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Today, most scholars would agree with E. E. Schattschneider’s famous assertion that “the political parties created democracy, and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the political parties” (1942, 1). However, parties as political institutions are a relatively new phenomenon, one that was at first perceived as neither unavoidable nor desirable. Indeed, criticism of parties was first raised in the eighteenth century and in some sense predates the emergence of parties in their modern political form in the nineteenth century.

Parties In Early Political Philosophy

The assessment of parties as political institutions depends very much on the underlying concept of democracy. While for theories of popular sovereignty, democracy means the implementation of the common good, or to use Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s term, the general will (volonté générale) of the people through the rule by the people, liberal democratic theories tend to conceive of democracy as a political method to safeguard individual liberty against state power and to promote the pursuit of individual interests. From both perspectives, early political philosophy often tended to view parties as a threat to democracy. Group interest representation through parties was perceived as rejecting the interests of the individual and thus as incompatible with the idea of liberal democracy. In contrast, from the perspective of democracy as popular sovereignty, the idea of representation of particular and competing interests through parties was seen as jeopardizing common values and thus as a threat to the general interest.

One of the first political philosophers to write about parties was David Hume, who considered them “the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon that has yet appeared in human affairs,” (1742, 60) but was rather critical: “As much as legislators . . . ought to be honored and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated,” he argued that factions “beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other” (ibid., 55). Similarly, James Madison (1787) saw the development of parties, or factions, as inevitable given the diverse interests in society, but he believed that majority factions posed a threat to the public good, individual liberty, and minority rights. Yet not all were as critical: Edmund Burke (1770) is considered the first thinker in the history of political philosophy to argue for the respectability of parties, contending that people could disagree about the common good and unite in different parties to promote what they believed to be in the national interest.

Parties And Modern Democratic Theory

The main change in the perception of parties came at the turn of the twentieth century with the arrival of mass democracy, which legitimized parties as political actors. As shown by Stein Rokkan (1970), parties played a historical role in integrating newly enfranchised groups into politics through the development of mass parties. As a result, institutionalized party competition was increasingly seen as a valuable, or at least necessary, characteristic of democratic politics. Yet authors of the early twentieth century remained concerned about the role of parties in modern society. In particular, Moisei Ostrogorski (1902) and Robert Michels (1911) challenged the idea that mass parties promoted participatory democracy and popular sovereignty. Instead, they drew attention to the parties’ undemocratic and oligarchic tendency to empower party leaders, thus denying individuals their sovereign right to decide and instead submitting them to strict party discipline.

Joseph Schumpeter (1942), in contrast, rejected the classic idea that democracy was a mechanism to realize the common good through self-rule by the people. Since the people were susceptible to manipulation by agenda-setting politicians, the idea of rule by the people was not only unrealistic, it was also undesirable. Instead, he advocated a minimalist conception of democracy as rule for the people, in which electoral competition between political elites, or parties, legitimized government. The electoral competition will became the outcome of the political process rather than its origin. Schumpeter’s theory of democracy also opened up a new perspective on parties as actors in a political market, explicit in Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) and Otto Kirchheimer’s catch-all party, characterized by a “drastic reduction of the party’s ideological baggage,” powerful party leadership, and a deemphasis of both the role of the individual party member and the ties to specific social groups “in favour of recruiting voters among the population at large” (1966, 190). In this view, politics turns into the electoral competition between professional party elites that simply seek to maximize their vote share. While Downs emphasized the moderating effects of competition between two parties that had to compete for the same voters in the center, Kirchheimer was critical of catch-all parties that in his view performed badly with regard to mobilization and representation.

Thus, since the turn of the twentieth century, neither main strand of democratic theory has considered parties as obstacles to democracy per se, but the strands imply different views on the parties’ roles and functions. Theories of popular sovereignty advocate a participatory form of democracy. Accordingly, the role of parties is to provide mass mobilization and integration, and their legitimacy depends primarily on direct popular involvement in party decision making. In contrast, the main role played by citizens in liberal democracies is to choose (or reject, and thus hold accountable) their leaders by means of competitive elections, while individual participation in politics as such is not an important ideal. Consequently, in this view parties are seen as a necessary instrument of electoral competition but do not need to emphasize mass membership, internal democracy, or even a particular ideology.

Parties And Contemporary Democratic Theory: The Lack Of Dialogue

Today, authors such as Richard Katz (2006) or Ingrid van Biezen and Michael Saward (20 08) point out that with few exceptions, research on political parties and normative democratic theory have for some time developed in mutual isolation. While current party scholars often take a specific interpretation of the inherently contested concept of democracy for granted, the broad literature on modern democratic theory has largely ignored the wealth of empirical studies of political parties. As a result, authors argue that modern political science has done little to address or even understand current pressing concerns: A number of empirical studies have shown that parties appear to be losing some of their key functions, such as representation, mobilization, and interest aggregation. Growing disengagement from partisan politics and increasing levels of popular distrust in political parties are widespread. However, if parties are essential for representative democracy but at the same time unable to perform their representative functions, what are the implications for democracy? Are parties failing democracy, or do we need to reinvent them and their role? Do we need to reinvent democracy again? As van Biezen and Saward remind us, it is only when democratic theory and the study of parties reengage with each other “that we can try to make sense of the place of parties in contemporary democracy and, indeed, of the nature of modern democracy itself and its potential futures” (2008, 31).

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