Michael Laver writes: The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford, 2025) by Didi Kuo, a widely published Stanford academic, adds to a burgeoning ‘decline of parties’ literature. The author’s premise is set out clearly on the first page: ‘Parties are integral to the functioning of democracy, because they give meaning to participation, to political conflict, and to the very purpose of government. … Yet citizens around the world have become cynical about the role parties play in democratic governments. Parties are some of the most unpopular institutions in democracies.’ Targeting an engaged general reader, the author combines a synthesis of arguments by well-known specialists in (mostly) US politics with her own interpretation of recent (mostly) US political history.

The decline of the ‘old’ twentieth-century party system is of course a global phenomenon, extending well beyond a US political system that is in many ways atypical. A recent YouGov poll of British attitudes to political parties, for example, asked people which party they most trust on 18 different matters – from immigration to defence, housing, taxation, poverty, the NHS, the environment and many more. On 16 of the 18 issues, the winner was ‘no party’ closely followed by ‘don’t know’. The only exceptions were immigration, where the upstart Reform party was most trusted, and the environment, where the Greens were most trusted. Voters’ trust in traditional parties – Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats – was very low across the board.

Another manifestation of this is the relentlessly declining vote share of the two largest parties and relentlessly increasing vote share of upstart parties, often of the populist right, bent on disrupting the established system. The chart above plots the vote share (taken from the ParlGov database: www.parlgov.org) of the top two parties in the 210 parliamentary elections held since 1970 in 10 western democracies: Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, United Kingdom. In 1970, on average of about 20 percent of the vote did not go to one of the two largest partes. By 2025, this had doubled to about 40 percent.

This pattern is particularly striking in Ireland. In the two 1982 elections, parties which were not Fianna Fàil or Fine Gael mustered about 15 percent of the first preference vote between them. By 2024, support for such parties had swelled to about 57 percent. The 2025 Presidential election extended this trend and was a debacle for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. A left-wing independent candidate opposed by both major parties won 63 percent of the vote, while huge numbers of disaffected voters spoiled their ballots.

Although she does not deal with it directly, Didi Kuo’s argument does bear on how all this has been possible. Her core concern is the degeneration, indeed virtual disappearance, of the relationship between local party organizations and local party voters. Her proposed solution is to rebuild this relationship. She starts with what she almost presents as the good old days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall politics, which ‘embedded party politics in everyday life for the first time’. Imported from Ireland and long derided as clientelist and corrupt, this system nonetheless fostered an intimate connection between politicians and the people they were elected to serve. Voters had to go to party politicians if they wanted to get something done. As a result, party politicians were constantly reminded of what voters want. Given the technology of the day, parties also needed effective local machines, deploying committed party members who pounded the streets to turn people out to vote for their candidates. And these candidates campaigned on the basis of a retail politics that kept voters and politicians in close proximity.           

Kuo documents how, over the years, this connection between party organizations and voters has withered away, with corrosive consequences for democracy. The bulk of her argument is specific to the peculiarities of US politics – permissive campaign finance laws, party primaries, first-past-the post elections, partisan drawing of district boundaries, to name but a few. As noted above, however, the declining role of traditional parties extends far beyond the US. Although her explicit discussions of party politics outside the US are relatively brief and shallow, many of the processes that she argues have changed US politics have also affected party politics more generally.           

The underlying engine of change has been the rapidly evolving digital technology that powered an industrial revolution. This transformed many things that affect party politics. Tectonic shifts in the social structure of the electorate changed their preferences, needs and desires, while disrupting traditional pathways of political socialization. Globalization of production led to convergence between established centre-left and centre-right parties on a neo-liberal ideology that promotes a shrinking role for the state. At a much more nitty-gritty level, new technologies transformed how to run effective election campaigns.

Reprising an argument by Piketty in Capital and Ideology about social democratic parties, Kuo discusses how the Democratic Party in the US lost its appeal to regular working people, evolving into a party dominated by affluent professional and intellectual elites. Convergence between the two parties on the economic policy dimension, once the definitive cleavage of post-war politics in many countries, happened as policy professionals in the Democratic Party embraced the neo-liberal ‘Third Way’, moving to the centre-right and abandoning longstanding policies articulating the interests of the working class.

Kuo describes how, in the US, this shift away from the rank and file, towards elite control of the party, was made possible by technology-powered changes in campaign strategies. Data-driven targeting of voters, first via direct mail and then by email, text and social media, replaced the large teams of party workers on the ground who had not only been delivering party messages to voters, but also hearing what motivated and agitated those voters, passing this up the line to policy makers. Campaigns came to be designed and run by desk-based consultants and pollsters-for-hire rather than by seasoned party diehards.

