ABSTRACT
It is often assumed that a democratic or parliamentary socialism will adopt a passive and conservative approach to the representative institutions by means of which it has come to power. It is evident that the conditions o f stable parliamentary politics in advanced Western countries will deny victory at the ballot box to any party that seeks the revolutionary overthrow of the existing constitutional and legal framework. Few democratic socialists would wish to do so even if they could, fearing that the result would be a dictatorship and one-party domination. But democratic socialist ideas are virtually meaningless if they do not encompass the radical reform of the political system by legal means, including the reform of Parliament itself. Political reforms - such as radical democratization - ought to be as important as economic and social reforms to democratic socialists today. Indeed, they ought to perceive that democratization is one of the preconditions for the lasting success of socialist policies.
