Constitutional (liberal) democracy pursues an ambitious project. It weaves together majority rule and minority rights and encapsulates a political and institutional organization of public life deliberately orchestrated to guarantee and safeguard rights and freedoms, the peaceful resolution of social and political conflict, and the widest-possible participation of citizens in democratic self-rule. Critical for these goals are procedural mechanisms that enhance the responsiveness and accountability of elected officeholders, contain the power of the governing majority, enable the mutual checks and balances involved (...) with institutional prerogatives, and allow citizens to periodically assess their representatives and, should they want to, select new ones. This vision crystallized in the second half of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of totalitarian monopartyism and the two world wars; it seemed destined for global hegemony after the end of the Cold War and—supposedly—of history. However, the present and future of constitutional, liberal democracies around the world looks less idyllic than the optimism seen at the turn of the century might have suggested. Even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, debates about the wellbeing of liberal democratic regimes around the globe had been at the core of academic and public debates for at least a full decade. (shrink)

This essay weaves together the history of political and legal thought, contemporary democratic theory, and recent debates in legal scholarship to examine the ambivalent relationship between political parties and democracy. Celebrated as a structural necessity for the mechanics of democratic government, political parties are also handled with suspicion for their hybrid nature—neither entirely public nor completely private—and for their always-possible regression into factions. Anti-factionalism, I show, has been a powerful ideal driving constitutional imagination and practice over the centuries, from antiquity (...) (with its emphasis on parts and its horror over factions), to the age of democratic revolutions (with its signature anxieties about divisions), up through the present. However, this long historical process has not extinguished the long-lived concern with the nature and implications of party spirit, nor has it made party democracy completely safe from revamped forms of factionalism. Two manifestations of factional politics stand out in the contemporary political landscape: authoritarian regime changes and populist constitutionalism. While the former is easy to diagnose but hard to prevent, the latter exemplifies a torsion of the constitutional and democratic imagination from within. Despite their differences, both scenarios remind us that constitutions need to envision mechanisms to prevent parties from undermining the liberal democratic order they have been designed to serve. At the same time, they call for renewed attention to the study of parties in the domains of democratic theory and constitutional scholarship. (shrink)