Intra-party Deliberation and Reflexive Control within a Deliberative System

The Role of Parties within a Deliberative System

The normative theory of democracy has traditionally been wary of parties because of their tendency to polarize political debates and create ideological divisions. ⁶ The deliberative framework has reinforced this antipartisan perspective by requiring citizens to ground their claims in publicly and universally justifiable arguments, assess political proposals on their merits, and critically discuss with one another so as to identify what is best for the polity. ⁷ The ideal political actors, according to this view, are independents, not partisans. ⁸ However, since parties have a central role in contemporary democracies, undermining their legitimacy is particularly problematic for those theories that aim to devise a realistic and workable ideal of deliberative democracy.

In the past few years, the main tenets of this antipartisan doctrine have been challenged by two different literatures, which have offered a new outlook of the nature of parties and of the model of deliberation that should be assumed by a deliberative theory of democracy. On the one hand, it has been claimed that parties should not be conflated with factions. They are not necessarily the institutional medium of sinister interests, but they can be carriers of democratic political agency through which citizens can pursue the common good. ⁹ Therefore, the normative theory of democracy should not rule out parties because of the dysfunctional ways in which they are currently organized; instead, it should define standards that parties need to meet to promote their essential functions for a democracy. ¹⁰ On the other hand, the recent systemic turn in the theory of deliberative democracy has further facilitated this transition to a more benign view of parties by loosening the strict conditions of deliberation that were imposed by former conceptions of deliberative democracy. According to this perspective, deliberative procedures have to be considered systemically. While a deliberative system as a whole requires “a talk-based approach to political conflict and problem-solving,” ¹¹ some of its components may be released from standards of impartial and unitary deliberation, insofar as their operation still contributes to the deliberative quality of the system as a whole. This understanding of deliberative democracy not only accounts for the structural complexity and diversity of democratic institutions, but it achieves democratic inclusivity while at the same time relieving citizens from the cognitive and motivational burdens implied by a unitary model of deliberation. ¹² The systemic approach, thus, provides a workable model of how a complex and large-scale democracy can promote democratic deliberation.

Though these two new trends within the normative theory of democracy and deliberation have been developed independently of one another, they can be seen as complementary. In fact, from within the systemic standpoint, it is possible to claim that parties, far from being foes of deliberative democracy, perform instead three important functions that are necessary for the proper working of a deliberative democratic system.

1. Epistemic function. It is often argued that deliberation enhances the epistemic quality of democratic procedures. However, for these beneficial effects to take place, the information mobilized in the diverse sites of the public sphere must be accessible to citizens. But citizens may be exposed to an overwhelming flux of information, and the arguments circulating in the public sphere may be unintelligible to them, especially when they relate to technical matters that involve fair amounts of expertise and specialization. It can be argued that within a deliberative system, parties play an essential role in selecting the relevant information and making it accessible to the general public. ¹³ First, parties reduce informational complexity by developing programs that define sufficiently coherent orderings of normative commitments and by integrating expert knowledge into their policy agendas. ¹⁴ Second, since parties seek public support, they have an inherent interest to make technical and complex information accessible and relevant to citizens by connecting principles, policies, and facts to their concrete interests and values. ¹⁵

2. Motivational function. In a deliberative democracy, political decisions must be based on reasoned arguments that are systematically linked to the interests, values, and claims of citizens. This implies a two-way process in which, on the one hand, the members of the demos are moved by these arguments and, on the other hand, their claims are made relevant and pushed through the discursive web of interactions that will eventually affect institutional decisions. Exercising this kind of political agency is demanding because it requires that citizens have the motivations and resources to connect their political preferences to the discursive interactions that occur within the deliberative system. A diffused deliberation in the diverse sites of the public sphere may fail to ensure this sort of mobilization. ¹⁶ In fact, it is unlikely that citizens will spontaneously engage with issues that do not strictly affect them. Moreover, political engagement can be particularly burdensome for the disadvantaged. ¹⁷

Parties can overcome these problems. On the one hand, they can generate a sense of political collectivity among citizens, thus motivating citizens to engage with the political agenda in its entirety and be moved by general arguments. On the other hand, parties’ organizational support ¹⁸ can ensure that even disadvantaged citizens are enabled, and then motivated, to have an impact on the web of discursive interactions.

3. Justificatory function. In a deliberative democracy, political proposals should be supported by arguments acceptable to each and every member of the community. Parties have a central role in ensuring that political proposals are publicly justified and addressed to a general audience, while still allowing citizens to uphold their particular perspectives and concerns. Political parties are able to play this justificatory function in virtue of two essential traits. First, parties are “bilingual.” ¹⁹ They politicize citizens’ demands, values, and interests by connecting the various claims voiced within society “to normatively grounded, powerful notions of the possibility of a better society.” ²⁰ As a consequence, citizens can ground their proposals in values that they acknowledge as “theirs” but are also publicly acceptable. Second, parties have an inherent tendency to articulate their claims and programs in adversarial terms, ²¹ calling for the public to constantly compare, assess, and redefine the arguments on which their political proposals are grounded.

