Keywords

Theories of Democracy

Democracy is a contested term. It is also a historical term. In Held’s Models of Democracy, there is a whole range of models of democracy, from the classical model of ancient Greek Athens to ideas on the cosmopolitan model of democracy (Held 2009). In addition, many theoretical considerations about democracy have more recently evolved. However, not all models of democracy include political parties.

Within ideas of representative government, within which we now see the important role of political parties, there is no substantial political philosophical basis for the element of political parties in the democratic system of government. In fact, parties first gradually developed in the Western European and North American context into a critical link between society and politics, between the ruled and the rulers. A theoretical justification for political parties, which was heavily based on the same contexts, followed later.

More precisely, it was liberalism that formed the ideational basis for a modern, representative government. In spite of the stress placed on the representative (that is, indirect) form of government, liberalism primarily focused on an individual as a unit of democratic governing.

Indeed, the key characteristics of its development from the Enlightenment are focused on individual rights and the individual morality of English liberalism (John Locke and later John Stuart Mill) and German (Immanuel Kant) and American liberalism (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine).

It is not only that liberal thinkers focused on the individual. They also made a virtue of selfishness (Goodwin 2001, 37). From Hobbes and Locke onwards, the pursuit of self-interest was accepted as man’s proper motivation. Locke said that the ‘law as of nature’ gave man (de facto meaning male) the right ‘to preserve his property – that is, his life, liberty and estate, and that the task of government was to help him in so doing’. This economic reasoning was directly exported to politics. The classical economists’ understanding that economic man maximizes profits was also translated into politics in the form of a thesis that a political man maximizes the fulfilment of his interests by taking part in a governmental process and making choices (Goodwin 2001, 37).

From Jefferson’s (like Rousseau’s and Kant’s) point of view, each individual (the common man) has common reason and moral sensibility (common sense) within himself. The premise that the individual is the prime source of value rests on the thesis that—unlike a beast—the individual human is rational. His rationality, his knowledge of his own interests, individuality, originality and self-distinction are only compatible with a form of political organization based on a participatory form of government rather than an authoritarian government (‘Declaration of Independence: A Transcription’ 2023).

The influence of the major European philosophers on the thinking of the American Founding Fathers is well known (Conniff 1980). Even the crafting of America’s constitution was based, among others, on the French philosopher Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and included a hope to create a republic in America that would retain the virtues of the English system without the vices of a monarchy. Locke’s influence on America’s constitution could not only be traced by natural law philosophical arguments but also justified as constitutive of the ‘best form of government’—a representative type of government, assembling institutions similar in structure and function to those of the constitutional democracy described in Locke’s Second Treatise.

Furthermore, the colonial nature of the British context also found its way into British liberal thought. Locke not only treated the natives in colonized America as irrational and unlearned (Locke 1689, 58) but even conditioned equality on capitalist economic criteria. These criteria were expressed in a particular conception of property. Locke held that property could not be separated from the labour that went into it (Locke 1690, 28). He did not recognize the pre-modern, unproductive practices of the American Indians as equal to modern productive practices. According to Locke, the right to ownership of land (territories) can only be claimed on the basis of labour and use (Locke 1690, 31). It is of critical importance that for Locke, persons without property cannot be part of civil society as a collective and, therefore, cannot be part of a sovereign people (Locke 1689, 95–98).

Although liberalism—based on the Lockean emphasis on natural rights—had prevailed in America, an additional stream in American political thought had evolved that went beyond a focus on the rights of individuals and, in fact, stressed civic humanism as an ideological counterweight to liberal individualism (Nederman 2023). Civic humanism (recalling the ancient Greek philosophy) proceeds from the premise that human beings are social. From this perspective, natural rights in their abstract form are questionable and need to be substantiated within the community (Davis 1996, 43). The influence of these ideas is seen in the conceptualization of republicanism as a form of government in which citizens take an active part in governing.

Besides the politics of the rights of man, it is the controlled government that underpins the American system. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—like Burke—discussed limited political participation and control in favour of the continuous (favourably enlightened) elite (Testi 2001; Arblaster 2002). The American system of government has remained a rather unique case of marriage between the idea of institutional prevention of the arbitrary exercise of governmental power and the Enlightenment’s individual rights.

The anticolonial nature of American political thought was also expressed in American political philosophy. Unlike the French Enlightenment (e.g., Voltaire and Rousseau), American political philosophy was built on an understanding that individual rights and interests needed to be protected against collective ones. It was the protection of the individual from the state (limitations of the government’s intervention into the lives of citizens) that was primarily built into the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration relates to ‘inalienable’ positive rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Meanwhile, negative rights (‘freedom from’ rather than ‘freedom of’) prevailed in the Bill of Rights. Later, an extreme form of liberalism—libertarianism—even developed as an anti-state philosophy (representatives being James M. Buchanana, Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Vernon L. Smith) and found its place in US politics as part of the conservative ‘radical right’.

