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Attempting to reconcile the diverse immigration policy demands of the 'old' working class and the 'new' middle class, social democratic parties struggle to take a clear position on immigration policy. Adopting more restrictive policies is a possible way forward, but this is likely to lead to electorally costly intra-party conflict. This article illuminates the conditions under which social democratic parties can unite behind more restrictive immigration policies and promote them consistently. Employing a most-similar systems design, it presents a comparative case study of the Austrian and Danish social democrats, from the 2015 'refugee crisis' to 2020. The article argues that low levels of territorial decentralisation enabled the Danish social democrats to promote a restrictive stance on immigration top-down, while the Austrian social democrats' federal party structure exacerbated internal disagreements between urban and rural leaders. These findings highlight the importance of internal party characteristics in explaining how parties respond to strategic trade-offs. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1975211. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People's Party's efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party's permissive acceptance of the Polish government's attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article examines the existing possibilities and normative justification for sanctioning European political parties that make a complicit contribution to democratic backsliding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that an analysis of the conflict around the nature and limits of European integration that arose between Catholic and Protestant Christian Democrats in the post‐war era can shed new light on the expansionary dynamics that gradually came to characterize the project of European integration. Catholic Christian Democrats framed the unification of Europe as a relatively exclusionary cultural‐civilizational endeavour, while Protestant Christian Democrats favoured a more inclusive conception of Europe that prioritised free trade over cultural homogeneity. Focusing specifically on Germany, we suggest that the eventual resolution of the intra‐party struggle between the two camps in the early 1970s was a crucial enabler for including more and more countries into the European project. For it was only thereafter that Catholic Christian Democrats began supporting the expansion of European integration beyond the core Europe of the original Six, with geopolitical concerns gradually crowding out cultural ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out the case for undertaking democratic reforms that reconnect parties with society, and addresses the well-known objection that democratising parties holds the risk of making them less electable, since it means empowering people who care more about their ideology than what the wider public wants. The article then argues that proportional representation systems reduce the risks associated with this potentiality, thus being more hospitable to party reform than first-past-the-post systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important functions that political parties were traditionally said to perform is the integration of hitherto disenfranchised citizens into the political process. The 'people's parties' of the post-war era even succeeded in making quite heterogenous groups feel like they were part of a common endeavour. This research note explores how and why the integrative capacity of parties has changed from the age of mass parties until today, and discusses the distinctive challenges facing contemporary parties that wish to appeal to wide and diverse constituencies. The note closes by reflecting on how partisan integration could be studied empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-Eurocrisis, normative debates on democracy in the European Union have seen a revival of democratic intergovernmentalism. This article questions not the substantive proposals put forward under the heading of democratic intergovernmentalism, but the theory-building strategy typically used to justify these proposals. It argues that democratic intergovernmentalism theories fail to sufficiently theorise the connection between normative principles and political practice, over-emphasising the former at the expense of the latter. Citizens are thereby relegated to passive recipients of normative standards thought to be independently valid. Providing an alternative to this view, the article then advances a contestation-based account of democracy in the European Union where the central unit of analysis is the agents who propose particular interpretations of what democracy in the European Union means and what institutional reforms need be taken, in domestic and transnational public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The constitutional politics of the EU have been intensely debated in recent times. At work here seems to be the contestable Schmittian assumption that the allocation of constituent power is an either-or question, such that any exercise of constituent power beyond the state is bound to nullify constituent power at the state level (see Cohen, [8], Chapter 2). The suggestion is to conceive of constituent power in the EU as I pouvoir constituant mixte i , understood as a supra-state constituent power in which individuals participate in their dual capacity as members of the member states' demoi, on the one hand, and EU citizens, on the other. So far, it seems clear that it can satisfy desideratum (1), which emphasizes that the supra-state constituent power in Europe ought to be a mixed form of constituent power, whose participants act both in their capacity as members of states and as members of a (present or future) supranational polity. [Extracted from the article]

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided that the latter conforms to particular discursive norms. What the article calls a 'liberal ethics of populism' turns out to be closely bound up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who 'the people' are in a way that is compatible with liberal–democratic principles of political justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to exercise power in the name of the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In democratic theory and practice, it has become a popular view that designed deliberative mini‐publics can effectively counteract failures of representative democratic institutions. But when should mini‐publics be deployed, and how should they be designed? This article develops a framework for thinking about these questions. It argues that when representative democratic institutions ensure the empowerment of inclusions, enable the formation of collective agendas and wills, and are capable of translating those agendas into binding decisions, mini‐publics should be used sparingly and as complementary initiatives; the less representative institutions are able to serve these functions, the more mini‐publics should gain independence and standing to correct these problems. The article shows how this can be operationalised in light of two key institutional design issues – coupling and authority – and discusses some empirical examples that foreground the empirical leverage offered by the suggested framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the heart of the ideal of deliberative democracy lies an emphasis on the political autonomy of citizens participating in procedures of public justification aimed at the promotion of the common good. The recent systemic turn in deliberative democracy has moved so far away from this ideal that it relegates the deliberations of citizens to a secondary matter, legitimising forms of rule that may even undermine the normative impulses central to the project of deliberative democracy. We critically discuss this theoretical development and show how deliberative agency can effectively be exercised in complex political systems. We argue, in particular, that political parties play a central role in facilitating the exercise of deliberative agency, fostering deliberation among citizens and linking their deliberations to decisions. Instead of giving up on the possibility that citizens participate in procedures of public justification, deliberative democrats should look to parties' unique ability to enable deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the face of it, membership ballots present a clear case in which intra-party democracy comes into collision with core principles of representative democracy: they weaken the autonomy of representatives, and undermine the authority of the voters. In this article, I investigate whether this is correct, and whether membership ballots are, therefore, democratically illegitimate, using the controversial 2013 Mitgliederentscheid in the German Social Democratic party as a critical case. I argue that there is nothing democratically suspect about membership ballots and mount a defence of intra-party democracy as intrinsically valuable, appealing to a principle of equal respect for persons as autonomous agents. It turns out that endorsing this principle has two possible implications: that the content of the ballot must be open to deliberation, and that these deliberations should be rendered open to non-members. I discuss these implications and offer some institutional design guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary scholarship on intra-party democracy pays a great deal of attention to aggregative procedures like primaries or membership ballots but widely ignores deliberative procedures within parties. This article begins by highlighting why scholars should care about deliberation within parties, discussing several functions intra-party deliberation is said to serve in the democratic theory literature. It then goes on to explore the deliberative credentials of political discussion between party members, drawing on group interviews with party members in two Social Democratic parties in Germany and Austria. Two issues are investigated: the preconditions for deliberation among party members and their justificatory patterns. The results of the analysis suggest that parties can be genuine vehicles of deliberation, and thus point towards a research programme on intra-party democracy that differs quite starkly from that which prevails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Advocates of demoicracy dismiss the proposal to transform the EU into a supranational democracy on the grounds that there is no pan‐European demos. This article examines several arguments that have been advanced to that effect and, noting some problems left outstanding, goes on to suggest that demoicrats who endorse the no‐demos thesis fail to consider the possibility that citizens themselves may seek to europeanize the identities of Europeans. If we take this possibility seriously, it not only follows that the no‐demos thesis is not a knockdown objection to supranational democracy. We are also provided with an alternative normative vision for transforming the EU into a legitimate supranational democratic order, one that turns upon the transformative potential of citizens who associate across borders in pursuit of shared political goals. The article concludes by examining this vision under the heading of ‘transnational partisanship’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]