Rethinking Party Reform 019884994X, 9780198849940

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Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

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Copyright Page  https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.002.0003 Published: December 2019

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941433 ISBN 978–0–19–884994–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

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Dedication  https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.002.0004 Published: December 2019

Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

p. vi

To Eve and Cecilia

Pages v–vi

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

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Acknowledgements 

CF

Published: December 2019

Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

This book has been a long time in the making, and in the course of writing it I have incurred many debts of

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gratitude. The book is based on my PhD thesis, so it seems natural to begin by thanking my supervisors at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Jonathan White and Abby Innes, for their guidance and support. As the arguments that are developed in the book indicate, Jonathan’s own work on parties and partisanship has greatly in uenced my thinking. That our friendship and dialogue has continued after my four years in London is something I am immensely grateful for. Albert Weale and Russell Muirhead have, in their capacity as external examiners, o ered many perceptive observations concerning the manuscript and the project’s broader intellectual potential. I thank them for that. A great deal of thanks also goes to the party members who agreed to participate in the interviews that were

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conducted for this book. I thank the SPD branches in Berlin Mitte, Bonn Beuel, and Theilheim, as well as the SPÖ branches in Vienna’s Sandleitenhof, Wien Wasserturm, Linz-Innenstadt Mitte, and Gampern for o ering me an insight into their activities. Jakob Kapeller, Felix Faltin, Leonhard Dobusch, and Doris Aschenbrenner o ered invaluable assistance in recruiting the participating party groups. Without their help this research would not have been possible. Livia Puglisi generously provided accommodation during my research stay in Germany. The London School of Economics and Political Science has been a tremendous work environment in the four

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years of thesis-writing. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to write my PhD in such an intellectually stimulating place. I rst would like to thank my colleagues in the European Institute’s PhD cohort, especially Chris Wratil, whose sharp mind and deep commitment to academic rigour has been an inspiration to me. The same goes for faculty members Mareike Kleine and Sara Hobolt, who have helped me a great deal with my work over the course of the last few years. Special thanks are due also to Giulia Pastorella. Her passionate opposition to party democracy has prompted me to rethink many of my arguments. Outside the European Institute, I have found a ‘home away from home’ in the Political Theory group of the LSE Government Department. I thank especially Jakob Huber, Kai Spiekermann, and Laura Valentini for many discussions, drinks, and for more generally being lovely human beings. Lea Ypi, who shares my interest in political parties, has greatly in uenced my thinking and inspired many of this book’s arguments. p. viii

She also helped me in countless other ways, and I am very

grateful for her unfailing support and advice.

Lastly, in the wider LSE and University of London cosmos, Ria Ivandic, Linda Gabel, David Schäfer, David Brenner, and Daniel Schade have been great friends whose company I miss.

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In the short post-doc stint at the University of Frankfurt that followed my London years, I was lucky to be

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adopted by a vibrant group of political theorists working on questions of justice under the aegis of Rainer Forst. Rainer has been a tremendous host, and he generously o ered feedback on my work—including the research on which this book is based—on multiple occasions. The sta

of the Centre of Advanced Studies

Justitia Ampli cata and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg also deserve praise. They helped bring into existence an incredibly friendly and stimulating work environment for young scholars. I really could not have wished for a better place to re ect on how to develop the arguments of this book. On the whole, Frankfurt was both personally and intellectually rewarding, and I want to thank in particular

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Nate Adams, Sara Amighetti, Julian Culp, Koshka Du , Dimitrios Efthymiou, Menachem Fisch, Amy Hondo, Tamara Jugov, Brian Milstein, Darrell Moellendorf, Esther Neuhann, Till van Rahden, Miriam Ronzoni, Christian Schemmel, Antoinette Scherz, Johannes Schulz, Florian Wandruszka, and Caleb Yong for many discussions, critical exchanges, and most importantly: for their companionship. I have also come to miss Miriam Dajczgewand Świętek’s warmth and sense of humour, eating Grüne Sauce, and spending my afternoons reading or writing at the table commune in Café Hoppenworth & Ploch on Friedberger Landstraße. The manuscript was eventually nished in Aarhus, Denmark, where I moved in autumn 2017 to take up a

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position as Assistant Professor. Although they contributed only very indirectly to the completion of the manuscript, I rst want to thank the whole political theory afdeling at my department—Kasper LippertRasmussen, Søren Midtgaard, Tore Vincent Olsen, Andreas Albertsen, Didde Boisen Andersen, Viki Møller Lyngby Pedersen, Jens Jørund Tyssedal, Andreas Bengtson, Lauritz Munch, Anne-So e Greisen Hoejlund, and Göran Duus-Otterström—for being wonderful colleagues and friends. Thanks also to Roman Senninger, Helene Helboe Pedersen, Rune Slothuus, Kees van Kersbergen, and Ann-Kristin Kölln for helpful comments on some chapters of the manuscript. So e Frøkjær must be acknowledged for prompting me to reconsider my conception of feasibility. Generously supporting my integration e orts into Danish society, my dear friends Mette Kjær, Andreas

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Bengtson, and Kristina Bakkær Simonsen have patiently helped me learn the Danish language. They have also more generally enriched my life. The latter is true also for multiple other people who became friends in addition to being colleagues: Göran Duus-Otterström, Ann-Kristin Kölln, Roman Senninger, Jens Jørund Tyssedal, Jonathan Klüser, Lisa Hirsch, and David Parker. Elena Mattana is not a colleague in the narrow p. ix

sense of the term,

but her friendship has certainly made Aarhus a much better place. Morten Schmidt and

Sigrún Jóhannesdóttir have helped me settle in and been exactly the sort of neighbours one wishes for when moving to a new city. Several of the book’s arguments were presented at academic conferences and workshops between 2013 and

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2016. I thank André Bächtiger, Simon Beste, Udit Bhatia, Matteo Bonotti, Denis Cohen, Maurits De Jongh, Martin Ebeling, Alice El-Wakil, Kevin Featherstone, John Erik Fossum, Charles Girard, Simon Glendinning, Charlotte Haberstroh, Sjoerd van Heck, Julian Hörner, Saara Inkinen, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Andrew Knops, Jonathan Kuyper, Jenny Mansbridge, Oscar Mazzoleni, Carmen Pavel, Sanna Salo, Nicolas Sauger, Astrid Séville, Nenad Stojanovic, and Daniel Weinstock for extremely helpful comments on these occasions. Simon Beste and Flooh Perlot have repeatedly engaged with my work and provided very useful feedback. I apologize if I have forgotten anyone. At Oxford University Press I thank my editor Dominic Byatt, as well as two anonymous reviewers. This

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manuscript draws on material that was rst developed in a series of articles, and I acknowledge John Wiley and Sons and Sage Publishing for permission to reproduce passages from the following: • Fabio Wolkenstein (2019) ‘Agents of Popular Sovereignty’, Political Theory 47 (3): 338–62.

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• Fabio Wolkenstein (2018) ‘Intra-Party Democracy Beyond Aggregation’, Party Politics 24 (4): 323–34.

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• Fabio Wolkenstein (2016) ‘A Deliberative Model of Intra-Party Democracy’, Journal of Political

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Philosophy 24 (3): 297–320. My close friends—in particular Patrick Wollner, Valerie Toscani, Johanna Posch, Eva Titz, Julian Horn,

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Jonny Nemetz, Leslie Taussig, Rene Sa arnia and Rike Hofmann, Lorenz and Katharina Sommer, Benjamin Gutiérrez, and Felix Faltin—have been very supportive of and curious about my work throughout. They have also distracted me in all the right ways. I am immensely lucky to have them in my life and emphatically grateful for their friendship. Patrick Wollner deserves a special mention in this connection. His friendship, and innumerable long evenings in his kitchen in Cambridge, have made writing the major part of this book —when it was still a thesis—easier. Jakob Huber, Philip Rathgeb, Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti, Jonathan Kuyper, and Astrid Séville have had the double role of being both good friends and scholarly interlocutors over the years. I am grateful to them for patiently discussing my work with me, as well as continuously inspiring me with their own work. Helena and Anders Bruzelius have been extremely generous hosts on my many stays in Stockholm and

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Skäret, where a good deal of this book was written. Ett stort tack to them and to the rest of the Bruzelius p. x

family—Petra, Nils, Doris, and Mila—for always being welcoming and kind. Big thanks also to Ann-Lie Brattås-Fejne and the team of Flickorna Lundgren for supplying me with the world’s best kanelbullar, securing high sugar levels for fast and focused writing. Finally, but most importantly, I would like to thank two women without whom nothing in my life would be possible—Eve, my mother, and Cecilia, my partner in life. Words are not enough to express my gratitude for all they have done for me. It is with all my love that I dedicate this book to them. Fabio Wolkenstein

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March 2019

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Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

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List of Tables  https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.002.0007 Published: December 2019

Pages xiii–xiv

Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

3.1. Two types of party membership  70 3.2. Overview of group characteristics  72 3.3. Reasons to engage in parties  76 3.4. Party loyalty and age  78 3.5. Members and their party  80 4.1. Preconditions for deliberation in party branches  101 5.1. Issues of disagreement  107 5.2. Summary of the analysis  122 6.1. Summary of the analysis  146 p. xiv

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

Introduction 

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Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0001 Published: December 2019

Pages 1–CI.P30

Abstract In addition to summarizing the book’s main themes as described, this Introduction places special emphasis on connecting the problem animating the book—the apparent incapacity of contemporary parties to mediate between citizens and the state—to current political developments in established Western democracies, showing that the issues the book addresses are not only of academic interest but also directly relevant to ongoing public debates about the state and health of representative democracy. Chief amongst the themes foregrounded here is the rise of so-called ‘populist’ parties on the left and right of the political spectrum, as well as the re-branding of established political actors as ‘movements’ (think, e.g. of Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche). These phenomena are interpreted as part of a larger ‘revolt against intermediary bodies’—meaning rst and foremost a rebellion against political parties. The Introduction suggests that this ‘revolt’ brings with it only a temporary shift in how representative politics looks, without actually reversing the disconnect between parties and voters or compelling established political parties to give up their privileges and decolonize the institutions of the state. This argument sets the stage for the book’s core contention that more thought has to be put into nding ways to reconnect political parties with society.

Keywords: party democracy, populism, movement parties, representation, linkage, intra-party democracy Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Political parties are perhaps the most discredited institutions in the democratic world. Long is the list of wrongs they are charged with. To pick just a few examples: parties have been said to foster corruption and distribute public resources amongst them as they see t; to be unable to o er voters real political choice, having become ideologically indistinguishable from one another; and to be more generally out of touch with 1

citizens, having ossi ed into self-serving clubs of a ‘political class’. The last of these objections—levelled usually at the larger ‘people’s parties’ that were once the dominant political forces in Western democracies —is especially weighty because it suggests that today’s parties are unable to perform the main function that has traditionally been ascribed to them, namely, providing the ‘central intermediate and intermediary structure between society and government’ (Sartori 1976 [2005], ix).

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Because representative democracies are typically thought to depend on parties that can connect citizens to

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the state in a meaningful fashion, the perception that contemporary political parties are unable to mediate the relationship between society and government is widely assumed to be feeding into a crisis of democracy writ large. The main worry is that parties that are detached from the citizenry cannot e ectively aggregate p. 2

and articulate social demands in a way that allows

them to be translated into public policy. The policies

they promote will then be ‘more generically policies of the state’ than they are policies of any particular citizen majority, hollowing out political representation (Katz and Mair 2009, 759). Nor can parties that are disconnected from the larger society plausibly transmit what Sartori (1976 [2005], 25, emphasis in original) calls ‘demands backed by pressure’, as they lack the social basis for mobilization. In this light, Peter Mair (2013a, 1), one of the world’s leading scholars of party politics, concluded that parties ‘no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form’. Complaints of this sort are not only voiced within the academy. A sense that the failings of established

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parties have led to a broader crisis of democracy itself has also at least been one reason for why numerous anti-establishment parties have arisen in recent times, both on the left and on the right of the political spectrum (Bickerton and Invernizzi-Accetti 2017a). These actors—think, for example, of the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) or Podemos, or of the numerous so-called ‘right-wing populist’ parties that have become a persistent feature of European democracies—often expressly deny their ‘partyness’ and style themselves as bottom-up movements (cf. Müller 2016). Some of them even advocate radically di erent forms of organizing democracy, in which traditional parties play a much less central role. Most innovative in this respect has been M5S (which at the time of writing has just formed a government with the far-right Lega in Italy), with its aim to create a direct connection between citizens and the movement leadership via the blog of former leader, the comedian Beppe Grillo (Vittori 2017). In addition to the emergence of new movements that expressly oppose the political establishment and its

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parties, actors that are undeniably part of the much-loathed political establishment have also sought to reinvent themselves as popular movements. The most signi cant and successful cases are the Liste Sebastian Kurz in Austria, a dynamic re-branding of the centre-right Austrian People’s Party—a party that stagnated for many years—and of course Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche. Both of these ‘movements’ rely not so much on grass-roots mobilization as on their claim to stand for a departure from the debilitating partisan con icts that have disgruntled Austrian and French citizens for decades. This has been achieved in part through clever political marketing, and in part by including non-politicians in the party, sometimes giving them prominent positions on electoral lists. One way of looking at these developments is to see them as what Urbinati (2015) calls a ‘revolt against

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intermediary bodies’—meaning rst and foremost a rebellion against political parties, the bodies who have traditionally mediated between state and society. As already indicated, the promise of the just-mentioned movements is a politics centred on more or less unmediated decision-making, in which leaders somehow directly connect with citizens and translate their ostensible will into decisions. It is a politics that is best p. 3

described by the oxymoronic notion of ‘direct representative democracy, wherein directness pertains to the visual and communicative … rather than direct participation’ (Urbinati 2015, 480; also see Müller 2016). This is a mode of organizing democracy where political leaders seemingly ‘directly’ communicate with their followers via Twitter or other social media, endowing the latter with a feeling of being taken seriously by 2

those they have elected and thus having agency in the democratic process.

If the underlying perception that something needs to be changed about party democracy is correct, however, it is doubtful that the self-styled alternatives to party we see today are a promising way forward. For one, even movements with professed emancipatory aims are not immune to the kind of organizational conservatism they charge the established parties with. The cases of M5S and Podemos are instructive. While presenting themselves o

cially as ‘anti-parties’, they became increasingly dominated by distinctively

charismatic leadership and tight control from above—two traits that raise questions about their capacity to

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deliver on their promise of bottom-up participatory democracy (Caruso 2017; Vittori 2017). Those ‘movements’ that are but a re-branding of more established political actors, exhibit similar tendencies, although these also hardly made any pretence to being participatory associations. For example, by involving non-politicians in the organization, the Liste Sebastian Kurz could not just claim a symbolic departure from old-style professionalized politics, but also concentrate power in the hands of the party leader. Similar things may be said about Macron’s La République en Marche. Having recruited people both from civil society and from other parties, Macron is able to exercise tight control over his personnel. As one observer notes, ‘Ministers and representatives of [Macron’s] party know that they owe him everything; they rarely speak without his authorisation, and when they do speak freely, they are often put in their place’ (Fassin 2018, 17). In short, the new ‘movements’ that present themselves as being something other—and better—than a party ultimately appear to be little more than parties in their most elitist form. There is another, even more signi cant, problem facing newly-emerged ‘movements’ or ‘movement-

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parties’. This is that established parties are deeply entwined with the state, which lends them the capacity to hold onto life-sustaining resources as well as maintain in uence in the public (and sometimes even private) sector even when they lose o

ce. In the literature on comparative party organization, this has been

described as part of established parties’ wider survival strategy. In part as a reaction to the evident decline p. 4

of public support, many parties have over the last four decades or so began to increasingly rely on the state’s legal and bureaucratic apparatus for their legitimacy and power. For example, in most democracies, and especially in Europe, the status of parties is anchored and regulated in constitutions and party laws (Biezen 2012); these laws—written by the parties themselves—also ensure that parties receive su

cient

public funds (Biezen and Kopecký 2007; Katz and Mair 2009); and through many years of targeted patronage they are able to exercise control over bureaucratic bodies that are central to the delivery of public services and policy even when other parties are in government (e.g. Kopecký and Mair 2012a; Ignazi 2017). In this light, Biezen (2004) has noted that many long-established parties have e ectively become ‘public utilities’. Clearly, this a ects the fortunes of newly-formed movements. First, even if the latter manage to win

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elections they will often be faced with a ‘deep state’ that is controlled by the older parties that they wish to replace (cf. Kopecký and Mair 2012a). This may curtail their room for manoeuvre when trying to implement particular policy agendas. Moreover, long-standing parties will be able to retain a grip on resources for organizing campaigns and maintaining their organizational infrastructure. This is not about ‘mere’ survival —at stake is in any case usually not the disappearance of a party from the political scene—but about being able to e ectively campaign against challengers. In fact, established parties often cooperate to that end, making use of their ‘ability to … write their own salary checks’ (Katz and Mair 2009, 756). To cite a recent example, in June 2018 the German centre-right Union party and the centre-left SPD—two long-established parties that have lost a great deal of public support recently and face serious opposition in the form of the emerging hard right party Alternative für Deutschland—decided that public party funding will be signi cantly raised. Although ultimately all parties will pro t from this, the main bene ciaries will be the Union and the SPD, as parties receive tax money proportional to votes and the two traditional ‘people’s parties’ still remain the overall biggest parties. The two parties were able to push through the requisite legal changes in fasttrack mode, despite protest by other parties. How does the entwinement of parties and the state impact on the so-called ‘movements’ of the political establishment, though? First, insofar as these movements are no more than a re-branding of longestablished parties, as with the Liste Sebastian Kurz, they will arguably be able to bene t from the institutionalized power their party has built up over time. They can use existing organizational structures and nancial means to stabilize and sustain their new organizational form that is centred on charismatic leadership and top-down control. In a country like Austria, where parties have over time essentially merged with the state (e.g. Treib 2012, 48), this is a considerable advantage vis-à-vis newcomers. When

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establishment-movements are not a mere re-branding of existing parties, on the other hand, as with Macron’s La République en Marche, other strategies for obtaining crucial resources must be sought. In La République en Marche’s case, it seems that the main strategy is to simply emulate some of the established p. 5

parties’

ways of gaining public funds, notably using personal networks with key public stakeholders that

are constantly expanded by involving more members of the political and administrative elite into the party. That Macron was apparently able to use a total of €120.000 from the state budget for his presidential campaign alone is said to have been facilitated by his deep knowledge of the state and the many contacts he possesses within the French political elite (L’Hour and Says 2017). In Didier Fassin’s (2018, 15) words, ‘Far from the media’s rebel against the system’ Macron appears to be ‘an accomplished politician’. The conclusion to take from this is that despite the ‘revolt’ against political parties we are currently

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witnessing (Urbinati 2015), established parties are still very much alive and in a powerful position (an extensive recent discussion of this point is found in Ignazi 2017). Moreover, even where established parties are temporarily superseded by new actors, these new actors are often simply ‘more of the same’, adopting the same hierarchical forms of leadership and di ering from older parties only in terms of how they communicate with their followers and present themselves in public. The often-announced ‘change’ is one of style, not of substance. (The Liste Sebastian Kurz’s campaign slogan incidentally was ‘Der neue Stil’—‘the new style [of politics]’.) This should give us reason to think harder about political parties, in particular about how we can reform existing parties in such a way as to restore their capacity to provide meaningful ‘intermediate and intermediary’ structures between society and government. Put in another way, given the evident failures of long-standing parties to adequately perform their representative roles, and given that the capacity of new political actors to actually provide an alternative to those parties may reasonably be questioned, we should invest our intellectual energies into devising strategies for organizing parties in a di erent, more democratic way—strategies that can both help re-invent the parties that already exist and ensure that newly-founded parties avoid the problems of elite domination and co-opting a more or less discredited system. Developing such reform strategies is the ambition of this book.

Confronting the Task of Party Reform

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The focus on party reform is not the popular approach to thinking about representative democracy. In the

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political-theoretic literature there seems to be a near-universal agreement that parties are part of those established powers that ought to be critiqued and opposed. Changing the way in which they work is not typically contemplated. I take this to be re ected not only in the tendency of political theorists to glorify non-institutionalized social movements (see, paradigmatically, Young 1990 or Butler 2015), but also in a burgeoning body of theoretical work concerned with expanding the possibilities of representation and the p. 6

signi cation of that term as broadly as possible, beyond parties and

traditional representative

institutions (e.g. Rehfeld 2009; Rosanvallon 2008; Saward 2010; Näsström 2015). It is also re ected in recent work on civil disobedience, which recognizes that Western democracies are in crisis but appears to see resistance rather than reform as the more fruitful strategy (e.g. Celikates 2016; Scheuerman 2016; Smith 2017), as well as in the broad literature on democratic innovations that suggests using designed institutional devices to o set the democratic distortions political parties create (e.g. Fung 2003; Goodin 2008; Smith 2009). All the while parties remain the proverbial elephant in the room: the importance of social movements, civil disobedience and democratic innovations notwithstanding, it is still parties who organize elections, legislatures, and governments. To theorize them out of the picture is to look away from the institutions that are central to elected democratic legislatures and the practice of law-making. At the same time, empirical political scientists take parties seriously as central agents in representative democracy, but insofar as they recognize and problematize their failings they tend to view these failings as near-impossible to remedy or reverse. Indeed, one easily gets the impression that those (few) empirical

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scholars whose work is motivated by an avowed concern for the functioning of democracy have given up on the possibility of party reform, indulging instead in a deep pessimism about the present and future of democratic societies. For example, Peter Mair, in his recent book, tellingly entitled Ruling the Void (2013), starts with the claim that ‘[t]he age of party democracy has passed’ (1) and continues to elaborate a complex empirically-grounded argument for why that age won’t return. Similar views are found in the work of other scholars, such as Piero Ignazi (2017) or Wolfgang Streeck (2014), the latter of whom laments that ‘major political parties’ would at any rate hardly ‘stand a chance today of organizing and mobilizing their constituents in ways that were taken for granted in the 1970s’ given that ‘social bonds are construed as a matter of taste and choice rather than of obligation’ (126) (also see Katz 2013). But such defeatism is an intellectual dead-end. The best it can do is foster cynicism, turning one into a ‘resigned realist’ who, when told about the dire state of contemporary parties, says with a sigh, ‘Well, what can you do?’ My reply in this book is: ‘think harder about how to change the status quo’. I want to resist the tendency to

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see parties’ present state as irreversible, and indeed also resist the tendency of many theorists to simply assume parties away. While I do not deny that non-partisan forms of political engagement or alternative participatory institutions can contribute to democracy, or that the status quo of party democracy is in many respects di

cult to overcome, I want to ask in this book how parties could recover their position as those

institutions who facilitate the exercise of popular sovereignty by mediating between society and the state? The answer I put forward is of a piece with that given recently by Piero Ignazi, who, in what might be the only expressly prescriptive passage in his recent book Party and Democracy: The Uneven Road to Party p. 7

Legitimacy (2017), suggests that

parties should aim at ‘abandoning the citadelle in which they are

entrenched, recasting societal linkages, relinquishing all their privileges … dismissing their self-referential attitude … [and] immersing themselves again in society’ (264). In short, parties have to minimize the distance between themselves and the citizenry, and they should do so not merely by using the means of ‘direct representative democracy’, as the movements I touched on earlier do, but by actually reconnecting with society. Is this a realistic proposition? One reason to think so would be that some parties seem actually to have

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managed to recreate a link with society, even if their e orts are only in their infancy. The perhaps most astonishing case is the British Labour Party, which, after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the party, has undergone a signi cant democratic transformation. This was marked by a break with the inherited tradition of top-down leadership and the handing back of in uence to the extra-parliamentary Labour Party—the members on the ground (Seymour 2017). To be sure, the driving force behind all of this is a movement, Momentum. But Momentum is not a movement that rejects the party as a political form (though some of its representatives claim that the Labour Party should be ‘more like a movement’, see The Guardian 2016), like some of the movements we encountered earlier do, nor is it run by elites who merely seek to rebrand an old party in order to come across as more ‘dynamic’; rather, it represents a genuine bottom-up organization, set up by citizens with the aim of reconnecting an increasingly unpopular party with society at 3

large while also re-inventing what the party stands for. Whatever one personally thinks of Corbyn’s and Momentum’s political agenda, it is di

cult to deny that they have achieved a paradigm change in the Labour

Party, both politically and organizationally. And the fact that the party managed to signi cantly expand its membership base while (at the time of writing) having the highest poll ratings of all major European leftwing parties signals that this transformative e ort bears fruits. What must be taken seriously both to understand the success of the Labour Party under Corbyn, and to p. 8

devise more general proposals for party reforms that

are likely to be e ective, are the changing patterns

of political participation. When Emma Rees, one of Momentum’s four founding members, insists that ‘politics as a spectator sport has lost traction with voters’ (The Guardian 2018a), she is voicing a position that is backed up by plenty of empirical evidence. Recall that many citizens today perceive political allegiance less and less as a matter of loyalty to a collective and more and more in terms of an individual

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choice—a trend resignationist scholars like Streeck complain about. This has had a palpable e ect on their participatory preferences and the way in which they relate to politics more generally: having grown reluctant to ‘defer to party elites or to support a party simply out of habit’ (Dalton and Wattenberg 2001, 11), many citizens now demand more individualized and direct forms of participation (Dalton 2008; Gauja 4

2015a; Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017; Norris 2002; Stolle et al. 2005). Young people in particular are progressively gravitating towards new styles of political participation that are extra-parliamentary in nature, non-hierarchical, and considered to be self-actualizing and highly e

cacious (Farthing 2010;

Furlong and Cartmel 2012; Henn et al. 2018; Inglehart and Welzel 2005, 2–3; Li and Marsh 2008; Stolle et al. 2005). Recognizing the increasing prevalence of such post-modern participatory demands (the modern ones being

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those that are underpinned by relatively xed social group identities) helps us better understand the success of Momentum. After all, the latter is intent upon involving people in the wider association of the Labour Party via multiple di erent and also unconventional channels of participation in which people can in principle choose how, and how much, they engage politically. And, it usefully orients our thinking about party reforms to what such reforms would have to achieve if they are to be successful, namely, attract people who relate to politics di erently than their parents’ or grandparents’ generation, seeking meaningful self-expression in their political engagement. This insight is central to the argument developed in this book. If the forward-looking task is to develop a model of party organization that is responsive to citizens’

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changing participatory preferences, where—besides political practice and the e orts of such groupings as Momentum—could one look for inspiration? I suggest that democratic theory, in particular work on deliberative democracy, can provide important leads. Deliberative practices for one thing provide a more meaningful form of democratic political self-expression than procedures in which preferences are merely aggregated, as in referenda or polls (Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017). They do not reduce individuals to a more or less anonymous vote but allow them to give and demand reasons before decisions are taken, which seems important if non-hierarchical and egalitarian modes of political engagement are what we are looking for. So, if parties are to be organized in such a way as to cater to post-modern p. 9

participatory demands, making

them more internally deliberative does on its face seem like a promising

strategy. This of course does not mean that procedures of voting within parties are in and of themselves problematic. But such procedures should be preceded by and embedded in discursive exchanges about the issues at stake, in which those who engage in the party can debate the pros and cons or even contest the terms of the vote. This leads to a second, closely linked, reason for thinking that deliberation is a practice that should be given

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special prominence in party reforms. This is that deliberation can perform a critical function, allowing party members and activists to question, critique, and modify the party’s intended actions or wider agenda. That deliberative practices can have this status quo-questioning potential is routinely mentioned in both normative and empirical work on deliberative democracy, the point usually being that deliberation—in contrast to ‘mere’ voting—allows people to voice concerns and ask questions, thus bringing critical reasoning to bear on politically relevant questions (the list of works one could cite here is extremely long; for some in uential accounts, see Cohen 1989; Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 16; Mansbridge et al. 2010, 65–9; Neblo 2015, 25–39). In an age where, to cite Dalton and Wattenberg’s (2001, 11) well-chosen formulation once again, citizens are generally unwilling to ‘defer to party elites or to support a party simply out of habit’, it seems crucially important to institutionally enhance the capacity of those who want to take part in partisan politics to exercise voice in this way. It seems essential for them to be able to obtain ownership of the party as a ‘shared political project’ (on this notion, see White and Ypi 2016). The emphasis on deliberation may come as a surprise to some readers. After all, even after decades of complex debates about what the term actually denotes, deliberation is routinely associated with the kind of

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rational, dispassionate argument that privileges the ‘white male with a college degree’ (Sanders 1997, 364; also see Young 2002, 49), thus handing ‘elitists and reactionaries … a convenient lever for e ectively restoring unequal power’ (Neblo 2015, 4). But this is not what I refer to in this book when I speak of deliberation, and I hasten to add that I think this view of deliberation is but a caricature of the position that most avowed deliberative democrats hold today (see, e.g. the discussion of ‘Type II’ deliberation in Bächtiger et al. 2010 or the work on deliberative systems in Mansbridge et al. 2012). Deliberation is in the following meant to denote a wide range of di erent communicative practices that can range from heated debate to the telling of stories to the polite weighing of arguments. The only normative constraint operative is that it has to be dialogical, involving the (non-coercive) uptake of arguments and actual mutual engagement. I see no reason to think any more restrictively of deliberation, and I take this position to be consistent with the state of the art in deliberative theory (for an overview, see Mansbridge et al. 2010, 67– 5

72; Neblo 2015, 34–5). p. 10

If some critics falsely view deliberation as elitist and potentially conservative, deliberative democrats

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generally have an ambivalent relationship to political parties. Bearing testimony to this is for instance the curious fact that the Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (Bächtiger et al. 2018) includes chapters on virtually all things one could possibly connect with the topic of deliberation except parties. And even the recent ‘systemic turn’ in deliberative theory—which acknowledges that deliberation occurs within and is facilitated by multiple di erent political institutions—tends to mention parties only as actors promoting ‘low quality’ deliberation, providing at best polarizing stimulants to a broader public debate (see, paradigmatically, Mansbridge et al. 2012; for a dissenting view see Neblo 2015, 23; White and Ypi 2016, ch. 3; Ebeling and Wolkenstein 2018). All of this coheres with the already-mentioned tendency in contemporary democratic theory to see parties as part of the problem rather than part of the solution—but neither has deliberative democracy traditionally been mean to exclude parties (see the canonical work of Cohen 1989 and Habermas 1994), nor is turning a blind eye to parties especially consistent with deliberative democrats’ professed goal of making democratic societies more deliberative. Indeed, if we think it is important that citizens exchange reasons about their collective choices in such a way that they can recognize themselves in a common endeavour, it seems only intuitive to invest our e orts and energies into enhancing the deliberative capacity of the main agents that link citizens to empowered executive and legislative channels: parties. With this in mind, part of my burden in this book will be to explore how party reforms can be informed by the insights and innovations of research on deliberative democracy. Taken together, this book is an exercise in democratic theory, addressing a topic that is unpopular amongst

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most contemporary theorists but—as I have tried to argue up until this point—centrally important to the health of our representative democracies. This topic is that of political parties and how they could be reformed so as to adequately serve their linkage function again. If the topic is unpopular among most theorists today, it would of course be an overstatement to say that it is

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being entirely ignored. In fact, there have in recent times emerged a number of theoretical studies that seek to bring the topic of parties back onto the agenda of political theory, reminding fellow theorists of why parties were initially thought to be desirable and what is distinctive about them as political associations. Key works include Nancy Rosenblum’s magisterial book On the Side of the Angels (2008), The Promise of Party in a Polarised Age (2014) by Russ Muirhead, The Meaning of Partisanship (2016) by Jonathan White and Lea Ypi, and Matteo Bonotti’s Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies (2017). These works are the exception to the aforementioned rule that political theory stays silent on parties, and the present book seeks to add to their contributions by not just asking why we should care about parties but how, granted that there are good reasons to care, we can reform existing parties so as to restore their capacity to perform the roles that make them valuable to begin with. p. 11

The present book di ers from the just-mentioned works rst in terms of its focus on parties as institutions (instead of partisanship as practice) and party reforms, and secondly in terms of its more general approach

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to theorizing about politics. Rather than building on the history of political thought or moral philosophy— the resources mobilized by scholars like Rosenblum, White and Ypi and others—it combines democratic theory with an original empirical study of partisan activism and intra-party deliberation. One may think of it as qualitative sociology in the service of applied political theory. The empirical study, conducted in two major European Social Democratic parties, explores party activism as a micro-level practice, focusing on how party members relate to their party, including what they demand in terms of democratic participation; what preconditions for deliberation parties provide; how deliberation unfolds when it occurs; and how deliberation within parties may fail. The point of investigating these things is at once to better understand the nature of partisan engagement in those traditional parties that appear to be most in need of reform, and to dispel potential scepticism towards the proposal to make parties more deliberative. Such scepticism may ow from the widely held positions that parties are impossible to reform because they were co-opted by a corrupt political class, and that their focus on mobilization makes them inherently un-deliberative institutions. The evidence marshalled for this book suggests that such worries are misguided.

Outline of the Chapters

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The argument of the book is developed in a ‘funnel-like’ shape, starting with the most general and

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theoretical considerations and gradually narrowing the focus down to more speci c and empirical issues. Chapter 1 frames the argument of the book by making the case that, under contemporary political conditions, the e ective exercise of popular sovereignty—the essence of democratic self-rule—requires internally democratic political parties. While the chapter draws on a range of empirical evidence, including some of the work on changing patterns of participation that I have already alluded to in this Introduction, its primary guide are theoretical insights that date back to the 1920s and are found in the democratic theory of constitutional lawyer Hans Kelsen. Kelsen, whose work on procedural democracy has recently seen an ever-so-small renaissance (see Baume 2012; Invernizzi-Accetti 2015; Urbinati 2014), remains one of the most clear-sighted and relevant authors when it comes to political parties, and his sober and nonmoralistic approach to understanding collective political agency usefully re-orients our thinking about parties to the importance of their internal structure. The chapter reconstructs Kelsen’s position and contrasts it with alternative views of popular sovereignty, arguing that the former is superior given how people today prefer to participate in democratic life and how parties have evolved to be agents of the state. p. 12

If Kelsen provided a persuasive argument for why internally democratic parties are key to the exercise of

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popular sovereignty, he had very little, in fact nothing, to say about how exactly internally democratic parties should look. Chapter 2 aims to answer this particular question, developing what I will call a ‘deliberative model of intra-party democracy’. What such a model entails and how it is justi ed has already been anticipated. The justi cation for such a model, to repeat, is rst that deliberation can cater better to the demand for political self-expression many citizens share than merely aggregative democratic practices, and second that deliberation can perform an important critical function within parties, allowing the status quo to be questioned and transformed. The challenge is to devise mechanisms and institutions that can enhance deliberation within parties, and the chapter looks here to the more practice-oriented literature on deliberative democracy and democratic innovations for inspiration. As an instantiation of bottom-up democracy, it is suggested, a deliberative model of intra-party democracy must empower the active members on the ground and o er numerous fora in which they can make their voices heard and in uence decisions. Chief amongst the institutional design paths suggested are problem-oriented fora, partisan deliberative networks, and larger deliberative conferences. These proposals are discussed in turn, and empirical illustrations of how they could be realized are provided. Chapter 3 is the rst empirical chapter of the study. It asks a fundamental question that needs handling: how do contemporary party members view themselves, their party, and their role in it? This question is

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important because the success of party reforms depends centrally on whether the newly-created channels of participation and engagement are recognized as meaningful and valuable by those who engage in parties or are generally inclined to engage in them; and to nd out what could be considered meaningful and valuable by these individuals we need to understand what they expect from a party in terms of participation and opportunities to make one’s agency felt. The basis of the study, as will be explained in detail, are focus group interviews held with party members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), two parties that were chosen as empirical cases because Social Democratic parties are arguably on top of the list of the parties that may be considered ‘victims’ of the trend of shifting participatory norms, having lost much of their once-great electoral support across most of Europe. An important nding the chapter presents is the tendency of party members to demand (not more direct participation like membership ballots or the like but) more face-to-face contact and two-way communication with party elites and their fellow activists—which buttresses the general case for a more deliberative understanding of parties that the book advances. But if one gave party members and activists more opportunities to deliberate, would they be able to

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deliberate? That is, would they at all be capable of engaging in non-coercive dialogical exchanges of p. 13

arguments that result in concrete political

proposals, or sustained critiques of some existing proposals?

Chapters 4 and 5 set out to answer these questions. Chapter 4 looks speci cally at the circumstances of deliberation at the party base. It asks whether the local partisan associations in which the interviewed party members engage provide the conditions that are necessary for reasonably non-coercive and dialogical deliberation to arise, namely that participants have equal opportunities to in uence the deliberative process, and that they hold a variety of di erent viewpoints that ensure that the issue under deliberation is considered from multiple angles. It argues that these desiderata are satis ed, showing that diversity is ensured by members’ di erent occupational backgrounds, and that partisans’ joint commitment to shared political ideals establishes an egalitarian ‘deliberative eld’ in which everyone’s voice is heard. These are, I suggest, very favourable conditions for deliberation, even if one applies much higher normative standards than I will do. Interestingly, the fact that partisanship involves having common adversaries—a by-product of having shared normative commitments—also contributes to the equal standing branch members enjoy; so partisanship’s inherent exclusionary dynamics have the happy e ect of rendering branches supportive environments for deliberation. Chapter 5 shifts the focus from the circumstances of deliberation to actual deliberative practice. It begins by

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distinguishing two di erent types of disagreement within the partisan groups: ones about organizational matters and ones about issues concerning society at large. It then goes on to examine several exemplary text passages that illustrate how partisans ‘deliberatively’ handle these kinds of disagreements. The central point that emerges from the analysis is that party activists engage in acts of reason giving that may reasonably be interpreted as satisfying the twin demands of uptake and mutual engagement. One of several interesting speci cities of partisan deliberation is that it is marked by tensions between pragmaticallyminded partisans and more ideological ones. This, it turns out, is a further important source of diversity within party groups. Another notable nding is that the political principles underpinning partisanship can facilitate mutual justi cation. The ‘normative consensus’ that characterizes partisan collectives plays a crucial role in this connection: partisans’ pre-deliberative agreement on a certain set of political principles ensures that appeals to those principles are immediately resonant. This makes reaching agreements and compromises easier. The upshot is that even though deliberation in party branches is a particular kind of deliberation, it is undoubtedly good deliberation. If this is any indication, then there is plenty of potential for involving these partisans more in the party’s wider deliberations and giving them bigger deliberative tasks. Although the picture of intra-party deliberation that emerges in Chapters 4 and 5 is generally very positive, it is important to note that some of the party groups that were studied for this book proved to be less deliberative than others. Those groups provided good preconditions for deliberation, yet their actual

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p. 14

deliberations displayed numerous shortcomings. Chapter 6 examines these

shortcomings, looking

closely at three types of ‘deliberative failure’—group splits and defection; cases where deliberation does not arise, or only seldom arises; and polarizing tendencies. The chapter also sketches a number of institutional devices for making deliberative failures tractable and concludes that even though deliberative failures will be di

cult to avoid in an internally deliberative party, their most harmful e ects can be limited through

institutional design. So the fact that deliberation sometimes fails does not speak against a deliberative model of intra-party democracy as a whole. This is important as the proposal of a more deliberative and thus democratic party the book advances is emphatically meant to be feasible and functional even under di

cult conditions.

Finally, Chapter 7 puts all those pieces together and concludes the book. It summarizes the arguments advanced and re ects on three challenges facing the book’s argument: that parties are ultimately unreformable; that the institutional proposals put forward are too vague to be useful for practitioners; and that re-modelling parties with only the participatory preferences of those who seek self-expression and self-actualization in politics in mind risks excluding those who do not hold such ‘post-modern’ participatory preferences. Each of these concerns is warranted but, as I will show, none of them is fatal to the broader argument of the book.

Notes 1

2

3

Talk about parties being out of touch with those they claim to speak for has proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century. Two momentous transformations are usually thought to have caused the disconnect: the decay of traditional cleavage politics, on the one hand, and the transformation of statehood that resulted from the crisis of national Keynesianism in the 1970s and 1980s, on the other. Bickerton (2012), for example, has shown that the latter transformation brought with it a ʻdilution of representationʼ. At least in Europe, national governments began increasingly to relate to societies in a ʻdistanced and sceptical wayʼ, assuming that ʻrepresentation needs to be qualified by a consideration—at the executive level—of how public expectations and desires fit with a considered, long-term, and expert-based assessment of public policiesʼ (70). With this declining belief in state-managed social transformation, national governments—and thus parties—gradually emancipated themselves from domestic constituencies and became ʻmore dependent upon international rules and norms for their own identity and sense of purposeʼ (Bickerton 2012, 75). A troubling by-product of this has been that parties also became increasingly more responsive to the preferences and interests of the wealthy and powerful. In the US, some scholars have gone so far as to argue that contemporary US democracy is but ʻdemocracy by coincidenceʼ, meaning that ʻordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shotsʼ (Gilens and Page 2014, 573). Similar developments have been traced in Europe as well (see, recently, Elässer et al. 2017; Schäfer 2013; cf. O e 2013). What this indicates is that parties being out of touch with citizens has real consequences for democratic representation, significantly diminishing representative equality. As Bickerton and Invernizzi-Accetti (2017b) have shown, the mirror image of this ostensibly unmediated form of politics is technocratic rule, which seeks to derive legitimacy not from ʻdirectʼ communication with constituents but from a claim to competence and expertise (an analogous argument is made in Caramani 2017; Culpepper 2014 provides an interesting case study of Mario Montiʼs technocratic government that proves the point; Bickerton and Invernizzi-Accetti 2018 argue that M5S and Podemos are in fact representatives of a new party family, which they call ʻtechno-populismʼ). In the run-up to the 2017 British general election, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, was quizzed on public television by BBC Channel 4ʼs election anchor Jeremy Paxman (The Battle for Number 10, BBC Channel 4, 29 May 2017). The encounter between the two Jeremies started o as follows. jeremy paxman [holding the Labour manifesto in his hand]: Are you frustrated that so many of your core ideas, your basic principles, didnʼt make it into this manifesto? […] corbyn: Listen, this manifesto is a product of the views of the Labour Party, of party conference decisions, and of the views put forward by individuals in the shadow cabinet; but this manifesto fundamentally … paxman [interrupting]: You couldnʼt persuade the cabinet, the shadow cabinet, to accept your basic principles, which you have adhered to for the whole of your adult life: that there should be nuclear

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disarmament. You promise in this to renew Trident [i.e. the British nuclear weapons program]! corbyn: This is a conference decision by the Labour Party, and as the leader of the party I accept the democracy of our party. 4 5

For an excellent theoretical analysis of these and other trends that occur in connection with individualization, see Reckwitz (2017). On non-coerciveness as core to deliberation, see Mansbridge et al. (2010, esp. 65–6). Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

1 Democratic Parties and Popular Sovereignty 

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Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0002 Published: December 2019

Pages 15–C1.P54

Abstract This chapter frames the broader argument of the book by making the case that, under contemporary political conditions, the e ective exercise of popular sovereignty—the essence of democratic self-rule —requires internally democratic political parties. While the chapter draws on a range of empirical evidence, its primary guide are theoretical insights that date back to the 1920s and are found in the democratic theory of constitutional lawyer Hans Kelsen. Kelsen remains one of the most clear-sighted and relevant authors when it comes to political parties, and his sober and non-moralistic approach to understanding collective political agency usefully re-orients our thinking about parties to the importance of their internal structure and organization. The chapter reconstructs Kelsen’s position and contrasts it with alternative views of popular sovereignty, arguing that the former is superior given how people today prefer to participate in democratic life and how parties have evolved to be agents of the state.

Keywords: popular sovereignty, party democracy, intra-party democracy, Hans Kelsen, participation, agency Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Popular sovereignty is the doctrine upon which modern democracy is built. Its central idea is that a democratic polity is one in which power ultimately vests in ‘the people’. In the earliest writings on the topic, perhaps most famously in the work of Jean Bodin, this is not taken to mean that the people actively engages 1

in collective self-rule. While the people is conceived as the subject to whose will the original constitution of the polity can be traced, it is made clear that that subject is normally ruled by others, becoming active only in periods of constitutional founding or change. Later accounts of popular sovereignty tend to advocate a more agentive view of the people (for an overview, see Maus 2011 and Stanton 2016). Most of these accounts likewise declare the people the nal authority over the constitution, but they do not limit its exercise of agency to the exceptional moments when the basic shape of the polity is articulated and re-articulated. Instead, popular sovereignty is taken also to extend to ‘ordinary’ democratic law-making, the business of parliaments and parties.

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This second, more agentive understanding of popular sovereignty is arguably more widespread today than

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the earlier, more restrictive view, at least in the sense that few would dispute that a polity whose members are given no say in ordinary law-making does not qualify as democratic (though see Ackerman 1991 and 2

1998). How exactly can the people exercise political agency on a regular basis? If we follow the larger part of 3

theoretical scholarship on the topic, we nd that two di erent answers are available. The rst holds that p. 16

popular sovereignty properly

conceived can be exercised only directly and by the people as a whole, as in

a nation-wide referendum (e.g. Canovan 2005, 108–14; Ochoa Espejo 2011). I call this the radical approach to popular sovereignty. The second perspective conceives the exercise of popular sovereignty in indirect terms, that is, as exercised not directly by the people but by authorized representatives who seek to produce a general will in parliamentary procedures (e.g. Habermas 1994; Pettit 2012; Urbinati 2006). I call this the indirect approach to popular sovereignty. The argument of this chapter is that, under contemporary political conditions, neither of these approaches

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to popular sovereignty are adequate from the point of view of citizens’ agency. The radical approach to popular sovereignty is susceptible to becoming a mere mechanism of acclamation that often excludes citizens from determining the issues on which they are to make a sovereign decision. The indirect approach, on the other hand, with its insistence on a strict division of democratic labour between representatives and represented, leaves too little room for citizens’ active engagement in political life. To be sure, this may not in and of itself be problematic so long as representative institutions reliably facilitate a close linkage between citizens and their political representatives. But that is arguably not the case in the democracies of our age. Since traditional representative mechanisms are widely failing, what we need is a more robust mechanism for connecting citizens to government. Against this backdrop, the chapter seeks to reclaim an alternative account of popular sovereignty that

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appears better placed to facilitate the e ective exercise of citizens’ agency than the two standard approaches. The gure to whom it looks for inspiration is Hans Kelsen, who is widely known for dismissing the notion of popular sovereignty as a ‘political ction’ that only serves to legitimize the autonomy of parliament, but in fact developed a distinctive theory of popular sovereignty centred on inclusive and participatory political parties (2013, cited in the following as EaV). Kelsen maintained that parties that permit citizens to channel their interests and values into comprehensive political agendas and shape collective decisions accordingly provide the agent able to connect the real people we can expect to nd in existing democracies to the ideal conception of the sovereign people who actively govern themselves. I take these ideas as my primary guide. The model of popular sovereignty through parties is importantly unlike the two conventional approaches. In

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sharp contrast to the radical approach, it does not decouple the people from deciding the terms of their own empowerment, but allows them to choose these terms themselves. And contrary to the indirect approach, it sees citizens not only as selectors of political representatives whose task it is to manufacture a general will, p. 17

but as capable of more continuously

in uencing the behaviour of representatives and the larger agenda

upon which they act through participatory partisan associations. In so doing, the party-centred account of popular sovereignty signi cantly strengthens the role of citizens in the process of (ordinary) law-making, transforming them from passive recipients of others’ decisions into agents of popular sovereignty. It is this fundamentally di erent understanding of the role of citizens in collective self-rule that marks the partycentred account o

from the indirect account, rendering it a separate vision of how popular sovereignty can

be exercised in contemporary societies; or so I want to argue. It will become clear that many of the problems facing the radical and indirect accounts of popular sovereignty are a consequence of larger problems that currently plague most established liberal democracies, notably the deep disconnect between citizens and their representatives that has emerged with the loosening of the relatively xed class roots of political ideologies, the professionalization of politics and rising levels of education among the citizenries of Western societies (two recent accounts of this are Mair

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2013a and Ignazi 2017). The party-based account of popular sovereignty o ers a perspective on collective self-rule that is sensitive to these developments, proposing as it does to involve citizens more directly and continuously in those institutions that have originally been meant to provide the link between representatives and represented—political parties—thereby bringing the former and the latter again closer in touch with one another. This proposal may also be read as involving a broader reform agenda for political parties, an issue the chapter’s nal section and the subsequent chapter touches upon. Before embarking, some more words of clari cation concerning the nature of the chapter’s argument are in

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order. As I have indicated, my aim is to investigate the capacity of di erent accounts of popular sovereignty to facilitate citizens’ exercise of political agency under contemporary political conditions. By this is meant that I am not interested in analysing these accounts in the abstract, assuming idealized conditions that do not currently and perhaps may never obtain in any polity we know of. Instead, I want to examine di erent accounts of popular sovereignty, paying special attention to the contingent historical and sociological contexts that characterize established democracies, drawing extensively on empirical scholarship where appropriate. An important implication of this is that the conclusions presented in the chapter cannot necessarily be taken to hold true universally, extending to polities with di erent political histories, 4

institutions, and opportunity structures for political mobilization. I want at least to take no position on how far the chapter’s argument can travel beyond established democracies.

p. 18

What Does it Mean to Say that Citizens ʻActʼ?

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The essence of an agentive understanding of popular sovereignty is that citizens can connect their agency to

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collective decisions about a state’s general laws and policies. As one prominent author puts it, popular sovereignty so conceived involves not only a commitment to the idea that ‘the ultimate wielders of political power are the citizens themselves’ (which, as Bodin held, is compatible with denying citizens the right to rule themselves actively) but also ‘that the institutions of the state are the agencies through which [citizens] act’ (Buchanan 2002, 708). Act is the keyword here, but what exactly does it refer to? I suggest that this is the rst issue that must be settled. For only when we have a clear idea of what acting involves can we evaluate di erent conceptions of popular sovereignty according to their ability to allow citizens to engage with democratic agency in a meaningful fashion. At the most general level, the exercise of agency requires a ‘me’ that directs the causal order of behavioural

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events and is capable of critically re ecting on them. As one author puts it, ‘[w]hat makes us agents rather than mere subjects of behaviour […] is our perceived capacity to interpose ourselves into the course of events in such a way that the behavioural outcome is traceable directly to us’ (Velleman 2000, 128). This talk of ‘behavioural outcomes’ typically refers to the actions of individuals; but, as many authors have shown, it can plausibly be ‘extrapolated’ to democratic life. Accordingly, to say that citizens act through the 5

institutions of the state means that they perceive the general laws and policies as traceable to themselves. (1) The perception desideratum: In order for general laws and policies to be considered an

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expression of citizens’ agency, citizens must perceive the content of those laws and policies as traceable to themselves. That citizens perceive certain political outcomes as traceable to themselves is necessary for them to be said to be acting through the institutions of the state, but is not su

cient. There must also exist some actual

causal connection between their attitudes or preferences and general laws and policies. However modest the in uence of a single person may be, she must be able to contribute to those decisions.

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(2) The causality desideratum: In order for general laws and policies to be considered an expression of citizens’ agency, citizens must be capable of causally contributing to decisions shaping those laws and policies. p. 19

To say that citizens must have causal impact on laws and policies invites the familiar objection that

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democracy, realized in accordance with the principle of popular sovereignty, actually condemns citizens to ‘causal impotence’ (Przeworski 2010, 110). For insofar as political power is distributed equally, and each vote (or voice) counts the same, no individual has a causal e ect on the collective decision. But this objection misconceives the type of causality underlying democratic action. To exercise causal in uence in a democracy is not to single-handedly decide an election, say, as implied by the objection from causal impotence, but to contribute to a political decision jointly together with others. The type of causal in uence at work may be characterized as what has been called ‘contributory causation’ (Beerbohm 2011, 67–72; Tuck 2008). This type of causation is di

cult to understand in terms of the standard counterfactual analysis

of causality, but there is nothing unfamiliar about it. Beerbohm illustrates the point as follows: ‘When a large majority of persons votes to humiliate a fellow citizen, is it plausible for the victim to view this decision [as one where nobody had any causal e ect]? If you were the target of such abuse, would you accept the claim that none of the millions of citizens who voted to grossly mistreat you had any ‘causal e ect’?’ (Beerbohm 2011, 68). Clearly it would be implausible to deny any causal connection here. To better understand why both the perception and the causality desideratum must be satis ed, consider the

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following cases. Imagine rst a state run by a charismatic leader who claims to speak for the people as a whole. That leader has the last word about the meaning of the general will and stands above democratic procedures and representative institutions. Suppose further that citizens perceive the leader’s decisions to be genuinely ‘theirs’, for instance because they identify with the leader, as in Ernesto Laclau’s model of populist democracy (Laclau 2005, esp. 99–100) or the previously-mentioned practice of ‘direct 6

representation’ (Urbinati 2015). If so, the perception desideratum is easily satis ed. Yet, since citizens are unable to causally in uence the decisions of the leader (because the leader stands above democratic procedures and representative institutions), we would be hard pressed to attribute to them the status of agents (and hence to call the state in question a properly democratic state) (Sa on and Urbinati 2013). It seems uncontroversial that the satisfaction of the perception desideratum is, by itself, insu

cient.

