Political Parties and the Representative Disconnect

The story of partisan decline is at the heart of the broader picture of the ‘representative gap’ (or representative disconnect) in contemporary societies (Merkel 2019). There are at least three powerful stories of how parties contribute to the representative gap in the literature: a) parties are faced with increasing social dislocation (or social dis-embedding); b) there is a rise of cartel parties; and c) there is a rise of ‘anti-politics’ parties (Urbinati 2019). These are important and powerful stories, but they are not exhaustive for the role of parties within the broader context of the representative disconnect. There are at least two reasons for that. The first is that the representative disconnect is a phenomenon and a problem that cannot be pinned down exclusively to certain types of parties but may reflect a broader transformation of the role of parties within society. The second reason is that technological, economic, social, cultural, and political changes reconfigure society and state-society relations with profound bearings on parties. We therefore need to get a better sense of whether parties are key drivers or more like recipients (or intermediary variables) in dynamics creating representative disconnects. This paper argues that in order to understand the role of parties within the representative disconnect, we need to situate parties within the broader institutionalized system of state – society intermediation and this system’s broader social, cultural, and economic anchorage and resonance (this is what Castiglione (2024) refers to as the representative ecology). That is in line with the REDIRECT project’s thesis, namely that we need to analyze the representative disconnect within the context of the broader representative ecology. Further, we need to unpack and discuss parties from three angles, namely: partisanship, party, and party system. Partisanship is closely related to the normative role and justification of parties, whereas the latter two terms are tailored to political practice. Clarifying how, in what sense, and to what extent parties are supposed to sustain representative democracy is the first step towards clarifying parties’ contribution to the representative disconnect. That requires explicating all democratically relevant functions parties perform and assessing how and to what extent these functions are mainly tied to the political party (and party system) as opposed to the broader representative ecology. The natural point of departure is the model of representative party democracy (as this was set out in Mair 2014). The second step is to survey the literature in order to zoom in on the most relevant sites wherein parties will figure in the representative disconnect. The third step towards a more exhaustive account of parties’ contribution to the representative disconnect is to apply new theories of representation to parties in order to discern what we can learn about the representative disconnect when we conceptualize political parties from the vantage point of the democratic turn to representation as well as from the vantage point of the constructivist turn to representation.