Democratic innovation without political parties should be unthinkable

Much has been written about the state of parties and democracy. For electoral democracy scholars, parties are in trouble and, thus, so is democracy. Meanwhile, democratic innovations scholars operate with a different premise about parties, which they see as ‘the problem’, and the state of democracies, which they see as being re-imagined as citizen-centred. In short, we have a dystopian view about the state of parties and democracy versus a utopian view of a democracy that excludes parties. The paper start by reviewing these conflicting views to make the case that one is under-estimating the potential of democratic innovations and the other is under-estimating the role of parties in driving the innovations. We then set out a framework of democratic innovations centred on party agency. Finally, we reverse things to examine the role of democratic innovations within parties, again revealing divergent views about the nature of the reforms and the potential of parties.