All in all, it has been believed that the American ideal of democracy diverged from the British ideal of democracy particularly with the creation of the US constitution. The critical difference has been found between Madisonian pluralist democracy favouring cooperation, deliberation and bargaining as ways of achieving political decisions and the British inclination towards majoritarian decision-making in British parliament (Goodwin 2001, 275). In contrast, in the American context, the danger of ‘permanent majorities’ very much worried Madison and other Federalists.

Liberal Thought and Parties

For most of the known history of mankind, political parties have been unknown as they are modern formations. Early liberal definitions of democracy do not include political parties. However in spite of the fact that parties did not receive extensive and systematic attention prior to the twentieth-century systematic study, some theoreticians had even before this period touched upon the still current concerns about the compatibility of organized ‘partial’ interests and factions with democracy (e.g., Rousseau, Hobbes and Maddisson). Nevertheless, ideas on the role of political parties did not find their explicit place in the liberal thought.

Neither in the United States nor in the United Kingdom has a normative model been developed in advance with political parties as intermediary structures between individuals/citizens and government. Nevertheless, in the old liberal–democratic systems, indirect political representation developed spontaneously in practice.

British liberalism includes several key political ideas: modern individualism, the social contract, a strong executive and majority rule. Only to a lesser extent can the political philosophical thought of British liberalism be revered for the legal treatment of individual rights and freedoms in the British model of government.

In British history, several theoretical streams evolved as to what should be the basic unit in a system of government. This basic unit has been redefined over the centuries. Initially, it was defined as a state, later as a particular social group (class), and then as an individual. For Locke, who is considered the ‘father of liberalism’ (Cram 2010, 472–473), not all people counted politically. He only recognized individuals who possessed natural rights in the state of nature. Such individuals could contract with each other to form a civil society. In doing so, they form a political body—a body politic. This political community, in turn, empowers a chosen political authority, which then governs in the interests of the governed. Locke was not merely arguing for the right of people to give or withhold their consent. He believed that people have the capacity for moral judgement. This was related to the thesis that abuse of power could be avoided if the monarch (government) was accountable to the political community. Nevertheless, continuous dissatisfaction of the majority may have a decisive impact on the government (Locke 1690).

Whereas Locke argued primarily for the rights of property and less for the rights of the individual in relation to the state, Burke stressed the importance of limiting the monarchical power, yet at the same time, only advocated limited popular representation (Burke 1770; Judge 1993, 37–39). Mill (1861/2001, 84‒118) went even further, arguing that a completely equal democracy would bring about risks of some evils and pointed at the need for a person’s capacity (like knowledge and intellect) for getting involved in democratic practices.

Contrary to Burke, Paine (who emigrated to America in 1774) recognized rights as primary and government as secondary while also stressing the need to limit the state power while legally guaranteeing human rights (‘Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man’, n. d.).

In America, more often the negative connotations of factions/parties were noticed in political philosophical discourse. This is especially evident in Madison's definition of a faction as ‘a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of a whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interest of the community’ (Madison 1787/2003, 118). Due to an aversion to the ‘mischief’ of factions, Madison analysed the possibilities of dealing with this practically already-existing phenomenon.

One way of achieving this lay in removing its causes and the other in controlling its effects. Since a removal of its causes would have implied either the destruction of liberty or the prescription that every citizen should have the same opinions, the same passions and the same interests, this way of dealing with factions was unacceptable. It would have meant abolishing liberty, which is, according to Madison, ‘essential to political life’.

The second way is not feasible since ‘the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man’. Although Madison found various specific causes of factions, he stressed that the most common and durable source of factions is the various and unequal distribution of property. Property holders and those without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Madison continues at the same point: ‘Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views’ (Madison 1787/2003, 119). Since the causes of factions cannot be removed, Madison believed that the only acceptable solution was to seek means to control the effects of factions. He believed that regulation of the various interfering interests was the principal task of modern legislation and that a spirit of party and faction was needed in the basic and ordinary operations of government.

Nevertheless, political parties as political institutions playing an important role in the political market as an important element of a modern representative government were initially not even mentioned when the American political system was being shaped. In fact, the American constitution preceded the development of modern political parties. As they developed in the context of historical cleavages, they were only indirectly recognized by the Twelfth Amendment, which separated presidential from vice-presidential voting in the Electoral College and (by this procedural change) acknowledged the role of partisanship in these elections.

Theoretical Adaptations to the Real-Life Phenomena of Political Parties

Regardless, political philosophical foundational thoughts on political parties in representative government found their way into the theorizing of democracy under real-life pressure. The key to the acceptance of political parties was their role in solving political conflicts.

In British history, there is at least one theoretical defence of political parties as intermediary institutions in the system of government. Edmund Burke (1770) included a philosophical defence of this emerging political phenomenon in his Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents. The legal acceptance of political parties is based on the fact that political interests are formed first, and political parties as institutions are formed second—even if they are framed as the common good. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the jurist Capel Lofft, as early as in 1779, defined a political party as an institution formed for the common good and an institution that pursues truth, freedom and virtue, as opposed to factions that represent narrow, self-interested views and interests and are prone to corruption (Evans 1985, 9). In line with this understanding, the prevailing view on political parties after the Second World War was that political parties were the ‘life and blood of democracy’ (Peele 1990, 138).

