“Why Political Parties Matter and How to Make Them Better: Rethinking Party Democracy in Dark Times”
Douglas Chalmers Graduate Scholars Lectureship by Dr. David Ragazzoni
Virtually everywhere, political parties are the victims of a major contradiction. They are stronger than ever in structural and financial terms, but uniquely fragile in the eyes of citizens. They dominate the political processes of established democracies but suffer from dwindling confidence and trust on the end of those they are supposed to represent. They have gradually wasted the aura they enjoyed in the very aftermath of WWII, when they were celebrated as instruments of democratic freedoms, and are increasingly unable to win the hearts and minds of democratic citizens. Torn between disaffection and resentment, party democracy has fallen on hard times. Are parties doomed? Are they destined to be either corrupt power machines driven by self-referential elites or empty shells for the rhetoric of populist leaders? If they are routinely on trial and often found guilty, is there an alternative to their life – or even death – sentence?
In my lecture I develop the argument that political parties can be re-engineered and improved, and that the future of liberal democracy – in the US and beyond – depends precisely on both the depth and the breadth of party reforms. Doing so – I argue – requires questioning political projects centered on the myth of ‘the People’ as one, homogeneous entity represented by a leader that claims to directly embody – and be – the People against intermediary bodies. It also entails a stronger connection between party democracy and intra-party democracy – that is, the redesigning of parties’ internal life along participatory-cum-deliberative lines.
To unpack my argument, I revisit the influential debate on parties and democracy that, exactly one century ago, ignited Continental Europe and juxtaposed two leading figures of Weimar jurisprudence throughout the 1920s and 1930s: the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who sided with the Nazis after 1933, and the Jewish Austrian legal and political theorist Hans Kelsen, whose work laid the foundations for the reconstruction of constitutional democracy in Europe after World War Two.
A hundred years after Weimar, two months before the European elections, and with the 2024 US Presidential elections on the horizon, my lecture turns to this key chapter in the history of 20th-century democratic theory to distill insights – both theoretical and practical – into the nature and role of parties in our present (why they matter) and suggest venues for their democratic reform (how to make them better). Through and beyond Kelsen, I call for an ethics of partisanship and a nuanced understanding of the importance of political compromise in party democracy, blending the principled and the pragmatic sides of party politics and thus eschewing the overly simplistic dichotomy between campaigning and governing in the life of democratic parties.
Dr. David Ragazzoni is a Core Lecturer in Contemporary Civilization in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. He received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia in October 2022, with a specialization in political theory and a special minor in law. His work explores – in a transnational and comparative key – historical debates on factions, parties, and democracy and the implications of such debates for our present.
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