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Abstract
There is a widespread belief that in order to cure the so-called crisis of democracy, citizens’ involvement in decision-making processes needs to be fostered. However, despite the fact that there is a move towards more inclusive institutions in Europe, changes implementing democratic innovations at the national level remain rare. Why are democratic innovations not implemented more often? In this article, we provide explanations on why inertia seems to win over change through an analysis of party elites’ willingness to enact democratic innovations across 15 European democracies, by using the PartiRep Comparative MP Survey. This research concentrates on party-level factors: party age, time in government and party ideology. Findings suggest that institutional inertia is partially rooted on the fact that party elites’ support for democratic innovations is heavily related to anti-establishment parties, to left-wing parties and to parties with limited access to power.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our thanks go to Jean-Benoit Pilet and Sarah Birch for their helpful comments.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Lidia Núñez http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3385-534X
Notes
1. The PartiRep (Participation and Representation) research project (http://www.partirep.eu/) is funded by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO).
2. We have opted not to take into account the positions of regional MPs on democratic innovations due to the differences in levels of competences on these issues across regions. This could jeopardise the comparability, the robustness and the conclusions that can be drawn.
3. Fewer than five respondents per party entailed the risk of not being able to differentiate between individual-level positions and party positions, hence the choice of using averages only for the larger parties.
4. Due to the important changes occurred in the Italian party system in 1993, time in government of Italian parties is computed for the period 1993–2012. Time in government for the Belgian parties is computed after the split of each of the parties along the linguistic divide (1975), although they emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century.
5. According to the average parties’ MPs’ placement on a 0–10 points left-right scale: Radical left = 1.48, Social Democrats = 2.68, Greens = 3.66, Liberals = 5.58, Christian Democrats = 5.87, Conservatives = 6.63, Radical right = 6.98.
6. Note that in preliminary analyses, we controlled for the effect of party size (% seats), but it did not alter the results.
Additional information
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Notes on contributors
Lidia Núñez
Lidia Núñez is an FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her main research interests are institutional reforms, political parties, and elections. Her recent work has been published in the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, and the Journal of Legislative Studies among others.
Caroline Close
Caroline Close is an FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Politics (Cevipol), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her main research interests are party organization, intraparty politics, party ideology, legislative studies, elections as well as intra- and extra-party democratic innovations. Her research has been published in Acta Politica, Party Politics, the Journal of Legislative Studies, and Political Studies.
Camille Bedock
Camille Bedock is an FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Politics (CEVIPOL) in the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her main research interests are democratic reforms and the perceptions of democracy and institutional change by citizens across Western Europe. Her recent work has been published in the European Political Science Review, French Politics, and the European Review of Social Sciences among others, and she will publish a book entitled Reforming Democracy: Institutional Engineering in Western Europe with Oxford University Press in the coming months.