Intra-Party Democracy: A Functionalist Account (w/ Udit Bhatia)

Intra-Party Democracy: A Functionalist Account Samuel Bagg, University of Oxford Udit Bhatia, University of Sheffield NB: This is the final pre-publication draft of an article that has been published at the Journal of Political Philosophy. Please cite the published version. Email me for a copy, or if you have access through your institution, you can download it here: doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12270 Abstract: This paper articulates a functionalist account of intra-party democracy (IPD). Like realist critics, we insist that IPD practices be evaluated on the basis of whether they facilitate resistance to domination and capture at the level of the polity as a whole, and therefore accept certain realist worries about IPD. Yet realists neglect the possibility that wealthy interests could control the political agenda by capturing all viable parties simultaneously—and that mass-facing IPD could counter this threat of oligarchic agenda capture. Taking this as the key function of IPD within broader democratic systems, we conclude that inclusionary party reform is less urgent in more flexible party systems, where dissenters are better able to resist this threat from within the framework of inter-party competition. Regardless of the context, meanwhile, we also conclude that mass-facing IPD practices should aim at enabling ordinary members and supporters of a party to resist agenda capture by oligarchic interests. Though we stop short of defending any particular set of reforms, we reject the emphasis of recent IPD advocates on individualized forms of deliberative participation, in favor of a more oppositional and collectively-oriented approach—on the grounds that the latter is more likely to encourage the development of effective institutions of countervailing power. Key Words: political parties, democratic theory, countervailing power, organizing, deliberation Author Bios: Samuel Bagg is Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford ([email protected]). Udit Bhatia is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Acknowledgments: For feedback and discussion, the authors are very grateful to Pierre-Etienne Vandamme, participants in the 2020 REDEM workshop on representative democracy, and several anonymous reviewers. §I. Introduction The organization of political parties presents a serious puzzle for democratic theory. On the one hand, nearly everyone recognizes their essential role in supporting collective decision-making and popular accountability. On the other hand, many parties are internally undemocratic, inviting precious little input from ordinary members and supporters. Indeed, political parties have often been accused of entrenching various interests and blocking democratic progress. In response, many demand the internal democratization of parties. According to “isomorphic” approaches, more specifically, party platforms should reflect the views of their core members and supporters, realizing the same democratic ideals of deliberation, public reason, and participation demanded of the polity itself.1 On this account, indeed, mass-facing forms of intra-party democracy (henceforth IPD) are a clear requirement of democratic legitimacy: the only remaining “puzzle” is how to implement them. Yet others criticize this isomorphic approach as naïve. If democracy is really about the benefits of inter-party competition—as democratic realists like Schumpeter have argued—then strong and centralized parties may be its very essence.2 From their “systemic” perspective, indeed, democratizing parties could actually weaken democracy writ large, by undermining the ability of party elites to compete effectively against rivals.3 Properly conceived, in other words, democratic ideals make no demand for mass-facing IPD to begin with—again leaving no genuine puzzle. Martin Ebeling and Fabio Wolkenstein, “Exercising Deliberative Agency in Deliberative Systems,” Political Studies 66, no. 3 (2018): 635–50; Jan Teorell, “A Deliberative Defence of Intra-Party Democracy,” Party Politics 5, no. 3 (1999): 363–82; Jonathan White and Lea Ypi, The Meaning of Partisanship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942).See also Elmer Eric Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1942); Ian Shapiro, Politics against Domination (Cambridge: Belknap, 2016); Samuel Bagg, “The Power of the Multitude: Answering Epistemic Challenges to Democracy,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 4 (2018): 891–904. 3 Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 1 1 Rejecting both views as overly simplistic, we develop a functionalist account of mass-facing IPD. To begin with, we endorse the systemic evaluative approach favored by realist critics, and we share their concern that intra-party conflict could undermine inter-party competition. We also recognize, however, that certain forms of mass-facing IPD may perform a critical democratic role within certain contexts—namely, preventing wealthy elites from controlling the agenda through influence over the leaders of all viable parties—which actually enhances inter-party competition. Rather than offering universal praise or censure, we hold that the democratic value of any massfacing IPD practice hinges on its tendency to facilitate resistance to oligarchic agenda capture. Adopting this functionalist account has important consequences for the way we think about intra-party democracy. First, the desirability of inclusionary party reform will vary by context, depending on whether its function is already duplicated by other elements of the political system. In particular, oligarchic capture of any given party is less threatening to broader democratic goals when internal dissenters can relatively easily found new parties. Under more rigid party systems where this is more difficult, by contrast, party reform within existing parties will be more urgent. No matter the context, second, certain IPD practices will perform this anti-oligarchic function better than others. As certain recent advocates have insisted, not all forms of mass-facing IPD face the same challenges as the aggregative practices criticized by realists. Where these “revisionists” favor deliberative forms of participation, however, our functionalist account suggests a focus on building organized forms of collective countervailing power instead. While this goal overlaps at times with that of enabling deliberative self-expression, our account also diverges from revisionist approaches in several ways. For one, the function of mass-facing IPD might be fulfilled equally well—if not better—by tight integration with external mass organizations such as labor unions, rather than internal practices designed by party elites. Regardless of its institutional location, more 2 broadly, the goal of mass participation should not be individual self-expression but the creation of countervailing organizational capacity through solidarity, social ties, and habits of collective action. These, we argue, are the best tools ordinary people have in fighting oligarchic capture of parties. §II. A functionalist approach to intra-party democracy: preliminary arguments We define “intra-party democracy” as any practice that limits the centralized discretionary control exercised by top-level party leaders, by opening decision-making processes to input from wider circles of party stakeholders. In this article, more specifically, we focus largely on massfacing practices that invite participation from ordinary party members and supporters.4 We also support elite-facing forms of IPD, which constrain top-level leaders by empowering mid-level elites such as backbenchers, party officials, and local or regional politicians. Since these practices are endorsed by nearly everyone involved, however, we devote most of our attention in what follows to the more contentious questions surrounding mass-facing IPD.5 A. An isomorphic approach: commonsense arguments for intra-party democracy Many commonsense arguments for mass-facing IPD share the same basic structure. It is widely believed, first, that the legitimacy of representative democracy hinges on a secure principal-agent 4 Perhaps most commonly, this means leadership selection through primary elections open to all supporters (as in the US) or intra-party elections open to dues-paying members (as in the UK Labour Party). Rank-and-file supporters might also participate in candidate selection through primaries, open lists and preference rankings, or recall mechanisms between elections. (See Jonathan White and Lea Ypi, “Reselection and Deselection in the Political Party,” in The Politics of Recall Elections, ed. Yanina Welp and Laurence Whitehead (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), 179–99.) Finally, ordinary people may contribute to platform construction through participation in local branch deliberations or larger party congresses, as suggested by Enrico Biale and Valeria Ottonelli, “Intra-Party Deliberation and Reflexive Control within a Deliberative System,” Political Theory 47, no. 4 (2019): 500–526; Fabio Wolkenstein, “A Deliberative Model of Intra-Party Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 24, no. 3 (2016): 297–320. As we argue below, the goals of mass-facing IPD can also be served by integrating external mass-membership organizations into party decision-making procedures, and this strategy also belongs in this category. 