Parties

Abstract

This chapter focuses on political parties in the older liberal democracies of the United Kingdom and the United States, and, to a lesser extent, the broader ‘West’ and ‘North’, and their relationship to the kind of social change pursued by progressives on the Left. It tells a story of how mass parties in the mid-twentieth century promised social change of this kind by mobilising participation, articulating interests, aggregating those interests into programmes, and implementing those programmes. Over time, however, these parties were gradually abandoned by citizens in search of less hierarchical and elitist pathways to political action. Struggling for supporters, mass parties gradually became replaced by catch-all and cartel parties – institutionalised parties focused less on social change and more on reproducing themselves by winning elections. The chapter makes an argument for how progressives might now respond. The solution is not further abandonment of parties and formal politics. There remains plenty to be learned from the period of mass-party dominance concerning the value of political institutions, attention to policy detail, and reforms to legislation. While there can be no simple return to the mass-party model and its twentieth-century context, there could be a renewed appreciation of how formal and informal politics interact. Formal politics provides political opportunity structures for social movements, which depend on healthy parties as targets or allies of campaigns. Indeed, a new party model has emerged in recent years – the movement party – that challenges these very distinctions between formal and informal politics, party politics and social movements.