“Although there is no doubt that parties still ‘are the central mechanism to make the constitutional chain of political delegation and accountability work in practice’ (Muller, 2000: 330), they find it more and more difficult to recover their legitimacy. They know they need to regain the ‘hearts and minds’ of the citizens. The question is how? Devoid of an ideological flame, for which there is no room in the liquid society, as we have seen, parties have shown an increase in openness and, to a lesser extent, responsiveness and accountability. How well this remedy will work is not clear: it may be too early for a fair assessment, but it should be noted that while parties have introduced participatory incentives, they have continued to colonize the state and drain its resources for their own activities. Parties persist in the use of selective incentives ‘to generate internal support’ (Bolleyer, 2008: 2), but by following this route they continue to lose credibility and thus legitimacy.Panem et circenses, the tools the Roman emperors used to reward and flatter the mob, never work for long.
(…) [I]n the first years of the new millennium, parties appear to be powerful and rich but devoid of internal energy and at odds with the external environment. They resemble something like a post-modern, somewhat inconsistent Leviathan: mighty but not frightening, forceful but disliked, pervasive but discredited.” – Piero Ignazi, Power and the (il)legitimacy of political parties: An unavoidable paradox of contemporary democracy?,Party Politics, 2014, Vol. 2(2), p. 166
Ah, Piero Ignazi, esse grande ingalês.