Are political parties really indispensable? An overview of the alternatives

Lucardie, Paul [University of Groningen] Vandamme, Pierre-Etienne [UCL]

Representative democracy is inconceivable without political parties, most scholars seem to agree. Parties are required to recruit political leaders, aggregate demands, organise government and opposition, and mobilise citizens. However, they also close the representative process, reduce citizens’ capacity for spontaneous action and impede open-minded deliberation. While parties suffer from public hostility, alternative democratic forms have been conceived and sometimes tried out either in historical regimes or in small-scale experiments: assembly democracy, individual representation, council democracy, referendum democracy, liquid democracy and sortition. Exploring these alternatives with open-mind challenges the path-dependent assumption that parties are indispensable, but also helps to re-appreciate their roles and value. Responding to a call for more dialogue between empirical research on political parties and contemporary democratic theory, this article widens the debate on the necessity of political parties by extending it to new theoretical proposals, and maps it by bringing together insights from both fields