Banning parties pose a dilemma for democracies. Parties are usually banned for promoting authoritarianism and violent regime change, undermining democratic commitments to equality and pluralism, serving the interests of a foreign power, undermining the territorial integrity of the state, or some combination. However, party bans may undermine foundational liberal democratic commitments to free association and speech and equal representation of citizens.
The paper develops a theoretical framework to explain why only some democracies respond to the dilemma posed by anti-system parties by banning them. I test hypotheses in ‘deviant’ cases of Herri Batasuna and successors (banned 2003-2012) and Sinn Féin and Republican Clubs (banned 1956 and 1967 respectively but legalized 1974 and 1973 respectively). Most parties that fail to unambiguously reject violence as a means to pursue political goals are banned, while Sinn Féin, Herri Batasuna and their successors enjoyed both long periods of legality and illegality.
More robust theoretical statements on rationales for party bans are needed. The empirical literature on party bans has devoted limited attention to the task of explaining proscription. Paradigmatic concepts in the study of democratic responses to political extremism, such as ‘militant democracy’ (Loewenstein, 1937), ‘defending democracies’ (Pedahzur, 2004) or ‘intolerant democracies’ (Fox and Nolte, 2000), help classify constitutional and democratic responses to extremism, but provide little guidance for investigation on rationales for proscription (see Bourne 2012).
The paper moves beyond a focus on the constitutional foundations of democratic states and formal contours of government policy to examine deliberative processes, discursive strategies and political preferences of elites and citizens on party bans. Hypotheses examined conceive of party bans as the outcome of securitization processes (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, 1998); focus on the role of both partisan and judicial veto players (Tsebelis, 2002), and examine the resonance of elite discourses with voting publics.
