Democratic Political Parties and the Right to Compete for Electoral Office

Democratic political parties and The Right to compete for electoral office Annabelle Lever Annabelle.lever@sciencespo.fr Proposal for a paper for the ECPR Prague, May 2025 panel: The political theory of democratic elections. The recent normative literature on political parties seeks their justification as collective agents for the advancement of reasonable, albeit partisan, views of the common good, amongst which citizens are entitled to choose. But political parties also select, promote and discipline would-be candidates to the legislature and, even, those successful candidates sitting as representatives, or in government. This important aspect of political parties has received little normative attention, although its implications for the freedom and equality of citizens as would-be candidates for election are not especially appealing, nor is it clear that the special powers that political parties now exercise, as compared to other associations and compared to voters, can be justified democratically. This paper therefore looks at the rights and duties of political parties, as key players in democratic elections, and considers what justification, if any, can be offered for their particular powers and rights. As we will see, the right to stand cannot be treated as an appendage to the rights of associations to select their leaders and to govern their own affairs – not least because successful political parties determine the personnel of elective government, and because the right to stand, like the right to vote, has a justification independent of the associations, if any, to which citizens belong. So conflicts of interest between citizens as candidates and as members of political parties need to be taken seriously in a democratic theory of elections, though at present they have received little, if any, attention from political theorists. On the other hand, as we will see, citizens as successful candidates for office – and as would-be candidates – have important interests in avoiding the collective action problems, and the threats to equality and responsibility that go with them -that would typify legislatures where everyone had an independent mandate, whether secured by election or random selection. This, as we will see, provides a critical missing link in the case for political parties with distinctive political rights – and duties – in democratic theory. Finally, we will see that voters, too, have interests in avoiding conflicts of equality and responsibility in their evaluation of legislatures. So while the right to stand highlights the importance of support for independent candidatures in a democracy, it also illuminates a distinctively democratic case for political parties which builds on, and revises, important work on political parties in the past twenty years. (