Against Responsible Parties

Should be political parties be internally democratic? Though this question has pre-occupied many would-be democratic reformers for more than a century, it remains relatively underexplored in democratic theory. Among contemporary democratic theorists who study party politics, the implicit answer seems to be “yes.” A number of recent “defenses” of partisanship tout the virtues of democratic deliberation among rank-and-file partisans in intraparty fora. The most systematic attempts to answer the question whether political parties should be internally democratic, though, have answered in the negative. E.E. Schattschneider’s book classic book Party Government makes the case for centralized, elite-driven political parties. Schattschneider argues that, counterintuitively, more internally democratic party organizations undermine the realization of democracy overall. Recently, the case for elite-driven parties has been revived in Shapiro and Rosenbluth’s comprehensive defense of “responsible parties.” The arguments for “responsible” (i.e., elite-driven) party organizations have also gained some popular cache in light of recent populist movements that seem to reflect the perils of a breakdown in party discipline. This paper systematically examines the two major alternative visions for party organization: intra-party deliberative democracy, and centralized elite party leadership, and presents a strong case for the former. The arguments for responsible party government rest primarily on a kind of realist claim. Defenders of responsible parties acknowledge that elite-driven party organizations are less normatively attractive than alternative visions of party politics, but that, given immutable facts about political life, a system of responsible parties represents the best achievable arrangement for large modern democracies. This paper contests the realist argument for responsible parties. First, by putting the arguments for responsible parties in closer conversation with positive theory and empirical work on cartel parties, I show that the case for responsible parties rests on empirical assumptions that are comparably contingent and demanding as those that underlie the case for intra-party democracy. Moreover, I argue, the variety of democracy purportedly achieved by competition among responsible parties is less appealing than its defenders make it out to be.