Who rules the deliberative party? Examining the Agora case in Belgium

Abstract

In recent years, pessimism about plebiscitary intra-party democracy has been challenged by assembly-based models of intra-party democracy. However, research has yet to explore the emergence of new power dynamics in parties originating from the implementation of deliberative practices in their intra-party democracy. We investigate how deliberative democratization reshuffles power relations within political parties through a case study of Agora, an internally deliberative movement party in Belgium. Employing a process-tracing approach using original interview and participant observation data, we argue that while plebiscitary intra-party democracy shifts power towards passive members prone to elite domination, our case suggests that deliberative intra-party democracy shifts power towards active members that are more likely to be critical of elites.

From Representative to Represented Mini-Publics: How Mini-Publics’ Outputs are Shaped by Representation

“…The Agora party obtained one seat in the Dutch-speaking part of the Brussels Parliament during the regional elections of May 2019. Agora is a single-issue party that organizes itself according to deliberative and participatory principles and exclusively focuses on promoting deliberative and participatory democracy within the broader political system (Junius and Matthieu, 2022). Organizing the BCA is the main way they seek to realize these goals.…”

Political parties and deliberation: from challenges to opportunities

“…Until recently, with several notable exceptions (Fishkin 1991;Gutmann and Thompson 1998;Teorell 1999), the research on political parties ignored widely the topic of deliberation and the rich corpus of (deliberative) democratic theory largely neglected the topic of political parties. It is only recently that a dialogue has been launched between the two strands of literature with explicit interest in studying intra-party deliberative procedures systematically (Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017; Ignazi 2020;Heidar and Jupskås, 2022;Junius and Matthieu 2022).…”

“…Different new parties implemented deliberative forms of intra-party democracy (Gad 2020;Stoiciu and Gherghina 2020;Vodová and Voda 2020;Junius and Matthieu 2022), while the established parties complemented their traditional processes and mechanisms of internal decision-making with it (Fishkin et al, 2008;Barberà and Rodríguez-Teruel 2020b). These diverse experiences of political parties with deliberation share the principle that the participants take part to open discussion on specific political issues with the aim to induce reflection in a non-coercive fashion.…”