Why and when democracies ban political parties: a classification of democratic state orientations to party bans

Abstract Defending democracy requires undemocratic steps; one of the most radical is the prohibition of political parties. The functioning of political parties is fundamental to healthy and pluralistic democracies. Thus, their exclusion from the political process raises a severe dilemma for a democratic society, which has to address sufficiently why and when a political competitor can legitimately be kicked out of the political arena. The latter is crucially important because of the rise of far-right parties and attempts by authoritarians to infiltrate the domestic political competition of democratic countries. The approaches of various national courts in cases concerning the prohibition of political parties are far from uniform. Experiences in Spain, Ukraine, the UK and, eventually, Germany demonstrate significant contrasts regarding the political theory and legal rationale for prohibition. While democracy is a universal value for a pan-European context, the courts set different limits of democratic tolerance for guarding it. The paper offers a new paradigm that explains why and when democracies ban political parties. The classification of democratic state orientation to party bans consists of liberal, institutional and militant models, which illustrate different concepts around finding the balance between personal rights on the one hand and the interests of a democratic society on the other.