Imagine next a polity where a causal link between citizens’ preferences and political decisions appears to

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exist, but citizens largely regard themselves as disempowered. One example of such a polity may be the p. 20

European Union: though

there is ample evidence that nationally elected governments usually decide in

line with domestic public opinion when acting at the EU level, being as they are constrained by domestic electoral incentives (this is the causal mechanism), citizens tend to perceive themselves as having scant 7

in uence on EU policy (Hagemann et al. 2017). Arguably, it seems to right to say here that the widespread perception of powerlessness poses a very real problem for the democratic credentials of that polity. This is so because our perceived capacity to interpose ourselves into the course of events is just as central to the notion of agency as the de facto capacity to shape outcomes, as established from the third-person perspective of an observer (say, a researcher). Again, it seems clear that both agency desiderata must be satis ed. How can the citizens’ agency obtain tangible expression in a democratic polity? To what institutions and practices should one look? As I have noted, two di erent responses to this question are available, one that emphasizes direct participation by the people as a whole (the radical view of popular sovereignty), and one that emphasizes the necessity of a division of labour between citizens and political representatives (the indirect view of popular sovereignty). It is to these views that we will now turn.

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Radical Popular Sovereignty

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The radical view of popular sovereignty contends that the latter requires that the citizenry as a whole—the

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people—asserts its will directly, say in a nation-wide referendum. This view goes back to the time of the French Revolution and the Rousseauvian trope that democracy and representation are essentially incompatible, and parts of this legacy can still be traced in some contemporary accounts of radical popular sovereignty. While very few of these accounts would question that representation and democracy are compatible, they all assume that the people is only truly sovereign when it acts directly and in a more or less uni ed fashion (Canovan 2005, 108–10; Ochoa Espejo 2011; Tuck 2015). Even if direct participation may not be the only way in which norms, laws, and policies can be made responsive to citizens’ values and preferences, goes the argument, popular sovereignty makes itself visible only in moments when the citizenry of a given political community acts as one. In these moments we can discover the true will of the people. Importantly, the radical view of popular sovereignty is not synonymous with the much broader notion of

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‘direct democracy’. While the latter is typically thought to involve all sorts of more or less unmediated p. 21

decision-making

mechanisms that may be implemented at di erent levels in the political system (see,

e.g., Altman 2011; Smith 2009)—ranging from local popular initiatives to participatory budgeting schemes —the former emphasizes, as noted, the participation of the whole people in a direct decision. In practice, moreover, the radical view of popular sovereignty requires one to commit to the idea that the electorate is 8

the people (and usually also to the idea that the will of the half plus one is the will of the whole). To this contestable belief proponents of direct democracy need not subscribe, as one can defend the latter simply as a useful palette of participatory devices and remain agnostic about whether these can a ord us an insight into the true will of the people. Now, does the radical view of popular sovereignty satisfy the two agency desiderata set out above?

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Instinctively one thinks that the answer must be yes. For it seems that there is simply no more e ective way for citizens to determine the direction of the state than via a direct-democratic vote. It enables citizens to causally determine decisions (thus satisfying the causality desideratum); and it certainly also makes them perceive the decision as directly traceable to themselves, not least because there appear to be no intermediary bodies like parties or parliament standing between the ‘popular will’ and the decision (thus satisfying the perception desideratum). It is for this reason that, ‘[a]sked to say what the exercise of popular sovereignty means, many citizens of modern democracies would point to referendums’ (Canovan 2005, 108; cf. also Manin 1997). But this argument overlooks that referenda are not typically designed by the people themselves, but by political elites who tend to be disconnected from the wider society and have axes to grind. This need not undermine the radical account’s capacity to satisfy the perception desideratum: citizens may still perceive the outcome to be genuinely ‘theirs’. But it raises doubts about its capacity to satisfy the causality desideratum. To see this, consider that the political question that is referred to the people for a direct decision in a plebiscite is hardly ever actually formulated by citizens, but by o

cials. As Carl Schmitt (2004,

89) correctly observed in his discussion of the plebiscites of his time, ordinarily ‘[t]he people […] cannot pose a question, but can only answer with yes or no to a question placed before them’. Without means by way of which the people can determine the issues over which a choice is being made, however, their capacity to causally shape decisions is severely circumscribed. The people are granted direct causal impact on a political decision, yes, but they have little impact on the nature and content of the decision, which is 9

predetermined by elites. Furthermore, political elites usually also possess the resources to in uence public p. 22

debate so as

to in uence the nal outcome of the referendum. Especially when there is widespread

agreement among elites as to the most desirable outcome of the referendum, dissenting voices are bound to get rather little publicity. Schmitt for these reasons went so far as to suggest that, in a plebiscite, the

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causality of democratic decision-making is actually inverted, in the sense that referenda are but a mechanism of acclamation: decisions are de facto made by political elites, while the people are relegated to head-nodding or -shaking (Schmitt 2004, 90). Of course, referenda are not always or necessarily manipulated by self-interested elites. There are certainly

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cases of referenda where citizens are granted more control over the issues that are being decided (or where the public debate prior to the referendum is inclusive). But it seems indisputably the case under contemporary political conditions that the power to decide on the substantive content of referenda rests not 10

normally with the citizens but with their government.

Indeed, it is di

cult to think of recent relevant

nation-wide referenda in established democracies where that has not been the case. It is therefore also no surprise that, if we inquire into the reasons for why certain political questions are made the subject of a nationwide majority vote, or why the exact question over which a choice is being made is formulated as it is, typically we nd that, ‘because the people wanted a referendum on that particular question’ is a dubious 11

explanation (Weale 2018).

For example, the much-discussed Brexit referendum of 2016 was initially suggested by the British

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Conservative Party in order to appease the eurosceptic wing of the party and to avoid a ight of voters to the right-wing, anti-establishment United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Even if the British public has consistently been the most eurosceptic electorate in the EU ever since the UK joined in 1973, it would therefore be misleading to say that an in–out referendum has been straightforwardly ‘demanded by the British people’. Similar things may be said about the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014. This had its origins not in the desire for the people to decide fundamental constitutional matters, but in the Labour Party’s rather clumsy response to the rise of Scottish nationalism, and the hope that a referendum victory for the Labour-backed pro-UK side would make it go away. In sum, the agenda of these momentous referenda was shaped not so much by citizens’ exercise of democratic agency as by parties who tactically sought to avoid losing electoral support. All of this is neither surprising nor uncommon in an age where p. 23

many formerly powerful parties have been abandoned by their traditional electorates, and

deference to

political elites has almost entirely disappeared (on this point in relation to the Brexit referendum, see Bogdanor 2016, 349). But it raises serious doubts about whether radical popular sovereignty can be exercised in a way that actually gives expression to citizens’ agency. The conclusion to take from examining these arguments is that, under contemporary political conditions, the radical approach to popular sovereignty does not provide an appropriate way of enabling citizens to ‘act through the institutions of the state’. Though it appears prima facie empowering, on closer inspection it is prone to compromise citizens’ capacity to act by excluding the people from deciding on the terms of their empowerment. These objections, it should be added, equally apply to the kind of ‘direct representative democracy’ that I mentioned in the Introduction of the book, in connection with the new ‘movements’ that emerged on the political scene across Europe. The major di erence between direct representative democracy and radical popular sovereignty is that the former by default—and not just because of contemporary political conditions—relegates citizens to the status of spectators. Its logic, to recall, is that ‘directness pertains to the visual and communicative … rather than direct participation’ (Urbinati 2015, 480); it is about leaders and elites communicating with their followers via (for example) social media, creating a feeling of being heard and taken seriously, and not about citizens actually having any agency.

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Indirect Popular Sovereignty

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The second widespread approach to popular sovereignty conceives popular sovereignty in indirect terms,

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appealing to the necessary division of labour between the people and their political representatives. Like the radical view of popular sovereignty, this approach has a long pedigree in the history of political thought. A gure often mentioned as its patron saint is the anti-Jacobin clergyman and writer Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, who broke decisively with the already-mentioned Rousseauvian idea that democracy cannot be representative (Urbinati 2006, ch. 4). As one scholar has put it, Sieyès ‘saw representation as a fundamental fact of modern society, as something indelibly inscribed in the division of labour and commercial sociability, and political representation as a permanent necessity in any large and populous country in which it was virtually impossible to unite the voice of the people directly’ (Hont 2004, 198). On this perspective, elections are essentially a means for creating two peoples: a group of citizens who make

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the laws for all and a group of citizens who obey those laws—but this reallocation of direct decision-making power does not undermine the sovereignty of the people. It only changes the mechanism through which the people can make their agency felt: rather than relying on direct rule, the ‘generation of a collective national p. 24

will’ is made ‘dependent upon

the unity of a national representative body […] whose representatives

[have] constituted power […] to act in the name of the people’ (Kelly 2016, 276). Thus, the people exercise agency by way of authorizing in elections representatives to act on their behalf. This conception of representative government remains highly in uential in democratic theory and practice,

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which tends to take for granted both the inevitability of a division of democratic labour between citizens and their representatives and the legitimacy of that division of labour (e.g. Christiano 2007; Habermas 1996; Urbinati 2006). By making the divide between citizens and their elected representatives a constitutive feature of democratic government, then, the indirect approach to popular sovereignty ‘makes room for sovereignty as an inherently plural unifying process’ (Urbinati 2011, 45) that involves giving collective shape to myriad individual interests, preferences, and conceptions of the common good. Facilitating that process are political parties. Parties mediate between individual principles and projects and

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the good of the whole, in that they ‘re ne and generalize particularist appeals by casting them in terms appropriate to public reason’ (Muirhead and Rosenblum 2006, 104), and make these appeals the basis of general laws and norms that are created in parliamentary compromises engineered by the representatives of di erent (competing) parties (Manin 1997, 212–13). This allows parties to master the apparent paradox that representatives are both supposed to make laws that all citizens must obey and be responsive to the values and demands of those who elected them, such that the latter can perceive the content of laws and norms to be traceable to themselves. Does the indirect account of popular sovereignty satisfy the two agency desiderata? The answer is that it can, but only under particular circumstances. First, the indirect account can satisfy the causality desideratum if (1) citizens possess the right to an equal share in determining the political will via elections, with the incentive for representatives to get re-elected ensuring that representatives and parties are reasonably attentive to citizens’ concerns and expectations. This requirement seems not especially arduous; its demands are no more exacting than those of Schumpeterian minimalist democracy. But, second, there are two further, more demanding requirements that must be met in order for the perception desideratum to be satis ed. Since, as one prominent theorist of representative democracy puts it, the indirect view makes ‘apathy, not agency, the main quality of popular sovereignty’ and ‘citizens’ participation during the period between elections super uous’, it requires (2) that the people are in principle content with nonparticipation between elections, and (3) that representatives continually maintain an informal sympathetic relation with their constituents, in the sense of an ‘interpretative or arti cially created similarity’ that instils in the latter the sense that they are closely connected to decision-making (Urbinati 2011, 25).

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p. 25

Can these requirements be met in practice? Whether requirement (1) can be met in contemporary democracies is di

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cult to answer. Political scientists disagree over the extent to which real-world parties

and governments are actually responsive to citizens, and about the main causal factors involved. Evidence tends to point in di erent directions, depending on the methods used to study responsiveness and the 12

countries studied.

An answer to the question of whether requirements (2) and (3) can be met seems more

readily available. Let us begin with requirement (2), that which is concerned with citizens’ willingness to accept non-

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participation between elections. That this requirement can be met is, prima facie, doubtful. As already noted in the book’s Introduction, research indicates that across established democracies, the decline of class cleavages and the concomitant rise of post-materialist and self-expression values set in motion a transformation of citizens’ participatory demands that rendered people dissatis ed with institutionalized forms of collective action that leave little or no room for individual voice. While in the age of class con ict and mass parties many citizens readily accepted non-participation between elections, not least because they felt adequately represented by parties that reliably stood up for their group interests, nowadays 13

citizens tend to prefer more regularized and individualized forms of participation.

The indirect model

o ers however little in the way of channels for more regular, or di erent forms of, participation and thus risks leaving citizens feeling disconnected from the institutions through which they are supposed to act. That representatives are capable of maintaining an informal sympathetic relation with their constituents

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(3) in contemporary democracies seems equally unlikely. The just-mentioned decline of class cleavages and rise of self-expression values has triggered a crisis of representation and accountability that is marked by a growing disconnect between representatives and represented. Schmitter describes the cause of that crisis in terms of the ‘generalized loosening of the links between interests and organizations’, understood as the unravelling of the interests that emerged out of the grand cleavages of religion and class and were mediated by Christian, social democratic, and communist parties (Schmitter 2008, 208). What has arisen in their place is a seemingly unaccountable and technocratic form of politics whose main agents often appear more concerned with holding onto o

ce and minimizing the costs of losing it than with promoting principled

agendas that are sensitive to citizens’ political aspirations and expectations. A powerful indication of this is p. 26

that, in the face of declining

memberships and weak partisan alignments, many established political

parties have begun increasingly to rely on the state’s bureaucratic apparatus (courts, regulatory agencies, 14

independent commissions) for their power and legitimacy. that o

This has instilled in many citizens the belief

cials and representatives form an undi erentiated political class that rules in unrepresentative

ways. This belief, reinforced by so-called ‘populist’ parties and movements that fervently oppose established politics, undercuts citizens’ sense of being able to exercise political agency. In sum, there is a very real sense in which the indirect account of popular sovereignty falls short of satisfying the two agency desiderata that must be satis ed if citizens are to act through the institutions of the state. Its exclusive reliance on mechanisms of representation, and the accompanying circumscription of popular participation, is bound to weaken citizens’ perception of being able to exercise collective political agency, especially in this age of individualization and the decay of traditional political con ict lines.

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Popular Sovereignty Through Parties

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An alternative account of popular sovereignty is available, one that appears better placed to satisfy the two

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agency desiderata speci ed above. This starts from the presumption that the traditional indirect account of popular sovereignty is insu

cient in terms of enabling citizens to act through the institutions of the state

since it mainly regards them as passive recipients of others’ decisions. Reacting to this, it stresses the central importance of internally democratic political parties for achieving popular self-rule, arguing that such parties can connect citizens to government in a more direct and continuous fashion. Like the two more familiar accounts of popular sovereignty, this is rst and foremost a normative model. But unlike them, it has rarely been realized in practice. As we shall see, however, it provides a powerful prescriptive account of how citizens can engage with collective political agency so as to rule themselves democratically. The basic elements of this complementary model of popular sovereignty are found in the democratic theory

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of Hans Kelsen. Kelsen may at rst appear like an unlikely point of reference. After all, he is notorious for p. 27

dismissing the notion of popular sovereignty as a ‘political ction’ whose sole purpose it is to legitimize the 15

division of labour between citizens and their representatives.

Furthermore, although he accepted the

argument that a division of labour between political elites and citizens was inevitable in modern societies, he was far from unsympathetic to the Rousseauvian trope that democracy and representation are essentially incompatible (EaV, 58–9; also see Urbinati 2011, 39–40). Finally, Kelsen denied that there exists such a thing as ‘the people’ to begin with. The people, he insisted, are not a collective of citizens sharing a common history and purpose, but a purely arti cial entity, ‘a system of individual human acts regulated by the state legal order’ (EaV, 36). That is, the people are that group of individuals that is granted political rights by a particular state—but no more than that, contrary to ordinary folk imagination. However, in spite of his scepticism towards many of modern democracy’s more central concepts, Kelsen did

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not rule out altogether that citizens could govern themselves in a sovereign fashion. This appears in the 1929 edition of Kelsen’s treatise On the Essence and Value of Democracy (cited here, to recall, as EaV)— especially the section addressing the concept of the people, where a focus on the relationship between the ‘ideal conception of the people’ and the ‘real people’ is intended to unveil the possibilities of popular sovereignty in modern democracies. Kelsen there suggests that ‘[a]mong those who in fact exercise their political rights by participating in government, one would have to di erentiate between the mindless masses who follow the lead of others and those few who—in accordance with the idea of democracy— decisively in uence the governmental process based on independent judgment’ (EaV, 38). The latter, he continues, are those who come closest to instantiating the ideal of a self-governing people in the real world: the people as active shapers of the general will—‘a ruling, and not a ruled, People’ (EaV, 38). Where may those self-governing people be found in real-world democracies? Kelsen’s answer is that they are found in particular political associations, namely in political parties, which bring ‘like-minded individuals together in order to secure them actual in uence in shaping public a airs’ (EaV, 38). His argument is as follows. If the people are to rule actively, then a form of association that promotes and supports the ongoing pursuit of particular political goals is essential. Parties provide such an association, supplying citizens with an institutional channel through which their principles and goals can be connected to the relevant legislative and executive mechanisms. It is this unique quality of parties that makes them the main enablers of popular self-rule. Kelsen follows this thought to its logical conclusion: ‘the “people” does p. 28

not actually exist as a viable political

force prior to its organization into parties’; it is only the

‘integration of isolated individuals into political parties’ that ‘unleashes social forces that can be reasonably referred to as the “People” ’ (EaV, 40). Popular self-rule thus ‘rests on political parties, whose importance grows the more the democratic principle is realized in practice’ (EaV, 38).

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So Kelsen uses the concept of the people in two di erent senses. The people in the rst sense is meant to

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refer to all those who a given state grants political rights. One may call this the ‘legally de ned demos’. The people in the second sense then are those members of the legally de ned demos who actively exercise their political rights, and exercise them not only by voting in elections but by participating in political parties. It is this second conception of the people that I am interested in here. It is Kelsen’s central conceptual innovation and sharply distinguishes his account of popular sovereignty from alternative accounts. The people in this second sense is a group of individuals who actively participate in democratic self-rule but

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do not form a single collective agent, as in the radical account of popular sovereignty. Nor does this concept of the people describe a loose collection of individual citizens who stand in no particular public relationship to each other and whose collective will only emerges through the mediation of elected representatives, as in the indirect account of popular sovereignty. Rather, Kelsen’s self-governing people is a people that divides into several di erent collective agents who associate as partisans with the aim of in uencing political decisions in accordance with their principles and interests. Now, it is of course true that parties also gure in the indirect account of popular sovereignty. But note that while the indirect account operationalizes parties as ‘mere’ representation-enablers run by professional politicians, the Kelsenian model conceives parties as participatory organizations that directly implicate citizens into their internal decision procedures, thus giving them the opportunity to become active shapers of common rules. That Kelsen favoured internally democratic parties is a feature of his democratic theory that easily goes

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unnoticed, for he does not elaborate much on it. I interpret Kelsen to think that parties have to be internally democratic rst and foremost because it is di

cult to see how citizens could otherwise e ectively use

parties as channels for collectively exercising in uence in the way he describes. But there is further support for this interpretation, namely in Kelsen’s reference to Robert Michels’s classic study Political Parties (which demonstrated that the ‘mass parties of integration’ that became the dominant democratic forces throughout Europe in the early twentieth century were democratic only in appearance, but oligarchic in reality) (Michels 1989; also see Caterina 2019, 60). Kelsen expressly agrees with Michels that ‘even parties pursuing a radically democratic programme’ often organize the ‘processes of collective will-formation that occur within [them]’ in ‘an explicitly aristocratic-autocratic’ fashion, and takes issue with this by p. 29

approvingly noting that, ‘anchoring political parties in the

constitution provides the possibility for

democratising the aspects of the governmental process that occur within the parties’ sphere of in uence’ (EaV, 41). Against this interpretation, it might be argued that Kelsen’s project is not primarily or necessarily to make

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political parties more open and receptive to ordinary party members, but to strengthen the control of party machineries over their elected party o

cials. This alternative interpretation is supported by several

passages in chapter 4 of On the Essence and Value of Democracy, where Kelsen proposes that parties (i) should be able to recall their elected representatives, and (ii) that representatives should be forced to resign once they decide to leave the party (EaV, 60–1). These mechanisms are intended to prevent individual candidates from using parties as a taxi to get into representative institutions and then change their party a

liation

based on their own personal contingent ambitions and interests, thus dis guring the role that parties ought to play in parliamentary democracies (Kelsen 2006, § 43; EaV, 58–9). Yet, however much Kelsen was concerned about these dangers, it remains the case that his understanding of popular sovereignty would make little sense without an inclusive and participatory conception of political parties. As I said, it is hard to see how citizens could use parties as vehicles for in uencing laws and policies in the way Kelsen describes if they are not organized democratically. As I conceive it, then, the party-based account of popular sovereignty expands the indirect account in important ways. Similar to the indirect account, which regards parliament as the site in which the general will is engineered, it ascribes to parliamentary deliberation and debate the function of mediating between the collective wills of the multiple di erent ‘peoples’ who associate in parties. By mediating is meant the

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achievement of a compromise between competing partisan demands, a ‘synthesis’ resulting from the ‘dialectical process within parliament’ (EaV, 70). (Note in this connection that Kelsen emphasized repeatedly, and consistent with this broader view of pluralist party democracy, that Proportional Representation is the only adequate way of ensuring that the multiple di erent ‘peoples’ that exist in a 16

polity can make their voices heard in the parliamentary process. See EaV, ch. 6.)

But in contrast to the

indirect account of popular sovereignty, the democratic and participatory organization of parties that the party-based account prescribes permits citizens to assume an active role in that process, contributing to the outcome of parliamentary procedures in a continuous and coordinated fashion. Citizens who associate in parties assume this active role insofar as they (for example) jointly shape the platform of their party, or p. 30

deliberate with elected o

cials over a particular parliamentary negotiation strategy.

In this way, they

can in uence the nature and the scope of the compromises pursued, as well as specify positions on which no compromise is acceptable. Because of its distinctive participatory features, the party-based account of popular sovereignty is well

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placed to satisfy the two agency desiderata speci ed earlier. That it can satisfy the causality desideratum should be evident. The fact that those who engage in parties can actively shape the agenda the party ought to pursue, and so bring their principles and projects to bear on decisions taken in parliament, creates a tight causal link between citizens’ concerns and collective decisions—a causal link that is at least much tighter than in the two traditional models of popular sovereignty (Pettitt 2018; Ebeling and Wolkenstein 2018). In the indirect account of popular sovereignty, citizens can only be said to ‘cause’ the actions of o

cials

insofar as the latter have a strong incentive to be re-elected (or at least be popular), and correspondingly are responsive to public opinion—but citizens cannot contribute much to more general political agendas. In the radical account, citizens produce a mandate by way of taking a direct decision on a single political issue; but as we saw, they are not involved in determining what this issue exactly involves and what courses of action must be pursued after the collective decision has been made. The party-based account of popular sovereignty also satis es the perception desideratum. It does so

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because, when parties are thoroughly democratic and permit their members to shape the party’s more general direction, those committed to the party and its wider political project will likely perceive its decisions (including negotiated bargains and agreements) as ‘theirs’. Of course, internal disagreements over, say, the correct interpretation of core principles, or the most appropriate electoral strategy, are likely to persist even within the most democratically organized parties; and so there will also always be party members who refuse to support their party’s decisions without reservations or protest. But so long as dissenting voices can weigh in and be heard, the notion that it is possible to link one’s action to collective decisions retains credibility, sustaining party members’ belief in the worth of engaging with political agency so as to exercise collective self-rule. Notice that I have argued that internally democratic parties may increase the likelihood that those committed

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to a given party and its larger political project will perceive the party’s decisions as ‘theirs’. This formulation deliberately includes sympathetic non-members, who do not participate actively in partisan politics. Why? One straightforward reason is that internal party democracy can help parties reconnect with their constituencies, realigning their programmatic outlook with many principally sympathetic non-members who were alienated by the growing rift between representatives and represented that has resulted from the unravelling of the links between interests and organizations that has occurred across established democracies over the last four decades or so (on this point, also see Gauja 2017). In short, parties that permit p. 31

those in whose

name they claim to speak to determine their political agenda may also signi cantly

increase the extent to which non-members perceive the party’s decisions as traceable to themselves. It is worth underlining in this connection that genuinely participatory and democratic parties are also likely to cater well to citizens’ shifting participatory preferences. Recall that the decline of class con ict and the rise of self-expression values has triggered a transformation of participatory demands: citizens in Western

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societies have grown increasingly dissatis ed with limiting their political participation to voting every couple of years, and they tend to want to have a say on a more regular basis. By providing a channel for meaningful and consequential political participation beyond periodical elections, internally democratic parties could go a long way in satisfying these demands, drawing in the renewed involvement of traditional constituencies and mobilizing new, perhaps hitherto disenfranchised or silenced ones (and thus also 17

address one of the key causes of the present crisis of party democracy).

This capacity to elicit participation

constitutes a signi cant advantage of the party-based approach to popular sovereignty relative to the indirect approach. It powerfully counteracts the risk of making citizens feel disconnected from political agency that the latter inevitably brings with it. What role, one may wonder, does the account of popular sovereignty defended here ascribe to citizens who

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choose not to participate in party politics? Are those who Kelsen un atteringly calls the ‘mindless masses who follow the lead of others’ bound to be dominated by those who ‘decisively in uence the governmental process’? The answer to this question is two-pronged and part of it has already been anticipated. On the one hand, there is of course a power di erential between those who do participate in parties and those who don’t. That those who actively seek to harness institutional power have a greater impact on collective decisions is ultimately inescapable in democratic politics. On the other hand, however, the aforementioned capacity of the party-based approach to reconnect parties with their constituencies, together with the additional participatory incentives it engenders, can o set some of these di erences in de facto in uence. To the extent that those who participate in parties ensure that the party’s agenda and decisions track the preferences of those in whose name it claims to speak, internally democratic and participatory parties can therefore tether Kelsen’s ‘mindless masses’ closer to the democratic process, situating them in the circumstances of agency. So, to sum up, the party-based account of popular sovereignty sees the people as consisting of several p. 32

collective agents—political parties—who seek to in uence the

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general will in accordance with their

interests and normative commitments. The account acknowledges that a distribution of democratic labour is inevitable in complex modern societies; it accepts the principle of representation and emphasizes the ultimate importance of parliamentary deliberation aimed at compromise. What renders it unique is that it operationalizes parties as participatory associations through which citizens can exercise in uence on collective decisions in a more continuous and immediate fashion. This not only makes for a much stronger causal link between citizens’ preferences and collective decisions compared with the familiar radical and indirect accounts of popular sovereignty. It also delivers on the important concern that the meaningful exercise of political agency requires that citizens perceive outcomes as connected to their intentional attitudes.

Objections and Conclusions

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One might object at this point that the argument developed so far is marked by an imbalance between a very

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critical treatment of radical and indirect approaches to popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and a relatively uncritical treatment of political parties, on the other. This imbalance might be traced to how evidence about parties is deployed. While numerous failings of real-world political parties are mentioned as the source of radical and indirect populist sovereignty’s shortcomings, it might be said, the discussion of the party-centred approach makes little notice of these failings, thus e ectively ignoring facts about parties that are earlier highlighted in order to critique the two more familiar approaches to popular sovereignty. This objection is understandable, but it misses the point of the argument I have been trying to make. Recall rst that the party-based account of popular sovereignty is a normative account, yet unlike the other two accounts it has rarely been realized in practice. Its foremost aim is thus to show, connecting theoretical

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re ection and empirical observation, how we can improve existing practice. If we take that ambition seriously, we must also acknowledge that the party-based account is in fact far from uncritical towards parties: indeed, by suggesting that parties should be internally democratic and participatory, it allows for the diagnosis that very few existing political parties currently work as they should. In other words, the argument advanced is not oblivious to the reality of political parties but counterposes to that reality an alternative view of political parties, the proposition being that that alternative view of parties can furnish a more promising account of how popular sovereignty can be realized in established democracies. I take this also to be consistent with Kelsen’s theoretical intentions: being well aware of parties’ many empirical shortcomings, his aim was to make a more general point about what well-functioning parties can achieve and why it matters. Even if this response is accepted as partially tempering the initial objection, the concern remains that the p. 33

proposed conception of well-functioning parties is

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hopelessly optimistic. If it is true, as I suggested, that

party leaderships are typically more concerned with holding onto power than with enhancing citizens’ ability to rule themselves, why should we believe that contemporary political parties would ever adopt an organizational form that gives members and supporters a greater say within the party? And if there is no reason to believe that parties could become more internally democratic and participatory, why should we think that ‘popular sovereignty through parties’ is a goal worth pursuing the rst place? This criticism sees the desirability of Kelsen’s understanding of popular sovereignty as closely bound up with its feasibility, and questions its feasibility on the grounds of how parties operate under contemporary political conditions. Admittedly, this worry is di

cult to answer given what we know about how political parties tend to work. It

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would be foolish to deny that the resistance of party elites to power-sharing and internal democracy is a major obstacle to realizing popular sovereignty through parties, one that will be hard to overcome. Yet it would be equally rash to think about these obstacles in a deterministic fashion, as if ‘iron laws’ were at work. One straightforward reason for why is that even long-established parties have seen ‘revolutions from below’ in which unexpected changes of leadership initiate internal democratization and an expansion of the active membership base—an important recent case, already mentioned in the Introduction, is the British Labour Party after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader (Seymour 2017; Whiteley et al. 2019). Accepting this point does not require us to renounce our critical assessment of contemporary parties. We can retain the view that party elites tend to be self-interested and power-seeking while acknowledging that, at critical moments at least, there may be very real possibilities for organizational change and renewal—and hence also for actualizing the party-based account of popular sovereignty (cf. Panebianco 1988, 17). C1.P52

Some readers might wonder whether this means that citizens will ultimately have to wait for the justmentioned ‘critical moments’ or ‘revolutions from below’ in order for them to be able to exercise popular sovereignty? If that were the case, arguably we would again face a feasibility-related objection, albeit a di erent one than before. This is that, even if popular sovereignty through parties is feasible in the sense that it can in principle be realized, the likelihood that it will be realized is very small. For, although critical moments of organizational renewal and internal revolutions from below are certainly a possibility, to rely on them to happen in established democracies is simply absurd. In addition, even when parties are radically transformed, such transformations will at most occur in single parties, but certainly not at a scale su

cient

to render a critical mass of parties’ inclusive participatory organizations. All the more reason to discard the notion of popular sovereignty through parties. There are at least two ways to answer this objection. First, although it would be wrong to deny that feasibility and likelihood are connected in relevant ways, it is also deeply problematic to con ate feasibility p. 34

with unconditional or near-unconditional likelihood. Doing so risks the kind of cynical realism that equates the real with the ideal, making super uous any normative inquiry that goes much beyond the defence of the status quo (Gilabert and Lawford-Smith 2012, 817). Consider further how immensely di

cult it is to

determine in a non-arbitrary or question-begging way what it means to say that a normative model’s

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realization is su ciently likely to be worth aiming at. As long as there are no in-principle unsurmountable obstacles to its realization (which is not the case with Kelsen’s notion of popular sovereignty through parties) the judgement that it is su

18

ciently likely to be worth pursuing is almost entirely subjective.

It

depends as much on how we interpret empirical opportunity structures as on how much we want the model to become a reality. So even if it may plausibly be doubted that the instant realization of the party-based vision of popular sovereignty is very likely, this is not su

cient to delegitimize it as a normative model.

A second possible counter-argument to the above objection is that we need not necessarily wait for ‘critical moments’ or ‘revolutions from below’ for popular sovereignty through parties to become a reality, but can try to take concrete measures to bring it about. This was also Kelsen’s response to the challenge of feasibility. As we saw, he argued that by ‘anchoring political parties in the constitution … the amorphous structure of the parties’ due to which ‘the political processes that occur within them take on an explicitly aristocratic-autocratic character’, could be reshaped into a manifestly democratic form, counteracting those ‘inner workings of the party’ that undercut ‘democratic self-determination’ (EaV, 41). Though with the bene t of hindsight we may judge this particular proposal spurious, for none of the several waves of party constitutionalization that have occurred throughout Europe since the end of World War II have palpably strengthened internal party democracy (Biezen 2012, 211), it points to the importance of re ecting on strategies of actively promoting internally democratic and participatory parties. How could one alter parties’ institutional design so as to make them more democratic? What design tools are available, and how can they best be used and justi ed? These are the questions the next chapter addresses. It outlines and defends what I will call a ‘deliberative model of intra-party democracy’.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

7

See, for instance, Richard Tuckʼs book The Sleeping Sovereign (2016). Tuck reconstructs Bodin as objecting to ʻdemocratic government with its instability and demagoguery, and not to democratic sovereigntyʼ (30). Bodin thus proposed that governmental structures should not be ʻmere agents of the sovereignʼ but ʻauthorised by the sovereign precisely not to execute the law mechanically but instead to use their own discretionʼ (42). This means that there is a clear division of labour between the people qua sovereign and the government qua rulers: the former is a passive multitude, the latter engages in active law-making. On this point, also see Canovan (2005, esp. 16–20). More in line with more traditional views of popular sovereignty, Ackerman sees the role of the people as limited to constitutional founding and revision and di erentiates between popular sovereignty and government. Note that there is also the widespread view that traditional notions of popular sovereignty make little sense in todayʼs globalized and inter-dependent world (e.g. Benhabib 2011; Cohen 2012). Some authors defending this view suggest departing from the idea that citizens can rule themselves through traditional representative institutions. Since discussing this position in detail is beyond the scope of this chapter, I limit myself to noting that, even though states are undoubtedly more and more constrained by supra- and international agencies and legal norms, it would be rash to deny that there still remain many issues that are decided within states, and decided through the representative institutions of parliaments and parties. This more contextual approach to theorizing about popular sovereignty is also most consistent with how Kelsen himself practiced democratic theory. See EaV, 25–6, and Kelsen (1955, esp. 1–3). This idea is as old as the idea of democracy, but it has re-appeared in recent philosophical work. See for example, List and Koenig-Archibugi (2010, see esp. 89). For a more traditional view of the demos as a group agent, see Miller (2009, 208–9). Note that these accounts of the demos qua group agent all start from a position of methodological individualism, breaking decisively with the pre-modern understanding of the sovereign as an ontological entity yet preserving the idea that multiple individuals who act together with shared intentions can constitute a collective agent. Cf. also List and Pettit (2011). Laclau (2005) speaks in this connection of an ʻequivalential logicʼ, through which di erent individual social demands are linked together. What keeps them together is a ʻnameʼ, the name of the leader, with whom all the di erent individuals can identify. As he puts it, ʻthe equivalential logic leads to singularity, and singularity to identification of the unity of the group with the name of the leaderʼ (100). None of this is to suggest, of course, that the institutional design of the EU is su iciently democratic.

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8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15

16

17

18

For a good discussion of this problem, see Canovan (2005, 110–11). Some scholars have suggested that this is indeed an ʻinevitableʼ consequence of plebiscites, so for example Christiano (2007, 105). For an insightful empirical account of how the powerful skew referenda outcomes, see Gerber (1999). This is a point acknowledged even by many staunch defenders of referenda, for instance by Altman (2011). In his excellent recent book, The Will of the People: A Modern Myth (2018), Weale shows that the kind of collective decisionmaking I discuss here under the heading of ʻradical popular sovereigntyʼ paradoxically ʻall too o en has the e ect of putting more power in the hands of the executiveʼ, with parties in government manipulating politics to their own ends in the name of the people (xi). For a comprehensive overview of the ambiguities of the vast responsiveness literature, see Achen and Bartels (2016). For an influential recent study that shows that parties are, by and large, responsive to citizens, see Dalton et al. (2011). One indication of this is the veritable explosion of new forms of unconventional political participation, such as new social movements and transnational advocacy networks. For an overview treatment, see Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein (2017, esp. 99–100). Katz and Mair (2009, 755) note that, across established democracies, there has since the 1980s been an increase in the use of ʻpublic money to fund party organizations and the parties in parliamentʼ; a proliferation of ʻparty laws, which had o en accompanied the introduction of state subventionsʼ; and parties generally started to enjoy ever-greater ʻaccess to the state machineryʼ as ʻa source of patronage and supportʼ. Specifically,Kelsen (2006, § 43 D) argues that traditional theories of popular sovereignty serve a ʻpolitical purposeʼ, namely ʻmaking those [citizens] who are […] excluded from lawmaking believe that they still determine the will of the state, if only by being represented by parliament. To the extent that [those theories of popular sovereginty] succeed, they justify the power (Machtstellung) of parliament.ʼ Note the formulation in EaV on p. 70: ʻBy demanding that the simultaneous filling of multiple [parliamentary] seats should occur in such a way that each party has a number of elected representatives corresponding to its strength, i.e., that every party is given its “own” proportional representation, one abandons the notion that the “People” as a unitary whole creates the representative body.ʼ Also see Kelsen (1955, 84–5). This thesis is elaborated for example in Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein (2017). Also see the work of scholars who argue that parties may expand the community of enfranchised citizens beyond the borders of the state, forming ʻtransnational communities of the likeminded, countering thereby a more parochial definition of peoplehoodʼ (White and Ypi 2017, 454; also see Wolkenstein 2018a). For an analogous point, see Sangiovanni (2019, 23): ʻjudgments of feasibility are very di icult to estimate reliably. To see this, consider that feasibility is best understood as an empirical property of a course of action … consisting in the likelihood of realizing the course of action in question against some fixed background … Given the unreliability in general of forecasting models in the social sciences, and given how contrary-to-fact judgments of feasibility must be to be useful, it is likely that we will only be able to exclude only more far-out proposals.ʼ Valentini (2014, 791) helpfully suggests the concept of ʻnon-infeasibilityʼ to overcome these problems, meaning that a proposal should count as feasible as long it is not proven infeasible. My own take on feasibility is of a piece with Valentiniʼs suggestion: as noted, the baseline constraint are ʻin-principle unsurmountable obstaclesʼ, such as logical or nomological obstacles; if these are not given, feasibility obtains. Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

2 A Deliberative Model of Intra-Party Democracy 

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Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0003 Published: December 2019

Pages 35–65

Abstract This chapter aims to answer the question of how exactly internally democratic parties should look, developing a ‘deliberative model of intra-party democracy’. The main justi cation of such a model is rst, that deliberation can cater better to the demand for political self-expression many citizens share than merely aggregative democratic practices, and second, that deliberation can perform an important critical function within parties, allowing the status quo to be questioned and transformed. The challenge is to devise mechanisms and institutions that can enhance deliberation within parties, and the chapter looks here to the more practice-oriented literature on deliberative democracy and democratic innovations for inspiration. As an instantiation of bottom-up democracy, it is suggested, a deliberative model of intra-party democracy must empower the active members on the ground and o er numerous fora in which they can make their voices heard and bring them to bear on decisions. Chief amongst the institutional design paths suggested are problem-oriented fora, partisan deliberative networks, and larger deliberative conferences. These proposals are discussed in turn, and empirical illustrations of how they could be realised are provided.

Keywords: intra-party democracy, deliberation, deliberative democracy, democratic innovations, participation, party membership, linkage Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

If internally democratic and participatory parties are crucial for the e ective exercise of popular sovereignty, how exactly should such parties look in practice? What internal channels of participation and engagement should they provide? In the book’s Introduction, I have brie y mentioned the movement Momentum, which contributed considerably to the democratization of the British Labour Party. Momentum is what one might call an ‘intra-party movement’ that is premised on the idea that the party has ‘not been su

ciently democratic or participatory’ (The Guardian 2016). Its activities include phone canvassing, local

campaigning, and even educational events like ‘People’s PPE’, where more and less prominent speakers discuss current political a airs with lay audiences. Is this the kind of democratization parties should aspire to?

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While Momentum is indeed an excellent example of how bottom-up initiatives can make parties more

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democratic and participatory (without compromising electability), my ambition in this book is to go beyond stressing the importance of such initiatives. What I want to do is discuss more general institutional design paths for party reform. Put in another way, my concern is less with the people who try to change parties and the more or less spontaneous forms in which they organize and mobilize, but with models of structuring, indeed institutionalizing, internal party democracy. Undoubtedly, the e orts of those who try to democratize parties—like the many activists of Momentum—are crucial in order for party reforms to succeed; they enable parties to, as Ignazi (2017, 264) puts it, ‘recast societal linkages’ and ‘immerse themselves again in society’. But if intra-party democracy is to be sustainable, re ection must be brought to bear on how best to regularize party members’ and activists’ participation in the party and how to empower 1

their voice.

This chapter begins by looking at existing understandings of how intra-party democracy may be

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institutionally organized. I examine the two dominant models of intra-party democracy that are found in both democratic theory and practice—which focus on candidate selection and direct participation, p. 36

respectively—and go

on to argue that they are not adequate to the task of making parties more internally

democratic and participatory. I suggest, rst, 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. Second, and perhaps even more pertinently, these models are often insu

ciently sensitive to the changing

patterns of participation I have mentioned several times before. What is missing from these models, in particular, are fora of discussion and debate, in which the party base can critically question the status quo and devise alternative positions on speci c policies as well as the party’s more general direction. It is these fora that parties need to establish and empower to make internal democracy meaningful. 2

Against this backdrop, I then outline what I call a deliberative model of intra-party democracy. At the

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centre of this model are processes of preference-formation and discussion at the partisan base, in particular the deliberations of local party branches and other activist groupings. I argue rst that these traditional sites of partisan activism provide favourable circumstances for good quality deliberation, and then examine several ways in which their deliberations could be connected to decisions. In doing so, I also suggest a set of novel institutional designs that activists and practitioners can avail themselves of, in particular problemoriented fora, partisan deliberative networks, and deliberative party conferences. These are intended as concrete proposals for institutional renewal that can be modi ed in accordance with the particular design needs of speci c political parties, and will be developed further in the remainder of the book. In closing, I run through several objections facing a deliberative model of intra-party democracy and show that they are less weighty than might at rst appear.

Why a Deliberative Model of Intra-party Democracy?

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To see the relative merits of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy, it is necessary rst to audit the

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main alternatives to it: the candidate selection model and the direct participation model. These are the two standard models of intra-party democracy, meaning that they are the most common ways of thinking about democracy within parties, both in political practice and in scholarship on parties. In this section I want to show that these models are, by themselves, inadequate. A major reason for why is that they bracket out p. 37

processes of preference-formation, which has adverse implications for the capacity of parties to link citizens to political decisions in a democratic fashion. Another reason, as will become clear, has to do with citizens changing participatory demands: to the extent that citizens seek political self-actualization, candidate selection or direct participation within parties has much less to o er than one might be inclined to think.

Consider rst the candidate selection model. This is arguably the most common conception of intra-party

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democracy in academic scholarship on the topic. Candidate selection refers to the ‘nonstandardized and predominantly unregimented particular party mechanisms by which political parties choose their candidates for o

ce’ (Hazan and Rahat 2010, 4), and the normative model of intra-party democracy that

focuses on candidate selection holds that those mechanisms should be inclusive and give a maximally large number of members the opportunity to voice their preferences. Some qualify the focus on participation, arguing instead that the ‘best candidate selection method’ is not necessarily the ‘most democratic of selection methods in terms of its adherence to the participatory principle alone’ (Hazan and Rahat 2010, 176). What they propose instead is that there are other important democratic requirements candidate selection ought to meet, such as that selection procedures should also be reasonably competitive and designed in such a way as to ensure that women’s descriptive representation on the party list is adequate. But few advocates of intra-party democracy qua candidate selection would be inclined to deny that broad participation is central. This model is problematic for at least two reasons. First, for many active party members and activists, it

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may simply not provide a su ciently meaningful channel of participation. Especially those who want to engage on a more regular basis are likely to become disenchanted when internal participation involves only candidate selection. This is a real problem because it is usually these more active and committed party members that sustain a party’s ties to the citizenry, since they often act as ‘street-level’ representatives of the party that enable the party to remain attentive (or at least signal attentiveness) to citizens’ concerns— think of practices such as door-to-door campaigning, or setting up party stalls at the local market, where passers-by can talk to party members. Furthermore, reducing intra-party democracy to candidate selection is also likely to appear insu

cient in the eyes of those party members (or, indeed, potential party members)

who, for instance because they were not socialized into relatively stable political identities, demand more individualized and exible forms of participation. This is problematic in an age where, as we saw, more and more citizens—and especially the young—prefer non-traditional political participation of this kind (Dalton 2008; Gauja 2015a; Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017; Norris 2002; Stolle et al. 2005). These two observations lead to a simple conclusion: to reconnect the party with the society, a model of intra-party democracy must o er its active members and supporters more substantial participatory opportunities than merely selecting candidates. p. 38

The second problem the candidate selection model holds is that it treats members’ preferences as simply given.

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But I want to set aside this problem for the time being and return to it after outlining the second standard model of intra-party democracy, since the second model is plagued by this problem as well. The second standard model of intra-party democracy, then, focuses on direct participation. This model of

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intra-party democracy operates with a much ‘thicker’ conception of participation than the candidate selection model. It holds that, rather than indirectly in uencing the party’s decision-making through selecting candidates, party members should be able to translate their preferences directly into decisions. Most commonly this involves membership ballots, in which policy or personnel questions (which are usually pre-selected by the party leadership) are referred to the members for a direct decision. Since the mid-1990s, parties across the democratic world increasingly made use of such ballots (Scarrow 2014, 181– 5). Another well-known example of direct participation within parties are ‘rotation schemes’ for MPs. In the 1980s, the German Greens have experimented with such schemes. The idea was to limit the term of o

ce to

two years (two years less than the full legislative term of four years) in order to ‘prevent the estrangement of MPs from their grass roots’ (Poguntke 1992, 244; also see Scarrow 1999), and to give more people the opportunity to directly in uence policy making processes. Although the direct participation model grants party members more in uence than the candidate selection model, it holds a number of problems that make it ill-suited as a self-standing model of intra-party democracy. If a party adopts rotation system for o

ce holders, the lack of expertise of those who have just

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been propelled into o

ce may place disproportionate power in the hands of experts who lack democratic

authorization. Thomas Poguntke has noted this problem in an almost-classic study of the German Greens: [A] high turnover of MPs means that the informal power of permanently employed parliamentary

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assistants, who can rely on accumulated knowledge of parliamentary procedures, is likely to rise. Hence, rotation may lead to the situation where functional oligarchies replace democratically legitimized power centres. 3

(Poguntke 1992, 243)

Ultimately, this of course weakens, rather than empowers, party members.

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Membership ballots, on the other hand, may also cause a problem of disa ection similar to the one I have

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highlighted in the discussion of the candidate selection model. The reason is that in intra-party referenda, p. 39

the agenda-setter and the

initiator are often the same actor, namely the party elite (Hopkin 2001;

Faucher 2015; Katz and Mair 2009, 759; Sussmann 2007). Similar to the reality of ‘radical’ forms of popular sovereignty (see Chapter 1), the party elite controls both the question that is referred to the members for a decision and the timing of the referendum (cf. Wolkenstein 2018b). This lack of control over the terms on which the referendum is held may dishearten those partisans who want to have more in uence. Active and organized members might demand a right to initiate referenda themselves, for example. And where they already have such a right, they may want to be o ered more channels to promote their cause. Furthermore, by concentrating so much power in the hands of party elites, membership ballots may indeed have disempowering consequences. As Carty (2013, 19) points out, the kind of participation they o er is rather ‘atomistic’ in the sense that ‘individuals are isolated from one another and engaged in direct communication only with the party centre, in a fashion that inhibits their ability to act in common with each other’. This, he adds, ‘provides the party in public o

ce with the ability to manipulate a formally popular

decision-making process, by ensuring that members’ choices are constrained and limited to alternatives acceptable to the existing elite’. Are these problems intrinsic to the direct participation model? One possible reply to the argument I have

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just put forward is that direct-democratic forms of participation are as good as their design. When they are designed in such a way as to privilege elites, of course they are normatively troubling. But when this is not the case, they may also prove genuinely empowering, giving the majority of party members direct command over the party (on this point, cf. Altman 2011). In short, the problem with the direct participation model of intra-party democracy is not that direct participation is per se disempowering, but the fact that the model is often poorly put into practice. Clearly this reply has some force. Despite its poor empirical track record, it is certainly possible to imagine a well-designed direct participation model of intra-party democracy, which is not hijacked (as in the rotation model) or unilaterally controlled (as in membership ballots) by party elites. For example, the right to initiate membership ballots may be restricted to ‘ordinary’ party members, who in this way could determine 4

the exact question of the referendum, its timing, and how the nal decision should be implemented. But even if we concede that some of the direct participation model’s shortcomings may be contingent on institutional design, it is still inadequate as a self-standing model for intra-party democracy. This is because of the second problem the model holds: it presumes that only the act of expressing one’s p. 40

preferences is normatively and practically relevant.

Indeed, the direct participation model does not

valorize the process of preference-formation prior to the decision. Instead, people’s views and preferences are treated as simply ‘out there’. As I have mentioned earlier, this problem a ects also the candidate selection model. Both models draw on concepts of participation which revolve around expressing preferences but ignore the processes through which preferences come into being.

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Why exactly is this problematic? Primarily because it undermines the transformative potential of intra-

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party democracy. Democratic theorists in the deliberative tradition widely criticize such ‘aggregative’ conceptions of democracy, arguing that taking preferences as given risks cementing the existing state of a airs (Cohen 1989; Gutmann and Thompson 2004; Mansbridge et al. 2010). Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (2004, 16) put the classic worry in this way: By taking existing or minimally corrected preferences as given, as the base line for collective

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decisions, the aggregative conception [of democracy] fundamentally accepts and may even reinforce existing distributions of power in society. It’s main shortcoming, they argue, is that it does ‘not provide any process by which citizens’ views about

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those distributions might be changed’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 16). To understand this point, consider the potentially problematic e ect of involving the whole party

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membership, rather than just the active party members, in candidate selection procedures. Evidence suggests that making candidate selection thus inclusive ultimately buttresses the party leaderships’ power, since it strengthens those large groups of passive members who are ‘at once more docile and more likely to 5

endorse the candidates proposed by the party leadership’ (Mair 1997, 149). Contrary to the active members, who deliberate with their partisan peers, those passive members are not provided with an opportunity to jointly debate and question the leadership’s candidate choices. As a result, they are usually more inclined 6

uncritically to accept these choices. (Notice, however, that the problem here is not the candidate selection procedure’s inclusiveness per se, but the lack of opportunities for non-organized members to deliberate.) If this is correct, it should give proponents of the standard models of intra-party democracy pause. Intrap. 41

party democracy becomes obsolete as a means of

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recasting ties with society when it merely serves to

legitimize the position of party leaders and elites. This is the main de ciency of the two dominant models of intra-party democracy and the institutions they prescribe. A closely related problem is that the methods of preference expression we have auditioned so far—

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candidate selection and direct participation—hardly provide ways to challenge these methods themselves. In membership ballots, it is typically not possible to express a preference for using a di erent method of decision-making to deal with the issue at stake (cf. Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 16–17). Perhaps members think that a ballot is not the appropriate way to resolve the issue: they might think, for instance, that a yes/no referendum on a divisive issue could undermine party cohesion. But the ballot itself does not provide opportunities to raise these concerns and propose a di erent decision-making process. In candidate selection processes, on the other hand, key questions such as who is included in the selectorate need to be decided prior to the actual selection process. In practice, this decision is usually made in top-down fashion 7

by the party elite. Members are e ectively excluded from deciding on the terms of the decision-making process they are supposed to participate in at a later stage. But even if they had a say, it remains the case that the candidate selection model fails to specify a mechanism through which they can have a say. Because voting for particular candidates is considered the most, or perhaps even only, relevant mode of democratic expression, democratic arenas where party members can collectively debate on and decide their preferred candidate selection mechanisms are theorized out of the picture. Summarily, the candidate selection and direct participation models of intra-party democracy are concerned only with participation qua expressing views and preferences, but provide no room for participation qua forming views and preferences. This limits their democratic potential in important ways. What we need, I suggest, is a corrective to the limitations of these models.

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Deliberation as Corrective and Complement

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A possible way forward is to shift the centre of gravity from processes in which preferences are expressed

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and aggregated to processes of preference formation and clari cation. Most important amongst these processes is deliberation. Deliberation is a practice that involves jointly engaging in non-coercive dialogical exchanges about speci c issues. It is about nding agreements on, or getting clear about the nature and depth of disagreement over, these issues in conversation with others. All of this presupposes that people’s p. 42

positions and perspectives are, at least to

some degree, open to reassessment and revision. In this sense,

deliberation is transformative in its aspirations: a procedure to question, rather than reinforce, the status quo; and indeed, a procedure that takes (or principally intends to take) each person’s viewpoint seriously, thus also proving more attractive for individuals who seek self-expression and actualization in politics. This distinguishes it from the forms of ‘preference-aggregating’ participation we have considered up until this point. When we think about deliberation within political parties what naturally comes to mind are internal debates

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over ideology, policy, and personnel. We think perhaps also of party conferences, in which party elites give speeches and ordinary members respond. And possibly we think of everyday discussions among partisans, informal encounters where they talk about politics with their peers. Taken together, these and other intraparty deliberations form a complex arrangement of discursive interactions, a ‘deliberative system’ in which each component performs di erent roles (on the systemic approach to deliberative democracy, see the programmatic statement by Mansbridge et al. 2012). Not all of the system’s components are connected to decision-making procedures, and the quality of deliberation they produce will be very di erent. But each component contributes to a larger deliberative whole. Cast at the most general level, the main aim of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy would be to

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coordinate the party’s internal discussions and debates in such a way that the members on the ground are more connected to policy decisions. To that end, it appears that three things would have to be achieved: • First, that members on the ground deliberate about issues of common concern, and that they deliberate

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well; • second, that the preferences and opinions these deliberations generate are transmitted to the party

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elite, either face-to-face or (more likely so) through democratically elected delegates; • and third, that party elites and ordinary members engage in regular discussions where they explain to

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each other the reasons for why they think as they do, actualizing what one may call ‘deliberative 8

accountability.’

Before looking at the model’s di erent components, several clari cations about the nature of this model are p. 43

in order. First, the deliberative model would not

wholly replace candidate selection processes or

occasional direct-democratic initiatives, for these practices serve important functions in parties that deliberation by itself cannot serve. (It is for example a practical necessity in representative democracies that parties compose lists of candidates for election; and membership ballots can be useful in helping parties to increase the formal legitimacy of their decisions.) The point of the deliberative model is rather that it (a) corrects for the tendency of these practices to cement the status quo, and (b) complements these practices with participatory venues that emphasize discussion and debate. By o ering new opportunities to exercise voice, ones that cater better to the participatory demands of the active membership and of those citizens who prefer more individualized forms of participation, it can also counteract disa ection with the meagre opportunities for participation that the candidate selection and direct participation models provide.