5 Matteo Bonotti, Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27. 3 relationship between elected officials and ordinary citizens.6 Yet in practice, politicians often appear to serve wealthy elites and other concentrated interests, rather than the people at large7— and the mediation of political parties has long been blamed for facilitating this process of capture.8 In response, reformers have often sought to limit parties’ role by enabling people to vote directly on legislation, through mechanisms such as initiatives and referendums.9 Recognizing that parties are inescapable in modern politics, however, many have also sought to democratize parties themselves, through mass-facing IPD, in the hope that broader participation in party governance could restore the principal-agent relationship between ordinary citizens and public officials.10 We characterize this normative logic as isomorphic, in that it aims to democratize parties in roughly the same ways—and for roughly the same reasons—as the political system writ large. And whenever inclusionary party reforms are proposed, a version of this isomorphic logic is nearly always present. Because it is so widely accepted in several countries, meanwhile, many party leaders have also come to see such reforms as a strategic move that will endear them to voters and help them win elections. For instance, primaries became central to leadership selection in both major US parties after the tumultuous 1968 election, when the Democrats concluded that engaging ordinary supporters could heal divisions and renew broad investment in the party in the wake of a devastating loss. (The Republicans, not to be outdone, followed suit).11 As traditional European 6 See, e.g., Thomas Christiano, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Eric Beerbohm, In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 7 See, e.g., Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 03 (2014): 564–81. 8 For an overview, see Nancy Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 165–209. 9 Rosenblum, 254–315. 10 See Eric Lawrence, Todd Donovan, and Shaun Bowler, “The Adoption of Direct Primaries in the United States,” Party Politics 19, no. 1 (2013): 3–18. 11 For an overview, see Russell Muirhead, The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014), 146–72. 4 parties have shed their social base and lost ground to novel challengers in recent years, similarly, they have increasingly turned to various forms of IPD in an effort to regain mass allegiance and investment.12 B. A systemic perspective: realist objections to the commonsense view At first blush, these intuitive arguments for IPD appear quite plausible. Empirical support, however, is mixed at best—and many realist critics doubt that they provide a solid justification for mass-facing IPD. According to Rosenbluth and Shapiro, for instance, the most important impact of the post-1968 reforms in the United States has been to accelerate polarization.13 This, in turn, has only amplified distrust of politicians and disaffection with politics—precisely the trends that internal democratization was supposed to reverse. Similarly, they claim, recent democratizing reforms have only accelerated the decline of traditional European parties. Given that we cannot know what would have happened if these reforms had not been implemented, such causal claims are difficult to evaluate. Nevertheless, these correlations are not encouraging for IPD advocates. Meanwhile, the principal-agent model of representation that motivates many of their more theoretical claims is widely regarded as empirically inaccurate and normatively misleading. To start with, most of our political opinions appear to reflect our social and partisan identities, rather than a genuinely independent process of reasoning and will-formation.14 This is not merely a contingent result of bad policies or a lack of civic virtue: given the vast number of issues parties must address, even the best-informed must rely on cues from specialized elites. Thus, political Piero Ignazi, “The Four Knights of Intra-Party Democracy: A Rescue for Party Delegitimation,” Party Politics 26, no. 1 (2020): 9–20; Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible Parties. 13 Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible Parties. 14 Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Milton Lodge and Charles S. Taber, The Rationalizing Voter (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Samuel Bagg, “Can Deliberation Neutralise Power?,” European Journal of Political Theory 17, no. 3 (2018): 257–79. 12 5 parties could never serve purely as the “agents” of the voters they purport to represent. Rather, party elites will always have significant discretion in shaping the party platform—and, in turn, many of the views of the “principals” from whom they are supposed to take their orders.15 As such, few contemporary theorists of representation retain a pure principal-agent model as the ideal.16 Given a realistic appraisal of the dynamics of mass politics in contemporary democracies, in fact, many political scientists worry that mass-facing IPD is likely to exacerbate the problems of elite capture that it is ostensibly intended to resolve. Richard Katz and Peter Mair, for instance, argue that engaging the broader membership in platform construction only strengthens the power of top-level leaders.17 Compared to mid-level elites, ordinary members typically have less capacity for independent organization, and are less likely to resist the influence of the most visible popular figures. Like nearly all participants in debates about party reform, therefore, Katz and Mair agree that elite-facing IPD is crucial for preventing entrenchment, capture, and “cartelization” among top-level leaders. What they suggest, however, is that mass-facing IPD can undermine these goals; essentially handing power back to the most well-known top-level leaders. Relatedly, many critics also charge that mass-facing IPD empowers vocal minorities who value “ideological purity” over electoral competitiveness.18 If top-level leaders must cater to the idiosyncratic preferences of the most active and enthusiastic participants in intra-party procedures, party platforms will reliably shift to the extremes. If granted the discretion to maximize their vote For an extended version of this argument, see Chapter 2 (“Beyond Policy Responsiveness”) of Samuel Bagg, The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. 16 Lisa Disch, “Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 1 (2011): 100–114; Andrew Sabl, “The Two Cultures of Democratic Theory: Responsiveness, Democratic Quality, and the Empirical-Normative Divide,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 2 (2015): 345–65. 17 Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, “The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 4 (2009): 759. See also Jonathan Hopkin, “Bringing the Members Back in?: Democratizing Candidate Selection in Britain and Spain,” Party Politics 7, no. 3 (2001): 343–61. 18 Richard S. Katz and William P. Cross, “Problematizing Intra-Party Democracy,” in The Challenges of Intra-Party Democracy, ed. William P. Cross and Richard S. Katz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 171. 15 6 share in the general population, by contrast, they are more likely to appeal to the median voter, yielding greater systemic stability and overall responsiveness. From a systemic perspective, after all, parties’ main task is not to enact the preferences of their core supporters, but to pursue and wield power in the public interest. Whether pitching a platform on the campaign, pursuing a coherent agenda in government, or uniting opposition to incumbent abuses, top-level party leaders must maintain a diverse coalition long enough to take collective action in service of common goals. As such, they must articulate a political vision that is at once reasonably specific, broadly attractive, and emotionally salient—a difficult balance to strike. In order to perform their democratic functions effectively, therefore, party leaders need significant discretion over policy, messaging, and strategy. From the voters’ perspective, meanwhile, a system of strong and centralized parties simplifies electoral choices, enabling ordinary people without much specialized knowledge to exercise their political agency with maximal reliability.19 Rather than broadly enhancing political agency, realists charge, mass-facing IPD benefits highly active and informed voters at the expense of most others. By proliferating ambiguity and complexity within the political system, it fractures the public’s limited attention and attenuates its ability to hold leaders accountable. Far from limiting the influence of wealthy elites, Rosenbluth and Shapiro surmise, “weakening party control over decisions, candidates, and leadership selection creates only the illusion of more grassroots democracy. In reality, it empowers intense minorities 19 Some have read skeptical arguments about voter competence—i.e., that voters are largely uninformed and powerfully influenced by social identity—as evidence against Rosenbluth and Shapiro’s view. See, e.g., Peter Giraudo, “The Case for Democratic Intra-Party Selection” (American Political Science Association, Los Angeles (online), 2020). Yet even resolute skeptics like Achen and Bartels only argue that accountability is difficult; not that it is entirely impossible: on the margins, incumbent performance and other programmatic factors may still make a difference. If voters really behave as skeptics claim, indeed, that is all the more reason to sharpen the stakes of their choices as much as possible. 