Political parties and democracy: A mutual murder?

Abstract

Democracy is good at generating demands and bad at satisfying them. Autocracy, on the other hand, is in a position to stifle demands and is better placed to meet them. (Bobbio 1987: 39) Abstract According to the classical Eastonian approach a political system faces stress when it is not able to respond to an acceptable number of demands. The support for the system then drops. In this article we use this conceptual tool to attempt to explain in very general terms the existing anti‐party sentiment in Western democracies. We try to show how democracy itself produces substantial stress for the system that could however be contained as long as political parties were able to act as collective identities between the citizens and the state. The adaptation and change of the traditional parties has made democratic systems more vulnerable to the erosion of support, and the parties themselves, as central actors in the systems, are the target of the protest.

Political Parties as Campaign Organizations

“…For party policy appeals to remain credible, programmatic adaptation should remain within the bounds of enduring party policy reputations (Laver 1997: 136), or such pledges are likely to be discounted by skeptical voters. This in itself raises a concern of some interest to students of "party decline," for if the major protagonists of party systems should lose all sense of persisting policy reputation, then they might be regarded as fundamentally opportunistic and vacuous by electors; this in turn exacerbates the risk of anti-party sentiment and party decline (Poguntke and Scarrow 1996; see also Deschouwer 1996).…”

O eleitor antipetista: partidarismo e avaliação retrospectiva

“…O terceiro desdobramento trata mais especificamente das consequências da ascensão de novas formas de organização e ação política, de maneira a se destacarem modelos de democracia direta e novas tecnologias de comunicação que estariam se sobrepujando aos partidos (Deschouwer, 1996;Drucker, 1993;Lawson e Merkl, 1988;Torcal, Gunther e Montero, 2001). Outro resultado verificado é a ascensão de lideranças populistas (Baquero e Linhares, 2011;Lipow e Seyd, 1996) perante o vazio institucional.…”

The discreet charm of political parties

“…A number of scholars, most especially Kris Deschouwer, have noted that parties lose the diffuse support of the citizenry thanks to the successes of modernization, as a result of which citizens become less interested in collectivistic solutions. One must not forget, however, that the success of modernization also happens to be the success of parties (Deschouwer, 1996).…”