New media are often believed to pose a major threat to today’s democracies. But today’s concerns are far from new. Over the course of the past century ever ‘newer’ media posed challenges to democracy. This project studies how societies responded to these challenges by translating fears for new media into institutional reforms to protect democracy. It investigates three concrete cases of institutional reforms that responded to the breakthrough of new media of their day: mass newspapers in France at the end of the nineteenth century; radio in the Netherlands in the 1920s; and commercial television in Italy in the 1980s.

New media are often believed to pose a major threat to today’s democracies. But today’s concerns are far from new. Over the course of the past century ever ‘newer’ media posed challenges to democracy. This project studies how societies responded to these challenges by translating fears for new media into institutional reforms to protect democracy. It investigates three concrete cases of institutional reforms that responded to the breakthrough of new media of their day: mass newspapers in France at the end of the nineteenth century; radio in the Netherlands in the 1920s; and commercial television in Italy in the 1980s.

Political parties stand at the heart of the crisis facing European democracies today. Parties suffer dwindling membership numbers, and are the target of a virulent wave of anti-party criticism that considers parties increasingly outdated or even plainly at odds with contemporary democratic practices. As populists from the right and new social movements from the left advocate a “party-less” democracy, party democracy seems to face inevitable demise.

Defying anti-party politics challenges this often-invoked analysis of contemporary politics. As the current challenge to party democracy is only the latest in a long history, this project seeks to explain the surprising resilience of party democracy in the face of relentless critique. It shifts the topical debate on contemporary democracy to twentieth-century France, Germany, and Italy, where parties faced regime changes and a vocal tradition of anti-party politics. It investigates how parties reformed democratic institutions to defy the continuous challenges launched to them, and demonstrates how they rendered modern democracies ‘party-states’.

This project deploys a comparative historical-institutionalist approach to explain party-state entanglement: it analyses the development of the institutional framework of party-state relations, predicated on the institutional reforms after the First World War which ushered in the age of mass democracy; studies how these were legitimized as a democratic solution to the challenges of mass politics; and reads history forward from these reforms to establish how they collectively shaped the form of democracy which is under pressure across Europe today.

The project thereby shifts the historiography on democracy from the preoccupation with parties’ societal ties to the crucial role of parties in institution-making and their relationship with the state; and intervenes at the cutting edge of political science debates by demonstrating that entanglement between parties and the state has a long history and has been a distinctive feature of modern democracy.