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Defending representative democracy: parties and the future of political engagement in Britain
Democracy in Britain would appear to be in decline. Fewer people are joining political parties; fewer people are participating in general elections; and mass protest on a wide variety of issues is rising. This apparent breakdown in formal political engagement in Britain and other liberal democracies has led to a renewed claim by many critics inside and outside of academia that traditional representative forms of democratic governance have had their day and need to be replaced by a more direct model of democracy. This paper argues that this would be a mistake, and that moving to a more direct form of democracy would in fact do more to undermine the needs and concerns of minority groups and others than the conventional representative system. It claims that the key lies in addressing those issues which underlie political disengagement, strengthening existing links between the electorate and decision makers, and making sure that political parties adapt to the profound social changes that Britain has experienced in the past few decades. Parties need to reform themselves in order that they are better able to embody the ideals and aspirations of a new, consumerist, disengaged public. Failure to do so will lead to their continued demise and a further weakening of democracy in Britain.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
Parliamentary AffairsVolume
58Issue
(3)Pages
632 - 655Citation
PARVIN, P. and MCHUGH, D., 2005. Defending representative democracy: parties and the future of political engagement in Britain. Parliamentary Affairs, 58 (3), pp. 632 - 655Publisher
Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government / © The AuthorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2005Notes
This article is closed access.ISSN
0031-2290Publisher version
Language
- en