On Political Parties

• In Event: Democracy and Representation

Abstract

Political parties are unpopular in many democracies, prompting calls to weaken or even to do away with them. Recent literature, rejecting principal-agent models of representation, has defended new normative accounts of what parties should do by defending “partisanship,” variously understood. Missing from this literature is sufficient attention to the full implications of abandoning principal-agent accounts and to the best ways of structuring electoral competition to get partisan parties to govern in the public interest. Rather than ask how much authority, and under what conditions, voters should cede to politicians, I attend first to the natural monopoly character of power and then ask how best to manage it both democratically and in the public interest. This leads to a distinctive defense of majoritarian democracy with large strong parties incentivized to bundle issues, rather than decentralized decision-making that empowers intense minorities and makes it harder to hold governments accountable over time.

Author

• Ian Shapiro, Yale University