The declining public trust in political parties is a striking phenomenon that has attracted lots of attention from scholars. This however has rarely been theoretically connected to debates within democratic theory, and in particular those discussing the relation between representation and direct democracy. This paper will address this gap by looking at parties as quintessential representative institutions, which themselves attempt to find new avenues to engage citizens directly. The central aim is to ask what the introduction of new participatory mechanisms within parties means for their modes of political representation. Two recent empirical examples allow for illustration: The online primaries of the European Greens for the European Elections 2014 and the 2013 SPD membership vote on the German coalition accords. It will be argued that both examples point to different, but related, changes in parties’ representative roles.
