Contested legitimacy: Paradoxes in the legal regulation of political parties
(Leiden University, January 24-25, 2013)

Workshop organizers: Fernando Casal Bértoa, Fransje Molenaar, Daniela Romée Piccio, Ekaterina Rashkova
Chair: Ingrid van Biezen

The centrality of political parties for modern representative democracies has long been underlined in the political science literature. Despite apparent signs of increasing problems with democratic legitimacy, political parties continue to be regarded as the crucial and inevitable intermediary organizations between the citizens and the state. The growing recognition of the centrality of political parties has also been recognized by European legislators and policy-makers. Indeed, the large majority of national constitutions now incorporate explicit references to political parties and the democratic functions they (ought to) perform, while at the same time a growing number of countries have started to adopted specific party laws and party finance laws aimed to regulate the political parties' internal and external organizational activities, as well as matters related to their financial management. The increasing legal regulation of political parties is related both theoretically and empirically with the concept of political legitimacy, if only because the introduction of rules on political parties is often portrayed by both national legislators and supra-national policy advisors as a way to restore public confidence in political parties and re-establish their legitimacy within the political system. The goal of this workshop is to evaluate this relationship between party regulation and democratic legitimacy, in order to provide both conceptual clarity and insights in the causes, effects, and implications of the legal regulation of political parties in modern democracy.

Papers

Lars G Svåsand (Universitetet i Bergen) - Regulations of political parties and party functions in Malawi.
Gerardo Scherlis (Universidad de Buenos Aires - Conicet) - Parties and Ballot Access in Latin America: A New Trend in a New Political Context.
Fransje Molenaar (Leiden University) - Legitimizing political party representation: The cyclical nature of party law development in Latin America.
Gayil Talshir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) - Contested Legitimacy, Popular Democracy and the Restructuring of (some) Catch-all Parties: The Social Democrats of the UK, France and Israel in Comparative Perspective.
Fernando Casal Bértoa, Fransje Molenaar, Daniela R. Piccio, Ekaterina R. Rashkova (Leiden University) - The World Upside Down: De-Legitimizing Public Funding.
Paul Whiteley (University of Essex) - Does Regulation Make Political Parties More Popular? A Multi-level analysis of Party Support in Europe.