7 at the expense of most voters, and it promotes the capture, corruption, and lack of responsiveness that lead people to demand decentralizing control in the first place.”20 C. A revisionist alternative: rescuing intra-party democracy? In our view, realist critics are right to be skeptical of the most common arguments for massfacing IPD. We also endorse their systemic evaluative perspective: whatever intrinsic value there may be in popular control of parties as such, the democratic character of the political system as a whole surely deserves priority over that of its component parts.21 For two reasons, however, we reject the categorical dismissal of mass-facing IPD by realists like Rosenbluth and Shapiro. First, their exclusive reliance on inter-party competition to advance democratic goals ignores the possibility of elite collusion across party lines.22 In a common process known as “cartelization,” for instance, the “major governing parties” in a polity “agree to maintain state party funding for the opposition when in power,”23 and lower the costs of competition by adopting a set of “agreed goals.”24 As such, they begin to compete on efficient management of the polity, rather than ideological cleavages, and come to “increasingly resemble one another.”25 And while the specific phenomenon of cartelization has emerged most clearly in certain European party systems over the past few decades, elements of an elite governing consensus can be found in every democracy. By employing their outsized leverage to influence the leaders of all viable parties at once, in short, wealthy elites and other groups with concentrated interests and extensive resources can often 20 Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible Parties, 21. To be clear, this broadly instrumentalist approach to IPD does not entail instrumentalism about democracy itself: after all, there are plenty of “intrinsic” reasons we might value accountability and oppose capture by narrow elites. 22 Emilee Chapman, “Against Responsible Parties” (American Political Science Association, Los Angeles (online), 2020). 23 Jonathan Hopkin, “The Problem with Party Finance: Theoretical Perspectives on the Funding of Party Politics,” Party Politics 10, no. 6 (2004): 635. 24 Peter Mair and Richard S. Katz, “Party Organization, Party Democracy, and the Emergence of the Cartel Party,” in Party System Change: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. Peter Mair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 115. 25 Katz and Mair, “The Cartel Party Thesis,” 757. 21 8 keep certain threatening issues off the political agenda entirely. In particular, the phenomenon we call “oligarchic agenda capture”—reflected in a governing consensus maintained by all viable parties that protects the interests of extremely concentrated wealth—is strikingly resilient across the democratic world.26 It thus illustrates a critical weak point of inter-party competition, which appears to face special challenges in contesting this form of capture. Second, realists like Rosenbluth and Shapiro are too quick to paint all forms of mass-facing IPD with the same brush. Although they accept many realist criticisms of existing IPD practices, for instance, Fabio Wolkenstein and other revisionist advocates of inclusionary party reform point out that mass-facing IPD practices might be designed differently—transcending the simplistic principal-agent model assumed by commonsense views, for instance, and avoiding the tendency of plebiscitary methods to further strengthen top-level leaders.27 Rather than simply aggregating the unreflective opinions of rank-and-file members via primaries and open lists, more specifically, revisionist IPD advocates demand the proliferation of opportunities for egalitarian, open-ended exchanges of reasons between ordinary people and party elites.28 26 Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2020); Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Following Arlen “Aristotle and the Problem of Oligarchic Harm: Insights for Democracy,” European Journal of Political Theory 18, no. 3 (2019): 394., we understand oligarchs as agents who “retain personal access to massive concentrated wealth” and “deploy their wealth to achieve discretionary influence in the public domain.” As a class, oligarchs share “an overriding focus on wealth and income preservation,” which cuts across their other interests (398), and which they protect successfully within a range of political systems. In democracies, oligarchs pursue their interests via agenda capture as well as other methods like campaign donations, lobbying, and bureaucratic capture Jeffrey A. Winters, “Wealth Defense and the Complicity of Liberal Democracy,” in NOMOS LVIII: Wealth, ed. Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 158–225. 27 Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti and Fabio Wolkenstein, “The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 1 (2017): 97–109; Ebeling and Wolkenstein, “Exercising Deliberative Agency in Deliberative Systems”; Fabio Wolkenstein, Rethinking Party Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 28 Fabio Wolkenstein, “Intra-Party Democracy beyond Aggregation,” Party Politics 24, no. 4 (2018): 323–34; Fabio Wolkenstein, “Agents of Popular Sovereignty,” Political Theory 47, no. 3 (2019): 338–62. 9 D. A functionalist approach: beyond realism and revisionism In our view, revisionists are right to insist that other models of mass-facing IPD may be less vulnerable to certain of the worries realists have raised about practices that are currently in wide use. More specifically, we endorse their emphasis on multi-level organizational structures as a way of avoiding the plebiscitary tendencies of purely aggregative practices. Where revisionists retain the isomorphic goal of ensuring that party platforms reflect the views of core supporters, however, we focus resolutely on the systemic aims of inter-party competition, and therefore propose a more precise role for mass-facing IPD: i.e., resisting the sort of oligarchic agenda capture that seems especially resilient to the power-neutralizing discipline provided by inter-party competition. While revisionist reforms may occasionally support this narrower goal, their anti-oligarchic tendencies will be limited. Because they foster individual self-expression rather than collective power, indeed, deliberative forums will often favor wealthier and better-organized interests. What emerges from our discussion, then, is a functionalist account of intra-party democracy, which seeks to evaluate mass-facing IPD practices with reference to their performance of a specific role within a broader framework of inter-party competition. In what follows, we first expand on that function: i.e., facilitating resistance to oligarchic agenda capture (§III). We then ask when inclusionary party reform is most needed to serve this function—arguing that it is relatively less urgent in more flexible party systems, where dissenters have other ways of challenging a governing consensus (§IV). Finally, we ask what kinds of inclusionary party reform will fulfill this function most effectively, concluding that the goal of resisting oligarchic agenda capture is best served by practices that generate solidarity and organizational capacity among ordinary people (§V). 10 §III. The systemic function of mass-facing intra-party democracy: facilitating resistance to oligarchic agenda capture On the broadly realist view we have accepted here, the key aims of electoral competition are to minimize domination and prevent the capture of state power by any particular faction or elite.29 To the extent that mass-facing IPD practices threaten these systemic aims by constraining toplevel party leaders, then, realist critics are right to be concerned. In dismissing all forms of massfacing IPD as harmful on balance, however, realists underestimate the danger that cross-party collusion among wealthy elites will yield oligarchic agenda capture—as well as the potential for certain inclusionary party reforms to obstruct this process. As we argue in this section, indeed, that should be seen as the key democratic function of mass-facing IPD. Realists like Rosenbluth and Shapiro typically rely on a combination of inter-party competition and elite-facing IPD as the best formula for preventing systemic domination or capture. Most basically, they claim, inter-party competition incentivizes parties to attract a majority coalition by serving the interests of the median voter30—and in order to pursue this goal effectively, top-level leaders need significant discretion.31 Some degree of elite-facing IPD is necessary, however, to ensure that backbenchers can replace top-level leaders who turn out to be ineffective, corrupt, or ideologically motivated, and therefore unable to achieve that goal.32 When these two conditions are met, then, policy convergences can generally be supposed to reflect clear preferences among the electorate at large, rather than the failure of party leaders to identify and cater to a potential majority coalition.33 29 Adam Przeworski, Why Bother With Elections? