Party Bans as an Instrument of Militant Democracy: Under What Conditions do Democracies actually Ban Parties in Practice

In 2017, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) was racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and xenophobic, that sought to undermine the free democratic basic order. However, the Court did not ban the NPD, as it did in the the 1950s, when banning the Nazi successor party, the Socialist Reich Party (and the Communist Party of Germany). In Spain, Herri Batasuna and its successors were banned for around a decade, until parties of the Basque nationalist left were effectively legalized following failure of ban proceedings against Sortu and Bildu. In the UK, bans on Sinn Fein an Republican Clubs in the 1950s and 1960s, were reversed when Westminster resumed power over Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. In this paper, I examine five hypotheses that aim to account for these different party ban outcomes –party bans, failed bans and legalization of banned parties. Hypotheses focus on securitization of anti-system parties as existential threats, the targeted party’s orientation to political violence, the role of veto players and the effectiveness of alternatives to party bans, such as electoral rules that marginalise small parties, exclusionary practices of government formation and the incentives of partisan party-ban-veto-players in the context of democratic competition. I argue that securitization and desecuritization discourses and varying preferences of numbers of party-ban veto players were a central features of public deliberations on the dilemmas posed in all cases, while an anti-system parties’ orientation to violence was important for party ban cases. The availability of effective alternatives to party bans and incentives for partisan party-ban-veto-players to cooperate, rather than ban anti-system parties to achieve office and policy goals did not vary systematically across the cases. These findings provide insight into the political conditions under which party bans may be deployed to address populist anti-system parties.