According to this reconstruction of the epistemic, motivational, and justificatory function of parties in a deliberative system, parties’ activities produce two outcomes that are essential ingredients of a workable deliberative democracy: first, they produce relevant and accessible information, strong motivations, and public arguments that can enter the public debate; second, they do so by systematically linking such information, motivations, and arguments to the interests, stances, and knowledge of citizens, thus making such deliberative ingredients truly democratic. Of course in a deliberative system no party by itself can perform all the work of creating, selecting, and publicly validating the reasons that eventually serve as the ground of collective decisions, because in the end this must be the result of the public confrontation between the different reasons and claims they advance in the public arena. However, the outcome secured by the epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions of political parties, namely, fair and publicly acceptable reasons that systematically connect citizens’ preferences and interests to decision making, constitute the essential building blocks on which institutional decisions will eventually be grounded.

Deliberative Democracy and Reflexive Control

Of course, for parties to be able to perform their important functions within a deliberative system, they must be immune from obvious pathologies. For example, a “cartel party” ²² may cease to perform its epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions because it has lost its connection with the electorate. Similarly, a “catch-all party” may fail to provide a definite program and public arguments in its support, thus failing to provide a link between its voters’ interests and a vision of the common good. ²³

However, simply warning against these dangers is not enough. Even when parties do not suffer from these pathologies and are able to perform the functions we reviewed in the last section, we still need to ask through which specific processes parties perform such functions.

This question is important in view of a serious risk inherent in the systemic approach to deliberative democracy, one that was recently highlighted by David Owen and Graham Smith. ²⁴ Taking a systemic approach might induce us to look at the workings of deliberative democracy in a purely functionalist and outcome-oriented way, just asking whether the system as a whole is capable of producing political decisions that are grounded on reasons that appeal to general interests and in principle everybody could accept.

Yet by only focusing on the quality of the public reasons on which decisions are grounded, we adopt an approach that is exclusively concerned with the outcomes of a deliberative system and we lose sight of a defining procedural requirement of the deliberative ideal: that political decisions be made through a process that addresses the reason of each and every citizen as a participant in public reasoning. Call this the reflexive control requirement.

The notion of reflexive control we define here builds on and further elaborates Owen and Smith’s claim that in a deliberative democracy citizens must have a “deliberative stance,” defined as “a relation to others as equals engaged in the mutual exchange of reasons oriented as if to reaching a shared practical judgment.” ²⁵ While we share Owen and Smith’s dismay at a strictly outcome-oriented reading of the systemic turn, we believe that this is not an unavoidable flaw of such a perspective. We claim, instead, that a deliberative system may ensure a “deliberative stance” while departing from a unitary, impartial model of deliberation, once such stance is properly defined. The notion of reflexive control specifies this procedural requirement in view of the distinctive way in which the deliberative ideal interprets the principle of democratic legitimacy, according to which political decisions should be made by citizens. To fulfill this legitimacy principle, equal voting powers are not enough. Rather, the process through which decisions are made must reflect the development of an informed and reflexive opinion in the general public through the exchange of reasons. ²⁶ Reflexive control is a procedural requirement that needs to be fulfilled if this deliberative principle of legitimacy is to hold.

Thus defined, reflexive control is a truly minimal requirement for a conception of democracy to be called deliberative. It is important to stress, in fact, that reflexive control does not require that each and every citizen take part in a deliberative process each time a political decision of collective relevance is made, nor does it require a perfect knowledge and transparency of all the processes that lead to such decisions. ²⁷ It requires, though, two important conditions. First, citizens must be able to form a critical and reflexive understanding of the main reasons that constitute the basis of democratic decisions.

Second, they must be able to expect a similar understanding in their fellow citizens. This second condition responds to the fact that the deliberative conception of legitimacy has an inherent relational character: in a deliberative democracy, decisions are made collectively on the basis of a mutual exchange of reasons. Even in the face of deep disagreement, and even when, as is commonly the case, the members of a democratic society are not addressing each other directly and simultaneously through face-to-face communicative exchanges, they must conceive themselves and their fellow citizens as engaged in the same kind of reflexive activity in validating the reasons that eventually ground collective decisions.

Reflexive control thus grounds both the intellective and the affective dimension of the consent that lends legitimacy to the institutions of a deliberative democracy. Intellectually, citizens can see that the arguments exchanged in the public sphere and on which institutional decisions are based address their reason because they can have a critical grasp on those arguments. Affectively, their political passions and loyalty to the outcomes of democratic decision making are not the result of manipulation, mere habit, or ignorance, but result instead from their engagement with public reasons. ²⁸ Moreover, since citizens can see that the same critical reflection is exercised by others, they do not lend democratic decisions a purely strategic consent, treating their fellow citizens as mere unwitting means of making such decisions and devising their rationales.

