Introduction

Didi Kuo

How democratic do political parties have to be to serve democracy? Parties receive much of the blame for the current crisis of democracy. At times, they are decried for being undemocratic: Party elites are described as out of touch with voters, currying favor with donors, special interests, and ideological extremists at the expense of the majority of citizens. Yet they are also criticized for being too democratic, valuing electoral expediency over all else, refusing to place principle over party.

Political parties are still the central organizing feature of modern democracy. Every aspect of representative government—from assessing what voters need, to fielding candidates, to assembling coalitions for policy passage—is mediated through parties. But the fact that parties are crucial to democracy also makes us ambivalent about the role they play, historically and through the present day.

Democracy is a set of institutions that places checks on power, while the pursuit of power is often a party’s raison d’etre. President Dwight D. Eisenhower once argued that this pursuit of power was justified only if a party’s cause was “right” and “moral.” His sentiment echoed a longstanding fear that parties are incompatible with democracy. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison warned about the dangers of faction. In his Farewell Address, President George Washington railed against parties for enfeebling public administration, kindling animosity and riot, and opening the door to corruption.And it was a study of German parties that led sociologist Robert Michels to develop the iron law of oligarchy, a theory that all organizations tend to centralize power among a small elite. Voters, for their part, have also become more wary of parties over time. Today, the growing distrust of parties fits a larger pattern of declining faith in formal and informal democratic institutions across the advanced democracies.

Yet parties are also crucial to democracy. They have been the vehicles for leaders, ideologies, and groups to expand the state’s rights and obligations, to grow the economy, to protect new and marginalized citizens, and to broker compromises between extremism and moderation. At the local level, parties have been particularly important as sources of information and education. Parties help individuals organize their complex political views and interests, and work collectively.

But owing to the developments of the past 50 years, voters today are more likely to identify drawbacks of party politics than any of these benefits. After Watergate and the economic crises of the 1970s, trust in government began to decline. The rise of polarization and inequality date to this period, as the parties became more ideologically cohesive. Economic policies also drove a shift away from manufacturing, towards freer trade and globalization. Parties devoted more resources to national campaigns and elections, rather than local and state party organizations. In an era of fewer unions, civic associations, and local parties, the connections between citizens and parties became even more tenuous.

In this series, leading scholars of parties and politics update this long debate by looking at American parties as they stand today, and what the future might hold. Across Europe and the United States, Didi Kuo shows that parties face ongoing challenges related to responsiveness and gatekeeping. In the next essay, Sheri Berman traces the specific decline of social democracy across Western Europe. While social democratic parties once relied on everyday ties—through grassroots associations and party meetings, for example—to their members, these ties began to erode. As she argues, this had significant consequences for democracy itself. Though the United States does not have a traditional social democratic party, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld describe the fractured Democratic party of the 1960s, and the way reformers embraced internal party democracy—at the expense of party control. Lily Geismer traces how factions such as the Atari Democrats and Democratic Leadership Council modernized the party by mobilizing new social bases of support and offering policies that combined elements of social democracy with neoliberal economics. Finally, as a result of these developments, social issues and identity have assumed a new prominence in politics, as Lily Mason, John V. Kane, and Julia Wronski demonstrate.

As these papers show, the consequences of party decline are significant. Given the scale of contemporary political challenges, and a rising tide of illiberalism at home and abroad, the question of how governments connect with their citizens is paramount. Ultimately, to shore up liberal democracy, political parties will need to reestablish their commitments to voters, and better secure their position as pillars of our democractic system.