Revisiting Parliamentary Democracy in the Twentieth Century: Is "Competition" the Core Mechanism of Democracy?

This paper is an attempt to re-conceptualize the theoretical core of parliamentary democracy in the twentieth century Europe. In mainstream literatures, "competition" is regarded as the key mechanism ensuring various virtues of democracy. The current talk of "post-democracy" is all the more strange, as the competitiveness of elections seem to have increased. In order to evaluate the predicament of democratic politics properly, the paper builds on the work of Hans Kelsen. His work shows us that a sort of "integration" by political parties is crucial to the working of parliamentary democracy. It also suggests that a rather monist view of democratic institutions, which puts the parliament in the center , had underlain European party democracies, in contrast to the prevailing “rule of law” view. This interpretation highlights the importance of social preconditions which are not amenable to constitutional engineering, which elucidates the limits of institutionalist view of politics.