Political Parties and Forms of Citizens’ Involvement in Decision-Making: A Special Section

Abstract

This is the introductory article to a special section that discusses the relationship between political parties and the different forms of citizens’ involvement in decision-making, that is, participatory forms, referendums, and deliberative practices. The three articles in this special issue seek to answer two specific questions, respectively, (1) regarding how ideology relates to some of these forms of involvement and (2) why politicians do not act on the recommendations resulting from such forms. They focus on Spain, Switzerland, and Iceland and bring both theoretical and empirical contributions to the existing knowledge. Their findings are that ideology matters for the use of participatory practices but does not influence the non-implementation of outcomes from deliberative practices. The policy model rarely explains parties’ positioning in referendums, but there is flexibility and moderation during campaigns, and parties are more oriented towards participatory institutions at the local level than towards deliberative practices at the national level.

Introduction

Political parties have long been key institutions of political representation and have fulfilled functions related to governance – either as part of the government or in opposition – for roughly a century. Their initial presence was limited to the handful of countries that belonged to the first wave of democratisation in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but they gradually gained prominence in many other places. A seminal work published during the Second World War argued that ‘the political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties’ (Schattschneider, 1942: 1). In 2024, of the 248 countries and territories recognised by the United Nations through their listing in its geoscheme, only about 8% do not have, or do not allow, political parties. The latter have become the rule of the game around the world regardless of how democratic or authoritarian the regime is, or whether countries or territories are in a transition process. In general, political parties have encouraged citizens’ political engagement in two ways: the participation of members in the internal party organisation, and the external political activity of voters (and members) in elections and campaign activities (Dalton et al., 2011). In terms of members’ participation in the internal life of their parties, the past three decades have marked a visible increase in the number of primaries used for both candidate and leadership selection (Astudillo and Detterbeck, 2020; Hazan and Rahat, 2010; Hopkin, 2001).

Beyond choosing representatives through intra-party or community-wide elections, people’s involvement in the decision-making process has gradually developed since the 1960s when activist movements demanded a greater voice in decisions that have an impact on them and on their communities (Barber, 1984; Pateman, 1970). The participation in elections once every 4 or 5 years was deemed insufficient for people to express their preferences, demands or concerns. The essence of democracy – ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’, as Lincoln concisely described it in his Gettysburg address – is possible only through people’s involvement in decisions that affect them. This quest for more political participation has been reflected in practice in a diversity of forms ranging from contentious politics (e.g. demonstrations, protests, strikes, civil disobedience, etc.) and social movements that engage in contentious politics through to referendums and citizen’s initiatives through which people can decide on a broad range of policy questions at local and national levels, and to participatory budgeting, that allows citizens to decide on how to direct a proportion of their locality’s spending (Dias et al., 2019; Qvortrup, 2024; Setala and Schiller, 2012; Silagadze and Gherghina, 2020; Tilly and Tarrow, 2015). In particular, allowing people to make more of the important public decisions through direct democracy could restore the connection between the people and government (Matsusaka, 2020), which has been continuously degrading over the past few decades.

Deliberative democracy proposes a specific form of participation characterised by publicity, inclusiveness, and dialogue that can generate legitimate political outcomes. The communication and informed dialogue between the people who engage in deliberation are crucial in building arguments and in the pursuit of the public good (Dryzek, 2010; Habermas, 1996; Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012). Previous studies have extensively discussed who participates in deliberation, how deliberation functions, how it achieves its purposes even in fragile contexts, and its main consequences (Bächtiger et al., 2018; Curato and Calamba, 2024; Elstub and Escobar, 2019). With a few notable exceptions, for example, the Ostbelgien Model in Belgium, deliberative practices are not institutionalised and remain one-off exercises of involvement.

Three decades ago, political parties were considered incompatible with the use of participatory, direct and deliberative practices, mainly because of their competitive structure, non-inclusive decision-making process, centralised leadership and orientation towards the professionalisation of electoral campaigning (Cohen, 1989; Panebianco, 1988). In more recent times, the participatory and deliberative practices that enable citizens’ direct involvement are discussed without political parties (Geissel, 2023). Citizens’ participation can be challenging for parties because they rely on specific non-party forms of communication and engage people in decisions beyond the traditional avenues and control to which parties are accustomed (Gherghina et al., 2020). In this sense, they might provide citizens with more power than parties and politicians are willing to share (Niessen, 2019). Another hurdle is the low trust that citizens have in political parties, which leads to effects which are visible both in aspects of elections such as lower turnout or higher electoral volatility compared to a few decades ago and in forms of direct engagement. For example, the public’s distrust in political institutions led to the failure of a recall procedure in the capital city of Republic of Moldova (Mișcoiu, 2019).