Historically, political parties gradually developed, nested in the modernizing British political institution—the House of Commons. While in the early stages of modernization, the political community was conceived of as one body, which was to have one voice vis-à-vis the monarch (Judge 1993, 13–14), factions—embryos of political parties—developed relatively early in practice. The various adaptations of parliament and the extension of the franchise went hand in hand in the process of the development of modern political representation.

Initially, proto political parties grew out of pre-modern splits between Whigs and Tories in the 1770s. Early splits emerged on the issue of the exclusion of James, Duke of York (brother of Charles II; later James II) from legitimate succession to the throne due to his Catholicism, while in the 1770s, modern splits occurred between the defenders of the monarchy (the Tories) and the advocates of increasing the power of Parliament vis-à-vis the monarch (the Whigs). However, at that time, political splits were actually the expression of the different interests of powerful families (Evans 1985, 5). While the status of the monarch was crucial in the constitutional debates of the eighteenth century, including the issue of who shall control the executive (the monarch or the Parliament), the question of the status of political parties as institutions was also opened. Although the King disapproved of parties, the Whigs sought to incorporate parties into the constitution. Burke, a member of the British parliament and political philosopher, took a critical part in a constitutional debate. In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, he offered a justification of a party. He defined the party as ‘a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’ (Burke 1770, 110). Using Edmund Burke’s arguments in favour of a party (contrary to a faction as an organization for promoting private interests), the Whigs opposed the King's opposition to parties and stressed the differences between factions and parties.

In addition, John Stuart Mill (1861/2001), who was not only a political philosopher but also a politician, acknowledged that in representative government, various elements of power must be organized and that the advantage in organization is necessarily with those who are in possession of the government. Nevertheless, he was very much disappointed with the British party system in his time. Still, he did not dismiss the party conflict as part of the representative government (considered to be the best form of government). Rather, he was concerned about the lack of a fruitful political debate between systems of belief.

In the British context, concerns related to (British) democracy, particularly its party centrism, have persisted until today. Indirect (party) representation is built on the fact that while voters choose their representatives in democratic assemblies in general elections, it is political parties that run the candidate selection and campaigning processes. In addition, parliamentary parties demand discipline from their elected candidates. A highly developed system of party whips ensures that members of the House of Commons largely vote along party lines. Effective power is more in the hands of the party than in the choice of individuals. The sovereignty of Parliament remains embedded in the prevailing traditional notion of strong government. For all of these reasons, it can be said that in Britain, Parliament is sovereign and that Parliamentary sovereignty replaces popular sovereignty (Kingdom 1991, 41). This British peculiarity has often been neglected when attempts have been made to transfer features of the Westminster model to other countries (Evans 1985, 1).

In America, the predecessors of the modern parties originated as agents in political conflicts over the nature and operation of the new polity, as the key political cleavages involved both the contest between patriots and loyalists in the context of the struggle for independence from Britain and the contest between the Federalists and the Antifederalists. In spite of the fact that political parties were left out of the constitutional system and were considered to be more or less temporary phenomena in experimenting with the new system of government, they played very important roles as agents of democracy in the making. Furthermore, since the early nineteenth century, American democracy has, in fact, been party democracy.

The experimental nature of the American political system as well as its pragmatism overcame the problem of the missing link between voters and political office holders. The political parties originally grew out of the rivalry between those politicians gathered around Jefferson and Madison and those gathered around John Adams and Alexander Hamilton and quickly developed into organizational vehicles to recruit and promote candidates for public offices who were broadly sympathetic to the views of the given party. They have also functioned to mobilize voters in support of candidates in the electoral process, to present alternative political views and to aggregate and represent the interests of the mass voters.

Although Madison in his thesis of Timeless Wisdom (the famous 10th Federalist) was very critical of what we now call ‘interest groups’ or ‘special interests’ (then called ‘factions’) for contradicting the common will or interest, he remained a realist in his expectation that the American republic could not be faction free. In thinking about ways to eliminate the effects of factions as much as possible, he concluded that the only acceptable solution was to allow numerous and well-diversified factions, whereby no single one could dominate over all the others. In fact, democracy needs to prevent one minority from suppressing the other minorities.

In America, the fear of a ‘political evil’ embodied in the factions/parties did not prevent the development of political parties. The expectations of the modern party pre-successors (the Federalists and the Republicans) that they would eliminate conflict through persuasion and the absorption of acceptable members of the other mass-based parties were not fulfilled. Instead, the two-party contest grew into a defining feature of the American political system (Cummings 1996).

