Political Parties and Deliberation: An Analytical Framework

The development of deliberative practices brings along a dual function for political parties. On the one hand, they may use and instrumentalize them for their own purpose. On the other hand, the deliberative logic can fundamentally alter the functions and the roles of parties in representative democracy. In spite of much empirical evidence about how political parties use and abuse the deliberative procedures, to date the analytical dimensions have not been put together to facilitate the study of the interaction between parties and deliberation. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature and proposes a framework to understand how, why and when political parties use deliberative practices. It differentiates between the internal use (e.g. deliberative forums created in political parties) and the external use (e.g. citizens' assembly promoted by political parties).