The Juridification of Party Politics: On the Legal Status and Functions of Political Parties

This paper focuses on juridification of party politics in European polities, understood as the regulation of party activity, organization and behaviour through public law. The paper centres on the question what precisely the regulation of parties suggests about the different, and possibly changing, conceptions about the place and functions of political parties in a modern, representative democracy. As few, if any, institutional preferences are politically neutral, choices about the nature and intensity of party regulation are themselves not above politics. This makes the body of party law an important source for an investigation of the prevailing ideas about the place of political parties within contemporary democracy. The public regulation of parties itself underscores the changing conceptions of party and democracy, by which parties are losing their identity as private and voluntary associations and become defined increasingly as public utilities or semi-state agencies. The increasingly elaborate regulatory frameworks that affect political parties effectively accord them a (quasi-) official status as part of the state: by giving them a legal status, political parties are granted explicit recognition to the institutional importance of democracy. Despite the increased prominence of party regulation in modern democracies, the empirical and normative dimensions of this phenomenon have hitherto received relatively little systematic scholarly attention. This paper aims to address part of that hiatus by investigating the legal status of political parties, the legal regulation of their functions and internal organization, as well as their position as intermediaries between society and the state. By evaluating how the public regulation of parties should be understood in light of particular conceptions of parties and democracy, this paper address the common indifference of the literatures on political parties and normative democratic theory towards each other.