The Social Function of Agonism? Parties as Vehicles for Deliberation

This paper addresses the question which meaning and value deliberative democrats can and should attach to political parties and party competition. Although most deliberative democrats have largely neglected the important intermediary role that political parties play within modern democratic societies, it is possible to reconstruct the general outline of a deliberative democratic theory of political parties on the basis of the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Bernard Manin, and Thomas Christiano. Starting from John Stuart Mill’s notion of the social function of antagonism this paper distinguishes three important functions of the system of party competition (epistemic, transformative, and constructivist) and five different roles of political parties (motivating, filtering, moral, exemplary, and educating). The paper ends with a few suggestions for further research