“A New Kind of Political Party”?: Visions of Representative Renewal in ‘Your Party’

Many advanced democracies currently suffer from a representative disconnect, observable in the tendency for elected officials to be considerably more responsive to the preferences of the wealthiest than to the poorest, as well as declining trust in and engagement with democratic processes among much of the citizenry. How might these fraying ties between citizens and their representatives be renewed and strengthened? This paper analyses and assesses the initial efforts of England’s newest political party - ‘Your Party’ (YP) - to conceptualize, and to challenge, the representative disconnect. From its inception in the summer of 2025, YP’s founders and many of its members were clear that the goal was to create “a new kind of political party” rather than a standard Westminster centered grouping which replicates the various representation-shortfalls of the other established parties. Whilst the (at times highly chaotic) efforts to bring YP into being have received substantial coverage from journalists, the specifics of YP’s vision for a new type of political party have mostly escaped systematic academic study. My aim in this paper is to begin to remedy this. More specifically, my paper has two main goals. First, I will set out the contours of YP’s strategy for responding to different elements of the representative disconnect. Central to this strategy are the following components: constituency-level community organizing and regular open assemblies are posited as partial solutions to declining trust in politics as well as accountability deficits between elections, and the tendency for elected representatives to favor the interests of the wealthiest are addressed through collective, ordinary member leadership of the party, as well as novel recall and whipping mechanisms, and strict prohibitions on the receipt of donations and gifts. I also highlight the specifics of this vision through comparing YP with a range of other European socialist parties that have recently sought to reimagine the traditional party form in the hope of challenging the representative disconnect, including La France Insoumise and Belgium’s PTB-PVDA. The second goal of the paper is to offer some preliminary assessments about how much political promise the overall YP project has, from the perspective of engendering a more democratic society (these reflections must remain highly preliminary at this stage as, at the time of writing, elections to YP’s inaugural Central Executive Committee are yet to conclude). I do this by pointing to several major tensions within the project which appear likely to obstruct its attempts to make its vision of representative renewal a reality. Perhaps the most important of these is the tension between adequately representing engaged YP members on the one hand and representing a broader constituency of considerably less engaged citizens whose preferences have been largely ignored by political representatives on the other. I argue that YP’s rocky formation can be understood at least in part as the result of a contestation between several different accounts of where the optimal balance between these two forms of representation is to be found.