Abstract
Political parties have been the subject of a recent resurgent interest among political philosophers, with prominent contributions spanning liberal to socialist literatures arguing for a more positive appraisal of the role of parties in the operation of democratic representation and public deliberation. In this article, I argue for a similar re-evaluation of the role of political parties within contemporary republicanism. Contemporary republicanism displays a wariness of political parties. In Philip Pettit’s paradigmatic account of republican democracy, rare mentions of political parties often stress their tendency to lead to factionalism or corruption. Others working in the republican tradition such as Richard Bellamy and Ian Shapiro provide more extended discussion of the role of parties, but limit their theoretical function to enabling electoral competition. I argue that political parties play a far more significant role in promoting non-domination than this. In addition to enabling electoral competition, I show that political parties are also essential to the effective operation of two other components of republican democracy: contestation and interest-formation. I further argue that understanding political parties in these terms is compatible with republican democracy more generally, addressing the worry that parties will produce factional rather than common-good oriented public decisions.
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Notes
I take the distinguishing feature of republican models of democracy as conceiving of democracy in terms of the promotion of non-domination. This does not require a wholehearted embrace of the label, and means that my discussion incorporates theories that reject various elements of the neo-republican prospectus, or which are not presented as ‘republican’ (such as Ian Shapiro’s). Given the distinctive centrality of the concept of non-domination to republican thinking about democracy, I suggest that all theories of democracy which are largely based on the value of non-domination can meaningfully be conceived as republican. The main focus of my argument, though, will be on neo-republican accounts, primarily Philip Pettit’s.
Note that my discussion here makes no comment on the proper organisation or scope of electoral politics with a republican institutional system, on which these authors disagree. See Rosenbluth and Shapiro (2018) for a detailed defence of a competitive two-party system that differs substantially from Pettit’s model of democracy. I comment on the organisational implications of my argument in more depth below.
Of course, voter behaviour is not exclusively based on party manifestos, and incorporates perceptions of trust, competence, leadership, moral character, and so on, as well as considerations such as geography and tradition.
Note that state institutions do not perform this political epistemic function. Local government bodies may feed information regarding their region to central government departments or bodies, but this is a purely administrative flow with no collective dimension.
There will be important differences in the character and capacity of different kinds of parties (especially between those operating in political systems in which party affiliation is less central to the identity and commitments of office-holders at many levels, such as the US) to contest in this way. The form of collective contestation I focus on here is based on parties which have a unified organisational structure, a permanent committed membership base, affiliations with other groups, and (paradigmatically) a parliamentary presence. The organisation of the main US parties, and the political system in which they operate, make this kind of contestation more difficult, at least at the national level.
This might also include forms of partisan activity that enable or overlap with contestation. Internal discussions about which principles a party should be guided by; the education and training of activists in relevant political traditions and history; justifying or defending core principles in public debate and applying them across different policy areas; and reflecting on how those commitments are best promoted by the state and convincing voters and other parties of the merits of those policies are all relevant forms of contestatory activity that help form this connection.
Consider how, after losing its parliamentary majority in the UK’s 2017 heneral election, the Conservative government led by Theresa May became highly reliant on the political support of the ten elected members of the Democratic Unionist Party, which was able to exert radically disproportionate influence over government policy and spending.
Pettit of course acknowledges the role of political protest in contestation, but stresses the importance of depoliticized processes (see Pettit, 1997, pp. 195–197).
Of course, subaltern groups will still participate in the creation of social meaning, and these forms of intellectual and social innovation will sometimes gain traction within society at large despite the prejudices and constraints that prevent dominated individuals from equal participation in normative life. But without a wholesale reformation of the distribution of normative authority – what Frederick Douglass termed a ‘revolution in thought’ - such influence will remain dependent on the permission of the dominating class (see Coffee, 2020).
The role that political parties have played in developing particular visions of national and trans-national belonging in various post-colonial contexts is also important to note here.
I am thinking here not only of trade-unions and local party branches, but also of the educational colleges, clubs, and sporting associations that characterised much of the British Labour Party’s social presence in its heartlands throughout much of the twentieth century. Note that comparable institutions have also been of historical importance for conservative parties.
Although I do not explore the possibility here, I think it plausible that parties within a republican framework will be charged with meeting what White and Ypi (2016, p. 210) have called an ‘organizational minimum’ - that is, a core set of organizational principles which can enable parties to fulfil their normative function, above which there is room for significant variation. For an extended discussion of the normative considerations surrounding the internal organisation of parties, see Wolkenstein (2019).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ben Golder and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and thoughtful comments. I am also grateful to Alan Coffee and Yiannis Kouris for their comments.
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Bryan, A. Political parties and republican democracy. Contemp Polit Theory 21, 262–282 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00499-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00499-5