While their further decline can therefore be expected, it is worth considering the roles that the major political parties have hitherto played in the democratic framework, and ask whether microparties will be able to fulfil these same tasks.

One description of the role they play, focused on the work in Parliament, comes from a report by a House of Commons committee:

"Political parties are the mechanism by which people of any background can be actively involved in the tasks of shaping policy and deciding how society should be governed. While they are not perfect organisations they are essential for the effective functioning of our democracy. Without the support of political parties it would be difficult for individual Members of Parliament, as legislators and/or as members of the Executive, to organise themselves effectively for the task of promoting the national interest – including by challenge to the Government, where that is necessary and appropriate – and ensuring that proposed new laws are proportionate, effective and accurately drafted." [i]

These roles are set out in more detail by Ben Rogers (2005), who identified their broad outline as follows:

– They simplify the choices citizens make at elections (if you know the party to which a candidate belongs, you know, roughly, what they stand far, how the people and the policies they support have performed, and what they have pledged to do if elected to office);

– They facilitate the creation of stable governments, and oppositions able to hold governments to account;

– They recruit people into political life and give them a voice and civic standing;

– They provide forums for people of broadly similar outlook to reflect on their values, articulate their interests and agree on the priorities they want representatives to pursue, so ensuring that the political system is representative and legitimate. [ii]

To consider the first point, it is hard to imagine a simpler choice than that offered by a microparty, which will be focused on one narrowly defined set of goals. Such a party will not have had a past record on which it can be judged, but that is unavoidable and the appeal to niche interests could well be stronger than any questions about competence, at least until proven otherwise.

On the second point, as the themes of this essay indicate, the exact opposite can be expected to apply. No individual microparty could form a government or run a state, and nor, in the vast majority of cases, would they expect or want to. This may seem counter-intuitive, given that the raison d'être of all the political parties currently in existence is to form, or be part of, a government and implement their policies. But the purpose of microparties should be viewed as getting their particular perspective acknowledged and addressed, rather than necessarily seeking the means to implement it themselves. In this sense, they are more akin to pressure groups than parties.

But microparties could still carry out the third role, albeit in forums which may be more online than 'real world'. In fact, if they can appeal more strongly to the niche interests of the public, microparties may be more successful than their larger counterparts in encouraging political participation. They are a means of harnessing the engagement many people already show for single issue causes.

And social reputation can matter as much online as offline; whether people make a contribution to political life through online or offline forms makes little difference to whether they can be considered engaged or not.

The fourth point could in part be satisfied by microparties. They will undoubtedly allow people of similar outlook to group together; in fact they will be more similar in outlook than members of larger parties. But unlike traditional parties, this will not generate any representation or legitimacy.

Associated with this point, however, is the issue of interest aggregation and the role of parties in choosing between competing demands in order to develop a coherent set of policies across the board which can be implemented when they are in government. Microparties will rarely have the capability to do this on their own, but the interesting point is that in aggregate they will cover a huge range of issues, local and national, and perhaps in greater detail and with more expertise than the major parties. So again the issue here will be finding mechanisms to settle issues between parties rather than within them.

So microparties can play some of the roles of their larger counterparts, but not those related to generating legitimate parliaments and governments capable of planning and acting for the whole of a society.

Rogers argued that the larger parties "because they connect so directly to power, and because they are multi-issue organisation par excellence, are particularly well-suited to fostering collective deliberation, and forging broad consensus. In this respect they do have a unique democratic potential."[iii]

But while the major political parties may have a role in the current system that is hard to replace, they need not retain this importance in alternative systems of government. Part II considers what such alternative systems might look like.

Footnotes:

[i] Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation (2010), final report, House of Commons. Available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/spconf/239/23904.htm [January 21, 2010].

[ii] Rogers, B. (2005), pp. 604-605.

[iii] Rogers, B. (2005), p. 605.