People are fed up with political parties, and that's a big problem for democracy, says political scientist Didi Kuo. She joins host Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast to discuss why we need well-functioning parties, how we got the party system we have today, and what can be done to course correct and build better parties for the future.

Watch the video version of their conversation above, or listen to the audio below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms. A full transcript of the episode is also available.

Kuo's latest book is The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't, published by Oxford University Press.

TRANSCRIPT:

McFaul: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Michael McFaul, the Director of FSI. Today, I'm talking with Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow here at th Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law. 

She's an expert on comparative politics, democratization, political reform, and she's the new author of this fantastic book called The Great Retreat, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't.  You should all buy it now. 

Didi, thanks for coming on to World Class with us.

Kuo: Thank you Mike

McFaul: What's the origin story here? Why did you decide to write this book?

Kuo: It's interesting that we're both here at CDDRL because this is very much a product of our intellectual programming. So when I first got to Stanford ten years ago, we started a program on American democracy in comparative perspective.

We at CDDRL have primarily been concerned with how to build strong democracies in places where democracy is emerging and how to have that partner with effective development.

And we started this program on U.S. democracy because we noticed there were these new challenges in the U.S.. I mean, they have historical roots, of course. But we wanted to look abroad and see, are these challenges just in the United States or are they in a lot of other places? And also, what kind of lessons can we draw from them?

And as a result, I got a lot of cool opportunities with the reform community around the United States. And one thing that really struck me is there's deep and widespread anti-party sentiment among a lot of people who care deeply about American democracy. And as a political scientist and a comparativist in particular, it runs counter to everything we know about the relationship of parties and democracy. And really the long-running empirical finding, in anyone who studies democratic consolidation and stability, is that you need strong and robust parties in order to ensure good democratic outcomes.

So, this book was born of a sort of understanding of this big disconnect. We have a public that increasingly dislikes and distrust parties. We also have a lot of historical evidence that we need strong parties to get better democratic outcomes. And in particular, to mediate this relationship of democracy and capitalism that has long been considered stable, but has been fraught, especially at the start in the 19th century.

This book is to try to help us understand what parties historically have been good for, why it is that they're weak today, and why we should think in a kind of pro-party or a party-building framework when we also think about democratic renewal.

McFaul: Well, that's a great segue. Those are three great questions. You just asked three big ‘why’ questions. Let's talk about them in detail.

So, why parties in the first place, right? It's not intuitive, I think, to a lot of people that parties are necessary for democracy. Tell us that story.

And then the next ‘why’ question is, why are they in retreat?

Kuo: There's a long history. We could go all the way back to the beginning of modern democracy when democracy was very limited, right?

So you had these little proto democracies, including the United States, that had legislatures but were not popularly elected in many cases and suffrage was not universal. And in those places you had what Duverger referred to as kind of elite cadre parties. So loose factions in the legislature.

McFaul: Talk about who Duverger is. That just rolls off of your lips, but not necessarily everybody else's.

Kuo: He's a French political scientist who did very early studies of political parties and he's someone who's most well known for an adage that if you have single member districts and first-past-the-post elections, you're likely to get two political parties. And if you have proportional representation, you get multiple parties.

When he was sort of thinking of the history of parties, he noted that they were initially just these elite factions in the legislature. But as democracy expanded and suffrage itself was extended to people who didn't have to own property to vote, there was this kind of dilemma: How do you actually mobilize people into a democratic system and how do you make it actually representative?

And the answer was party organizations.

So parties had to build local chapters. A lot of campaigning and electioneering was very labor intensive. So you had to deploy election agents and volunteers to go literally register people to vote. Parties purveyed the initial journalism, literature, party pamphlets. And elections themselves were often big spectacles. There were public rallies, people voted viva voce, by voice, before the secret ballot. So parties distributed ballots once we got to that era of voting. So a lot of the actual coordination of democratic elections was through parties.

But at the same time, parties performed this linkage function of trying to understand—what are the segments in society? How can we create distinct parties around them that will represent specific constituencies and segments?

