“The age of party democracy has passed,” Irish political scientist Peter Mair declared in a book posthumously published in 2013. He had spent his academic career peering at a specific organism in the life of humans as political animals—the party, with its leaders, members, functionaries, and voters, operating both in parliament and on the street. To Mair, who died in 2011, modern politics was hard to imagine without it; at times, he wondered whether democracy might survive its demise. Yet by the end of his life the verdict became irresistible. The species he dedicated his career to was threatened with extinction. The ecosystem might persist but now without its previously dominant specimen.

Mair’s statement still carried a sense of premonition at the time. Then, the effects of the global financial crisis were still rippling through Europe; Donald Trump’s ruthless takeover of the Republican Party was some years away. In 2026, however, his warning seems anything but trite, with both Labour and the Conservatives wiped out in the last U.K. council elections. In the U.S. and European political systems, it has become apparent that democratic politics will no longer be conducted with parties as traditionally understood.

“The age of party democracyhas passed,” Irish political scientist Peter Mair declared in a book posthumously published in 2013. He had spent his academic career peering at a specific organism in the life of humans as political animals—the party, with its leaders, members, functionaries, and voters, operating both in parliament and on the street. To Mair, who died in 2011, modern politics was hard to imagine without it; at times, he wondered whether democracy might survive its demise. Yet by the end of his life the verdict became irresistible. The species he dedicated his career to was threatened with extinction. The ecosystem might persist but now without its previously dominant specimen.

Mair’s statement still carried a sense of premonition at the time. Then, the effects of the global financial crisis were still rippling through Europe; Donald Trump’s ruthless takeover of the Republican Party was some years away. In 2026, however, his warning seems anything but trite, with both Labour and the Conservatives wiped out in the last U.K. council elections. In the U.S. and European political systems, it has become apparent that democratic politics will no longer be conducted with parties as traditionally understood.

On both sides of the Atlantic, parties do still appear as participants on election lists. Officially, the party landscape has enlarged rather than shriveled. If the major 20th-century parties were lumbering dinosaurs, their disappearance needs to be read against the rise of new creatures: digital outfits, one-man vehicles, so-called movement-parties, which had a shorter lifespan but could be equally active in their respective biosphere. As Mair already pointed out, however, such new creatures hardly seem deserving of the same name as the older ones they competed with.

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Parties were not simply pop-up ventures for politicians seeking to win an election. Instead, as membership organizations, they were designed for longevity, persisting beyond a single media or election cycle. They were also the modern era’s emblematic tool for collective action, allowing elites to control masses but also offering a modicum of representation to the disenfranchised. As political scientist Christopher Bickerton notes, they could thereby be compared to corporate bodies under the ancien régime, entities that constituted the bridgeway between individuals and the state—with the proviso, of course, that parties were voluntary organizations, unlike guilds or corporations, which coerced membership from cradle to grave.

For this very reason, in the 1930s, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci likened them to the modern prince—the only collective actor that could reconcile democracy and complexity. Parties, to Gramsci, stood at the conjuncture of two quintessentially modern processes: industrialization and democratization. This was the “dual revolution” that British historian Eric Hobsbawm himself dubbed modernity’s driving process. As agents, parties gave content to the form of democratic struggle. They acted as conduits between society and the state, translating popular wishes into policy but also providing personnel for the elite, allowing them to coordinate between factions of the upper class, who not only wanted to buy consent but also sought to reconcile differences.

Politics and parties thereby became near synonyms in the 20th century. Parties were “the organization of democracy,” as Italian politician Palmiro Togliatti saw it, indicating that without them, the body politic would lack a backbone. Later, economically minded political scientists began to cast parties as “public utilities,” or “semi-state organs crucial in the functioning of democracy.”

That parties and democracy would once become synonyms was not a given of political theory in the 19th century. The template provided by ancient democracies, for instance, had little place for them as a concept. Factions and shifting alliances might have existed in Athens, but distinct groupings with membership structures were practically absent. To many modern thinkers, democratic politics was the exclusive province of small polities with slave populations, willing to do the work while actual citizens engaged in the leisurely pursuit of politics. The other precedent for popular politics was the dictatorship of a Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte, who sought plebiscitary mandates for their rule. Both shunned parties as dangerous factions.

The modern aversion of the party form took a while to overcome, even for elites who preferred parliaments over kingly rule. Throughout the 18th century, regular voting groups in the U.K. House of Commons were gradually classed together as opposing Tories versus Whigs. But they remained caucuses or clubs rather than clear organizational entities, and only in the 19th century did they begin to register as official institutions. For the most part, they were informal gatherings of elites that coordinated without binding.

There was one weathered exception to this case: the United States. Already in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted how the stability of U.S. democracy came with highly specific preconditions. One of them was the strength of party elites, willing to mobilize an electorate through machine politicking. “The skill of the actors in the political world,” he noted in Democracy in America, lies “in the art of creating parties,” and a “political aspirant in the United States” needed a party “to secure his popularity; just as the imprimatur of a King.” Europeans would come to democracy through their own route, Tocqueville insisted. It was simply not possible to re-create U.S. conditions on continental soil. But that parties would have to take on some kind of stabilizing function in European democracies was clear.