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The second issue that needs to be clari ed concerns the main protagonists in the model. Why does the

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deliberative model of intra-party democracy centre on the deliberations of the ‘party on the ground’? Recall in this connection the ambition of the book to devise ways in which parties could re-establish a connection with the wider citizenry, immersing themselves again in society. To achieve that, it stands to reason that parties ought to empower rst and foremost ordinary members and activists, who are more or less directly in touch with the rest of the society—or at least aspire to bring citizens and the party closer in touch with one another, like the activists of the aforementioned Momentum movement. This means essentially that members at the partisan base must be given adequate power to in uence the party leadership and shape important decisions. While this does not preclude two-way communication between the party elite and the wider membership, it certainly involves placing limits on the discretion of party elites. Institutional designs must aim at neutralizing the kinds of power asymmetries that exist in most parties. (I return to this point below.) Notice that, in a deliberative model of intra-party democracy, the grass-roots activists and party members

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that are the main agents of intra-party democracy are not just are meant to serve as messengers or delegates of the constituents, as in more traditional conceptions of partisan ‘linkage’ (e.g. Lawson 1988). The emphasis on deliberation means that their task is not only to channel the inputs of citizens into the party, but also, and even more importantly, on processing these inputs discursively by pooling relevant arguments and specifying interpretations in discussions and debates. Thus, those actively engaging in the party are not merely messengers, but deliberative agents who jointly subject the information provided by citizens to critical scrutiny (cf. Ebeling and Wolkenstein 2018). In the next section, I look more closely at deliberation at the party base. In a later section, I discuss how

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these deliberations can be connected to decision-making authority, and how decision-makers can be held p. 44

accountable. Before proceeding though, it should be mentioned that less than a decade ago the idea that parties should be treated as sites of deliberation would have sounded somewhat controversial to many democratic theorists. I have alluded to this already in the book’s Introduction: for a long time, advocates of deliberative democracy regarded deliberation as incompatible with partisanship, the main worry being that partisans are essentially incapable of changing their minds because of their strong commitments, or are not interested in discussion in the rst place because they anyways ‘know what’s right’ (for an overview of these arguments, see Muirhead 2010; for contributions that address the [limited] compatibility of partisanship and democratic deliberation see Gundersen 2000; Williams 2000; Hendriks et al. 2007). But even if this position cannot be easily dismissed, it fails to acknowledge that there is an important di erence between (a) inter-party deliberation and (b) intra-party deliberation. The former is indeed prone to be insu

ciently dialogical, at least insofar as it involves clashes of incompossible policy preferences or

irresolvable disagreement over principles. This is arguably the type of partisan deliberation most theorists have in mind when they think of partisanship; hence their dismissive attitude. Intra-party deliberation, on the other hand, is much less susceptible to these problems as it usually proceeds on the basis of shared values and principles (and possibly even partly shared policy preferences). These can facilitate respectful reason giving in circumstances of disagreement at other, less fundamental levels (see recent discussions of partisanship as a special form of ‘political friendship’, e.g. in Muirhead 2014, ch. 5; White and Ypi 2016, ch. 4). Furthermore, even if the deliberations of like-minded partisans are sometimes insu

ciently dialogical, this

may not necessarily give reason for concern. For once we accept that a party forms a self-standing deliberative system, we also need to acknowledge that the failures of one of its parts to produce good deliberation can be compensated for by another part if the individual parts are ‘concatenated in the right 9

way’ (Goodin 2008, 186). If, for example, a group of members at the party base polarizes over an issue, this is likely to be the result of bad quality deliberation, where views are reinforced without weighing alternative arguments. But polarization may help put the demands of this group on the agenda of other party groups

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and party elites, and these can critically re-examine those demands in their own deliberations. So, the p. 45

interaction between di erent deliberative agents

within the party can raise the overall ‘systemic’

deliberative quality, understood as the extent to which the party’s actions may be characterized as driven by arguments and reasons those involved in it consider important. (As I will argue in later chapters, however, this should not lead us to abandon procedural standards for deliberation.)

Deliberation and the ʻParty on the Groundʼ

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With this preliminary outline of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy in place, we are now in a

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position to look more closely at its individual components. Most important amongst these are, as I have argued, the deliberations of the party base. But what precisely is the ‘party base’? Which of the numerous organizations and participatory venues one typically nds at the bottom of the party hierarchy should be included in a deliberative model of intra-party democracy? This is the rst question I want to address in this section. The answer to this question will depend rst on the extent to which a given party grass-roots organization is connected to the wider citizenry (in the sense that it is not a ‘siloed’ and self-referential association but trying actively to engage with the public) and second on its capacity to produce good quality deliberation, understood in the more broad and general sense of genuinely dialogical non-coercive exchanges. If it satis es these two desiderata—connectedness to the citizenry and deliberative capacity—then it may be integrated into the deliberative model. To foreshadow, my contention is that it is only local party branches which, in virtue of their design as inclusive participatory institutions and their members’ commitment to discussion with like-minded partisans, satisfy these desiderata. Alternative grass-roots fora may satisfy one of the two, but not both, desiderata. We can proceed by a process of elimination here. Milieu organizations, such as party academies or partisan

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sports clubs, traditionally played a crucial role in connecting parties with their supporters. They o ered opportunities for partisans to socialize with like-minded people, thereby functioning as sites of political identity formation. The problem with these organizations is that they exist only in very limited form today. As a result of falling levels of party identi cation, milieu organizations have diminished to the point of insigni cance in most Western democracies (Scarrow 2014, 162). So regardless of whether they satisfy the desiderata—where they still exist, they almost certainly satisfy the connectedness desideratum—including them in a deliberative model of intra-party democracy is not a fruitful direction. We need to look for more vibrant sites of partisan engagement. Might the various online platforms through which parties involve their membership base be a good place to

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look for ordinary party members who are willing to debate? In recent times, parties have increasingly tried p. 46

to o er members

10

opportunities for online participation.

The target of these initiatives are partisans

who want to interact with a political party but commit as little as possible to it—partisans, that is, who do not want to regularly meet on a face-to-face basis with other partisans, and thus look for ‘ad hoc engagement’ with few costs and obligations (Gauja 2015a, 94). To cite just one example of such partisan online platforms, the British Labour party’s consultative forum Your Britain.org.uk allows members (as well as non-members) to communicate their ideas on how Labour policy should look in the future. The format of communication are online posts, which are collected and thematically organized by the website’s administrators. Insofar as online platforms of this kind give citizens easy access to political parties, they in principle have the potential to link parties to society. Thus, they are likely to satisfy the connectedness desideratum. However, their deliberative credentials are questionable. This is principally because they work on a nocommitment basis: people can vent their ideas and log o . There is no requirement to justify one’s statements and claims, nor will participants be inclined to respond to others’ concerns. Coleman (2004, 117)

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has observed this in Labour’s 2003 Big Conversation online consultation exercise, the predecessor to Your Britain: C2.P38

[N]obody responds to what anyone else has said, rather like a phone-in programme in which caller after caller makes a short speech and then disappears into the ether.

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Online fora of this kind, Coleman (2004, 117) concluded, ‘lack any scope for interactivity’ (on the deliberative defects of online fora, see also Sunstein 2017). If this is true, then partisan online platforms 11

seem ill-suited as basic building blocks of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy.

For as I have

noted, deliberation presupposes a level of dialogic interactivity. People must be willing to invest time and 12

intellectual resources in formulating arguments and engaging with others’ viewpoints.

Some readers might still think that I am painting an overly negative picture of online deliberation. Has the p. 47

rise of what Gerbaudo (2019) calls ‘digital

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parties’—most notably M5S in Italy, Podemos in Spain, and

the (much less successful) Pirate Parties—not led to the establishment of deliberatively functional and socially well-connected fora within parties? Digital parties may be characterized as the ‘translation of the business model and organizational innovation of digital corporations to the political arena and their application to the idealistic project of the construction of a new democracy in digital times’ (Gerbaudo 2019, 6). To achieve the latter goal, they have created online platforms for collective decision-making and deliberation—the most well-known being perhaps LiquidFeedback, Consul, or Rousseau—that allow citizens to participate via their laptops or smartphones. Can these participatory platforms satisfy our two desiderata? C2.P41

I think not. Research shows that, while the digital parties’ online platforms are not entirely nondeliberative, they are rst and foremost a place where party leaders ‘verify the level of support they enjoy 13

among the [base]’ (Gerbaudo 2019, 18).

Moreover, they are ‘skewed towards … plebiscitary democracy,

centring on initiatives and referenda proposed by the top, rather than towards … participatory democracy, with individuals intervening actively in strategy building and policy developments’. So, even if these platforms may succeed in establishing some sort of connection between the party and the wider citizenry, and even if the citizens who use these platforms exhibit ample deliberative capacity, it seems as though the 14

platforms were never meant to enable deliberation in the rst place (Deseriis 2017; cf. also Caruso 2017).

What are we to make of all this? I suggest that we do not dismiss online deliberation once and for all, but

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still make other sites of partisan deliberation the centrepiece of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy. The sites of deliberation I have in mind are local party branches. In most parties (that is, in most 15

developed democracies other than the US, where parties are quite di erently organized), p. 48

are the smallest cells of party organization. They

local branches

consist of groups of party members who meet in regular

intervals to discuss politics and coordinate party activities in their local community, including door-to16

door campaigning, organizing party events, and providing political information to citizens.

The members

who attend these meetings usually hold a strong commitment to the party, and voluntarily spend considerable amounts of time engaging in grass-roots politics. Party branches unambiguously satisfy our two desiderata of connectedness and deliberative capacity. First, they are typically closely linked to the local communities in which their members are based. They are directly in touch with the local constituency, and have the authority to delegate representatives to 17

hierarchically higher party bodies to make these concerns heard.

(I will say more about delegation below.)

For many aspiring party members, moreover, local branches provide the starting gate for their politically active life. Where they exist, they are the primary contact point for those who want to engage in the party, allowing citizens to get to know other like-minded people and participate in a range of activities with 18

them.

Thus, although their vibrancy has decreased as party membership gures fell over the previous

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decades, they are still crucial for sustaining the party’s roots in society (Scarrow 2014; also see Clark 2004; Pattie et al. 1995). C2.P44

Second, local party branches are, as it were, ‘natural’ deliberative fora. Deliberation typically occurs at the branches’ regular meetings, where activists, ordinary party members, and some party o

cials convene to

discuss local issues and current politics. These meetings are likely to exhibit characteristics that are typically thought to promote good deliberation, namely (1) a relative equality of opportunities to in uence the deliberative process and (2) a relative diversity of viewpoints which ensures that issues are considered from multiple angles (on these criteria, see Mansbridge et al. 2010, 65–9). Beginning with (1), participants in party branch meetings may enjoy relative equality because social status di erences are typically diluted in a partisan context. Membership in parties can equalize status inequalities by giving people of less advantaged social backgrounds the opportunity to engage in politics as equals (Cohen 1989, 31). This means p. 49

not only

that membership in a party gives underprivileged people an equal standing with their political

adversaries (that too). Party membership is also a source of equality among allies. More particularly, it is the partisanship—the identi cation as part of a collective promoting shared political and social goals—in party membership from which a sense of equality and solidarity with fellow party members ows. As Nancy Rosenblum argues, partisanship so conceived is characterized by an ‘avowed connection to what “people like me” value, think, and do politically’ (Rosenblum 2008, 344). It is about recognition for those one stands together with in the political struggle, and about a sense of being at home with those people. In party branches, this sense of ‘being at home’ is further reinforced by the fact that members know each other well. As a result of their regular meetings and their joint engagement in the local community, they will be familiar with each other’s backgrounds and personal histories, and friendships will have germinated over time. C2.P45

Moving now to the (2), to what extent do participants in local party branch meetings exhibit a diversity of viewpoints? Is it not more likely that they hold rather similar views? After all, they are committed to the same political party and based in the same local context. However, this might not dramatically limit opinion diversity. On the one hand, most party branch members are not professional politicians, but politically committed lay citizens who pursue di erent kinds of professions; and their individual occupational 19

backgrounds and corresponding everyday experiences are likely to result in a plurality of perspectives.

On

the other hand, opinion diversity may also be a consequence of age di erences between the members. For example, young partisans who have just started their work in the party in the local district might enthusiastically promote new ideas, whilst older members may be more concerned with protecting past accomplishments. These kinds of con ict are particularly likely to occur in large and established parties 20

where the average age of party members tends to be higher than the average age of the population in large.

To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that all local party branches one nds across Western democracies will

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exhibit the just-described characteristics. Party branches are diverse and some of them may indeed have serious deliberative defects—they may, for example, be colonized by strongly polarized party members who deliberately ignore facts that support alternative positions. All I am claiming is that, given the tendency of these groups to be socio-economically diverse, and given the integrative force of partisanship, party branches are overall likely to be promising sites of intra-party deliberation. p. 50

Someone might still object that the meetings of local party branches are more likely to produce loose everyday talk than serious political discussion. People attend these meetings to socialize with like-minded people, ‘talking about sports or having a summer picnic’, rather than to debate politics (Katz 2013, 52–3). But though I do not want to deny that some of the activities of party branches are not exclusively about deliberating political issues (party branches for example often organize events for the local community, where political debate plays a minor role), it is unlikely that their members generally eschew this sort of discussion. Even if some members are less politicized than others, their shared political commitment will

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prompt regular political discussions, since it brings with it a heightened sensitivity to particular grievances 21

in society as well as a sense of responsibility for resolving them.

It might also be asked what the role of more spontaneous and less institutionalized forms of within-party

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activity may be in a deliberative model of intra-party democracy? Above I have mentioned the partisan movement Momentum, and highlighted the productive role its activists play in reconnecting the British Labour Party with the wider society. The forms of activism chosen by Momentum are much less formalized than the activities of party branches; some of it occurs on an ad hoc basis, for instance in targeted campaigns that are intended to involve or mobilize a particular group of people at a particular point in time, rather than in more or less regular meetings that take place in the same venue and serve mainly the purpose of discussing. Where do these things t in a deliberative model of intra-party democracy? Should they be embraced or treated with caution, given that they might operate beyond, indeed circumvent, the local party branches I have singled out as core elements of the model? At a general level, there is no reason not to embrace more spontaneous bottom-up activism within parties.

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If we conceive parties as deliberative systems in their own right, where what happens in one segment of the party might productively in uence what happens in another, even those within-party movements that try to bypass traditional party branches can contribute positively to deliberative democratization from below. Momentum, to use the example again, avowedly wants to o er channels for political participation and deliberation that speak to people who ‘don’t nd [local] party meetings friendly or accessible’ (The Guardian 2016). What they sought to establish in their place are rst and foremost more inclusive fora for discussing p. 51

political alternatives, ones that are less devoutly ideological or inward-looking than many long-established local branches within the Labour Party are, or at any rate appear to many. Such ambitions can be of great help in democratizing parties when existing party branches are plagued by serious deliberative defects or are disconnected from the wider public. However, it is important to note that, precisely because forms of activism like those employed by Momentum are less regularized and formalized, they are di

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cult to ‘integrate’ into our deliberative model of intra-

party democracy, in the sense that it is hard to prescribe a particular role for them. Perhaps there is in any case no point in aiming at ‘integration’. After all, the strength of ‘irregular’ party activism is to unlock and mobilize political energies in a more or less spontaneous fashion, correcting existing democratic de cits over and above the formal and institutionally anchored participatory mechanisms or decision-making structures the party o ers. So, the best way of putting the point is to say that a deliberative model of intraparty democracy has plenty of room for spontaneous democratic action, but remains agnostic concerning the appropriate place or intensity of such activities. Anything else would indeed defeat the purpose of spontaneous activism and possibly even contradict the agentive view of party members on which the deliberative model builds.

The ʻSystemicʼ Uptake of Deliberation at the Party Base

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The next question that needs handling is how the deliberations of local party groups can be connected to

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substantive decisions. This section addresses this question, looking at mechanisms of delegation and accountability which normally should ensure the transmission of members’ deliberated preferences to the party elite. The section also canvasses novel institutional designs to make parties more deliberative if these mechanisms are defective. So, we now shift the focus from the party base as a site of deliberation to the ways in which it interacts with the other components of the partisan deliberative system.

Preference Transmission, Delegation, and Accountability

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In most political parties, the party base is indirectly linked to decision-making authority—note the analogy

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to indirect popular sovereignty, as discussed in Chapter 1. Typically, grass-roots members delegate to representatives at higher hierarchical levels of the party, just like voters delegate to MPs in elections. Essentially, there are two modes of intra-party delegation. The rst and more direct one is candidate selection. How does candidate selection allow party branches to bring their deliberated views to bear on decisions? Mainly through so-called ‘selectorates’. Those who select the candidates can in uence later p. 52

decisions by

22

choosing candidates with whom they share views and values.

If selectorate member A is

also a member of a party branch—and this quite often the case, especially if the method of candidate selection is decentralized (Hazan and Rahat 2010, 55–63)—then her selection is likely to be in uenced by the deliberations of her branch. In a pre-selection meeting, for instance, the branch’s members may reach a reasoned agreement regarding which candidate to support, and commit A to select accordingly. C2.P53

Furthermore, selected candidates may themselves be members of party branches, and correspondingly ground their decisions in their branch’s deliberative judgements. Undoubtedly, this is the most direct way for party branches to in uence policy decisions. It allows local deliberations to directly feed into the legislature. This is certainly not an unfamiliar scenario: in many parties the road to candidacy in legislative elections necessarily involves engagement at the local level, since the support of the local base is an important requirement to gain a place on the party list; thus, some elected MPs will inevitably engage in a local branch. When that is the case, the members of the party branch can also hold their parliamentary delegate accountable by demanding explanations and justi cations for her decisions in the group’s regular 23

meetings, thus actualizing a form of deliberative accountability.

The second and more indirect mode of delegation is what I call multi-level delegation. By this I mean that

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elected delegates of the party branches carry the branches’ deliberative judgements to various assemblies at di erent levels of the party hierarchy, where they are either channelled into decisions or, alternatively, delegation proceeds to higher organizational levels. Multi-level delegation is a hallmark of parties that adopt a territorial organizational structure comprising several hierarchical organizational levels. Typically, this form of organization implies that the membership is represented at all organizational levels by a members’ or delegates’ assembly, which is composed of or elected by the party membership, with the local and regional assemblies as well as the national party congress constituting ‘the supreme decision-making organs of the party at the respective organizational echelons’ (Biezen and Piccio 2013, 43). In these assemblies, and in the party congress, the branches’ judgements are again made the subject of deliberative 24

reappraisal. p. 53

In addition, delegates can be held accountable by the branch members when they return from

the assemblies. Just as in

cases where members of party branches hold a seat in the legislature, they can

respond to their questions and explain them why decisions played out as they did.

Empirical Challenges to Preference Transmission

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These are the two standard ways for party branches to link their deliberations to decision-making authority.

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To the extent that they permit communication ows between the party base and the decision makers in the party, they can in principle provide the kind of bottom-up linkage I have earlier singled out as desirable. Once we consult the empirical literature on political parties, however, doubts arise as to whether these modes of delegation work su

ciently well to perform their linkage function. C2.P56

First, if multi-level delegation is to successfully connect the party branches’ deliberations to policy 25

decisions across several hierarchical levels of the party, it needs to proceed largely from the bottom-up.

Otherwise the party branches’ deliberations are likely to be bypassed by more powerful actors in the party. In reality, though, parties seldom work in this way (Houten 2009). Even if party laws prescribe a bottom-up

organizational structure (as it is the case in many European countries), and even if the parties formally adopt such a structure, they are de facto organized from the top down, or indeed stratarchically, as in Katz and Mair’s much-discussed cartel party model (Katz and Mair 1995 and 2009). On the latter model, the relationship between party members and the party leadership is in fact characterized by ‘mutual autonomy’, which is to say that the party’s di erent hierarchical levels are e ectively decoupled from one another. At best, real existing parties ‘combine bottom-up and top-down government’, but even in those cases the deliberative judgements of the party base are often overruled by party elites (Allern and Saglie 2012, 966; for another case study, see Carty and Cross 2006). Second, parties across Western democracies increasingly adopt candidate selection methods that shift

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power away from the party branches and activists to the passive and uninvolved membership (and sometimes even to non-members) (Hazan and Rahat 2010, 39–44). I have earlier alluded to this tendency. According to one prominent commentator, this is ‘one of the most commonly distinct trends we see today’ (Mair 1997, 149; also see Katz and Mair 2009, 759). Parties tend to make selectorates more inclusive, which carries the aura of greater internal democratization but often diminishes the in uence of party branches p. 54

and their

activists on the selection of the candidates. For example, party primaries in several parties in

Germany, New Zealand, and Finland formally incorporate all party members in the selectorate and thus concentrate the power over the party list in the hands of members who ordinarily engage little (or not at all) in the party, and in any case are more inclined to support the candidates nominated by the party leadership (Rahat 2013, 138; Hopkin 2001). By implication, this decreases the extent to which the deliberative judgements of party branches impact on election candidates. In sum, the standard pathways of linking the deliberations of the party base to substantive decisions appear defective in most contemporary parties— re ecting the more general tendencies of party failure I have touched upon in previous chapters.

Making Parties more Deliberative

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How might one bring the deliberations of party branches to bear on policy decisions despite the

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unfavourable institutional environment most parties provide today? One way that is consistent with the propositions laid out so far would be to make increased use of deliberative institutional designs within parties. Recent years have seen a proliferation of these kinds of institutions across established democracies —examples include deliberative polls, citizens juries, and other types of deliberative consultative fora—and it seems worthwhile to consider integrating them into parties, too. Indeed, practitioners could avail themselves of a vast array of deliberative innovations. In the nal part of this section, I want to suggest some possible institutional designs. Although mainly indicative—more concrete ways of organizing intraparty deliberation would have to be speci ed on a case-by-case basis—the following three proposals highlight ways in which parties could draw on their internal deliberative resources to strengthen the link between the members on the ground and the party elite. 26

The most obvious deliberative institutional design is what one may call a problem-oriented forum.

This

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kind of forum is a specially established assembly for deliberation over one or multiple predetermined issues. Problem-oriented fora could for instance convene the members of several randomly selected party branches in a larger deliberative setting to devise a strategy for the party in a particular policy eld. They could make tasks like drafting a party or election manifesto a more collaborative and interactive exercise, and its results are likely to enjoy more legitimacy than if such tasks are left to a small elite. p. 55

An innovative approach to using party branches as problem-oriented fora has been taken by the Australian Labour Party (ALP). In December 2011, the ALP’s party conference endorsed the establishment of issuebased branches, called Policy Action Caucuses (PACs). PACs are established and run by party members; setting them up requires thirty members. Once established, they ‘receive nancial support and resources from the party in the same way as a geographic local branch, and [they are] entitled to convene meetings,

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policy forums and put policy motions to conference’ (Gauja 2015a, 98). This provides party members with an opportunity to pool relevant knowledge relating to a particular issue and work out policy proposals. While the deliberative credentials of PACs have yet to be examined, it seems clear that issue-based fora of this kind are a vehicle of membership empowerment that is much in line with the institutional recommendations put forward here. Second, to handle bigger deliberative tasks, single fora could also be ‘networked’ (on the idea of deliberative

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networks, see for example Rummens 2012). This design bears resemblance to the way in which internal sites of deliberation would ideally interact in multi-level delegation. A partisan deliberative network would comprise a number of dispersed fora of deliberation within the party that are linked together. In such a network, local branches would form single nodes that address limited aspects of speci c issues in their deliberations, perhaps with an eye to the demands of their local constituency. The information from each node would subsequently be channelled together so that their recommendations can guide decision-making in large. Upon concluding its deliberations, each branch could for example elect a representative to a single national forum, which in its turn could pool all the deliberative judgements of the party branches across the country and work out a highly integrative decision. Note that establishing partisan deliberative networks might not require much institutional e ort. After all,

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according to much recent research, parties are in any case best conceived in terms of networks of partisans, 27

that is, dispersed and decentralized systems of interconnected partisan groups.

If this is true, then making

these networks more deliberative would involve simply improving the channels of communication that connect individual partisan groups, and coordinating their deliberations better. So, networked partisan deliberation might have plenty of pre-existing resources to build on. The third and nal institutional design I want to sketch here is a partisan deliberative conference. This type of

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deliberative assembly di ers from the problem-oriented forum in that it brings grass-roots members together with party elites, rather than convening the members on their own. Its chief purpose is to p. 56

strengthen

accountability by promoting face-to-face encounters between members and elites, in which

they ‘ask questions and give answers, exploring whether or not they remain mutually aligned and whether the grounds of their alignment might have changed’ (Mansbridge 2009, 384 fn. 57). This strong focus on member-elite contact, accountability, and mutual justi cation also distinguishes a partisan deliberative conference from normal party conferences, where usually much less emphasis is placed on party leaders and ordinary members talking at ‘eye level’ and on the ‘deliberativeness’ of the exchanges (see Robin Pettitt 2007; Ebeling and Wolkenstein 2018). Moreover, partisan deliberative conferences need not result in immediate collective decisions. They could also only prepare the way for decisions that are taken at a later point in time, or be organized with a retrospective outlook to evaluate previously taken decisions. One potential use of partisan deliberative conferences is to supplement direct democratic procedures. For

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example, the members’ conferences the German SPD organized in several federal states prior to its membership ballot on the 2013 coalition agreement with the CDU/CSU allowed large numbers of members and activists to debate the terms of the coalition pact face-to-face with the party leadership. In these conferences, the party leadership was compelled to explain the reasons for their support of the ‘grand coalition’ and engage in two-way communication with the membership. While the party base in the end supported the coalition agreement, the initial resistance by segments of the membership (notably the JUSOS, the party’s youth organization) that mobilized internal protest against the coalition, and the ensuing pressure on the leadership to more extensively justify the coalition agreement vis-à-vis the members, is indicative of the democratic potential of such conference-style fora. Readers might wonder at this point how much autonomy exactly party elites should be granted in an internally deliberative party. Should they have some discretion in the making of decisions (e.g. in parliament), provided that they take the outcomes of members’ deliberations as point of orientation? Or

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should they be mere delegates of the membership, who are meant to decide in accordance with the deliberated will of the party members without modifying it? The answer to this question is that party elites should indeed be granted some discretion. The reason for why has to do with the well-known limits of a purely delegative conception of representation (see Urbinati and Warren 2008, 400–1; Guerrero 2010): without some ‘room for manoeuvre’, party elites might struggle to translate the members’ deliberated preferences into decisions. This is true especially when a decision has to be made jointly with other parties or stakeholders. When that is the case, being bound to act strictly in accordance with the will of the membership may undermine the capacity of party elites to reach integrative compromises. At worst, it can lead to deadlock. Nonetheless, party elites must remain accountable to the membership in the way I have p. 57

outlined above. They must defend and justify their actions and decisions, and respond to members’ 28

activists’ concerns.

and

Otherwise the linkage between parties and citizens could not be sustained.

Importantly, this means that making parties more internally deliberative does not involve doing away with the ‘division of labour’ between party members and party o

cials. That would in any case be very di

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cult

to achieve in large, complex party organizations. Rather, making parties more deliberative involves more comprehensively democratizing the internal division of labour by introducing e ective deliberative accountability mechanisms. These mechanisms not only give party members the opportunity to question the party o

cials’ decisions and demand justi cations for them. They may also over time reinforce

solidarity among party elites and party members. For if members and party elites engage in regular exchanges about the party’s principles and ends, they may come to understand better each other’s authentic motivations and so build a relationship of mutual trust and respect. This is bound to further enhance the democratic character of the internal division of labour (on an analogous point, cf. Christiano 2012, 37–8). Another question that might be asked is whether the just-proposed institutional designs can be adopted by

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any party. Parties ultimately come in a variety of di erent forms, and it seems likely that both di erent organizational features and ideological commitments would a ect the feasibility of internal deliberative democratization. Absent in-depth empirical research on deliberation within parties, however, taking a de nitive position regarding the compatibility of deliberative designs with di erent party types is di

cult.

But given the variegated contexts in which non-partisan deliberative designs proved to work, I think it should be possible to experiment with such institutional designs in many di erent kinds of parties. A minimum condition would seem to be that their membership is organized to some degree, and that members and activists actually want to participate. Of course, there are some parties where enacting deliberative reforms is bound to be very di

cult. In radical

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parties on the fringes of the political system, for example, deliberation is likely to be of rather low quality, as members of those parties tend often to be uncompromising and uncooperative due to their extremist p. 58

29

political commitments.

Making these parties more internally deliberative in

the ways I described above

would be a great challenge. While it is certainly possible to imagine that the deliberative capacity of these parties could increase to the extent that they manage to win over more and more supporters from across society, and so become more internally diverse, without such shifts in the membership composition it is di

cult to see how deliberative reforms could be successfully implemented.

There certainly appears to be a great demand for voice and empowerment among present members and supporters of ideologically more radical parties such as the many so-called ‘populist’ parties that have sprung up in many Western democracies. Arguably, one of the main reasons why the latter are increasingly gaining electoral ground in established democracies is that they promise to give voice and agency back to sections of the citizenry that were left behind by mainstream politics. But note that it is doubtful that this demand for voice amounts to demand for deliberation. For insofar as supporters of ‘populist’ parties endorse the standard claim of these parties that the people constitutes a uni ed collective with few or no internal divisions (Müller 2016)—or perhaps more accurately: insofar as they view themselves as being part of a 30

uni ed people—probably they will in any case see little point in deliberating.

After all, if the people stand

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as one, there are simply no substantial internal disagreements that have to be deliberated. Instead, and consistent with the demands of their parties, they will ‘support direct democratic mechanisms and other strategies that allow an unmediated relationship between the constituencies and the leader’ (Kaltwasser 2014, 479). This means that they will probably also be content with what I have above called ‘direct representative democracy’, where charismatic political leaders communicate seemingly ‘directly’ with their supporters through social (and other) media (Urbinati 2015).

Some Objections

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Although I have responded to a number of objections throughout the chapter, it might still be worried that

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some of the arguments I have laid out are excessively optimistic. The most obvious worry is perhaps that the near-universal decline of party memberships across democratic countries puts the possibility of internally deliberative parties out of reach (Biezen et al. 2012; Mair 2013a). Absent active members, it may be said, turning parties into deliberative assemblies in which reasoned collective judgements emerge from the membership base is illusory. Local-level membership is simply too thinned out and fragmented to be meaningfully involved in the party. p. 59

But this argument lacks persuasive force. The rst thing to say in reply is that, empirically, one should be

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cautious with overstating the decline of party memberships. Of course, membership parties are not what they once were. But their decline is not absolute in the sense that there are no active members left in today’s parties. In fact, several recent studies of party members suggest that ‘traditional party membership is far from obsolete’ (Scarrow 2014, 216). Though party membership gures declined in the last two decades, the number of politically active partisans remained surprisingly consistent (Ponce and Scarrow 2016). Second, notice that the claim that there are ‘too few active party members in order for deliberative intra-party democracy to be feasible’ presupposes that one could determine a membership threshold above which the latter is feasible, and below which it is not feasible. But it is hard to imagine how this could be done in a non-arbitrary fashion. To my mind at least, it is unclear how a convincing argument to the e ect that the feasibility of intra-party democracy hinges on a particular number of active members could look. Insofar as deliberation is a dialogical practice, perhaps two party members are just enough. A second challenge arises from what Peter Mair called the growing tension between the ‘demands of

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responsiveness’ and the ‘demands of responsibility’. Parties, the argument goes, are subject to increasing pressure from lobbyist and special interests as well as supranational or international bodies that ‘have a right to be heard and, indeed, the authority to insist,’ and this makes it more and more di

cult for them to

respond to the demands of their members (Mair 2013b, 145). In Europe, for example, the EU level has assumed responsibility in a large number of policy elds, which naturally limits the scope of policy goals parties can realistically pursue (Bickerton 2012; Rose 2014). In light of this, one may say that, insofar as party members make decisions that go against the ‘demands of responsibility’, party leaders lack the discretion to translate these decisions into policies. Both right-wing and left-wing critics of the EU have routinely complained about this. For example, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour party, recently said that the EU’s state aid rules, which all member states have to follow, could prevent Labour from fully implementing its democratically decided economic agenda. One cannot ‘regenerate an economy’, he complained, when one is ‘told by somebody else that [one] can’t use state aid in order to be able to develop industry in this country’ (The Guardian 2018b). The problem that institutional constraints reduce the range of policies that can be o ered and pursued is no doubt very real, but whatever one makes of it, it would be rash to conclude that this speaks against intraparty democracy. For there are always practical limitations that make the realization of political goals more di

cult, without it following that seeking to attain these goals is fruitless. Indeed, even if party leaders are

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constrained by rules and norms on which they have little in uence, that they try their best to translate the p. 60

demands of the membership (as well as their constituents) into responsive political decisions would seem a minimal condition for citizens to exercise collective agency. Such is in fact the rationale and justi cation of intra-party democracy, as I argued in the previous chapter. And one may add to this argument that, especially in an age where party leaderships have increasingly limited room for manoeuvre in their decision-making, and party members are less willing simply to accept whatever party leaders decide just because of leaders’ hierarchical authority, it is important that parties are equipped with inclusive deliberative mechanisms that enable party leaders and o

cials to explain and justify their decisions to the

membership. In this way, it can be rendered understandable to the party base why some political aims cannot be realized instantly or even on the longer run, which may in turn induce further deliberation about how the party should deal with the institutional constraints in place (in the Labour Party example mentioned in the previous paragraph, some have concluded that the best strategy to bypass EU-level institutional constraints is to leave the EU altogether). A third objection to the deliberative model of intra-party democracy I have proposed raises the issue of the

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slow-moving nature of deliberation. Finding agreements and compromises can take a lot of time when the issues at stake are discussed in a thoroughgoing fashion. Does making parties more internally deliberative thus mean sacri cing their capacity to act swiftly? If this were so, it would give us reason to question the desirability of an internally deliberative party. For oftentimes a party must act quickly so as to e ectively respond to emerging problems, or in order not to be outpaced by its adversaries in a campaign. In these situations—often critical moments—there is arguably little time to sit down and deliberate about what best to do. Otherwise the party risks ‘sleepwalking’ into trouble. This objection is plausible. Deliberation is indeed a slow-paced activity: its emphasis on re ection and

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dialogue stands in opposition to ‘fast thinking’ and hasty decision-making (Stoker et al. 2016). It is possible to temper the force of the objection, however, by pointing out that the proposal of making parties more internally deliberative does not involve abolishing the division of labour between party members and party o

cials. On the contrary, the model leaves room for discretion on the part of party o

cials and leaders. For

example, while party members deliberate about (say) general policy visions (e.g. in partisan deliberative networks) or more concrete policy proposals (e.g. in problem-oriented fora), party o

cials could take fast

decisions to respond to urgent problems. So long as they act broadly in line with the aims and ideals that party members have collectively de ned, and justify their decisions to the party members, ideally engaging in two-way communication with them (e.g. in partisan deliberative conferences), there is nothing 31

normatively troubling about this.

In this way, an internally deliberative party can retain its capacity to

respond to pressing issues. p. 61

Another way of answering the objection that more deliberation will slow down a party in troublesome ways

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would be to highlight the democratic value of slow-going deliberative procedures. By this, I mean that such procedures allow for a more careful consideration of the available courses of action, including hearing a greater plurality of di erent views (cf. Stoker et al. 2016). This is no doubt democratically attractive, at any rate more attractive than brisk top-down decision-making. One may also reasonably expect unhurried deliberation to deliver epistemically better decisions than the latter mode of taking decisions. So, perhaps it is possible to accept that there are circumstances when a party must be able to act quickly while maintaining that fast-paced action ought generally to be underpinned and contained by slower, more re ective and discursive ways of deciding. A party may plausibly be conceived as a ‘multi-speed’ organization not just with respect to forms of membership (see Scarrow 2014, ch. 6), but also with respect to its di erent, interconnected spheres of collective decision-making. A nal but important argument that could be held against a deliberative model of intra-party democracy is that it implies a return to the old ‘mass party’ model, which, as many commentators have objected, is outdated, being as it is ‘out of sync with the opportunity structures for political mobilization in

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contemporary democracies’ (Biezen and Romée Piccio 2013, 45). This objection is more complex than might at rst appear, so let us unpack it step-by-step. To begin, what might the mass party and the deliberative party share in common? The mass party was a type of party organization that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of extended su rage. It incorporated previously disenfranchised segments of society, most importantly the industrial proletariat and religious Catholics, into the political process. Often this model of party is glori ed as epitomizing bottom-up decision-making and the empowerment of the party base, and it is here that one may detect a parallel to the deliberative model of intra-party democracy. But there are important di erences between the mass party and the internally deliberative party envisaged

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in this book. Consider rst the formal structure of internal democracy in the two-party models. The mass party’s bottom-up process is meant to unfold over several levels of organizational hierarchy. Preferences are supposed to be ‘passed on’ from the branches to local and regional assemblies to the national party congress. While this ‘multi-level’ model of preference transmission is in principle an appealing way of designing intra-party democracy, in practice it has proven largely dysfunctional, in the sense that it failed e ectively to democratize the parties, and possibly even promoted internal oligarchy (for classic treatments of the mass party and its organizational defects, see Michels 1989; Blyth and Katz (2005, 37) explain the problem as follows. If party was the political arm of a particular social segment, then it followed that the party on the p. 62

ground should control and direct the party in public o

ce

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which is in e ect its delegate.

However, since the party congress (or equivalent body) cannot be in continuous session, it needs to elect an executive committee to act in its place. This executive then becomes the core of a central o

ce that, though nominally subordinate to the party on the ground, in fact solves the

coordination problem of networking leaders, members and constituents by e ectively rising above 32

all of them.

The internally deliberative party I propose is (amongst other things) intended to correct for this democratic defect. It aims at minimizing the distance between party members and party o

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cials by o ering novel

deliberative institutions like partisan deliberative conferences or problem-oriented members’ fora, through which members can more directly exercise in uence on party elites and hold them accountable. This may involve bypassing di erent hierarchical levels of the party. In this sense, one may say that the deliberative party seeks to deliver the democratic promise of the mass party—but it does so in an entirely di erent way than intended by the traditional mass party model. The internally deliberative party also di ers from the mass party in that it is, well, internally deliberative. Because it relied on strong social segmentation, the mass party did not have to place particular emphasis on internal deliberation: its membership could be expected to have largely aligned preferences (e.g. a clearly identi able class interest). Benevolent party elites could simply ‘read o ’ these preferences and weave them into a cohesive partisan agenda. To the extent that political discussion among members did occur in real existing mass parties, moreover, its purpose was not so much to induce re ection but to reinforce class consciousness and mobilize ‘the masses’ for political action (Duverger 1990, 39–40). The deliberative party, in contrast, does not assume mainstreamed preferences or ‘class consciousness’ among party members. That would in any case be a dubious supposition in an era where the class roots of party ideologies are—to put it mildly—loosening. Instead, the deliberative party starts from the presumption that the members of a party do not necessarily favour the same policies for society, and sometimes even disagree on how the shared principles they subscribe to should best be interpreted. This triggers a demand for procedures of mutual justi cation and compromise: absent xed, pre-politically established preferences, the preferences of party members and activists have to be developed in a give-and-take of reasons, in continuous discussions about aims articulating how political power should be exercised and what

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appropriate alternatives to the status quo there might be. It is these exchanges that the deliberative model p. 63

of intra-party democracy takes to be the central ingredient of any internally democratic party; it

is these

exchanges that it seeks to empower. Thus, it does not herald a revival of the mass party but di ers sharply from it. It should be clear now that the objection that I am simply suggesting to revive the mass party in deliberative

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guise fails. Here is a nal related point. While there can be no doubt that the mass party, with its reliance on the mobilization of a particular segment of society, is ‘out of sync’ with today’s opportunity structures for political mobilization, the deliberative party proposed in this book is—as I have argued above—especially attuned to the structural changes that occurred since the age of mass parties. This is because its emphasis on preference formation and re nement through discourse and reasoning caters to the more individualist and cognitively mobilized citizenry of contemporary, post-industrial societies, whose members have the tools to develop their own preferences independently of their material circumstances (and correspondingly also are keener on political self-actualization than reinforcing group loyalty). It caters to those kinds of citizens because it allows them openly to express their views irrespective of whether or not these views are consistent with the party line, and, even more importantly, because it signals to them that their views are taken seriously in the process of internal will formation. These characteristics of the deliberative party— being able to speak one’s mind and being taken seriously—stand in stark contrast to the widespread perception of parties as hierarchical and ideologically streamlined organizations in which individual voices do not count and reasoned debate rarely occurs (cf. the analysis in Neblo et al. 2010). This might increase the attractiveness of parties as participatory venues and generate an incentive for politically committed citizens 33

to engage more in partisan politics (Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017).

Surely, making parties

more internally deliberative is no panacea for all the problems of popular dissatisfaction facing parties. But it can go a long way in meeting the demands of politically interested citizens for whom social bonds and political preferences are ‘a matter of taste and choice rather than of obligation’ (Streeck 2014, 123)— citizens who seek political self-expression without subordinating themselves to a bureaucratic leviathan.

p. 64

Conclusion

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In this chapter, I have argued for a deliberative model of intra-party democracy that centres on the

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deliberations of the organized party base. This model

corrects for the adverse e ects of standard models

of intra-party democracy, and complements these models with additional and more empowered participatory opportunities for party members. I have suggested that this could help parties recast societal linkages and bring citizens closer to government again, enabling them to realize the ideal of ‘popular sovereignty through parties’ that I defended in Chapter 1. Whether reforming parties in terms of the model I have proposed is viable would seem to depend in large

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part on the actual participatory preferences and demands of party members and activists, as well as on the deliberative credentials of real-world party branches. Although we have some evidence concerning the former—that is, the participatory preferences of party members and activists—and this evidence has been used to undergird the arguments that were developed in the present and prior chapters, there is still very little in-depth research on how party members and activists relate to their respective parties more generally and what they expect in terms of internal democratization in particular. Clearly, this is an issue that merits empirical attention if the viability—and indeed also the desirability—of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy is to be established. There is even less evidence on intra-party deliberation, in particular the deliberations of ‘ordinary’ party members and activists. Possibly because the practice of deliberation has rarely been thematized in connection with parties, not even in the specialized literature on intra-party democracy (see Introduction),

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neither empirical scholars nor empirically-minded democratic theorists have paid much attention to it. However, not least because demonstrating that citizens actually engage in deliberations is an important way of establishing the potential of deliberative institutional designs (e.g. Mackenzie and Warren 2012; Neblo 2015), showing that there is indeed deliberation occurring within party branches would add weight to the claims and arguments made above and considerably strengthen the overall case for a deliberative model of intra-party democracy. If, contrary to the expectations I have articulated in this chapter, it turns out that political discussion in party branches is non-deliberative—if, for example, party members merely vent complaints without dialogically re ecting on each other’s viewpoints—or deliberation does not really occur at all, then the normative claims of this chapter may be treated not so much as prescriptions for institutional design, but, at best, as a yardstick for measuring how much actual parties are failing compared 34

with ideal ones.

But of course: this kind of ‘yardstick’-theorizing is emphatically not the ambition of this

book (and given the evidence I have marshalled in this chapter, my wager is in any case that members who regularly convene in party branches engage in proper deliberations). The remainder of this book will look closely at the two sets of empirical questions I have just alluded to—the p. 65

participatory demands of party members and

their general relationship to the party, on the one hand,

and the deliberative capacity of party branches, on the other. Its basis is a small but dense body of empirical material that was collected in group interviews with party members in two social democratic parties in Austria and Germany. As will be explained over the course of the chapters that follow, the methodological logic of the study is to take party members and activists seriously as agents involved in voluntary democratic activity, reducing them not to anonymous numbers but paying close attention to their attitudes and self-descriptions. Inspired by such work as Jane Mansbridge’s Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980), the aim is to enrich and supplement theory with original in-depth eldwork that enhances our understanding of democratic micro-practices that are highly relevant to democracy on a large scale (on the defence of such an approach, see also Herzog and Zacka 2019).

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7

I will in the following use the terms ʻparty membersʼ and ʻparty activistsʼ interchangeably, as I am mainly referring to people who are actively engaging in their respective parties. Wherever I refer to people who are formal members but do not engage actively, I shall make that clear. References to the possibility of such a model have surfaced on a few occasions in the relevant theoretical literature (see Cohen 1989; Teorell 1999; Biezen and Saward 2008; White and Ypi 2011), but a systematic treatment has not emerged yet. Of the existing treatments, Teorellʼs piece comes closest to a discussion of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy. Yet Teorell pays little attention to concrete institutional design questions, and his theoretical framework is by todayʼs standards outdated. This is why Kelsen, in a point that appears in an earlier edition of The Essence and Value of Democracy (1920, 24), thought that permanently employed bureaucrats undermine democracy, and that democracies, therefore, ought not permit what he called Berufs- und Fachbeamtentum. Notice that many parties have enacted statutory reforms to provide party members with the formal right to initiate an internal referendum. Again though, evidence suggests that it is far from clear whether awarding members those formal rights can outweigh the power of the party elite to shape the internal agenda (Sussman 2007; Detterbeck 2013). For an in-depth empirical study of these problems in parties in Great Britain and Spain, see Hopkin (2001). See also Faucher (2015) and Garland (2016, 25). Katz and Mair (2009, 759) suggest that this is in fact the party leadershipʼs calculus: ʻAlthough the objective is a kind of party oligarchy, the means ironically […] may be the apparent democratization of the party through the introduction of such devices as postal ballots or mass membership meetings at which large numbers of marginally committed members or supporters—with their silence, their lack of capacity for prior independent (of the leadership) organization, and their tendency to be oriented more toward particular leaders rather than to underlying policies—can be expected to drown out the activists.ʼ For an in-depth case study of British parties, see Mikulska and Scarrow (2010).

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8

9

10 11

12

13

14

15

16

17 18

19 20

It might be objected here that some of the just-sketched discursive interactions are already implied in existing conceptions of intra-party democracy. For example, in practice candidate selection processes are likely to involve deliberations among members concerning the strengths and weaknesses of di erent candidates and their agendas. However, none of these interactions are recognized as normatively desirable or practically relevant in existing articulations of these models. It is the distinctive feature of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy that it is sensitive to the broader significance of these discursive interactions. Note that there is nothing unfamiliar in thinking about parties in ʻsystemicʼ terms. Katz and Mair (1993) famously distinguish ʻthree facesʼ of party, casting the ʻparty on the groundʼ (i.e. the membership base), the ʻparty in central o iceʼ (i.e. the professionalized administrative body of the party) and the ʻparty in public o iceʼ (i.e. the party in parliament) as three di erentiated but functionally interdependent parts that interact with each other in a continuous fashion. Besides this more recent account, we also find references to internal functional di erentiation—the basis of a systemic understanding of party—in the classic literature on the topic, for example in Robert Michelsʼ classic Political Parties ([1911] 1989), where the functional di erentiation between party members and the party leadership is considered the root of internal oligarchy, or in Gramsciʼs Prison Notebooks ([1971] 2007), where it is highlighted that di erent elements of party have di erent characteristics and functions. Thus, Gramsci says that ʻIn analysing the development of parties, it is necessary to distinguish: their social group; their mass membership; their bureaucracy and General Sta ʼ (211). Recent empirical studies reveal a considerable change of party structures. Scarrow (2014) speaks in this context of ʻmultispeed memberships partiesʼ, in which a range of di erent membership options are o ered. More generally, it is important to emphasize that evidence concerning the ability of online discussion fora to promote reasoned and meaningful exchanges among citizens is very mixed, ranging from very promising (Polletta and Lee 2006; Price 2006) to rather disappointing results (Coleman 2004; Smith et al. 2013; for a comprehensive review of the recent literature on online deliberation, see Steiner 2012). Of course, it has also been shown in research on party blogs that committed online discussion can occasionally occur in a partisan context (e.g. Gibson et al. 2012). However, in these blogs, participants to discussion were virtually only partisans of the same stripe. Non-partisans rarely engaged, and it remained unclear whether anyone outside the party is aware of the debate. Thus, it appears that party blogs scarcely satisfy the connectedness desideratum. They might be reasonably deliberative, but are largely detached from the wider society. It is at any rate doubtful whether the radical democracy advocated by ʻdigital partiesʼ is not just a sham. As Gerbaudo (2019, 17) shows in his comprehensive study, ʻthe opening at the partyʼs bottom is accompanied by an increasing concentration of power in the hands of the charismatic party leader … and his or her immediate entourage. Rather than the “participatory democracy” promised on the tin, the reality of the online democracy seen in these formations and their “participatory platforms” corresponds to … a “reactive democracy” manifested in the dominance of forms of “passive democratic engagement” that are constantly retro-alimented by the leadershipʼs top-down interventionʼ. As Deseiriis (2017, 64) demonstrates, in the M5Sʼs online participation system Rousseau deliberation is actively suppressed: ʻusers are not allowed to discuss whether there is enough ground to call a vote on the expulsion of a party member, which political decisions should be opened to the party baseʼs input, or how the party program should be cra ed. To allow for this kind of agenda-setting debates would mean to create the conditions of possibility for the emergence of alternative and potentially conflicting political lines that would need to be mediated. But … the party in central o ice sees no value in the internal dialectic and intermediating function of traditional party organisms such as executive committees, regional councils or federations of local Meetups, national assemblies and congresses.ʼ Note that I do not mean to suggest that US parties could not draw on internal deliberative institutions. Although US parties have no direct equivalent to party branches, their ʻcounty committeesʼ serve similar local-level functions as party branches. Thus, they might exhibit similar deliberative characteristics as party branches. This issue must of course be settled empirically and cannot be discussed more here. Consider how the Austrian Social Democrats (SPÖ) define the functions of their local party branches: ʻWe inform the people in our area about political changes of all kinds. Above all, the branch (Sektion) is a place where people who live in the surrounding neighbourhood meet, talk to each other and help shape their environment.ʼ http://www.sektion.at/index.php?article_id=105, retrieved 19 January 2015. As Clark (2004, 40) notes, ʻarticulating interests to a local party can therefore be a way of getting an issue into the forefront of debateʼ. That party branches are highly inclusive was already highlighted by Maurice Duverger ([1954] 1990) in his classic study of political parties. According to Duverger, party branches are ʻwide openʼ—ʻyou only need to wish to belong to be able to do soʼ (39). Compare also empirical evidence showing that party members generally become more and more like members of the wider citizenry (Scarrow and Gezgor 2010). Empirical studies reveal that, especially in traditional parties on the le , older members o en hold more traditional (that

21

22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29

30

31 32 33

34

is, more le ist) views than younger members. Some of these older members even see themselves as ideologically at odds with the rest of their party (Haute and Carty 2012). Another point is that even if some of their exchanges do look like the reasoned deliberation theorists would like to see flourishing, this might not imply that they do not contribute to deliberation in a wider, more systemic, sense. Evidence from empirical studies of deliberation suggests that even loose everyday talk can serve deliberative functions. As Conover and Searing (2005, 281) argue, it provides people with an opportunity to explore di erent arguments, try out justifications for their views and ʻdevelop confidence about performing in the public arenaʼ. Empirical studies show that selectors tend to choose candidates according to this logic. As Gallagher (1988, 2) notes in a classic study of candidate selection practices, ʻthe values of the selectorate […] frequently have more impact than those of the votersʼ. Note that a potential shortcoming in this scenario is that a single party branch would gain disproportionate influence on policy decisions compared with those party branches which have no elected representatives among their members. Compare Robin Pettittʼs (2007) account of internal dissent at the party congresses of the British Labour Party and the Danish Socialist Peopleʼs Party. As I have said earlier, on my understanding this does not preclude leaving room for two-way communication between party elites and ordinary members, for instance in party conferences (see Robin Pettitt 2007). But certain institutional checks are necessary to restrict the discretion of the party elite, notably formal rules that require party elites to consider and take seriously the membersʼ judgements. Note that this proposition di ers starkly from the partisan deliberative fora Hendriks and her colleagues (2007) have examined. In contrast to these ʻstakeholder forumsʼ, which include representatives of di erent businesses as well as advocacy groups, the type of fora I am proposing here convene only grass-roots members of a single political party. This topic has recently received special attention in research on party politics in the US, see for example Desmarais et al. (2015). For a theoretical (and rather critical) statement on the ʻparty as a networkʼ, see Katz and Mair (2009, 761–2). In practice, one potential way of making this possible would be to hold deliberative conferences on a more regular basis, perhaps involving only selected representatives of single branches to reduce the scale of the event. For example, recent psychological studies suggest that supporters of so-called populist parties tend to score low on a personality trait called ʻagreeablenessʼ, which is to say that they are likely to be ʻegoistic, distrusting towards others, intolerant, uncooperative and [to] express antagonism towards othersʼ (Bakker et al. 2016, 305). ʻThe populist antiestablishment message—accusing the political elite of incompetence, insubordination and profiteering at the expense of the common people—matches a distrusting, tough-minded, cynical and intolerant personalityʼ (ibid.). These personality traits are likely to undermine deliberation, which is based on cooperation, mutual trust, and a general willingness to listen to what others have to say. A similar point is made by Jan-Werner Müller (2016, 55–6) in his recent book, What is Populism?: ʻIf there is only one, clearly identifiable peopleʼs will, which the leader or leadership can single out—what does one need intra-party debate for?ʼ This idea is powerfully captured in Mansbridgeʼs (2017) discussion of ʻrecursive representationʼ. Scholars of parties sometimes see this feature of the mass party as leading to the further decoupling of party members and party elites in the course of the second half of the twentieth century (cf. Katz and Mair 1995 and 2009). Empirical studies of the public willingness to deliberate reveal that those citizens who want to deliberate tend to be dissatisfied with existing partisan politics (Neblo et al. 2010). They look for opportunities to discuss politics which leave space for articulating individual views and what Neblo et al. call ʻrepublican consultationʼ, that is, communication between citizens and representatives in which the latter seek input from the former in forming political agendas. I think that more deliberative parties could cater to these demands and so make parties generally more attractive participatory venues (Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017). On the distinction between ʻyardstickʼ and ʻprescriptiveʼ theorizing, see Valentini (2012b, esp. 660). Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

3 Partisan Activism in the Age of Individualization 

C3

Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0004 Published: December 2019

Pages 66–C3.P70

Abstract This chapter addresses the following question: How do contemporary party members view themselves, their party, and their role in it? This question is important because the success of party reforms depends centrally on whether the newly-created channels of participation and engagement are recognized as meaningful and valuable by those who engage in parties (or are generally inclined to engage in them); and to nd out what could be considered meaningful and valuable by these individuals we need to understand what they expect from a party in terms of participation and opportunities to make one’s agency felt. The basis of the study, as will be explained in detail, are focus group interviews held with party members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), two parties that were chosen as empirical cases because Social Democratic parties are arguably on top of the list of the parties that may be considered ‘victims’ of the trend of shifting participatory norms, having lost much of their once-great electoral support across most of Europe. An important nding the chapter presents is the tendency of party members to demand (not more direct participation like membership ballots or the like but) more face-to-face contact and two-way communication with party elites and their fellow activists—which strengthens the general case for a more deliberative understanding of parties that the book advances.