And so we have this famous idea from political science that political parties freeze the divisions in society in various ways.

That's kind of a static conception of the party, but over time parties, of course, adapt to the modern era. Once we have full suffrage, for example, parties already have an infrastructure that allows them to integrate new voters. And as we move into the post-war era, in the 19th century, there was a lot of skepticism about whether or not you can have market capitalism and democracy. People like Karl Marx said that these institutions are just going to get captured, right?

McFaul: Right. Right.

Kuo: The post-war consensus about democratic capitalism was because political parties could serve a function of mobilizing interests distinct to capital. You got labor parties and social democratic parties that had strong ties to trade unions. You had the mainstream parties of the center-left and the center-right that alternated in power, competed in fairly predictable ways along a set of economic interests and issues, and developed policy programs that hewed to their different kind of ideological conceptions of the relationship of states and markets.

That's a long way of answering the question of why we have parties. They serve an electoral function and they also serve a representative intermediary linkage function.

Now the retreat. The retreat is after the 1970s, which is an era that, you know . . .

McFaul: It was way back then! Oh! Not just in the last four or five years. That's interesting. Go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

Kuo: No, it's okay! So you get a bunch of different things happening beginning in the 70s, but really accelerating in the 90s.

First, parties adapt to changing communications technology. They become more professionalized and more nationalized. So you start to see an atrophying of local party organizations arise in the use of, first it was direct mail and then of course, if we accelerate way into the nineties, it starts to be a little bit digital. And now, television advertising, et cetera, allows parties to reach voters directly.

So they rely more on professional polling strategists, consultants, to do a lot of the campaign messaging that used to be done in-house or even through a more bottom-up process. And those have had the effects of potentially eroding the intermediary and linkage function of parties, despite the fact that parties continue to be very good at winning elections.

The book focuses at length, I would say, on the 90s, the end of the Cold War, when there's a real consensus about market and political liberalization around the world. And the way that that takes root in Western democracies is through cross-partisan agreement that economic growth should be the foremost goal of government, and that the way to achieve growth is through policies we would associate with neoliberal orthodoxy.

So, deregulation, free trade, globalization, cutting corporate taxes. And that basically creates a consensus in favor of a pro-market, anti-state relationship of democratic capitalism.

McFaul: Just so I'm clear, that happened in both Europe and the United States? Left parties both moved that way, right? I know the American story pretty well. That's like Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council and the Third Way. It was not just in our countries, it was in Europe as well?

Kuo: Right! And there's a really interesting history of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, new leaders who led these insurgent factions within parties of the left to say we have an electability crisis. In order to become a majority party once again, we're going to need to adopt some of the policies of the right and we can do it with social democratic characteristics. We can still care about alleviating poverty through market means. We don't have to rely on the state.

And so you have people like Bill Clinton saying the era of big government is over. But you also have Western European leaders within the social democratic parties getting together at different Third Way conferences and conventions talking about a new era of global social democracy.

And in Europe, the way that that really took hold was the project of the European Union, which provides a really interesting comparison to the United States because once the EU is up and running as a common currency union and it is responsible for a lot of macroeconomic policy, and the free movement of goods, people, and capital across borders, it constrains what national governments can offer. And political parties across Europe, especially of the left, become more constrained in the kinds of economic policies that they adopt in elections. And that kind of convergence of parties nationally provides ample opportunity for extremist parties to fill that void in representation.

It is not dissimilar from what happened in Latin America after structural adjustment policies implemented and mandated by the West take hold in the 80s and 90s, where you have parties along the political spectrum of the left and the right implementing very similar austerity policies, scaling back the scope of their bureaucracies, and in doing, also muddled party distinctions in a way that created more voter antipathy and distrust and ultimately paved the way for more extremist leaders there as well.

McFaul: So, to fast-forward, let's do America and if we have time, we'll come back to Europe . . . tell us a little more about the more recent, and let's focus on Trump first, right?

So Trump seems to be a highly disruptive person within the Republican Party, both in terms of his worldviews and his ideas, but also in terms of his methods, right? Tell us how Trump took over the Republican Party.

