Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions (Didi Kuo)

Americans are fed up with political parties. In poll after poll, they report trusting any number of institutions—including business leaders, the police, and journalists—more than they trust elected officials or the parties.¹ The number of self-proclaimed independents is rising; many of them are turned off by the party system entirely, even if they tend to vote for one of the main parties.² These trends parallel those in other longstanding democracies. In Western Europe, for example, parties have been losing members, with fewer voters joining parties or participating in party activities. Citizens of Asia, Africa, and Europe feel less trusting of parties today than in previous decades.³

In the United States, as organized advocacy for political reform has grown over the past decade, much of the focus has been on reforms that would circumvent or eliminate the role and influence of the two main parties. These reforms include open or blanket primaries—such as those in which the top two, four, or five finishers in the primary move on to the general election—as well as totally nonpartisan primaries. But weakening the role of parties in politics would diminish the crucial role they play in our democracy, and would likely only serve to make more Americans feel disconnected from politics. This essay provides a brief history of parties and democracy, focusing on the role of parties as sites both of representation and of political participation and deliberation.

Strong parties with roots in society are considered essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth.⁴ Historically, ideological debates manifested themselves in the party system, with parties competing by offering distinct policies and visions to voters. The mass party organization—densely networked, local, labor-intensive parties that date from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century—was itself embedded in the lives of citizens.

The history of parties is the history of democracy itself—the history of how representation is built and how it becomes stable and permanent. Because parties emerged with, and in some cases, predated, the extension of suffrage, their histories are inextricably intertwined.⁵ Parties began as narrow legislative factions in limited democracies of the West. As democracy expanded to include non-property-owning males, parties connected candidates and representatives to voters, on the one hand, and to legislative coalitions on the other.⁶ As parties became national organizations, the “mass” in mass party referred not to the collective masses (i.e., a party that wins decisive majorities) but instead denoted a party with extensive networks within specific segments of society. These parties placed a premium on representational integrity—how well they channeled the interests of their base—rather than on how savvily they conducted campaigns.⁷

“The history of parties is the history of democracy itself—the history of how representation is built and how it becomes stable and permanent.”

Over time, parties became responsible for most of the work of democracy: They recruit and field candidates, manage election campaigns, aggregate and mediate competing interests, devise and pass policies, and mobilize the citizenry into politics. But we tend to focus exclusively on the electoral-legislative dimension of parties, both as scholars and as policy reformers. Parties today perform some of their responsibilities effectively. They are ideologically sorted and coherent; they vote together in the legislature; they are incredibly effective at campaigning and winning elections. But historically, parties have faced trade-offs in how they prioritize different tasks—whether maintaining local party organizations, fostering relationships with civic associations and community groups, selecting good candidates capable of winning elections, or passing policies that might address the needs of voters. Parties cannot do all of these things well, all of the time.

As Joseph Schumpeter famously argued, parties are engaged in a competitive struggle for the people’s vote. Much of the scholarship on parties therefore focuses on campaigns, elections, and legislative politics. The foremost theory of parties in the study of American politics tells us that parties are not intermediary organizations at all—they are merely “groups of policy demanders.”⁸ This makes parties susceptible to capture by narrowly organized private interests. As a result, they are more likely to be vehicles of political and economic inequality than they are vehicles of mass representation. Today’s “hollow parties” are a far cry from the organizational party of the mid-century.⁹

Attention devoted to the electoral-legislative dimension of parties neglects an equally important dimension: parties as membership and linkage organizations, rooted in society. Parties are critical to democratic stability not because they win elections, but because of their representational integrity—their ability to channel voters’ interests and translate them into the substance of party competition and policy. As parties have built up their capacities in the electoral arena, they have neglected many of the social ties once considered integral to their work. As Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum describe it, we now see “a failure of the elemental linkage function once attributed to parties…if parties cannot link the groups vying for power in the legislature with groups in the larger society, then legislatures, which are the heart of representative government, lose their connection to popular interests, wants, and passions, and representative government loses something of its legitimacy.”¹⁰

An alternative approach is to examine the capacity of parties to serve as intermediaries. Parties mediate the relationship between society and government, a responsibility that no other organizations perform. While social movements and issue organizations may represent interests, they do not govern. As the sociologist Stephanie Mudge has written, what matters are the dynamics of party representation, and “the key problematic, or concern, of the historical social science of parties, party politics, and party-political institutional order should be representation—as opposed to policies, votes and elections, demographics, or ideas—and within that concern, parties’ capacity to mediate.”¹¹

Are parties effective intermediaries today? Few citizens feel connected to parties. A “relationship” to a party might entail receiving emails soliciting campaign contributions or following candidates on social media. It is not clear to voters or even to aspiring candidates how to access their local party offices, if and when they exist. While parties still claim to represent and speak for the people, they may have no connection to actual people. Instead, the campaign is a branding and advertising exercise. Candidates rely on support not from residents of their districts, but from far-away fans willing to donate money. The parties market their candidates through a vast network of political strategists and consultants.