The notion of reflexive control is a defining and minimal feature of the deliberative ideal and, as such, it is compatible with all conceptions of deliberative democracy, including those that adopt a systemic approach. A clear statement of the principle of reflexive control within a systemic model of deliberative democracy can be found in the theory of Jürgen Habermas. ²⁹ His “two-track” model of deliberative democracy surely situates him among the theorists of the systemic approach. ³⁰ However, Habermas still insists that the public sphere must have a reflexive character. ³¹ No matter how decentered, complex, and diverse a deliberative system can be, if it needs to respond to the basic tenets of the deliberative ideal, citizens cannot serve as mere gears of a decision-making machinery, the workings of which escape their critical grasp.

Although the requirement of reflexive control is compatible with a systemic approach to deliberative democracy, it constrains the way the components of deliberative systems can operate. Christina Lafont, for example, seems to have such a principle in mind when she objects to the use of mini-publics as a device for producing the reasons and justifications on which political decisions are grounded. ³² The problem with mini-publics, according to her reconstruction, is that they are expected to produce judgments and reasons that escape the reflexive control of the general public; citizens are asked to trust those reasons and judgments without necessarily having the opportunity to develop a critical grasp of their content.

At first sight, when deliberation takes place in the main political arena and is channeled by parties, rather than being secluded in mini-publics or similar bodies, no such danger of citizens becoming alienated from the outcomes of the deliberative process seems to exist. As is often stated, in fact, parties play a unique function of “linkage” between civil society and decisions made at the institutional level. ³³ They establish a systematic link between citizens at large and the outcomes of the deliberative processes that ground political decisions.

However, this is not enough to assume that parties provide reflexive control, because this systematic connection between citizens’ preferences and political decisions might be promoted through processes that are opaque to citizens. In fact, it is important to distinguish between two different readings of the notion that parties perform important functions within a deliberative system. According to an outcome-oriented reading, political parties are an essential component of a legitimate deliberative system to the extent that they produce intelligible, publicly justifiable claims and reasons that can ground collective decisions and are capable of anchoring them to the motivations and interests of the public, independently of how they achieve these important outcomes. According to a different, procedural reading, political parties are essential components of a legitimate deliberative system if they promote these functions through processes that ensure citizens’ reflexive control. In this reading, the performance of political parties will be connected to the reflexive quality of their procedures and the way they promote reflexive control in the deliberative system as a whole.

The difference between these two readings of the notion that parties perform essential functions within a deliberative system is all the more important since parties, in fact, are especially responsible for providing reflexive control. This is because they are, and are meant to be, the last link of the chain that connects the public sphere with the election of democratic representatives. Unlike other institutions and actors within a democratic regime, parties do not simply stir up themes, feelings, and arguments that eventually enter public deliberation. Given their epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions, they channel, filter, and mobilize the enormous flux of information and sentiments that, coming from citizens, populate the diverse sites of the public sphere and ultimately serve as the bases of public decision making. In this sense, they perform an irreplaceable role of two-way “transmission” between citizens and the institutional sites of political decision. ³⁴ In fact, other bodies and actors may be more efficient in conveying specific claims to such institutional sites, ³⁵ or more apt to be “coupled” in a fruitful exchange of reasons with other parts of a deliberative system; ³⁶ however, only parties are part and parcel of such decision-making bodies and have at the same time the ambition and task to address the general public of democratic citizens. Still, the unique position of parties within a democratic system only tells us about their special responsibility in providing reflexive control. It does not guarantee that they always provide such control, and it makes it all the more damaging when they do not. While a procedural interpretation of political parties can identify and correct these shortcomings, an outcome-oriented reading will be completely blind to them. In fact, as the cases presented in the next section will show, parties may fail to fulfill such a special responsibility for providing reflexive control, even when from a strictly outcome-oriented point of view they perform their epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions.

Deliberative Functions without Reflexive Control: Two Illustrations

Consider a party that uses marketing techniques ³⁷ to devise and publicize its political agenda, as has been the case, according to an established literature, with the New Labour of Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, ³⁸ the Democratic Party at the time of the election of President Clinton, ³⁹ and to some extent Forza Italia in Italy. ⁴⁰ This party builds its program by resorting to focus groups and polls in order to catch the interests and concerns of its prospective electorate. Following the advice of political marketing experts, ⁴¹ it also tries to make its program cohere with the traditional positions and ideological tenets that are cherished by its older members—this, too, after an internal survey in order to establish what is most marketable to them.

We may conjecture that the construction of the party’s agenda through the method just described does serve to reduce the informational complexity of the public sphere, and that the party has an interest in making the policy proposals and principles so devised intelligible to citizens. Therefore, the party in our example is able to filter and simplify the information circulating in the public sphere, thus serving an important epistemic function.

From an outcome-oriented perspective, it could also be argued that marketing methods may be efficient from the motivational point of view. Developing programs and political platforms through these techniques might easily ensure that people’s attention is channeled towards the principled appeals eventually advocated by the party, thus mobilizing a critical mass of people to participate in the democratic game and systematically connecting their preferences to political proposals and general values.