Kuo: So there are two things I would point to here.

One is that some of the trends that we've already talked about, including professionalization and nationalization have been true everywhere, right? You need less of a party infrastructure these days. It's something that Allen Hicken and Rachel Riedl have called party deinstitutionalization around the world. Nowadays, a lot of leaders can just use social media to connect directly to audiences.

McFaul: Right. As Trump most certainly did, right? I mean, the first time he ran, he just went, he was on Twitter. He didn't have to go through the party and he didn't have to go on TV.

Kuo: Well, he was already a celebrity.

McFaul: He was already a celebrity, right.

Kuo: As a result, you can obviate a party infrastructure entirely as a candidate. And that's led to trends of personalization. And there's a great new book about how we're entering an era of personalistic parties where they still compete in democratic elections, but they are vulnerable to takeover by specific individuals.

Of course, the way that parties succeed in supporting democracy is when they can transcend the needs of any one individual, right? And they become these brands that last over time and people need to kind of put aside their self-interest to work in the interest of a party. It has a disciplining effect.

Under a personalistic party, of course, there is no such thing and it starts to resemble more of the worlds that you're familiar with: one in which loyalty to an individual is paramount and institutions are only important in so far as they serve the desires of that individual.

I was just reading this morning—and I know we're going a little wide—that Republican members of Congress are now asking for specific exceptions to the DOGE cuts. Which is, of course, what happens in a patrimonial regime and in an era, that I've written about, when patronage and clientelism were far more pervasive than they are today. So building a clean state takes a very long time. Dismantling it can be very fast.

So, on the one hand, there are some trends in political parties and the way they organize that make it more likely that an individual can come to power very quickly. But on the other hand, the other trend that I think is global rather than—or at least in the West—is that of far right extremism.

You and I have written about global populism years ago and we now see through any number of different kinds of overlapping reasons, but one of them is that people are upset at, sort of, this bargain of democratic capitalism, right? It hasn't worked for a lot of people, especially the workers who are left behind by the promise of globalization.

And if we think of the 21st century, the global financial crisis didn't translate into some kind of change in the political alignment or the left and the right, at least that change hasn't been fast by any means. And after the COVID pandemic, that's kind of a juncture of even more distrust. It accelerated that. As a result, you have a lot more general grievance, discontent in the electorate that, again, is ripe for extremist messaging. People don't feel loyal to democratic institutions or processes.

Now, it's not a given that just because there's a combination of democratic and economic unrest that you're necessarily going to get strongman leaders, but it certainly makes it more likely. It can facilitate that kind of politics.

Those are both what I see as long running factors that produced President Trump.

And then I'll just point to a very quick thing is that in the book, I spent some time in the conclusion arguing that when there's a imbalance between who democracy serves—you know, say we go in a much more sort of pro-market private sector direction—it makes it much harder for the government to articulate its raison d'être and the way that the government has effectively protected people or implemented programs that people care about.

These anti-state attitudes have been building in the United States for a really long time and that has made it more likely that people think the private sector should solve problems and it has also has really accelerated the thing that none of us really foresaw which is things like the private sector now, Elon Musk, being asked to make decisions about how the federal government should operate.

For the world's richest man, who's not democratically elected, to take a chainsaw to government and to seemingly do it without being held to account, because the litigation process is going to be slow and is likely to have differential outcomes depending on which circuit court you go to, that is an outcome that I didn't really anticipate: that we would literally just give capitalists the keys to the kingdom.

McFaul: Well, you and me both. I mean, just one more question on that and then let's talk about some solutions or party systems that work.

So this paradox in the United States: I'll just make it personal, but it's an anecdote about a bigger story that's in your book.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Montana. Both my parents were members of unions. And my grandfather was a union leader in Wisconsin at a factory, right?

They voted for decades for Democrats, no question about it. There was never any debate. It was just, “we’re part of the Democratic Party.” And now, seeing the data from the last several election cycles, you have this flip where people that self-identify as working class or less well-off in terms of income, vote for, as you say, a billionaire who's a president who's got as his lieutenant or co-president the richest man in the world. That's such a paradox to me. How did that happen?

