Does online politics need parties?
John Lloyd wrote an article in yesterday’s FT on the decline of political parties. It was not particularly noteworthy, but near the end, he said:
As urbanisation and industrialisation produced the mass party, so mass participation in the internet begins to sketch a new democratic order – one that depends little on party.
While I think the Internet has potential for supporting a ‘new democratic order’, ’sketchy’ is an understatement in describing it.
The jury is definitely out on whether political parties are going to be killed off by the Internet - Barack Obama’s candidacy, for all the new media buzz around it, is fundamentally a party political campaign.
At a more philosophical level, political parties answered the main challenge of mass democracy - how do you take the views of millions of disparate people and discuss them rationally, in a way that political leaders and citizens can understand?
It’s not certain that the rise of the internet invalidates the old way of working. The challenge of mass democracy is the same online or off - and the online picture will get even more confused as internet penetration rates increase further.
Political parties are not the only possible solution, and British parties are proving slow to adapt to the online world. There may be better ways of framing online debate, but parties have a track record and it is hard to see anything, at least currently, that offers a better alternative.