In a representative government, this means that every representative in government has to walk between the factions and that the many factions involved will have to accept bargaining and compromises in political decision-making. In addition, the constitutional system was determined in such a way that there is only one national institution—the House of Representatives—that is elected directly by popular vote and could thereby be conceivably colonized by factions. Indeed, the structure of the US institutional system prevented the creation of programmatic parliamentary parties that could create such a platform and fight for it on the federal level and, at the same time, allowed for local variations and political struggles among various social groups with scattered policy outcomes. However, more recently researchers have been pointing out that party politics has become more nationalized during the last two decades and that national issues tend to dominate state and even local political debates (Hopkins 2018).

Empirical Liberalism and an Operational Definition of Liberal Democracy

As already mentioned, embryos of political parties emerged first while philosophical and social science responses to this phenomena followed later. However, it was the law in the British context that had been pressured for practical political reasons to step in to define a political party. In America, it was not until later in the 1800s that parties were in any way legally regulated. From this extreme, the United States radically shifted to another extreme by introducing extensive legal rules at various levels of the political system (from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards) that determined the organizational and electoral characteristics of parties (McSweeney and Zvesper 1991).

After the Second World War, a conception of liberal democracy increasingly stressed that democracy is a system of competing political organizations, often understood as parties. According to contemporary liberal conception, the party as ‘part of the whole’ is not controversial and is, in fact, understood as one of the presuppositions of a modern (pluralist) government in which parties compete for electoral support based on democratic rules and win power by democratic means. The model of liberal democracy with parties has been globally promoted (Chan 2002) by wealthy Western countries self-determined as old democracies.

Indeed, political parties have gained the status of a fundamental part of the democratic institutional setting (Key 1959, 12). Even based on this common understanding, from the two main streams of political science theorizing about democracy, two main conceptions emerged.

First, the minimalist conception of democracy understands democracy as a system in which the rulers are selected based on competitive elections (Schumpeter 1942)—contrary to replacing the government by bloodshed (Popper 1962, 124). At the core of the understanding of democracy as electoral democracy is actually the equation of democracy with party rule. In practice, such democracy had more or less become synonymous with party rule (Schattschneider 1964). Together with other institutions and procedures, political parties provided the means for peaceful change in power. It is this that had become the essential element of distinction between totalitarianism and democracy.

Second, a more complex understanding of democracy would then bring about evaluative criteria for a system to be called a democracy (Skinner 1973, 299). However, Skinner also pointed at empirical theorists of democracy as authors who insisted that they are investigating the facts of political life using the scientific approach to empirical studying (Dahl 1956a, 1956b), while at the same time, producing normative implications. However, critics of empirical liberalism not only criticized the supposed ideological neutrality of the system of government that actually functions as a norm of democracy based on empirical studies in Western countries, particularly in the United States, but also the conservatism of empirical theorists. The conservativism of empirical theorizing had been found in the focus of authors such as Almond, Verba, Eckstein, Milbrath and Lipset on stability and efficiency of the system as well as in their attempt to generalize the conditions of stable and democratic rule (Skinner 1973, 291–292). In addition, Dahl (1956b, 151) undermined his alleged neutrality by stating that the American hybrid system is a relatively efficient system and acknowledging that he, in fact, did not restrain from normative analyses and prescription (Dahl 1966, 298). Even more, critics openly pointed not only at conservativism but also at ideological burdens of such a thesis (Walker 1966, 287–288).

Nevertheless, Dahl’s eight conditions ensuring ‘rule by the people’ or ‘democracy among a large number of people’—a genuinely democratic political system (Dahl 1971, 1–3)—were not considered a ‘must’ in its entirety. In fact, he stated the minimal version of polyarchy, which is expected to be devoted to reaching its maximum. The minimal version consists of continuous, political competitions among individuals, parties or both in the frame of maintaining the regular elections. While this is found to be critical for the distinction of democracy from dictatorship, Dahl’s critics pointed at his ideological redefinition of democracy as not giving full attention to popular political participation. By doing so, he was also turning from an understanding of democracy as rule by the people towards a more elitist understanding of democracy (Skinner 1973, 295–297). Indeed, Dahl—like Schumpeter, Almond and Verba—accepted the rule of politicians as democracy (Skinner 1973, 302). In spite of that, Dahl’s concept of democracy has become canonical (Galston 2018, 25) and it became a globally used standard for the evaluation of democracy.

Somewhat in parallel, another school has evolved based on the tradition of the rationality stream in liberal political thought. It is an economic model of democracy in which the democratic process is understood in line with economic conceptions, including the rational behaviour of citizens (voters) and parties (acting to maximize their electoral support; Downs 1957). His understanding of democracy was very much under the American influence. Indeed, Downs (1957, 137) defined democracy as: ‘a political system that exhibits the following characteristics: a) Two or more parties compete in periodic elections for control of the governing apparatus. b) The party (or coalition of parties) winning a majority of votes gains control of the governing apparatus until the next election. c) Losing parties never attempt to prevent the winners from taking office, nor do winners use the powers of office to vitiate the ability of losers to compete in the next election. d) All sane, law-abiding adults who are governed are citizens, and every citizen has one and only one vote in each election’.

