Life of the Parties

Not so long ago, parties were the dominant engines of the political process in many democracies. They identified, recruited, trained, and nominated suitable candidates, then helped finance and organize campaigns for public office. This process was brilliantly analyzed decades ago by the French scholar Maurice Duverger, who described parties as “transmission belts.” More recently, after the 2008 Democratic primaries in the United States, four American political scientists summarized this traditional approach in The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations before and after Reform. But today the transmission belts of many democracies seem to have worn out. What has happened?

A complex process of societal transformations has brought fundamental changes that have weakened party institutions. These have included upheavals in the news media, specifically the decline of print journalism and local newspapers, and the increasing domination of cable news channels that...