Keywords: party membership, individualization, party democracy, social democracy, participation, activism, post-materialism Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Shifting tack from theoretical to empirical analysis, this chapter asks how contemporary party members view themselves, their party, and their role in it. This question is pertinent because the success of deliberative party reforms depends importantly on whether deliberative channels of participation and engagement would be recognized as meaningful and valuable by those who engage in parties (or are generally inclined to engage in them); and to nd out what could be considered meaningful and valuable by these individuals, we need to understand what they expect from a party in terms of participation and opportunities to make one’s agency felt. To be clear, given existing evidence there are very good reasons to think that deliberative participation is very well-suited to meet the participatory demands of citizens who wish to

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engage more politically or already are politically active (e.g. Neblo et al. 2010; Neblo 2015). This is a point I have repeatedly discussed in the prior chapters. But the evidence we have is also very general in scope; it is mainly based on large-N surveys that provide rough indicators but are not especially sensitive to party members’ and activists’ individual experiences and perspectives. Thus, a full defence of a deliberative understanding of intra-party democracy would need to dig a little deeper and take a closer look at the individuals who are central to reconnecting parties with society. The empirical basis for the chapter, as well as for the subsequent chapters, are focus group interviews held

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with party members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), two cases that were chosen because Social Democratic parties are arguably on top of the list of the parties that may be considered ‘victims’ of the trend of shifting participatory norms I have discussed, having lost much of their once-substantial electoral support across most of Europe. Notice also that Germany and Austria are paradigmatic examples of the relatively stable Western European democracies that are especially a ected by widespread disa ection with parties and a tendency of parties to collaborate, indeed collude, so as to maintain power (e.g. Detterbeck 2008; Müller 2002). How exactly these interviews have been conducted will be explained more below, and readers who are interested in a more detailed methodological discussion—as well as additional empirical material—may also turn to Appendix 2. p. 67

The chapter begins by developing a conceptual framework for investigating party membership, drawing

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rst and foremost on the literature on changing participatory demands and preferences I have already alluded to above. Taking Inglehart’s (1997) in uential modern vs. post-modern distinction as its point of departure, it contrasts a ‘modernist’ type of party membership with a ‘post-modern’ one. These two types of party membership correlate with very di erent dispositions concerning the relationship between the individual and the party. The subsequent sections introduce the research design and proceed with the empirical analysis, using the two types of party membership as a heuristic to interpret the empirical material. The concluding section relates the ndings to the argument laid out thus far, re ecting in particular on what the ndings mean with respect to party reforms. A key nding highlighted is that the active party members who participated in the study tend to demand more face-to-face contact and two-way communication with party elites and their fellow activists. This, I argue, strengthens the case for the more deliberative understanding of parties that the book advances.

Party Membership, Modern and Post-modern

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As already repeatedly mentioned, the way in which people participate or desire to participate politically

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changed considerably in the last four decades or so. The development can be summarized thus: duty-based and institutionalized forms of collective action have increasingly given way to individualized and direct forms of participation (Inglehart 1997; Norris 2002; Stolle et al. 2005; Dalton 2008; Gauja 2015a). Political parties have often been said to be the ‘primary victims’ (Gauja 2015a, 89) of these developments, having su ered from membership losses that have reduced their traditional organizational bases (Biezen et al. 2012; Dalton and Wattenberg 2001, 11; Mair 2013a; Ignazi 2017). Using Inglehart’s (1997) in uential terminology, one might say that the importance of party as a distinctively modern political form is increasingly undercut by post-modern participatory patterns.

Besides the uncontroversial fact that memberships are declining, however, we know relatively little about

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how party membership/activism as a practice has been transformed by said developments. Some recent research charts the diversi cation of forms of party a

liation, that is, the tendency of contemporary

parties to o er citizens a menu of di erent membership schemes that are tailored to their individual participatory preferences (Scarrow 2015; Garland 2016). However, much of this research concentrates mainly on the parties’ side of the equation, examining not so much how membership looks from the p. 68

perspective of the members themselves but how parties de ne it (see Lisi and Cancela, forthcoming, 2). There exists also a wealth of survey-based studies of the changing shape of party membership that focuses on such trends as the increased ‘emancipation’ (Kölln and Polk 2017) of party members, understood as the incongruence of members’ political views with the views of party elites (Narud and Skare 1999; Scarrow and Gezgor 2010; Haute and Carty 2012). Yet, while these studies do take seriously the perspective of party members, they scarcely capture the full ‘diversity of membership experiences and the range of in uences that impact upon what it means to be a party member’, having to do with the limited number of questions one can eld in a survey and the ad hoc nature with which questions are asked (Gauja 2015b, 235, 238; also 1

cf. Haute and Gauja 2015, 193, 200; Scarrow 2015, ch. 4). In sum, while there is plenty of reason to think that party membership, insofar as it still exists, makes itself visible and is enacted in numerous di erent ways today, we lack more detailed and substantive knowledge about party members’ particular motivations and their relationship to their party. As I have already said, in this chapter I want to take an in-depth look at how contemporary party members

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view themselves, their party, and their role in it. Understanding these things is key if we want to appropriately design new participatory channels within parties that are responsive to members’ selfunderstandings and participatory preferences. To start with, I want to develop a conceptual apparatus that can help us navigate the empirical material that has been collected in the focus groups with party members that were conducted for the present study. A useful point of departure is the observation that the transformation of participatory norms and demands from more duty- and group-based to more individualized participation falls together with broader cultural changes that occurred since the late 1970s or so, marking the transition from ‘modernity’ to ‘post-modernity’ (Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). This ‘post-modernization’ argument is of course not uncontested, but it has been in uential among scholars of parties and recently been shown to go a long way in explaining salient developments in party organization and membership (see Dalton and Wattenberg 2001; Gauja 2015a; Ignazi 2017; InvernizziAccetti and Wolkenstein 2017). As far as membership in political parties is concerned, one major consequence of the changes discussed under the heading of ‘post-modernization’ has been the decline of party membership gures (Dalton and Wattenberg 2001, 11), but this is not what I am interested in here. Rather, my primary concern is with how the practice of party membership, insofar as it still exists, has been shaped by large-scale shifts in participatory norms. To properly understand this, it is necessary to adopt a historically and sociologically grounded conception of party membership that does not conceive party membership as animated by p. 69

ostensibly ahistorical (and mostly material) ‘incentives’, but as re ecting di erent ways in which party members conceive themselves and relate to their parties in ‘modernity’ and ‘post-modernity’, respectively.

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If we follow the larger part of the contemporary literature on party membership and the more sociologically

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informed work in the eld of comparative party organizations, it does seem plausible to say that there exist distinctively ‘modernist’ and ‘post-modern’ forms of party membership, though that literature does not typically describe party membership in these terms. Forms of party membership that one may plausibly class as modernist initially emerged in tandem with the rst socialist and confessional mass parties that appeared across Europe around the end of the nineteenth century, and they constituted the dominant mode of party membership roughly up until the mid-1960s (Duverger 1954; Bartolini 2000; Kalyvas 1996). Because mass parties were built around relatively closed political communities, membership in one of them was not so much a matter of individual re ection or choice but of loyalty to the group that one was born into. As one observer puts it, the age of mass parties was an era where party members ‘were believed to “belong” to their parties’—joining a party ‘was seen instead as an expression of identity and commitment … rather than re ecting the outcome of a reasoned choice between the competing alternatives’ (Mair 2013a). Underscoring the group-centred and collective identity-driven nature of modernist party membership,

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studies of party activism often emphasize the importance of the ‘collective social bene ts’ that membership in the ‘cleavage-based parties’ of the early and mid-twentieth century provided (Scarrow 2014, 162–3). Chief amongst these bene ts is the nourishment of group identity. This was achieved not so much through including members directly in political decision processes—as we saw in the last chapter, mass parties in fact tended to be hierarchically organized and gave members little control over internal decisions (Duverger 1954; Michels 1911 [1989])—but via the many milieu organizations (e.g. sports clubs, women’s organizations, etc.) that were connected with the wider political movement and allowed members to take part in a variety of identity-reinforcing activities in their daily life (and have today almost entirely disappeared in established democracies). As noted, modernist party membership remained the predominant form of party membership up until the mid-1960s, as the mass party gave way to the ‘catch-all party’ (Kirchheimer 1966). It was only in the 1980s that an altogether new form of party membership that may plausibly be labelled post-modern emerged. Key to this development was the rise of what is usually called ‘post-materialist’ or ‘self-expression’ values (Ignazi 2017, 150–9). The standard explanation for this broader value change is that the generation born after World War II, having come of age under conditions of relative material security and growing a

uence,

increasingly began to emphasize a desire for individual self-actualization and self-expression (Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). Equipped with greater ‘political and cognitive resources’ than previous generations thanks to overall higher educational levels, they grew increasingly reluctant to ‘defer to party p. 70

elites

or to support a party simply out of habit’ (Dalton and Wattenberg 2001, 11), demanding instead

di erent, more direct forms of participation.

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These demands for a new, more individualist type of politics fuelled the formation of new political parties,

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notably Green parties (Poguntke 1992), and with it gave rise to a uniquely post-modern type of party membership. The latter sees party membership as individual choice (rather than a duty) and is structured around calls for more voice and direct participation, or at any rate less hierarchy and subordination to the dictates of elites. Importantly, evidence suggests that the expansion of self-expression values, and the rejection of traditional party politics that often went hand in hand with it, shaped the demands of party members across the political spectrum, over and above the members of the new parties founded in the 1980s (Dalton and Wattenberg 2001; Faucher 2015; Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017). This has led some authors to observe that in the ‘a

uent consumer cultures’ of our age, ‘[p]olitical participation as the duty

of a citizen’ has more generally been replaced by ‘political participation as fun: one personal preference like any other, rather than a collective obligation’ (Streeck 2012, 45; Stolle et al. 2005). Though ideological and political motives are still major reasons for why citizens join a party (Scarrow 2015, 177; Seyd and Whiteley 1992, 107; Haute and Gauja 2015), they do not join parties as members of a more or less homogenous social group of which the party is the political arm, but as individuals who ‘want “something” that ts their individual concerns’ (Ignazi 2017, 204; also see Faucher, 2015). Table 3.1 summarizes the features of the two types of party membership I have outlined. In short, while the

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modernist type of party member is animated by a sense of duty to a pre-existing social group, the postmodern type tends to ‘choose’ to join a party, in the sense of deciding between di erent political alternatives and engaging re ectively with di erent political aims and goals. Needless to say, this distinction is a highly stylized one; still, I take it to capture what are arguably major shifts in how party membership makes itself visible that can be traced in the existing conceptual and empirical literature on the p. 71

topic. In addition to these di erences, it seems plausible to expect age di erences to demarcate

modernist

from post-modern party membership, with the former tending to be older than the latter. There is of course no way to determine a precise cut-o

point above or below which individuals can be said to belong in one of

the two categories, but it is reasonable to assume that individuals who are—as the second decade of the twenty- rst century draws to a close—older than sixty- ve are more likely to fall into the modernist category. C3.T1

Table 3.1. Two types of party membership Modernist party membership

Post-modern party membership

Group-centred

Individualistic

Partisan allegiance acquired through socialization into socioeconomic/confessional groups (ʻparty membership as dutyʼ)

Partisan allegiance developed/sustained through critical reflection and cultural inputs (ʻparty membership as choiceʼ)

Less reflective about political preferences

More reflective about political preferences

Less demanding of voice

More demanding of voice

Below I will use the modernist/post-modern distinction as a heuristic to interpret the empirical material that has been collected for this study. The central question I pose is whether party members’ perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes regarding their own activity and organization may be interpreted in terms of modernist or post-modern expressions of party membership, respectively? Before proceeding, it is worth spelling out a few expectations that follow from the discussion of modernist and post-modern party membership. These serve not strictly speaking as hypotheses to be tested in the following, but as points of orientation for making sense of the material analysed below.

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First, if trends of cultural value change are as deep-cutting and pervasive as the relevant literature suggests,

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then one would expect that post-modern forms of party membership to have largely crowded out modern ones. Of course, this expectation is tautological as far as parties that have arisen from post-modern political and social demands, such as Green parties, are concerned, for in these parties’ modernist forms of membership are presumably not found at all. However, in long-established parties such as the Social Democratic parties that are the focus of the present study, the expectation seems plausible enough. Second, with the proliferation of post-modern forms of party membership across parties, one could also expect contemporary party members to favour more direct and unmediated forms of exercising voice. A nal possible expectation is that, insofar as modernist and post-modern forms of party membership coexist within the same party, members of each ‘camp’ could get into con ict concerning questions about the role of members and their appropriate relationship to the party. We shall see shortly whether these expectations are borne out by the empirical material.

The Role of Focus Groups in Exploring Party Membersʼ Attitudes

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The analysis that follows draws on material collected in focus groups with members of local party branches

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in Social Democratic parties in Germany (SPD) and Austria (SPÖ). A total of seven group discussions were conducted at locations across the two countries between January 2014 and March 2015, with the goal of gathering from di erent locations a body of comparable material which can be explored for commonalities and variations (for an overview of the interviewed groups, see Table 3. 2.) Interviews took place in six p. 72

di erent cities: Vienna, Linz, and Gampern in Austria and Berlin, Bonn, and Theilheim in Germany. These

p. 73

cities were chosen with presumed diversity in mind: Vienna and Berlin are large cities, while Linz and Bonn are mid-sized cities, and Gampern and Theilheim are small municipalities. Social Democratic parties were chosen for reasons I have already alluded to in the chapter’s Introduction: they are emblematic cases of parties that are a ected by the socio-cultural transformations whose impact on political participation I am concerned with here. However, they can also still be expected to exhibit a relatively high degree of organization, a trait that makes them more likely to have active members than parties with lower organizational density (Webb and Keith 2017, 34). Taken together, these features make these parties interesting ‘laboratories’ for studying the reality of party membership in the contemporary world.

Table 3.2. Overview of group characteristics Berlin Mitte

Bonn Beuel

Theilheim

Vienna Sandleiten

Vienna Wassertu

Frequency of meetings

Monthly

3 times/month

Monthly

Monthly

Monthly

Main activities

Organizing public talks

Local campaigning, intra-party agenda promotion, running a public ʻinformation standʼ, organizing events for political debate.

Local campaigning; publishing local party newspaper

Organizing events for local community; community counselling

Organizin events fo local commun

Membership

Chiefly young (i.e. under 40)

Mixed

Chiefly old (i.e. 60+)

Mixed

Chiefly o (i.e. 60+)

✓

✓

—

—

In limited form, through chairman

composition Contact with party elite

The countries of Germany and Austria were selected rst and foremost because they are cases of established

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Western European democracies that are a ected by widespread public disa ection with mainstream parties and a tendency of those parties to collude with the aim of maintaining power—in other words, they are exemplary cases of precisely the kinds of societies this book is about (see Introduction). As far as the party collusion is concerned, note that in both countries the major ‘people’s parties’—the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats—have often been said to exhibit many features associated with the muchdiscussed ‘cartel party’ model, notably comprehensive access to the state machinery as a source of patronage and support (on that model more generally, see Katz and Mair 2009; on how Germany and Austria’s mainstream parties ‘cartelize,’ see Detterbeck 2008 and Müller 2002). Austria in particular has a highly developed and far-reaching ‘culture’ of party patronage that serves as a form of ‘institutional control or … institutional exploitation … to the bene t of the party organization’ (Kopecký and Mair 2012a, 7; 2

Ennser-Jedenastik 2013; Treib 2012). As far as public support is concerned, election results strongly suggest that the formerly dominant centre-right and centre-left parties are gradually declining. Social Democratic parties have su ered even more in this respect than their Christian Democratic counterparts: both in Austria and in Germany, the last national elections (2017) saw them reach vote shares below 30 per 3

cent (26,9 per cent and 25,7 per cent, respectively). p. 74

Thus, the selection of Germany and Austria as country cases does not serve a comparative purpose in the

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sense most readers will be familiar with from studies that include multiple cases. That is, its aim is not to contrast countries that di er substantially on some dimension that is directly relevant to the larger questions the book addresses (say, countries in which mainstream parties have developed in radically di erent directions in terms of intra-party democracy). To be sure, and as noted above, the material gathered has been collected with the aim of being explored for commonalities and variations; and doing so is inevitably a comparative exercise of sorts. Yet this is quite di erent from ‘Mill’s methods’ of systematic comparison and its contemporary expressions. Why then were two rather similar countries chosen? The reason is chie y pragmatic and has to do with the feasibility of doing this sort of in-depth research on parties as a ‘party-outsider’. In fact, the project started out as a single-country study, but it turned out that only very few of the partisan groups that were contacted responded to my contacting attempts; many emails and calls remained unanswered. So, to obtain more than just a handful of interviews it was necessary to expand the study to another country, ideally one that is similar in many relevant ways. Eventually the participating party groups were recruited with the help of ‘party-insiders’, notably academics who themselves are more or less active members of the respective parties. This was necessary rst because of the mentioned di

culties of getting responses from the groups; vetting by party-insiders

enabled better access to the interview subjects. Second, it also helped nd groups that are actually active, which is of great importance in countries where a considerable number of party branches—perhaps the majority—are rather passive, meeting only very seldom, or indeed exist ‘only on paper’ (Butzla

and Micus

4

2011, 17). The groups that responded ordinarily announced to make ‘participating in a social-scienti c study’ an agenda item for their next meeting, which members were supposed to vote for or against. So, in each case, the question of whether or not they want to partake in this study was referred to the members of the branch for a majority decision. Once the members voted in favour of participating—none of the groups that were contacted voted against it—a date and time for the interview was set. In the interviews, then, groups of ve to ten party members were assembled in the constellation in which they usually convene for their regular branch meetings, for (roughly) one hour-long group discussions (for details about the groups, see Table 3.2). The discussions were conducted with a concern for some degree of ‘naturalness’, meaning that interventions on the part of the researcher were kept to a minimum, giving participants the opportunity to speak in an unconstrained fashion.

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The interviews were quite loosely structured and divided in two parts. For approximately the rst twenty p. 75

minutes participants were invited to re ect on

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their motivation to engage in the party, and more

speci cally on their experience of partisan activism. This gave them an easy opening to make contributions. Participants here voiced reasons for why they chose to actively engage in party politics, giving accounts of how their regular meetings typically proceed and how they relate to the rest of the party organization. The clear advantage of discussing these topics in a group, rather than asking respondents as individuals in indepth interviews or surveys, is that it a ords an insight into the group dynamics at work within party groups (e.g. whether participants are able openly to express their views in the presence of their peers, or whether they act in accordance with internal(ized) norms of party discipline). In the second part of the interviews, which lasted for approximately forty minutes, participants were asked to identify topics of disagreement between them. These were often party-related topics, such as member–elite relationships or campaign strategies. Talking about these issues provided deeper insights into the relationships between party activists and their party, bringing to light themes participants passionately cared about. As we shall see in Chapter 5, making participants take up some of their earlier disagreements again also created an opening to analyse actual processes of deliberation at the party base.

Why Join a Party? Motivations for Membership

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As already mentioned, at the beginning of each focus group participants were asked to re ect on the reasons

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5

for why they have joined and actively engage in the party. Participants’ responses in this ‘warm-up exercise’ may be divided into ve broad categories: (1) They want to contribute (in a more or less direct way) to social change;

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(2) they are loyal to the party and its larger political project;

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(3) they care about particular social and political topics, and consider engaging in the party the best way

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of achieving their topic-speci c goals; (4) they were initially inspired to get involved by a particular person; or

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(5) they exhibit a more general ambition to engage in public life.

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These four categories are not mutually exclusive: some participants listed multiple reasons for why they

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have become party members and continue to engage in the party. As I will explain more shortly, the interaction of the di erent reasons that participants advance is important to understand how di erent types of party membership are enacted. p. 76

Applying the modernist vs. post-modern party membership-heuristic to these categories, one’s initial inclination will be to regard category 2 as the only category that may straightforwardly be interpreted as an indicator of modernist party membership, while seeing the other categories, perhaps with the exception of category 5, as plausibly compatible with both types of party membership. I will explore the complexities of categories 1–4 in a moment, but before doing so let us brie y consider category 5. This is a rather unusual category, in that it does not rely on an express commitment to a particular party. Indeed, it seems that if participants were driven solely by category 5-motivations, they could as well have joined any other party if it promised to satisfy their participatory demands. Given this peculiarity, it does not come as a surprise that only two participants reported to be motivated exclusively by reasons falling within category 5, both of whom were members of the Theilheim group. Five participants outside the Theilheim group mentioned that category 5-motivations were a major reason why they got interested in party politics in the rst place, but added to this that they also had additional reasons for joining a speci c party. All of this suggests that category 5 is an outlier category that warrants less attention than the other categories.

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Zooming in on categories 1 to 4, then, we nd quite a bit of complexity and variation. As displayed in Table

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3.3, the most prominent categories were 1 and 2. Let us begin with category 1, which captures statements suggesting that participants have joined the party because of a broader commitment to changing society for the better, in accordance with particular political values and ideals. If, as I have suggested, this category can plausibly be related to both a modernist and a post-modern sort of party membership, what might p. 77

distinguish a modernist form of

category 1 from a post-modern one? Arguably a major di erence is

whether the motivation to promote social change is underpinned by a more duty-based adhesion to the party and the particular political project it stands for, or rests primarily on a more re ective engagement with di erent political alternatives. A good example of the former is this passage from the Bonn group: Sabine, thirty-six years old: Social justice is my main motivation … as far as substantive

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commitments (Inhalte) are concerned. And other than that, I am, shaped by my family, a very social person … who also enjoys engaging in associations (Vereinsmeierei). And then … it seems 6

natural to contribute in a party branch.

Facilitator: What do you mean by ‘shaped by your family’?

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Sabine: Well, my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather were Social Democrats

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and also active in many other associations (Vereine). And I have … as a child … already gotten to know the structures of associations (Vereinsstrukturen) and a form of participation (Mitbestimmung). C3.T3

Table 3.3. Reasons to engage in parties Category of statements

Number of expressions

(1) Contributing to social change (ʻI care about social justice, and this party has the best way of furthering itʼ, ʻI want to contribute to making society more equalʼ, etc.)

17

(2) Loyalty to the party (ʻI have always been committed to the project of Social Democracyʼ, ʻI was born into a Social-Democratic familyʼ, etc.)

17

(3) Issue-specific engagement (ʻI want to do something for the children in our local communityʼ, ʻI want to shape the partyʼs agenda on information technologyʼ, etc.)

13

(4) Inspired by another person (ʻI joined because of I liked party leader Xʼ, ʻI joined because X persuaded me to joinʼ, etc.)

8

(5) General ambition for civic engagement (ʻI want to contribute to the common good in our cityʼ, ʻI joined because I want to take part in public lifeʼ, etc.)

7

Total

62

Here we have a combination of a broader, value-driven motivation in line with category 1, plus a sense of duty to the tradition of political activism upheld in one’s family, that seems to sustain that motivation. This combination is not atypical: it has been found widely across the di erent groups.

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To get a better sense of what exactly a post-modern variant of category 1 might look like, it is helpful to

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examine more closely category 2, which captures the motivation to join a party out of loyalty to the political project it embodies, for statements falling into category 1 usually appeared alongside statements falling into category 2. As already indicated, it is possible to distinguish two di erent kinds of loyalty across the groups. The rst is the sort of duty-based loyalty we have already encountered; the second a more re ective type of loyalty that has evolved over time and in a process of ongoing cognitive engagement with the aims and values the party stands for and/or other members of the party. An exemplary expression of this second form of loyalty is provided below. It is indicative of a long-winded process of re ection, introspection, and weighing the pros and cons of di erent political alternatives, that resulted in a decision to join a particular party.

Reflective Loyalty (Seven Statements)

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The motivation to engage politically … I tried to formulate that for myself. […] On the one hand, I

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was born into a working-class family, but nonetheless my mother and my father really enjoyed p. 78

watching

debates in the Bundestag whenever they were broadcasted on TV. And I thought this

was really exciting (spannend), just like my parents. These important debates about war and peace … and I could not really grasp it as a child, but I found it incredibly exciting to witness that. Some seed was planted there, so that I am now interested in political processes and engage too; but not so much in terms of party-categories. That [i.e. the commitment to a party] came much later to be honest. After I held various positions, [for example] in student representation, at university … I always oscillated a little bit between red and green [i.e. Social Democrats and Greens] … and always voted like that, too. And then came [the] Red-Green [government, in 1998], and then there was a time when it didn’t go so well [with the government]—that must have been around the end of 99 —and I thought, ‘no, it cannot be the case that we now get all the evils of the [Helmut] Kohl-years again’ … now you have to take a stand and become a member. And then I remembered my workingclass roots and decided to join the SPD.

(Nikolas, thirty-eight years old, Bonn group)

While the interviewee ends his statement by rationalizing his ‘working-class roots’ as determining the

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decision in favour of the SPD, it seems evident that the decision was actually shaped by a much more complex web of re ections. The gures presented in Table 3.4 show that there is, generally speaking, an age gap between duty-based

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and re ective loyalists. This is consistent with the expectations that were derived from discussing the modernist vs. post-modern party membership heuristic. Accordingly, there is a manifest generational divide between party members who became politically active at a time when parties were still more closely tied to particular social groups, and party members who started to engage at a later point in time. C3.T4

Table 3.4. Party loyalty and age Age group

Duty-based loyalty Number of expressions

Reflective loyalty Number of expressions

20–30

–

–

30–40

1

4

40–50

–

1

50–60

–

–

60+

9

2

Total

10

7

Turning now to category 3, this describes party membership driven by topic-speci c concerns. This was the

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third most common category of reasons for joining a party. Chief amongst the topics highlighted was the p. 79

aim to ‘do something for the

children/next generation in our community’, with seven mentions across

groups (out of a total of thirteen category 3 statements). This tended to be connected to re ections about the ‘localness’ of activism in a party branch, that is, the opportunity to make an impact on community life in a particular part of a city using the resources of a party organization. The following example from the Vienna Sandleiten group illustrates this well: For me, this [i.e. engaging in a local party branch] is primarily about life in [our] social housing

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complex (Gemeindebau) [where the party branch is located], which we ultimately owe to Social Democracy. And I thought: yes, you should do something … also for the future for the children here. Because one has to secure [their future] … by educating (aufklären) them, being present, and doing activities together, and so on. (Slobodan, thirty-seven years old) Though ambitions of this sort undoubtedly go well together with a modernist understanding of Social

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Democratic parties as class-based organizations that help socialize the lower classes into politics, across the focus groups category 3 motivations were expressed by participants with modernist and post-modern pro les alike. Finally, let us cursorily look at category 4, which captures statements by participants that denote that they

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were inspired to join a party by a particular person. Like category 5, this has not been an especially salient category; as shown in Table 3.3, only eight statements to that e ect were uttered. What is worth noting is that ve of the participants who declaredly joined the party because of another person did so because of family members or close friends who ‘recruited’ them for the party, as it were. Unsurprisingly this sort of response correlates strongly with a modernist party member pro le, re ecting cross-generational bonds of partisan allegiance and/or forms of loyalty to one’s social group. But since there are only very few such cases across groups, one must also be cautious with generalizations. Su

ce it to say that, in the few

relevant cases, said correlation was palpable.

Membersʼ Relationship to Their Party

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In the later stages of the focus groups, as participants were discussing how they relate to their party, the

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same pattern unfolded across all the focus groups: judgements concerning the party organization at large, and party elites in particular, became increasingly critical, both among ‘modernists’ and ‘post-modernists’. While in the rst part of the group interviews participants tended to portray the party and their role in it in positive terms, now they increasingly started to highlight what they were dissatis ed with. Table 3.5 a ords a rst glimpse of the substantive content of the criticisms voiced by participants. By far the p. 80

most common complaint concerned the

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behaviour of party elites: in particular, participants across

groups often expressed outright contempt for their lack of concern for the party base. A good example is the following statement from the Theilheim group: Only when they need something is the party base good enough. Otherwise they ignore the base. I nd that the leadership (Spitze) should recognize this: they live o

the base. And when the base

doesn’t exist anymore, the top [of the party] will also slowly collapse. And this is the crux in the SPD … I believe in any party. When Herr Gabriel [i.e. Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the SPD at the time when the interviews were conducted] comes to Würzburg, then we are [considered] good enough to be his cheerleaders … When he gives a speech at the marketplace, then we are good enough. They really make it very easy for themselves. (Hans, seventy-one years old)

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Table 3.5. Members and their party Category of statements

Number of expressions

Discontent with party elites (wanting to hold onto power at all costs, ignoring party base, etc.)

19

Disagreement with party line (di erent positions on core issues, individual division from o icial party line, etc.)

13

Complaints about hierarchy (being overruled by party elites, having too little say, etc.)

11

Calls for more internal participation (more direct decision-making, more consultations with members, etc.)

5

Total

48

Criticisms of this sort routinely went hand in hand with more general disapproval of the party’s hierarchical

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structure. Another relevant nding is that many members disagreed—sometimes vehemently—with the positions of the party leadership, or whatever they regarded as the o

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cial party line. This can take two di erent forms.

Either members voiced a blanket complaint that the party has ‘sold out’ and betrayed its ideals, or said that the party has assumed the wrong position on a speci c policy issue. In this second category of statements, a broad range of issues were listed, without there being a clear-cut pattern. A plausible explanation for this is the fact that party branches in di erent cities face very di erent political challenges and hence also put their focus on di erent sets of topics. Due to the ‘localness’ of party members’ experiences, in other words, their individual and collective policy priorities diverge. Salient di erences between participants with a modernist and post-modern member pro le were not

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observable in any of the classes of statements that have been considered so far. Modernists and postp. 81

moderns were, on the whole, equally

dissatis ed with their party. What is noteworthy is that, despite all

discontents and disagreements, none of the party members mentioned that they contemplated leaving the party at some point. Even members exhibiting the kind of re ective loyalty discussed above were steadfast in their commitment to the party. (See, e.g., Alex, forty years old, Bonn group: ‘When the party in the end holds a view that is di erent from mine concerning single technical questions [Sachfragen] or positions, this is not a reason for me to quit the party, but to emphasize and discuss the topic even more within the party.’). It is not di

cult to interpret this as suggesting that re ective loyalty, as typically found among post-

modern party members, need not imply that members engage only on an ad hoc basis and are inclined to 7

defect once things are not going their way.

Moreover, it is also surprising that explicit calls for more intra-party participation were not very frequent across groups (see Table 3.4). After all, one way of looking at the numerous complaints about party hierarchy and being ignored by party elites is to see them as strengthening the case for more internal participation. Instead of voicing general demands for having a greater say within the party, however, participants presented very nuanced views regarding the pros and cons of intra-party democracy that were indicative of more continuous re ective engagement with issues concerning party institutional design. A good example of this is the below discussion that took place in the Linz group, about the relative merits of letting party members decide on a coalition agreement with another party in a membership ballot. The discussion revolved mainly around the delegation of authority and the availability of information to the wider party membership.

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Leo, thirty-eight years old: If I haven’t looked into the coalition agreement at all [prior to the

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ballot] … and now I want to claim the right [to decide on it] … this means, at the same time, that I should comprehend the whole thing, and that I should take the time and the resources to read it. One can imagine [that] a coalition agreement has more than just a few pages … so it’s about comprehension. That is, what does it mean for me? Now if I say, ‘yes, I want this’, or ‘yes, I want to participate in [making] the decision’, then I ought to have the resources […] for it takes days to read the thing and to understand it. Franz, seventy-seven years old: If I am for it or against it, I have to know what I am for or

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against. And this presupposes that I have some knowledge about the content of the coalition agreement, and that [is a knowledge] even he who voted for it in parliament doesn’t have. So, we don’t have it [i.e. this knowledge] at all. Or at least: I don’t have it. And so, I do not want to subject p. 82

myself to the responsibility to decide on something when I don’t really know what it is am deciding on. … Therefore, I am sceptical. Moreover, we have elected 183 people into parliament … we really elected them ourselves … and they should work for their money. Therefore, I am, and I adhere to this view, against [directly voting on a coalition agreement]. Because then we might also say the next time we raise the parking taxes in Linz: ask the citizens of Linz, not the local government. Then the whole thing gets a bit complicated! In the end, we have elected people and they will […] be re-elected or not, depending on whether they do what one expects. […] [short cross-talk]

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Petra, sixty-two years old: I think it’s always a balancing act, that one delegates authority and [at

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the same time], so to speak, wants to retain some in uence. One needs delegates, as you say, one gives them a mandate and says, ‘please do something useful [etwas Richtiges]’. But how can I, during the year, say ‘hey, I want that you in parliament to do things di erently’? Franz, seventy-seven years old: [interposing] If you get an appointment to chat [with an MP] …

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Herbert, seventy-one years old: I believe any organization knows: one needs a structure.

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Whether this is a sport club, right up to parties like the SPÖ, which is a big organization … there is always a statute about structure … how and who can be delegated [to], how one is governed, and so on. But I think this is necessary and it is in my opinion also bad if one would make fundamental changes here. That statutes were marginally changed and changes were brought about, this happened often in the history [of the party]. But in principle one needs an organizational structure from which these things follow. It is worth quoting this discussion at full length because it re ects the full level of complexity of participants’ judgements (it is also an indication of their ability to engage in dialogical exchanges that can plausibly described as deliberation; we will explore this more in Chapter 5). Noticeably, the majority of participants involved in this exchange, in particular Franz and Herbert, have a modernist party member pro le (indicated by their age), which means that they might generally be more likely to be sympathetic to delegating authority to others. Yet, as manifested in the opening statement by Leo, even younger party members with post-modern characteristics tended to agree with them that mechanisms of direct democracy should not be used within the party at all costs. Ultimately, agreement on this point among ‘modernists’ and ‘post-modernists’ emerged across groups; thus, among the most active party members, post-modern member pro les do not correlate with strong demands for direct participation.

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To be sure, it would be misleading to interpret these discussions in terms of an outright rejection of more

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internal democracy. What is revealed by the above remarks about the ultimate importance of wellp. 83

functioning mechanisms of

intra-party delegation and representation—as well as the complaints about

the lack of direct contact with party elites—is rather what may be called a ‘non-direct-democratic understanding’ of intra-party democracy. Overall, it seems that participants tend to view the party as a multi-level organization in which internal democracy is not so much about having a direct say on all issues of common concern as about being adequately represented at higher party levels, and about two-way communication with party elites. Again, these views were expressed both by participants with modernist pro les and those who may straightforwardly be classed as ‘post-modern’ party members.

Discussion

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Re ecting on the ndings presented above, at least three things stand out. First, at least in Social

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Democratic parties, modernist party membership, as a form of partisan engagement based on duty and group membership, has not entirely been crowded out by the post-modern type of party membership that is centred on a re ective commitment to the party and an ‘individualist’ mindset. Second, although party members—both those who are driven by duty-based loyalty and those who are driven by re ective loyalty— display a steadfast commitment to the party, there has also been much discontent with the way in which the party is run, in particular the lack of contact with party elites and the di erent ways in which hierarchy is sometimes enforced by higher-level party o

cials. Third, however, widespread discontent with the party

did not translate into blanket calls for more direct participation; rather, party members widely agreed that more direct-democratic participation within the party is at best ambivalent, and that it is more important to have well-functioning mechanisms of intra-party delegation and accountability in place, as well as being more closely in touch with party elites. As far as the rst point is concerned, some might say that this nding is hardly surprising given recent

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studies that demonstrate the persistence of older membership cohorts across European parties—age groups that are more likely to exhibit modernist member pro les (e.g., Scarrow and Gezgor 2010; Gauja and Haute and 2015, 193–4). Yet there are at least two reasons for why this nding is worth underlining. First, as I have argued earlier, if the relevant social changes are as pervasive as the relevant literature suggests, then one might reasonably expect modernist forms of party membership to be more or less marginalized in contemporary parties. This point is also made in the most comprehensive recent (mainly survey-based) volume on party membership in Europe, Emilie van Haute and Anika Gauja’s Party Members and Activists (2016), which nds that ‘policy incentives’ and a more general motivation to take an active role in political processes—hallmarks of post-modern party membership—are the most dominant motivation for p. 84

individuals to join a party across countries (192); the more modernist ‘social reasons’ for party membership, notably family traditions, were only more important for members of older, larger parties in Denmark (Kosiara-Pedersen 2016). Second, it should also be added that the observation that party members are on average older relative to the wider population says itself very little about whether these party members are actively participating in the party, like the participants of our focus groups do. For example, they may well fall into the category of ‘ideological mis ts’ (Haute and Carty 2012), who are estranged from their party yet are not among those using voice to protest or exit altogether—a member pro le indicative of what Haute and Carty (2012, 893) call ‘passive organizational loyalty’, which is more likely to be found among modernist party members.

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This leads to the second nding of the chapter: the discrepancy between party members’ basic loyalty

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towards their party and their negative evaluation of its organizational reality. There is much talk in the more recent literature on party members of the incongruence of members’ political views with the agenda of their parties (e.g. Kölln and Polk 2017; Scarrow and Gezgor 2010; Haute and Carty 2012). This literature helpfully illuminates ideological di erences between party members and party elites but tends to stop short of providing a fuller account of the views that party members hold with respect to party organization. What the evidence from the focus groups shows is that negative evaluations of how the party is run are pervasive among both types of party members. In spite of that, and however disgruntled they were, not a single party member contemplated quitting the party. This suggests that loyalty to the party is perhaps greater among the more active sections of the membership than among party members broadly conceived, adding important nuance to recent survey-based research that studies party members as a generic category and establishes a strong correlation between critical attitudes towards party elites and members’ likelihood to leave their party (see esp. Kölln and Polk 2017). It is also possible to link party loyalty—at least to some extent—to the persistence of modernist membership, for these members can generally be expected to feel an especially strong duty towards the party. But since party loyalty was observed across generational cohorts, this can only be part of the story. Third and nally, perhaps the most surprising nding is the absence of demands for more direct

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participation—what Bolin et al. (2017) call ‘plebiscitary intra-party democracy’. To repeat, such demands would seem to arise ‘naturally’ from members’ discontent with their party organization and could be expected to be especially pervasive among members with post-modern pro les—but they simply were not voiced. Instead, members expressed demands for well-functioning mechanisms of intra-party delegation and accountability, as well as for two-way communication with party elites. The rst thing to note is that this nding could help make better sense of the common nding that party

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members have a desire for greater intra-party democracy. In scholarship on party membership, it has often p. 85

been shown that party

members almost always, and across the political spectrum, demand more internal

democracy, but questions remain as to whether this sentiment should be interpreted ‘as a suggestion that members’ [current democratic] rights are ine ective, or marginalizing, or as an aspirational statement that intra-party politics ought to be done democratically’ (Haute and Gauja 2015, 191). The interpretation the material explored above suggests is that members understand ‘more internal democracy’ in terms of ‘more e ective representation within parties’, including more contact and dialogue with party elites and decisionmakers—and not simply in terms of directly voting on decisions in intra-party plebiscites. What could explain members’ rejection of plebiscitary intra-party democracy? One possible explanation is

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that those who actively engage at the partisan base are less driven by the ‘selective bene ts’ of exercising direct in uence via plebiscitary channels, but by ‘collective political bene ts’, to do with advancing a cause together with others in a community of shared principle (see Whiteley and Seyd 2002; Scarrow and Gezgor 2010, 828; Scarrow 2014, ch. 7). This does not involve accepting the dominance of party elites but seeing the party as a cooperative venture with democratic divisions of labour between members and elites, much in line with the theoretical considerations I have defended in the prior chapters. Another explanation is that the members of the particular parties studied here are simply not used to plebiscitary forms of intra-party democracy, for neither the SPD nor the SPÖ have a great tradition of direct internal democracy. Indeed, recent comparative research on varieties of intra-party democracy suggests that, insofar as the SPD and SPÖ allow members to have a say in internal a airs, they usually do so via mechanisms of delegation and representation—what is sometimes called ‘assembly-based intra-party democracy’—rather than in a direct and unmediated fashion (Bolin et al. 2017, 178). Internalizing and endorsing these norms of decision-making might lead members to put more value on well-functioning non-direct forms of intra-party democracy.

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A third possible explanation takes its cues from the literature on comparative party organizations and

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suggests a more self-interested rationale. This is that the active members oppose plebiscitary intra-party democracy because they are aware of the fact that introducing such mechanisms may well lead to their own disempowerment. For, as two observers suggest, with ‘the introduction of such devices as postal ballots or mass membership meetings […] large numbers of marginally committed members or supporters—with their silence, their lack of capacity for prior independent (of the leadership) organization, and their tendency to be oriented more toward particular leaders rather than to underlying policies—can be expected to drown out the activists’ (Katz and Mair 2009, 759; also see Ignazi 2017, 239–42). This is, again, consistent with some of the arguments laid out in the previous chapter, in particular the point that purely aggregative and plebiscitary forms of intra-party democracy are normatively questionable as they tend to stabilize the rule of party elites rather than empower members. p. 86

These explanations all carry some plausibility, and most likely di erent explanatory factors interact. As we

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shall see in subsequent chapters, in the case of the German party groups, the third explanation provides perhaps the most powerful explanation: members of these groups talk much about recent bad experiences with plebiscitary intra-party democracy, complaining about ‘manipulation’ by the party elite. At any rate, it seems certain that the kinds of demands concerning party organization that were expressed by party members in this study have important implications for how we generally think about intra-party democracy. Most importantly, they cast doubts on the idea, widely held among both scholars and practitioners (cf. Faucher 2015), that party members’ desire for more internal democracy is inevitably a desire for more plebiscitary mechanisms. That the ndings presented in this chapter have direct implications for the broader argument of the book should be evident. But let me, summarily, spell out what I take to be the two main takeaway points for the topic of deliberative party reforms.

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1. The just-mentioned nding that party members prefer well-functioning mechanisms of intra-party

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delegation and accountability, as well as increased two-way communication with party elites, over direct-democratic participation has important consequences for thinking about party reform in general and deliberative party reforms in particular. One way of looking at the problem at hand is that, presently, the relationship between members and party elites is insu ciently communicative, in the sense that the former too rarely get to talk to the latter, asking them to explain changes in policy or o ering them new political proposals. Increasing the deliberativeness of the party—for instance through the more regular use of partisan deliberative conferences that aim at enhancing two-way communication among the party base and party leaders (see Chapter 2)—could therefore go a long way in addressing this problem. Like all representative relationships, representative relationships within parties must be based on an ‘interpretative or arti cially created similarity between the representative and her electors’ if they are to be considered legitimate by those represented, and this ‘similarity of ideas’ (Urbinati 2011, 44) can e ectively be established and maintained by 8

institutionalizing and regularizing dialogue between party elites and the membership base.

2. The fact that ‘modernist’ forms of party membership have not been entirely crowded out by ‘post-

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modern’ ones adds useful nuance to the prima facie-plausible view that partisan activity almost exclusively takes a ‘post-modern’ shape today. But although I have argued that deliberative forms of p. 87

intra-party democracy mainly satisfy the participatory demands of post-modern

members and

activists—with their increased desire for political self-actualization and being taken seriously qua individuals—it does not follow from this that ‘modernists’ would be alienated from the party if deliberative forms of participation were given more emphasis. Even if modernists see party membership rst and foremost about showing loyalty to a group, and correspondingly place less value on discussion and debate, it is highly likely that a proliferation of post-modern attitudes to partisan engagement generates new con icts among members (evidence in support of this claim will be presented in detail below). If modernists are to retain a sense of ownership of the party, they will have to address and resolve these con icts in a dialogical fashion together with the younger members whose ideal image of a party di ers from theirs. So again, there is good reason to think that a more deliberative mode of intra-party democracy provides a promising way forward. Ultimately, the analysis conducted in this chapter constitutes only a rst step towards a more complete empirical understanding of the practice of party membership in established parties. But if the ndings are any indication, then the argument of Chapter 2—that making parties more internally democratic requires making them more internally deliberative—appears sound. If we care about what those who engage in parties consider valuable and important, as well as about what they deem problematic, it seems that deliberative mechanisms could go a long way in addressing their worries and demands. And if these worries and demands are adequately addressed, arguably this could, to paraphrase Kelsen’s formulation about ‘the people’, help bring the reality of parties closer to the ideal of parties qua enablers of popular sovereignty.

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Of course, from establishing that more intra-party deliberation could be a fruitful direction, it does not yet quite follow that more intra-party deliberation could actually be achieved. Even though we already got a rst glimpse of how party members and activists discuss with each other in this chapter, it might be the case that exchanges between them are in fact rarely properly dialogical, failing to meet the most fundamental of deliberative desiderata. They might for one thing be more about venting complaints than dialogue; or they might be marked by a tendency to assert views that everyone in any case agrees with, leading to group polarization instead of real discussion (see Chapter 6). As noted in the Introduction and in Chapter 2, partisans have often been charged with exhibiting such non-deliberative behaviour, which is also why deliberative democratic theory has tended to look to parties with scepticism. The next two chapters that follow take these worries seriously and inquire into party members’ deliberative credentials, drawing again on the empirical material generated by the focus groups conducted in Germany and Austria. Chapter 4 asks whether the partisan groups provide favourable circumstances for deliberation. Chapter 5 studies actual deliberative exchanges, examining their deliberative credentials.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6

7 8

One notable exception is the comprehensive study of young party members by Bruter and Harrison (2009). Patronage serves mainly as an organizational resource used by the peopleʼs parties, subjecting numerous state-owned enterprises and semi-public institutions to partisan control. Clientelistic practices—once a ʻmass phenomenonʼ (Treib 2012, 48) in Austria—have likewise not disappeared. For example, a 2014 report in the newspaper Kurier revealed that party membership remains a crucial factor to gain a job with one of the federal stateʼs main gas providers. Even at the level of low-income technicians, party membership and/or ʻrefereesʼ within the party were here a crucial prerequisite to gain a job in the company (Kurier 2014). The Christian Democrats have been relatively resilient despite an overall downward trend, in Germany due to the rather stable leadership of Angela Merkel and in Austria because the ÖVP recently re-invented itself as a movement—the Liste Sebastian Kurz—as noted in the Introduction. This also means that a certain selection bias seems unavoidable. A note on the presentation of the empirical material: the symbol ʻ[…]ʼ indicates where the text has been abridged; ʻ … ʼ indicates where a speaker pauses or trails away. Furthermore, all intervieweesʼ names have been changed. In this chapter, I will note the intervieweeʼs age throughout, as this is a relevant socio-demographic indicator for whether a party member is likely to qualify as ʻmodernistʼ or ʻpost-modernʼ. In the subsequent chapters, I will largely refrain from making references to participantʼs age. As we shall see in Chapter 6, however, that there are cases of members leaving first the party branch and then abandoning the party. Mansbridge (2017) refers to this as ʻrecursive representationʼ, in which representatives and represented ʻhear one another, communicate well with one another, and change one another for the better through their interactionʼ (7). Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

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Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

4 The Circumstances of Partisan Deliberation 

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Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0005 Published: December 2019

Pages 88–C4.T1

Abstract This chapter aims to provide a tentative answer to the question of whether party members are at all capable of engaging in non-coercive dialogical exchanges of arguments that result in concrete political proposals, let alone sustained critiques of some existing proposal. It looks speci cally at the ‘circumstances of deliberation’ at the party base, asking whether the local partisan associations in which party members engage provide the conditions that are necessary for reasonably non-coercive and dialogical deliberation to arise, namely that participants have equal opportunities to in uence the deliberative process, and that they hold a variety of di erent viewpoints that ensure that the issue under deliberation is considered from multiple angles. The chapter argues that these desiderata are indeed satis ed, showing that diversity is ensured by members’ di erent occupational backgrounds, and that partisans’ joint commitment to shared political ideals establishes an egalitarian ‘deliberative eld’ in which everyone’s voice is heard. These are, it is suggested, very favourable conditions for deliberation, even if one applies much higher normative standards than the book does. Interestingly, the fact that partisanship involves having common adversaries—a by-product of having shared normative commitments—also contributes to the equal standing branch members enjoy; so, partisanship’s inherent exclusionary dynamics have the happy e ect of rendering branches supportive environments for deliberation.

Keywords: party membership, deliberation, deliberative capacity, activism, participation, local parties Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

The aim of this chapter is to examine, under the heading of the ‘circumstances of partisan deliberation’, whether party branches provide favourable preconditions for deliberation. That this is an important indicator of whether non-coercive, dialogical exchanges are possible is a staple of deliberative democratic theory. Ever since Jürgen Habermas, arguably the leading philosopher of deliberative democracy, suggested the hypothetical possibility of an ‘ideal speech situation’, in which speakers are completely free of coercive in uences and motivated by the aim of achieving rational consensus, it is commonly assumed that deliberation requires certain enabling conditions (for a review of the more recent literature, see e.g. Steiner 2012, ch. 9). It does not just happen anywhere. Recall also that I conjectured in Chapter 2 that party branches

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are likely to provide the relevant enabling conditions for deliberative dialogues. What I argued in particular was that one can plausibly assume that their meetings are marked by a relative equality of opportunities for participants to in uence the discussion, and a relative diversity of viewpoints among participants, which ensures that issues are considered from multiple angles—two characteristics that are often highlighted in the deliberative democracy literature as creating a deliberation-supporting environment. In what follows, I want to investigate how much these expectations are borne out by the data collected for this study, and explore what equality and diversity means in a partisan context.

Do Party Branches Provide Favourable Conditions for Deliberation?

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If we want to explore whether party branches provide favourable conditions for deliberation, this of course

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raises the prior question of what it means to say that ‘favourable conditions’ for deliberation are present in a deliberative setting. What exactly are favourable conditions for deliberation, and why would it matter that such conditions are given? Let me take the questions in reverse order, since if we do not know why good deliberation requires some preconditions, we need not get into the intricacies of determining what exactly these preconditions are. To understand why deliberation requires a supportive environment, notice rst p. 89

that,

even when understood ecumenically as non-coercive and dialogical exchange, deliberation is a

rather demanding democratic practice, requiring people to invest time and intellectual resources in formulating arguments and engaging with others’ viewpoints in a re ective fashion. Deliberators ought to 1

display a certain willingness to give thought to the arguments they articulate and hear.

The question then becomes under what circumstances citizens ‘display willingness to give thought to the

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arguments they give and hear’. What properties must a group of people exhibit for their discussions to become ‘deliberative’? In Chapter 2, I suggested that some commitment to discussing politics is essential. This is why the deliberative model of intra-party democracy focuses on those party members who generally devote themselves more to the party, and actively participate in local branches, rather than, say, those who participate only in low-commitment activities such as discussion in unmoderated partisan online fora. The reason why commitment matters is that committed deliberators tend to be more willing to engage closely with each other’s arguments and put extra e ort into the soundness of their argumentation (Fung 2003, 345). But there are several other preconditions for deliberation that appear relevant. If we follow the larger part of

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deliberative theory, we nd that two features of deliberative fora are typically identi ed as providing favourable conditions for deliberation, often on empirical—and rather intuitive—grounds. The rst is that a diversity of viewpoints is represented in a deliberating group (see e.g. Barabas 2004, 689; Jackman and 2

Sniderman 2006; Mutz 2006; Hendriks et al. 2007; Thompson 2008, 502; Sunstein 2009, 145–8). The second is that group members enjoy a relatively equal standing (see e.g. Cohen 1989; Young 2002, 24–5; Thompson 2008, 501; Mansbridge et al. 2010, 65–6; Morrell 2010). Scholars of course acknowledge that identifying the right preconditions for deliberation is di

cult since deliberation is a multi-dimensional and

sequential phenomenon (see Goodin 2008, ch. 9). But it is uncontroversial that an equal standing among the participants to deliberation and a relative diversity of viewpoints among them are crucial (indeed, it su

ces

to re ect for a moment on our own ‘everyday’ political discussions to see how an equal standing is conducive to making these discussions more dialogical and less coercive, while a diversity of viewpoints p. 90

ensures that they retain a—however modestly—con ictual character). Thus, I will take these requirements as the baseline for assessing whether party branches provide favourable conditions for deliberation. I will refer to them in the following as the diversity desideratum and the equality desideratum. To recall, I have also argued in Chapter 2 that there is a high likelihood that party branches can satisfy these two desiderata. My point was, rst, that the integrative force of partisanship can establish a sense of

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equality among partisans, and second that because members of local party branches are usually voluntary activists who pursue a range of di erent (non-political) careers and come from di erent age groups, it is likely that a broad diversity of viewpoints will be represented in the branches. In the remainder of this chapter, I will look at whether these expectations are supported by the empirical data collected in the group interviews, and, perhaps more importantly, examine what equality and diversity mean in a partisan context. I will take diversity and equality in turn, expounding rst on their theoretical signi cance and then considering relevant text passages relating to each desideratum. Since my concern is with capturing the perspectives of participants in the deliberative process and providing insights into the ‘lived experience’ of partisan deliberation, I draw here mainly from the rst part of the group discussions, where participants discussed their experience of engaging in party branches, paying particular attention to the references evoked to describe the regular debates and discussions in the group.

