Party Democracy: Political Parties and Representation

Party Democracy

Duverger, in Political Parties, discussed the position of modern political parties between representatives and their constituency. He argued that the classical theory of representation never corresponded to reality. He interpreted the classical theory as an ingenious mechanism whose purpose was the transfer of national sovereignty, officially proclaimed as the real sovereignty of Parliament.

The post-Schumpeterian perception of political representation doubted that representation could be more than a mechanism for choosing the government. Thus, sociological representation, the similarity between the political views of the nation and Parliament, seems a mystery. Sociological representation seems like the relationship between a landscape and a photograph. So, we just try to contrast public opinion with parliamentary speech. For Duverger, to carry out what we want, we compare the percentage of votes for the parties to the percentage of seats in Parliament. This leads to a double distortion, because there is always a dissonance between the two dimensions above. For him, the franchise is just a way of expressing public opinion. The distance between the people and the government is not easy to bridge from a sociological perspective of representation.

This is the idea that Manuel García Pelayo seems to collect to submit a description of democracy that seems to go beyond the normative character of political representation. In his work The State Party, he defines contemporary democracy as a democracy of parties. The word 'adaptation' suggests a continuity in the development of democracy with which we disagree.

Contemporary Circumstances

It is important to address what is referred to as contemporary circumstances. These are the increase of the demos due to the extension of suffrage to most adults. The other refers to the type of society in the democratic process that operates. He calls it "organizational society." In this order, the parties have an important role in the democratic system. These functions are:

• Integration and political mobilization of the masses
• Transmission of society's demands to the government, the political agenda
• Articulation to compete for the vote and to form the government action
• Simplification of political problems for the government
• Facilitating minorities under certain circumstances
• The representation of interests

In this context, elections are a plebiscite competition in which parties compete for voters' confidence. The party becomes the main political actor. Palombara and Anderson have argued that the advent of the parties represents a quantum leap in the nature of politics. And they said that the parties give substance to political representation.