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018); Shapiro, Politics against Domination; Bagg, “The Power of the Multitude.” 30 Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957). 31 Shapiro, Politics against Domination. See also Samuel Bagg and Isak Tranvik, “An Adversarial Ethics for Campaigns and Elections,” Perspectives on Politics 17, no. 4 (2019): 973–87. 32 Ian Shapiro, “What Are Parties For?” (American Political Science Association, Los Angeles (online), 2020). 33 Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible Parties, 39. 11 As critics have pointed out, however, Downsian convergence models “exclude the possibility of influence by money or interest groups and maximize the apparent power of ordinary voters, by making a series of highly restrictive and quite implausible assumptions.”34 Like the principal-agent model often criticized by realists, for one, such models also presume that party elites primarily respond to constituents’ pre-existing preferences, when in fact they often have a large role in shaping the views of rank-and-file supporters. More broadly, median-voter models also presume that voters are representative of the population, and that they vote based on an accurate understanding of each party’s platform. Yet oligarchic elites often wield their outsized material power to shape both the composition of the electorate and the terms of public discourse to their advantage—thereby enabling parties to win elections without serving the median voter. Compared to their resilient need to curry favor with wealthy elites, indeed, the incentives of party leaders to serve the diffuse interests of poorly informed, poorly organized, and poorly resourced constituents may be quite weak. On most issues, after all, ordinary people tend to adopt the positions of their preferred party.35 By contrast, well-informed, well-organized, and wellresourced elites have little trouble discerning and pursuing their interests through pressure on officials. On certain issues, of course, the views of ordinary people may be more recalcitrant, forcing party leaders to disappoint wealthy donors in order to remain electorally competitive.36 Given the public’s finite and fractured attention, however, only a tiny minority of issues can be salient at any time—and on others, wealthy interests remain privileged.37 In fact, parties may Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page, “Oligarchy in the United States?,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 4 (2009): 742. 35 Achen and Bartels, Democracy for Realists. 36 Mark Smith, American Business and Political Power: Public Opinion, Elections, and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); David Vogel, “Political Science and the Study of Corporate Power: A Dissent from the New Conventional Wisdom,” British Journal of Political Science 17, no. 4 (1987): 385–408. 37 See especially Pepper D. Culpepper, Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Oligarchic capture is especially pronounced—and welldocumented—in the US Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age 34 12 converge on oligarch-friendly positions without any concerted effort by wealthy actors, due simply to leaders’ “individual calculations of the vote-producing impact of money.”38 To the extent that mid-level elites face these same incentives, meanwhile, they are no more likely to resist oligarchic influence—and where their power lacks independent grounding in a popular base, those who do dissent can easily be disciplined or removed by top-level leaders. While it is a crucial element of multi-level IPD structures, therefore, elite-facing IPD is insufficient on its own to resist oligarchic agenda capture. We recognize that the extent of oligarchic influence varies across different contexts, and that our account of its prevalence and severity may be somewhat controversial. We note, however, that the general problem of oligarchic capture is a key concern for nearly all contemporary democratic theorists—including all of the major participants in debates about IPD. And while realists like Rosenbluth and Shapiro appear insensitive to the specific threat of agenda capture, via influence over party leaders, this too is a very widespread concern, which has long motivated calls for massfacing IPD. Given the suggestive evidence already presented, and our broader aims in the paper, then, we assume going forward that collusion across party lines in support of wealthy interests is at least a plausible threat—and one that inter-party competition cannot address on its own. If that is right, meanwhile, then certain realist concerns about mass-facing IPD are also likely overstated. The demands imposed by ideologically motivated factions certainly limit the flexibility of top-level leaders, and in some cases this will prevent them from satisfying the median voter and (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton University Press, 2012); Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 03 (2014): 564– 81; Winters and Page, “Oligarchy in the United States?”, but scholars have found similar results across the democratic world Nathalie Giger, Jan Rosset, and Julian Bernauer, “The Poor Political Representation of the Poor in a Comparative Perspective,” Representation 48, no. 1 (2012): 47–61; Noam Lupu and Zach Warner, “Affluence and Congruence: Unequal Representation Around the World,” Journal of Politics, 2020. 38 Winters and Page, “Oligarchy in the United States?,” 743. 13 appealing to the broadest possible electorate. In other cases, however, these ideological demands may serve to pry those leaders from the clutches of wealthy donors. Indeed, if these demands have hitherto been suppressed because they threaten oligarchic interests, and not because majorities of ordinary people oppose them, the success of such factions could even broaden the party’s electoral appeal. If so, mass-facing IPD would advance systemic democratic goals—and that possibility is what animates our functionalist account of mass-facing IPD. In at least some cases, it seems, party reform that limits the flexibility of top-level leaders carries potential benefits for democracy as well as potential costs—even from the systemic evaluative perspective accepted by realists. To be clear: we do not claim that all mass-facing IPD practices will always facilitate resistance to oligarchic agenda capture. On the contrary, we are sympathetic to realist concerns that certain inclusionary party reforms, in certain contexts, may make capture more likely. On a systemic approach that grants priority to the demands of vigorous inter-party competition, indeed, we think that a stance of pro tanto caution towards decentralizing party reforms—rather than the pro tanto enthusiasm offered by isomorphic approaches—is probably warranted. Our claim, rather, is that some forms of mass-facing IPD, in some contexts, can facilitate resistance to oligarchic agenda capture—and that because this threat is especially resilient to the effects of inter-party competition, our pro tanto caution may be defeated in those cases. Rather than presenting mass-facing IPD as a generic democratic good, therefore, we see its value as conditioned by the contextual urgency of resisting oligarchic agenda capture, and the effectiveness of particular practices in doing so. We turn now to the two central questions that emerge from this functionalist account: i.e., when is party reform most needed, and what kinds will best advance the systemic goals of democracy? 14 §IV. When is inclusionary party reform democracy-enhancing? The role of party system rigidity In brief, our answer to the first of these questions is that the urgency of mass-facing IPD varies with the rigidity of the party system: i.e., the difficulty of pursuing political change through new parties. Many factors affect rigidity—including cultural familiarity with party creation, as well as inequality and polarization39—but the most important is surely the electoral system. Briefly, single-member districts with plurality rule (SMD) tend to generate rigid duopolies—or stable, regionally differentiated oligopolies—while multi-member districts with proportional representation (PR) typically yield more flexible multi-party systems.40 For our purposes, the key point is that parties in a rigid system entrench themselves in various ways; in part by making it difficult for new parties to gain traction.41 To prevent oligarchs from imposing a favorable governing consensus by capturing the leadership of these entrenched parties, therefore, dissenting factions must be able to contest oligarchic influence within each party. In more flexible party systems, by contrast, dissenting factions from outside the existing political elite are better able to contest oligarchic agenda capture by founding new parties, so the need for internal channels of dissent and contestation is comparatively less urgent. Sean Goff and Daniel J. Lee, “Prospects for Third Party Electoral Success in a Polarized Era,” American Politics Research 47, no. 6 (2019): 1324–44. 