ABSTRACT
One of the early twentieth-century writers on compromise in politics was the Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen. In this chapter, David Ragazzoni argues that Kelsen’s political theory offers an underexplored, and misinterpreted, contribution to the discussion of the place of compromise in democratic politics. For Kelsen, modern, representative democracy is party democracy, and the division of the people into political parties is the precondition for the achievement of compromises inside representative institutions. Ragazzoni connects Kelsen’s vision of compromise to recent discussions of the place of parties and partisanship in democracy (Rosenblum 2008; Muirhead 2014; White and Ypi 2016). He argues that a critical analysis of Kelsen’s democratic theory helps to address the relation between parties, partisanship, and representation— three “dots” of political compromise that, usually compartmentalized by theorists, is worth reconnecting.
