Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book. It summarizes the arguments advanced in the book and reflects on three challenges facing the book’s argument: that parties are ultimately unreformable; that the institutional proposals put forward are too vague to be useful for practitioners; and that re-modelling parties with only the participatory preferences of those who seek self-expression and self-actualization in politics in mind risks excluding those who do not hold such ‘post-modern’ participatory preferences. Each of these concerns is warranted and taken seriously but, as the chapter shows, none of them is fatal to the broader argument of the book.