Kuo: This his realignment of around class and education has been somewhat long in the running, I suppose.

Since the 90s, people have noted that there's new middle-class coalitions that support, for example, the DLC and the project of the Third Way. Whereas the Republican Party, which used to be very reliably the party of capital, has very recently been breaking its long-standing alliance with business.

When Kevin McCarthy was speaker, he argued that corporations are becoming “too woke.” That chambers of commerce are not reliably Republican enough. And we've started to see these tensions, within and among capitalists themselves, they say we need to move towards stakeholder capitalism rather than shareholder capitalism and embrace environmental, social, and governance goals and implement DEI projects.

All of that has been under attack by certain Republican leaders and Republican governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis. And today, I think we have a very uneasy relationship between capitol and the Republican Party. We've seen a lot of owners of corporations capitulate very quickly to Trump. But again, I don't think that this is like a long-term winning strategy.

But the realignment is also around education. So part of it is that there's not really a reliable party of the working class. And the left is in crisis across the advanced democracies. The social democrats have had very bad electoral showings. In Germany, the worst post-war electoral showing ever was a few weeks ago.

And when that happens, the parties of the left now are more likely to represent people who are better educated. So professionals with higher levels of education, more reliably vote for parties of the left.  Whereas the working class is either up for grabs or increasingly is targeted by parties of the right, not necessarily through economic appeals, but instead through kind of grievance and nationalism, xenophobia, those kinds of cultural issues.

There are some scholars who have been able to empirically document that contestation over economic policy has either declined or stayed the same over the past 30 or 40 years, while there's been an uptick in contestation over cultural issues or ones that are person-based, that are less divisible, that there's less issues, areas for compromise. And that's how you're simultaneously able to see polarization between parties, even though there's also kind of an underlying—or was for a while, at least—economic consensus.

Which is all just to say that the issue of “who do the working class vote for?” is increasingly unsettled.  And both parties claim to represent the working class, although they do so in very different ways.

McFaul: Two last questions. I know we're running out of time. First, what's a good example of a well-functioning party system in the world?

Kuo: A party system that functions well is one that kind of preserves democracy and party competition.

And there are many places in Western Europe, where we still see similar trends of  less rates of party membership. People are less likely to want to join parties. They may switch their votes more, but those parties are still able to preserve democratic procedures and fairness.

I would point to places where parties have actually succeeded in blocking anti-democratic candidates.

In France, there have been multiple times that Marine Le Pen's National Rally made it to the final round of the French presidential election and the parties worked together to stop that. And that was also true when it looked as if that party, the National Rally, was going to make inroads in French legislative elections. All parties worked together to preclude that from happening by sort of bargaining over where they would run candidates.

You know that Poland's Law And Justice party finally suffered electoral defeat and was precluded from a majority by, again, a lot of civil society actors coming together with political parties across the spectrum to block PiS. 

And in Brazil and South Korea, leaders who have overreached have been held to account. 

That's less about parties in general and more about parties in moments of democratic crisis when there's a real possibility of an anti-democratic leader being elected. But I think that in the United States, we now face this question that is prior to building strong parties, we need to establish pro-democracy coalitions across people who disagree, you know, whose issues are not the same, who care about different things. But you have people in the center-right, who now don't have a party. You have people across the political spectrum who should care more about principles and American values than they do about whether or not they should continue to capitulate to this administration in this moment.

McFaul: Right. Well, you may have just answered my last question, but if you were going to write a decade from now, a new book called The Great Renewal, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Do, what would have to change in that decade for you to be able to write that book?

Kuo: There's one theory of democratic transition called “pacting” about when, you know, elites come together and create just an agreement that they're going to put down their arms and agree on these rules of the game. 

The most basic thing that needs to happen is a recommitment to American values and holding people accountable who have violated those values. And I would say those values have to do with accountability, rule of law.

But that's a conversation for another time  But the first thing would be to get the democratic house in order to allow fair play and reestablishing the rules of the game.

