Didi Kuo: Stronger political parties, stronger democracies
Didi Kuo: Stronger political parties, stronger democracies
Political scientist Didi Kuo challenged the narrative that political parties are the problem and said that strengthening their connections to the citizenry is the key to addressing today’s democratic crisis.
When political parties are strong intermediaries between citizens and the government, they can effectively manage the relationship between democracy and capitalism, political scientist Didi Kuo told a Stanford audience.
But when parties become weak intermediaries, they lay the groundwork for crises in democracy, she said during a February 20 event for her new book, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, 2025). In her work, she challenged the narrative that parties are the problem and explained that strengthening them is actually the key to addressing current challenges to democracies.
The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted the panel discussion with Kuo, Center Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, and co-director of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Honors Program; Bruce Cain, professor of political science at Stanford and director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West; Jake Grumbach, associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley; and Julia Azari, professor of political science at Marquette University.
Kuo described how political parties in the last 50 years have grown weaker and more unpopular while also becoming increasingly professionalized and beholden to the private sector – trends that have resulted in a “plutocratic populism” where parties no longer exist to represent their constituents.
‘They’re often hollow’
As democracy expanded across the West in the 19th century, she said, political parties were often strong and arguably machine-like in their effectiveness. Then, after the Cold War, a neoliberal economic consensus emerged that included seismic changes to campaign finance and shifting party priorities. The effects included the weakening of the party systems of Western democracies, a ceding of governance to the private sector, and, as a result, a crisis in democracy.
“Party organizations themselves have become far more professionalized, elite, and focused exclusively on the technology and machinery of election campaigns. There's been much less role for state and local parties,” said Kuo, adding that in this “era of nationalized parties,” political parties at these lower levels have become sidelined. “They're often hollow.”
And that creates an opening for some. For example, she said, after 2010, the extreme right began to build local power in parties. “Steve Bannon did a podcast in which he recommended that people look up their local Republican Party organization. He said you’re very likely to find that it’s empty, so you can just go there with some of your friends. Sign up, become a local party chair, and then you can take over election administration. So, this was a strategy that was promulgated on his podcast prior to 2020.”
Today, state parties have played very weak roles in their national parties’ structures, Kuo said. “There’s also been much less reliance on the affiliated groups that once constituted the core of parties, such as labor unions, student groups, women's groups, and groups that really emerged in an era of the mass organization party.”
At the same time, she noted, while not a full convergence, an increasing similarity has arisen among the major parties regarding their economic approaches to governance and markets.
This holds two key implications, she said. First, this embrace of neoliberal orthodoxies has eroded the traditional distinctions between left and right that support the party systems. “Neither party really represents the working class through an economic agenda,” Kuo said.
She added, “There’s a lot of empirical evidence that these erosions of party differences in left and right generate more political instability. They produce more extremist candidates who can capitalize on the fact that voters aren't sure how to hold politicians to account when the policies are the same and also increases the level of anti-system messaging in political campaigns.”
The second implication is that these changes to party organization have resulted in more delegation to non-party groups – political strategists, consultants, and the private sector – that end up doing the work that parties historically did.
Meanwhile, the parties increasingly reflect an “educational cleavage” among voters that, along with increased outsourcing of governance to the private sector, has contributed to a rise of “plutocratic populism.”
In his remarks, Cain raised the issue of how campaign finance reform and other institutional changes, such as the introduction of primaries, contributed to the decline of strong political parties. Meanwhile, rapid changes in technology and global economics are playing roles in the political process.
“Globalization means we don't have stable neighborhoods anymore, that labor is going in and out, that we communicate in a completely different way than the way we used to, which makes it very hard to rely on the party machines,” he said.
Azari said parties are failing to live up to their central role in representing the citizenry and “empowering less powerful groups in society” that offer “a countervailing source of power to capital.” A turn to centrism or a “third way” by the Democratic Party in the 1990s reflected such a dynamic of disconnection.
“The political center is a nondescript place, a nonexistent voter, yet it looms large in the public imagination,” Azari added.
Grumbach said that as a behaviorist, he seeks to understand the “neurology of the mass voter brain.” He cited a recent Quinnipiac survey that revealed how negatively Democratic voters now view Democratic members of Congress compared to poll results in October 2024. “It is a massive shift … the Democratic Party is ripe for a takeover.”
‘Democratic renewal’
Kuo, an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the think tank New America, has written widely about democratization, capitalism, and political parties.
Kuo said, “I'll say that we are in a very bad place in American democracy that goes far beyond anything any one political party can do … I think that building stronger political parties very much needs to be part of democratic renewal.”
In a recent interview with CDDRL, Kuo noted, “Much of my research highlights the importance of understanding not just what governments and institutions look like, but how they link to society. How do they connect with citizens? How do they convince citizens that government actions are meaningful and worthwhile? These are critical questions for democracy.”
