ABSTRACT
No one should write another paper about inter-party competition withou some very good excuse, but I think I have found two related difficulties which together justify another paper on the subject. The first and most important of these follows from the very special place given to party competition in contemporary democratic theory, and from an ambiguity which arises from it. We no longer pretend that the citizens of a democratic state literally choose the policies with which they must live: rather, we now say, they choose the political parties which make these policies. This view, which emerged as a substitute for the naivetes of earlier positions, 1 presumes that election outcomes decide which party or coalition of parties will make policy during an inter-election period. Anthony Downs, for example, suggests that the following condition is met in practice by all those regimes which we think of as ‘democratic’: 2 A single party (or coalition of parties) is chosen by popular election to run the governing apparatus.