Over time, this relationship changed dramatically, and there is evidence that political parties include people in internal decisions through various forms of participation and actively engage in direct and deliberative practices in society (Fishkin et al., 2008; Gherghina, 2019, 2024; Teorell, 1999). This trend was accelerated by the emergence of connective and digital parties which had abandoned the traditional way of interacting with voters, members and sympathisers and instead adopted participatory practices. The emergence of political parties based on social movements also contributed to the momentum. Political parties are compatible with deliberation in theory and can accommodate it in practice if they meet a basic set of principles (Wolkenstein, 2016). Participatory forms can satisfy members’ demands for a voice, provide deliberative forums that convey a message of openness to the electorate and send a signal that they are oriented towards citizens.

What is Missing From the Literature

The discussion above indicates that political parties have recently engaged with various forms of citizens’ involvement in decision-making, both internally and externally. However, we know relatively little about how ideology – which is a defining characteristic of contemporary political parties – relates to some of these forms of involvement, or why politicians are unwilling to act on recommendations resulting from deliberative practices. On one hand, the relationship between ideology and direct or deliberative democracy has often been studied through the lenses of rhetoric. Populists support direct democracy more than other political parties, although there are differences in the references they make to referendums (Gherghina et al., 2024; Gherghina and Pilet, 2021). Mainstream parties, especially those on the right-wing, oppose referendums in specific political contexts (Paulis and Rangoni, 2023). Meanwhile, left-wing political parties support the use of deliberation and populists rarely refer to it in their rhetoric (Biard et al., 2020; Gherghina and Mitru, 2024; Pascolo, 2020). To date, there has been limited empirical investigation regarding the ways in which ideology is reflected in the use of referendums or deliberative practices.

On the other hand, politicians’ approach to deliberative practices is important because it sheds light on their policy-making choices. Politicians can be either facilitators or gate-keepers in implementing the decisions coming from such practices. It is unclear whether politicians perceive deliberative practices as process-driven (e.g. as fostering the education and engagement of citizens, or opening up the political process), consequence oriented (e.g. as avenues to gain legitimacy and support), or as a combination of the two. So far, the evidence has been mixed. Some scholars report that politicians find formal consultation processes too staged and antagonistic to produce constructive interactions, but favour informal and spontaneous conversations with individual citizens (Hendriks and Lees-Marshment, 2019). Others show that politicians advocate deliberative practices that enjoy enough support from civil society groups to be imposed on the political agenda (Jacquet et al., 2022). Several studies conclude that elected politicians are actually sympathetic towards deliberative democracy (Gherghina et al., 2023; Rangoni et al., 2023) and agree to adopt it on a large scale (Macq and Jacquet, 2023).

Contributions and Content of the Special Section

This special section includes three articles that seek to answer the following two research questions: How does party ideology relate to participatory democracy in general and direct democracy in particular? and Why did politicians disregard the recommendations resulting from a one-off deliberative practice? In their quest for answers, the articles bring two important contributions to the state of the art. First, they enrich the theoretical and analytical foundations. One article proposes a novel approach that goes beyond the classic discussion about party families and identifies the typical profile of parties that develop participatory institutions (Font and Motos, 2023). The authors aim to understand whether the different political ideologies of governing parties led to the development of different participatory processes in Spain between 2003 and 2010. In doing so, they compare both the general left versus right dimension of competition and various party families. A second article provides a systematic account of the genesis of political parties’ positions in the arena of direct democracy to identify the potential determinants of political parties’ positions, a topic that is both salient and under-researched (Hornig, 2024). This article covers the Swiss case and presents four ideal-type models of party positioning. The third article in the special section investigates politicians’ actions beyond expressing rhetorical support for deliberation. In this sense, it asks why politicians do not pick up the results arising from deliberative practices and integrate them into the policy-making process. The analysis covers the 2019 deliberative practice in Iceland, and the analytical framework is inductively derived from interviews with MPs elected at the national level in the 2017–2021 term in office (Pálsdóttir et al., 2023).

Second, they provide rich evidence that add nuance to the existing knowledge and advance the state of the art. The findings of the article about the Spanish case indicate that the party families with a strong presence in local administration are similar with respect to the participatory activities implemented. Nevertheless, there are several noticeable differences between their target constituencies and preferred types of participatory processes (Font and Motos, 2023). The article about Switzerland uses an original data set of 162 single positions of five Swiss political parties in 37 national referendums between 2015 and 2019. The results show that the parties’ positioning in referendums is not dominated by the policy model, but there is flexibility in the campaign stage, and the parties moderate their positions (Hornig, 2024). The results of the study on Iceland finds that politicians are critical of deliberative practices both in procedural and substantive terms. The politicians instead advocate the representative model of democracy that, in their view, provides citizens with sufficient ways to get involved in politics, thus making deliberation redundant. These views are observable across all political parties, that is, ideology does not influence politicians’ attitudes.

The articles in this special section reach three conclusions that form a useful point of departure for further research on political parties, participatory democracy, and democratic innovations; the latter is a term that covers the direct and deliberative forms of involvement. These conclusions are as follows: party ideology matters in the use of participatory practices but does not make a difference when parties choose not to implement the outcomes of deliberative practices; polarisation and conflict in the party system do not mean that the policy model guides parties’ positioning in referendums; and parties are oriented more towards participatory institutions at the local level than towards deliberative practices at the national level.