New Adventures In Party Democracy

Two very nice gentlemen came to my door this weekend, to invite me to join, but not join, but sorta kinda join the Liberal Party of Canada. Particularly they wanted me to do so if I was excited about Justin Trudeau  and his candidacy for the leadership of that party.

Don't know how I missed this, but it seems that any voting age Canadian (who is not currently a member of another national political party) can become a hemi-demi-semi-kinda-Liberal and participate in the leadership festival. You don't even have to pay anything to get this hemi-demi-semi-kinda membership. I was intrigued until I remembered I didn't fit the profile (re. non-membership in non-Liberal national party).

I'm not decided on the merits of Just Justin. He's certainly got a lot of the qualities one wants in a modern candidate for high political office, cosmetic though they may be. And perhaps there's something more solid there too. I'm really not sure. Going up against Stephen Harper you could do worse.

Still, I was brought back to thoughts about the dangers of this way of electing party leaders. I wrote about this a good long while ago (before the blog went  into hiatus) in relation to the Liberal's last leadership decision. The post certainly wasn't prescient about how Michael Ignatief might do (although maybe I could argue he did better than Stephane Dion would've done) but I've seen nothing to convince me I'm not right on the basic point: party democracy has a very anti-democratic dark side. It disempowers the sitting Member of Parliament in favour of a diffuse party apparatus and thereby the Prime Minister. I would argue also that the negative effects include a big drop in the overall quality of candidates for office, since many smart, talented people, knowing that back-bench MPs are powerless unless they reach the cabinet level, stay out of the arena. This approach seems to take things even farther in that direction.

I want to think more about this, since I'm less convinced now than I was that geography-based representation is the best way to aggregate diverse opinion on national issues, but it's what we've got, and while we've got it it'd be nice to make better use of it.