40 Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (London: Meuthen Press, 1954). Of course, these tendencies are mediated by many other factors. Regional differences can produce multiple parties at the national level, while barriers to ballot access—in the US, for instance—reinforce a two-party system. Similarly, details like the minimum viable vote share can lead to variation among PR systems (with higher thresholds for entry generating greater rigidity). In addition, many systems employ a hybrid model mixing elements of SMD with elements of PR. For simplicity, we bracket this diversity here. See Karen E. Ferree, G. Bingham Powell, and Ethan Scheiner, “Context, Electoral Rules, and Party Systems,” Annual Review of Political Science 17, no. 1 (2014): 421–39. 41 The existence of many diverse parties gives voters more “exit” options, and is often a sign of a flexible party system. Yet multiparty systems can still become entrenched, making it easier for oligarchs to capture all parties simultaneously. Even in an apparently static duopoly, meanwhile, the credible threat of new party formation could induce party leaders to reject oligarchic demands. As such, the true variable of interest for us is the difficulty of pursuing political change by founding new parties, rather than the number of existing parties as such. 39 15 From the perspective of resisting oligarchic agenda capture, in other words, mass-facing IPD and a flexible party system can be understood as partial substitutes. Wherever it is especially difficult to challenge the governing consensus upheld by all existing parties—either by contesting party platforms or founding new parties—oligarchic elites with outsized access to covert, backchannel influence will face little institutional opposition in capturing the political agenda. So long as dissenting factions have at least one of these institutional avenues available to them, however, the risk of agenda capture will be notably reduced. Where mass-facing IPD gives ordinary voters agency over the agenda through their voice within their parties, a flexible party system empowers voters through their choice between parties—i.e., through meaningful exit options.42 Either way, party leaders have somewhat stronger incentives not to accede to oligarchic demands. This insight allows us to cast doubt on the model hailed as ideally democratic by Rosenbluth and Shapiro: centralized parties combined with a rigid party system. The closest approximation of this ideal type in real world, they claim, is the Westminster model—especially as it functioned in the mid-20th century UK. And in their view, the UK’s high social spending during that period demonstrates that societies employing this model are sufficiently capable of resisting oligarchic domination. As we explore below, however, it is misleading to depict mid-century UK parties as fully centralized. In particular, the Labour Party may have had relatively few channels for directly incorporating popular input, but like many other social democratic parties in that era, it was tightly integrated with strong social organizations that did have such channels for mass engagement: namely, trade unions. Despite their flaws, many unions were at least minimally accountable to a Mark Warren, “Voting with Your Feet: Exit-Based Empowerment in Democratic Theory,” The American Political Science Review 105, no. 4 (2011): 683–701. 42 16 large base of engaged members with a strong collective identity, which helped them—and the Labour Party whose platform they shaped—resist oligarchic demands.43 A better example of the consequences of combining a rigid party system with centralized party control, we claim, is provided by contemporary India. For several years, India’s electoral landscape challenged Duveger’s law by presenting a multi-party democracy despite a First-Past-the-Post system. This was, as observers noted, due to the presence of various regional parties that exercised an influence on coalition government at the national level. 44 Recent years, however, have seen a decline in the competition posed by such regional parties in general elections, and consequently their ability to exercise electoral influence or bargaining power on the national scene.45 Thanks to extreme anti-defection laws,46 meanwhile—among many other institutional and cultural factors— the top-level leaders of India’s major parties control some of the most centralized party structures in the democratic world.47 As such, dissenting factions have no viable institutional means—either by reforming existing parties or creating new ones—to contest a governing consensus that increasingly seems to favor the wealthiest elites.48 43 D. W. Rawson, “The Life-Span of Labour Parties,” Political Studies 17, no. 3 (1969): 313–33; Paul Webb and Tim Bale, “No Place Else To Go: The Labour Party and the Trade Unions in the UK,” in Left-of-Centre Parties and Trade Unions in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 44 See, for instance, Adam Ziegfeld, Why Regional Parties? Clientelism, Elites and the Indian Party System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 45 For more on this trend and the reduction of the “effective number of parties” in recent elections, see Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson. India’s Fourth Party System (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2019). 46 The 52nd amendment to the Indian Constitution entails that legislators who defy their parties may lose not only their party membership but also their place in parliament. For discussion, see Udit Bhatia, “Cracking the Whip: The Deliberative Costs of Strict Party Discipline,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2020): 254–79. 47 Eswaran Sridharan, “The Shifting Party Balance,” Journal of Democracy 28, no. 3 (2017): 76–85; Udit Bhatia, “What’s the Party Like? The Status of the Political Party in Anti-Defection Jurisdictions,” Law and Philosophy 40, no. 3 (2021): 330–33. 48 In recent years, for instance, “substantial growth in the power of business groups in Indian politics” has been accompanied by “a noticeable convergence in the economic programs of India’s major political parties, the BJP and the Congress.” Christophe Jaffrelot, Atul Kohli, and Kanta Murali, “Conclusion,” in Business and Politics in India, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot, Atul Kohli, and Kanta Murali, Modern South Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 284. See also Aseema Sinha and Andrew Wyatt, “The Spectral Presence of Business in India’s 2019 Election,” Studies in Indian Politics 7, no. 2 (2019): 247–61; Eswaran Sridharan, “Parties, the Party System and Collective Action for 17 Of course, we can hardly claim to offer a comprehensive account of oligarchic capture in India—or anywhere else, for that matter. After all, wealthy elites have outsized influence in all democracies, including those incorporating mass-facing IPD and flexible party systems. In the first instance, rather, our aim is simply to suggest that oligarchic agenda capture in India could be mitigated by increasing the flexibility of the party system, or—more realistically, perhaps—by implementing certain inclusionary party reforms. More broadly, our aim is to demonstrate that the model preferred by Rosenbluth and Shapiro is not ideally democratic. Given that it features neither mass-facing IPD nor a flexible party system, dissenting factions within their model have few institutional resources for challenging an oligarch-friendly governing consensus. As in India, therefore, the democratic character of such systems could typically be enhanced—albeit only on the margins—through certain well-designed inclusionary reforms to internal party governance. It might seem to follow from the preceding discussion that the optimal democratic structure would feature both a flexible party system and (certain effective forms of) mass-facing IPD. We reject this inference, however. Despite their blind spots, realists like Rosenbluth and Shapiro are right to worry that weaker and more decentralized parties may have more trouble presenting a clear platform, implementing a coherent set of policies, and coordinating opposition to incumbent abuse. Given the vagueness of key terms and the array of other potentially confounding factors involved, such sweeping theoretical claims are difficult to verify empirically, and it is not our aim here to defend them systematically. As noted, however, we find these realist concerns about the systemic effects of inclusionary reforms plausible enough to warrant a stance of pro tanto caution. What we have argued in this section, then, is that this pro tanto caution is relatively easier to defeat in rigid party systems. We do not suggest that it is always defeated; nor that caution is never State Funding of Elections: A Comparative Perspective on Possible Options,” in India’s Political Parties, ed. Peter Ronald deSouza and Eswaran Sridharan (New Dehli: Sage, 2006), 311–40. 