Is the party perspective over?

For more than 70 years, scholars have taken Schattschneider’s renowned statement that ‘Modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties’ as an axiom. But amid claims of party decline and evidence of political personalization, presidentialization, and the judicialization and digitization of politics, do parties still deserve to be treated as central actors in democratic politics, or are they treated as such because of a conservative bias? If so, should they be abandoned in favor of alternative heroes, or should we stick to the party perspective and continue to foreground parties as the central competitive units within a democratic system? The article starts with identifying the fields in which parties are perceived as central actors in democratic politics. After making the case for focusing on individual politicians as an alternative to the party perspective, it puts the party perspective on trial. It examines the current status of political parties in democracies using three general approaches: functional, sociological, and rational choice. Based on the analysis, it argues that the party perspective should not be abandoned, and that it should continue to respond to change in order to serve as an optimal framework for political analysis.