Internal Reform and Electoral Strategy: Political Parties and Democratic Innovations in New and Established Democracies

A burgeoning literature discusses how political parties use democratic innovations for their internal decision-making process and in their relationship with the voters. Most analyses reveal great variations in the extent to which political parties use democratic innovations, but we do not know why these variations occur. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature and to explain why political parties use or refuse to use forms of direct or deliberative democracy both internally and externally. The analysis compares 20 political parties that gained at least 1% of the popular support in the most recent national legislative elections in an established (Belgium) and a new democracy (Romania). It relies on a total of 60 semi-structured interviews with political elites from these parties. The results indicate that there are three main types of reasons for which political parties use democratic innovations: strategic reasons, issues related to parties’ functioning, and the politicians’ genuine belief in the effectiveness of democratic innovations to improve the quality of democracy.