While parties once reached citizens through membership and local party offices, they now rely on a politics industry—pollsters, strategists, and increasingly, data scientists—to target potential voters. As parties became more professional and campaign-oriented, they also became less responsive, shedding the representation and mobilization functions they once performed. Citizens are no longer recruited and socialized into parties through active engagement and community networks. Indeed, parties have outsourced many of their traditional intermediary and mobilization functions to outside groups.¹² Advocacy coalitions, non-governmental organizations, lobbying firms, media, and social movements now provide messages and information to voters, rather than parties. As a result, voters are likely to hear about the failures of parties, rather than hear parties defend and justify how political decisions are made. As parties have abdicated their traditional intermediary roles, trust in parties has plummeted and party membership has reached historic lows.

“As parties became more professional and campaign-oriented, they also became less responsive, shedding the representation and mobilization functions they once performed.”

In 1988, Angelo Panebianco described the rise of the “electoral-professional party.”¹³ These parties were oriented toward issues, rather than ideology, and toward leaders, rather than members. These parties were likely to become more dependent on interest groups and single-advocacy groups to do the work of representing citizens and to depend on technicians, rather than party bureaucrats, to formulate policy.

Panebianco’s description of the electoral-professional party led him to predict the “dissolution of parties as organizations….[They will] be only convenient tags for independent political entrepreneurs.”¹⁴ Mass media and television made campaigns more candidate-centered, and as a result, parties would increasingly specialize in public relations and advertising. Communications technology also made parties more dependent on pollsters, who could now gauge public opinion in more efficient, supposedly accurate ways.¹⁵

A deep suspicion of political parties indicates a broader erosion of faith in liberal democracy. Increasing numbers of voters feel that parties are corrupt and cannot be trusted or that they care only about short-term goals rather than the public good. Many politicians spend their time currying favor with donors, lobbyists, and allies who help them maintain their hold on power.¹⁶ There is also ample empirical evidence of a gap in responsiveness. Wealthy voters are more likely to get their preferences implemented into policy, particularly on redistribution and taxation issues.¹⁷ Issues of policy responsiveness are not limited to the United States; policies tend to reflect the preferences of high-income voters in Western European countries as well.¹⁸

Parties with a traditional working-class base or ties to organized labor—which, in the past, have been important channels for recruiting and electing working-class representatives—have also become more elite, and not only in the United States. Elected representatives come from highly educated, professional backgrounds, with incomes far above those of their constituents.¹⁹ In 1945, 56 percent of representatives in the House and 75 percent of Senators had college degrees, while in 2021, 94 percent of House members and all Senators graduated from college—and 66 percent and 75 percent, respectively, have graduate degrees.²⁰ Education is a salient political cleavage, with college-educated voters increasingly more likely to support Democrats than Republicans. While 60 percent of white voters without college degrees voted for Bill Clinton, in 2020, only 27 percent supported Joe Biden.²¹

The blurring of class distinctions and the emerging educational divide has made both U.S. parties seem captured by the elite and nonresponsive to the working classes. There is a structural imbalance of power at the heart of the wealthy democracies today that seems insurmountable through routine politics alone.²² Further, the anti-democratic ideas and individuals mobilizing on the far-right are attempting hostage takeovers of mainstream center-right parties as well as democratic governments themselves.

“There is a structural imbalance of power at the heart of the wealthy democracies today that seems insurmountable through routine politics alone.”

This simply makes the issue of party reform more urgent, rather than more hopeless. A democracy of the future that is more inclusive, more equitable, and more just will require reasserting and repurposing parties, rather than rejecting or displacing them. As Theda Skocpol has written, “there cannot be any going back to the civic world we have lost. But Americans can and should look for ways to recreate the best of our civic past in new forms suited to a renewed democratic future.”²³