Party Democracy in a Fractured System

This paper examines the fragmentation of Britain's party system as a crisis of party democracy, and argues that electoral reform is necessary to return to a point where parties can still do the representative work on which democratic government depends. The mass‐party model and class cleavages that once underpinned stable party government have been breaking down across the capitalist democracies for decades, but First Past the Post presents unique challenges to reform in Britain. Where proportional systems register electoral fragmentation and force parties to negotiate it, majoritarianism compresses a plural electorate back into a two‐party parliament. This produces increasingly undemocratic outcomes and raises the likelihood that voters turn to anti‐system alternatives. The paper argues that the way through this impasse is to embrace fragmentation by moving towards a more proportional electoral system. Opening it up to the plural politics voters already practise would rebuild legitimacy by allowing parties to make distinct offers to core constituencies, which in turn would allow them to rebuild the linkage functions that animate healthy party democracy.