Although democratic theorists have been reengaging questions of institutional design, they have ignored political parties (cf. Rosenblum 2008). No doubt the explanation for inattention mirrors the more general picture:Parties have been viewed as strategic organizations that are primarily instruments of political elites rather than venues of participation. Moreover, parties are, well, partisan—and thus do not provide a hospitable environmentfor reasoned deliberations about common ends, the preferred mode of political interaction for political philosophers from Plato to Rawls.
Yet if elections provide real choices for citizens—that is, if citizens are able to use the vote to authorize and to hold to account those who would represent them—parties will naturally form, structurally determined by the characteristics of electoral systems, the regulations that enable elections, and the constitutional form of government. As Rosenblum (2008) notes, in contrast to democratic theorists, most political scientists view democratic representation as unthinkable without parties. They are arguably the key representative bodies within representative government. Their representative functions include aggregating and deliberating interests and values, and linking issues through programmatic visions within political environments that are increasingly segmented. Because they perform these functions in ways that can be more or less inclusive and more or less deliberative, political parties should find their wayback onto the agenda of democratic theory (see Beitz 1989). Such integration, however, will require that we understand partisanship as an essential feature of deliberation. Parties as organizations are not to be confused with factions since they can and should transform particular forms of advocacy into more competing accounts of common goods and interests, and in this way structure public discourse (Urbinati 2006, pp. 37–38; Rosenblum 2008).
Although democratic theorists have been reengaging questions of institutional design, they have ignored political parties (cf. Rosenblum 2008). No doubt the explanation for inattention mirrors the more general picture:Parties have been viewed as strategic organizations that are primarily instruments of political elites rather than venues of participation. Moreover, parties are, well, partisan—and thus do not provide a hospitable environmentfor reasoned deliberations about common ends, the preferred mode of political interaction for political philosophers from Plato to Rawls.
Yet if elections provide real choices for citizens—that is, if citizens are able to use the vote to authorize and to hold to account those who would represent them—parties will naturally form, structurally determined by the characteristics of electoral systems, the regulations that enable elections, and the constitutional form of government. As Rosenblum (2008) notes, in contrast to democratic theorists, most political scientists view democratic representation as unthinkable without parties. They are arguably the key representative bodies within representative government. Their representative functions include aggregating and deliberating interests and values, and linking issues through programmatic visions within political environments that are increasingly segmented. Because they perform these functions in ways that can be more or less inclusive and more or less deliberative, political parties should find their wayback onto the agenda of democratic theory (see Beitz 1989). Such integration, however, will require that we understand partisanship as an essential feature of deliberation. Parties as organizations are not to be confused with factions since they can and should transform particular forms of advocacy into more competing accounts of common goods and interests, and in this way structure public discourse (Urbinati 2006, pp. 37–38; Rosenblum 2008).
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