Friendships as Enablers of Participatory Democratic Party Politics

• In Event: The Limitations of Modern Democracy

Abstract

Friendships in party politics have been regarded with suspicion by academic and lay observers. When political organisers are connected to each other through intimate relations, we predict that more decisions are made on the basis of personal loyalties than programmatic commitments to the interest groups the party claims to represent. Greater influence of informal decision-making processes in turn renders information about these processes less transparent. This poses a democratic problem in elite parties wherein party elites grant favours to their personal connections within and outside of the party organisation to gain power despite low degrees of political mobilisation. It has resurfaced as a problem against the backdrop of waning social capital in post-industrial societies. Several party organisations have become dominated by socially homogenous elites who are also personally connected through shared social circles, educational trajectories, or previous employments. Mass parties in their “golden age” of post-WWII Western Europe are taken as the implicit point of contrast, understood as inclusive, participatory parties grounded in civic rather than intimate relations between party members.

In this paper I will argue, however, that personal relationships in the form of close friendships were common amongst organisers at local party branches of mass parties. Rather than thwart formal, transparent, democratic processes, they often served as enablers of such processes. Whilst coalition theory predicts that individuals engaged in participatory, democratic politics will only remain active at the grassroots level as long as there are ample political resources to satisfy the interest group they represent, I argue that mass parties have enjoyed wide participation also when interest-group spoils were few and far between. Coalition theory presumes that party activists have the subjectivity of interest-maximising monads, yet the prevalence of close friends in mass-party politics puts into question this presumed universality. We can better understand the durability of democratic, participatory politics if we recognise the alternative subjectivity of close friends who are engaged in politics together, which I entitle “politics-as-life”. Their everyday at party offices or other loci of political activity is not only characterised by bureaucratic tasks (which are crucial to sustain organisationally-challenging participatory politics), but also mutual appreciation, delight and care. The nature and persistence of low-level organisers’ political engagement is not merely a function of their ability to actualise pre-established interests, but varies based on their interpersonal setting. The latter may transform politics as the analytical equivalent of a job into politics as a fulfilling way of being (which also impacts what they consider as their main political interests). As for their implications on the lack of participation and transparency in 21st century party politics, these findings suggest that the problem today might not be the presence of personalistic relations, but rather their insufficient presence, at least of a certain kind.

I predominantly rely on a case study of the Indian National Congress between 1920 and 1969 to corroborate my argument that close friendships have enabled, not only thwarted, formal, transparent, democratic processes. Since the analytical scale at which the friendships I am interested in operate is spatially-situated, everyday politics, I analyse the everyday operations of five randomly selected party branches (i.e. not knowing from the outset the nature and degree of their democratic participation) in the Hindi belt. Close friendships are hard to observe as they are constituted by a mutual, often non-spoken desire to be together: I consider evidence of party members “killing time” together (from diaries, letters, oral histories, and photographies) as my most important source to demonstrate the presence or absence of close friendships. I then consider whether such friendships systematically covary with political outcomes like degrees of processual openness and participation, and explore causal mechanisms that explain such variations.

To enhance the external validity of my findings, I examine anecdotally other examples of political parties that strive for mass participation, but which vary from the INC in ways that render the general validity of the democratising impact of friendships questionable. I look at everyday local party activities in settings with different friendship registers; different ideological platforms; and different levels of success at actually involving large numbers in political processes. Though insufficient to draw systematic conclusions, these comparative efforts serve as a starting point to examine factors that determine whether friendships in party politics serve as enablers of democratic politics, or whether they aid personalistic, authoritarian tendencies.

Author

• Astrid Wik Hallaraaker, The Graduate Center, City University of New York