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The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

CARLO INVERNIZZI-ACCETTI  and
FABIO WOLKENSTEIN
CARLO INVERNIZZI-ACCETTI*
Affiliation:
City College of the City University of New York
FABIO WOLKENSTEIN*
Affiliation:
Goethe University Frankfurt
*
Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY), 160 Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031, and Associate Researcher at the Center for European Studies of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, Paris FR 75007 ([email protected]).
Fabio Wolkenstein is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany ([email protected]).
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Abstract

The much-discussed crisis of political parties poses a challenge to democratic theorists as institutional designers: how can the capacity of parties to mediate between society and state be resuscitated? In this article, we suggest that parties need to become more internally deliberative, allowing partisans to debate policy and more general visions for the polity. We outline a prescriptive model of deliberative intraparty democracy, drawing on the empirical literature on the changing structure of civic and political engagement. We argue that deliberative reforms are the most appropriate response to the demands of an increasingly more cognitively mobilized citizenry which seeks self-expression and nonhierarchical forms of political engagement. We highlight the model's distinctive strengths and defend it against several objections.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 111 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 97 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2017 

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank Christopher Bickerton, Dario Castiglione, Bruce Cronin, Daniel DiSalvo, Lisa Disch, Richard Katz, Jeffrey Kucik, Rajan Menon, Francesco Ronchi, Nadia Urbinati, Jonathan White, Lea Ypi, as well as the four anonymous reviewers at the American Political Science Review, for extremely helpful comments on previous versions of this article. We would also like to thank the organizers and participants of the “Workshop on political parties” held at the ECPR's 2015 Joint Sessions of Workshops in Warsaw, Poland for exchanges that laid the foundations for many of the ideas developed in this article. Fabio Wolkenstein acknowledges the valuable assistance of Leslie Taussig at the first stage of writing this article.

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