Revisiting Parliamentary Democracy in the Twentieth Century: Historical Contingency of Party-Based Democracy?

In mainstream literatures, "competition" is regarded as the key mechanism ensuring various virtues of democracy, which almost becomes pre-theoretical shared belief. On that belief, various diagnosis such as “post-democracy” or “cartelization” has been given. This paper questions this assumption and try to re-conceptualize the theoretical core of parliamentary democracy in the twentieth century Europe. We argue that the twentieth-century party democracy in Western Europe was based not on “competition” but on “integration” and compromise. To advance this theoretical reflection, the paper builds on the work of Hans Kelsen. His work shows us that a sort of "integration" by political parties is crucial to the working of parliamentary democracy. It also suggests that a rather monist view of democratic institutions, which puts the parliament in the center, had underlain European party democracies, in contrast to the prevailing “division of powers” view stressing accountability. As empirical illustrations, we take two examples, Interwar Austria and Postwar West Germany, to show that Kelsen's view had been a better abstraction from the actual working of party democracy, than the textbook Schumpeterian model. By implication, this paper argues that programmatic party-based democracy was made possible by the underlying socio-cultural structure and the party organizaton, which are very hard to reproduce or substitute and it necessitates contextualized understanding of the working mechanism of real existing democracy.