LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it.A deliberative model of intra-party democracy * FABIO WOLKENSTEIN Political Science, London School of Economics and Political Science I. INTRODUCTION: PARTIES AND LINKAGEPolitical parties serve a number of important functions in representative democracies.Connecting citizens to government is perhaps the most important one. This is how parties were traditionally conceived, and it continues to be the main standard according to which their legitimacy as representative institutions is evaluated. 1 Intra-party democracy is instrumental in establishing and sustaining this connection between society and government. Internally democratic parties empower the members on the ground, who have privileged access to the demands of the constituents, and provide them with opportunities to channel these demands into policy decisions. 2 Earlier versions of this article were presented in workshops at the LSE, the universities of Western Bohemia in * Plzeň and Lucerne, as well as at Sciences Po Paris and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I thank André Bächtiger, Simon Beste, Gideon Calder, Maurits De Jongh, Charles Girard, Lilia Giugni, Simon Glendinning, Volkan Gül, Andrew Knops, Jenny Mansbridge, Giulia Pastorella, Carmen Pavel, and Sanna Salo for incisive and generous comments on these occasions. The article has also greatly benefited from exchanges with Cecilia Bruzelius, Charlotte Haberstroh, Lise Herman, Abby Innes, Jakob Kapeller, Mareike Kleine, Christina Maria Koch, and Jonathan White. My thanks to them for engaging with my work. Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous referees of the JPP for their extensive and extremely helpful comments.As Sartori (1976, p. ix) put it more than a quarter century ago, "parties are the central intermediate and In this article, I begin by arguing that existing models of intra-party democracywhich focus on candidate selection and direct participation, respectively-are not adequate to the task of linking citizens to government. I suggest that these models run the risk of simply reinforcing the preferences of the party elite, thus weakening, instead of strengthening, the members on the ground. Missing from these models are fora of discussion and debate, in which the party base can...

The much-discussed crisis of political parties poses a challenge to democratic theorists as institutional designers: how can the capacity of parties to mediate between society and state be resuscitated? In this paper, we suggest that parties need to become more internally deliberative, allowing partisans to debate policy and more general visions for the polity. We outline a prescriptive model of deliberative intra-party democracy, drawing on the empirical literature on the changing structure of civic and political engagement. We argue that deliberative reforms are the most appropriate response to the demands of an increasingly more cognitively mobilized citizenry which seeks self-expression and non-hierarchical forms of political engagement. We highlight the model's distinctive strengths and defend it against several objections.

In democratic theory and practice, it has become a popular view that designed deliberative mini‐publics can effectively counteract failures of representative democratic institutions. But when should mini‐publics be deployed, and how should they be designed? This article develops a framework for thinking about these questions. It argues that when representative democratic institutions ensure the empowerment of inclusions, enable the formation of collective agendas and wills, and are capable of translating those agendas into binding decisions, mini‐publics should be used sparingly and as complementary initiatives; the less representative institutions are able to serve these functions, the more mini‐publics should gain independence and standing to correct these problems. The article shows how this can be operationalised in light of two key institutional design issues – coupling and authority – and discusses some empirical examples that foreground the empirical leverage offered by the suggested framework.

What, if anything, is problematic about gentrification? This paper addresses this question from the perspective of normative political theory. We argue that gentrification is problematic insofar as it involves a violation of city-dwellers' occupancy rights. We distinguish these rights from other forms of territorial rights, and discuss the different implications of the argument for urban governance. If we agree on the ultimate importance of being able to pursue one's located life-plans, the argument goes, we must also agree on limiting the impact of gentrification on peoples' lives. Limiting gentrification's impact, however, does not entail halting processes of gentrification once and for all.