ABSTRACT
This chapter's reflections and conclusions on the many challenges to modern democratic government and to democratic theory as a public philosophy begin with the problems created by political parties. Although it is over simple and misleading for modern democracy to be defined in formal terms as competition between political parties, the struggles for and the exercise of governmental power by political parties are the central empirical facts of current democratic politics. Political parties, for public choice theorists, resemble large companies competing in an economic market, but with the opposed parties using their resources to obtain votes rather than profits, and with the purpose of their vote gathering being governmental power for their leading members, and the status, monetary rewards and other perks which go with it. Democrats in the public philosophic tradition have resisted the undermining of democratic life by political parties and tried to further the potential of these parties to enhance it.