In spite of variations among the empirically based conceptualizations of democracy, Goodwin (2001) points at their common characteristics, which are in contrast with classical democratic theory. Among them, in particular, are idealizing stability and orienting towards the maintenance of the system, replacing the idea of consent with, at most, retrospective control over government and seeing interest groups instead of political individuals as fundamental political actors in the system (Goodwin 2001, 283).

Illiberal vs Liberal Democracy

Illiberal ideas are not new. While they were recognized at the beginning of the twentieth century, they seemed to have moved to the margins after the Second World War but have been returning again since the 1990s.

After the Second World War, liberal democracy had been established as a globally hegemonic understanding as well as the core of the idea of the promotion of democracy from the Western world to other parts of the world (Hobson 2015). It was particularly Dahl’s understanding of polyarchy—democracy for the many—that inspired the creation of the European Communities’ political criteria that were set for post-socialist candidate states.

Like liberal democracy, illiberalism has remained doctrinally fluid and context based (Vormann and Weinman 2021). Thus, it doesn’t come as a surprise that we can find various qualifications of illiberalism in addition to some common characteristics. Nevertheless, illiberalism has been recognized as a concept diametrically opposed to liberalism (Table 2.1) and, at the same time, a very complex phenomenon that requires interdisciplinary research (Scheiring 2021; Rosenblatt 2021). In spite of some typical ideas linked to illiberalism, it has not been recognized as a comprehensive ideology in line with political philosophical criteria (Sajó and Uitz 2021).

Table 2.1 Illiberalism vs. Liberalism
Full size table

Among the common descriptions of illiberal democracy (see, e.g., Zakaria 1997; Frankenburg 2022; Laruelle 2022) are two major rejections of liberalism and the promotion of selected values, institutional principles and particular public policies. First, it fundamentally rejects liberalism, particularly liberal concepts of equal political freedom and civil liberties, for its alleged hypertrophic individualism and diminishing constitutional boundaries of power. Second, it rejects some political cultural characteristics of liberalism, including tolerance and the protection of minorities and their ‘decadent’ way of life, while favouring traditional hierarchies, cultural homogeneity and nation centrism. In contrast, illiberalism promotes homogeneity and nation centrism, protectionism at the nation-state level, traditional social hierarchies, cultural homogeneity and nation centrism, majoritarian rules and politicization of cultural issues. Generally, illiberalism has been associated with unfreedom (Sajó and Uitz 2021). It has also been qualified as a reaction to liberalism (e.g., in Hungary; Halmai 2021). Nevertheless, it has been recognized in both young and old democracies (Alviar García and Frankenberg 2021).

Since Fareed Zakaria's (1997) article on illiberal democracies in Foreign Affairs, this nickname has been increasingly used by politicians (especially by Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán), thinktanks and mass media. In 2021, even a special academic journal—The Journal of Illiberalism Studies—was established. Indeed, the concept of illiberal democracy has been extensively used in spite of criticism for a lack of clarity and its overlap with many other concepts, such as conservativism, populism and the extreme right (see, e.g., Laruelle 2022). Its use has spread to cover several phenomena, such as a path to autocratic regime; a political party programme; and actions that erode liberal democracy (backsliding of democracy, democratic regression). Illiberalism has also been equated with democratic backsliding as a global process and with international/global linkages among right populist actors with illiberal programmes.

However, illiberalism may exist within democracy understood as: (1) procedural democracy; (2) a formalistic democracy, in which there are elections that ensure some elements of democracy (therefore named ‘electoralacy’); and (3) illiberal democracies as deficient democracies.

In spite of the fact that illiberal qualifications of democracy have been persistently spreading in literature, public scholars, in general, have pointed at the need for more academic rigorousness and have proposed to replace the qualification ‘illiberal’ with other qualifications. Landau (2021, 426) stressed that illiberal democracy is, in fact, an unstable regime type with strong authoritarian tendencies. Furthermore, Morlino (2021) reminded us of older regime typologies, particularly of a ‘hybrid regime’ type, that can be connected to its possibly triple sets of legacies (the deterioration of democracy, the deterioration of authoritarianism or the weakening or transformation of personal rule). More precisely: ‘If the hybrid regime comes from previous authoritarianism or traditionalism, then it is progress. If it is the result of democratic deterioration, it is a painful regression’ (Morlino 2021, 150).

As our research interest is in the roles of political parties and party systems, it is interesting to note that illiberalism literature has not yet gone beyond mentioning particular individual illiberal leaders, their parties and countries or a comparison of such cases. In general, literature on illiberalism seems to cover, first of all, general issues of democracy, constitutional issues (particularly the roles of government in relation to democracy, especially division of power), political institutions and procedures, including elections, and particular public policies (e.g., focusing on mass media, nongovernmental organizations, selected marginal social groups and cultural issues). All in all, issues of the role of political parties in illiberalization processes seem to be primarily covered via an analysis of the executives’ roles in such processes and less so in terms of party politics.

A Variety of Other Democratic Ideals in the Frame of a Nation State After the Second World War

In the Western part of the world, some normative ideals of democracy emerged after WWI. They have varied quite a lot.

