The failings of political parties: reality or perception? - Paul Webb

Análisis sobre la aparente crisis de los partidos políticos mediante el análisis de las distintas concepciones de democracia.

Parites appear to be largely failing democracy, but remain important mechanism by which a significant degree of popular choice and control can be achieved.

1.1 Democracy as Interest Optimalisation (Alan Ware)


Results that promote or defend the interests of the largest number of people.

• Pluralists
  
  Not hostile to parties as agencies of representative democracy
  Interest groups are not problematic
  Political agents have to bundle up the plethora of group demands into coherent packages of policy
  Prioritisation of interests and generates coalitions of support
  Single-issue groups may rival parties in the 'market for activism' but they are not in the business of bundling together a multiplicity of itnerests into ordered and coherent programmes of legislative action; inerest aggregation, core party function.
  Group interests as central to healthy democracy

• Interest optimisers
  
  The electoral process is destined to be flawed inasmuch as it produces voting 'paradoxes' and 'cycles'.
  It is impossible to satisfy people's wants in an optimal way, unless policy is made in homogenous and consensual communities or in pure two party contexts.

1.2 Democracy as Civic Orientation


Democracy is not fully realised until citizens express their shared interests as members of a community.

Parties are inimical since they tend to articualte and foster narrow group interests to the detriment of the wider community. We can adopt a less demanding version of the concept.

Loss of habitual affective loyalty to the parties. Public perception depend critically on the presentation of politics by the mass media.

The civic vision of democracy is based on the normamtive ideal of a highly engaged citizenry.

This collapse of membership has a counterpart in declining levels of party activism. Electoral turnout appears to have moved in the same  direction. One of the major sources of attack on parties comes from the participationist left.

• Participationist critique
  
  Citizens should be given the right to initiate legislative processes, public inquiries and hearings into public bodies and their senior management. Advances in communication technology will increasingly allow large numbers of citizens to become engaged in political deicisions in a focussed way  (Power Inquiry Report).
  
  The principal reason for growing political dissafection is the rising expectations of government that citizens of Western democracie shave.  These expectations are most pronounced among the young, the better educated, the more affluent and the post-materialist.
  
  They don't represent a threat to democracy per se, these dissatisfied democrats are driven by a passion for the democratic creed that fosters disillusionment.
  
  On the other hand, the last thing people want is to be more involed in political decision-making.
  
  Citizens know that democracy exists but expect it to be barely visible on a routine basis. An naive and unfeasible attitude.
  
  Three of the major claims of the participationists: deliberative and participatory democracy produces better decision-making, it enhances the legitimacy of the political system, it leads to personal development.

Democracy as Popular Choice and Control

Democracy can be regarded as meaningful to the extent that it provides the opportunity for people to exercise a degree of choice and control over public affairs.

Democratic elitits as Schumpeter: 'Popular control', consisting of little more than the electorate's capacity to remove leaders when their governance is no longer wanted.  

Parties are useful for democratic elitists in so far as they structure and organise the necessary process of electoral competition and perform the implicit function of recruiting candidates for office.

Other approach with higher expectations on parties. Meaningful democratic control can be exerted through mechanisms of popular choice such as parties, they ensure a connection between the competing programmes put before the electorate and the policies a government impliments.  

Critic: Parties fail to offer voters a meaningful choice, they converge around a limited range of ideological or programmatic options.  The current political malaise among citizens owes much tot he narrowing of political space in Britain around a neo-liberal consensus.  Ideological distance between parties tends to fluctuate, but that gap has dimisnished sharply since 90s.

Anyway parties can and do continue to make a difference, at least to quantitative trends in public expenditure. It is intuitively still obvious to most observers that parties can effect quite considerable qualitative shifts in public policy once in power.


Politicians have contributed through their strategy of depoliticisation. 

Role of the media: Dumb down politics by focusing on the inmediate, the scandalous and the negative, they increasingly fuse reporting and opinion in a provocative way, they actively spread a culture of contempt, media place themselves above politics and demcoracy as self-appointed arbiter and judge. (Stoker)

Conclusion

Model of democratic party government:  parties afford the citizenry a meaningful degree of choice between and control over political elites in as much as they foster accountability through elections.

Parties sufffer from the widespread perception that they fail to offer sufficiently meaningful choices to voters.  The party control over the state may be becoming part of the problem in terms of public perception and legitimacy. Voters dislike quangocracy. 

On the ground and in terms of their representative role, parties appears to be less relevant and to be losing some of their key functions. In public office, on the hand, and in terms of their linkage to the sate, they appear to be more privileged than ever.

Reform efforts need to focus on the perceived problems of excessive party control of the state. Neither is there yet convincing evidence to suggest a great appetite among citizens for a radical extension of participation.   

Political parties continue to make an important contribution to the functioning of democracy in the UK.



                              


Paul Webb (2009): The Failings of Political Parties: Reality or Perception
 Representation, 45:3, 265-275