Representative versus Responsible Government and May’s Law: The Case of the Czech Christian Democratic Party
Representative versus Responsible Government and May’s Law: The Case of the Czech Christian Democratic Party

Summary/Abstract: In this article, we will examine through use of a theoretically informed case study what happens to the internal workings of a political party if its governing function comes to dominate its representative role. Mair [2005, 2008, 2009, 2011] in a series of infl uential papers convincingly argued that the growing incompatibility between a party’s representative and governance functions is ‘one of the principal sources of the democratic malaise that confronts many Western democracies today’ [Mair 2009: 1]. Mair’s ‘representative versus responsible government’ thesis may be unpacked into four main claims.

• Details
• Contents