In the 1970s and 1980s, authors who critically assessed elitist and Western political practice-oriented empirical theorists, such as Dahl, turned to ideas on the development of democratic characteristics that were missing in real-life Western democracies. The proliferation of ideas on mending liberal democracy included the orientation towards actively involving citizens—as in participatory democracy (Pateman 1970; Barber 1984). Another segment of literature stressed the democratic role of citizen associations in associative democracy (Hirst 1994). Some other authors believed that the missing democratic qualities could be developed through the inclusion of various stakeholders in political deliberations—as conceptualized in discursive or deliberative democracy (see an overview, e.g., in Hansen and Rostbøll 2015).

An entirely different segment of literature developed in peculiar societies where politics evolved based on social segmentation with strong ethnic and/or religious cleavages, such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. The model of consociational democracy had acknowledged the empirically existing social pillars, which are internally integrated based on ethnic and/or religious identities, socio-economic ties and political organization. In such circumstances, the consociational democracy in terms of cooperative behaviour of segmented elites and their favouring of politics of accommodation was believed to be a model for downsizing the risk of conflict and war (Lijphart 1999). However, with the evolvement of a combination of parties as representatives of citizens (individuals) and parties representing ethnic and/or religious groups (collective), Lijphart also moved his ideas in a direction of stressing constitutional democracy (rights, institutions and rules), supporting the power sharing and naming it consensus democracy. The whole set of literature evolved with a focus on institutional engineering in segmented societies, in which the management of electoral rules have been instrumentalized to control both candidate and party extremism in order to help manage divided societies in a peaceful way (see, in particular, works by Donald L. Horrowitz).

Also based on empirical research, the conflict between two schools evolved—the pluralist school and the neo-corporatist school. Both of these schools recognized interest groups as mediators between citizens and the state. While the first stressed competition between interest groups to gain access to the state, corporatism stressed the cooperation between the interests and the state. Generalizations on a model of governing evolved within both schools, while critics pointed at a lack of grounds for such generalizations (Jordan and Schubert 1992). However, with changing real life in Western countries where the enlarged social state and interest groups interacted with a state in various ways and modes while political parties appeared to be in decline, critics of both schools noted that actual policymaking had been increasingly closer to ideas of networks. Indeed, at the meso level of political decision-making, many types of policy networks had been analysed based on several criteria (Van Waarden 1992), predominantly in contexts of older democracies (Jordan and Schubert 1992). Policy networks were also applied to the EU’s context where a network approach helped to better understand governing at the supranational level (Börzel 1997) as well as in a global context (Hajer 2003). Such approaches stressed that networks are horizontal (contrary to traditional hierarchical governing) and result in network governance with missing control and accountability. At the same time, such endeavours pretty much left out the representative forms of governing, including political parties.

Indeed, a whole school on governance has developed during the last several decades (see, e.g., Ansell and Torfing 2016). It has been focused on the changes in governing in advanced industrialized democracies where the power ceased to be aggregated in the representative government within nation states (Pierre 2000, 1). Governance has become predominantly understood as the processes of governing, which (1) may be undertaken by government, the market or a network over a family, tribe, formal or informal organization or territory; and (2) executed through laws, norms, power or language (Unu Merit 2012). Researchers have revealed many modes of governing, some still related to the ‘government’ as well many others outside the traditional understanding of power. They have appeared in changes in the steering of policymaking, amending public policymaking with private modes and combinations of private and public modes of governing. These were named ‘governance’ to distinguish between the two. Various modes and subtypes of governance have been revealed, such as network governance, democratic network governance, interactive governance, regulatory governance, collaborative governance, private governance, urban and regional governance, multilevel governance, multi-actor governance, supranational governance, transnational economic governance, meta-governance and adaptive governance (Hoogh and Marks 2001; Bache and Flinders 2004; Tömmel and Verdun 2009; Kahler 2009; Torfing et al. 2012; Ansell and Torfing 2016).

As liberal democracy has been found to be in decline, the relationships between various types of governance have come onto the research agenda (see Sørensen 2002; Sørensen and Torfing 2005; Blanco et al. 2011; Bäckstrand and Kuyper 2017). In an attempt to solve dilemmas about the relationships between various types of governance, the key questions of democracy and the role of politicians in such post-liberal democracy have been raised. A meta-governance framework has been offered as a potential solution, although it is not very developed (Sørensen and Torfing 2005). All in all, issues related not only to the ‘publicness’ (Ansell and Torfing 2016) of governance but also issues of accountability, governance’s relation to representation and a lack of democratic aspects of many forms of governance have become rather burning issues (Papadopolous 2016).