The other things that I would really like to see are for parties to reestablish themselves as linkage organizations. And you could do this in any number of ways. One is that parties have been delegating a lot of the work of elections to outside groups. So get out the vote efforts, messaging, issue areas. They can bring that back in-house.

And Giovanni Sartori, a political scientist, once described parties as a transmission belt between society and leaders. If they want to do that again, they will need to bring all of that knowledge and work back within the parties and allow for a bottom-up process of listening to what it is people on the ground want. I don't want to just say voters, because they are more than that. Citizens, people who are living in this country and making their living here and trying to make it a better place also need some way of having their voices heard within the party and for parties to serve that sort of deliberative, factional, mediating function again.

I'd also like to see changes to campaign finance where we learn from most other democracies that have reigned in how private money can affect elections. We have really a diffuse campaign finance system now where many—especially billionaires—can influence politics or at least get their preferred outcome by acting through any number of channels outside the party. But given the current Supreme Court interpretation of speech and equating it to money, it's unlikely that we'll see that anytime soon, but I think it would be good for our political system.

And finally, I would like people who have an issue they care about, or who think the parties are failing, to work within parties rather than outside of them. You can build power outside of a party, but eventually you will need to work within the channels of party organizations to accomplish long-lasting change.

And I think that if people could sort of imagine a world in which they are partisans, but not in a fake way or a way that's highly attenuated from everyday action, but partisans who realize that compromise is part of this, and negotiation, and doing the hard work of everyday politics, seeing that as a goal rather than an enemy, I think would be very helpful.

McFaul: Well those are all very practical things to think about and for people to do.

So Didi, congratulations! Thanks for being on World Class.

The book is called The Great Retreat, How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't.

Please buy this book. If you don't buy books like this, they won't get written in the future. And we need this kind of research for the health of our democracy. This book is not just about parties; it's really about the future of democracy here in the United States and Europe.

So congratulations, Didi! Great to have you on World Class.

Kuo: Thanks Mike, thanks everyone for listening.

McFaul: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.

The second installment discusses the administration’s efforts to cut off funding to democracy-promoting organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, despite congressional approval, which violates the law and undermines democracy. Fukuyama and Diamond highlight how, historically, authoritarian regimes erode the rule of law while claiming democratic legitimacy. They warn that the U.S. is heading toward a constitutional crisis, as Trump's disregard for judicial authority could set a dangerous precedent. Finally, they urge vigilance and legal challenges to uphold liberal democratic principles and institutional checks and balances.

In January, Fukuyama and Diamond also shared their annual review of democracy around the world. Part I focuses on global democracy after the “year of elections,” while Part II examines the state of democracy in the U.S. Both videos can be viewed below.

Kathryn Stoner, the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), introduced the panelists, and Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, moderated the discussion.

On the frontlines, outnumbered Ukrainian troops have waged a stiff resistance, while a mass influx of Russian troops, with enormous loss of life, have made incremental but not decisive progress. Hundreds of thousands have died or been injured on both sides. Talks to end the war are underway between the Trump Administration and Russia, with Ukraine and European nations not currently invited to participate.

‘We will cease to exist’

Matviichuk, who was a visiting scholar from 2017-2018 with the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at CDDRL, noted the conflict has actually been going on for 11 years, since 2014 when Russia invaded and occupied Crimea. Today, she said, there is no safe place in Ukraine where people can hide from Russian rockets. “Just two days ago, Russia sent 263 drones against Kyiv and other peaceful cities in Ukraine.”

Matviichuk described how Russia seeks to ban the Ukrainian language and culture, and how they take Ukrainian children to Russia to put them in Russian education camps. “They told them they are not Ukrainian children, but they are Russian children.”

If the West does not provide Ukraine with security guarantees in a peace plan, then “it means that we will cease to exist. There will be no more of our people,” Matviichuk said.

Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's Parliament, said, “If we talk about life in Ukraine now, it's complicated, especially during the last week after the Munich Security Conference,” where Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech that focused on internal politics in Europe.