Diversity

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In deliberative theory, there are at least two arguments for why participants to deliberation should exhibit a

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diverse cross-section of views. Both are essentially pragmatic and empirical. The rst and more fundamental argument is that disagreement among a group of people is a necessary precondition for deliberation to arise. Without disagreement, there would simply be nothing to deliberate about. And disagreement presupposes that participants hold di erent views and opinions. Dennis Thompson (2008, 502) puts the point in this way: ‘If the participants are mostly like-minded or hold the same views before they enter into the discussion, they are not situated in the circumstances of deliberation. They do not confront the problem that deliberation is intended to address.’ The ‘problem’ Thompson talks about is that a group of people have to take a collective decision on an issue

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they disagree about. Deliberation can solve this problem insofar as exchanging arguments for and against certain courses of action can produce an agreement about how to decide. Or, perhaps more realistically, deliberation can yield what Moore and O’Doherty (2014) call ‘deliberative acceptance’, understood as a ‘deliberative agreement to let something stand as the position of the group even if it is not fully shared by every members of the group’ (303, emphasis added). But again, all of this presupposes that participants to p. 91

deliberation

disagree about something. There is not much point in deliberating if there exists a pre-

deliberative agreement in the group as to how to decide. Of course, there are di erent types of agreement not all of which threaten deliberation: to be in the

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‘circumstances of deliberation’, participants to deliberation do not have to disagree on every possible level. Quite the opposite is the case. Consider Dryzek and Niemeyer’s (2006) distinction between normative, epistemic, and preferential agreement—agreement, that is, about values, facts, or concrete (policy) preferences. Agreement on one of these dimensions can facilitate nding agreement on another. For example, like-mindedness concerning the values that should predominate in a decision might make it easier to nd a common position concerning policy preferences, since it generates a sense of equality among speakers and renders appeals to shared ideals immediately resonant. (I will say more about this later in this chapter and in the next chapter.) So, the relationship between disagreement and successful deliberation is not linear but complex and multi-dimensional. Thompson’s point is in principle correct but simpli es matters too much. Our takeaway point is therefore simply that deliberation requires disagreement at some level. Otherwise discussion would hardly arise and people would not be put in a position where they are confronted with competing arguments about issues that matter to them. There are also ‘epistemic’ arguments for diversity in deliberative fora. Typically these contend that a diversity of perspectives ‘ensures that the issue under deliberation is considered from multiple angles’ (Hendriks et al. 2007, 366), which makes deliberation at once a learning experience for its participants,

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since exchanging di erently situated knowledge broadens the perspective of all the participants, and improves the quality of decisions, since such an ‘enlarged view’ enables participants to nd better solutions to collective problems (e.g. Gastil and Dillard 1999; Young 2002, 115–18; also see Landemore 2012, ch. 4). I have some sympathies for this argument, in particular for the aspect about mutual learning, but I will not pursue any epistemic argument in the following. All I want to do is draw attention to the fact that there exists this further argument for group diversity. These are the main arguments in favour of group diversity in democratic deliberation. Now, how internally

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diverse are the party branches that were studied for this research? One of the rst notable things about diversity is that, across the di erent groups, participants repeatedly underline that their group is rather heterogenous. Most groups are very diverse in terms of age and social and occupational backgrounds, and it is the latter—members’ di erent occupational backgrounds—that participants most commonly identify as the main ‘source’ of diversity in the group. Carina from the Gampern group is not atypical when she stresses that ‘it was not a circle of friends that got together because one shares hobbies in common. Rather it’s a ragtag crowd in our municipality; from social pedagogues to locksmiths … to [university] students.’ This p. 92

connection between occupational diversity and a diversity of viewpoints is repeatedly drawn when speakers re ect on group composition. Hannes in Linz similarly makes a clear link to the di erent professions of the participants: ‘I think we have a rather exciting cross-section [of people] from di erent domains of society. We all work in di erent elds, and when we discuss together one is being exposed to di erent points of view.’ Notice the positive overtone: diversity of job backgrounds is considered ‘exciting’; it enriches debates. Di erent views about diversity are found in the Vienna Sandleiten group, where participants generally seek

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to avoid disagreements, and the Berlin group, whose members purport to agree with each other to the extent that discussion is unnecessary—a claim that runs counter to their reports of intra-group disagreements, as we shall see shortly. We will return to these two groups in Chapter 6, in which we consider ‘deliberative failures’ in party branches. A second source of diversity participants single out is age di erences. These are however not explicitly

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mentioned as a feature of group composition, but alluded to in an entirely di erent context: as the root cause of recurring disagreements that are not enriching but tiresome. (Remember in this connection the argument made at the end of the prior chapter that the persistence of modernist forms of party membership will also come with con icts between generations that require deliberative resolution.) Indeed, while participants often explicitly attach positive value to di erences of opinion that arise from di erent occupational experiences, where present references to age di erences tend to conjure an image of avoidable, sometimes annoying, con icts between younger and older participants. An example that is mentioned by both the Berlin and Vienna Wasserturm groups is arguments over cycling policy. In both cities, this is a central urban policy issue, and there is a natural age gap between supporters and opponents of more space for cyclists. The following statement from Rike in Berlin brings out the problem at stake: This is an ‘everyday topic’ for me. And it is also a topic that annoys me massively in our party …

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and [it is a topic] where the di erence is very big between the younger people, who cycle a lot, because that is their means of transportation, and the older [people], who never cycle, who also know this from the viewpoint of pedestrians … and [complain] ‘again one of them almost knocked me over’. And this often leads to … really … these discussions can sometimes get out of control. Rike is a relatively young activist (she turned twenty-nine shortly before the interview) and strongly in favour of making Berlin more ‘cyclist-friendly’. From her point of view, the intransigence of the older generation is hard to understand. She regards the antithetical interests and experiences of the younger and the older members as the origin of this perennial disagreement, and explains, not without frustration, that in the debates about the rights of cyclists, basic norms of mutual respect are sometimes transgressed. What

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p. 93

is interesting is that even though the

majority of the Berlin group’s active membership is young, once

older members attend the meetings these con icts arise time and again. Participants suggest that this is 3

because of the contentiousness of the cycling topic, trivial though it may appear to outsiders.

Speakers in the Vienna Wasserturm group express similar annoyance with arguing over the cycling issue.

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Maria notes for instance that ‘one de nitely can’t reach agreement’ on this issue. ‘Some [members] say “the cyclists are all mad and I open the door [of the car] whenever I want:. And when I hit one [with the car] I run him over! And the others perhaps want to cycle a bit in the city—and perhaps have a few more cycle lanes in the district.” In short, the debate has become too emotional and any progress seems out of reach. At best, one can agree to disagree.’ (As Maria nishes the sentence, Gertrude, one of the older group members intervenes, ‘No, we had enough cycle lanes!’, reigniting the discussion.) Such perceptions intensify the negative connotation of the relationship between age di erences and diversity of viewpoints in some of the groups. However, even if participants look with discontent to those speci c con icts, they generally embrace the

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diversity of viewpoints available in the party branches and the disagreements triggered by it. To put it simply, repeatedly arguing with elderly members about the appropriate infrastructure for cyclists in a modern city may be exasperating, but exchanging viewpoints and hearing di erent perspectives is generally valued. Alex in Bonn is not the only participant to welcome the perennial disagreement in the group: ‘a party is actually not a place where I look for harmony. It is not a place where I look for consensus, but where I want to [engage in order to] bring positions “out on the street.” […] Disputes are part of the trade; disputes are important … it is important that we argue.’ So, disagreement is widely seen as fruitful and productive, as something the groups pro ts from rather than a reason for despondency. To sum up: the dominant pattern across the party groups is that participants perceive groups as being

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characterized by a diverse cross-section of perspectives. This diversity is rooted in participants’ di erent occupational backgrounds, on the one hand, and age di erences, on the other—the latter corresponding loosely to the modernist/post-modern distinction introduced in the last chapter. So, it would seem that the party groups studied in this research satisfy what I have called the ‘diversity desideratum’. To be sure, the two sources of diversity we have identi ed have notably di erent connotations. But although disagreements arising from age di erences tend to be seen as avoidable and tiresome, di erences in opinion are not generally regarded as problematic; rather, diversity is widely celebrated as enriching the group experience. p. 94

In the next chapter, I will look more

closely at the content of participants’ disagreements, that is, what

precisely they disagree about. At the present stage I am simply trying to explore whether the party branches that were studied for this book are internally diverse, and how their members relate to diversity.

Equality

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In contrast to the diversity desideratum, what I have called the equality desideratum is not typically justi ed

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on empirical grounds. Rather, this second desideratum is usually thought to derive from a more general principle of equality. In the eyes of most democratic theorists, this principle constitutes a core element of any plausible account of democracy (for a classic treatment, see Dahl 1989, ch. 6; and see also Kelsen 2013, 4

ch. 1). So it is normative in nature, but it does not ask us to endorse an especially controversial normative ideal. In essence, as a normative principle equality stipulates that democratic politics ‘requires some form of manifest equality among citizens’ (Cohen 1989, 69), that is, citizens should enjoy an equal standing in democratic procedures. This is instinctively familiar in the context of voting: everyone ought to count for one. It is also well-known from the realm of democratic law and Rechtsstaatlichkeit: everyone ought to be equal before the law. But what exactly does it mean in the context of deliberative procedures?

When asked how one should conceive equality in a deliberative procedure, deliberative theorists usually

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insist it involves participants treating each other with ‘mutual respect and equal concern’ (Mansbridge et al. 2010, 65–6), though there is considerable disagreement about what this entails. Some suggest it requires that participants to deliberation listen to each other empathically and try to take seriously each other’s concerns (Morrell 2010). Others argue that speakers ought to refrain from asserting ‘their own interests above all others’’ or insisting ‘that their initial opinion about what is right or just cannot be subject to revision’ (Young 2002, 24–5). Ultimately, writes Thompson (2008, 506), ‘most [scholars] agree that the more the deliberation is in uenced by unequal economic resources and social status, the more de cient it is’. In what follows, I shall thus employ a deliberately broad standard of deliberative equality qua discussion una ected by status and resource inequalities. This is likely to involve some empathy, mutual respect, equal opportunities to participate in the deliberative process, and openness towards others’ arguments, but it cannot be reduced to any one of those things. Re ecting on these criteria, it is easy to see that the equality desideratum could also in principle be justi ed p. 95

empirically, without recourse to normative ideals.

It does at least not seem especially di

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cult to

establish that discussions de facto become more dialogical and less coercive, the more people treat each other as equals. When people approach one another in unequal terms, in contrast, or try to dominate each other, arguably a discussion’s dialogical and non-coercive character is at risk. In the end, we may be able to simply see this as a happy case where widely shared intuitions about what’s normatively and practically appropriate align. What we are talking about are not high-minded principles that rarely map onto empirical practices, but common-sensical intuitions that correspond neatly to how particular practices at their best look. Importantly, partisans of the same political conviction might be better able to reach deliberative equality

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than ‘ordinary’ citizens. This is because they hold a shared commitment to a speci c political project, which generates a special connection between them that can eradicate obstacles to deliberative equality (such as di erences in socio-economic status). Consider Nancy Rosenblum’s (2008, 344) observation that partisanship is best conceived as a particular form of ‘collective identity’, and as such marked by an ‘avowed connection to what “people like me” value, think, and do politically’ (cf. also the empirical work by Achen and Bartels 2016). ‘People like me’ refers here not so much to shared socio-demographic characteristics like a similar job background, but to similarities of belief in the worth of particular ideals, aims, and policies. This is why partisanship can have integrative force independent of people’s material circumstances. Partisans are, to use a term that has become popular in the recent political theory literature on parties, political friends (Muirhead 2014, ch. 5; White and Ypi 2016, ch. 4). Moreover, in the local partisan groups I concentrate on here, members will know each other personally, and sometimes even be friends outside the arena of political activism. This adds another layer of familiarity and equality. For all these reasons, it seems plausible that these groups can provide especially favourable conditions for the kind of equality that marks political deliberation. How far are these expectations borne out? Overall, group interview-participants describe their meetings as marked by equality and mutual respect. While no group describes their group dynamics in the same way, references to the ful lment of di erent aspects of deliberative equality (e.g. empathic listening, mutual respect) were considerably more common than references to their non-ful lment. Sometimes even an explicit connection between norms of equality and democracy as a normative ideal was established. An emblematic example of this is a statement by Leo from the Linz group, in which he explains that the disposition to ‘put oneself into the position of other members and view things from their point of view’ is widespread among the members of the group, and goes on to suggest that empathic perspective taking is ‘simply part of democracy’. But though the data contains a number of references to aspects of deliberative equality which involve a link to democracy or democratic values, such references are altogether rare. That a p. 96

connection between democratic ideals and equality is drawn speci cally in the Linz

group might be

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because the members of that group are disproportionately educated. Some have backgrounds in the social sciences or humanities, and might promote an awareness of philosophical arguments for democracy and justice within the group. More frequent than such high-minded statements about equality were references which see equality

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expressed in the equal weight that is given to everyone’s opinion in the group. Participants generally note that they consider the branch meetings a forum in which they can speak their mind and will be taken seriously by others; ‘everybody is entitled to an opinion here’, as one participant in Bonn puts it. The data is replete with references of this kind. ‘It wouldn’t be democracy if we were not allowed to state our opinions’, says a participant in the Linz group. Similarly, a member of Vienna’s Sandleiten group: ‘We tell our opinion to each other’s faces, and we say what we think and everyone accepts that … and nobody imposes anything on others.’ However, it is also often pointed out that the deeper purpose of speaking one’s mind is to facilitate the formation of a shared position on relevant political issues. Expressing opinions is not an end in itself. Rather, participants make e orts to persuade one another of the rightness of their point of view, and are ready to be persuaded by others. For Lukas from the Gampern group, for example, ‘the best point of view crystallises when one can really convince the others, or when one lets oneself be persuaded that one has oneself … thought, as it were, in the “wrong direction”, or that the direction in which one thinks doesn’t receive the support of the majority in the party group’. Dispositions of this kind are palpable across the groups. They become even more apparent in the discursive exchanges that were analysed for this research, some of which are presented in the subsequent chapter. If participants freely speak their minds in their regular party branch meetings, this implies plenty of

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potential for con ict, not least because of the diversity of viewpoints represented in the groups. But though disagreement is indeed mentioned as persistent across groups, it is never seen as undermining the unity of the group. Instead, perhaps with the exception of the above-mentioned debate over cycling policy, even heated debates are generally described as being marked by the kind of good cheer that typically characterizes minor squabbles among friends. Alex in Bonn for example stresses with collective approval that ‘it’s great fun […] when we get on to [talk about] concrete topics and rant at each other [sich anschnauzen] in the end. And […] we hit the table with the at of our hands. And in the end, we get along again … this is how I envisage politics, this is how I envisage discussing, this is how I envisage opinionformation [Meinungsbildung].’ Such statements signal that even a confrontational style of debate is not seen as violating mutual respect. Participants know each other, and generally know their limits. They know that even if debates become heated, others will not take it personally if an adversarial tone is struck. p. 97

There are, however, clear ethical boundaries within which the discussions proceed. This emerges most

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clearly in Vienna’s Sandleiten group, which operates in the con ict-laden environment of a large municipal building in which many people with immigrant backgrounds and citizens who work in low-income jobs or are unemployed live side by side. In this context, explain the group’s members, treating others with equal respect is of paramount importance—and indeed can have a de-escalating e ect on the wider social environment. Treating others unequally, on the other hand, is unacceptable: it risks increasing social tensions in the immediate surroundings, and more generally jars with social-democratic ideals. The group’s objective is to set an example, not just out of necessity but also out of moral conviction. Equality in the group means, then, that the background of individuals ought not in uence the way in which they address each other in political discussion. Slobodan, who throughout the discussion emphasizes his own immigrant background, having moved to Austria from former Yugoslavia as a child, explains that this basic rule has never been broken thus far: Heinz [another member of the group] and I often disagree for example … and we never had any con ict. That he would say, ‘you are a Yugo [derogatory expression for people of “Yugoslav” origin], you have no idea’, or that I’d say to him ‘who do you think you are, Austrian?’—that never

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happened … I never heard anything discriminatory from Heinz! We always found a compromise. He states his opinion, then I explain why and how [I disagree]. But I never heard anything disrespectful from Heinz. But of course, equality means not only that participants’ country of origin does not play a salient role in

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their interactions. Socio-economic di erences, such as di erent educational backgrounds, are also irrelevant, in the sense that those who are more educated do not use their social status to dominate the others. ‘I never heard Katharina [the group’s chairwoman, who is the only member of the group who has a university degree] say “I am a university graduate and you [the other group members, who are on average much less educated] don’t know what’s going on”’, Slobodan goes on. ‘On the contrary!’ So deliberative equality qua discussion una ected by status and resource inequalities clearly seems enacted here. The sources of mutual respect in particular, and the equal standing participants enjoy in general, are rarely

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rendered explicit in the discussions. Only in the Linz group do references to a ‘source’ of equality emerge: participants single out their joint commitment to the party as the ‘foundation’ on which their discussions proceed. A shared sense of dedication to a collective political project is seen by them as exercising a more general enabling and constraining e ect on their interactions, shaping the way in which they relate to each other. But perhaps the fact that participants in the other groups do not make explicit what exactly it is that p. 98

promotes

equality among them re ects that they take some sort of ‘common foundation’ for granted.

Perhaps they presume—not unreasonably—that those with whom they interact in the branch meetings are driven by similar concerns simply because they engage in the same political party. Lending support to this interpretation is the fact, mentioned in the prior chapter, that most participants record a strong commitment to the party as one of the principal reasons for their political engagement. Participants are unequivocal that they widely seek to promote similar normative commitments, and the value of these commitments is assumed without discussion. To cite just two illustrative examples, while Frauke in Bonn stresses that she joined the SPD ‘out of […] political conviction … my concerns were always: peace, social justice and gender equality’, Martin in the Vienna Wasserturm group notes ‘the belief in, and struggle for, a better, more solidaristic society’ as his main motivation to engage in the party. There is of course a great deal of indeterminateness in these statements. But perhaps this is part of what it

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means to be a partisan. As Rosenblum argues (2008, 340), party identi cation is ‘based on a voter’s mental image of who partisans are, of the party as a social group’, and ‘partisan self-conceptions much more closely resemble ethnic or religious self-conceptions than they do evaluations of political leaders, opinions 5

about party platforms, or voter intentions’. If this is correct (I believe it is), then it is no surprise that participants have very personal reasons to why they identify as partisans and what the party means to them. In a sense, partisans’ shared normative commitments involve what is sometimes called ‘incompletely theorised agreements’ (Sunstein 1998). Partisans, that is, may invoke many di erent grounds for their shared beliefs about what the party stands for and what aims it should pursue. The ip side of having shared normative commitments is having common adversaries, and the data contains material suggesting that this also strengthens equality among branch members. Rival parties, rival partisans, and indeed non-partisan agents who pursue goals that are seen as being at odds with those of the party (sometimes a whole organization, sometimes speci c individuals) are identi ed as the chief adversaries in the Theilheim, Bonn, and Vienna Wasserturm groups. And where adversaries are identi ed, participants often make explicit that their presence buttresses group unity, in terms of fostering a sense of being equally committed to prevailing over one’s rivals among the members of the group. The rival parties or partisans who are singled out as adversaries are mainly the other large ‘people’s parties’ in the two countries—the CDU or CSU in Germany (the latter only in the Bavarian Theilheim group), and the ÖVP in p. 99

Austria—and

6

sometimes speci c representatives or members of these parties. Non-partisan agents that

are mentioned as pursuing con icting, sometimes even repugnant, political goals include lobbyist and

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special interests. In the eyes of many participants, for example, transnationally organized business interests seek to impose the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) onto European countries, which undermines the ability of those countries to e ectively regulate big rms and enforce standards of product quality and social protection. To be sure, references to such actors often remain vague: who exactly those adversarial actors are and how much agency they are being attributed is not much speci ed. But insofar as participants de ne their own position against the position of these actors, there can be no doubt that these ‘indeterminate adversaries’ perform the same unifying function as more concretely identi able rivals. As one might expect given the previous chapter’s nding that participants tend to be dissatis ed with their

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party elites and leadership, moreover, sometimes party elites are also singled out as rivals, in the sense that they are being accused of ignoring the party base and promoting policies that run counter to the party’s lead principles. Ben in Theilheim is one of many participants across the groups who complain that ‘the party base is simply being ignored … and that entails that the party ‘overtakes” the base on the right [rechts überholen, guratively for being more right-wing in one’s political views than someone else]’. But such views are never shared by all the members of the group. In each group, some participants in fact emphatically endorse the party’s general direction. So even if a number of participants de ne their own positions as incompatible with those of the party elite, the party elite is not a group that everyone regards as adversaries, and whose existence correspondingly helps strengthen a sense of equality among members. In fact, given that many groups perceive a considerable distance between themselves and the party leadership, one could plausibly expect the motif of the party elite as adversary to be much more prominent. Sometimes participants overdraw the unifying e ect of common adversaries. Asked whether the group

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experiences internal disagreements, for example, Sinja in the Theilheim group responds, ‘not at all’. Bernhard, in turn, adds that this is because of ‘our common “bogeyman” ’, meaning here the town’s mayor, whose politics they fervently oppose. By and large, however, there is little evidence in the data that the existence of common adversaries can eradicate internal disagreements. It is of course important to recall here that the Theilheim branch operates in a rather hostile political environment, where a single rival party —the conservative CSU—holds the absolute majority of seats in the local council and thus signi cantly constrains the social democrats’ ability to shape local politics. So, what might lead participants to overstate p. 100

the ‘enemy-character’ of those wielding

political power in their community may be their own inability to

in uence local politics. But even in Theilheim the divisions between di erent parties are barely as deep as the just-cited passage suggests. At a di erent stage in the interview, Sinja emphasizes that in small municipalities like their own ‘one should seek to jointly work for the good of the community’ and ‘put ideological con ict to one side’. Thus, in spite of rivalries some participants still exhibit a belief in the worth of cooperation across party lines—or are simply torn and hence inconsistent. In short, it seems that there is an inclusionary and exclusionary side to having and upholding shared

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normative commitments. We may say, with Nancy Rosenblum (2008, 358), that there is always a partisan ‘we’ that ‘aspires to be as inclusive as possible’ while ‘casting the partisan “other” as sectarian, narrow, and few’. This relationship between ‘partisan we’ and ‘partisan other’ shapes the way in which equality manifests itself within the partisan groups. Participants stand for something, and this standing for cultivates a sense of equality among partisans that is not reducible to any prior identity participants share. And they also stand against something else, and reminding themselves of who their adversaries are (and of why they are adversaries) in its turn reinforces the feeling of jointly standing for something. Accepting this reading of the material, can it be said that the party members’ experience of equality in their group meetings satis es the demanding equality desideratum? I think yes. What emerges from the above discussion is certainly a complex picture: equality among participants takes di erent forms across the groups, and it can hardly be said that one particular manifestation of equality is dominant. But regardless of this variation, the evidence examined suggests that participants face a relatively ‘level playing eld’ in their

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regular deliberations. They can freely speak their minds, and can expect others to listen respectfully, possibly even empathically. Sustained and enhanced is this basic sense of equality by a pre-deliberative agreement on certain political commitments, on the one hand, and by the corresponding awareness of common adversaries, on the other. Interestingly, although there exist personal friendships among participants (as many of them acknowledge during or after the interviews) they make no mention of them as a potential source of equality in the groups. Nor is there any evidence suggesting that personal friendships are pertinent to the equal standing participants enjoy. What establishes and sustains equality seems most of all to be the shared commitment to certain ideals, aims, and policies.

Discussion

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Table 4.1 summarizes the observations of this chapter, highlighting the relevant patterns that have emerged

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from the empirical analysis that was carried out. Divided into four boxes, the table recapitulates both what p. 101

diversity and equality

mean in the context of the partisan groups, and where diversity and equality ow

from. One pertinent discovery is the generally positive view of di erence and diversity. Participants regard the plurality of perspectives present in the groups as widening their own perspective and so making the discussions more rewarding. With the exception of some age-di erence related disagreements, they appear to thrive on disagreement and debate. One may say that this re ects a highly ‘deliberative attitude’ in the sense that it signals that participants are willing to re ect on their own standpoints and preferences in light of arguments put forward by their peers. This lends credence to Chapter 2’s claim that, in intra-party deliberation, partisanship is not an obstacle to deliberation but may in fact be conducive to it. C4.T1

Table 4.1. Preconditions for deliberation in party branches

Perceptions and meanings (i.e. what does diversity and equality mean in the context of party branches?)

Precondition 1: Diversity

Precondition 2: Equality

Di erent viewpoints in the group enrich debates and make them more rewarding; disagreement is a part of the political process, and one to be embraced.

Being able to speak oneʼs mind, be heard and taken seriously.

Variation: Disagreements are avoided in the Vienna Sandleiten group. Sources (i.e. where does diversity and equality flow from?)

Occupational di erences

Being considered equal regardless of socio-economic or national background

Tacit: agreement on shared principles, aims and policies.

Connotation: positive, contributing to an overall broader perspective on issues Age di erences Connotation: primarily negative, resulting in unnecessary and unresolvable disagreements

Explicit: common adversaries, i.e. rival parties, partisans or nonpartisan agents pursuing aims contrary to the partyʼs

If one presumes that those who actively engage at the party base are the most dogmatic and intransigent partisans, as both the folk understanding of party politics and mainstream political science tend to do, this is certainly an unexpected nding. If we follow John May’s (still) much-cited ‘Law of Curvilinear Disparity’ (1973), for example, we should expect members of party branches to be not re ective but uncompromising with respect to their own standpoint. We should expect them not to relish disagreement but to be overly concerned with group unity, and be sceptical of division. However, none of this is the case in the groups that p. 102

7

have been studied for this research; quite the contrary. The idea that active

party members are naturally

unyielding zealots might sound intuitively correct, but this research nds little evidence in support of it.

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This also means that empowering the active party members would not result in them imposing vote-losing policies on the party because of their extreme views. We can con dently discard this worry. All of this lends further plausibility to the previously-formulated expectation that parties provide promising

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spaces for deliberation. So, might—contrary to the presumption of classic deliberative theory that partisan commitments pose an obstacle to deliberation, and contrary to the slightly more favourable recent assessment that deliberation among partisans merely ‘fails to rise to the level political philosophers model or democratic theorists organize in actual experiments’ like deliberative polls or mini-publics, but still ‘conforms to a latitudinarian view of argument and evidence employed in the process of negotiating and compromise’ (Rosenblum 2008, 361)—might, contrary to these views, partisans turn out to be model deliberators who are capable of discussing political issues dialogically and non-coercively in circumstances 8

of disagreement? Clearly, the requisite preconditions are in place. A nal notable observation relating to participants’ deliberative capacity concerns the tacit agreement on shared principles that shapes the way in which they relate to each other (and to the world outside the group and the party). Insofar as this agreement exercises an enabling and constraining e ect on participants’ interactions, it forms a central pillar of what sociologists sometimes call ‘group style’, that is, a set of shared assumptions among members of a group about ‘what the group’s relationship (imagined and real) to the wider world should be’, ‘what members’ mutual responsibilities should be while in the group context’, and ‘what appropriate speech is in the group context’ (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003, 739). This has implications not only for how equality is practiced in the group (whether people can speak their minds; be taken seriously by others; and so on). It plausibly also in uences participants’ justi catory practices (how they present their arguments so as to render them acceptable to others in the group). This is because an implicit consensus on ‘what appropriate speech is in the group context’ entails not only that (for example) certain forms of verbalized disrespect are ruled out, but also that there exists an understanding among participants as to what kinds of argument will carry persuasive force. Discursive exchanges might then be more successful, in the sense that agreements on contested issues can swiftly be found. If this is correct, then we have another argument in hand for why deliberation among committed partisans may be especially fruitful.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5

6

Note that even though I speak of deliberation being ʻdemandingʼ and requiring citizens to be respectful vis-à-vis each other, I am not asserting a universal standard for good deliberation here. That is, I am not suggesting that there is only one way of expressing mutual respect (for example), and that whether participants to deliberation treat each other with respect is, therefore, immediately clear to a third party (such as a researcher). Indeed, I think that all the demands of good deliberation can find di erent expressions in di erent contexts. Thus, the ʻdeliberative experienceʼ of citizens is more important than the researcherʼs third-party perspective if we want to find out whether deliberative demands are met. On this point, also see Appendix 1. Scholars use di erent terms for this, e.g. ʻcross cutting exposureʼ (Mutz 2006) or simply ʻdisagreementʼ (Thompson 2008, 502). One potential explanation for why participants in the Berlin group claim that there are hardly any arguments within the group is that they only refer to the ʻcore teamʼ of young activists, disregarding the wider membership of the branch with whom there is plenty of potential for conflict. Some deliberative theorists operationalize this principle in terms of reciprocity (e.g. Gutmann and Thompson 1996 and 2004; Thompson 2008). A similar point is stressed by Ernesto Laclau in his influential work on populism. As Laclau (2005, 98–9) argues, vagueness and imprecision are necessary features of any more widely shared political identity, for if identities are overly concrete and particularistic, they will not manage to unite people ʻon a radically heterogenous social terrainʼ. Note that these parties are identified as adversaries despite the fact that the social democrats are in a coalition government with them at the state level in both countries.

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7

8

Note that there is some evidence suggesting that the Law of Curvilinear Disparity is empirically groundless (Norris 1995; Scarrow and Gezgor 2010; Scarrow 2014). However, none of these studies look in detail at the political views and ethics of party activists, drawing instead only on large-N survey data. This leaves open many questions concerning the ideological dispositions of party activists. Obviously, we are here looking only at deliberation among fellow partisans, and not at deliberation across party lines. Inter-party deliberation is likely to look very di erent from intra-party deliberation, even if the latter is of high quality. But this is not the focus of this study. Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

5 Partisan Deliberation in Action 

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Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0006 Published: December 2019

Pages 103–C5.T2

Abstract This chapter shifts the focus from the circumstances of deliberation to actual deliberative practice. It begins by distinguishing two di erent types of disagreement within the partisan groups: ones about organizational matters and ones about issues concerning society at large. It then goes on to examine several exemplary text passages that illustrate how partisans ‘deliberatively’ handle these kinds of disagreements. The central point that emerges from the analysis is that party activists engage in acts of reason giving that may reasonably be interpreted as satisfying the twin demands of uptake and mutual engagement. One of several interesting speci cities of partisan deliberation is that it is marked by tensions between pragmatically-minded partisans and more ideological ones. This, it turns out, is also an important source of diversity within party groups. Another notable nding is that the political principles underpinning partisanship can facilitate mutual justi cation. The ‘normative consensus’ that characterizes partisan collectives plays a crucial role in this connection: partisans’ predeliberative agreement on a certain set of political principles ensures that appeals to those principles are immediately resonant. This makes reaching agreements and compromises easier. The upshot is that even though deliberation in party branches is a particular kind of deliberation, it is undoubtedly good deliberation. If this is any indication, then there is plenty of potential for involving these partisans more in the party’s wider deliberations and giving them bigger deliberative tasks

Keywords: intra-party democracy, deliberation, justification, activism, party members, participation Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Preliminaries: the Party as Compromise

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An important truth about political parties is that they always embody compromise. After all, even if

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partisans broadly agree on what principles should inform political decisions, they are not protected from con ict. Due to the plurality of di erent interests and preferences within parties, ‘intra-party dissension ares all the time, unsuppressed’ (Rosenblum 2008, 361). It is for this reason that partisans need to undertake the business of conciliation and compromise. They need to accommodate dissenting voices and nd middle ground on potentially divisive issues; otherwise the unity of the party and its collective capacity to act are at risk (compare studies of factionalism such as Boucek 2012). The requirement to negotiate compromises arises not only among policy-making elites at the top level of

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the party; often, it also arises at the party base. The organized members, like those who engage in local branches, tend to disagree about a plethora of issues. One classic example is the impact and defensibility of the party leadership’s decisions. Was it right to coalesce with another party? Did it eventually cost votes to promote a particular policy? Another set of issues that members routinely disagree about concerns concrete courses of action they might collectively pursue. How should the next campaign be framed? What can be done e ectively to address pressing problems in the community? What stakeholders should we cooperate with in the pursuit of shared goals? In all of these cases, nding compromise is important in the sense that it is a prerequisite for concerted action. Without some sort of agreement on what the position of the group is 1

on those matters, the group will struggle to exercise collective agency. In other words, if partisans fail to agree then they will likely fail to act. C5.P3

Normatively, there are at least two reasons for why the organized members at the party base should be capable of acting together. First, the collective capacity to act is necessary in order for the party base to e ectively contest the decisions of the party elite. Internal dissent is unlikely to be heard and taken seriously p. 104

if dissenters do not speak with one voice and act in unison. This point

is especially pertinent in the

context of the model of intra-party democracy I have defended in Chapter 2, which proposes the 2

empowerment of the organized membership as a way to strengthen parties’ capacity to provide linkage.

Following this model, successful preference transmission from the bottom up requires that members jointly question the position of the party elite and promote alternatives that are grounded in their own deliberations. Second and more generally, the collective capacity to act is crucial when members at the party base could take actions that would improve on the status quo and be backed by a majority of those a ected —for example helping to promote a policy that the local community would bene t from. No doubt a failure to act here would not be normatively neutral, since it would favour the status quo and potentially disempower collective responses to emerging or long-standing problems. These preliminary re ections serve to remind us of the wider signi cance of e ective deliberation within

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parties. The success of internal deliberation is an important determinant of the ability of the organized party members e ectively to address local problems, and correspondingly impacts on their trustworthiness as collective agents who are capable of changing political institutions in accordance with their normative commitments. Be that as it may, my primary concern in this chapter is not with what happens once deliberation has concluded. Instead, I will focus on how members of party branches discuss in circumstances of disagreement. So, the chapter shifts the focus of the analysis from the preconditions for deliberation in party branches to actual deliberative practice. I begin in a plain and descriptive fashion by listing the kinds of disagreements that arise in branch meetings, distinguishing between disagreements about organizational issues and disagreements about societal issues. I then clarify how I understand and operationalize the concept of deliberation in a brief excursion into democratic theory, before embarking on an in-depth analysis of several exchanges that occurred in the focus groups. These exchanges exemplify the type of political conversation one is likely to

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p. 105

nd in party branches, exhibiting patterns that are dispersed more widely across the groups. In the course of the analysis

I will also foreground what’s distinctive about deliberation among partisans, weaving the

ndings into the bigger picture that has emerged so far.

Domains of Disagreement

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In the previous chapter I have argued that disagreement is an important prerequisite for deliberation, and I

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have shown that, in party branches, disagreement arises for reasons to do with group diversity. What I have said little about was what branch members actually disagree about. Now I want to zoom in on the content of the branch members’ disagreements. In Chapter 4 we have already encountered one concrete issue of con ict, namely cycling policy; but there are also other relevant areas of disagreement. Indeed, the data from the group discussions suggests that participants disagree on a wide range of issues. While there appears to be among participants an agreement on the values that should predominate in the making of policy, di erences surface when it comes to epistemic and preferential questions, that is, when it comes to beliefs about the impact of a policy or a given course of action, as well as the expressed preferences for a policy or a course of action. For purposes of analysis, a distinction can be drawn between two main domains of disagreement. The rst

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and perhaps more common one encompasses matters relating to the strategy and organization of the party. I call disagreements that belong in this domain disagreements about organizational issues. In these kinds of disagreement, participants are divided over such issues as the appropriate strategy of the party elite vis-àvis political adversaries or coalition partners; the degree to which members should be involved in internal decision-making; or the future of the party more generally (disagreements over these particular issues arose across the groups). Usually divisions run here between (a) participants who hold what one might call ‘pragmatic’ views, and see strategic behaviour and compromise as necessary for holding on to power and exercising in uence on policy, and (b) participants who endorse what one might call ‘purist’ views, and wish to see the party adopt a more principled, indeed sometimes uncompromising, approach in reaching certain political and organizational goals. This divide between ‘pragmatists’ and ‘purists’ in fact seems to be another important source of diversity in the groups. Even though it remains unmentioned in participants’ re ections on their deliberative experience in the group, it becomes readily apparent in the deliberative exchanges. Notice that the pragmatist/purist divide that cuts through the party branches challenges two commonplace

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assumptions in political science. One is that activist groups at the partisan base are uniformly purists (the p. 106

classic exposition of this view is May 1973). The other is that, insofar as there exists an ideological gulf between purists and pragmatists, this runs between the party elite (who are pragmatists because they have to compromise in order to win elections and govern) and the party base (who are purists because they care about principles and want to see these principles realized in full)—but not across the party base (for such a perspective see, e.g. Katz and Cross 2013, esp. 171). As I have already suggested in the previous chapter, it seems that the party branches are much more internally complex in terms of their members’ preferences and attitudes than one would expect in light of the contemporary political science literature on the topic. The second domain of disagreement, then, involves what I call societal issues, that is, issues to do with grievances that are manifest in the local community or society in large, usually with more or less direct policy implications. Examples include growing social inequality, rising living costs, and public fear from immigration. Typically, these kinds of issues are brought up in connection with references to ongoing public debates, or in connection with the personal experiences of participants. These references in turn often serve as a point of orientation for the discussion. Principal causes of disagreement in this domain are contrasting personal experiences and di erent viewpoints on which values (of those that are central for the party)

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should inform the party’s stance on a given issue, or how speci c values should be interpreted. A major reason why there exist di erent positions on the relative priority or substantive interpretation of values is, again, the pragmatist–purist divide within the groups. Those with a more ideological outlook tend to argue for a narrow interpretation of values, or assert that some values are too central to be compromised in the making of policy. The pragmatists, on the other hand, usually do not disagree about which values should predominate but tend to regard an outspoken commitment to certain values as compatible with a cooperative and compromising outlook. For them, what counts is concrete political achievements, not maintaining ideological purity. Table 5.1 presents an indicative (but not exhaustive) list of issues of disagreement participants mentioned in

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the group interviews. What this list shows is that branch members problematize topics with direct implications for both the structure of the party they support and the political community in which they reside. Their discussions do not only touch on purely local issues or on intra-party politics; nor are they exercises in non-decisional, purely theoretical reasoning. Even if individual branches have no authority to make nal decisions regarding many of the topics under deliberation, each branch counts as a locus of practical reasoning. All of this lends more weight to the idea, developed in the foregoing chapters, that party branches are promising sites of deliberation. To be sure, whether the actual discussions of branch members actually qualify as deliberative has yet to be established. This is examined later in the chapter in an analysis of two particular instances of disagreement within the branches. The next section discusses what it even means to say that verbal exchanges are deliberative, and introduces the main category of analysis: justi cation. p. 107

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Table 5.1. Issues of disagreement Organizational Issues

Societal Issues

• Is the party leadership committed to internal democracy?

• How can more social housing be provided in the community?

• Are direct-democratic forms of intra-party democracy preferable to delegated ones? • What is the best electoral strategy for the party in EU elections? • Is the current party leader capable of winning the next election? • Should the party conduct more sociological studies about its constituency to better meet their demands? • Who should gain a place on the party list in the forthcoming council elections?

• What can be done about the rising rents facing the less well-o ? • Should the minimum wage be raised? • What can be done about the adverse e ects of inflation on peopleʼs lives? • Should a (local) tramway line be extended? • Does TTIP (and especially ISDS) endanger democracy? • How can people living in poverty be appropriately supported? • Should more bike lanes be built in the city?

Measuring and Operationalizing Deliberation

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The main question I want to address in this chapter is this: if the members of party branches disagree over a

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wide range of issues, and if their meetings provide favourable preconditions for deliberation, how is disagreement being dealt with in practice? What I want to do in particular is look at practices of mutual justi cation among branch members. Those practices—understood either as instantiations of a particular moral theory according to which all citizens owe each other reasons for ‘the laws and policies that govern their public life’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2004, 134; also see Cohen 2009; Forst 2007), or simply as practically necessary for achieving mutual understanding and hence valuable (cf. Mansbridge et al. 2010, 72–80; Neblo 2015, 3–7)—are emphasized as normatively central in virtually all theories of public deliberation and deliberative democracy and are a powerful indicator of how well con ict is discursively 3

processed (for an overview, see Chambers 2010). In other words, if we want to get a sense of the p. 108

‘deliberativeness’ of party activists, then we must pay close attention to how their justi catory

practices

look. But how should practices of justi cation be studied and evaluated? The paragraphs that follow will try to o er an answer to this question. In essence, mutual justi cation means that people o er each other an account of their viewpoints,

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4

providing reasons for why they think as they do. In contrast to mere explanation, this involves speakers (to some degree) ‘recommending’ their views to one another, framing their own reasons in such a way that 5

they can be appreciated even by those who may initially be inclined to disagree. In doing so, the viewpoints of the latter are expressly given consideration, signalling that they are taken seriously. This is not hard to imagine in practice: as far as I am concerned, the rst thing that comes to mind is a political discussion with friends or colleagues, in which disagreements bubble up, but everyone still listens to one another and tries to get others to view things in a di erent light. But once we start searching for more robust standard that allows us to evaluate di erent justi catory practices—one that allows us to show that it can be done in better or worse ways—things get signi cantly more complicated. To be precise, there are two di erent things at stake: (a) can a particular exchange of views or arguments be classed as a justi catory practice or not? (a binary question); and, (b) if it can be classed as a justi catory practice, is it a ‘good’ or ‘average’ or ‘bad’ instance of mutual justi cation? (a continuum question) (cf. Neblo 2015, 32–4). Existing empirical approaches to deliberative democracy can provide some guidance on how these issues

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could be approached. For example, in Jürg Steiner and André Bächtiger’s highly in uential Discourse Quality Index (DQI)—a coding scheme developed for measuring the quality of deliberation—a distinction is drawn between the level of justi cation on the one hand, and the content of justi cation, on the other (Steiner 2012, 270–1). The level of justi cation is operationalized in terms of the number of reasons given by a speaker and p. 109

the extent to which the

speaker makes clear that these reasons speak for or against the course(s) of

action under deliberation. By way of illustration, here are some sample codes for di erent levels of justi cation as presented by Steiner (2012, 270). 1. The speaker does not present any arguments (asks, for example, merely for additional

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information). 3. The speaker justi es only with illustrations why X should or should not be done.

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6. The speaker gives at least two reasons why X should be done and for at least two reasons a

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linkage is made with X. These codes allow us to answer both the binary and the continuum question. If multiple or all speakers fail to o er any arguments in support of their position (1), it is doubtful that the discussion we are surveying quali es as marked by mutual justi cation properly understood. The remaining codes (3–6) are meant to help answer the continuum question of the quality of mutual justi cation. They are based on a procedural

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standard of good argumentation that has both quantitative (How many reasons are given?) and qualitative aspects (Is a ‘linkage’ between the reasons and the proposed course of action made explicit by the speaker?). C5.P18

The DQI’s ‘content of justi cation’-code, in turn, is disaggregated into three components. It asks (1) whether the speaker makes explicit her proposals’ costs and bene ts for his own group and other groups; (2) whether references are made to abstract principles like equality or social justice; and (3) whether stories are told in order to reinforce the point. These codes are mainly derived from the aforementioned moral theories of deliberation, which tend to play up the relevance of appealing to moral principles in justi cation, considering the common good, and—though this is not an aspect highlighted by all moral theories— enhancing the accessibility of arguments via storytelling. The ‘content of justi cation’-codes can assist in providing answers to the continuum question of how good the provided justi cations are insofar as one takes a position as to the relative importance of criteria (1–3). If, for example, one thinks (for pragmatic or philosophical reasons) that the most important aspect of justi cation is a group-centred rather than selfinterested outlook, one will have to say that acts of mutual justi cation that only exhibit characteristics 2 and 3 are of lower quality than ones that exhibit characteristics 1, 2 and 3. Without a free-standing theory of what matters most in justi catory exchanges normatively speaking, however, the ‘content of justi cation’codes remain purely analytical (but not strictly speaking evaluative) tools.

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While this approach provides helpful cues as to how justi catory practices could be empirically studied, it also holds several problems. Above all, it de-contextualizes justi cation, treating it as a practice whose quality can be meaningfully evaluated from a third-person perspective, without considering the situated p. 110

and particular character of the deliberating collective in question. This is

problematic because

justi cation is a highly contextual activity. It is about the deployment of reasons in a particular social environment, with a particular set of persons as addressee: the justi catory audience. What matters, therefore, is not so much how many reasons a speaker gives, or whether she makes a connection between those reasons and the proposed course of action. Nor is it necessarily relevant that speakers refer to abstract principles and discuss all the costs and bene ts their proposals entail for society in large. Rather, reasons and arguments must be adapted to the speci c justi catory audience that is being addressed (see Young 6

2002, ch. 2; Goodin 2008, ch. 9; Bächtiger et al. 2010, 42–8; Mansbridge et al. 2010, 67; Dryzek 2012, ch. 4). Otherwise e orts at justi cation are unlikely to be resonant and dialogue will come to a halt, rendering the whole exercise pointless.

To better understand this point, consider a literary example. When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra for the rst time

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addresses the village dwellers at the marketplace, his sophisticated philosophical considerations are met with laughter and incomprehension. ‘When Zarathustra had thus spoken […] all the people laughed at Zarathustra’ (Nietzsche [1886] 1988b, prologue, III). Zarathustra’s deliberations strike us as eloquent and sharp, but they are simply out of sync with his justi catory audience’s patterns of understanding. This frustrates his e orts at justi cation. Putting the point in another way, even though Zarathustra’s arguments are—at least from a philosophical third-person standpoint—of high quality, they prove unintelligible in the speci c setting in which they are aired. Thus, there is a potential gap between the ‘objective’ quality of reasons and their force and plausibility in the context in which they are deployed. This gap cannot be overcome by the DQI’s one-size- ts-all operationalization of justi cation (on this point, see also Appendix 1). What we need is a looser operationalization, one that ratchets down the requirements a speaker practicing justi cation ought to satisfy. With all this in mind, I want to suggest a strategy that is both normatively modest and phenomenologically plausible. If justi cation’s principal currency is appeals that recognize the situated and particular character of the justi catory audience in question, and if the quality of justi cation cannot be ascertained without considering the justi catory audience’s engagement with the reasons o ered by a speaker, then the satisfaction of two basic conditions should stand at the centre of our analysis.

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(C1) Reason-giving condition: A speaker must provide reasons rather than simply state her point p. 111

of view or preference, though she retains discretion as

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to what kinds of reasons these are (in

order to render them resonant to her justi catory audience). (C2) Uptake condition: The speaker’s justi catory audience, or some members of that audience (if

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the group is large and not everyone can be expected to speak), must react to the reasons provided by the speaker in a way that signals comprehension and re ection. Some readers will nd the formulation of these conditions frustratingly imprecise. But there are good

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reasons for making use of placeholder terms here. If justi cation is intersubjective and necessarily situated, insisting upon any narrowly de ned threshold of permissible actions may unduly call for false precision. Any empirically meaningful conception of justi cation must leave room for agency. It must permit reasonproviders to give an account of their views in terms that makes sense to those they address, rather than 7

limiting the range of permissible forms of communication (C1). And, accepting that the justi catory audience has an important role to play in the process, it must allow a wide range of re ective reactive moves on the part of the reason-recipients—provided, that is, that the reasons they were o ered were understood 8

and recognized as worthy of consideration (C2). We ought not impose onto deliberators a normative straightjacket just for the sake of reducing necessary degrees of underdetermination (see Appendix 1). A closely related worry is that the proposed operationalization of justi cation is too normatively modest. If justi cation is couched in such permissive terms, it may be said, almost any dialogue may satisfy C1 and C2 and so count as ‘good justi catory practice’. The answer to the aforementioned binary question—Can a particular exchange of views or arguments be classed as a justi catory practice or not?—then becomes that there is no binary question: there cannot be any such thing as exchanges without justi cation in an absolute sense. But I think this concern is unwarranted. A closer inspection reveals that the demands of C1 and C2 are far from normatively hollow. C1 explicitly precludes speech acts where no reason is given, which weeds out a substantial amount of utterances from the category of valid justi cations. For example, statements such as ‘I prefer X’ or ‘I think Y is better’ do not classify as justi cation. Participants must say why they those certain preferences. C2 in its turn demands some re ection on the part of those to whom justi cation is given and so guards e ectively against docile reactions like passive acceptance, and against disengagement p. 112

triggered by reasons that are not

9

meaningfully received. It also clearly rules out that ‘one person

completely dominates’ (Thompson 2008, 501)—which is incompatible with the logic of mutual justi cation —since it requires others to re ect and react. Thus, it should be clear that not any dialogical exchange can satisfy C1 and C2. Though we have loosened the requirements of the justi cation criterion, there is no reason to think the operationalization presented here is normatively empty. Instead, it strikes a balance between showing recognition for pertinent normative demands and the necessity to accept the situatedness of justi catory procedures. The next sub-section examines whether the political discussions of party branch members satisfy C1 and C2, and looks closely at patterns of justi cation across groups.

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Deliberative Exchanges

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The preceding theoretical discussion was quite lengthy, but it has done the necessary conceptual

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groundwork in order for us to embark on our empirical analysis. It has clari ed what justi cation is, why it matters, and how we may conceive of it empirically. What I want to focus on now are two discursive exchanges among members of party branches. These exchanges were triggered by internal disagreement about issues falling, respectively, into the organizational and societal categories discussed at the beginning of the chapter. While in principle there are numerous passages of text that could be selected and usefully analysed for justi catory moves, those explored here were chosen because they present patterns that are dispersed more widely through the empirical material. The disagreements that prompted the discussion arose quite naturally in conversation, as participants talked through particular problems. No interventions on the part of the researcher were made. This free- owing discussion provided an opportunity to study political reason-giving among party members in its perhaps most natural form: as something that ares up in the course of repeated encounters among likeminded, politically committed citizens. I have chosen to present only two examples of partisan deliberation for reasons to do with readability and

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analytical leverage. As far as readability is concerned, in-depth textual analysis of the kind engaged below tends to require great amounts of space, making it sometimes di p. 113

cult for readers to follow the argument

(or make reading somewhat tedious). Focusing on two examples, which correspond

neatly to the two

umbrella categories of organizational and societal disagreements, elegantly avoids that problem. But besides these ‘aesthetic’ motivations, I think that the two examples that are discussed in what follows are su

cient to make the broader analytical point this chapter seeks to make, and to make it in an adequately 10

robust way.

Presenting further examples of deliberative exchanges would not add anything of import to

the argument and ultimately compel us to sacri ce some of the analysis’ depth. Readers who are interested in more textual evidence of deliberation within party branches may turn to the book’s Appendix 2, which o ers additional empirical material. This material a ords more insight into the data upon which this chapters’ argument is built. In order to examine whether C1 is satis ed, we shall focus in what follows on speech acts that contain (a) an

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evaluative statement about a given issue, and (b) a reason that is given in support of that statement. For example, ‘I think X is a good thing. This is because it can promote Y through Z.’ In this example the speaker’s rst sentence signals that she takes an evaluative stance with respect to issue X, while the utterance ‘This is because it can promote Y through Z’ communicates a reason for why the speaker has come to think the way she does, and draws a link between the earlier evaluative statement and that reason. To see whether reason-recipients satisfy C2, on the other hand, we shall focus on whether they react in a way that may reasonably be interpreted as indicating comprehension and some degree of re ective engagement with the speech acts of the reason-provider. To pick a few examples of possible responses: reason-recipients may ask questions of clari cation, critique the reasons given by a speaker or the mode in which reasons were delivered, or o er evidence that challenges the validity of the speakers’ argument. Both of the justdescribed categories are deliberately loose, consistent with the normative arguments laid out above. They treat deliberation as marked by speakers’ exercise of discursive agency, drawing only on minimal standards of good discursive practice. In addition to elding these two operational tests, I want to explore what kinds of arguments partisans exchange. The motivation behind this is not that some reasons are normatively more desirable than others, as some deliberative democrats believe. I have rejected this view earlier as imposing inappropriate constraints onto speakers. Rather, exploring the properties of the arguments aired in party branches allows us to understand what (if anything) is particular about partisan deliberation. Speci cally, we shall concentrate here on patterns of what is deemed relevant to justifying a given point. I make this the focus of p. 114

attention because in practice a good portion of justi cation lies not in explicit reason-giving but in the

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assumptions of relevance that are embedded in the utterance. Speakers often merely provide brief argument-sketches that hint at the reasoning that leads them to their conclusions, assuming that others will receive these as equally relevant to the justi cation of their point (Goodin 2008, 88; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; also see Appendix 1). In exploring these patterns, I shall employ familiar categories, for example ‘storytelling’ or ‘principled justi cation’, yet without implying that these categories carry any special value apart from usefully describing the particular instances of justi cation analysed. The point of this exercise is simply to make sense of salient patterns of political reasoning across the groups. In short, we shall explore in the following (1) whether the justi cation criterion is satis ed in the political discussions of party members, and (2) what party members’ patterns of argumentation look like.