18 defeated in flexible systems. Some inclusionary reforms may be generally counterproductive— and therefore unwise to pursue, even in rigid party systems—while others may be quite effective at resisting oligarchic agenda capture across a range of circumstances, and thus democratically valuable even in flexible systems. In the next section, indeed, we examine the differential effects of different kinds of mass-facing IPD practices. Despite our best predictive efforts, however, any proposed reform always carries risks and rewards. Our point in this section is simply that when dissenters have no alternative institutional avenues for challenging a governing consensus that may have been imposed by oligarchs, the urgency of finding a solution is greater, and that may shift the balance in favor of reform. Because flexible party systems ensure that dissenters have alternative institutional avenues for challenging oligarchic agenda capture, by contrast, proposals for inclusionary party reform must meet a higher bar within such systems. §V. What kinds of inclusionary party reform are democracy-enhancing? The importance of organized collective power The second major consequence of adopting a functionalist approach is to shift the kinds of mass-facing IPD practices we understand as most likely to enhance democracy. Like revisionists, to begin with, we think that party leaders may be held accountable through broad participation by rank-and-file supporters in local institutions that are linked to the decisions of top-level leaders through multiple levels of organization. Beyond that, however, the orientation to inclusionary party reform that we propose diverges in several key respects from revisionists’ deliberative approach. A. Revisionist and functionalist approaches: key differences Given the systemic evaluative perspective we adopt, for one, the point of including a wider group of stakeholders is not to ensure that the party platform reflects their views in any general sense. If the primary role of parties is to compete for votes from diverse groups of citizens in inter- 19 party elections, then each party’s top-level leaders must enjoy significant discretion in shaping its platform—and its strongest supporters are not the only constituency whose views are appropriately considered in that process. In our view, therefore, the relatively narrow aim of mass-facing IPD is simply to provide some degree of resistance against a specific threat that inter-party competition is distinctively ill-equipped to address—i.e., oligarchic agenda capture—by ensuring that dissenters have at least some tools at their disposal for contesting the influence of wealthy elites. Similarly, the reason to engage large numbers of ordinary citizens—in addition to various midlevel elites and other stakeholder representatives—is not that this will satisfy their postmaterialist demands for individualized self-expression, and thereby strengthen their commitment to the collective aims of the party as such. Mass participation is necessary, rather, because it protects the integrity of elite-facing IPD, which in practice carries much of the burden of resisting oligarchic agenda capture. One the one hand, it ensures that some mid-level elites have independent sources of power in a mass base, such that dissenters cannot simply be replaced by top-level leaders. In the absence of any dissenting mid-level elites, on the other hand, its role is again to ensure that dissenters among the broader population of members and supporters have at least some institutional channels through which to oppose oligarchic agenda capture. Beyond simply providing institutional forums within which citizens could contest oligarchic influence, finally, we argue that mass-facing IPD practices must be designed to maximize the likelihood that oligarchs will actually encounter significant resistance in their attempts to influence the party’s agenda. On our account of the mechanisms of oligarchic agenda capture, recall, its pervasiveness is largely attributable to wealthy elites’ superior ability to coordinate in defense of shared interests. A key realist criticism of aggregative IPD practices, meanwhile, is that they weaken the complex forms of intermediation and organization provided by many mid-level 20 elites—instead fostering direct, plebiscitary connections between disorganized individuals and prominent top-level leaders. As such, we argue that inclusionary party reform must aim to facilitate potent forms of countervailing organization among ordinary people, which could counterbalance the pressures that are reliably exerted on party leaders by well-organized and wealthy elites. Assuming that the most effective strategies will vary substantially by context, we stop short of prescribing any particular practices as optimally democratic or universally required for this antioligarchic end. Drawing on the experience of social democratic parties tightly integrated with the labor movement, however, this final section illustrates the limitations of deliberative approaches and outlines a more promising orientation for inclusionary party reform. Although revisionists’ emphasis on layered, multi-level organizational structures is a step in the right direction, we argue that their exclusive reliance on deliberative modes of engagement between party elites and rankand-file members or supporters fails to address underlying problems of disorganization and individualization. Instead of proliferating opportunities for individual self-expression within the party, we conclude that efforts to democratize political parties should aim to strengthen social ties, solidarity, and habits of collective action among ordinary people—and that these imperatives need not be pursued entirely within existing party hierarchies. B. Organized collective power: achievements and challenges Our point of departure is the widespread historical observation that many of the parties which have consistently resisted oligarchic agenda capture have been integrated with independent massmembership organizations such as labor unions.49 Of course, revisionists’ turn to deliberation is at 49 John S. Ahlquist, “Labor Unions, Political Representation, and Economic Inequality,” Annual Reviews in Political Science 20 (2017): 409–32; Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Malden, MA: Polity, 2004); Richard Freeman and James L. Medoff, What Do Unions Do? (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (New York: Harper Collins, 2020); Wolfgang Streeck and Anke Hassel, “Trade Unions as Political Actors,” in International Handbook of Trade Unions, ed. John T. Addison and Claus Schnabel (Edward Elgar, 2003), 335–65. 21 least partly motivated by their pessimism about the prospects of reviving this kind of organized collective power, given the declining strength of labor and related trends, and we acknowledge that contemporary conditions present serious challenges for this model. In our view, however, the resurgence of some such countervailing organizations—albeit, perhaps, in novel or unfamiliar forms—is both possible and urgently necessary. As Steven Klein has recently argued in this journal, that is, democracy requires organized collective power.50 In brief, the key challenge is that the alliance between labor unions and social democratic parties—once a robust source of opposition to oligarchic interests—has disintegrated along with the labor movement itself.51 For one, globalization and other changes have gradually eroded the “cohesive social environments that helped structure the original growth of mass parties”— including trade unions, social clubs, and so on—as well as the collective class-based identities that were once supported by these organizations.52 Relatedly, the left-right dimension that once reliably structured political contestation around economic issues has increasingly been complicated by a cross-cutting “cosmopolitan–communitarian” dimension, further obstructing the organization of parties around consistent opposition to oligarchic interests.53 At least partly in response to this marked decline in class consciousness and conflict over issues of economic redistribution, revisionist advocates of mass-facing IPD have argued that our efforts Steven Klein, “Democracy Requires Organized Collective Power,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 2021. Sheri Berman and Maria Snegovaya, “Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 3 (2019): 5–19; Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011); Stephanie L. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 52 Wolfgang Streeck, “The Politics of Exit,” New Left Review, 2014, 123. See also Gabriel Winant, “We Live in a Society,” N+1, December 12, 2020, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/we-live-in-a-society/. 53 Simon Bornschier, “The New Cultural Divide and the Two-Dimensional Political Space in Western Europe,” West European Politics 33, no. 3 (2010): 419–44; Pradeep K. Chhibber and Rahul Verma, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India (Oxford University Press, 2018); Michael Zürn and Pieter de Wilde, “Debating Globalization: Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism as Political Ideologies,” Journal of Political Ideologies 21, no. 3 (2016): 280–301. 