Finally, this way of concocting the party’s program allows the party to serve an important justificatory task. Since party leaders and spokespersons eventually have to enter an adversarial process of confrontation with their opponents, those in charge of devising the party’s program need to provide arguments and reasons that back their proposals.

The party of our example therefore would put forward claims to be debated in the public arena, count on the active engagement of a motivated mass of citizens, and provide public arguments in support of its proposals. If, in line with an outcome-oriented reading of political parties, we exclusively evaluate the impact these outcomes of the party’s activities have on public deliberation, it could be argued that this party would contribute to the workings of a deliberative system.

However, these tasks would be performed in the absence of genuine reflexive control by party affiliates and citizens at large. Consider first the epistemic function. A party that resorts to marketing techniques will try to keep its policy proposals as close as possible to the pre-existing interests and values of prospective voters and subsume them under umbrella principles that will promise to fulfill their desiderata. Therefore, by hypothesis, party supporters would not have the chance to critically reflect on the claims and principles embraced but would simply be served a principled justification of their pre-existing preferences. This lack of reflexivity would also concern the party’s opponents and the democratic public at large, which would be confronted with the party’s proposals without being able to track the actual rationale by which they were produced. Of course, they would be able to examine the content of these proposals, but they would not be able to locate them in a wider discursive context, and their presuppositions and background would remain opaque to them. To conclude, a marketing party can produce accessible and reasoned claims, but the opaque processes through which these outcomes are achieved cannot ensure that party members and citizens form a critical grasp on them.

This opacity would also circumvent reflexive control in the way the party of our example would perform its motivational function within the deliberative system. By hypothesis, through its marketing techniques the party would be able to mobilize a large mass of people by connecting their interests and preferences to the party’s platform. However, this would happen simply because such a platform is concocted to track their pre-existing preferences, rather than because they have the opportunity to reflect upon the motives and reasons for their support. This would also negatively affect the relational side of reflexive control because the general public and the party’s opponents would perceive that the party’s members and affiliates lack critical engagement with the party’s platform. They might still have reason to argue with them and try to prove them wrong, but they could not consider them counterparts in a process of “mutual exchange of reasons.” ⁴²

Finally, consider how the party of our example would perform its justificatory function. We assumed that its marketing techniques would encompass producing a set of arguments in support of its claims and proposals, arguments to be deployed in public debates and in the wider deliberative circuit. However, those justifications would be produced ex post, rather than constituting the actual grounds on which the party program was selected. This mocking of the deliberative agency of the party’s opponents, who would expend their argumentative and critical skills on straw reasons and justifications, would constitute an obvious betrayal of the relational side of reflexive control. This would not affect the argumentative quality of the justifications thus produced, but it will not ensure a context in which reflexive agents will reciprocally acknowledge one another as peers engaged in a discursive relation.

The above example shows how parties can perform epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions that serve a deliberative system from an outcome-oriented point of view, and yet fail to ensure that citizens exercise reflexive control. It might be suspected that these shortcomings depend on the seemingly top–down, undemocratic nature of the concoction of the party agenda in our example, which by hypothesis, in fact, is crafted by a group of experts. However, our second example shows that this is not the case. Consider a participatory party that promotes citizens’ direct involvement in defining its programs and main political choices along the lines followed by the Five Star Movement in Italy. ⁴³ Though this party has been heavily criticized for the hegemonic role of its founder and spokesperson Beppe Grillo, it undeniably implements a form of direct, Internet democracy in the selection of candidates ⁴⁴ and other important choices in the life of the party (expulsion of members, revisions of the charter, and participation in a government coalition). This model of democracy has been further advanced by the development of the online platform Rousseau, through which party members can directly suggest and put on a vote policy proposals that will then be advocated in the parliament by the Five Star Movement’s representatives.

According to this model, no formal structure or hierarchy should characterize a party. Party representatives are delegates who should implement the will of party members by collecting their votes and voices and translating them into proposals that enter the institutional circuits of decision making. The Rousseau platform ensures that each party member has the same opportunity to participate and ensures a certain level of transparency because everyone can read the proposals made by the participants, their comments, and the replies to these comments by the representatives or their staff. ⁴⁵

The outcome of the participatory processes enacted through the use of this kind of online platform, if properly filtered by party representatives, can be a set of proposals that serve the mechanics of a deliberative system and perform the epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions previously analyzed.

From a purely outcome-oriented perspective, in fact, this party model is able to perform its epistemic function because it activates a process through which lay citizens are incentivized to make use of the diffused knowledge available on the web, ⁴⁶ and party representatives make this knowledge available to the rest of the public in a simple form by filtering the suggestions of party members into a coherent set of proposals.

If we look at the outcomes, this party’s methods are also able to fulfill a motivational function within the deliberative system. Direct involvement through online platforms appears much less demanding than traditional forms of participation because it can aggregate individual claims and preferences and make them visible even when people are simply concerned with single, discrete issues. ⁴⁷

Finally, this party model can fulfill a justificatory function because its representatives, by entering the adversarial process that characterizes competition among parties, need to support the decisions issued by the party’s participatory decision-making process with reasons aimed at persuading the general public.