Exchange 1: Questioning the Legitimacy of Membership Ballots

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Let us then move to the empirical material, looking rst at a disagreement over an organizational issue. This

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occurs in the Theilheim group, its starting point being that one participant questions the appropriateness of membership ballots as a means to enhance intra-party democracy. To put things in context: the issue of membership ballots proved to be particularly contentious across the German groups. This is because the legitimacy of the ballot on the coalition agreement between the SPD and the conservative CDU/CSU party that was held after the 2013 Bundestag elections remains bitterly contested within the SPD’s membership. In each group, there were supporters of the ballot initiative (and of the ‘grand coalition’ between CDU/CSU and SPD more generally). For them, the ballot represented a legitimate instance of direct democracy within the party. Yet there were also opponents, who usually objected that the ballot was procedurally awed (we shall see shortly what exactly is meant by that). Perhaps unsurprisingly, supporters of the ballot were mostly what I have called ‘pragmatists’, that is, party members who see strategic behaviour and compromise as necessary for holding on to power and exercising in uence on policy. Opponents tended to be what I have called ‘purists’, partisans who more generally wish to see the party adopt an uncompromising, strongly principled approach to reaching certain political and organizational goals. In the following passage, which appears about thirty-eight minutes into the interview, the di erent priorities of supporters (Willi, Sinja, and Hans) and opponents (Ben) of the ballot become manifest. ben: Membership ballots are in principle a good thing. But of course, if one manipulates them and

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bludgeons [niederknüppeln] one’s adversaries in gatherings where there should [actually] be discussion about [the issue on which the ballot is held] … then this has nothing to do with grassp. 115

roots democracy

[Basisdemokratie] and it has nothing to do with a democratic decision. […] One

could have saved the money … since there was ultimately also the argument ‘this ballot was so expensive that we can hardly a ord campaigning now’ [if the members had voted against the coalition and forced a re-election]. This was, amongst other things, a reason that was given for why one should agree [to the coalition agreement]. I thought that was really dubious. willi: I have to say, Ben: I absolutely disagree. Because there is certainly much more manipulation

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in the […] elected party committees than in a membership ballot. [That] is my opinion. So … I just cannot imagine that one can manipulate many people in the same way as when one wants a speci c result in […] a committee. ben: Whoever uses party funds to advertise in big newspapers, but does not o er the same

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[ nancial] means to adversaries [within the party] … is democratically highly dubious. […] I think this was a waste of party funds. willi: Then one has to abolish membership ballots, then one should have to say: ‘pointless!’ … that

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is what follows from your reasoning. ben: Yes! If one does not conduct them in a democratic fashion, then one has to abolish them. Either everyone is provided with the same opportunity to argue with impact or not.

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sinja: I have a di erent view. […] When one refers an issue to others for a direct decision, then I

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will have a personal point of view on it. You will have a di erent one [pointing at other participants], you will have a di erent one, you will have a di erent one … [let’s] suppose. Then everyone will try to win over the majority for his position … for whatever reasons. What I do not like is the thing with advertising in big newspapers. Yet I have made my decision on the grounds of my own re ections. And I am a realist, I am businesswoman, and I nd it more important to hold public o

ce and exercise in uence than sitting somewhere on the opposition benches and […] be

unable to exercise in uence. And so, I bit the bullet and said: yes, let’s be part of this, so we can […] have a say and table our proposals and see … and if you look at the results today, then … ben [interposing]: We have put some ideas into practice [Inhalte umgesetzt], yes. But how does the

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party bene t from it? hans: Well, how does the party bene t? We have achieved things for the people!

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sinja: We want to achieve something for the people, not for the party!

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hans: The party is not an end in itself, Ben!

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sinja: Consider the [higher] minimum wage of €8,50. That’s still not much but now it’s been

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achieved! In this passage one sees several justi catory moves taking place. Central is Ben’s expression of disapproval

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concerning the 2013 membership ballot, which initiates the discussion. Ben claims that internal criticism of p. 116

the coalition agreement

between SPD and CDU/CSU—the issue on which the ballot was held—was

suppressed by the party elite prior to the ballot. Three instances of suppression are cited in support of this claim, namely that the party elite lashed out at internal critics in the debates that took place before the ballot; ‘blackmailed’ members into voting in favour of the coalition by suggesting the party would lack the funds to run another campaign; and used party funds to promote their plans to form a grand coalition in newspapers, without o ering critics the means to publicise their views in a similarly e ective way. Setting aside the question of whether or not it is factually correct that the party elite tried to disempower

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internal critics in the ways Ben describes (given that similar accusations were voiced in other groups there might be some truth to it), there can be no doubt that Ben’s argument satis es C1. It constitutes a clear case in which reasons are given in order to substantiate an evaluative statement about a certain issue. How do the responses of Ben’s justi catory audience look? To begin, Willi and Sinja both openly disagree

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with Ben, though to a di erent extent and for di erent reasons. Willi, who reacts immediately to Ben’s argument, appears entirely unconvinced. He rst tries to relativize Ben’s charges, and then expresses doubts about whether manipulating the outcome of a decision-making procedure is in fact possible when publics as large as the SPD’s membership are involved. Sinja, in contrast, reacts in a more nuanced fashion. On one hand, she accepts Ben’s worry about resource inequality in the debate preceding the ballot, at least insofar as she declares that she ‘does not like’ that the party elite used party funds for promoting their position on the coalition agreement in key newspapers. On the other hand, she thinks it was inevitable that the party elite try everything to win over a majority for their preferred course of action. Despite the substantial di erences between Willi’s and Sinja’s responses, it is not di

cult to interpret both

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as satisfying C2. Far from passive acceptance or unreasoned assertions, it is evident that both reasonrecipients are engaging with the argument given to them. Even if some of the points that are being advanced —especially Willi’s—are not developed much, and only gestures towards arguments are o ered, the replies constitute instances of spirited disagreement on the basis of reasons. As far as the speci cities of argumentation in this exchange are concerned, perhaps the most notable thing in the discussion is that a key part of the reasoning leading Ben to his conclusions remains implicit. Let me explain. When Ben criticizes the party leadership for trying to silence internal dissent, he seems to have in mind a strongly egalitarian conception of intra-party democracy, according to which resources to in uence

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the process of internal will-formation ought to be equally distributed among the party membership. However, he does not elaborate the details of the ideal of intra-party democracy he has in mind. Presumably p. 117

he expects that others will catch the allusions and receive them as meaningful and

persuasive. This is a

risky strategy: it cannot reasonably be expected that one’s interlocutors will always be on the exact same wavelength. But here it seems that the others accept, or at least do not reject, Ben’s implicit assumptions. After all, their criticism is addressed not to his premises but his conclusions. The most plausible explanation for why Ben’s arguments are intelligible to the whole group is arguably that

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group members are very familiar with one another. To wit, they have a rough idea of ‘where the others are coming from’ in their argumentation. Over time and through repeated exchanges they will have become increasingly aware of each other’s beliefs and convictions, and the kinds of arguments they are likely to hear from each other. So, Sinja, Hans, and Willi are able to make sense of Ben’s positions on intra-party democracy because he has elaborated these positions in conversations that were held on prior occasions, or because these positions are in harmony with a wider set of previously defended views. Either way, Ben’s claims are enmeshed in a broader history of discussion, one which is kept in the branch’s ‘collective memory’, so to speak. This sensitivity towards each other’s viewpoints and mindsets greatly facilitates reason-giving among the members of the group: it enables them to make their points understandable to each other, and lends them a sense for what is ‘out of bounds’ in a debate. (I will return to this issue later in the chapter.) This analysis must be supplemented with one further observation. This concerns the exchange’s

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inconclusiveness. Insofar as there is no sign that Ben’s arguments have managed to persuade Sinja, Hans, and Willi, and vice versa, the disagreement remains unresolved. That things are left open is common across groups when it comes to organizational disagreements: rarely do deliberations over issues to do with organization or strategy yield consensus or the ‘joint acceptance’ (Moore and O’Doherty 2014) of a position for that matter, even if several constructive proposals are put forward. The reason for this, I suggest, is that there is often simply no need for participants to nd agreements on many organizational matters: as the present example shows, organizational disagreements are usually quarrels about issues that have already been decided, or indeed about matters that participants have very little or no direct in uence on. However, this should not be read as a ‘failure’ of deliberation. If anything, the spirited attempts at mutual justi cation and critical re ection that can be observed even when ‘undecidable’ topics are discussed signal reason to believe that the groups’ capacity to deliberate can be emphatically a

rmed.

Exchange 2: Debating Poverty and Social Inequality

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We turn now to the second deliberative exchange. This features a disagreement over a societal issue in the

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Linz group, that is, an issue relating to grievances manifest in the local community or society in large. We p. 118

join the discussion about

twenty-eight minutes into the interview, just after one participant explained

that the group’s regular discussions help him to clarify ‘what is really at stake’ in public discourse as opposed to what is being ‘singled out by the media as important’. Franz, a participant in his mid-seventies, who throughout the discussion stressed his experience of poverty in his youth, reacts to this by identifying the problem that the general public is fundamentally misled and misinformed about their de facto material welfare. His contribution immediately receives deliberative uptake by Petra, a social worker, who contests Franz’s moves on the basis of her inside knowledge of the more deprived sections of society. franz: I believe there are many di erent viewpoints, or rather wrong points of view, misleading views, concerning the development of prices. I have a very good memory of numbers and I can tell you today how much which product had cost 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And if I compare that with how much [money] I earned back then, or how much others earned—because that I also still remember—then I nd that we are extremely well o

today! And the feeling that we’re not

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comfortably o

today … happiness is after all a matter of being content … arises from being told by

advertising and commercials: ‘You need that [product]! And if you don’t have it, then you cannot live properly!’ … And I take my responsibility to be that I tell people, ‘You’re actually well o !’ petra: I have to disagree with you in one respect: in my job I am very often confronted with people

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who have been evicted from their homes. And I can tell you of cases of mothers with two children, who were evicted because of rent arrears of 3000 Euros. These are not big sums. It is getting tough at the moment … the last years in fact. And there are many things such as … many people cannot a ord glasses anymore. In the 1990s, I remember, that was not a problem. Back then everyone in Austria was able to buy new glasses every 2–3 years. There are many people in Austria who are covertly [versteckt] really poor! And this is about heating, this is about having a piece of meat on the weekend, and so on. And some people are really not doing well in this sense. And I think one has to calculate again from … from our secure position what it means to live o franz: Well, that [i.e. living o

700 Euros [a month]. C5.P52

700 Euros a month] is not possible.

petra: I know, but many people have to do that.

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franz: I know, but that is not normally possible. I have no illusions about that.

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herbert: Well, I agree. I have perhaps an even better insight into what people actually earn because

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we allocate public homes two, three times a week, and there we look closely at people’s income and also see how much rents are. And then you know how much electricity and heating and so on costs. And, well, it is exactly like Petra says … by now a considerable number of people drag themselves p. 119

around along the poverty line (an der Armutsgrenze herumkrebsen).

Of course, you, Franz, you

look at this from your point of view. I could say the same. What did we have when we were children? How was it in our home? There were ve of us—that is, three children and two parents— living on 60 square metres. But okay—today the standards are di erent. And we do not want to go back to lower standards! And many are simply unable to a ord their rents for a at that is appropriate measured by today’s standards. They are unable to a ord that. That’s how it is. franz: Let me put it in this way: there’s no point in agreeing with people when they say they are

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poor, because that doesn’t build them up (aufbauen). What much better builds people up is when I say ‘well, whether I am doing well or not is ultimately never a question of money, but a question of comparison … with others’. And if I only compare the bad bits, then one will feel even worse afterwards. petra: And for me it’s clear: 500 Euros are relative. Whether I have 1500 Euros or 1000 Euros a

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month makes a big di erence. Whether I have 4000 or 4500 Euros makes no di erence. And I utterly resist saying: it depends on you, whether you are doing well or not! Because such an argument is along the lines of ‘Me Incorporated’ [German: ‘Ich-AG’, a term chie y used pejoratively to describe the individualist, ‘entrepreneurial’ lifestyle in contemporary societies], where we are solely responsible for ourselves. And this is the exact opposite of the idea of the SPÖ, of social democracy, of solidarity, where there should be a certain standard of life for everyone. And beyond that everyone may consider aiming for more … but a certain shared basis for everyone … franz: [Thinks] Well, yes. Solidarity. You’re right! Does this exchange meet our two justi catory desiderata? I think yes. Both Franz and Petra advance positions backed by argument, providing reasons for why they think as they do (C1). Petra’s several responses to Franz, moreover, go way beyond the reactions of reason-recipients we have encountered in the Theilheim passage. Rather than merely expressing preliminary intuitions or re ections concerning Franz’s position, she delivers a full-blown counter-argument to it (C2). Her reasoning may thus be interpreted not only in terms of a response to another speakers’ act of justi cation, but in terms of a self-standing justi catory move. What to make of Herbert’s intervention, in which he balances Franz and Petra’s position against each other? This, too, falls squarely within the purview of C2. Herbert’s explicit and intellectually

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honest weighing of di erent arguments constitutes a paradigmatic example of the sort of re ective engagement with the arguments of others that enriches and sustains the deliberative process. In short, the analysis fully a

rms the participants’ justi catory capacity.

When one looks at the kinds of reasons participants give each other, two things stand out: the strong use of

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narrative and the e ective appeal to the principle of solidarity with which the conversation closes. First, as p. 120

we have seen, all

participants in the above passage draw on personal stories of some kind. Narratives are

used to a much greater extent than in the Theilheim discussion. Franz justi es his viewpoint by talking about his youth; Petra by conjuring experiences collected in her job as a social worker; and Herbert, in his attempt to mediate between the others’ positions, anecdotally refers to the special insight into people’s lives he gains in his job, and invokes an autobiographical story akin that which Franz articulates. Notice however that while storytelling typically involves the provision of a rst person-account of one’s own experience, or of the experience of someone with whom certain interests or socio-cultural characteristics are shared (Young 2002, 73–4), Petra, and in part also Herbert, use it to a di erent e ect. Central to their stories is not so much their own experience, but the experience of others—others with whom they ultimately share little in common. One may call this second order storytelling. To see what is meant by this, consider the following examples. In Petra’s statement, ‘In my job I am very

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often confronted with people who have been evicted from their homes’, the focal point is not the fact that she is confronted with those people but that there are many other people who struggle to pay their rent and risk homelessness. And when Herbert says that ‘I have perhaps an even better insight into what people actually earn because we allocate public homes two, three times a week’, his emphasis is on the di erential between people’s salaries and housing costs, not on the fact that he is involved in allocating public housing. So, the point of those narratives is not to convey facts about the speakers’ own situation, or about the situation of people who are like the speaker, but about the situation of completely other persons the speaker cares about in some relevant sense. One way of looking at second order storytelling of this kind is to see it as potentially strengthening the

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connection between parties and the wider citizenry. Why? Because expressing citizens’ concerns in a concrete and empathic fashion can raise consciousness for those concerns within the party. What is meant by this can best be brought out through an example. When Petra empathically speaks of ‘cases of mothers with two children, who were evicted because of rent arrears of 3000 Euros’, she does not talk of abstract social problems or anonymous statistics but of real existing citizens whose su ering deserves attention— citizens we all can relate to in one or another way. This personalized and somewhat dramatized way of presenting a problem can help foster and sustain awareness for that problem in the group (cf. Dryzek 2000, 68; Boswell 2013, 631). It can strengthen the extent to which group members feel responsible for addressing the problem, providing an impulse for collective responses. In this sense, communicating the worries of those the party seeks to represent in terms of second order narrative can be an e ective way of translating their demands into political action. p. 121

The second notable thing about the sorts of reasons participants o er each other in the Linz group is that Petra’s principled appeal to solidarity eventually manages to persuade Franz. Remarkable is the immediate resonance this appeal nds. It seems to speak directly to Franz’s normative intuitions about political life, for after a brief moment of re ection he concedes that solidarity is an important political principle in the context of the issue under discussion, indicating a change of mind. Remember in this connection the predeliberative agreement on central political values that was mentioned in the previous chapter. I have discussed this in connection with the question of whether participants enjoy an equal standing in their discussions. The fact that participants bring to the table such an agreement would seem to be an important enabling condition for arguments like Petra’s to succeed: indeed, without it being in place, any appeal to shared principles could easily mis re. For to accept Petra’s argument, Franz arguably needs to recognize the value of solidarity and endorse it as a general principle that ought to guide political practice. He needs to attribute

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to it the same, or at least similar, importance as Petra does. This means that the participants’ likemindedness regarding certain shared values performs an ‘agreement-facilitating’ function. It plays an important role in nding common ground on potentially divisive issues. A nal point: if one looks beyond the Linz case, it emerges that appeals to abstract principles like solidarity

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or equality take place more frequently in disagreements about societal issues than in disagreements over matters to do with organization. One straightforward reason for why this might be the case is that the party’s lead principles naturally have a more direct bearing on societal questions than on organizational ones: these principles tend to be a point of orientation for general political agendas and concrete policies, for shaping and designing political institutions, but not necessarily for such questions as who gains a place on the party list. Therefore, it will be more di

cult for reason-providers intelligibly and persuasively to link

those principles to organizational matters. Of course, principled considerations may play a role in disagreements over organizational issues. In the excerpt from the Theilheim group, for example, Ben’s conception of intra-party democracy is clearly in uenced by his interpretation of certain democratic ideals. But, as this very example shows, the principles informing organization-related disputes are typically not those that are constitutive of partisans’ shared activity. In any case, if the observed pattern is any indication, then giving party branches more weighty deliberative tasks, and encouraging them to discuss policy issues relating to society at large, as I have suggested in Chapter 1, is likely to produce more of the principled kind of justi cation that we have witnessed in the Linz excerpt. And this might be the best basis for strong, integrative agreements that are regarded as legitimate by all those involved in making it.

p. 122

Discussion and Conclusion

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Tracing the two selected discussions indicates important things about deliberation among party branch

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members. Most importantly, it suggests that there is reason for optimism concerning their ability to deliberate. As we have seen, both discussions satisfy our two justi catory desiderata: the reason-giving condition and the uptake condition. They are marked by the mutual provision of reasons, with participants listening and responding to each other in a way that signals a degree of re ective engagement with the arguments in question. Notice also that there are no marked di erences between the two countries studied, suggesting that certain deliberative tendencies appear to persist independent of the institutional context in which parties act (for a summary, refer to Table 5.2). C5.T2

Table 5.2. Summary of the analysis Issue under deliberation

Justificatory desiderata satisfied

Types of reasons appealed to

(Example 1) Theilheim group

The legitimacy of membership ballots and their misuse by the current party leadership

✓

Tacit appeals to normative principles

(Example 2) Vienna group

Poverty in contemporary society.

✓

Appeals to shared principles; personal narrative; second-order narrative

What might account for all of this? I suggest the two examined discussions reveal a deeper reason for why deliberation in party branches is generally likely to reach good quality. When non-partisan citizens deliberate, it is a purely contingent matter whether or not basic (normative) premises are shared as

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common ground among all participants to the conversation. That just depends on the nature of the beliefs that are present within a political community. In party branches, this contingency is signi cantly reduced. It is reduced, on the one hand, because branch members share many values and goals. Where they do not share those premises and goals, on the other hand, they are familiar enough with each other to know roughly what underlying premises their interlocutors construct their arguments upon. This is likely to sustain a sense of trust among them—recall in this connection the discussion of how partisanship can be a carrier of equality, indeed a form of political friendship—and facilitate the resonance of arguments even in heated disputes over the righteousness of certain policies or course of action. That participants are su

ciently familiar with each other to have some idea of the premises underlying

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each other’s arguments manifests rst of all in the fact that they hardly engage in what Goodin (2008, 88– p. 123

90) calls ‘premise probing’.

Premise probing usually takes place when it becomes clear to the

participants to a conversation that they do not get each other’s points. Participants then ask each other why they believe the things they say—‘Why on earth do you believe that?’—and proceed to elaborate in fuller detail their underlying reasoning. This does not occur in the above passages. Either premises are accepted (call to mind how the Theilheim group deals with Ben’s argument about intra-party democracy), or participants disagree over premises, but forego the ‘probing’ process and proceed directly to questioning them (think for example of Petra’s nal response to Franz in the Linz passage, in which she attacks his premises without having demanded further clari cation). It is no interpretative leap to suggest this has to do with the fact that participants know each other reasonably well, and have discussed many times before. Through repeated exchanges they are likely to have familiarized themselves with each other’s standpoints and commitments. They will have understood what kinds of arguments their fellow activists tend to make— who in the group is a ‘purist’ and who is a ‘pragmatist’, for example. As a result, they will have a good sense of ‘where the others are coming from’ when they argue about a given issue. But as I said, participants also genuinely share many premises. This comes out most clearly in the

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concluding moments of the Linz discussion, where Petra’s appeal to the principle of solidarity persuades Franz to change his mind. The premise shared by the two participants is that solidarity is a value that should drive political decisions. This leads them eventually to converge at the same conclusion. The point to note here is that shared premises do important work in making e ective deliberation possible. This is a wellacknowledged point in deliberative theory: from Rawls’s (1993) plea that good deliberation requires an ‘overlapping consensus’ on the basic institutions of society to Dryzek and Niemeyer’s (2006) argument that ‘reciprocal understanding and recognition of the legitimacy of the values held by other participants in political interaction’ (642) is the minimum requirement for adequately dialogical democratic discourse, authors have treated some level of shared premises as indispensable to deliberation. What the example of Petra and Franz reminds us of is that party branches are good places to look for collectives with shared premises: insofar as partisanship rests upon a shared belief in basic political values, sharing premises with others is part and parcel of what it means to be a partisan. By implication, party branches are also good places to look for e ective deliberation. Of course, to recognize the bene ts of partisanship for deliberation is not to imply that any party branch can produce good deliberation, and the di erences between the two examined passages point to potential variations in the deliberative practice of party branches. But to recognize this limit means only that we need to be prepared for contingencies—not that the generally positive picture of deliberation in party branches p. 124

that emerged in this chapter should be renounced.

On the contrary, if the ndings of this chapter are any

indication, it seems that party branches could nd their place among paradigmatic deliberative fora like town meetings or citizens juries. These sites of deliberation are often celebrated as contexts in which ordinary citizens become legislators, as natural laboratories for democracy (e.g. Bryan 2003; Mansbridge 1980). Party branches seem to share their democratic credentials: they appear capable of producing decisions with a distinctively deliberative pedigree.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8 9

I say ʻsome sort of assentʼ because an agreement to let something stand as the position of the group can take di erent forms. It can take the form of full normative unanimity, for example. This occurs when the members of the group through discussion come to share beliefs. But it can also involve only partial normative unanimity, by which is meant an agreement on a group position without unanimity at the level of the substantive belief itself (see Moore and OʼDoherty 2014, 303–5). Note: as far as the partyʼs overall capacity to act is concerned e ective internal dissent might have a decreasing e ect— that is, if there can be no quick compromise found between the party elite and the organized members. It is a recurring finding in the empirical political science literature on parties that internal divisions undermine partiesʼ agentive capacities (and lead them to de-emphasize policy) (e.g. Katz 2014). This presents us with a complicated trade-o in which the value of intra-party democracy needs to be balanced against the value of a partyʼs general agentive capacity. Though I cannot discuss all the intricacies of this trade-o here, I suspect that no definitive rationale for why one should be privileged over the other can be given. Much seems to depend on the gains and losses action or non-action brings with it in a particular context. My own understanding of justification is more pragmatic than moral, that is, I take it to derive its normative value mainly from its capacity to achieve mutual understanding and potentially agreement. While many arguments advanced in moral theories of deliberation are plausible, making as they do ʻexplicit the rationale behind intuitive ideas and practices already embedded in our political cultureʼ (Neblo 2015, 5), the fact that they take as point of departure our political culture casts doubts on whether they can be seen as universal (as moral theories of deliberation typically suggest). For another important critique of moral theories of deliberation and the demands they impose on people, see Beerbohm (2011, ch. 4). Beerbohm persuasively argues that moral theories of deliberation are supererogatory, asking implausibly much of ordinary citizens. Notice that this point is rarely presented in such a stripped-down version. Especially in moral theories of deliberation, it usually comes with a number of provisos, which are typically derived from moral considerations. One standard qualification is that justification ought to be practiced in public. This is because when ʻpublic thingsʼ that a ect the political community as a whole—like laws, constitutions or the basic social structure—are at stake, the addressee of justification ought to be the public in large; private conversation does not su ice. Another typical caveat is that citizens are obliged to limit their justificatory e orts to providing only reasons of a certain kind, though what this exactly means is contested. Especially theorists who tra ic in public reason endorse this latter clause, since they believe that not all types of reasons reflect the mutual respect citizens ought to have for each other. Accordingly, citizens should prescind from referring to their self-interest or their ʻcomprehensive viewsʼ (that was Rawlsʼs term) about justice, right and wrong, etc., presenting instead reasons that appeal to widely shared ideals (for an excellent discussion, see Bohman and Richardson 2009). But since defending any particular conception of justification would take us too far from the topic of the present chapter, I will limit myself to an ecumenical definition here. While explanation also involves the provision of reasons (accounting for the emergence of, say, a particular problem), it does not necessarily involve an e ort on the part of the speaker to present her arguments in such a way that those addressed could accept them. In other words, an explanation does not by definition require that the reasons one gives are placed in a favourable light. That said, it should be noted that it may in practice sometimes be di icult to distinguish between the justification and the explanation. Whether an utterance is received as justification or explanation may in fact depend much on the listener. This point is o en made in discussions of the role of rhetoric in deliberative democracy. Second-generation deliberative democrats, that is, those who approach deliberative democracy in non-ideal terms and eschew Rawlsian public reason, allow that rhetoric does have important roles to play (e.g. Dryzek 2012, ch. 4). Similarly to what I am arguing here, many of them suggest that rhetoric raises the inclusiveness of deliberation, since particular, rather than universal, appeals are more likely to connect to individuals from di erent social and cultural contexts. Some theories of deliberative democracy proscribe certain forms of communication. See the above discussion of the ʻprovisosʼ in fn. 4. For example, they may ask questions of clarification, critique the reasons given by a speaker or the mode in which they were delivered, provide evidence that tells against the validity of the speakersʼ argument, etc. C2 may also be criticized for making participation in a justification procedure a mere option that citizens may choose to exercise, allowing as it does that ʻonly someʼ members of a justificatory audience might react to the reason-providersʼ arguments. Yet if we accept that justification is not a moral demand but at most morally desirable, as I have argued earlier, there is no reason to tighten the reins on reason-recipients and impose a blanket participatory duty on them. The source of such a duty would be very di icult to determine. Moreover, in practice most deliberative groups will in any case be too large for each participant to be given the floor and present reflections on the reasons that were voiced.

10

I take this claim to be not especially controversial. Much work in qualitative sociology draws on a small number of cases that are explored in great detail with a theoretical interest in mind. Two important works falling into that category that I have already cited are Mansbridgeʼs influential study Beyond Adversary Democracy (1980) as well as Eliasoph and Lichtermanʼs (2003) account of ʻgroup stylesʼ. Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

6 Failures of Partisan Deliberation 

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Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0007 Published: December 2019

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Abstract Although the picture of intra-party deliberation that emerges in Chapters 4 and 5 is generally very positive, it is important to note that some of the party groups that were studied for this book proved to be less deliberative than others. Those groups provided good preconditions for deliberation, yet their actual deliberations displayed numerous shortcomings. This chapter examines these shortcomings, looking closely at three types of ‘deliberative failure’—(a) group splits and defection; (b) cases where deliberation does not arise, or only seldom arises; and (c) polarizing tendencies. The chapter also sketches a number of institutional devices for making deliberative failures tractable and concludes that even though deliberative failures will be di

cult to avoid in an internally deliberative party, their most

harmful e ects can be limited through institutional design; so, the fact that deliberation sometimes fails does not speak against a deliberative model of intra-party democracy as a whole. This is important as the proposal of a more deliberative and thus democratic party the book advances is meant to be feasible and functional even under di

cult conditions.

Keywords: deliberation, deliberative failure, party membership, activism, participation, institutional design Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

The preceding chapters suggested that party branches qualify as proper deliberative fora. We have seen that branch members approach each other as equals; that they belabour a diverse range of internal disagreements; and that their exchanges are marked by the mutual provision of reasons. In this nal empirical chapter, I want to add nuance to this picture and look closely at what I shall call ‘failures’ of deliberation in the party branches, that is, non-deliberative moments that occurred despite favourable preconditions for deliberation. To be sure, precisely because the branches generally provide a supportive environment for deliberation, deliberative failures were rare. But those that occurred raise important questions about the limits of partisan deliberation and the design of deliberative institutions within parties. So, it is crucial that we devote our attention to cases where deliberation failed.

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The chapter divides into three sections. I rst clarify what a ‘deliberative failure’ is, especially how it

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conventionally understood in deliberative democratic theory, and why it is often normatively ambivalent. I then discuss three types of deliberative failure in party branches, looking speci cally at (a) group splits and defection; (b) cases where deliberation does not arise, or only seldom arises; and (c) polarizing tendencies among the groups. In the third section, I re ect on possible strategies for making deliberative failures tractable, suggesting di erent small-scale reforms to reduce the likelihood that intra-party deliberation goes awry. The chapter concludes that occasional deliberative failures will be di

cult to avoid in an

internally deliberative party, but their most harmful e ects can be limited through institutional design xes. Thus, the fact that deliberation among partisans can fail does not undermine the viability of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy; if anything, failures of deliberation reinforce the case for thinking carefully about how to appropriately reform parties.

What are Failures of Deliberation?

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What does it mean to say that deliberation fails? Deliberative democrats are divided over this question. This

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is because whether deliberation can be said to have failed depends on what ideals one thinks it should reach in the rst place, and deliberative democrats disagree over what counts as appropriate deliberative ideals. p. 126

On a more traditional understanding of deliberation, for example,

deliberators’ openness to preference

shifts is a key indicator of deliberative quality (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 174). Good deliberation, in other words, requires that people are willing to change their minds in light of others’ arguments. If one endorses this view of deliberation, one will interpret the refusal of deliberators to adjust their preferences as a deliberative failure. But this interpretation of the deliberative ideal has been quali ed in important ways in recent times. Thus Mansbridge et al. (2010, 68) stress that ‘when interests or values con ict irreconcilably, deliberation ideally ends […] in a clari cation of con ict and structuring of disagreement, which sets the stage for a decision by non-deliberative methods’. This more recent take on deliberation (which I endorse) 1

considerably loosens the requirement that deliberators change their preferences.

To provide another example, some deliberative democrats believe that deliberators should o er each other

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only arguments of a particular kind. Especially those who are committed to the idea of ‘public reason’ often want to impose narrow limits on what constitutes authentic deliberation, suggesting that deliberators should refrain from appealing to their ‘comprehensive conceptions of the good’ (i.e. their ethical vision of the good life) as well as to their self-interest. Again, if one supports this conception of deliberation, exchanges in which deliberators openly talk about their personal ethical beliefs or about their basic material interests will count as failures of deliberation; there are clear limits to the way in which speakers can permissibly reason in a deliberative setting. But again, this way of looking at deliberation has been contested by in uential theorists. As Bächtiger et al. (2010, 43) note, many deliberative democrats today are ready to admit even ‘claims cloaked in confrontational language or barely concealed sarcasm, conceding that this very mode of delivery may go hand in hand with the nature of the point that is being made, or necessary to communicate to a particular audience’. (This contemporary approach chimes with the one I have taken in this book.) However, to say that what counts as deliberative failure ‘depends on what ideals one thinks it should reach in the rst place’ is not to say that classifying speech acts as deliberative failures is an entirely subjective p. 127

matter either. First, there have

been proposed strategies for measuring deliberation that simply fail to

convince and thus can reasonably be set aside. Chief amongst these are what Neblo (2015, 37–8) calls ‘consequentialist’ strategies as defended by Mark Warren (2007). Warren proposes to evaluate deliberation purely in terms of outcomes: setting procedural criteria to one side and admitting nearly any form of communication in principle, he reasons that the best way of guring out whether deliberation has

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succeeded or failed is through a substantive assessment of the results of deliberative exchanges. This strategy turns upon three argumentative moves, all of which are unpersuasive. The rst move is to deny that there is anything procedurally distinctive about deliberation: indeed, such

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things as ‘lies and half-truths’ or ‘strategic communications’ (Warren 2007, 10) also qualify as deliberation and non-coercive dialogue—the inclusive de nition of deliberation employed in the present book—is only one of innumerable shapes deliberation can take. Yet if we accept this, we risk extending the concept ‘to the point of vacuity’ (Neblo 2015, 33). This not only jars with widely-held intuitions the term has traditionally 2

sought to capture. As Neblo (2015, 33) puts it, ‘If deliberation … is to have any cutting power, [it also] must be contrasted with other forms of political interaction.’ The second argumentative move consists in asserting that there is such a thing as unambiguously ‘deliberative outcomes’. This claim equally strikes me as unpersuasive, most notably because it rests on the two contestable assumptions that it (a) is straightforwardly obvious what ‘deliberative outcomes’ are, and (b) that the relevant normative standard can be knowable by the analyst largely independently of what participants to deliberation think. That such moves typically beg the question of how valid procedure-independent standards can be established and defended is a familiar objection to epistemic conceptions of (deliberative) democracy, and it can be raised against Warren’s position too (e.g. Schwartzberg 2015). The third and nal argumentative move, then, consists in advancing the proposition that it does not matter

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how we achieve deliberative outcomes as long as we achieve them. This proposition follows from the denial that there is anything procedurally distinctive—such as non-coerciveness—about deliberation, and requires one to accept the spurious claim that there exists such a thing as unambiguously ‘deliberative’ outcomes. Yet even if one endorses Warren’s view that there exist unambiguously deliberative outcomes, it is not clear why we should really accept that it does not matter how we reach them. As critics have rightly pointed out, endorsing even coercive and manipulative forms of communication as long as they produce deliberative outcomes is a normative dead-end, since it treats people as mere means to the end of achieving p. 128

certain ostensibly desirable

results (Owen and Smith 2015, 223 and 227; Ebeling and Wolkenstein 2018,

638–40; also see Neblo 2015, 38). Far from a trivial implication, this implies that people are not taken seriously as individuals whose views deserve recognition and who might want to bring their agency to bear 3

on collective political decisions. (Recall that the ability of deliberative procedures to provide a channel for individuals to exercise voice qua individuals was a major reason for why a deliberative model of intra-party democracy was thought to be desirable to begin with.) A second reason why we should resist the idea that what counts as deliberative failure is a purely subjective matter is that—if we accept that evaluating deliberation entirely in terms of outcomes is implausible—there are still some broad evaluative criteria we can draw on to evaluate deliberative practices without running the risk of severe controversy. Recall how I have de ned and operationalized deliberation so far: I have suggested to understand deliberation capaciously as non-coercive dialogue and singled out (in the previous chapter) two conditions—reason-giving and uptake—as practically central to such dialogue. These two procedural conditions are derived from sociological considerations about what forms of communication are conducive to achieving mutual understanding and are not especially restrictive in terms of what styles of speech they admit. Yet, as I have argued, they also still have a critical edge that renders them powerful and plausible evaluative criteria. In particular, the two conditions rule out discursive exchanges in which participants to deliberation do not o er each other an account of their standpoints, and indeed, exchanges in which participants do not treat one another with some degree of respect, re ectively engaging with each other’s arguments. These things, I submit, are central to thinking about deliberative success and failure: deliberation may be said to fail, that is, when no reason-giving or uptake takes place. As I will indicate where necessary, all of the deliberative failures I will discuss in the remainder of this chapter fall squarely within the purview of this understanding of deliberative failure.

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An important point to note before proceeding is that deliberative failures are rarely ‘absolute’ wrongs, in the

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sense that their consequences are unambiguously negative. For one thing, deliberating groups are usually in some ways connected to each other, and one group’s failure to produce good quality deliberation might have a positive e ect on the deliberations of other deliberative agents. This idea has recently been popularized by theorists of ‘deliberative systems’, who propose to conceive of the various deliberative sites in a society in terms of ‘distinguishable, di erentiated, but to some degree interdependent parts’ which are ‘connected in such a way as to form a complex whole’ (Mansbridge et al. 2012, 4; also see Dryzek 2012, esp. 139–40). By p. 129

way of illustration, let me reiterate an example

I have discussed in Chapter 2. If a group of members at

the party base polarizes over an issue, this is likely to be the result of bad quality deliberation, where views are asserted without re ecting much on them. But polarization may lead that group of members to promote their position with special vigour, and allow them to put their demands on the agenda of other party groups and party elites. Thus, the group’s internal polarization can serve the inclusion of views that would otherwise not be heard, which may be seen as a democratically positive outcome in its own right (Young 2002). So, conceived, deliberative failures are normatively ambivalent. Although they involve (on the view taken here) procedurally bad deliberation, they may have a positive ‘systemic’ e ect at a di erent level of the party. Some readers might think that the view that even procedurally bad deliberation might have democratically

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positive outcomes is at odds with the above-developed argument that we should resist thinking of deliberation purely in terms of outcomes. But this is not so. It is one thing to say that democracy might be enhanced even by deliberation does not meet minimal procedural standards, and quite another to claim that all we should care about is whether democracy is enhanced, irrespective of whether procedural standards are met in deliberation. On the strong view of deliberative consequentialism that I have discussed a few paragraphs ago, there are indeed no procedural standards whatsoever—only substantive, outcome-related ones. It should be clear that the ‘systemic’ argument is di erent: it does not depart from a procedural view of deliberation but simply notes that deliberative failures are no all-things-considered problems for a political party writ large. These points are important to bear in mind in the context of the analysis that follows. The types of

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deliberative failure I shall discuss may look troubling, but they may also have positive e ects on other deliberative fora within the party or beyond it. Nonetheless, I will not speak much to the ‘systemic’ consequences of party branches’ deliberative failures. Though this would be an interesting question to pursue, consistent with the overall focus of this book my main concern is with individual party branches, and not with how those branches interact with other deliberative institutions within the party or society at large.

Failures of Deliberation Within Parties: Three Types

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Re ecting on failures of intra-party deliberation many might think, paradigmatically, of aggressive

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factionalism. Historically, factional divisions have often made constructive and civil communication within parties impossible. An illustrative example is the famous controversy between orthodox Marxists and revisionists that took place in the German SPD at the end of the nineteenth century. The two groups were divided by profoundly di erent views on the nature of capitalism and the role of the party in shaping and p. 130

designing political institutions in

accordance with socialist principles, leading to a serious war of words.

At the party’s 1899 Hannover congress, for example, the famous Marxist August Bebel accused Eduard Bernstein, the key representative of the revisionists, of strengthening the party’s opponents with his attack on Marxism, and a few days later Bebel suggested that Bernstein should leave the party altogether (Berman 4

2006, 44–5).

The particular deliberative failure in the case of factionalism consists in the rival groups’ inability to talk to

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each other constructively and/or respectfully. Their divisions are simply too deep, or perhaps more accurately: too pronounced with regard to issues they both deem central to their agenda, to nd a shared basis upon which deliberation could proceed; and each group is convinced that the other group or groups are harming the party as a whole. Often the result of this is gridlock, in the sense that taking collective decisions becomes extremely di

cult (this was the case in the early SPD). Sometimes partisan in ghting even causes

parties to splinter. Can similar con icts arise within party branches? Yes. As I shall discuss shortly, some of the party branches

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that have been studied for this book have experienced corrosive internal con icts, which put the integrity of the group at risk. These con icts were of course smaller in scope, and thus much less harmful to the party as a whole, than factionalism at the level of the party elite usually is. Nevertheless, they pushed the individual branches’ ability to deliberate to its limits. In one of the two cases I will investigate, the group eventually splintered. In another, individual members defected. It is these extreme cases of deliberative failure I want to turn to rst. Later in the chapter, I will look at di erent, and arguably less dramatic, instances of bad deliberation.

Type 1: Group Splits and Defection

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The perhaps most extreme instance of deliberative failure occurred in the Vienna Sandleiten group. This is a

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group split, which happened approximately ve months before the interview took place and was triggered by irreconcilable di erences of principle and opinion. More speci cally, a number of people left the group after deep and persistent disagreement over issues to do with immigration and multiculturalism. While one sub-section of the group promoted an open-minded attitude towards immigrants, and emphasized the bene ts of multiculturalism for the local community and society at large, the other sub-section took a contrarian position on these issues, upholding restrictive and sometimes outright xenophobic views. It was the latter sub-group that eventually pulled out, leaving the more immigration-friendly members in charge of the branch. p. 131

To better understand the issues at stake, let us begin by looking at how Martha, one of the remaining

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members, recounts the con ict: The weird (schräg) people we had here … ranging from right-wing extremists to brainwashed

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people … we had everything here. When they were part of the group and worked with us, there were only arguments, only quarrels […]. We were only waiting for (was gerade noch gefehlt hat) one of them to shout ‘Heil Hitler!’ in a group meeting … that’s how bad it was! And then we got rid of those people but still had one person in the group that tried to brainwash us … someone who probably voted for the FPÖ [the successful far right party in Austria] … and we all shut ourselves o 5

(abkapseln) and insisted, ‘we have a di erent opinion’.

The references to the Hitler salute and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) provide an indication of how deeply divided the group was before the break-up. Indeed, since the current members of the branch strongly oppose xenophobia and disrespect towards minorities (see Chapter 4), it is di

cult to see how they could

possibly have negotiated compromises with co-partisans who openly stand for prejudiced and intolerant 6

views. As internal con ict intensi ed, constructive cooperation became increasingly impossible. Speaking about those who eventually left the group, Martha recalls that ‘they did not accept any of our proposals … they were wearing blinkers, so to speak’. To which Katharina adds, ‘they actively undermined every project we started’.

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What makes the break-up of the Sandleiten branch a paradigmatic case of type 1 deliberative failure is what

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is referred to in the rst cited passage as ‘shutting oneself o ’ from those who hold di erent views: one party to the con ict became unwilling to engage in further communication with the other party. The declaration ‘we have a di erent opinion’ hereby seems to imply ‘there is no point in belabouring our di erences of opinion any further’. Discussion has stopped, and will presumably not resume. Some members of the group in fact not only refuse to discuss politics with those who defected from the group. They believe that there is no point in engaging with them at all. Slobodan, for example, decided even to symbolically stop greeting them on the street: Meanwhile I have stopped greeting [those] people [from whom] I have heard statements […] that

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attack a certain race, religion, or whatever … statements against other people … even though they p. 132

are old Social Democrats, yes. They do

not deserve this [i.e. being greeted]. One must not forget

that in Sandleiten [i.e. the municipal building complex], there were in the past many people … and luckily so! … with Hungarian or Bohemian roots. Without those people Sandleiten would have been so boring, right? I mean, Sandleiten … from stories I know … we had the best upholsterers, who did not have Austrian roots, we had the best general practitioner, who was shot because of people like those [who hold racist views] … because of his Jewish roots! That was after the war. So those are people who do not hear a ‘good day’ or ‘hello’ from me, let alone, a ‘Freundschaft!’ [i.e. the traditional greeting of social democrats and socialists]. They do not deserve that. No matter what […] academic title they have … that doesn’t interest me. Slobodan’s refusal to greet the former branch members constitutes an especially powerful signal that

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communication between the rival groupings is not desired anymore. Greeting may be understood as a communicative gesture aimed at expressing recognition and respect for the other. As such, it may constitute a rst step towards conciliation between opposing groups, serving the twin functions of asserting ‘discursive equality’ and establishing or re-establishing the ‘trust necessary for discussion to proceed in good faith’ (Young 2002, 60). From this perspective, refusing to greet others, as Slobodan does, means denying those others equal respect and recognition; it conveys that one does not regard them as appropriate 7

discussion partners. His words (‘they do not deserve that’) may even be read as suggesting that he sees the ousted members not as political adversaries, with whom a level of cooperation is possible, but indeed as enemies, who do not deserve any respect or politeness, irrespective of their formal level of education and party a

liation.

Slobodan’s passionate statement is met with emphatic collective approval in the group. Heinz immediately

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responds, ‘Right! Nobody should be excluded. And this has nothing to do with skin colour or whatever, but with respect towards others. […] I believe the most important thing is … to treat people the same way you want to be treated yourself.’ One way of reading this response in the present context is to see it as expressing a belief that is sometimes associated with the doctrine of ‘militant democracy’ (for an overview, see Müller 2016): everyone deserves to be heard and taken seriously—apart from those who seek to exclude others on what might be called ‘morally arbitrary’ grounds and violate the most basic moral norms and p. 133

duties. This belief, it would seem, is deeply rooted in the

members of the group and fundamental to their

self-understanding. It shapes the group’s self-identity as egalitarian vanguard in the con ict-ridden environment of the Sandleitenhof, the large municipal building within which the group operates. This explains why the members of the group deem Slobodan’s symbolic decision appropriate, and why the 8

con ict arose in the rst place.

One notable consequence of the Sandleiten group’s internal con ict and resultant group split was that it uni ed those members who remained in the group. The fact that they prevailed over their rivals and seized control of the branch strengthened the sense of togetherness amongst them. Martha seems to express a shared sentiment among members of the branch when she calls the break-up of the group a ‘reason why we

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t together’. Those who are committed to the same political goals and ideals have remained in the group, which enables constructive communication and cooperation among the members. This seems in turn also to have increased the branch’s capacity to act: agreements and compromises on collective action plans are much more easily crafted when there is agreement on desirable political goals and the principles that inform them. So, the group split exercised an agency-enhancing e ect on the group, restoring their previously impaired capacity to take collective decisions. Is it surprising that con icts over the issues of immigration and multiculturalism erupted in the Sandleiten

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group? Probably not. In the con ict-laden environment of a large municipal building, where people with immigrant backgrounds and citizens who work in low-income jobs or are unemployed live door by door, it seems almost inevitable that some people adopt radical views. As Katharina, the chairwoman of the group, stresses, however, the quarrel within their group is not an isolated case: ‘one really has to candidly say this … it is a problem of Social Democracy that there are still, or rather again, … blue [i.e. very right-wing, blue is the colour of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ)] ideas (Gedankengut) [within the party]. And these are the people who massively oppose foreigners and wage war against openness.’ If this is correct, then the con ict in the Sandleiten branch may be indicative of larger tensions within the party, especially at the partisan base. Before turning to the second case of type 1 deliberative failure, a question worth addressing is whether it is p. 134

not normatively acceptable, or even desirable, to exclude

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people who hold views that are as extreme as

the Sandleiten group members suggest from intra-party deliberation? And if it is indeed acceptable or desirable, can we actually speak of a failure of deliberation? My answer is that it is possible to both nd the exclusionary response of party members legitimate and consider it a deliberative failure. It is legitimate because a party—or even a subset of a party—cannot accept members who outright reject the principles the vast majority of its members endorse (recall in this connection the above reference to the doctrine ‘militant democracy’). To the extent that parties are ‘communities of shared principle’ (White and Ypi 2016), there is simply limited space for wildly deviating value commitments within one and the same partisan community. Yet, the case at hand may also be classi ed as deliberative failure in the procedural sense of being characterized by a failure of participants to engage with each other’s position in a re ective fashion. This distinction between procedure and outcome corresponds to the point I made earlier in the chapter, that procedurally bad deliberation may have defensible consequences whilst still remaining procedurally bad deliberation and thus being normatively objectionable in its own right. Giving up a commitment to procedural standards for the sake of purely substantive, outcome-centred standards is, as I argued, the wrong way to go. At the same time, deliberative failure can only be classed as a pro tanto wrong. Let us turn now to the second case of type 1 deliberative failure, which concerns the defection of individual

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party members in the Bonn group. This case only loosely resembles the break-up of the Sandleiten group. At its heart is not so much an intra-group con ict, but the decision of individual members to leave the group for reasons to do with the party more generally, and the failure of the group to convince them to remain within the party. Although the members of the group mention several cases of defection, I want to look only at the most recent one: the case of Silja. This case brings out all the important issues at stake in this form of deliberative failure. What happened exactly? Silja, explained the members of the group, left the party branch (and thereafter the party) shortly after the membership ballot that the SPD held in 2013. To recall: after the 2013 general elections the SPD held an internal referendum on the coalition agreement with the conservative CDU/CSU, which remains hotly debated among members of the party many of whom question the ballot’s democratic credentials. Silja exited the party because she, too, judged the membership ballot democratically suspect. In her view, the party leadership did not accept any real internal opposition to the coalition agreement, and simply wanted to (mis-)use the ballot as a means to legitimize its own position. For Silja, this was intolerable. As Sabine recounts:

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If I have understood correctly from what I read on Twitter afterwards, then [she left] because she was of the opinion that the head of the party’s executive committee (Vorstandsspitze) massively p. 135

manipulated the membership ballot […]

in autumn 2013 … the ballot for or against the grand

coalition. And she is not so wrong! It was massively manipulated … so she left because of the manipulation that happened there. C6.P29

In this passage, Sabine not only sums up the reasons for why Silja left the party. She also expresses understanding for Silja’s disappointment and, presumably, outrage—if not for her decision to defect. ‘The members of the party’s executive committee exercised massive pressure’, says Sabine with palpable frustration. ‘They said, “if the members vote against [the coalition agreement], then the whole executive committee will resign” … and [they] tried to mobilise (Stimmung machen) in this way.’ Dieter adds swiftly, ‘this pressure really existed … and this is a classic practice of top-down politics … to proclaim from the top [of the party hierarchy] (von oben), “if the [party] base decides in this way, then we resign from our o

ces”

… that is indeed dubious, though I would not call it manipulative’. While not all members of the branch regard the actions of the party executive committee as thus democratically questionable, even some of those who later in the discussion reveal that they voted for the coalition agreement admit that the design of the ballot was dissatisfying on many counts. Does this mean the group supported Silja’s decision to leave the branch and the party, or even encouraged

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her to ‘vote with her feet’? No—but if we consider how the members describe the nal exchanges between Silja and the rest of the group before her defection, we nd that they also did little to persuade her to remain within the branch and party. Even though many members of the branch agreed with Silja’s judgement concerning the democratic faults of the ballot, they were united in their view that exiting the party is not a fruitful direction. As Dieter puts it, ‘I always say to myself: however much the party leadership blunders, they will never make me leave the “big tanker”.’ Thus, Silja’s position on the issue, namely that the party leadership’s actions provide a strong reason to exit the party, ultimately found little support within the group. And rather than trying to give her reasons to remain part of the branch (and the party), the others simply asserted their position. It might be asked at this point whether this case really involves a deliberative failure. Should deliberators not be free to exit deliberations? Is there not, as Warren (2011, 693) puts it, ‘a close correlation between the force of speech and the freedom of deliberators to exit arguments they do not nd credible’? Of course, individuals’ capacity to exit deliberation is important to ensure that the deliberation that does occur is among free individuals—free in the sense that ‘they could, without threat to life or livelihood, exit the conversation’ (Warren 2011, 694). Yet it must also be acknowledged that unilateral withdrawal is hardly ever the result of good deliberation. Recall that I have, in the previous chapter, conceptualized deliberation’s central justi cation requirement in terms of a ‘reason-giving condition’ (meaning that a speaker must provide reasons rather than simply state her point of view or preference, though speakers retain discretion p. 136

as to what kinds of

reasons they give in order to render them resonant to their justi catory audience) and

an ‘uptake condition’ (meaning that the speaker’s justi catory audience must argumentatively engage with the reasons provided by the speaker in a way that signals comprehension and re ection). Thus, when deliberators simply exit the conversation, as Silja did when she defected from the Bonn group, this means that they fail to satisfy the uptake condition. In this particular case, it would seem, moreover, that the other members of the group did not manage to render their arguments for staying in the group su

ciently

resonant to Silja. In this sense, the case of Silja’s leaving the Bonn branch may straightforwardly be interpreted as a failure of deliberation.

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Type 2: Deliberation Does Not Arise

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Deliberation within party branches may fail in a further respect: despite favourable preconditions for

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deliberation, branch members may not deliberate much (or at all). In the empirical material that was collected for this study, we nd two cases of party branches in which political discussion rarely arises—the Berlin Mitte group and, again, the Vienna Sandleiten group, though there are considerable di erences between the two groups. Beginning with the Berlin group, here deliberation fails to occur because of the non-decisional nature of their meetings. The members of the group usually convene in the context of public talks with external speakers (such as MPs or policy experts), who are invited to speak to a particular political topic. Naturally, there is no requirement to take a collective decision in these talks, or anyway reach agreement on the issue under discussion. As a result, branch members do not discuss much. Here is how the group’s members describe their meetings in their own words:

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bert: When I think back … we don’t have really big discussions about the topics [of the talks].