50 51 22 to deepen democracy should pivot to more individualized and deliberative forms of inclusionary party reform. In particular, Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein take their cue from recent claims that citizens of advanced democracies are increasingly motivated to participate in politics by the opportunities for self-expression it affords.54 Unfortunately, they observe, these “postmaterialist” demands cannot be satisfied by aggregative procedures, whose appeal is grounded rather in collective identification and the pursuit of common aims. To secure wider participation, therefore, contemporary political parties must institutionalize discussion within local branches and other empowered deliberative forums. In our view, however, revisionists’ acquiescence to perceived demands for individualized selfexpression is premature, and their exclusive focus on deliberative solutions is at best a distraction.55 Collective forms of anti-oligarchic power can be revived, we insist—both by fostering new solidarities, along new lines, and by contesting the policies that undermined labor’s strength in the first place. Indeed, we claim, they must be: individualized forms of deliberative participation will always be inadequate to address oligarchic agenda capture, and in some cases may be harmful. C. Deliberative forums and organized collective power Let us begin by considering the best-case scenario for deliberative party reforms. On the model proposed by Wolkenstein and other revisionists, intra-party forums would have substantial power, rather than playing a merely consultative role. They would also be structured in egalitarian ways— using facilitation techniques that can minimize the dominance of privileged voices, for instance56— Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein, “The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative.” See, e.g., Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Pippa Norris, Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 55 For further context, see Bagg, “Can Deliberation Neutralise Power?” 56 As described, for instance, in Afsoun Afsahi, “Gender Difference in Willingness and Capacity for Deliberation,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2020. 54 23 rather than being manipulated by party elites to serve their own ends. In such ideal conditions, we concede, deliberative reforms would likely advance certain democratic goals—giving participants a greater sense of political efficacy, for instance, and even enabling contestation of the agenda. Still, deliberative forums could realistically engage only a tiny minority of the party’s voters, and participants would almost certainly be unrepresentative of that larger group. The power given to any particular branch or forum, meanwhile, will necessarily be bounded by their small scale and local scope—constraints imposed by the demand to remain both deliberative and inclusive. In order to initiate party-wide changes in a coherent anti-oligarchic direction, therefore—rather than a cacophony of conflicting local imperatives that party elites could readily ignore—ordinary party members would need to unify around a specific set of demands, and successfully advance them over the objections of party leaders in a multitude of different branches and forums. It is not impossible to imagine groups of ordinary people taking just this kind of coordinated collective action in opposition to oligarchic agenda capture, and revisionists might therefore claim that their model can accommodate the sort of countervailing power we recommend. On the one hand, however, such a concerted strategic effort would seem to betray the open-ended spirit that is central to most justifications of deliberation. On the other hand, it would also rely on substantial solidarity and collective organization: i.e., precisely those elements of countervailing power that revisionists have notably failed to discuss. To the extent that deliberative forums can accommodate or even encourage coordinated collective action by organized groups of rank-and-file members, therefore, we conclude that they can facilitate resistance to oligarchic agenda capture. Given that other intra-party decision-making procedures could also accommodate such coordinated action, however, deliberative forums are less essential to anti-oligarchic resistance than the organizations 24 through which collective action is coordinated in the first place. Even in the best-case scenario, it seems, revisionists’ exclusive focus on the former over the latter is misplaced. Once we relax the idealizing assumption that party elites will act in good faith, meanwhile— rather than using their control over the structure of deliberative forums to insulate their agenda from serious challenges—there is even less cause for enthusiasm about deliberative approaches. Revisionists often rely on a largely undefended assumption that deliberative exchanges between citizens and elites are “likely to be a much more effective mechanism to check the power of the leadership over the base than merely voting on their proposals.”57 In doing so, they ignore the substantial evidence that elites often employ the tools of participatory inclusion very strategically, in ways that entrench and legitimize their power58—and neglect the strong possibility that opportunistic party leaders would use intra-party deliberation in similar ways. D. Organized collective power: contemporary prospects For all these reasons, then, we think revisionists are overly optimistic about deliberative party reforms. At the same time, we argue, they are also overly pessimistic about the prospects of more organized and collectively-oriented forms of participation. Though Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein are right to reckon with the declining salience of class conflict and the apparent increase in demand for individualized forms of participation, for instance, they are wrong to see these trends as inevitable and irreversible. Their account frames the transition from collective solidarity to individualized self-expression as a natural consequence of growing material security Invernizzi-Accetti and Wolkenstein, “The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative,” 103. 58 Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza, Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation (Stanford University Press, 2016); Jaskiran K. Dhillon, Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017); Caroline W. Lee, Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry (Oxford University Press, 2014); Albert Weale, The Will of the People: A Modern Myth (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). For further discussion, see Chapter 3 (“Beyond Participatory Inclusion”) in Samuel Bagg, The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming) 57 25 and other global economic trends, rather than as a contingent result of specific political choices. It therefore obscures the very deliberate efforts of oligarchic elites to dismantle the socio-legal foundations of labor unions and other sources of countervailing power.59 The declining power of labor cannot be attributed solely to government policies aimed directly at that result. Yet even many apparently unrelated economic trends—including the expansion of “workplace fissuring” and the “gig economy,” as well as broader forces such as globalization and automation—have thrived at least partly because they undermine workers’ organizational capacity, and thus serve the shared interests of elites around the globe.60 And if the declining power of unions and other organs of countervailing power is partly a result of policy choices, then a more “promotive stance” could mitigate this decline, thereby reviving our capacity to resist oligarchic capture.61 Even absent state support, meanwhile, shifts in the strategic orientation of union leaders and party elites—amidst changing economic and cultural conditions—could also initiate a revival of working-class movements. Clearly, there is no consensus about which organizing tactics are most effective, and no strategy is appropriate for every context. Nevertheless, several recent analyses have converged on the insight that, despite their relatively high costs to members, confrontational and participatory approaches often yield the most enduring increases in membership.62 As many 59 For a classic account, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). McAlevey, A Collective Bargain; Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 61 Martin O’Neill and Stuart White, “Trade Unions and Political Equality,” in Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law, ed. Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester, and Virginia Mantouvalou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). See also Kate Andrias and Benjamin I. Sachs, “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality,” Yale Law Journal 130, no. 3 (2021 2020): 546–635. 62 Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Deva R. Woodly, Reckoning: #BlackLivesMatter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). For further discussion, see Chapter 8 (“Organizing for Power: An Agenda for Democratic Action”) in Samuel Bagg, The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming) 60 26 effective organizers have long argued, in short, the experience of achieving concrete victories through collective struggle can be transformative—especially when it involves participation in mass collective action such as a strike.63 In particular, successful collective struggles can exert a powerful influence on participants’ identities, generating the sort of solidarity and sustained commitment to collective action that is necessary to support lasting, effective institutions of countervailing power. Even if labor unions, social democratic parties, and the class-based identities that support them are indeed in terminal decline, finally, other sources of countervailing power can be grounded in other forms of collective identity, among other disempowered groups with shared interests. Efforts to organize communities around common local concerns, for instance, have sometimes generated enduring organizations with substantial countervailing power64—as have the efforts of disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups to contest their shared oppression.65 While efforts to organize tenants, debtors, and welfare beneficiaries have fewer successful models to draw upon, shifting conditions may present new opportunities for building countervailing power among these groups as well.66 Like labor unions, these other countervailing organizations most often achieve broader political success by extracting concessions from left-leaning parties, thereby forcing certain issues onto the agenda for inter-party competition. Yet that is not the only way to resist oligarchic agenda capture: in some contexts, at least, well-organized groups of ordinary people 63 Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971); Robert Moses et al., “The Algebra Project: Organizing in the Spirit of Ella,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 4 (1989): 423–43; Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 64 Vijay Phulwani, “The Poor Man’s Machiavelli: Saul Alinsky and the Morality of Power,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 4 (2016): 863–75; Stout, Blessed Are the Organized. 