‘Stripped Down’ or Reconfigured Democracy

AbstractIn his later writings Peter Mair expressed strong and ever more urgent concerns over the state of party politics and the future of representative politics itself. This paper uses Mair’s thesis to frame a discussion about the state of our representative system of democracy. It starts by setting out his arguments on party and democratic failure. It then considers the question of whether the evidence supports such a perspective, or whether in fact there are signs of adaptability and change. This in turn leads to a discussion about the reform agenda in established representative democracies, with particular attention to the potential of ‘mini-publics’ in enabling a role for ordinary citizens in debates over constitutional reform. The paper concludes by arguing that this reform agenda provides evidence of democracies being reconfigured rather than stripped down. AcknowledgementsEarlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference in Memory of Peter Mair, ‘Responsive or Responsible? Parties, Democracy, and Global Markets’, European University Institute, Florence, 26–28 September 2012, at the Australian Electoral Commission Electoral Research Forum, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 20 November 2012, and at a departmental seminar at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 23 October 2013. I am grateful to the participants and also to Conor Little for comments and feedback, and to Fernando Mendez and Jonathan Wheatley for giving me prior access to their manuscript (Wheatley and Mendez Citation2013). I also thank the guest editors of this special issue, my reviewers, and especially Alex Trechsel, for their detailed and helpful suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.Notes1. The suddenness of Ireland’s economic crisis was undoubtedly an important catalyst in motivating the parties to embrace the reform agenda (see Suiter and Farrell Citation2011) – a reform agenda that, as Mair and others would argue, is long overdue. However, it would be wrong to conclude from this one instance that there is inevitably an inherent linkage between economic crisis and political reform.2. For instance, in such areas as gender quotas, party funding, and reducing the size of the parliament.3. Such as reform of the freedom of information legislation, and new legislation to facilitate whistleblowing and to regulate lobbyists.4. http://www.constitution.ie.5. Were he with us today, I have no doubt that Mair would be critical of the shortcomings in the Irish government’s reform agenda, but at least it has gone some way to considering reforms that he promoted, notably by involving ordinary citizens in the constitutional convention and by including electoral reform as one of the questions for the convention to consider.6. The following summary of Mair’s arguments draws variously on these papers.7. In passing it is worth noting his fascinating cross-referencing of climate change studies (e.g. Mair Citation2006b: 36) as a means of better understanding gradual and lumpy changes over time.8. A point he first drew attention to decades ago, and which is generally referred to as ‘Mair’s paradox’ (see Mair Citation1994: 13–14).9. For an example of his earlier, more positive, perspective, see Mair (Citation2003). In the more recent papers, referred to in this section, he suggests that his earlier perspective may have been ‘too sanguine’ (Mair Citation2006a: 49–50). Clearly these later papers were part of a larger project he was working on, as evidenced from draft papers in the Mair library on comparative party politics housed in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, and which were published posthumously (Mair Citation2013).10. Much of this section is drawn from Dalton et al. (Citation2011: chs. 1 and 2).11. This point is also made by Katz (Citation2013: 63) in a recent essay in which he questions whether declining party membership ‘should be attributed to failures by the parties’. He continues: ‘there are good grounds to believe that … the decline has been a by-product of social changes that neither can – nor in most cases should – be reversed’.12. As we have seen, this is a perspective that Mair used also to share in his earlier writings, before feeling that such views were ‘too sanguine’.13. I am grateful to one of my referees for suggesting this line of discussion.14. Of course, it could be argued that these new forms of ‘political action’ were already emerging decades earlier (Barnes et al. Citation1979).15. This list is based on data reported in Annex 2 of Bedock et al. (Citation2012).16. See also Dahl’s (Citation1985: 88) later discussion of ‘minipopulus’, arguably the origins of the term ‘mini-publics’.17. They refer to a third feature of variation, the style of the process, which can be either closed (behind closed doors and subject to negotiation and horse-trading) or open (more in public view with a greater potential for deliberation).18. They note, however, that the most popular models tend to trade off one ideal versus the other: i.e. either using direct election to elect members or using referendum as a means of ratification, but not both (Mendez and Wheatley Citation2013).19. For discussion on the virtues of random selection (or ‘sortition’) in democratic politics, see Dowlen (Citation2008) and Stone (Citation2011).20. The Icelandic Constitutional Council is not included in this list as its members were elected (Bergmann Citation2013). Obviously the two Canadian cases are not ‘national’; however, given that the country is a federation, a province-wide initiative is undoubtedly a first-order event.