Responsive and Responsible? The Role of Parties in Twenty-First Century Politics

Abstract

This article focuses on a particular aspect dear to theories of democracy in general and theories of representation in particular: the tension between responsiveness and responsibility affecting political parties in modern, liberal democracies. In doing so, it engages with Peter Mair’s intellectual passion for this topic, which he developed over the years and intensively worked on until his premature death in 2011. He argued that this tension became ever more apparent, putting the very functioning and legitimacy of democratic government under great pressure. This contribution goes back in time, to the very beginning of the modern state, and argues that already the nascent parties and party systems were affected by the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. It then offers a synopsis, organised in a series of ‘pictures’ or ‘frames’ of the historical parcours along which this tension has impacted on the development of political parties. The article also presents and summarises the collective effort undertaken by a number of scholars, coming together to honour Peter Mair’s work, to shed further theoretical and empirical light on this fundamental tension.

Notes

1. For an excellent critical review of these recent contributions by Peter Mair see Andeweg (2012).

2. We can perhaps find the first signs of this new attitude in ‘Partyless Democracy: Solving the Paradox of New Labour’ (2000), and in ‘Challenges to Contemporary Political Parties’ (Bartolini and Mair 2001). Since then, many other papers have signalled this new preoccupation for the way in which parties and democracy relate one to the other: ‘Populist Democracy vs. Party Democracy’ (2002), ‘Popular Democracy and EU Enlargement’ (2003a), ‘Political Parties and Democracy: What Sort of Future?’ (2003), ‘Democracy beyond Parties’ (2005), ‘Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy’ (2006), and ‘Representative versus Responsible Government’ (2009).

3. For a discussion of ‘anti-party’ arguments in different periods see Daalder (1992).

4. Britain was of course the exception and only there did parties enter more smoothly into the functioning of the British parliamentary institutions and previously dominant groups yield more graciously to the bottom-up pressures. But Britain was indeed the exception and not the rule, though the comparative politics literature of the time often took it as the ambitious yardstick against which to evaluate continental experiences.

5. A continuous debate regarded the varying capacity of different electoral systems and forms of government as offering adequate chances of representation to different gradations of opinions and interests, efficient parliamentary majorities, and stable executives. But only the parties were seen as being able to prevent the ‘balkanisation’ of representation (Duverger 1951; Kirchheimer 1966; Neuman 1956; Sartori 1976).

6. Schatschneider’s (1942) famous statement that democracy would be unthinkable without political parties is formulated in this historical constellation.

7. Ingrid van Biezen and Gabriella Borz (2012) document the increasing ‘constitutionalisation’ and public regulation of parties.

8. See for Germany Katzenstein (1987).

9. The growing interdependence in practical politics has been widely analysed in Germany under the term Politikverflechtung und Verhandlungsdemokratie (Czada and Schmidt 1993; Scharpf et al. 1976).

10. In the sense of the term as it is used by Manin (1995).

11. For a comprehensive overview of the growing literature in this field, see Farrell (2012) and, for recent contributions in this area, Grofman et al. (2014).

12. For a comprehensive articulation of this position, see Dalton et al. (2011).