The Ideal of Parties-as-Mobilizers

• In Event: Normative Reflections on Parties & Elections

Abstract

Political parties were once aptly described as the “orphans” of political theory (Schattschneider 1942, 16). That is less true than it once was. In recent years, many democratic theorists have grappled with the reality that parties are essential to democracy – and also sometimes a threat to it. Normative theories of political parties try to distinguish between healthy and pathological forms of party politics. They also try to identify the features of parties, party systems, and partisanship that tend to produce better, more democratic, forms of party politics.

A common approach to building such a theory is to begin with an account of the functions that parties serve and then develop it into a normative ideal. Some existing approaches have, for example, built such ideals around how parties identify interests or coalitions of interests large enough to have a claim to legitimacy (Muirhead 2014; Schattschneider 1942), how parties create the conditions for deliberative justification (White and Ypi 2011, 2016), and how parties turn legislators into a collective agent that can be held responsible for governing well (Rosenbluth and Shapiro 2018).

This paper takes a similar approach, but emphasizes an important democratic function of political parties that has been relatively neglected by existing normative ideals of political parties: the mobilization of the mass public. Political parties do not organize agendas and information that make it possible for the people to give meaningful answers to questions about how they will be ruled. Parties also get people to actually show up at the polls and give their answers. Parties turn subjects into citizens.

Of course, political parties can use many techniques to mobilize voters, and they do not all contribute equally democratic values. Most obviously, the threats and intimidation deployed by 19th century party machines in the US, make it difficult to interpret the votes they produce as valuable exercises of political agency. But mobilization strategies that are not so obviously out-of-bounds can also vary in terms of how much democratic value they produce. Some are more likely than others to encourage citizens to form long-term and meaningful political projects or to open the door to forms of political engagement beyond voting. And some mobilization strategies may increase the risks that party politics devolves into pathological forms of factionalism.

This paper develops an ideal of parties-as-mobilizers which argues that we should evaluate parties and party systems on the extent to which they deploy and promote broad, deep, durable, and inclusive mobilization strategies. This is not meant to be a comprehensive ideal for party politics. But I argue that it captures an important and overlooked component of what parties contribute to democracy. Moreover, because it focuses on parties’ concrete and observable activities, it offers more critical leverage than prominent theories that focus on unobservable or attitudes or (often vague and insincere) rhetoric.


Muirhead, Russell. 2014. The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rosenbluth, Frances McCall, and Ian Shapiro. 2018. Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself. New York: Yale University Press.

Schattschneider, E.E. 1942. Party Government. New York, NY: Rinehart and Company, Inc.

White, Jonathan, and Lea Ypi. 2011. “On Partisan Political Justification.” The American Political Science Review 105(2): 381–96.

———. 2016. The Meaning of Partisanship. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Author

• Emilee Chapman, Stanford University