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marie: I would agree with you here … and with respect to the talks [we organize], I would also tend

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to say: there are some questions [by] interested [individuals] … but it is not so much about intense (krass) discussion, but about … interest in the topic … proper disagreement […] I have not yet experienced. daniel: Well, we do not directly formulate a position in the context of such a talk […] so mostly one

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discusses a bit and then one splits up (auseinandergehen) and then … it was a nice evening [laughs]. It is indeed not the case that one directly [writes] a paper … a position paper about the topic of each event. Then things would be more controversial I believe. While Daniel suggests that the reasons for the group’s lack of deliberation have to do with the alreadyp. 137

mentioned non-decisional setup of the meetings, and even

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acknowledges that a di erent setup would

possibly trigger more discussion, Bert o ers a di erent explanation, relating it to strong intra-group agreement: It has always been like this in the branch (Abteilung) … that it was more shaped by consensus than

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confrontation. Why this is the case, I can’t say at all. But strangely enough … we tend to be oriented towards consensus. It’s not all rosy or so (lieb Kind), but I have rarely experienced issues about which we had really adversarial discussions. David adds to this that there are sometimes disagreements in the group, though these are easy to settle.

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There are from time to time di erent standpoints [among the members], but … those are in part …

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discussed away through proposals somebody makes, and then one somehow nds agreement. And then everything’s alright again. The general impression one gets from reading these passages is that the group members are unconcerned with, even appreciative of, the fact that there is so little disagreement and debate—that is, little conversation of deliberative character—in their meetings. At the same time, it seems that this story of internal consensus and harmony is not entirely consistent. Later in the interview, members of the group mention that there are several topics on which they regularly disagree. As I have noted in Chapter 4, for example, one recurring con ict within the Berlin group is that over cycling policy, where the views of the older members and the views of the younger members appear almost irreconcilable. In this case of internal disagreement, there is no trace of pre-deliberative consensus and internal harmony whatsoever. So, it seems that members like Bert overstate the unity of the group when they claim that the branch is generally ‘oriented towards consensus’. A more plausible reason for why deliberation does not occur so often is one that Daniel alludes to: the design of the group meetings fails to provide incentives for members to

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deliberate. If there is no requirement to develop a shared position, there is of course little point in thoroughly discussing complex issues (on this point, see Chapter 4). One might as well just have a ‘nice evening’ together. Moving now to the Vienna Sandleiten group, this presents an especially challenging case of this second kind

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of deliberative failure. In short, the group generally conceives itself as a collective of ‘doers’ rather than ‘talkers’, which leads some members even to pride themselves on their apparent refusal to deliberate. An emblematic example is how Martha describes the group: What we do is political … with a political background. We all know that. But I would put it … in one

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sentence … thus: we do not talk, like the politicians on TV, but we act. It is political and we do it and p. 138

everyone sees that. We need not sit

down and argue like the politicians on TV, because we

anyways see that all the time. Rather we know what we stand for, we know what we want, we know that it is political, and we do it. […] And we will also not sit down and … because Heinz has a di erent opinion, I have a di erent opinion … and if we’d then start to quarrel about this, this would be useless. It is much smarter to say: we do something for the people, for the elderly, for the children. The ‘populist’ sentiment Martha expresses by contrasting the group with ‘politicians on TV’ is widely

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shared within the group and constitutive of its identity. Most members of the branch see themselves as doing the sort of political work that ‘really matters’—in contrast to the many party functionaries and elites who, as Katharina says, ‘have only their own career advancement in mind’, or, as Slobodan says, ‘have a comfortable life […] and do not think of us’. As Martha’s longer statement reveals, one central aspect of this di erentiation is the assertion of the primacy of action over talk. Whereas professional politics is associated with cheap talk, the group conceives its own initiatives in the local community as having a palpably positive impact on people’s lives. In this connection, group members generally see little value in talking about their views and disagreements—unless it is absolutely necessary in order to, say, organize an event or help others 9

in a coordinated fashion. But these disagreements are rarely substantive political ones. This position is interesting as it evinces a distinctively non-deliberative self-identity which is not found in any other group. While it is di

cult to say how much this actually a ects the group’s deliberative practice,

however, it generally seems as though the group members overdraw their non-deliberativeness. Although the Sandleiten group is probably the ‘least deliberative’ group of those that have been studied here, it is not the case that its members out of principle baulk at discussing political issues. Extended political discussions, in which arguments are weighed and developed, do sometimes occur. In the next sub-section, we shall look closely at one such discussion, which arose in the context of the interview. The analysis will reveal polarizing tendencies, meaning that group members tend simply to a

rm each other’s positions without

sustained exposure to competing views. This constitutes a deliberative failure in its own right.

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p. 139

Type 3: Polarizing Tendencies

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There is one remaining sense in which deliberation within party branches may fail. This is that the members

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of a branch persistently a

rm, rather than question,

each other’s views when they discuss. I label this

third type of deliberative failure ‘polarizing tendencies’, since groups may move to extreme positions when its members continually hear echoes of their own voices. This phenomenon, standardly called ‘group polarization’, has been extensively studied by Cass Sunstein (e.g. 2002 and 2009), who gives two 10

explanations for why it might occur.

The rst is that members of a deliberating group generally want to be

perceived favourably by other group members. As they fear loss of reputation by being in the minority, they adjust their views to those of the majority. The second explanation is that the majority can supply more arguments in support of their position and thereby strengthen their con dence in their views, persuade those who are undecided, and silence potential opponents. In either case, group members take decisions not so much on the basis of arguments and re ection, but driven by social dynamics. This makes polarization a distinctive deliberative failure. Deliberating groups are most likely to polarize when they see themselves as sharing a salient identity, and

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when they meet regularly over time while minimizing exposure to competing views (Sunstein 2002, 182). This implies that partisan groups may generally be vulnerable to polarization. To the extent that members of these groups agree on a wide range of positions, there is a signi cant risk that deliberation will shift both 11

the group and individuals to positions that they might not have accepted earlier.

Recall that this was one of

the reasons why I have introduced a diversity test for party branches in Chapter 4: diversity has a depolarizing e ect as it counteracts the social dynamics that lead members of a group to shift their 12

preferences toward the dominant view.

Recall also that the party groups that were studied for this book

generally passed this test, which implies that they are unlikely to exhibit polarizing tendencies. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that one group leans towards the sort of ‘self-con rming’ talk that often leads groups to polarize. The group in question is, once again, the Vienna Sandleiten group. A passage in p. 140

which Heinz, Slobodan, and Jennifer

discuss what they nd most objectionable about today’s politics and

politicians brings out the problem at stake. heinz: The economy is dictating our parties, whoever, what they have to do! And our politicians, in

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my opinion, they only care about having a good job after all those years in politics … in which they have altered the laws in order to have it easy afterwards. jennifer: Exactly! They only care about themselves.

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heinz: The cash cow (Melkkuh, meaning here ‘those who have to pay’) is he who works.

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slobodan: Yes, yes.

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heinz: I always thought that I was part of the middle class … [now] I was told I am not part of the

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middle class but belong to the poor. Even though I am a skilled worker (Facharbeiter) … [and] work accordingly [many] hours. jennifer: There are only poor people anymore, it seems.

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heinz: Yes … that’s how it is.

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slobodan: No, it would be good if we had people somewhere in politics who also come from

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normal jobs … as workers or not as entrepreneurs. But now we have only people who have studied and … theory and practice, you know … they are very good at negotiating. […] But it would be good if there were people in parliament who really are workers, who maybe even were on unemployment bene ts at some point, who maybe have children too, whom they have to raise. […] I do say that people who have studied deserve the money … because they have studied, because they work hard for it. But in politics itself one ought to … heinz [interposing]: … look more after the people!

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slobodan: Look after the people! And think to oneself, ‘what would I do now if I was a normal

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worker?’

In this passage, participants a

rm and reinforce each other’s views, creating as it were an ‘echo chamber’

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in which alternative perspectives are barely considered. This is precisely the kind of talk that usually produces group polarization. When we consider the substantive content of the discussion, moreover, we nd that the ‘populist’ refrain of politics and politicians being out of touch with ‘ordinary people’ is consistent with the group’s self-identity as a collective of politically committed citizens who are distinctively di erent from the ostensibly self-interested ‘politicians on TV’. Repeated polarizing discussions are highly likely to strengthen and sustain this self-identity, leading to a greater sense of alienation from party elites and top-level politics. One way of looking at the deliberative de ciencies of the Sandleiten group is to see them as interrelated with p. 141

each other, or perhaps more precisely, following

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from each other. When the group split (type 1

deliberative failure), internal opposition was virtually eliminated. The resultant unity among members helped form and strengthen the group’s identity, which happens to take a non-deliberative shape (type 2 deliberative failure). This identity is in turn continually buttressed by repeated exchanges in which members of the group a

rm each other’s positions and refuse to consider competing arguments and

opinions (type 3 deliberative failure). It is not di

cult to interpret these three deliberative failures in terms

of a more or less linear progression, with the break-up of the group constituting the root cause of later deliberative failures. The relatively low deliberative capacity of the Sandleiten group (compared to the other groups) can in this way be seen as directly resulting from the event that gave the group its present shape (i.e. the recent split-up of the group). A nal point worth noting is that although the polarizing tendencies of the Sandleiten group present a clear

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case of deliberative failure, they may have some positive ‘systemic’ consequences, in the sense that they may have a positive impact on the immediate environment in which the group operates. For the branch members’ un inching commitment to equality and inclusiveness, which partly led to the break-up of the group, may perform an integrative function in the con ict prone, ethnically diverse context of the Sandleitenhof, the large municipal building complex that provides the group’s main area of activity. The actions and initiatives this commitment motivates—for example community events the group organizes— can promote dialogue between di erent ethnic and religious groups and facilitate peaceful coexistence. From the in-principle egalitarian perspective I am assuming by endorsing a deliberative approach to democracy, it may in fact be preferable to have members of the group nd epistemic support among their peers (even at the cost of polarization) than to have them renounce their commitments in an environment 13

where, as we have seen, radically anti-egalitarian views are rife.

So there may well be something

defensible in the Sandleiten group’s polarizing tendencies. However, none of this should distract from the fact that the same deliberative failures may in a di erent context lead to quite di erent, possibly normatively objectionable, results. The group of partisans who left the Sandleiten branch when it split up is a case in point: their openly racist and exclusionary political commitments were nourished by repeated exchanges in which they refused to consider alternative lines of p. 142

argument. This is why they were unwilling to engage in

constructive communication with those who

eventually seized control of the branch in the rst place. This ambivalence is built into deliberative failures, as I have argued earlier. How normatively problematic they are is largely context-dependent and has to be evaluated on a case-to-case basis. One major challenge for designing a defensible deliberative model of intra-party democracy is therefore to maximize the positive e ects of deliberative failures, and minimize the impact of their negative e ects. How this might be achieved is the question I shall address in the next section.

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Deliberative Failures and Institutional Design

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It is important to bear in mind that the just-discussed cases of deliberative failure are singular instances:

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they do not re ect broader tendencies that are found across the party branches that were studied for this book. Nonetheless they are indicative of the possible ways in which partisan deliberation may fail. As I have suggested, a tenable deliberative model of intra-party democracy will have to include institutional safeguards that prevent deliberative failures of this kind, or at least limit their negative impacts; if it is to appeal to theorists and practitioners, it will have to make deliberative failures tractable. My ambition in this nal section is to re ect on how this might be done. I want to sketch a palette of small-scale reforms for party branches: (1) training moderators; (2) linking individual deliberative groups together; and (3) raising the groups’ in uence. Each of these proposals is consistent with the account of intra-party democracy presented in Chapter 2, and responsive to the ambitions animating the book at large.

Trained Moderators

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The rst reform I want to suggest is to introduce trained moderators in party branches, whose interventions

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can reduce the likelihood of deliberative failures. Designers of deliberative experiments (e.g. deliberative polls) routinely put much e ort into selecting and training moderators for the discussions. Typically, moderators are advised to make more or less subtle interventions to keep deliberation on track without pushing participants towards certain decisions. To take an example, Luskin and his colleagues (2014, 118) record that they trained their moderators to intervene only neutrally and as little as possible. There was no push towards (or away from)

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consensus; the participants were explicitly told that they need not agree on anything, and that they might come to agree either more or less over the course of the day. p. 143

Similarly, Steiner’s (2012, 253–5) extensive list of recommendations for deliberative moderators, which is

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based on evaluations of past deliberative experiments, includes guidelines like the following: If participants support an argument with personal or group interests, moderators should welcome

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such justi cations. However, they should relate these special interests to the public interest, with formulations like […] ‘We have now heard how this measure will help you or your group, which we understand. Could you now please re ect on how the measure will impact other people, perhaps also in other countries and future generations?’ (Steiner 2012, 254) Such guidelines are intended to prevent deliberation from taking an inward-looking character that might

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lead groups to polarize. In party branches, one need of course not specially recruit moderators. Branches usually have an elected

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chairperson who, in addition to participating in internal discussions and debates, also acts as moderator. My proposal is to acquaint these chairpersons with best practices in deliberative moderation, instilling in them a sensitivity towards all the sorts of problems that might arise in deliberating groups and giving them the tools to prevent those problems from arising. Parties could achieve this for example by committing branch chairpersons to attend a number of training events when they are elected into their position, in which they receive advice from deliberative practitioners like those who design ‘arti cial’ deliberative events. This proposal targets all three types of deliberative failure. First, specially trained chairpersons could prevent group splits or defections by mediating between rival sub-groups in the branch, or between single members and the rest of the group. They could de-emphasize di erence and encourage participants to

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address each other in a constructive fashion, as moderators have successfully done in deliberative experiments in deeply divided societies (Caluwaerts and Deschouwer 2014; Luskin et al. 2014). Second, trained chairpersons could promote deliberation in branches where deliberation rarely arises by inviting members to re ect on issues from di erent perspectives, considering (for example) how they might impact other groups in society. This kind of perspective-taking could, third, also counteract tendencies of polarization, where participants to deliberation refuse to re ect on arguments and opinions o ered by proponents of radically di erent views. Let me guard against a natural worry. Is relying on trained moderators to promote good deliberation within

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party branches not potentially inconsistent with the context-sensitive conception of deliberation I have endorsed in this book? Does instructing moderators to act upon ‘best practices’ in deliberative moderation not imply compelling them to apply de-contextualized criteria of how a political discussion should best be p. 144

conducted? Responding to this concern allows

me to clarify an important aspect of my proposal. I am by

no means proposing that moderators should lead discussions according to strict guidelines that they are not permitted to modify. The point is rather that moderators should have a basic understanding of how moderation is typically conducted in deliberative settings, what deliberative failures are, and how they could be averted. Once familiarized with this information, they should of course be free to make their interventions responsive to the particular circumstances of deliberation in their branch. So there is no trade-o

between acquainting moderators with good moderating practice and having su

ciently context-

sensitive moderation.

Connecting Branches

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My second proposal, which targets the second and third types of deliberative failure (i.e. deliberation fails to

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arise, and polarizing tendencies), is to assemble the members of di erent party branches in regular joint deliberative events. One way of achieving this is to create ‘problem-oriented’ partisan fora, as suggested in Chapter 2. Such fora could for example convene the members of several party branches in a larger deliberative setting to devise a strategy for the party in a particular policy eld. They could address tasks like drafting a party or election manifesto, and make these exercises more collaborative and interactive. Problem-oriented fora could help avert type 2 and 3 deliberative failures in the following way: if the members of two or more party branches are clustered together in a single forum, this increases the diversity of viewpoints in the forum, and so counteracts both deliberation-impeding levels of intra-group agreement (like in the Berlin group) and polarizing tendencies (like in the Vienna Sandleiten group). Increased opinion diversity counteracts (1) deliberation-impeding levels of agreement (or ‘harmony-seeking’), since it increases the likelihood of disagreements, as well as (2) the twin social dynamics that lead members of a group to shift their preferences toward the majority view, since the more internally diverse a group is, the less likely it is that there will be a dominant majority that can silence opposition or instil in members a fear of losing reputation by being in the minority (and the discussion of what I have called the ‘diversity desideratum’ in Chapter 4).

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Empowering Branches

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The third and nal proposal is to empower individual party branches, connecting their deliberations more

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directly to decisions. This proposal chimes with much of what I have suggested in Chapter 2 of this book. p. 145

And here again, problem-oriented

fora may be the most promising design option. If these fora are

designed in such a way as to promote a continuous and symbiotic relationship between the party’s decision makers and the members on the ground, in which the latter can palpably in uence the actions of the former, this may help prevent deliberative failure in at least two respects. First, giving branch members decision-making power can o set the anti-deliberative impulses of non-decisional designs like that of the Berlin group, where members have little reason to discuss issues in a thorough fashion. To put it simply, knowing that their deliberations matter can create a powerful incentive for branch members actually to deliberate. Second, involving individual branches in collaborative decision-making exercises can disincentivize the kind of ‘enclave deliberation’ that commonly leads to group polarization. If groups that tend to isolate themselves from the rest of the party (or perhaps even the rest of society), like the Vienna Sandleiten group, are given the opportunity to exercise in uence on larger decisions, they will not only be unable to uphold their self-image as marginalized and excluded. They might also be compelled to consider a much wider range of arguments than they would initially be inclined to consider. So, in addition to serving an important democratic function, empowering party branches can also raise the quality of deliberation and avert deliberative failures.

Conclusion

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Because deliberation is a demanding democratic practice, there are many ways in which it can fail. Within

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party branches, it can fail in at least three ways; or so this chapter has argued. Party branches break-up or single members may defect; deliberation does not, or does only seldom, arise; or branches polarize, with branch members shifting their preferences towards the majority view without weighing alternative perspectives. To avoid these failures, or at least minimize their potential negative impacts, an internally deliberative party can implement some ‘deliberative safeguards’—moderation within branches should be ‘professionalized’, and individual branches should be connected with other branches in regular joint deliberative events, as well as equipped with more decision-making powers (for an overview, see Table 6.1). The latter two of these safeguards are already built into the deliberative model of intra-party democracy I have outlined in Chapter 2, which, amongst other things, proposes to convene members of di erent branches in problem-oriented fora, and to connect their deliberations to decisions a ecting the party as a whole.

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Table 6.1. Summary of the analysis Type of deliberative failure

Reasons for failure

Institutional safeguard

(Type 1) Group splits and individual defections

Irreconcilable di erences between party members; inability to talk across lines of di erence.

Introducing trained moderators.

(Type 2) Deliberation does not arise

Members of a group overstate intra-group agreement or hold anti-deliberative attitudes.

Introducing trained moderators; connecting partisan groups; empowering single groups.

(Type 3) Group polarization

Members of a group shi their preferences towards the majority view without considering alternative views.

Introducing trained moderators; connecting partisan groups; empowering single groups.

While I think that these institutional proposals would already go a long way in addressing the causes underlying most deliberative failures, however, it seems that an internally deliberative party cannot—and perhaps should not—be made completely failure-proof. Insofar as this party model is premised on a p. 146

conception

of the citizen as capable of agency and reasoning, there can be no one-size- ts-all strategy

for preventing failures of deliberation. Institutional design can make party branches a more supportive environment for deliberation, and make deliberation more constructive, but it cannot not eliminate the possibility that deliberation might mis re. Yet the modicum of uncertainty this leaves us with (Will deliberation arise? Will it succeed?) is nothing to scorn or bemoan, but the natural consequence of a conception of intra-party democracy that entrusts members at the party base with discussing and deciding on the direction of the party. It is the inevitable result of treating them as self-determining agents who are capable of taking reasoned decisions on what the party should stand for and what policies it should support.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

Note that this is not in tension with Chapter 1ʼs defence of the deliberative model of intra-party democracy. I have defended that model by pointing out that ʻaggregativeʼ conceptions of intra-party democracy problematically take existing preferences as given, and that a deliberative model is superior in that it does not do that, emphasizing instead the importance of inducing reflection on preferences, which makes reasoned preference shi s possible. But from arguing that it is desirable that intra-party democracy institutionalizes fora of discussion that allow people to reflect on and then possibly change their preferences, it does not follow that deliberation fails when preference shi s do not occur. It is one thing to reflect on oneʼs preferences in a non-coercive dialogue, and quite another to decide to change those preferences based upon those reflections. From the point of view of the ʻthinʼ conception of deliberation I adopt in this book, only the former—reflection on preferences in a non-coercive dialogue—is normatively crucial. Turning the latter—preference shi s —into a core normative demand deliberation must satisfy would require loading the theory with ʻthickʼ moral or epistemic standards that explain why preference shi s are valuable. This is obviously not a path I want to go down here. That deliberation refers to a procedure of collective reasoning—rather than to particular outcomes of reasoning—is even captured in the Oxford English Dictionaryʼs entry on the term. Accordingly, deliberation means ʻlong and careful consideration or discussionʼ. Owen and Smith (2015, 223) call this the neglect of ʻdeliberative equalityʼ, and suggest that this neglect is ʻhard to square with the requirement that the subjects of a deliberative democracy can coherently represent themselves to each other as the equal co-authors of the rule to which they are subjectʼ. Of course, factional conflict need not be ideological in nature. It can also be rooted in self-interest, as in the factional wars that led to the break-up of the Italian Christian Democrats in the early 1990s (Boucek 2012, ch. 7). Note: ʻWe were only waiting forʼ is an inevitably awkward translation of the idiomatic expression ʻwas gerade noch gefehlt hatʼ, which may best be understood in terms of ʻwhat didnʼt happen but may well have happenedʼ.

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6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Here is how Martha describes the groupʼs outlook towards others: ʻWe are people who do not pigeonhole others (wir hauen nicht alle in einen Topf hinein), right. We are open to everyone. One must say: one needs to get to know people, give them a chance … if they donʼt want to engage, then so be it. But the group is open to all.ʼ An interesting question to ponder in this connection is whether it is normatively acceptable, or even desirable, to exclude people who hold views that are as ʻunreasonableʼ as the group members suggest from intra-party deliberation. As discussing this question in su icient depth would take us too far away from the topic of the present chapter, I do not want take a definitive position on this here. My suspicion is that partisans whose views are incompatible with the partyʼs lead principles—which is certainly the case here—may permissibly be excluded from the party. One way of looking at this case is to say that deliberative failure occurred because the members of the Sandleiten group are partisans and consider certain political values non-negotiable. This is the negative e ect of partisanship on deliberation many deliberative democrats stress: strong commitments undermine deliberatorsʼ capacity to compromise (e.g. Hendriks et al. 2007). Notice however that in the present case the ʻreasonablenessʼ, to use Rawlsian language in lieu of less diplomatic terms that come to mind, of one party to the conflict—namely those who hold openly racist views—is open to question. When that is the case, it seems plausible that similarly uncompromising reactions may be observed among non-partisan citizens too. One need not be a partisan in the narrower sense of the term that I employ here to find racist attitudes repulsive and reject compromise with people who hold these attitudes (on this point see May 2017). So while there certainly exists a connection between partisanship and deliberative failure in the current example, the conflict cannot be explained exclusively in these terms. Compare Nina Eliasophʼs excellent anthropological study Avoiding Politics (1998). Studying civic groups in America, Eliasoph traces a culture of apathy, where citizens are ʻtoo busyʼ to care about political issues beyond those that a ect themselves or their local environment. Though standard, the term ʻgroup polarizationʼ is somewhat misleading. As Sunstein (2002, 178) clarifies, ʻIt is not meant to suggest that group members will shi to the poles, nor does it refer to an increase in variance among groups, though this may be the ultimate result. Instead the term refers to a predictable shi within a group discussing a case or problem. As the shi occurs, groups, and group members, move and coalesce, not toward the middle of antecedent dispositions, but toward a more extreme position in the direction indicated by those dispositions.ʼ White and Ypi (2016, 96) argue that polarizing tendencies play an important role in sustaining partisansʼ political commitment, as they ensure that ʻagents do not give up too easily on political projects they have thought worthy of endorsementʼ despite ʻepistemic pressureʼ, that is, information that might cast doubts on the value of certain commitments. In other words, some level of polarization may be required for partisans to remain convinced that their political activism is necessary and worthwhile. Just how much diversity is required to avoid polarization is, of course, very di icult to determine. Insisting on any brightline threshold may unduly call for false precision. As a basic rule, diversity should ensure that there is no dominant majority prior to deliberation, which is capable of silencing alternative views. This is not an unfamiliar point in deliberative theory. In a famous article concerned with the tension between deliberation and confrontational political activism, for example, Fung (2005) suggests that the extent of permissible deviation from deliberative norms increases according to the adversity of political circumstances. I think this is in principle correct, precisely for the reasons I have given here. But it is also clear that even if we may reasonably consider a deviation from deliberative norms permissible, it remains a deviation from deliberative norms. Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

CHAPTER

Conclusion 

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Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.003.0008 Published: December 2019

Pages 147–160

Abstract This chapter concludes the book. It summarizes the arguments advanced in the book and re ects on three challenges facing the book’s argument: that parties are ultimately unreformable; that the institutional proposals put forward are too vague to be useful for practitioners; and that re-modelling parties with only the participatory preferences of those who seek self-expression and selfactualization in politics in mind risks excluding those who do not hold such ‘post-modern’ participatory preferences. Each of these concerns is warranted and taken seriously but, as the chapter shows, none of them is fatal to the broader argument of the book.

Keywords: intra-party democracy, deliberation, institutional design, populism, participation Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

The argument of this book has taken us over a wide terrain. The book: • motivated the case for party reform through re ecting on the inconsistencies of current anti-party

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tendencies in established democracies; • defended a particular view of popular sovereignty, in which internally democratic and participatory

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parties play a central role; • outlined a deliberative model of intra-party democracy that empowers the deliberations of the activists

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and members at the partisan base; • gauged the motivations of activists to engage in parties and examined their relationship to the party at

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large; • investigated the preconditions for deliberation in organized partisan groups;

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• explored and evaluated discursive practices within these groups;

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• and, nally, re ected on failures of deliberation within parties and how institutional design xes can

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prevent them or at least o set their worst e ects. Perhaps the best thing I can begin this concluding chapter with is a summary of the argument. If this will

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inevitably be sketchy, I hope it can help readers to make sense of the central claims advanced in this book. Having done so, I will in the nal paragraphs also discuss some outstanding objections that might be raised against the book’s argument and ambitions.

The Argument, in Summary

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Let us start by returning to the book’s Introduction. I began by noting the widely-observed fact that political

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parties, in particular those that are well established, are facing a crisis of perceived legitimacy. Many citizens mistrust parties, and many political scientists a

rm that there is indeed good reason to mistrust

parties, as there is evidence showing that they have indeed become self-serving agents of the state that are far removed from society and detached from the lives of those they claim to speak for (see, paradigmatically, Mair 2013a; Ignazi 2017). I have also traced a countervailing tendency which I called, with Urbinati (2015), a ‘revolt against intermediary bodies’. This revolt feeds o

the widespread anti-partisan

sentiment of our age and consists in new political ‘movements’ emerging on the political scene or old p. 148

parties re-branding themselves as dynamic movements.

Given that the party form is discredited, these

actors often have considerable electoral success. CC.P11

Yet, I suggested, it would be rash to place all our hopes on these ‘movements’ and their promise of overcoming the age of party democracy. On the one hand, some of the movements have over time developed into parties in their most elitist form—precisely the kind of thing to which they claimed to provide an alternative. On the other hand, given that many established parties enjoy access to state funds and control (sometimes large) parts of the administration, and given that they have over extended time cultivated an organizational environment that allows them to e ectively put these resources to use, they retain signi cant power even as they are gradually losing electoral ground. For this reason, it is also very di

cult

for new political actors to fully replace established parties and ‘change the system’, even when they manage to win elections. The conclusion to take from this seems clear: if we want to counteract the present problems of party legitimacy, we will have to invest considerable intellectual energies into the question of what to do with established parties. In what ways should we change their design and behaviour? The simple answer is that parties should be re-designed with the aim of recasting societal linkages, dismissing their self-referential attitude, and immersing themselves again in society. The more elaborate answer starts from the argument laid out in Chapter 1, which holds that a neo-Kelsenian view of popular sovereignty that sees the exercise of popular sovereignty as requiring inclusive, societally anchored, and participatory parties, is the most apposite conception of of popular sovereignty under contemporary political conditions—and thus the normative ideal of popular self-rule we should seek to realize. This argument does not deny the increasing complexity of political interdependencies, or the fact that relevant new forms of political action have emerged outside established institutional channels and even beyond the state. It contends simply that, as long as our democracies are structured around legislatures and elections, and as long as parties are central to the functioning of both, we need to pay special attention to parties’ ability to serve their purposes of linking society and state. In indirect modes of popular sovereignty, where citizens and elites operate continually in separate spheres with only elections and opinion polls truly connecting them, it is hard to see how such linkage could today be achieved. Too strained and mistrustful is the relationship between representatives and represented. The radical alternative to this—direct participation by the people as a whole—also doesn’t seem like a fruitful direction. For since parties tend to occupy the place of power (not in a Lefortian sense, though), direct decision-making will rst require the

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consent of partisan agents who often have axes to grind. Again, the better strategy is to reform parties, making them inclusive, societally anchored, and participatory. The next larger argument advanced in the book has been that making parties more inclusive, societally p. 149

anchored, and participatory rst and foremost requires

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making them more internally deliberative. This

argument took as its point of departure the empirical observation that citizens increasingly seek selfexpression and self-actualization in politics (rather than seeing themselves as members of sectional groups whose common and stable preferences can be represented qua groups), and suggested that deliberative forms of participation are especially well suited to satisfy these participatory demands. A parallelly developed but closely linked line of reasoning was that institutionalizing deliberative forms of political engagement also enhances the capacity of party members, activists, and supporters to criticize proposals put before them by party o

cials, as well as devise agendas of their own. With this in mind, three di erent

institutional mechanisms for enabling and harnessing intra-party deliberation were suggested: problemoriented partisan fora, deliberative intra-party networks, and partisan deliberative conferences. Each of them was modelled on deliberative democratic innovations that have been devised and tried outside the partisan context; and each of them took as its smallest units the deliberating groups one nds among the organized members of a party. In short, the promise of an internally deliberative party is that it ‘communicatively’ connects those

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components of the party that are most deeply embedded in society—the deliberating groups of the members and activists on the ground—to the party’s executive channels, thereby also creating an incentive for more people to engage in partisan politics. But is such a model of intra-party democracy empirically viable? Besides being theoretically attractive, do parties have the potential of being transformed into deliberative spheres? Chapters 3–6 sought to address this issue in-depth, drawing on a qualitative study of party members in two major European Social Democratic parties. The main questions asked were as follows: How do party members relate to their party and what do they want in terms of intra-party democracy (Chapter 3)? Do the party branches in which members and activists are organized provide a supportive environment for deliberation, understood, roughly, as non-coercive dialogue about shared political concerns (Chapter 4)? What does deliberation among party members look like, and can it plausibly be called ‘deliberative’ in the just-mentioned (rough) sense (Chapter 5)? And what exactly happens when deliberation among party members breaks down?—Can a deliberative party cope with deliberative failures (Chapter 6)? The answers that emerged over the course of the chapters all in a way strengthen the case for the deliberative reforms of parties that I advocate; or so I wish to argue. Addressing the question of how party members relate to their party and what they demand in terms of

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intra-party democracy, Chapter 3 showed, importantly, that most of the interviewed party members found the relationship between members and party o

cials insu ciently communicative. What they demanded

were more opportunities for regular, ‘recursive’ (Mansbridge 2017) communicative exchanges with the p. 150

latter. The chapter also concluded that, while the di erent

partisan groups were not exactly dominated

by individuals with ‘post-modern’ participatory preferences, who seek individual self-expression and selfactualization in politics, there is considerable potential for con ict between those individuals and those with more ‘modern’ participatory preferences, for instance those who engage in a party because their parents already were party activists. This in turn calls for arenas of debate in which their diverging perspectives could be brought into dialogue and potentially reconciled. Thus, both the demands of party members as regards intra-party democracy and their own group-internal di erences chime with the idea of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy that centres on regularized and consequential internal deliberation. Looking at whether the local party branches in which members and activists are organized provide a supportive environment for deliberation, the ndings of Chapter 4 provided further reason for optimism concerning the viability of a deliberative conception of parties and internal party democracy. It

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demonstrated that the interactions between party members are marked by relational equality, and it also showed that there is a su

cient degree of opinion-diversity within the groups, one of the main sources of

diversity being age di erences. Equality among participants is a precondition for discussion to be maximally non-coercive and dialogical, in short to be deliberative. Diversity of viewpoints is important for discussions to arise in the rst place: if there is nothing to disagree about, there will be no discussion. Chapter 5—which investigated how deliberative political discussions among party members ultimately are —further added to this positive picture. It closely concentrated on two intense deliberative exchanges, probing and a

rming participants’ ability to dialogically engage with one another, giving and hearing

arguments in a re ective fashion. Partisan deliberation, it turned out, is certainly good deliberation. It is genuinely dialogical, with participants re ecting on and reacting to each other’s viewpoints in a noncoercive fashion. To complete the picture, Chapter 6 examined instances of ‘deliberative failure’ within the party groups,

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notably instances of group splits, polarization, and a general reluctance to discuss. While these failures have numerous di erent reasons, what is certain is that they could be made tractable through institutional design. Indeed, some of the deliberative institutions that were suggested in the discussion of the deliberative model of intra-party democracy seem capable of correcting for some potential deliberative de ciencies. Partisan deliberative networks, for example, which link di erent grass-roots organizations together, could stimulate discussion in groups that are non-deliberative out of a lack of internal diversity by adding new people and perspectives to the discussion. Of course, ‘making deliberative failures tractable’ does not mean that less than perfect deliberation could—or should—be avoided altogether; the normative logic of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy demands leaving the greatest possible room for politically engaged individuals to exercise agency, and that means that it ought not be designed in an overly p. 151

cautious and restrictive fashion as far as deliberative

procedures are concerned. The point is rather that

persistent problems with deliberation should be overcome and counteracted so as to ensure that communication within the party keeps owing and circulating. Ultimately, the evidence I have marshalled is tentative and preliminary, and one should be careful with

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extrapolating too much from the ndings. Still, the results of the study generally give reason to believe that deliberative institutions such as problem-oriented fora, and partisan deliberative conferences and networks could successfully be implemented into the organizational architecture of parties, and, crucially, that they would be received as meaningful and relevant by those who engage, or want to engage, in parties. If one is worried that parties do not possess the deliberative resources required for party reforms of the sort I proposed, then this worry can without doubt be discarded. At least the established mainstream parties that were studied in this book appear to possess internal venues that provide favourable circumstances for deliberative exchanges, and members who actually deliberate. To be sure, whether party-outsiders would nd internally deliberative parties attractive, perhaps even be incentivized by deliberative party reforms to join and engage in parties, is a question that cannot be answered conclusively here—though this was one of the book’s theoretical claims. The reason why this question cannot be answered is simply that the institutional proposals developed and defended in the present book have not fully been put into practice in any party I know of. We can certainly engage in grounded speculation as to what the answer might be. This is, in fact, what I have done in Chapters 1 and 2: there—and in other research (Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein 2017)—I wagered that deliberative party reforms would indeed create new participatory incentives. Whether this ultimately is correct is something I would hope to study in the future. But that will have to wait until one or several real-world parties actually enact such reforms.

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Final Remarks

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Are parties actually reformable? Some readers might accept the point that we should invest our e orts and

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energies into thinking about party reform, and even endorse the proposed deliberative reform agenda, but remain unconvinced that any attempt to reform real-world parties could bear fruits. Of course, those sceptical readers might think, there are some insular cases of parties that have successfully undergone, or are in the process of undergoing, democratic reforms with deliberative elements (the British Labour Party, an example I mentioned to several times in the present book, would be a case in point). But at the same time, the majority of parties in established democracies appear near-unreformable, being as they are rigid, selfp. 152

referential organizations with deeply entrenched

hierarchical power-structures. So why on earth should

we believe that they could be transformed and democratized in the near future? And if there is no reason to believe that they could be transformed and democratized, why should we believe that internally deliberative parties are a goal actually worth pursuing? In short: if e orts to achieve the desired outcome are bound to be futile, on the short run at least, why bother trying to achieve it? Although a version of this objection was already discussed in Chapter 1, it is worth revisiting it here because

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I take it to re ect widely held intuitions about political parties and their reformability. That parties cannot be changed and rebuilt is certainly the most common objection to the book’s argument that I have encountered in the course of writing it. In reply, let me make two points. Neither of these points are likely to fully satisfy the sceptic who endorses the near-unreformability thesis, but they are perhaps the best I can say to someone who rmly believes that the institutional structure of parties is almost impossible to alter. The rst point has already been developed in Chapter 1. This is that it is virtually impossible to determine in a non-arbitrary way what it means to say that the realization of a normative model of intra-party democracy is su ciently likely in order for that model to be worth aiming at. Thus, so long as the sceptic accepts that there are no in-principle unsurmountable obstacles such as nomological constraints to its realization—so long, that is, as she thinks that parties are ‘merely’ near-unreformable but not unreformable full stop—I think it is very di

cult for her to argue on the grounds of feasibility that its realization should not

be pursued. This is because, to make that case, she would have to show that there is some sort of objective threshold of likelihood that must be passed in order for a normative ideal to be seen as worth aiming at— and that a deliberative conception of internal party democracy does not pass that threshold. To my mind at 1

least, it is unclear how this could be done without begging the question.

Some readers might of course take a stronger view and reject the view that there are no in-principle unsurmountable obstacles to the realization of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy. In doing so, they depart from the view that most parties are extremely hard to reform, now and in the foreseeable future (the near-unreformability thesis), endorsing instead the position that they are actually impossible to reform (what may be called the unreformability thesis). Is this a plausible view? I think not. Such deterministic thinking not only seems empirically dubious; it is also intellectually corrupting. It is empirically dubious because, as I have noted throughout the book, there are indeed political parties that successfully underwent p. 153

democratic reforms that reduced the power of party

elites and enhanced the empowerment of members

and activists. And it is intellectually corrupting in that it quickly leads one to deny the possibility of shaping and designing institutions in accordance with political ideals, and so to be seduced by the false promises of non-democratic solutions that might lead to outcomes that di er from, perhaps even contradict, those which one has initially favoured. The biography of Robert Michels, the great scholar of intra-party democracy, should serve as a warning example: in uenced by his deterministic belief that parties cannot be internally democratic (Michels famously spoke of an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ in this connection), and that an emancipatory mass politics can therefore take no democratic shape, he eventually sought refuge in Mussolini’s fascism.

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A nal point worth making in response to the generally reasonable concern that most existing parties are

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very hard to reform, is this: if, in a particular case, reform e orts fail, or seem hopelessly futile, one could also aim at forming new partisan associations that exhibit the desired inclusive and participatory organizational structure. This has the obvious advantage that one would not have to reckon with the inherited organizational hierarchies and professionalized power elites that often prevent established parties from implementing democratic reforms, opening the door to experimentation with di erent mechanisms of internal participation. To be sure, and in line with what I said in the Introduction, experiments of this sort do not always succeed—the cases of Podemos and M5S indicate how initial democratic ambitions can dissipate quickly. But even when the impulses of new partisan groupings to promote new, more democratic forms of partisan political engagement are short-lived, they can still provide a powerful check on whatever tendencies there exist among long-standing parties to refuse thinking about their relationship with the wider citizenry and what opportunities to make their voices heard they grant their members and supporters. Fully setting this dynamic in motion requires lowering institutional barriers for political newcomers to

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establish themselves on the political scene. Chief amongst these are thresholds for parliamentary representation. These are characteristically low in electoral systems based on the principle of proportional representation, which, as Kelsen (EaV, 72–3) noted, encourage ‘the formation of small, indeed the very smallest, parties’—and maybe that’s a good reason for preferring proportional representation systems over majoritarian ones. One might likewise think of softening restrictions on access to public nance. In any case, the point to note is that some of the problems of existing parties could be corrected for by creating more opportunities for new, more democratic and participatory ones to emerge and set foot in parliament. This is no one-size- ts-all solution, and there remains the problem—also discussed in the book’s Introduction—that established parties often are tightly tethered to channels of power by having access to public funds and controlling bureaucracies. This creates power asymmetries that cannot easily be o set. But p. 154

in some political contexts, the formation of new

parties might indeed be the most adequate vehicle for

achieving the goal of bringing citizens and parties closer together again via deliberative intra-party democracy—if only because it puts pressure on established parties to open up more to the citizenry. Are the reform proposals too imprecise? There is a further possible concern about the argument developed in

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this book. This is that the three particular institutional proposals suggested in Chapter 2—the problemoriented partisan forum, the partisan deliberative network, and the partisan deliberative conference—are too vague to be useful templates for practitioners. Recall that I have sketched the contours of these institutions, and provided some examples of real-world partisan institutions that ful l analogue functions —but I have not detailed how exactly partisan fora, networks, and conferences should be designed. This may be seen as a shortcoming: if activists and reformers are to take inspiration from this book, it might be said, then it is not enough simply to hint at possible alternative participatory channels in the abstract. What we need instead is a concrete design plan that can be used as a blueprint for institutional reform, one that heeds such questions as: Through which mechanisms should party members and activists trigger problemoriented fora? How precisely should the nodes of a deliberative partisan network be linked? And, who has the right to set the agenda for a partisan deliberative conference? This concern is plausible, for when it comes to ambitious reform proposals of the sort advanced in this book it intuitively makes sense to think, ‘the more concrete, the better’. And yet there are good reasons not to be more speci c and detailed about the three deliberative institutional designs I recommended. First of all, since a deliberative conception of parties is fundamentally about individuals shaping collective decisions through discussing, weighing, and criticizing di erent political or organizational proposals, it would be inconsistent to assert a full-blown model of deliberative intra-party democracy that has virtually every detail worked out and can be implemented in virtually any party without much modi cation. It would be inconsistent because doing so would pre-empt the judgements of those party members and activists it seeks to empower, concerning how to organize their party in a more democratic fashion. Members and activists

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must be granted room for deliberating over what exactly deliberative party reforms should look like and how they should be implemented; they must be accorded agency in shaping their party’s organization. That institutional questions cannot be decided once and for all by the theorist is a long-standing point in

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deliberative democratic theory. Jürgen Habermas, arguably the most important thinker of deliberative democracy, had made it already in the 1970s, when he argued—against elitist democrats like Schumpeter, who ‘in a decisionistic manner’ ‘reduce democracy to a method of selecting elites’—that ‘[d]emocratization cannot mean an a priori preference for a speci c type of organization’ (Habermas 1979, 186–7). Indeed, p. 155

Habermas insists, no practices or

institutions can be ruled in or out a priori: many di erent

arrangements can in principle enable deliberation, depending much on the preferences, agreements, and 2

initiatives of the agents involved. Of course, this does not mean that researchers can never legitimately take a position on institutional design if they want to be consistent with the premises of deliberative theory: as Neblo (2015, 27) notes, since we have a lot of empirical knowledge and practical experience relevant to how deliberation is most e ectively organized, we are luckily ‘not limited to assessing proposals a priori’. This is why I have proposed problem-oriented forums, deliberative networks, and deliberative conferences as possible institutional designs: these sorts of designs have, as argued in Chapter 2, a solid empirical track record in enabling deliberation (also see Kuyper and Wolkenstein 2019). Still: a theoretically consistent approach must aim at striking a balance between issuing empirically grounded institutional design recommendations on the one hand, and leaving individuals leeway for taking their own situated decisions as to how these institutional designs should be modi ed and implemented, on the other—and I have tried to achieve that by resisting the temptation of formulating too detailed institutional proposals. A further—and related—reason for why it is better not to suggest overly speci c institutional designs is

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simply that the success of a particular deliberative institution will depend much on the context in which it is implemented. For example, in a party in which individual activist groups hardly interact with each other, establishing a well-functioning partisan deliberative network will require a much greater concerted organizational e ort than in a party where there is at any rate a lot of interaction among di erent groups that are dispersed across the country. It will require incentivizing systematic cooperation and coordinating the ows of information created by collectives that may not even speak the same language (think, e.g. of Switzerland or Belgium). Likewise, in some parties, internal rules and statutes might allow for more institutional experimentation than in others, thus granting members and activists signi cantly more opportunities for initiating democratization from below without re-de ning the party as a whole. In such cases, members and activists do not have to put much thought into changing the party constitution; they only need to focus on how one can best use existing pathways to attain the goal of deliberative democratization. Furthermore, the possibilities of trying out new democratic institutional designs may be greater in proportional representation electoral systems, where parties do not have to fear losing their foothold in parliament should internal democratization result in a shift in policy pro le, than in rst-pastp. 156

the-post systems, where the risk of

dropping out of parliament is much greater (Wolkenstein,

unpublished manuscript). In rst-past-the-post systems, party reformers might for this reason indeed be incentivized to limit the impact of party members on policy, even if they generally endorse the idea of internal democratization. Incentives against trying expanded and empowered forms of intra-party democracy exist also under proportional representation, of course. Here they are rst and foremost generated by coalition dynamics. Suppose the party leaderships of two large centrist parties—such as the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic Volksparteien that are found in many Western European democracies—agree to form a coalition government, but a majority of their members oppose this idea (worrying, for example, that their parties will ‘sell out’ ideologically). In this scenario, party leaders arguably have an interest in making sure that democratic decisions that are made within the party do not put their coalition plans at risk—they have incentives, in other words, to constrain intra-party democracy rather than freely experiment with it. The

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same incentives may also be operative after coalitions were formed: to ensure that the coalition’s joint policies keep being pursued as agreed with the coalition partner, party leaders, even those who are supportive of intra-party democracy, may want to keep a tight rein on internal democratic procedures. Clearly, to the extent that internal democratization is pursued at all in such circumstances, it cannot be

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pursued in accordance with a narrowly de ned and overly speci c model of intra-party democracy. Indeed, we must accept that, when certain incentive structures and power relations stand in the way of internal democratization, small advances that only partially and imperfectly instantiate the ideal one aims at might be a good compromise. Think in this connection of the SPD’s 2013 membership ballot on the coalition agreement with the CDU/CSU—an example we encountered several times in the book. While the party leadership had strong reasons to make sure that the ballot itself produces the ‘right’ result, the deliberative conferences held prior to the ballot created spaces where sceptical members could explain their concerns to party elites and demand justi cation from the latter. This is arguably a good thing from the point of view of a deliberative conception of party, and it should be seen as a small but by no means meaningless step forward, even if we are still far from the bottom-up democratization the book has argued for. Running through the manifold di erences between individual parties, on the one hand, and between the

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di erent institutional settings in which parties operate, on the other hand, it seems clear that a one-sizets-all-design for intra-party democratic institutions is implausible: institutional designs have to be tailored to the context in which they are supposed to be implemented, against the backdrop of a particular feasibility horizon. This is why there is nothing problematic in limiting oneself, as I have done here, to general and relatively under-speci ed institutional prescriptions. p. 157

Does the focus on ‘post-modern’ participation exclude citizens with ‘modernist’ participatory demands? A nal

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worry some readers might have is that reforming parties with only the participatory preferences of those who seek self-expression and self-actualization in politics in mind could risk excluding those who do not hold such ‘post-modern’ participatory preferences. To recall, a large part of the book’s theoretical argument was that parties should try to cater to the changed participatory demands of citizens, which are increasingly shifting from duty-based and institutionalized forms of collective action to individualized and direct forms of participation. The question is whether this comes at the cost of politically marginalizing citizens whose political and social identities are still shaped by identi cation with a (ostensibly stable) larger collective, who participate in democratic life mainly out of loyalty, and nd the emphasis on discussing or changing one’s preferences pointless or even alienating. If this is the e ect of deliberative party reforms, are we not paying too high a price for these reforms? This is again a plausible concern, and I have certainly not spoken much to it. But—especially in Chapters 1 and 2—I have o ered some hints as to what a good reply might look like. I return to these considerations here. The rst point I would like to reiterate is that even if some citizens will be alienated by parties that adopt deliberative institutional designs due to their more group- and duty-based participatory preferences, it does not necessarily follow that they are actually politically marginalized. Quite the contrary might be the case: for insofar as those individuals who are empowered by internally deliberative parties are sensitive to the demands and concerns of those more group- and duty-oriented citizens, they can help ensure that those demands and concerns are also brought to bear on the party’s agendas and decisions. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will happen. Much depends on whether party activists manage to foster the relevant cross-generational and cross-class coalitions (divisions with respect to participatory preferences often mirror age and class divisions; e.g., Farthing 2010; Furlong and Cartmel 2012; Henn et al. 2018; Inglehart and Welzel 2005, 2–3; Li and Marsh 2008; Stolle et al. 2005). But if politically dedicated members and activists are granted greater power over the party’s agenda, they may well try to extend that agenda to better include other constituencies. This has for instance been the avowed ambition of Momentum, the democratic movement within the British Labour Party that I have mentioned repeatedly in the book. Its members have sought to re-connect the party with disgruntled working-class voters who used to be

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Labour’s core constituency but have abandoned the party a long time ago—groups that are also more likely to see participation as driven by group loyalty (see Ford and Goodwin 2014). Consider second, that internal democratization may also have an important ‘symbolic’ e ect that could go

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some way in satisfying citizens who lean toward duty-based and institutionalized forms of collective action. p. 158

Survey evidence suggests that many citizens do have preferences for how parties more generally

(that is,

not just the parties they support) should be organized, and that politically disa ected citizens—a group that often also exhibits duty- and group-oriented participatory preferences—tend to prefer maximally internally democratic parties (Close et al. 2017). This means that, even though making parties more internally democratic in the way that I suggested in this book does not directly cater to their participatory demands, it could cater to their demands concerning how parties should be organized and thus in their eyes enhance the legitimacy of parties. This could in turn strengthen their identi cation with particular parties, at least so long as those parties’ goals are not at odds with their own political preferences and values. Third, however, there may well be groups of citizens who simply reject the idea of internal party democracy,

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and hence also the idea of intra-party deliberation. This may be so because, in addition to not desiring nonhierarchical and self-actualizing styles of political participation, they see no value in discursive and procedural forms of democracy. What they might prefer instead is charismatic leadership—perhaps the sort of ‘direct representation’ (Urbinati 2015) I have referred to several times above—or indeed referendumbased direct democracy, the institutional expression of radical popular sovereignty. For these groups of citizens, then, a deliberative conception of intra-party democracy may simply not be ‘the right thing’; they might feel represented only by parties that are structured in a radically di erent way, parties that place more emphasis on unmediated forms of asserting collective preferences than on participation and dialogue, or centre on a charismatic leader who decides top-down as (s)he sees t. Many parties on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, where top-down leadership is a by-product of authoritarian ideology, are likely to fall in that latter category. The same is true for the many so-called ‘populist’ parties that have arisen across established democracies, at least when they claim that the people constitutes a uni ed collective with hardly any internal divisions (Müller 2016). Such parties can always, and consistently with their programmatic outlook, critique as pointless the sort of intra-party democratization I have advocated in this book: as one scholar of populism puts it, ‘If there is only one, clearly identi able people’s will, which the leader or leadership can single out—what does one need intra-party debate for?’ (Müller 2016, 55–6). If we accept that a deliberative model of intra-party democracy is, as it were, ‘not for everyone’, what follows in terms of popular sovereignty? If, as I have argued in Chapter 1, the exercise of popular sovereignty under contemporary political conditions requires internally democratic and participatory parties, does this mean that those who prefer leadership-centred parties that are structured in a top-down fashion will be incapable of exercising popular sovereignty properly understood? Perhaps an unquali ed yes would be too strong a conclusion. But there is certainly a sense in which their capacity to exercise popular sovereignty is p. 159

likely to be impaired. For while parties with a non-democratic, top-down

organization may still make

(some) citizens think or feel that they possess a sense of democratic agency (satisfying what I called the ‘perception desideratum’), they certainly do poorly as far as the establishing an actual causal connection between citizens’ intentional attitudes and the party’s decisions (what I called the ‘causality desideratum’) is concerned, since the mechanisms available to hold party leaders and o

cials to account—and thus give

them reasons to act in a certain way—remain under-developed, or do not exist at all, in those parties. The congruence of citizens’ desires and parties’ actions may thus be no more than purely coincidental—which is not enough if we accept that the exercise of popular sovereignty demands satisfaction of not just the perception desideratum but also of the causality desideratum. In short, and not without irony, it is often those who most emphatically appeal to the ‘people’ who are only able to exercise popular sovereignty in a very limited sense.

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One way of thinking about the purpose of norms is to see them as allowing us to take a step back from actual institutions and practices, and consider alternatives to them (Möllers 2015). The argument I have o ered in this book is normative in this speci c sense: it takes a step back from actual parties and existing practices of intra-party democracy and considers a possible alternative. This alternative does not require us to accept idealized views of partisanship, nor does it demand that we reinvent parties from scratch. By the standards of contemporary political theory, the alternative to the status quo suggested in this book—namely, a deliberative model of intra-party democracy—is in fact quite modest. It provides the blueprint for a building that can be built, rather than a regulative ideal that can at best serve as a point of orientation but never be reached in full. It exhibits concern for real-world practices and the limitations of the agents who engage in them, rather than abstracting from them. My hope is that the distinctive ‘realism’ of the considerations I have presented, that is their non-ideal character and grounding in empirical research, lends them the capacity to inspire practitioners to initiate actual party reforms. This hope is far from modest, to be sure. But if the present state of parties in established democracies is any indication, then, to p. 160

modify a famous phrase by Marx and Engels, parties have nothing to lose but their bad reputation.

