Representative Democracy Takes a 'Deliberative Turn'

Abstract

In a set of papers published in his final years, Peter Mair expressed strong and ever more urgent concerns over the state of party politics and the future of representative politics itself . The aim of this paper is to examine his thesis. I start in the next section by setting out the main points of Mair’s arguments on party and democratic failure. I next consider the question of whether the evidence supports such a perspective, or whether in fact there are signs of adaptability and change. This then leads to a discussion about the reform agenda in established representative democracies, an agenda that in a growing number of cases is bringing deliberation centre stage.