In parallel, some researchers have been critically reflecting on democratic deficits at various levels of government. Authors have come up with a variety of corrections/amendments in favour of greater accountability to citizens and strengthening their voice in governing. Advocacy democracy has favoured citizens’ participation in policymaking processes by using modes of direct democracy. Monitory democracy—or a post-electoral democracy—has been found to be taking place in the real world of democracy since 1945 in the form of multiplying and ever more empowering, scrutinizing mechanisms involving a variety of actors (e.g., organizations, forums, citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, etc.; Keane 2015). Monitory democracy, however, does not exclude representative government and the role of political parties. Rather, ‘in the new age of monitory democracy elections still count, but parties and parliaments now have to compete with thousands of monitory organizations’ (Keane 2015, 514) and ‘the old meaning of democracy based on the rule of one person, one vote is replaced by democracy guided by a different and more complex rule: one person, many interests, many votes, many representatives, both at home and abroad’ (Keane 2015, 514–515). Liquid democracy was proposed as a combination of direct and highly flexible representative democracy (Blum and Zuber 2016) in which political parties still have a role, though it is somewhat decreased in comparison to the liberal–democratic model (Valsangiacomo 2021). Various searches for democratic innovations more or less evolved without radically changing a system (Guasti and Geissel 2021). The exception appears to be radical democracy, which focuses on the root conditions of governing while demanding rule by the people (Dahlberg 2015). In this stream, authors (as well as activists) expect people’s participation in all aspects and levels of active community institutions (neighbourhood, city, state, nation, beyond the nation) in order to deepen the democratic revolution and to link together diverse democratic struggles (e.g., antiracist, antisexist, anticapitalism) and, at least in some cases, also focus on the need for radical change in the capitalist system (Mouffe and Holdengräber 1989; Conway and Singh 2011; Dahlberg 2015).

All in all, in the literature on democracy, the Western tradition and Western lenses prevail. They have been somewhat criticized for their Western European—and American—centrism, but issues of ‘non-Western democracy’ (e.g., Voskressenski 2017) have not really been debated. To the contrary, Western-centric debates have also evolved on democratic deficits in a transnational, global space, including ideas on (future) regional and global democracy.

Transnational Democracy and the European Union as a Regional Political System

Debates on transnational democracy have often been linked to the example of the European Union. This has been particularly vivid in the process of the deepening of the European integration and the related evolution of its political institutions. In the debate on democratic qualities of such a transnational phenomenon, the issue of democratic deficit has been particularly interesting.

First of all, there has been no consensus on whether the European Union faces democratic deficit or not—and if yes—how democracy could be developed in the frame of a multilevel polity of the European Communities developing into the European Union since the early 1990s.

Several scholars have denied the EU’s democratic deficit with different argumentation. Majone claimed that the European Union is essentially a ‘regulatory state’ (Majone 1994, 1996) and that at the level of the EU level, it is technical regulation that is needed and not regulation that is redistributive or value allocative. Thus, he didn’t expect EU policy outcomes to produce winners and losers but rather to benefit some and make no one worse off. This is why he denied the need for politicization of the EU’s decision-making. While Moravcsik (1998, 2002) also didn’t believe that the European Union as a transnational political system needs a liberal–democratic model, he did stress that it is the intergovernmental decision-making at the EU level that earns democratic qualification. This is because national governments own legitimacy based on the functioning of national democratic orders.

Contrarily, critics of the democratic deficit believe that the European Union needs politicization of EU decision-making in order to gain democratic legitimacy. Follesdal and Hix (2006, 534–537) summarized the key problems of the democratic deficit in the simultaneous existence of (1) an increase in executive power and a decrease in national parliamentary control in the process of European integration; (2) a too-weak European Parliament (despite an increase in its power); (3) a lack of ‘European’ elections that would be about the personalities and parties at the European level or the direction of the EU policy agenda; (4) the European Union is institutionally and a psychologically ‘too distant’ from voters; and (5) ‘policy drift’ from voters’ ideal policy preferences (which is partially a result of the previously mentioned factors) as ‘the EU adopts policies that are not supported by a majority of citizens in many or even most Member States’.

Indeed, the critics of democratic deficit had been very much inspired by the liberal–democratic model when searching for democratic amendments to the EU political system. Follesdal and Hix (2006) stated that democratic polity requires contestation for political leadership and over policy. Mair and Thomassen (2010) directly linked the EU’s democratic deficit with the absence of a system of party government at the European level. More precisely, they indicated the need for parties at the European level to represent the will of the citizens of Europe and that the European parliament needs to gain the capacity to effectively control the governing bodies of the European Union.

In line with the predominant liberal‒democratic model in political science, the specific role of parties in democracy has come within the focus of efforts to construct a democratic system in the newly emerging transnational political community. It has been believed that it is the political parties that (alongside civil society) can establish the now-missing political communication. However, normative ideas of a democratized EU political system did not emerge in a context without any party structures at the EU level. In fact, European federations and confederations of ideologically related parties had been developing even before such normative debates. Nevertheless, such European party organizations were estimated to have failed to fulfil their democratic role within the EU system (Attina 1993, 1997; Bardi 1993).

