Are Parties Indispensable to a Democratic Polity?

There seems to be a consensus among political scientists that democracy (however defined) is impossible without political parties, at least in modern society. Few scholars have looked at alternative representative institutions mediating between citizens and their government; and if they did, they disposed of the alternatives rather quickly in order to return to their main target, the political party (e.g. Strøm, 2000; Kölln, 2014: 31-51). In this paper we look at six alternatives to representation by political parties that have been advocated by theorists or utopian thinkers and occasionally tried out in practice: assembly democracy, individual (territorial) representation, corporatism, council democracy, referendum democracy and sortition. We evaluate them from an eclectic democratic perspective, applying criteria loosely linked to competing theories of democracy: participation, deliberation, congruence between policies and popular demands, inclusiveness and reflexivity or counter-powers. We conclude (tentatively) that the political party is not indispensable to a democratic polity. However, under certain conditions party democracy may be superior to the six alternatives. If the institutional conditions allow open competition and the parties are internally democratic mass parties with radically different and coherent programmes, based on ‘agonistic’ (but not extremist) worldviews or ideologies, they might allow mass participation in decision-making, deliberation within as well as between the parties and reflexivity (as defined by Disch, 2011). If those conditions cannot be met, a combination of sortition, referendum and (local) assembly democracy might be more democratic than representation by parties.