ABSTRACT
Recent debates on the legitimacy of representative democracy have drawn attention again to the trinity of parliaments, parties and mass suffrage that has transformed politics during the last 150 years. In many parts of the world, the three constituted the basic structural building blocks for reconstructing national polities into twentieth-century liberal democracies. In public debate as well as political science literature, the institutional structures favourable or detrimental to democracy-in practice the ‘rise’ or ‘decline’ debates-are still central to concerns such as equality, efficiency and stability. Most resistance to mass suffrage, however, died with the reform itself, although those of an elitist inclination still vegetate intellectually on the works of Pareto, Mosca and Michels. The Russian turn-of-the-century liberal, Moisei Ostrogorski, wrote the bible of the ‘blame-it-on-the-parties movement’, claiming that permanent external party organisations perverted the free deliberation of parliaments. The illiberal power of the parties was not subject to control by parliament. Hence, Ostrogorski pleaded for temporary or ad hoc parties in order to save the primacy of parliament. In the early 1920s, however, Lord Bryce (reluctantly) accepted the impact of parties and general suffrage: ‘The spirit of democratic equality has made the masses of the people less deferential…. This is in some respects a gain, for it enables popular wishes to be better expressed, but it makes a difference to Parliamentary habits’ (cited in: Norton 1990:50).