All of this was also happening in most other western democracies. The difference was that many of these had proportional representation electoral systems and all had much stricter campaign finance laws. The result – and Kuo could have set this out much more clearly – was that these developments transformed western party systems by fostering the rise of new parties which challenged the established order. In the US, on the other hand, it transformed existing parties in the entrenched two-party system. In Europe, we have seen the rise of radical right anti-establishment parties: Reform in Britain, AfD in Germany, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Rassemblement National in France, VOX in Spain … the list goes on. In the US, in contrast, we have observed radical right factions capture the established Republican Party and power it to electoral victory in 2024. All of these changes have been made possible by an historic shift of alienated working- and lower middle-class voters away from social democratic parties which no longer championed their interests. The shift has been towards upstart parties (or in the US case upstart Republican factions) promoting a right-wing populist nationalism which has targeted immigrants, intellectuals, and the “woke” left as the problem to be solved.

Crucially, this happened at a time when launching and growing an upstart party had never been easier. The changes in communications technology that Kuo argues transformed the established parties’ campaigning styles in the US, in other countries made launching a new party so much easier. The rise of Reform in Britain is an object lesson in this. Trouncing the established parties – in the opinion polls at least – no longer requires a cohort of seasoned party workers in every district to get the message out. It no longer even requires sympathetic media outlets – though Kuo would have done well to pay some attention to the role of Fox News in the transformation of the Republican Party. The job can be done by a leader who makes waves, exploited by a savvy social media strategy.

The end result, illuminated by looking more closely at Europe than Kuo does in this book, is that the established parties of centre-left and centre-right both suffer. Social democrats suffer because they lose a goodly chunk of their core working class support to the radical right. Centre-right parties suffer because that shifting working class support goes not to them but to burgeoning populist parties who open up a new challenge on their right flank.

This manifests in the US two-party system, as Kuo discusses, in contested party primaries. Within the Republican Party, more moderate candidates face real or threatened primary challenges from an emboldened radical right – pulling the party away from the middle ground. For a Democrat Party girding its loins for a fightback, a similar contest is likely to emerge, each side drawing support from striking results in the November 2025 elections. On the left of the party, channeling the runaway success of Zohran Mamdani in elections for the New York mayoralty, will be those urging a return to the party’s roots as a champion of working-class interests. To the right of the party, channeling former CIA officer Abilgail Spanberger’s winning of the Virginia governorship from the Republicans, will be those who advocate contesting the centre ground.

A key factor here, largely ignored by Kuo, is voter turnout. It has long been the case that turnout out is low in the US, so that firing up the base, as much if not more than convincing undecided voters, is the key to winning elections. This requires parties having a clear sense of who their base is and how to fire it up. Outside the US, increasing voter cynicism about politicians has been associated with declining voter turnout. This changes the optimal balance between two classic party strategies: feed red meat to your base, or make nice with undecideds? The more the incentive to fire up the base, the more robust and polarizing the competition between parties.

Taking all of this into account, Kuo’s conclusion is that ‘[b]uilding a sustainable democratic future requires strong parties’, adding, ‘[f]or parties to be strong, they need robust organizations connected to communities … a welcome opportunity for a new generation of party leaders’. This is, of course, very much easier said than done, and what follows are fine words rather than workable plans of action.  ‘What parties need to do … is reclaim the levers of government … They need to think about their relationship with citizens … as a social contract for the twenty-first century’. This will involve Republicans ‘trying to appeal to the working class with economic policy rather than appeals to grievance alone’. For the Democrats, the prescription is pretty much the same thing – robust social policy designed to win back working class voters. ‘Parties that can successfully pass and implement these policies will be more successful … if they marshal [them] into a more coherent ideological alternative to neoliberalism’.  All that is needed, in other words, is a magic wand.

There is much of value in this book in its description of how party politics, particularly in the US but arguably also elsewhere, has got itself into its current pickle. Particular things that have been done in the US, which Kuo discusses at length, contributed to this. But a more systematic comparison with the similar trends we observe in most western democracies shows there is a much broader process at work, powered by technological development and its attendant socio-economic consequences, with much wider implications than the details of US politics. Kuo gives us a lot of detail on the US. She does not really tell us how much of what has happened in the US resulted from global developments which affect the role of parties across all contemporary democracies.