Critics of democratic deficit insisted on their evaluation even after the European Parliament adopted in December 1996, on the basis of the Tsars report, the resolution on the constitutional status of European political parties. The resolution defined a European political party as a ‘political association’ that expresses opinions on European public policies, is represented in the European Parliament and participates in the processes of expressing the political will at the European level by other comparable means. A European party must be organized in such a way that (a) it is likely (is likely) to express the political will; (b) it is more than an electoral campaign organization (electioneering organization) or an organization that predominantly supports a political group and parliamentary work; (c) it is represented in at least one-third of the member states; and (d) is active at the transnational level (Attina 1997). Since then, European parties and the EU level party system have further evolved (Schakel 2017; Brack and Wolfs 2023).

Applications of deliberative democracy and participatory democracy have also found a way into the debates on diminishing the EU’s democratic deficit, particularly in ideas of democracy through strong publics in the European Union (Eriksen and Fossum 2002) and ideas on substantive conception of representation understood as the agents of European governance ‘standing’ or ‘acting’ for the European public but without formal democratic processes of authorization and accountability (Bellamy and Castiglione 2011).

Other conceptualizations of democracy that don’t directly expose political parties have not been left out of debates on improving the EU’s democracy. Among them have been, for example, federal, deliberative and audit democracy.

Cosmopolitan Democracy

Discussions on cosmopolitan democracy have included a variety of ideas on how to mend present governing. Such ideas range on a continuum from only trying to ensure more democratic accountability for the existing international institutions, particularly international organizations, to ideas on institutionalization of a particular global form of democracy and democratic and/or regional associations based on the normative requirements for democracy.

The EU example has often been seen as a prototype of international democracy on the global scale. As in the case of the EU political system, debates on the global scale could not oversee the real, existing multiple levels of government. While regionalism has been very much linked to the EU’s example for other regional integrations, there have been reservations with regard to simply following the EU’s model, the regionalization was believed to enable a certain level of cultural diversity around the world (Gould 2012, 117). The issue of regionalism also appeared in a triangle of ideas on confederalism and federalism and polycentrism (Archibugi et al. 2012, 7).

The focus on multilevel governance did not include much elaboration of ideas on the role of political parties in such modelling of global governance. Rather, it seems that even ideas on constitutionalization of public international law and other forms of multilevel regulation were only amended by calls for mechanisms of democratic accountability either directly towards citizens or mediated via their national representatives without specification of the role of political parties (Follesdal 2012, 111).

In the phenomenon of increasing minimalization of democratic criteria, it does not come as a surprise that Koenig-Archibugi (2012, 178) believed that there are many paths that could pass the kind of ‘democratic’ threshold envisaged by Dahl. He summarized the following paths (Koenig-Archibugi 2012, 177–178): the intergovernmental path (including the idea of a global assembly and ‘eventually the popular election of its members’), essentially replicating the EU; the social movement path by global civil society networks’ creating non-state democratic institutions in pressuring primarily intergovernmental institutions to democratize them; the labourist path in which global trade unions ‘progressive coalition’ would play a role in promoting global democratization as in the past promoted domestic democratization; the capitalist path with transnational business pushing for global governance institutions, which could then serve as a focal point for democratization; the functionalist path resting on increasingly dense governance networks among specialized bureaucrats; and an imperialist path in which a dominant power establishes institutions for global governing and then ‘eventually accedes the demands for democratic representation’.

Already at the beginning of the 1990s, Held presented an idea on the transformation of the United Nations into an institution of a global liberal‒democratic system (Held 1992). However, such an approach has not found much support. Rather, theoretical elaborations, which have taken into account the governance literature, have pointed at the potential for four distinct types of governance located on the public‒private continuum and on the formal‒informal continuum: public/formal, public/informal, private/formal and private/informal governance (Bellamy and Jones 2000). While they do at least indirectly refer to the empirical reality, they are not normatively evaluated in terms of suggesting a particular model. Political parties are not in the focus of this attempt at theorizing.

Nevertheless, there are some authors who have linked global democracy and political parties. As a rule, they believe that democratic party contestation is a basis for real democracy, but at the same time, they think this will not be realistic for quite some time (Christiano 2012, 79; Follesdal 2012, 101).

As issues of feasibility have bordered many authors, solutions have also been offered to try to amend the existing conditions by using small-scale democratic experiments through which citizens (or their representatives) have a say in global policymaking (Kuyper 2013) or go to the philosophical level of thinking first, identify the principles of global democracy, the levels at which these principles work and how they fit together. The latter is expected to offer a basis for a fruitful debate on normative political theory and the feasibility of global democracy (Erman and Kuyper 2020).

All in all, it appears that the global reality of cosmopolitan democracy would be a downgraded institutionalization of the normative standards of democratic accountability in relation to the liberal‒democratic model (Hüller 2012). In the current circumstances, Anderson (2015) suggests the mutual support of different forms of democracy (representative and participatory, territorial and non-territorial, national and transnational) while combining bottom-up and top-down approaches to democracy beyond nation-state borders.

In no literature of which I am aware have political parties been recognized as the main actors or institutions of future models of democracy. Nevertheless, they persist in real-life politics and, at least indirectly (e.g., via their positions in governments at various levels of governing), take part in regional and international decision-making milieus.