Notes 1

2

Note that this is also true for the radical view that the only plausible conception of feasibility on which we should base our judgements about whether or not a political ideal is worth pursuing is feasibility qua unconditional likelihood. In addition, this latter view of feasibility risks falling into a version of the naturalist fallacy that sees the real as the ideal, presenting as inevitable what is ultimately a contestable result. As Habermas (1979, 186) puts it, ʻit … depends on the concrete social and political conditions, on scopes of disposition, on information, and so forth, which types of organization and which mechanisms are in each case better suited to bring about procedurally legitimate decisions and institutions … I can imagine the attempt to arrange a society democratically only as a self-controlled learning process.ʼ Rethinking Party Reform. Fabio Wolkenstein, Oxford University Press (2020). © Gregor Fabio Wolkenstein. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001

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Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

END MATTER

Appendix 1 Re ections on Method 

A1

Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.005.0001 Published: December 2019

Pages 161–168

Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Appendix 1 Throughout the book, I have kept the discussion of methods-related questions to a minimum, limiting myself to brie y describing the focus group method and case selection in chapter 3. Yet, although I think this in principle su

cient to defend the research strategy I have adopted, there are also good reasons to say

a little more about my choice of method. Why not study deliberation in a di erent way? Responding in a more detailed fashion to this question seems important in light of the ongoing debate in deliberative democracy scholarship about the empirical study of practices of deliberation (for an overview, see Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019). This debate is quite unique, since there are very few other sub- elds of normative political theory that have attracted as much empirical attention as deliberative democratic theory. Especially the emergence of designed deliberative fora in the late 1990s—often summarized under the heading of ‘mini-publics’—has led to a wave of sophisticated empirical research on deliberation, and with it of course, came also quite a bit of disagreement over how deliberation is most fruitfully studied. Trying to navigate some of the most prominent positions in the debate, Appendix 1 advances a more comprehensive justi cation of the focus group method. In so doing, it also situates the present study within the larger body of empirical work on deliberation that exists now.

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The Empirical Turn in Deliberative Democracy

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Empirical interest in public deliberation has grown considerably over the last decade. The recent

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proliferation of empirical studies of deliberation initiated what has been called the ‘empirical turn’ in deliberative democracy, the latest of the many ‘turns’ the theory has taken so far (for an overview of these ‘turns’, see Dryzek 2012, ch. 1). Theorists and practitioners of deliberative democracy have widely acknowledged that deliberative theory requires an empirical check to fully realize its potential (e.g. Bohman 1998; Mutz 2008; Thompson 2008; Neblo 2015). Though empirical research, as one theorist notes, ‘cannot be either the last or the leading word in deliberative democratic theory’ (Chambers 2003, 320), it can help re ne deliberative theory’s guiding principles, render more clearly how deliberative institutions should be best designed, and more generally demonstrate that deliberative ideas have a bearing on the world out there. One can divide the empirical literature on deliberative democracy into three related families. The rst deals

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with the e ects that deliberation has on citizens. Studies of this kind have examined, for example, how deliberation transforms individual preferences and perspectives, or how it contributes to the perceived legitimacy of decisions (e.g. Gastil and Dillard 1999; Mutz 2008; Druckman and Nelson 2003; Barabas 2004; Fishkin and Luskin 2005; Stromer-Galley and Muhlberger 2009; Niemeyer 2011; Talpin 2011). The second family is addressed to the structural features of deliberation. Scholars have here looked at the ways in which justi cations are presented or the function of rhetoric in deliberation (e.g. Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Polletta and Lee 2006; Ryfe 2007; Black 2013). Finally, in the third family of literature, the focus is on the p. 162

overall quality of deliberation, that is,

the extent to which real-world deliberation reaches deliberative

ideals. The principal aim of these studies is to evaluate a whole range of normative criteria that are thought to be essential features of good deliberation in di erent institutional contexts (e.g. Steenbergen et al. 2003; Steiner et al. 2004; Hangartner et al. 2007; Bächtiger et al. 2008; Bächtiger and Hangartner 2010; Steiner 2012; Lord 2013; Lord and Tamvaki 2013). These three families of literature comprise the main empirical work done on deliberative democracy to date. Although it draws loosely on the insights of all three families of literature, the empirical part of the present study—notably Chapters 4–6—was mainly concerned with the circumstances and quality of deliberation in a speci c institutional setting, namely local party organizations. Thus, it belongs in the third family of empirical approaches. Yet as far as methodology is concerned, it departs from the bulk of existing work in signi cant ways. In the remainder of Appendix 1, I explain why and how the approach taken here di ers from the majority of studies of deliberation quality.

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Existing Research on Deliberation Quality and its Limitations

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In research on deliberation quality, the work of Jürg Steiner and André Bächtiger (e.g. Steiner et al. 2004;

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Bächtiger et al. 2008; Bächtiger and Hangartner 2010; Steiner 2012) has perhaps had the greatest impact in recent years. Steiner, Bächtiger, and their collaborators have developed a Discourse Quality Index (DQI), a formal text coding scheme to measure the degree to which real-world talk approaches the ideals of deliberative theory. The DQI’s codes are based on a set of criteria of good deliberation that are derived from classic versions of deliberative theory. Examples include the level of justi cation (how many reasons a speaker o ers in support of a claim), the content of justi cation (e.g. whether the speaker refers to the good of a part or the good of the whole), and di erent degrees of respect actors show vis-à-vis others (e.g. whether the speaker acknowledges others’ demands and counterarguments). The data generated in the text coding is typically used in statistical models to determine the e ect of di erent institutional (e.g. consensus- vs. competitive political systems) and sociological (e.g. age and gender) factors on the quality of deliberation. The DQI is undoubtedly the most innovative tool available to empirically investigate democratic

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deliberation. Not only is its operationalization of the ‘essentials of the Habermasian logic of communicative action’ (Bächtiger et al. 2010, 38)—the core element of Habermas’ moral rather than political theory—a paragon of making normative theory empirically useable. The fact that DQI data can be used in statistical models also brings deliberative democracy closer to empirical political science, contributing to crossdisciplinary dialogue (for two recent studies, see Lord 2013; Caluwaerts and Deschouwer 2013). Research of this kind is important for the drawing attention to the relevance of deliberative practices beyond the boundaries of democratic theory, and the DQI’s creators deserve credit for facilitating such work. Nonetheless, some problems arise from studying deliberation in such a formalistic fashion. On the one

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hand, there is the methodological problem that formal coding bypasses the richness of phenomena pertaining to deliberation. On the other hand, there is a related normative problem, namely that the DQI engages a too narrow, and thus unnecessarily exclusionary, model of deliberation. Let us examine these problems in turn. Beginning with the methodological problem, the DQI elides many contextual components of deliberation

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that can in uence the quality of deliberation in important ways. One reason why this is so is that it focuses p. 163

only on text. Consider the example of interpersonal

respect. With a text-based metric we are able to

ascertain disrespect only if it comes in the form of speech acts that explicitly degrade others and/or their proposals and claims. Once rhetorical devices or gestures are at play, however, this becomes much more di

cult. These elements of interpersonal communication can be hard to detect in transcripts. Yet it seems

clear that the respectfulness of a statement often depends not only on what has been said, but also on how it has been said. Utterances that look respectful on paper might have been made with an ironic or sarcastic undertone; and even physical gestures can a ect a statement’s respectfulness. Losing track of these crucial details may generate a distorted picture of deliberation quality. Another reason why the DQI misses important contextual components of deliberation is that it draws on a relatively narrow set of evaluative criteria. Most importantly, the DQI evaluates the level of justi cation by looking at whether, and to what extent, an actor provides reasons in support of a proposition and links these reasons to the proposition. Moreover, it—quite arbitrarily—stipulates that at least two reasons have to be o ered by a speaker for any proposition to be considered adequately justi ed (Steiner et al. 2004, 172–3). However, in most real-world deliberations such extensive justi cation is typically not necessary because participants share enough common knowledge to make sense of communicative shortcuts. This is why, as Robert Goodin put it (2008, 88), ‘[r]ather than belabouring the point, we typically o er the merest of gestures towards arguments, expecting others to catch the allusions’. Indeed, Goodin continues, we ‘talk

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principally in terms of conclusions, o ering […] only the briefest argument-sketch describing our reasoning leading us to those conclusions’. And although ‘brief argument-sketches’ do not meet the DQI’s criteria of good justi cation, those addressed might still view the point as su

ciently (and persuasively)

justi ed. Therefore, it would seem that a minimum requirement to avoid distortion is that researchers are present at the actual deliberations. Researchers need to familiarize themselves with the context of talk and, if possible, observe the participants in action. This can to rman 2003; on groups and deliberation see also 1

Karpowitz and Mendelberg 2007, esp. 649). In some environments deliberative processes ‘are formal or ritualized’, in others ‘informal, even haphazard’ (Sass and Dryzek 2014, 4). In some contexts, people typically justify their claims with personal narratives or images, in others they may draw routinely on more generalizable or logic-driven evidence. In short, a variety of tmodes of talk can display deliberative characteristics. Admitting these in a model of deliberative democracy might even be said to have a moral or ethical claim as a way of recognizing what is sometimes called the ‘separateness of persons’. This ‘inclusion-argument’ is usually associated with the work of ‘di erence democrats’ like Iris Marion

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Young. In their view, deliberative theory should respect people as concrete beings who are embedded in particular social contexts. For Young in particular, this is chie y a matter of avoiding the speech norms traditional deliberative democrats avow. She p. 164

Notice that the normative argument against using the DQI is also more consistent with intra-party

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democracy’s aim to lend ordinary party members voice. To recall: the principle of intra-party democracy is predicated on the idea that parties should permit their broader membership to have a say in internal decision-making. The party on the ground includes however people who are likely to not always be highly educated and articulate. Thus, limiting our concept of deliberation to the kind of rational discussion that privileges ‘white males with college degree’ seems a less than promising direction; indeed, it would seem that the emancipatory potential of intra-party democracy would be undermined by a such narrow concept of deliberation. The argument from inclusion has another important methodological implication. If people ought to be

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respected as concrete, situated subjects, it follows that researchers also should take seriously the participants’ perspective when studying the quality of deliberation. That is, researchers ought to acknowledge that what good reasons are, what respectful speech means, and so on, can only be properly judged from the point of view of the participants themselves. Here again, the DQI proves problematic, for it evaluates the quality of deliberation entirely from a third-person perspective and so bypasses the participants’ viewpoints. In reducing the study of deliberation quality to a text coding exercise, it gives the researcher the power to decide what good deliberation means without consulting those directly participating in it whatsoever. Bächtiger and his colleagues (2010, 40–1) acknowledge this shortcoming of the DQI but maintain that the problem of ignoring the participants’ viewpoint ‘presses less forcefully when judging the formal properties of arguments’ as opposed to their speci c content. They claim, for example, that when it comes to justi cation the DQI can ‘measure whether an argument is accessible to rational criticism’, and that this be a sound ‘proxy for substantive justi cation’. But how should accessibility to rational criticism be adjudicated if the DQI codes ‘only assess whether the speaker provides supporting evidence’ (Bächtiger et al. 2010, 41, emphasis added)? Clearly, the fact that evidence is provided does not yet tell us whether that evidence is accessible to rational criticism. Evidence may be rational in the most profound sense of the word but inaccessible to those addressed, as with a scienti c study whose validity can only be evaluated by experts. Such evidence may ‘convince without persuading’, so to speak, but it cannot be subjected to critical scrutiny by most speakers. So, it is highly questionable whether simply providing evidence is a reliable proxy. It seems that the burden of taking the participants’ perspective into account cannot so easily be avoided. As we shall see in the next section, adopting an interpretative approach is a promising alternative.

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Before proceeding, though, let us summarize the above discussion. Taken together, the arguments

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examined in this section strongly suggest we should look for alternatives to the DQI when studying the quality of deliberation. Although the DQI has its merits as a tool that facilitates dialogue across subdisciplines, its shortcomings (which, it should be noted, the DQI’s creators are largely aware of) ultimately outweigh its advantages. From a methodological point of view, coding the formal properties of deliberation is problematic because it misses important contextual factors on which the quality of deliberation often depends. From a normative point of view, the DQI’s rigid framework of deliberative principles proves exclusionary vis-à-vis many di erent styles of communication that can perform a deliberative function. This point weighs especially heavy in light of intra-party democracy’s emancipatory aims: to make parties more inclusive and participatory, we ought not limit deliberation to forms of speech that ultimately privilege an educated few. At the very least, we must acknowledge that di erent forms of communication p. 165

can be deliberative. Understanding these forms of communication requires us to pay close

attention to

the viewpoints of those participating in deliberation. So even if one thinks that insensitivity to context is a price well worth paying for methodological rigour, theoretical consistency requires that we take a di erent approach.

An Interpretative Approach to Partisan Deliberation

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It seems clear now that an appropriate methodology to study deliberation at the party base must be

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particularly sensitive to intersubjective and phenomenological considerations. This points naturally to methods that are traditionally classed as interpretative. Interpretative approaches, a hallmark of anthropology and qualitative sociology, concentrate on ‘beliefs, and discourses, as opposed to laws and rules, correlations between social categories, or deductive models’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2006, 70). Scholars in the interpretative tradition hold that the meanings of these beliefs and discourses can be accessed through interpretation (for a classic treatment, see Taylor 1971). This means that the researcher needs to draw on his or her own resources rather than trying to abstract from them in order to achieve scienti c rigour. The aim is not to arrive at generalizations about social behaviour that are divorced from the particulars, as in the quantitative tradition of social-scienti c inquiry, but to make sense of the speci c meanings that constitute people’s actions and practices and explain phenomena and events ‘in terms of actors’ understandings of their own contexts’ (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012, 52). Interpretative approaches typically engage such research techniques as in-depth interviews, focus groups,

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discourse analysis, and participant observation. And most of these techniques have also been previously used in empirical research on deliberative democracy (e.g. Hendriks 2006; Ryfe 2007; Landwehr and Holzinger 2010). So, although there is clearly a growing tendency to study deliberation with quantitative methods, there is nothing unfamiliar in taking an interpretative route. In fact, echoing some of my concerns with the DQI, much of the motivation underlying scholarly support for interpretivism in research on deliberative democracy derives from dissatisfaction with the abstractness of quantitative approaches and their disconnectedness from the politics on the ground. As Ercan and her colleagues (2015, 6 and 12) argue in a recent paper, the virtue of interpretative methods is that they can ‘capture the perspectives of participants in the deliberative process’ and so provide insight into the ‘lived experiences … and 2

complexities of public deliberation’. For more practically-minded scholars like Gastil and his colleagues (2012, 222), interpretative methods are simply a ‘pragmatic’ choice of method insofar as ‘the meaning of texts [i.e. transcripts of deliberations] can be revealed only by attention to the particular context in which it is embedded’. A common worry, one that needs to be addressed here, is that interpretative methods give the analyst too much latitude for interpretation, at the expense of methodological rigour. This worry is usually expressed by those who think that quantitative approaches, which carry the aura of hard science, provide the gold

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standard of social-scienti c rigour. Dryzek (2005, 198), for instance, who is generally favourably disposed p. 166

to interpretivism,

3

objects that in much interpretative research ‘too much has to be taken on trust’.

Interpretation, in his view, is eventually ‘inescapable’ in the study of deliberative democracy—but it is ‘potentially deadly’ (Dryzek 2005, 198). But the fact that interpretative methods rely on the researcher’s situated judgements does not imply that interpretation is completely impressionistic and unsystematic; rather, since interpretivism is predicated on di erent ontological and epistemological assumptions than quantitative approaches, di erent standards of rigour apply. Brie y, quantitative methods tend to start from the presumption that there is an observer-independent world about which facts can be discovered with scienti c methods, and hold that rigour requires subjecting hypotheses to empirical testing. Interpretivism, on the other hand, rejects the assumption that there exists an observer-independent world (or at least that such a world can be accessed by humans), and looks instead at the ways in which people 4

invest the world with meaning by carefully interpreting what they say and do. Interpretative researchers can achieve rigour, then, by saturating their instruments with theory and being re exive and transparent about their approach. In this way, they can avoid the pitfalls of unconstrained interpretation. Now, which interpretative research techniques are best suited to study deliberation in settings like party

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branches? Ethnographic approaches certainly provide the greatest level of detail and nuance. Recent empirical work based on observation and immersion has proven to a ord a crucial insight into the lived experience of deliberation (e.g., Baiocchi 2005; Talpin 2011; Doerr 2012). But though this work is indicative of the great potential of ethnographic methods in the study of deliberative democracy, a purely ethnographic approach appears unsuited for studying the deliberations of local party groups. Ethnography is best suited, and usually used, to address one case in maximal depth. Rather than aiming at overview or comparison, it serves to ‘chronicle aspects of lived experience’ through complete ‘immersion in the place and lives of people under study’ (Wedeen 2010, 257). It seems, however, that we need to include some variation in our case selection to meaningfully explore the potential of a deliberative model of intra-party democracy. Recall that the party groups examined in this study not only exhibit considerable variation regarding the sociological composition of participants, but also convene with di erent frequency and debate di erent topics. Because of these di erences, taking an ethnographic approach and focusing only on 5

one or two groups over extended time is likely to leave us with an excessively partial picture.

More appropriate research techniques may be found in research with similarly exploratory goals as the p. 167

present study. In her study of the support for public deliberation by actors

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with vested interests, for

example, Carolyn Hendriks (2006) draws on in-depth interviews and document analysis. Donatella della Porta’s (2005) study of deliberation in social movements also uses in-depth interviews, in combination with document analysis and focus groups, while Pamela Johnston Conover and Donald Searing (2005) use focus groups to enrich survey results and content analysis data in their work on the deliberativeness of everyday political talk. Like the present study, these studies sought to map uncharted terrain, as it were. And although their results are not generalizable in the strict sense of being statistically representative, there is certainly room for some more general conjectures. (When, for example, no new information emerges after conducting a number of group interviews one may—tentatively and preliminarily—assume that the ndings re ect more general realities.) So, what research techniques should we opt for? Given that the present study is addressed to group discussion

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at the party base, drawing on the insights of focus group research naturally suggests itself. Let me rst explain in a bit more detail what a focus group is and then discuss whether the logic of focus group research can be applied to local party groups. First, focus groups are typically understood as moderated thematic group discussions that revolve around a speci c topic. Ideally people speak openly and in their ‘own language’, with relatively little control imposed by the researcher. In other words, focus groups are ‘partly-arti cial deliberations’ themselves: insofar as people interact and in uence each other in discussion, they can ‘echo the social context within which people

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discuss public a airs’ (Johnston Conover and Searing 2005, 273). Their scholarly value is two-fold. On the one hand, they allow researchers to investigate the meaning of arguments and concepts as people understand them. (Although the researcher tends to keep a low pro le in a focus group discussion, he or she can always ask participants to clarify their statements and elaborate how they arrived at their viewpoint.) On the other hand, focus group discussions admit an insight into the particular ways in which people discuss. They enable us to gain an understanding of what one may call discursive practices, that is, routinized patterns of talk. In short, focus groups are not only particularly suited to examine how people reason together, but also to study collective discussion from the point of view of the participants themselves. If this is so, can we also plausibly draw an analogy between focus groups and local party groups? Although

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local party groupings clearly resemble focus groups, they also di er from focus groups in several ways. The most obvious di erence is that party groups are not designed by researchers. First, typically researchers recruit focus group participants according to a speci c socio-demographic pro le. They determine the topic and timeframe of discussion, as well as the number of participants. In local party groups, by contrast, participants come from di erent social backgrounds and age cohorts. Discussion topics vary, and the number of participants di ers from group to group. Second, focus groups are usually discussions among people who meet for the rst time. Local party meetings, on the other hand, are regular exchanges among people who are acquainted with one another. That party groups meet on a regular basis furthermore means that they are likely to exhibit what Eliasoph and Lichterman (2003, 739) call a ‘group style’, that is, they may share assumptions about ‘what the group’s relationship […] to the wider world should be’, ‘what members’ mutual responsibilities should be while in the group context’, and ‘what appropriate speech is in the group context’. But while it is important to be aware of those di erences, the fact that party groups have not been designed by researchers certainly does not speak against treating them as focus groups. We may here adopt what p. 168

David Morgan calls an ‘inclusive approach’ to focus group

research and view focus groups simply as ‘a

research technique that collects data through group interaction’ (Morgan 1997, 6). On such a perspective, informality is one of the core strengths of focus group research. Rather than establishing formal criteria of what quali es as a focus group and what doesn’t, methodological restrictions should relate to the researcher’s speci c goals and the nature of the research topic. So even if the suggested analogy is imperfect in some way, party groups can reasonably be treated as focus groups. Of course, we need to bear in mind that doing so implies altering the normal course of discussion in these groups in signi cant ways, since in focus group discussions the researcher remains foreign to the group, and his or her presence will likely be felt by the participants. Thus, the researcher cannot simply take the role of an observer. Usually he or she needs to ask some introductory questions, breaking the ice, as it were, before the discussion can take a more natural course. Moreover, sometimes the researcher will be required to intervene in the discussion and remind participants to keep to the point, or ask them for clari cation (see for example Duchesne and Haegel 2006, 6

12–13).

Notes 1

One way of looking at di erent ʻstylesʼ of deliberation is to see them as shaped by what sociologists sometimes call ʻspeech normsʼ. Speech norms are ʻassumptions about what appropriate speech isʼ that individuals develop and adopt in their peer groups and social environment (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003, 739). These norms are likely to influence what people view as good deliberation in that they a ect what kind of speech people consider respectful, what kinds of justification they accept; and so on. A circle of educated middle-class deliberators, for example, might view dispassionate and polite talk as most respectful, while in less privileged social contexts more confrontational speech can still be seen as perfectly acceptable. Likewise, a group of religious deliberators will see no problem in accepting traditionalist arguments with references to a sacred higher order, whilst most atheists will be compelled to reject such reasonings. The DQIʼs static framework glosses over these important details.

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2

3

4

5

6

Ercan et al. (2015) list a range of advantages in their paper that I do not mention here. This is because many of the benefits they note refer specifically to the empirical study of ʻdeliberative systemsʼ, an approach to deliberative democracy that understands deliberation as occurring in multiple spaces at once (such as living rooms, co ee shops, or social movements), and are not directly relevant for the methodological propositions put forward in this chapter. Dryzek (2005) argues that mixing methods (combining surveys and focus groups, for example) can correct for the weaknesses of individual interpretative methods. But one should be cautious with such moves, especially when these involve mixing interpretative and quantitative methods. Di erent methods ultimately rest on di erent philosophical assumptions, and compounding methods can result in philosophical inconsistency. As Ahmed and Sil (2012, 936) rightly note, claims emphasising mixed methodsʼ ʻability to reduce error and deliver cross-validated findings are viable only for methods predicated on su iciently similar ontologies and su iciently similar conceptions of causalityʼ. Note that treating the world as a social construct is also more consistent with the idea of deliberation. Deliberation is about exchanging observer-dependent viewpoints, and such an exchange would be pointless if it were possible to discover that any of those viewpoints corresponded to an ontological ʻfactʼ in an observer-independent world (see the discussion of inter-subjectivism in Reckwitz 2002). I am by no means suggesting that such an approach would not be per se worthwhile. An ethnographic study of activism at the party base would be a welcome addition to the bulk of quantitative studies of the decline of membership-based politics, and could generate novel insight into citizen engagement at the party-public nexus. The researcherʼs prominent role in focus group research may lead one to draw analogies to designed deliberation. In designed fora moderators usually have been trained to encourage a deliberative discourse. However, in the focus group the researcherʼs role is not to ensure that people argue well; rather, interventions are generally made to keep the discussion going, and to keep it within the boundaries of the theme of interest.

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

END MATTER

Appendix 2 Supplementary Empirical Material 

A2

Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.005.0002 Published: December 2019

Pages 169–176

Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Appendix 2 In the analysis of partisan deliberation in Chapter 5, I have examined two exemplary passages of

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deliberation. Prioritizing depth over breadth, I have refrained from discussing further examples of deliberation among party branch members. This Appendix presents more examples of deliberation within party branches. This serves two primary purposes. First, it corroborates the conclusions I have drawn in Chapter 5. Most of the passages cited below easily meet the latitudinarian standard of deliberation I have defended in the book; with a few exceptions, the much-discussed ability of party members to engage in a give and take of reasons that conforms to basic standards of political justi cation is on display throughout. Second, o ering more examples of partisan deliberation provides readers with a more complete picture of the kinds of discursive exchange that occur in party branches and more insight into the rich context in which the argument of the book in general and Chapter 5 in particular is embedded.

Example 1

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The rst example of intra-party deliberation, which took place in the Vienna Wasserturm group, starts with

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participants complaining about problems of internal communication within the party. Christian stresses that it is hard for him to communicate to party functionaries that the party base is generally dissatis ed with the party’s present chairman (at the time of the interview that was Werner Faymann). After one participant diverts the focus of the discussion to the question of how the party and its leadership should present itself to the voters, participants agree that those representing the party in public ought to be more courageous, in the sense of showing rm leadership when it comes to shaping society in accordance with the party’s aims and principles. peter: If I let the people [i.e. the members of the branch] vote in a secret ballot … probably 98 per cent would say that they do not want Faymann [the leader of the party] anymore … how do you communicate that in the next [i.e. hierarchically higher] levels [of the party]? Which is doubly

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di

cult in our district because at the next [hierarchical] level, where I work [sitze], Faymann’s

wife works too. ruth: Yes, but that must not be a hurdle!

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peter: Yes, it shouldn’t!

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elisabeth [interposing]: Shouldn’t! I would tell that to her face.

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peter: Mother [Elisabeth is Peter’s mother], if somebody would attack me like this, what do you

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think how you would treat him?[LAUGHTER, TACIT AGREEMENT ON PETER’S POINT ]

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peter: So, the question is … so to speak … how does one communicate such a story in the right way?

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And I know, I am not spared this discussion. Because it is also my duty as elected vice chairman of p. 170

the SPÖ in Favoriten [the district of Vienna the party branch

operates in] to pick up this story

and carry it further and to say, ‘friends, it’s fuming there, they are not content’. These are the things … how do you convey that [within the party]? And this is of course not so easy. josef: I think what’s missing is courage! When I think about the story with Vassilakou [the

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chairwoman of the Green party in Vienna, who decided to pedestrianize one of Vienna’s main shopping streets, Mariahilfer Straße, despite great protests by local shopkeepers] … the whole of Vienna thought she would fail with [her plans to pedestrianize] Mariahilfer Straße. All of us were sure: this was out of bounds. The way this began, we thought this would be a big failure for the Greens … [but] she had the courage, she took something on. And in the meantime … I was so stunned how resistance vanished … almost everyone is enthusiastic [about it] now. Why? [Because] she had courage. lena: Yes! Yes, indeed!

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josef: We were all wrong [about this]. And this is what’s lacking in our own party. Where do we

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show courage? They [i.e. the party leadership] only try to hold on [klammern] [on past achievements] … and where is courage? That’s missing. […] peter: I have to say, Josef, this is correct. […] They do not think like we do. We think focused on

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ourselves [auto-fokussiert]. […] And you are right about courage. I have by the way said this to Michael [i.e. Michael Häupl, the mayor of Vienna] … I said, ‘if one is committed to something and follows it through’ … ‘in the end this will be rewarded’.[COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT ] Let us focus on the second and substantially more interesting part of the exchange. Though the positions

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expressed by the speakers are not particularly controversial—I would argue that few people would disagree with Josef’s larger point about the importance of leadership and political courage—genuine e orts at justi cation are made by the speakers, and their arguments are taken up by the others. The example Josef uses to justify his point, namely the Green party’s leadership in pedestrianizing Mariahilfer Straße, a key shopping street in Vienna, deserves particular attention. Its instant resonance with the other participants can be explained by pointing out the context in which the discussion took place. About six months before the interview was conducted, the topic of pedestrianizing Mariahilfer Straße gured prominently in the local (and indeed national) media; and even though public opinion was initially polarized, the initiative enjoyed gradually more support among the general public. Around the time when the interview took place, public opinion was then largely positive about the ‘new’, pedestrianized Mariahilfer Straße. If one followed the local media, it was easy to get the impression that many people were ‘enthusiastic’ about it, as Josef put it. So, in drawing on this example, Josef e ectively made use of a case of immediate public relevance to justify his point. This is a paradigmatic example of successful justi cation in a speci c social and political context. Besides the participants’ justi catory moves, note how Josef and Peter describe the leaders of their party. Both suggest, with collective approval, that the leadership is self-referential in its outlook and that party leaders are more concerned with administering the status quo than with shaping society and transforming social and political institutions in accordance with the political goals the party stands for. This sceptical position is much more representative of the way in which most participants of this study describe their relationship to the party than the position of the Linz group we have examined earlier in example 1, where

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participants endorsed the status quo, appealing to the legitimacy of internal hierarchy and a general feeling of trust towards elected leaders. In fact, many of the exchanges about organizational issues reveal a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction among participants with their party and its present leaders.

p. 171

Example 2

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The second example is again a discussion in the Vienna Wasserturm group. Its topic is how the SPÖ should

A2.P17

best deal with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), a party that is increasingly gaining electoral grounds in areas that were traditionally dominated by the Social Democrats. This includes Favoriten, the district in which the Wasserturm group operates. The principal concern of the participants is here with the question of what one might learn from the FPÖ in terms of electoral strategy, and whether a centre-left party like the SPÖ should at all look to the far right for inspiration. peter: What I think is that the party [i.e. the SPÖ] does not engage seriously with the substantial

A2.P18

positions of the FPÖ … in order to … maria [interposing]: I think they [i.e. the FPÖ] do not engage with their own positions …

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peter: … well, the problem is, so to say: when they [i.e. the FPÖ] claim a [political] topic [eine

A2.P20

Position besetzen], the SPÖ’s re ex is, ‘that is all bullshit’. And … the truth … the truth is multilayered … it is not all wrong what they say. But we have to engage substantially with the things at stake so as to analyse this and to say, ‘how do we solve the problem’ … they [i.e. the FPÖ] capture a general sentiment [in the population] and that is often quite correct … even if some issues are certainly no fun … but it’s not only about immigrants [Ausländer] … yvonne: What the FPÖ does … what they permanently do … they conduct damn many studies …

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social-scienti c studies which they pay [research] institutes to conduct … about demography, sentiments among the citizenry, capturing the composition of this city. That they went after the Serbs back in the days [i.e. the FPÖ tried to mobilize voters with a Serbian background], that they tried to drum up supporters, that is a clear sign … [that] they do not select people randomly but strategically. […] It is completely clear, they have clearly analysed the minority groups we have here in Vienna, be it the Serbs, the Bosniaks, Croatians, Poles … and they have analysed this and focused on one group, and this is how they … we [i.e. the SPÖ] capture a general vibe [Stimmungsbild] of the city but we do not analyse it. That is, we do not accurately target things, but … just like we don’t have strong opinions otherwise, we are vague about what we think is happening in the city. And I believe that … one can make use of what the FPÖ analyses. maria: But what do they analyse? I mean, when it comes to the Serbs … what do you want to do?

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Fair enough, they are the last Christians in the Balkans … this is why we want [to mobilize] them? georg: No, with the Serbs and the FPÖ it’s about something completely di erent. They are rather

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nationalist, that is to say, they have national pride, which they, tragically, carried into the Yugoslav War, and so on. And that ts with the FPÖ’s party line, and they consciously make use of that [stürzt sich darauf]. maria: But that is not yet a [political] position! There is no substance! Nationalism itself is no …

A2.P24

substance! yvonne: Yes, because they are all nationalist … the Poles, the Bulgarians, the Bosniaks too. And why they [i.e. the FPÖ] focused on them was […] rst that they are the largest [minority] group we have in Vienna, they are the most heterogenous group we have, and they are those who were the rst [to come to] Austria, 20–25 years ago … where now the second, third generation is here … and [the FPÖ] says, ‘listen, you are one of us, you are third generation, you are Austrian, you are born p. 172

here, you are a citizen, do you really want that the rest … from further away … comes here?’ And

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this is what they play with, with these feelings they play. You have a job, you have built up a life here … maria [interposing]: But this is still without substance …

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yvonne: It is an example of what you can make out of an analysis. One has to play to people’s

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emotions. I cannot only … that is what the SPÖ always does … only bring up sober, functional topics [Sachthemen]. I also have to play with people’s emotions. […] peter: One example: the FPÖ analyses population growth and raising social expenditures … this is

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at the moment very intertwined … maria [interposing]: But so do we. That’s why we build enough housing!

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peter: No. We think we’re at it but we do not build more. Nothing’s changing. This is so for various

A2.P30

reasons … but they [i.e. the FPÖ] … they promote these issues and they discuss them. And then we come and say, ‘no, all of those problems don’t exist, it’s not happening’. Like you, Maria. I hear this also from our city councillor. But I don’t believe that. I work in a housing cooperative, I know how di

cult it is to even get one’s hands on property at the moment. That’s how it is. We do not

need 7000 [new ats], we need in fact 10,000. The FPÖ occupies [besetzen] the topic … and rather than saying, ‘how can we develop ways of making things better together?’, we do not engage with this. We say straightforwardly that they are wrong. And this puts pressure on us, because the people can see that things are di erent, they can feel it. This passage is especially rich in detail. It re ects that the members of the group seriously engage with the

A2.P31

electoral and political strategies of their main political rival. Consequently, most participants’ e orts at mutual justi cation are argumentatively profound. Yvonne and Peter in particular seek to be even-handed in their judgements, drawing on non-anecdotal evidence in support of their claims. What is noticeable is that Maria, the only participant who appears to think that there is nothing the SPÖ can learn from the FPÖ, makes no comparable e ort to justify her position. She simply asserts her viewpoint without further defending it. So, her statements hardly satisfy what I have, in Chapter 5, called the ‘reason-giving condition’, which stipulates that a speaker must provide reasons rather than simply state her point of view or preference. Thus, even though her reactions to the other speakers’ contributions indicate a level of critical re ection and so signal deliberative uptake, her statements are insu

ciently deliberative. Perhaps

as a result of this, Maria’s position does not nd much support in the group: absent justifying reasons, her claims lack persuasive force. However, despite the low deliberative quality of Maria’s contributions, the passage should not be interpreted as an example of bad deliberation. For the majority of participants justify their views in a thoughtful fashion and take Maria’s contrarian position seriously, thus satisfying both conditions of successful justi cation we have established in Chapter 5.

Example 3

A2.S3

The third example of deliberation among party branch members is a debate in the Bonn group concerning

A2.P32

individual members’ relationship to their party. This exchange was triggered by the discussion about the defection of one group member following the membership ballot on the coalition agreement with the CDU/CSU. This issue was mentioned in Chapter 6, which looked at failures of intra-party deliberation. Dieter’s statement about what he describes as his ‘basic loyalty’ to the party kicks o

the debate.

dieter: I always say to myself: however much the party leadership blunders, they will never make p. 173

me leave the ‘big tanker’. So there is a certain basic loyalty to … also to the

historical party, yes.

And therefore it was always out of the question for me … even when it [i.e. decisions of the party leaders] really goes against the grain for me … so the religious policy of the SPD really goes against the grain for me … but I would never quit the party because of that.

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sabine: I see this quite like Dieter. I would not … for me it is always like in a marriage … there are

A2.P34

good and bad times, and just because it is now a bad time, that does not mean that I would generally want to separate. I for one in any case only joined the party because I was against Agenda 2010 [a series of labour market reforms enacted between 2003–5 by SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which have often been criticized as neo-liberal] and I said: if I don’t join now, I can never do something against this. And I was also against the grand coalition [in 2013] but I still remained in the party, even if I su er a bit from that, and even if it’s not fun to see that I have been proven right and that we are always punished by the voters for that. But that’s how it is. It’s like in a marriage, and there one doesn’t simply give up without a ght. One has made a choice, and then … Alex [interposing]: I think that it is precisely not like in a marriage. I think a party is actually not a

A2.P35

place where I look for harmony. It is not a place where I look for consensus, but where I want to [engage in order to] bring positions ‘out on the street’. And so … disputes are part of the trade; disputes are important … it is important that we argue, but that we still in the end have a common position or a position for which we can jointly stand for. And I think, that is part of our daily business … that one argues on a daily basis in a party. And therefore, I have a di erent relationship to the party than to my wife. There I do not argue daily, and there I do not think this is the meaning of it all. With respect to a party, I indeed think that arguing is a major part of its meaning. sabine: But ultimately your marriage is also about consensus. How one gets to consensus, that is

A2.P36

again something di erent, to be sure. But I also can’t always aim at love, peace, and harmony in a marriage. There are also di erent ways of attaining consensus. And in politics consensus is achieved by arguing. I think we do agree that these are important di erences. alex: [Nods head in agreement.] To get back to the question of quitting the party … when the party

A2.P37

in the end promotes a di erent position concerning certain issues than I, this is no reason for me to quit the party but rather to push within the party for revisiting the issue. When I am still not satis ed after that, I will revisit it again. And in the end, I might be 200 years old and utterly frustrated, but this is for me the meaning of this party.[COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT ] There can be little doubt that the normative desiderata of justi cation—reason-giving and uptake—are

A2.P38 A2.P39

satis ed here too. Speakers try to make clear why they think as they do and thoughtfully respond to one another. Sabine extends toward Alex an empathy that attends to their commonalities and di erences. What makes the passage particularly interesting is how, in describing their relationship to the party as a collective project, participants make creative use of analogical reasoning. As they weigh arguments for and against the validity of the analogy between party membership and marriage, one is indeed reminded of political theorists, who often draw on analogies and examples of this kind in order to make their arguments resonant and persuasive. The outcome of the exchange is a collective agreement on a joint position, namely that quitting the party is not an option that party members should exercise. Whether one looks for harmony and consensus or disagreement and contestation, membership in a political party ought to involve loyalty to the larger political project to which the party gives institutional expression; Dieter refers to the ‘historical party’ in this connection.

p. 174

Example 4

A2.S4

The fourth and nal example the Appendix presents is a rather heated debate in the Theilheim group about

A2.P40

citizens’ political identities in the local community and the adequate electoral strategy for the party. It begins with Willi emphasizing his failure to understand the SPD’s last election result in Theilheim, where the party lost a good deal of voters to rival parties.

willi: I must say, since this election I really question my sense of judgement (Menschenverstand). I

A2.P41

would never have thought … I was one of those who said ‘come on, let us work together … if we want to overthrow the current mayor … then we must ght together … we have organized events together … and I would never have thought that the blacks [i.e. the CSU voters] would rather vote for the UWG [i.e. Unabhängige Wählergemeinschaft, a local list of activists who do not belong to any of the established parties], and that the SPD-supporters would also rather vote for the UWG. That is the only way I can explain this election result. And that is why I am still disappointed to this day. ben: But on the other hand, … I can understand that if one traditionally supports the SPD, then

A2.P42

supporting the CSU is preposterous. So … in di erent [political] constellations … I could fully understand that one thinks that way. sinja: I can’t understand that.

A2.P43

horst: Neither can I.

A2.P44

sinja: I said this earlier: in a small community council (Gemeindeparlament) one should jointly aim

A2.P45

to make promote the welfare of the community, irrespective of whether one is red, green, black, or whatever. I can understand [traditional partisan rivalries] when it’s about politics a ecting the federal state, when it’s about the country … where it’s really about substance. There I can understand when someone says: ‘what, they are making a pact with the CSU? For goodness sake, I can’t vote for them anymore. They are betraying their principles.’ But on such a low level, where everyone should be pulling together (an einem Strang ziehen), and it should be in everyone’s interest to achieve the best for the community, there I cannot understand such conduct. But well, it is how it is. We can’t change it anymore. We can only draw our lessons from it and strive to make it to the top again. ben: In the end we have acknowledge that we, as SPD, are a self-standing party, and we have to

A2.P46

ght for ourselves! And that means, that we do not ght for the CSU or the like! hans: But we didn’t! We didn’t! We had a list of our own.

A2.P47

sinja: We didn’t ‘ ght for the CSU’! We fought for overthrowing the mayor!

A2.P48

ben: But we still supported the candidate of the CSU! That was the wrong strategy!

A2.P49

The argumentative dynamics in this exchange are similar to those we have observed in the Theilheim

A2.P50

discussion analysed in Chapter 5. By this, I mean that participants exhibit pronouncedly di erent attitudes concerning the way in which their party should deal with political rivals. Ben evidently holds what I have called ‘purist’ views. He is quite sceptical of cooperation with other parties, especially when his own party is in a weak bargaining position because of insu

cient electoral support. The other participants are more

‘pragmatist’ in their orientation. Sinja is particularly outspoken about her commitment to cross-partisan cooperation in the small community that is Theilheim. Even if the particular case of cooperation that is discussed in the exchange has resulted in a loss of votes for her own party, she thinks that working together with rivals for the good of the community at large is more important than the pursuit of narrow partisan p. 175

goals. These di erences of political

approach account for the agonistic nature of the exchange; the

excessive use of exclamation marks can only inadequately capture the belligerent tone that some participants struck. Because the pragmatist-purist divide that runs through the group acquires special salience in this exchange, the quality of deliberation is palpably lower than in the other examples I have presented in this Appendix. The main problem is that most of the interventions, especially those made towards the end of the passage, consist only of brief assertions and largely lack justifying reasons, thus failing to meet the reasongiving condition. However, it must also be noted that Willi and Sinja make genuine e orts at justifying their viewpoints to the others; Sinja in particular delivers her point with great clarity. So even though the passage in part comes close to deliberative failure, deliberative moves do take place. Even more pertinently, as participants remarked at a later point in the interview, the topic under deliberation has repeatedly been discussed by the group before. Participants are thus largely aware of the main disagreements that divide

A2.P51

them, and they have already ‘agreed to disagree’ on a previous occasion. Seen in this light, the passage lends itself to a more favourable interpretation: the fact that participants are willing to revisit the polarized issue at all, and the fact that some of them readily o er extensive justi cations for their position, may be read as re ecting a more general commitment to political deliberation. But even with that in mind, there can be no doubt that the exchange itself is among the least deliberative of those that were examined in this thesis. Arguably a slightly deviant case, it is clear that it fails to conform to our normative deliberative standards to p. 176

the same degree as the other examples of partisan deliberation I have presented.

Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

END MATTER

References  Published: December 2019

Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

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Rethinking Party Reform Fabio Wolkenstein https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849940.001.0001 Published: 2019

Online ISBN: 9780191884344

END MATTER

Index  Published: December 2019

Subject: Political Theory Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

Print ISBN: 9780198849940

Index Note: Tables are indicated by an italic ‘t’ following the page number. For the bene t of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Ackerman, Bruce 15–1615n.2 agreement-facilitating function 121 Alex (Bonn) 80–819396173 Alternative für Deutschland party 4 ‘assembly-based intra-party democracy’ 85 Australian Labour Party (ALP) 55 Austria 24–564–6671–748797118 Austrian People’s Party  See Liste Sebastian Kurz Austrian Social Democrats (SPÖ) 47–4848n.1682 Bächtiger, André 108–109126162164 Bebel, August 129–130 Beerbohm, Eric 19 behavioural outcomes 18 Ben (Theilheim group) 99114–117122–123174 Berlin group 92–9393n.3136–137144–145 Bernhard (Theilheim group) 99–100 Bernstein, Eduard 129–130 Bert (Berlin group) 136–137 Beyond Adversary Democracy (Mansbridge) 64–65 Bickerton, Christopher 1–31n.13n.2 Big Conversation (Labour 2003) 46 Bodin, Jean 1515n.1 Bolin, Niklas 84 Bonn group 134–136172 Bonotti, Matteo 10 Brexit referendum (2016) 22–23 Bundestag elections 114 business models 46–47 candidate selection model 36–3741–43 and party branches 51–52 procedures 40 capitalism 129–130 Carina (Gampern group) 91–92 Carty, R. Kenneth 38–3984 causality desideratum 18–1930158–159 CDU (Germany) 98–99114134172 chairpersons 143 Christian Democrats (Germany) 73–7473n.3 citizens 4554 civil disobedience 5–6 common adversaries 2498–100 conclusion 147–159 Conover, Pamela Johnston 166–167

Conservative Party 22–23 Consul 46–47 consumer cultures 69–70 contributory causation 19 Corbyn, Jeremy 7–87n.33359 CSU (Germany) 98–100114134156172 Daniel (Berlin group) 136–137 David (Berlin group) 137 deliberation among fellow partisans 102102n.8 among party members 149 demand for 58 and democratization of parties 87155–156 e ective, within parties 104 enabling conditions 88 freedom to exit 135–136 introduction 8–1012–14 model of 41–45 and narrow principles of good discourse 163 slow-paced activity 60 styles of 163163n.1 within party branches 169–170 deliberation quality 162–165 deliberative acceptance 90–91 deliberative accountability 4257 deliberative agents 43 deliberative consequentialism 129 deliberative democracy empirical turn in 161–162 ethnographic methods 166 deliberative equality 95–96128n.3 deliberative intra-party networks 148–149 deliberative polls 54 p. 194

democracy and changes of leadership 33 crisis of 1–2 directly representative 2–319 intra-party  See intra-party democracy minimalist 24 and political parties 28–29 populist model of 19 Denmark 83–84 Deseriis, Marco 4747n.14 Dieter (Bonn group) 135172–173 direct participation 20 model 2236–4042–43 direct representation 19158 direct representative democracy 58 Discourse Quality Index (DQI) 108–109162–165

discursive practices 147167 diversity desideratum 89–90 Dryzek, John S. 91123165–166166n.3 duty-based loyalty 7783 Elizabeth (Wasserturm group) 169 enclave deliberation 144–145 equality desideratum 89–9094–95 Ercan Selen A. 165165n.2 European Union 19–2059–60 factionalism 103129–130 fascism 152–153 Fassin, Didier 4–5 nal remarks 151–159 Finland 53–54 focus groups 71–75167–168168n.6 France 2 Franz (Linz group) 81–82117–121123 Frauke (Bonn group) 97–98 Freedom Party FPÖ (Austria) 131133171–172 French Revolution 20 Gampern group 91–92 Gauja, Anika 83–84 Georg (Wasserturm group) 171 Gerbaudo, Paolo 46–4747n.13 Germany 53–5464–6671–7486–87 Gertrude (Wasserturm group) 93 Goodin, Robert 122–123163 Green parties 70–7177–78170 Greens (Germany) 38 Grillo, Beppe (M5S) 2 group identity 69 group style 102 Gutmann, Amy 40 Habermas, Jürgen 88154–155155n.2162 Hannes (Linz) 91–92 Hans (Theilheim group) 174 Haute, Emilie van 83–84 Heinz (Sandleiten group) 97139–140 Hendriks, Carolyn 166–167 Herbert (Linz group) 82119 Horst (Theilheim group) 174 ideal speech situations 88 ideological mis ts 84 Ignazi, Piero 6–735 immigration 106130–131133 inclusion-arguments 163 Inglehart, Ronald F. 67 inter-party deliberation 41 interpretivism 165–166166n.4

intra-party deliberation 41158–159 intra-party democracy conclusions 63–65 deliberation as corrective and complement 41–4542n.8 deliberative model of 36–4236n.2466089–90148–149152–153159166 empirical challenges to preference transmission 53–54 introduction 35–36 making parties more deliberative 54–58 movements 35 objections 58–6362n.32 party on the ground 45–51 plebiscitary forms of 8587 preference transmission, delegation, accountability 51–53 uptake at party base 51–5853n.2557n.28–9 intra-party dissension 103 intra-party plebiscites 84–85 Invernizzi-Accetti, Carlo 2–33n.229n.1631–32 Jennifer (Sandleiten group) 139–140 Josef (Wasserturm group) 170 justi cation 102106–112107n.3108n.4163 Katharina (Sandleiten group) 97131133138 Katz, Richard S. 4040n.644–4544n.953 Kelsen, Hans 11–121626–3027n.1532343887148153–154 Kohl, Helmut 77–78 Labour Party 7–822–23333545–4650–5159–60151–152157 Laclau, Ernesto 1919n.69898n.5 La République en Marche 2–5 ‘Law of Curvilinear Disparity’ (May) 101–102101n.7 p. 195

legally de ned demos 28 Lena (Wasserturm group) 170 Leo (Linz group) 8195–96 Linz group 81–8295–98117–121123170 LiquidFeedback 46–47 Liste Sebastian Kurz 2–5 lobbyists 59 local party branches  See party branches Lukas (Gampern group) 96 Luskin, Robert 142 Macron, Emmanuel 2–5 Mair, Peter 1–264040n.65359 Mansbridge, Jane 64–65125–126 Mariahilfer Straβe 170 Maria (Wasserturm group) 93171–172 Marie (Berlin group) 136 Martha (Sandleiten group) 130–131131n.6133137–138 Martin (Wasserturm group) 97–98 Marxism 129–130 mass party model 61–6362n.32 May, John 101–102

Meaning of Partisanship, The (White) 10 mediation 29–30 membership ballots 38–43114–117 Michels, Robert 28–29152–153 milieu organizations 45 ‘Mill’s methods’ 74 modernism 70–7176–8486–8792 Momentum 19–20354350–51157 Moore, Alfred 90–91 Morgan, David 167–168 movement-parties 17 Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) 2–346–47153 Muirhead, Russ 1044–4544n.9 multiculturalism 130133 multi-level delegation 52–5355 multi-level organizations 82–83 Neblo, Michael A. 126–127154–155 new actors 5 New Zealand 53–54 Niemeyer, Simon 91123 Nietzsche, Friedrich 110 Nikolas 77–78 non-coercive dialogue 128150 N-surveys 66 O’Doherty, Kieran 90–91 On the Essence and Value of Democracy (Kelsen) 2729 online platforms 45–4846nn.11–12 On the Side of the Angels (Rosenblum) 10 organizational issues 105 ÖVP (Austria) 98–99 Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (Bächtiger et al.) 10 partisan activism discussion 83–87 focus groups 71–75 introduction 66 members’ relationships 79–83 party membership 67–7170t72t75–776t78t80t re ective loyalty 77 partisan deliberation discussion 100–102101t diversity 90–94 equality 94–100 genuinely dialogical 150 interpretative approach to 165–168 introduction 88 party branch conditions 88–9089n.1 partisan deliberation in action conclusions 145–146146t connecting branches 144

discussion/conclusion 122–124122t domains of disagreement 105–107107t empowering branches 144 exchanges 112–121113n.10 failures 125–129126n.1 failures/institutional design 142–144 failures within parties 129–142 measuring and operationalizing deliberation 107–112107n.3108n.4–5110n.6 preliminaries 103–105103n.1–2 trained moderators 142–143 type 1: group splits 130–136 type 2: not arising 136–138 type 2: polarizing tendencies 138–142139n.12141n.13 partisan deliberative conferences 55–56148–149151 partisan deliberative networks 55150–151 partisanship 12–1345–465995 Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies (Ypi/Bonotti) 10 party branches 4547–5148n.1849n19–2050n.21 candidate selection 51–5452n.23 con icts arising within 130 deliberations of 54–58169–170 disagreements 104–106 meetings 96167 organization of 150 thinned out membership 58–59 and two-party models 61 p. 196

Party and Democracy: The Uneven Road to Party Legitimacy (Ignazi) 6–7 Party Members and Activists (Haute/Gauja) 83–84 party reform 5–11147 ‘passive organizational loyalty’ 84 patronage 73–7473n.2 perception desideratum 18–1930158–159 Peter (Wasserturm group) 169–172 Petra (Linz group) 82117–121123 plebiscitary intra-party democracy 84–86 Podemos (M5S) 2–3153 Podemos (Spain) 46–47 Poguntke, Thomas 38 Policy Action Caucuses (PACs) 55 Political Parties (Michels) 28–29 popular sovereignty citizens acting 18–2018n.5 conclusions 32–3434n.18 exercise of 158–159 explanation 15–17 indirect 23–2625n.1326n.1451–52 radical 20–2338–39 through parties 26–32 ‘populist’ parties 58158

Porta, Donatella 166–167 post-materialism 69–70 post-modernism 68–7176–7880–8286–87149–150157 poverty/social inequality 117–121 pragmatism 114122–123 pragmatist/purist divide 105–106 preference-aggregating participation 41–42 premise probing 122–123 problem-oriented forums 54–5554n.26144148–149151154 Promise of Party in a Polarised Age, The (Muirhead) 10 proportional representation 29–3029n.16153–154 purists 114122–123 Rawls, John 123 reason-giving condition (C1) 110–113116119122 recursive representation 8686n.8 Rees, Emma 7–8 referendums 21–2221n.938–4139n.4158 re ections on method 161 Rike (Berlin) 92–93 Rosenblum, Nancy 109598100 rotation schemes 38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 202326–2746–47 Ruling the Void (Mair) 6 Ruth (Wasserturm group) 169 Sabine (Bonn group) 77134–135173 Sanders, Lynn 163 Sandleiten group (Vienna) 78–799296–97126130132–134132n.7136–137140–142144–145 Sartori, Giovanni 1–2 Schmitt, Carl 21–22 Schumpeter, Joseph 24 Scottish Independence referendum (2014) 22–23 Searing, Donald 166–167 ‘selectorates’ 51–52 self-actualization 149–150 self-expression 69–70149–150 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph 23 Silja (Bonn group) 134–136 Sinja (Theilheim group) 99–100114–117174–175 Slobodan (Sandleiten group) 97131–133133n.8138–140 Social Democratic parties 71–737983 Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) 126671–7385119169–172 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 126671–7385129–130 SPD party (Germany) 43777–7897–98114116134156174 Steiner, Jürg 108–109143162 Streeck, Wolfgang 6–8 Sunstein, Cass 138–139139n.10 Theilheim group 7679–8098–100114119–123174–175 Thompson, Dennis 4090–9194 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) 98–99

Tuck, Richard 1515n.1 Union party 4 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) 22–23 United States 47–4847n.15 uptake conditions (C2) 111–113112n.9116119122135–136 Urbinati, Nadia 2–3147–148 UWG (Unabhängige Wählergemeinschaft) 174 Warren, Mark E. 126–127 Wasserturm group (Vienna) 92–9398–99169171 Weale, Albert 2222n.11 White, Jonathan 10139–140139n.11 Willi (Theilheim group) 114–117174–175 Young, Iris Marion 163 Your Britain.org.uk 45–46 Ypi, Lea 10139–140139n.11 Yugoslavia (former) 97 Yvonne (Wasserturm group) 171–172 Zarathustra 110