“People do not understand how we thought the United States was our biggest partner,” she said.
 

At one point, Ustinova noted that she could not hear the conversation in her headphones because sirens were blaring as Russia had just launched an aerial attack on Kyiv.

She said that Russian President Putin and others who seek a Ukrainian election are trying to set a trap because Ukrainian law does not allow an election during martial law, which Ukraine has declared because of the Russian invasion. Plus, it would involve the demobilization of more than 400,000 troops.

“It would be very easy to fake elections, and that’s what the Russians would do,” Ustinova said. “It’s a trap. They're going to find where to put the money into their own candidate.”

Ustinova, who was also a visiting scholar with the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program from 2018-2019, said, “We can see that this is a new reality, not only in the Ukrainian war, but in foreign relations, and hopefully the Europeans can unite. Because if they don't, it will be a disaster for everyone.”

Oleksiy Honcharuk, a former Ukrainian prime minister from 2019-2020 who was the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at FSI in 2021, said, “I think that we are still strong. My prediction is that in three or six months, Ukraine can double the damage to Russia on the battlefield from a technological perspective with drones.”

But time is very expensive now, he added, because every single day, every single hour, Ukrainians are paying with the lives of their best people and soldiers.

Honcharuk said Ukrainians are “shocked” about the position of the United States’ recent vote against a United Nations resolution condemning the Russian invasion as well as the Trump Administration’s position on talks with Russia.

“This is exactly the moment when all the people of goodwill should do everything possible to support Ukraine in this very complicated time,” said Honcharuk.

Regarding the UN vote, McFaul said, “I am shocked, I am appalled, I am embarrassed as an American to see those votes today. We are voting with the most horrific dictators in the world.”

‘Not about people’

Matviichuk said, “Putin started this war of aggression, not because he wanted to occupy just more Ukrainian land. Putin started this war of aggression because he wanted to occupy and destroy the whole of Ukraine and even go further. He wants to forcibly restore the Russian Empire — he dreams about his legacy, his logic is historical.”

This ultimately means that Ukraine needs real security guarantees, she said. “President Trump said he started the peace negotiation because he cares about people dying in this war. So, if President Trump cares about people dying in this war, he also has to care about people dying in Russian prisons.”

She explained that she’s spoken with hundreds of people who have survived brutal conditions in Russian captivity. And so, it’s surprising, Matviichuk said, to hear political statements from U.S. officials “about natural minerals and elections, about possible territorial concessions, but not about people.”

Lack of Global Support

Serhiy Leshchenko, an advisor to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s Chief of Staff, spoke about the recent overtures by the Trump Administration to Russia.

“This is a new reality we are living in now. Frankly, my understanding is that Ukrainians are not very shocked with what's going on because we went through so many shocks within the last three years.”

Acknowledging the lack of an American flag at an allied event this week in Kyiv, Leshchenko said Ukrainians know perfectly well that perception is reality.

“It means that now we have an absolutely different perception. So, it’s obvious that there is no global security infrastructure anymore. It’s obvious that NATO is not an answer anymore,” said Leshchenko, an alumnus of the 2013 cohort of CDDRL’s Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program.

‘Sad occasion’

In her opening remarks, Stoner noted, “We’re here on what is actually a sad occasion, which is that Feb. 24 marks three years since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

She said, “Only about less than 1% of land has changed hands since December 2022, so Ukraine is not losing. Ukraine is at least defending what it has, and it remains in Kursk (Russia).”

McFaul said, “It’s in our national interest that we do not line up with Belarus and Russia and North Korea – that holds negative consequences for our future security and prosperity. I actually think our country cares about values.”

He added that the notion that all America cares about is mineral rights, business deals, and hotels in Gaza is not the America he knows.

McFaul told the panelists, “I've witnessed and observed what you’ve been doing for your country, and we are just extremely fortunate to be connected to all of you, whom I consider to be heroic individuals in the world.”

A full recording of the event can be viewed below, and additional commentary can be found from The Stanford Daily.

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, quoting a line from Kuo's book.

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.”