluding those who do not hold such ‘post-modern’ participatory preferences. Each of these concerns is warranted and taken seriously but, as the chapter shows, none of them is fatal to the broader argument of the book.

Partisan Deliberation in Action

This chapter shifts the focus from the circumstances of deliberation to actual deliberative practice. It begins by distinguishing two different types of disagreement within the partisan groups: ones about organizational matters and ones about issues concerning society at large. It then goes on to examine several exemplary text passages that illustrate how partisans ‘deliberatively’ handle these kinds of disagreements. The central point that emerges from the analysis is that party activists engage in acts of reason giving that may reasonably be interpreted as satisfying the twin demands of uptake and mutual engagement. One of several interesting specificities of partisan deliberation is that it is marked by tensions between pragmatically-minded partisans and more ideological ones. This, it turns out, is also an important source of diversity within party groups. Another notable finding is that the political principles underpinning partisanship can facilitate mutual justification. The ‘normative consensus’ that characterizes partisan collectives plays a crucial role in this connection: partisans’ pre-deliberative agreement on a certain set of political principles ensures that appeals to those principles are immediately resonant. This makes reaching agreements and compromises easier. The upshot is that even though deliberation in party branches is a particular kind of deliberation, it is undoubtedly good deliberation. If this is any indication, then there is plenty of potential for involving these partisans more in the party’s wider deliberations and giving them bigger deliberative tasks

The Circumstances of Partisan Deliberation

This chapter aims to provide a tentative answer to the question of whether party members are at all capable of engaging in non-coercive dialogical exchanges of arguments that result in concrete political proposals, let alone sustained critiques of some existing proposal. It looks specifically at the ‘circumstances of deliberation’ at the party base, asking whether the local partisan associations in which party members engage provide the conditions that are necessary for reasonably non-coercive and dialogical deliberation to arise, namely that participants have equal opportunities to influence the deliberative process, and that they hold a variety of different viewpoints that ensure that the issue under deliberation is considered from multiple angles. The chapter argues that these desiderata are indeed satisfied, showing that diversity is ensured by members’ different occupational backgrounds, and that partisans’ joint commitment to shared political ideals establishes an egalitarian ‘deliberative field’ in which everyone’s voice is heard. These are, it is suggested, very favourable conditions for deliberation, even if one applies much higher normative standards than the book does. Interestingly, the fact that partisanship involves having common adversaries—a by-product of having shared normative commitments—also contributes to the equal standing branch members enjoy; so, partisanship’s inherent exclusionary dynamics have the happy effect of rendering branches supportive environments for deliberation.

Democratic Parties and Popular Sovereignty

This chapter frames the broader argument of the book by making the case that, under contemporary political conditions, the effective exercise of popular sovereignty—the essence of democratic self-rule—requires internally democratic political parties. While the chapter draws on a range of empirical evidence, its primary guide are theoretical insights that date back to the 1920s and are found in the democratic theory of constitutional lawyer Hans Kelsen. Kelsen remains one of the most clear-sighted and relevant authors when it comes to political parties, and his sober and non-moralistic approach to understanding collective political agency usefully re-orients our thinking about parties to the importance of their internal structure and organization. The chapter reconstructs Kelsen’s position and contrasts it with alternative views of popular sovereignty, arguing that the former is superior given how people today prefer to participate in democratic life and how parties have evolved to be agents of the state.

A Deliberative Model of Intra-Party Democracy

This chapter aims to answer the question of how exactly internally democratic parties should look, developing a ‘deliberative model of intra-party democracy’. The main justification of such a model is first, that deliberation can cater better to the demand for political self-expression many citizens share than merely aggregative democratic practices, and second, that deliberation can perform an important critical function within parties, allowing the status quo to be questioned and transformed. The challenge is to devise mechanisms and institutions that can enhance deliberation within parties, and the chapter looks here to the more practice-oriented literature on deliberative democracy and democratic innovations for inspiration. As an instantiation of bottom-up democracy, it is suggested, a deliberative model of intra-party democracy must empower the active members on the ground and offer numerous fora in which they can make their voices heard and bring them to bear on decisions. Chief amongst the institutional design paths suggested are problem-oriented fora, partisan deliberative networks, and larger deliberative conferences. These proposals are discussed in turn, and empirical illustrations of how they could be realised are provided.