Taking up the baton? New campaigning organisations and the enactment of representative functions
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Author | Danny Rye,Katharine Dommett |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395717725934 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395717725934
Politics
2018, Vol. 38(4) 411 –427
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395717725934
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Taking up the baton? New
campaigning organisations
and the enactment of
representative functions
Katharine Dommett
University of Sheffield, UK
Danny Rye
Liverpool Hope University, UK
Abstract
Political parties have historically provided a key means by which citizens gain representation in
the state, with parties enabling participation, integration, aggregation, conflict management, and
linkage. Over recent years, parties’ representative credentials have declined and new organisations
have emerged as vehicles of representation. What is, however, unclear is the extent to which these
new organisations have taken on the representative functions parties are traditionally seen to have
performed. In this article, we examine Citizens UK and 38 Degrees as indicative examples to argue
that, while opportunities for participation and integration can be found, aspects of aggregation,
conflict management and linkage are no longer being performed. Diagnosing this change, we argue
that these shifts in representation are having significant but as yet unrecognised consequences for
how citizens relate to and engage with contemporary politics.
Keywords
new campaigning organisations, party decline, political participation, political parties,
representation
Received: 20th December 2016; Revised version received: 7th July 2017; Accepted: 11th July 2017
Schattschneider’s observation that ‘modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the
parties’ (Schattschneider, 1942: 1) has become something of a truism in political science,
but is it true anymore? Political representation has historically been advanced through
political parties, which ‘resolve the basic representational dilemma of articulating and
aggregating otherwise disparate interests, so that electoral majorities could be welded
together and countries could be governed’ (Mudge and Chen, 2014: 11). Located between
Corresponding author:
Katharine Dommett, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK.
Email: k.dommett@sheffield.ac.uk
725934POL0010.1177/0263395717725934PoliticsDommett and Rye
research-article2017
Article
412 Politics 38(4)
citizens and the state, parties have a unique capacity to advance both representative func-
tions as vehicles for political participation and expression and procedural functions relat-
ing to the formation and maintenance of government (Mair, 2009: 5). They provide, in
short, democratic ‘linkage’ (Lawson, 1980), forging a ‘solid and durable’ bond connect-
ing the electorate and policymakers (Cayrol and Jaffré, 1980: 27). The representative
functions they perform, therefore, extend beyond the formal role of elected representa-
tives, encompassing wider concerns including participation, the integration of communi-
ties, and the relationship between citizens and the state.
However, two significant trends have had critical implications for parties’ performance
of this dual role. First, is the idea that political parties have de-emphasised their repre-
sentative functions in favour of procedural ones (Mair, 2013). As parties have evolved,
they have become more professionalised and marketing-oriented (Lees-Marshment,
2008) and in many cases more like state-oriented ‘cartels’ increasingly distant from civil
society (Katz and Mair, 1995). Second, while there has been recent notable membership
growth in some UK political parties – with Labour, the Scottish National Party, and Green
Party all reporting significant increases – this professionalisation has been accompanied
by long-term declines in party membership (Van Biezen and Poguntke, 2014) and weak-
ening party identification (Dalton, 2008), which remains a durable trend (Poguntke et al.,
2016). Thus, while parties had in the past managed to combine both roles, we have now
arrived at a point at which ‘they emphasize procedural functions alone’ (Mair, 2013: 90).
This leaves a gap where their representative functions, important ingredients of a working
representative democracy, are left unperformed.
While some scholars suggest that this points towards a potential crisis for contempo-
rary representation (Enyedi, 2014; Van Biezen and Poguntke, 2014), others are more
optimistic. The growth of interest group membership including social movements and
online campaigning platforms provide evidence that, far from being in decline, represen-
tation is alive and well. The representative functions traditionally attributed to parties
have simply been taken over by new kinds of organisation. Accounts of, for example, the
rise of online participation (Shane, 2004), new social movements (Savyasaachi, 2014),
pressure groups (Grant, 2008), and campaign organisations (Jordan and Maloney, 1997)
therefore appear reassuring. However, political representation is a multi-faceted phenom-
enon that can be played out in different ways (Pitkin, 1967) and what is not clear is the
extent to which alternative forms of political organisation fulfil the representative func-
tions that have traditionally been attributed to parties. Thus, we are less concerned in this
article with the fortunes of political parties themselves and instead ask to what extent
have these representative functions been taken up by others?
Outline
In order to answer this question, we examine two organisations that represent emerging
and popular forms of non-party political participation – Citizens UK and 38 Degrees – as
indicative examples of the kind of bodies that have moved into the representative gaps
left behind by political parties. We have chosen these two examples because they exem-
plify growing modes of popular political campaigning, community organising (Citizens
UK), and digitally oriented activism (38 Degrees). Unlike pressure groups, they do not
limit themselves to single issues but seek to provide an organised voice in the political
system for communities with a range of interests and needs. Their approaches differ from
each other in key ways – for instance, Citizens UK organises on a largely geographical
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