Though this party model makes use of participatory instruments and in this respect is very different from the example of the party that resorts to marketing techniques, the way it performs its functions does not ensure that citizens exercise reflexive control. In fact, representatives do not need to reply to comments or explain why they do not, but only need to register and aggregate the preferences of the participants. ⁴⁸ This means that although the party’s representatives promote an epistemic and justificatory function by filtering and aggregating the claims of the participants, the mechanisms through which these functions are performed are opaque to the general public and to the members who take an active part in their operation. These mechanisms work in a plebiscitarian way, mostly by aggregating the members’ votes and then producing only ex post the justifications for the decisions thus taken. Neither the general public nor the members can form a critical understanding of the reasons on which the choices made by the representatives are grounded. No explanation is provided to justify such choices, but justifications are given only to rebut the potential objections that might be developed by other parties.

The opacity and the plebiscitarianism of the mechanisms for aggregating the affiliates’ opinion prevents the exercise of reflexive control. Regarding the epistemic function, citizens cannot form a critical grasp of the rationale behind the decisions made through this method. As to the motivational function, this party model requires citizens to trust the method through which the party concocts its platforms without being put in a position to critically assess its content. This behavior incentivizes blind loyalty of supporters and disrespect from those who do not share these views, as it happens in fact in the case of the Five Star Movement, which is often disparaged as a “sect.” ⁴⁹ Finally, since the reasons that justify political proposals and programs are developed only ex post by representatives, the general public will engage with arguments that in fact are not produced by the critical reflection of the party’s affiliates.

It is important to note that in the case of the participatory-party model just considered, as well as in the former case of a party that relies on marketing techniques, we are not facing any patent party pathology. These parties are not mere factions, since they aim at representing the interests of the whole political community, nor do they function as mere catch-all parties as they ground their claims on partisan conceptions of the common good and perform an adversarial function within the democratic process. ⁵⁰ Moreover, from a purely outcome-oriented point of view, their activities may contribute significantly to the mechanics of public deliberation by making relevant information available to the general public, by mobilizing the public around overarching political proposals, and by producing principled arguments that support them. It is also possible that these parties may achieve better results, according to outcome-oriented standards, than conceivable alternatives. They might produce more coherent platforms and of better epistemic quality, sharper justifications, and more solid, or more appealing, forms of mobilization. However, they fail to fulfill the important procedural requirement of ensuring reflexive control. As a consequence, the process through which these parties’ platforms are crafted will also fail to produce a genuine “deliberative stance” in their opponents and in the public arena at large.

Intra-party Deliberation and Reflexive Control

The examples presented in the last section illustrate how parties can perform the essential epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions that facilitate deliberation within a deliberative system according to an outcome-oriented interpretation while failing to guarantee reflexive control. We want to argue that the crucial element that must be present if parties are to ensure such control is intra-party deliberation. Intra-party deliberation has been advocated as an instantiation of intra-party democracy or as a fruitful means through which parties can better perform their role of linkage between public opinion and institutional decisions. ⁵¹ Instead, we propose to look at this notion from the specific angle set up by our preceding discussion—that is, as a requirement of a deliberative system that honors the principle of reflexive control.

In the model we propose, intra-party deliberation is defined as a process through which party decisions concerning political programs, party regulations, political strategies, and party values are taken according to three main requirements.

The first requirement is mutual acceptability. A party’s decisions about its own political programs, internal regulations, political goals, and strategies must be justified by arguments that are accessible and acceptable to all its affiliates and members. This requirement, as with any deliberative principle, mandates deciding on grounds of principled reasons and arguments rather than mere persuasion, bargaining power, manipulation, or any other process that does not address the reasoned consent of those involved. However, it is important to stress that intra-party deliberation, though principled and based on reasoned consent, is expected to be performed from a specifically partisan perspective. ⁵² Embracing a partisan perspective implies committing to a distinctive worldview, to a party identity shaped by a past history of political struggles, ⁵³ and to the strategic aim to gain electoral success and institutional power. This partisan requirement does not detract from the principled and consensual nature of the processes involved. In fact, partisan commitment to a worldview and loyalty to a party’s identity presuppose a constant work of clarification and interpretation of the party’s fundamental tenets and past history, which must be grounded on principles that can command the allegiance of party members. The same holds for the strategic aim to gain electoral success and political power. Although at first sight this might look like an unprincipled activity that can be performed by technicians and experts, the reasoning about the strategic positioning of a party is deliberative and principled to the extent that it relies on a shared interpretation of the basic tenets of its worldview and a consideration of its past history and tradition.

