Hollowed-out parties substituted consultancy for mass-membership organization

Evidence

The result of this hollowing out of European party politics was aptly described by the Irish political scientist Peter Mair as “ruling the void.” Since parties were no longer attuned to the desires and demands of their constituents, other channels had to be tapped, most often PR consultants who relied on focus groups, opinion polls, and open primaries. New Labour under Tony Blair proved particularly adept at the strategy. Consultants, of course, cost money—but the new model was organizationally less demanding than the older system of mass membership. Instead of mobilizing thousands of supporters and party members at meetings and congresses where they could exert pressure on politicians, it was easier to treat the electorate like a black box from which one hopes to extract insight after a plane crash. The Hungarian theorist Péter Csigo speaks of a “neopopular bubble”; in late-modern democracies, politicians were bound to speculate about “the people,” party members, and potential voters. In this respect, they came to resemble actors in the ascendant financial sector. That tropes and metaphors from the economy recur here will surprise no one. Political scientists had already begun to frame electoral competition in terms of supply and demand by the 1950s; by the 1980s, politics itself was a market form. Postpolitics triumphed across every layer of society. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 130

Categorization

• XREF: The consultancy-as-surrogate mechanism extends the hollowing-out thesis into an account of postpolitics that the reader can apply to saturation-without-change.
• SHARE: The metaphor of treating the electorate like a black box from a plane crash is a vivid formulation a political-commentary friend would enjoy.