65 Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom; Woodly, Reckoning. 66 Andrias and Sachs, “Constructing Countervailing Power.” 27 could also pry open certain features of an oligarch-friendly governing consensus via internal pressure on centrist or right-leaning parties. E. Implications of the functionalist approach As we have emphasized, it is beyond our scope to evaluate the prospects of any particular approach to building organized collective power in any particular context—and we are especially mindful to avoid universalizing the model adopted by 20th-century social democratic parties. One important concrete implication of our approach does emerge quite clearly from our examination of this historical model, however: namely, that the layers of organization linking mass participation to top-level party leaders need not be located within the party structure. As with labor unions in the social democratic party model, rather, a party might successfully resist oligarchic capture by integrating independent organizations into its decision-making at certain critical junctures. As long as those external organizations are accountable to a mass base of some kind, their democratic role is functionally similar to that played by more paradigmatic IPD practices, and thus belongs to the same category of democratic tools.67 Indeed, it may have advantages over internal party reforms. Because they remain independent, for one, external organizations are both less likely to be coopted by top-level leaders, and better positioned to challenge those leaders without damaging their ability to present and execute a coherent platform. Meanwhile, organizations with a social or economic purpose other than partisan competition will likely attract more consistent participation, outside of election campaigns, from a wider range of people. Even in an era of growing demand for political self-expression, opportunities to debate finer points of policy and strategy are unlikely For instance, Susan E. Scarrow and Thomas Poguntke argue that “linkage through collateral organizations is another important aspect of intra-party democracy,” citing the British Labour Party as an especially “conspicuous” example of this form of intra-party democracy. See their “Intra-Party Democracy and Representation: Necessity, Complement, or Challenge?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies, ed. Robert Rohrschneider and Jacques Thomassen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 328. 67 28 to appeal quite as broadly as the social bonds and other intrinsic benefits offered by organizations with a more immediate social purpose, such as labor unions and community groups—not to mention the social clubs and religious groups with which they are often intertwined. That said, the advantages of entrusting some or all IPD functions to external organizations are hardly decisive, and will vary by context. As such, we do not claim that mass-facing IPD must take this form. Regardless of where it happens, the crucial point is to design mass-facing IPD practices that generate regular, organized engagement—which, as we noted above, is the most reliable way to generate the solidarity, social ties, and habits of collective action that can actually sustain countervailing sources of power among ordinary people.68 And it is certainly conceivable that this sort of engagement could be generated within the party. Given that nearly all contemporary discussion centers on such internally-focused reforms, however, our insistence that external massmembership organizations could also fulfill the most important democratic function of mass-facing IPD—so long as they are properly integrated into party decision-making—represents an important intervention. Indeed, including this latter strategy in the category of mass-facing IPD allows us to considerably shrink the apparent distance between realist critics and revisionist advocates. On the one hand, realists like Rosenbluth and Shapiro often point to the “centralized” parties that created social democracy in postwar Europe as evidence that mass-facing IPD is unnecessary for resisting oligarchic capture. Because this account ignores the integration of those parties with external organizations, however, this description is misleading. Most crucially, we have suggested, it was their affiliation with mass-membership trade unions that allowed the UK Labour Party and 68 McAlevey, No Shortcuts; John S. Ahlquist and Margaret Levi, In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Hahrie Han, “The Organizational Roots of Political Activism: Field Experiments on Creating a Relational Context,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 2 (2016): 296–307; Paul W. Speer and Hahrie Han, “Re-Engaging Social Relationships and Collective Dimensions of Organizing to Revive Democratic Practice,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology 6, no. 2 (2018): 745-758–758. 29 other European social democratic parties to resist certain forms of agenda capture during that period.69 On the other hand, revisionists like Wolkenstein are clearly concerned with oligarchic influence on party leaders, and would likely welcome the growth of organized collective power, among ordinary people, as a counterweight. Yet their deliberative solutions are not well-suited to fostering such countervailing power, and in limiting their horizon to internal party structures, they ignore the strategies that have enjoyed the most success historically. By highlighting that certain external organizations can fulfill the most crucial anti-oligarchic function of mass-facing IPD, our functionalist account thus opens space for convergence among realists who are skeptical of internal party reforms, and revisionists who insist that resisting oligarchic capture of party elites requires some form of mass engagement. §VI. Conclusion This paper has articulated a functionalist account of intra-party democracy. To begin with, we have adopted the systemic evaluative approach preferred by realist critics—insisting that massfacing IPD practices be evaluated on the basis of whether they facilitate resistance to domination and capture at the level of the polity as a whole. In rejecting such practices altogether, however, realists put too much faith in the tendency of inter-party competition to realize those goals—in particular neglecting the possibility that wealthy interests could control the political agenda by capturing all viable parties simultaneously. As revisionist advocates have insisted, meanwhile, some forms of mass-facing IPD may hold more democratic promise than the plebiscitary practices rightly criticized by realists. Where revisionists press for deliberative reforms, however—as a way As Elin Haugsgjerd Allern and Tim Bale put it, this is regarded as “common wisdom” among students of political parties, trade unions, and working class power more generally. See “The Relationship between Left-of-Centre Parties and Trade Unions,” in Left-of-Centre Parties and Trade Unions in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 69 30 of ensuring that parties reflect the views of rank-and-file members—our functionalist account suggests a more specific aim, and a more targeted set of practices. The key role of mass-facing IPD within a broader democratic system, we have argued, is to counter the specific threat of oligarchic agenda capture. Our first conclusion, then, is that inclusionary party reform is less urgent in more flexible party systems, where dissenters are better able to resist this threat from within the framework of inter-party competition—i.e., by founding new parties. Whatever the context, second, we conclude that mass-facing IPD practices should aim at enabling ordinary members and supporters of a party to resist agenda capture by oligarchic interests. Though we stop short of defending any particular set of reforms, we reject revisionists’ emphasis on individualized forms of deliberative participation, in favor of a more oppositional and collectively-oriented approach—on the grounds that the latter is more likely to encourage the development of effective institutions of countervailing power. Organizing collective power and subsequently linking it to parties’ decision-making processes is undoubtedly a tall order. If we hope to address oligarchic threats to democracy, however, there are no shortcuts to be found. 31