The decline of an important institution?

I was listening to a podcast from Australia this week in which they debated the question " Both Major Parties are Failing the Australian People".

It was an interesting debate, and many of the themes were the same as those being expressed in Canada.

Themes such as:
• Concern about diminishing numbers of members
• Increasingly controlled by leaders and by small numbers of people
• Concern about the role of parties in engaging people in discussion about issues and bringing people together

Here in Canada, an organization called Samarra released its own report about Canadian political parties called It's my Party: Parliamentary Dysfunction Reconsidered The report is part of a series based on "exit interviews" with Parliamentarians.

What struck me as I heard some of the coverage of the release of the report, was how toxic the relationship between the Members of Parliament(MPs) and their party had become. The report itself states that "the consistent observation from the MPs that the greatest frustrations they faced during their political careers came from within their own political party."

As in Australia, there were comments about the small number of behind the scenes officials running the party, and tension around the amount of control being exercised by the political party.

Both these views from Australia and especially from the insiders in Canada, seem to suggest that political parties as an institution are no longer performing as well as they used to. Their ability to engage the general public and serve as an aggregator of interests, seems to be diminished, in part due to declining membership, particularly among young people.

This raises some interesting questions about how to engage citizens in the political process. If young people in particular are abandoning political parties, how do we engage them in the formal political process. They seem to be moving towards membership in advocacy organization outside the formal process, joining NGOs, starting NGOs and advocating their beliefs this way.

This shift towards being involved in ways that are outside the political process poses two problems, one it leaves a smaller tent, more filled with true believers and ideologues within the traditional party, while also leaving those involved outside, as frustrated by the lack of movement on their issues.

I have wondered what a political party would be like if it could include all those who criticize from the outside, were actually involved in building the parties from within. Part of the cynicism that seems to be increasingly to be a part of our political culture relates to the fact that there are so many outsiders taking shots and attacking political parties.

In the end political parties are an entrenched part of our political system, and we need them. They need to modernize to be sure, but they also need people within them to push them in that direction. Perhaps now is the time given the NDP and Liberals are under interim leaders to think more about ways to properly engage people outside the current parties and figure out a way to bring in new and future leaders.