Diminished Parties

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More often than not, contemporary works on political parties start by referring to Schattschneider's now famous dictum concerning democracy's need for political parties. At the same time, many authors have identified parties that, in democratic contexts, fail in various ways to fulfill the function of democratic representation. Mainstream political science has defined a political party as a group of candidates who compete in elections (Downs 1957, Schlesinger 1994, among many others). This minimal definition has important analytical implications. When analyzing electoral politics, we run the risk of looking for parties - and thus, finding them - without realizing that what we have found, empirically, is only weakly related to democratic representation"--