On the center right, Tocqueville long remained a lonely proponent of this insight. Instead, the idea that modern democracies required parties to live up to their promise was more prominent on the left. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels named their pamphlet “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” To both radicals, the workers’ movement would remain trapped in empty protest or conspiratorial meddling if it lacked the steering organ of the party. The latter would give direction and body to what remained powerful but inarticulate instances of struggle. Only a clear superstructure could turn rebellion into revolution.

From the 1850s onward, after long internal squabbles, their call was heeded. Workers’ parties began forming across Europe’s industrial core. To socialists, the party became the indispensable vector for social change. It took conservatives a while to realize that the same might hold for those seeking to halt social transformation rather than accelerate it.

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By the 1870s, conservative elites came round to Tocqueville’s admonition that the advent of democracy was inevitable but hardly Jacobin in essence. Instead, masses had to be made loyal to their states and hierarchies through parties, which would offer ideological guidance and social benefits. If mass suffrage were a certainty, there would be few guarantees against social leveling; the only solution was to build a party structure that could withstand the threat against property that a widened suffrage would entail.

At repeated intervals, parties became an object of ire and ridicule in the interwar period. To many critics, they indicated an oligarchic drift away from popular rule. To figures on the right and the left, they represented a corrupt caste of bureaucrats remote from popular preference. Yet, to contemporaries, it was also nigh impossible to imagine a critique of this “partocracy” that refused the party form, visible in the many far-right outfits that themselves operated on the party model. The left and center saw parties as agents of both revolutionary change and potential stabilization. In Northern Europe’s Low Countries, a system known as “pillarization” enshrined parties as the chief mediators between citizens and states, even delegating tasks such as social security provision to them. In 1960s Belgium, critics could speak of a so-called CVP-staat, in which the Christian Social Party monopolized the entire political field.

In the most recent polls, however, the CVP’s successor is hovering at around 10 percent. The three remaining “pillar” parties—liberal, socialist, Christian—have long since lost their joint majority.

Accounts of this extinction event require a double lens—at once passive and active, long- and short-term. On the passive side, a changing political culture in which collective institutions were seen as unduly interfering in citizens’ private lives became prevalent. Yet more important was the economic crisis of the 1970s, in which the state seemed incapable of rendering a return to capitalist normality. The problem was believed to be that citizens’ hold on the state via their parties—their insistence on particular “special interests”—made a return to growth and price stability impossible. Through a concerted class offensive, and an empowerment of unelected bodies such as central banks, the preconditions for capital accumulation were restored, at the expense of parties’ claims to effectiveness. There was a delay between these blows and the death of the parties in question; hollowed out from the inside, the entities still appeared on election lists and in parliaments. Yet their legitimacy, and with it their inner life, had been diminished.

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It took a while for the effects of this controlled demolition to become manifest. After 2008, the rot was revealed, and the term “Pasokification”—referencing the quick self-immolation of social democratic parties through their implication with austerity measures—became common parlance. In response, new parties were formed on the left and right, but these populist variants were again hard to compare to their previous mass opponents. They had no clear organizational structures, appeared only vaguely mandated, and were as easy to enter as to leave. By the close of the 2010s, many left-populist figures had been kept out of power or had collapsed as political competitors.

Both push and pull factors thus deserve discussion here. On the one hand, the new digital era has made the type of political engagement required for parties—patient, banal, at times hierarchical, taking many evenings—much harder to demand. The new structural transformation of our public sphere, as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas termed it, has created a populace both active and fickle, while many parties now prefer to rule without mass membership altogether (as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has so spectacularly illustrated). These concern the proactive ejection rather than passive retreat of members from parties.

What would a political system without parties look like? In the 19th century, it was said democracy without parties would inevitably result in the rule of strongmen across factional lines. Suggestions of such a system are now amply available across Europe. In the 1990s, Italy’s party system underwent the breakneck collapse from which it has never recovered. Into this void rushed the passively consumed “telepopulism” of Silvio Berlusconi, which replaced the organized involvement in politics typical of Italy’s postwar order. As one historian noted of the collapse of Italy’s Communist Party, “the effect of breaking up the mass parties was in many ways to ‘throw out the baby and keep the bathwater.’” From the center, Emmanuel Macron later carried out a remarkably similar feat in France, building a one-man politics on the burning heaps of the French party system.

By the 2010s, new creatures were starting to appear: digital parties with no clear dividing line between members and nonmembers, with digital consultation tools only vaguely visible to outsiders, a dependence on leaders who were more crucial to winning elections than the previous party platforms that leaders themselves were supposed to execute. These institutions might register as parties for elections and have a semblance of internal functioning. But they were hard to compare to their predecessors.

Announcements of the death of parties nonetheless sound slightly premature. Rather, they will continue to operate in a zombified state—still populating the state and providing a ladder for careerists, public relations jobs to consultants, and the occasional channel for citizens to voice grievances for which they will not find a reliable audience online. Yet as coherent units they seem increasingly anachronistic. One cannot clone a dinosaur, after all.