The second requirement of the model of intra-party deliberation we propose is pluralism: affiliates must be able to challenge their party’s policies according to competing interpretations of the party’s principles. This requirement complements mutual acceptability by ensuring that the principled reasons offered to a party’s affiliates are not imposed on them as authoritative interpretations of a party’s dogma but are contestable and can be conceived as the result of reflexive exchanges within the party. Pluralism thus understood implies that dissenting voices within the party are not censored. Moreover, parties should allow the development of organized cleavages and currents and provide appropriate venues in which the different positions on the party line can be presented and debated through an exchange of reasons, such as party conventions, meetings of local branches, online platforms, party newspapers, and other party media. Finally, and very importantly, such deliberative exchanges must be able to affect the circuits through which the party’s general lines of policy are decided. Such internal pluralism is more likely to emerge in large parties that have a wide spectrum of social referents and cover a broad range of issues, such as the two major parties in the US system; ⁵⁴ however, it is also compatible with smaller parties, provided they are not single-issue and do not represent highly factional interests. It is important to underline that the requirement of pluralism stops short of mandating complete participatory equality or direct democracy within the party. In fact, not only may such a mandate run against the need to ensure an efficient party organization, ⁵⁵ but contestations, internal dissent, and the adequate representation of different party lines may be best served by institutional mechanisms of delegation and representation ⁵⁶ in hierarchical party structures than by the direct participation of individual members as such.

The third requirement of our model of intra-party deliberation is publicity. It mandates that the processes through which a party sets up its principles, policies, and strategies must be visible and known not only to the lower ranks of the party, but to the party’s opponents and to the general public as well. Publicity is a standard requirement of deliberative processes, but in order to be applied to intra-party deliberation also this requirement, like the preceding ones, must be compatible with partisanship. In this respect, two points are especially worthy of clarification. First, publicity does not imply universal access to participation, which would defeat partisanship; it is perfectly legitimate for a party, in all the major sites where its internal deliberation takes place, to promote deliberation among its members only while still making it possible for outsiders and nonaffiliates to follow the deliberative process as bystanders. Second, publicity does not entail perfect knowledge and accessibility of all the processes and facts that lead to the formation of the claims, doctrines, and arguments that will contribute to the internal debate. Surely there are party events and meetings that can happen behind closed doors, and no deliberative ideal can require that the processes that lead to the airing of claims and arguments are public and transparent all the way down. However, publicity requires, quite demandingly, that the fundamental decisions on party policies and lines of action are taken in official settings that are visible and public in the sense that they can be known and followed by each affiliate and by the general public.

The requirements of mutual acceptability, pluralism, and publicity add an important procedural and discursive dimension to the idea that parties need to appeal to distinctive and coherent ideologies to justify their platforms, programs, and main political strategies. ⁵⁷ These procedural constraints do not set impossibly demanding standards on the life of parties, as in fact they are instantiated to various degrees by the current practice of many democratic systems. Nor do they validate a unique and defined party model, which is as it should be if the associative life of parties is to be free. However, they set some clear standards—which run against some current practices—for how parties should organize their internal life and their relations to the rest of the democratic public.

First of all, mutual acceptability and pluralism set important standards for the role and composition of party membership. In fact, mutual acceptability presupposes a bounded discursive community that shares some ideological background and commitment. This rules out forms of membership according to which party affiliation can be grounded on single issues or on fluid and not necessarily coherent values, ⁵⁸ and counts against procedures that undermine party membership, such as open primaries. ⁵⁹ However, it is important to underline that the bounded discursive community cannot include only those who hold the official status of members. It needs to be extended to individuals, groups, unions, social movements, and associations that openly share the same ideological background and towards which the party is therefore accountable. ⁶⁰

Constraints on membership also proceed from the requirement of pluralism. In fact, a party might ground its programs and internal decisions in coherent ideological views while the procedures through which these ideologies are developed might be hierarchical and not leave any reflexive role to party members. This is the case, for example, with a party that maintains ideological coherence through an aggressive use of expulsions or by barring from membership individuals or groups that might challenge the established leadership. ⁶¹ These practices, which have been common in right-wing populist European parties such as the Front National, ⁶² are often stigmatized as signs of the “personalization” of their leadership and their lack of internal democracy. From our perspective, their main fault is that by suppressing pluralism they hinder a fundamental condition for internal deliberation and undermine the requirement of mutual acceptability as a guarantee of effective accountability and contestability in the internal life of a party.

Secondly, it is important to remark once again that the requirements of acceptability and pluralism are meant to ensure internal deliberation, rather than internal democracy in the form of participatory equality within the party. These remarks are of the utmost importance, especially in view of the effort some parties have recently made to regain linkage and relevance by instituting methods of direct democracy and horizontal forms of confrontation through online discussion platforms. Even if these methods were successful in achieving better intra-party democracy, ⁶³ they might not create the conditions for the kind of intra-party deliberation that serves reflexive control, because absent organized forms of internal pluralism the debate would not be structured enough to clarify the issues at stake and make the social and motivational bases of the different positions explicit.

