The Need for Intra-Party Deliberative Leadership: the Case of Agora

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in political parties that promote deliberative practices in their organization (Wolkenstein, 2016; Gherghina, Soare & Jacquet, 2019). Existing research has mostly focussed on deliberation’s potential to enhance the inclusion of ordinary party members. One aspect that remains underexplored, however, is the fact that intra-party deliberation does not only increase bottom-up participation and the influence of normal members, it also decisively changes the nature of leadership at the top. There is a clear need for an account of intra-party deliberative leadership. This raises two crucial questions: what should deliberative leadership look like and how is it currently practiced? To explore these questions our study has two main goals. First, we build on Gastil’s (1994) notion of democratic leadership and propose a normative framework for intra-party deliberative leadership. We argue that deliberative leadership in a party context should distribute responsibilities, actively facilitate deliberative processes in the party, foster democratic citizenship within the party, and answer to deliberative accountability. Second, we will conduct a qualitative case-study of Agora and explore to which extent the party elites can meet our normative notion of deliberative leadership. Agora is a Belgian party that presents itself as an opponent of the representative system. While Agora won a seat in the Brussel’s Capital Region parliament through regular elections, the end-goal of the party is to hijack parliament and install a legislative citizen assembly with participants selected through sortition. Agora’s democratic aspirations raise several questions about leadership: who initiates processes within the party, how are these processes managed and led, and who holds decisional-power over processes and who executes on them? Methodologically, we draw upon qualitative interviews with party members and document analysis.