minister, Lionel Jospin, was beaten into third place in the first ballot by Chirac
and the candidate of the far-right Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the
early years of the 21st century, the party was suffering from the problem of all
European left-wing parties —how much of its past ideology must it shed to
compete in a world where social democracy seems to have had its day? The
problem is particularly acute in France which is culturally much less willing to
give up high levels of public investment and an economically powerful
centralizing state than Europe’s more successful economies.
Participatory Democracy
Participatory democracy is really an alternative label fordirect democracy,
although it does also involve a slight element of what is normally regarded as an
opposite of the latter, that isrepresentative democracy. The point is that
participation need not necessarily carry the implication of ultimate decision-
making power. Thus one can argue for a much greater degree of citizen
participation in a political system while accepting that the ultimate decision-
making and law-creating functions must be handled by a small body of elected
representatives. Widespread use of public enquiries, advisory referendums,
consultative bodies and similar devices can increase the degree to which
ordinary people participate in the forming of policy. (See alsoindustrial
democracy.)
Party
A party, in political terms, is an organized group of people sharing common
policy preferences and usually a general ideological position. Simply to have
such a common view does not make the group a party—it is necessary also that
it seeks, or has, political power. The historical derivation of the concept is
complex, and ‘party’ has not always had the innocent sense it has now.
Originally, to say of a group that it was a party was to suggest that it selfishly
pursued its own collective interest, and that by existing and working towards
power it destroyed a true latent unity of interest and opinion in society. Political
parties in the sense we know them now did not become important until the
extension of thefranchiseto large sections of the population. A typical
development was for a party, previously existing merely as a group of like-
minded men in parliament, to organize nationally in the hope of attracting the
newly enfranchised voters and keeping their elective power; in the United
Kingdom, to give a much simplified example, the Tories developed into the
Conservative Partyand Whigs into theLiberal Party. Alternatively a party
may have been organized from the grass roots to seek the election of
representatives of the newly enfranchised interests to the legislature (for
Party