Distancing the notion of intra-party deliberation from the ideal of intra-party democracy does not rule out that parties can resort to a vote among their members as a way to make an important decision. However, it excludes those procedures that do not leave room for a proper deliberation among party members in a context of organized pluralism. To exemplify, it might be useful to compare two cases: the 2018 referendum held within the German SPD to decide whether to take part in the Große Koalition, and the recent Italian case of the Five Star online vote on a “government contract” with the Lega. While the SPD left its members over a month to discuss the issue before the vote, which allowed different groups and prominent figures within the party to publicly confront one another on the pros and cons of the coalition, the Five Star announced the agreement and immediately opened, for ten hours, the online ballot without leaving any room for confrontation. ⁶⁴

This understanding of intra-party deliberation also avoids some important worries usually voiced against the ideal of intra-party democracy. Notably, there is the worry of polarization and radicalization because party members have a stronger ideological commitment than the rest of the public and more radical views than party elites. ⁶⁵ However, as we mentioned, mutual acceptability requires that programs and strategies be discursively justified to members by appeals not only to the ideological background of the party, but also to the party’s chance of electoral and political success. If these considerations enter the picture, it is unlikely that the party will radicalize. An established literature also warns against the dangers of intra-party democracy because of its potential divisiveness ⁶⁶ and the risk of ideological inconsistency. However, if mediated through open and visible mechanisms of internal deliberation, in some cases even major repositionings or realignments of political parties can be more intelligible and credible than perfectly consistent but dogmatic reassertions of the leadership line. For example, it has been argued that the shift towards the center of the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores that brought the party electoral success in 2002 was perceived as credible and intelligible because the party’s internal constitution provided institutional room for factions and organized contestation through which an open process of internal discussion took place. ⁶⁷

Finally, some important restraints on the shape of the internal life of parties come from the publicity requirement. Publicity is clearly violated in those parties in which the fundamental moments of decision making are hidden from the eyes of the public. However, visibility is not publicity, and mere accessibility does not guarantee understanding. This is evident in the case of online platforms for deliberation and decision making that are visible and accessible but in fact unintelligible because the processes they support are too fractured and dispersed. In this respect, a fundamental function of providing intelligibility can be performed by traditional media venues; by hosting the reflections of prominent party figures on the debates and decisions taking place within the party, they can play a significant role in making such debates intelligible and relevant to the general public. However, with regards to the requirement of publicity, new media are providing formidable opportunities that would be unthinkable in the past—for example, allowing parties to stream the official meetings of their central committees, a practice in use in some left-wing European political organizations such as the Democratic Party in Italy. ⁶⁸ Moreover, through their online sites parties can provide constant and updated information on their internal documents, decisions, meetings, and schedules, thus making their internal life accessible to party members and the general public.

In sum, although not impossibly demanding, the requirements of intra-party deliberation are not trivially satisfied. Not just parties built around programs devised through marketing techniques or directed by plebiscitarian methods of vote aggregation, but also highly centralized parties that systematically repress internal pluralism, parties with no fixed referent or membership, parties that make their most important meetings behind closed doors, and many other parties among those populating current democracies do not meet the requirements of intra-party deliberation as defined here. Although in many cases they are not affected by the obvious party pathologies that would make them incapable of providing linkage and ideological consistency, by failing to meet the conditions for intra-party deliberation they are unable to provide reflexive control. Conversely, it is easy to see that when the principle of intra-party deliberation as defined here is fulfilled, the epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions of parties will be carried out in a way that ensures reflexive control.

Consider first the epistemic function. Since intra-party deliberation requires publicity, the general public can keep track of the main steps of the filtering process through which informational complexity is reduced. The opacity that surrounded the way in which the party program was concocted in our previous examples is no longer possible. Once the party’s program and policy proposals eventually get to be debated in the public arena, not only the party’s affiliates but the public at large will have had the opportunity to form a clear grasp on their discursive background and rationale.

Second, we saw that parties may play an important motivational role in a deliberative system, but they may do so in a way that nurtures unreflexive loyalty in its supporters, who do not critically engage with the party lines and therefore cannot elicit respect from their opponents. Intra-party deliberation shields partisanship from this lack of reflexive control because a discursive model of political action is incompatible with unreflexive loyalty. When programs, policies, and political strategies within the party are deliberatively decided, they are the outcomes of a reflexive mediation among a plurality of interpretations of the values to which the party is committed. When the most relevant party decisions are produced in this way, partisanship will entail not a blind loyalty toward a party’s decisions and proposals but a reflexive commitment that critically assesses them.

This work of critical reflection will have effects on the deliberative processes taking place in the wider political arena. The requirement of publicity will ensure that partisans will see that members and affiliates of competing parties have formed their views in the same deliberative way. Within this context, citizens will be loyal to their partisan values and aim at winning over their counterparts but will respect those who do not share their views. Intra-party deliberation thus is able to warrant the affective dimension of reflexive control by ensuring and making visible that political passions and loyalties are not the result of manipulation, mere habit, or ignorance, but rather spring from a process of critical reflexion that elicits equal respect and the sense that the parties share a “deliberative stance.”

Finally, if parties produce their programs and policy proposals through a deliberative process that fulfills mutual acceptability and pluralism, this very process will also produce the relevant justifications. Moreover, the publicity requirement will ensure that the general public will be able to see this process as it unfolds. When such policies and programs will eventually get discussed in the wider public arena, the party’s opponents and the general public will know that they are confronted with the actual reasons and justifications that have shaped the party’s agenda, rather than straw arguments concocted ex post in order to participate in debates in front of a public audience.

Intra-party Deliberation and the Systemic Turn

If our analysis in the previous section is correct, intra-party deliberation as defined here is essential to ensure that parties perform their fundamental epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions in a way that makes it possible for citizens to exercise reflexive control in the process of democratic decision making.

However, we might wonder whether imposing a deliberative requirement on the internal life of parties does not bring us back to a model of deliberative democracy in which all the parts of a deliberative system must be deliberative themselves and be submitted to impartiality requirements, which would amount to a fundamental rejection of the systemic approach. This would be a significant drawback to the extent that the systemic approach is seen as offering an account of deliberative democracy that is descriptively richer and more in tune with a realistic assessment of the circumstances and complexity of contemporary democratic societies.

There are three main reasons why this is not the case. First, as we specified, the model of intra-party deliberation we have in mind involves reflexive interactions among partisans who ground their claims on partisan interpretations of the common good and adopt political strategies shared by their fellow partisans. Since a unitary, impartial model of democratic deliberation rules out these expressions of partisanship, what we propose here is not the return to a such a traditional model of deliberation, but a more fine-grained view of the role of parties within a deliberative system that is grounded on the idea of reflexive control.

Second, intra-party deliberation does not need to apply to all the issues and matters that a party is called to address, but only to those principles and policy guidelines that become matters of the party’s public advocacy within the public sphere. These matters should be treated deliberatively because they are of immediate concern for parties in their role as facilitators of public deliberation. However, parties also have other functions and roles within the political system. For example, they are a means of political socialization through political schools, organizational work, and similar activities; or (in many systems) they are a fundamental channel for the recruitment of the higher ranks of public administration. These activities contribute in important ways to the workings of a deliberative system but are not directly related to the tasks that parties perform as facilitators of public deliberation, and therefore the arguments for intra-party deliberation do not apply to them. This means that even within parties the deliberative requirement leaves ample room for nondeliberative activities. A fair degree of pluralism, publicity, and mutual acceptability can obviously be desirable also in the selection of public officials in order to prevent corruption, nepotism, or simply poor choice. However, these considerations are independent of those relating to parties in their function as facilitators of public deliberation.

Finally, the deliberative requirement that applies to parties (in their role as facilitators of public deliberation) does not necessarily apply to other parts of the democratic system, which can be fully nondeliberative. Parties are subject to a special deliberative requirement because, as we argued, they play a unique and important role in providing reflexive control within a deliberative system. In this, they differ from other actors and components of the system that are not subject to the same deliberative requirements. So, for example, a deliberative system can be enriched by acts of protest that do not respect the deliberative etiquette or by the open manifestation of private or factional interests; ⁶⁹ however, if these expressions must enter the deliberative circuit that ultimately grounds democratic decision making, they need to be translated into claims that, while still keeping their adversarial and contestatory potential, can be accessible to and assessable by the general public, and this is exactly a task that parties should perform.

The requirements of intra-party deliberation, in sum, only ensure that citizens exercise reflexive control, but do not demand that every component of the democratic system fulfill deliberative requirements. Therefore, they are very far from making the idea of a deliberative system collapse into a unitary, pre-systemic model of democratic deliberation.

Conclusion

The rehabilitation of parties within the normative theory of democracy, along with the systemic turn that recently characterized the deliberative ideal, has set the ground for a model of democratic deliberation that is not only closer to reality than previous theorizations, but richer from the normative point of view. In fact, because of their position and institutional role within the democratic system, parties have an inherent interest in performing epistemic, motivational, and justificatory functions that serve the mechanics of public deliberation and indeed make it possible and manageable. However, these claims risk being interpreted in a merely outcome-oriented perspective, thus leaving in the background the processes through which parties actually perform such tasks. But processes matter, and there are ways in which parties, through their typical activities, produce outcomes that are functional to the mechanics of public deliberation but in fact betray the deliberative ideal by failing to fulfill its distinctive principle of democratic legitimacy, which requires that citizens can exercise reflexive control on the processes that lead to democratic decisions.

We argued that intra-party deliberation is an antidote to such failings and that this is a strong reason to favor intra-party deliberation. In fact, this reason makes such deliberation a necessary requirement if parties are to contribute to democratic legitimacy. Moreover, we also argued that this line of argument points towards a specific understanding of intra-party deliberation, centered on the requirements of mutual accountability, pluralism, and publicity. Clarifying these requirements helps to pinpoint current practices and ways parties organize and communicate to the public, which can apparently contribute to the workings of a deliberative system from a purely outcome-oriented perspective but still fail to meet a fundamental procedural requirement of democratic legitimacy.