There was a time in Britain and other Commonwealth countries when the place to be for anyone interested in shaping, or at least influencing, public policy was on the floor of a political party convention. This is not a recognizable model today.

Political parties neither offer voters a meaningful opportunity for involvement in the policymaking process, nor do they generate policy alternatives for those elected to office. It is no exaggeration that political parties have lost their soul to image-driven politics and have, in the process, lost their ability to attract members. The combined membership of the three main political parties in Britain has fallen from 3.5m in the 1950s to about 540,000 today. In addition, the parties are failing to attract a younger generation of activists. The same can be said for other Commonwealth countries.

Party leaders are concerned with winning political power and have little interest in analysing political or policy issues that are not connected to that. Political parties are increasingly dominated by party leaders and their carefully selected courtiers. They play the politics of image and policy vagueness in the pursuit of political power. Party leaders take office with little sense of direction and end up as brokers among competing interest groups. Citizens, meanwhile, have come to understand that it is better for them to associate with an interest group rather than a political party to promote their policy preferences.

The modern media are often far more interested in the personalities of party leaders than in the parties they represent. Election campaigns are built around party leaders, money, political war rooms, political gaffes, public opinion surveys, spin, television ads (including negative ones) and highly anticipated televised debates. This politics is all about party leaders winning and losing, not about political parties and their platforms winning and losing. Pollsters, close advisers to party leaders, technology and spin doctors have, to some extent, replaced party volunteers. The role of party members has been relegated to an election-day organisation providing the foot soldiers to execute the effort. Should the party leader win the election, then the party is in his debt rather than the other way around.

More to the point, political parties have lost their place to the "celebritisation" of party leaders. The competition in contemporary politics is now between personalities rather than between political parties. That is, political parties today reflect their leaders, their personalities and their beliefs rather than the leaders reflecting their parties, their beliefs and their traditions.

British political observers must have been left scratching their heads when David Murray decided to support Alex Salmond for a second term in office as first minister. Party ideology and policy preferences took a back seat to Salmond's "safe pair of hands". That is hardly the only example in Britain or in other Commonwealth countries. More than a few eyebrows were raised when George Galloway secured the support of the nationalist Solidarity in his decision to stand for a seat in the Scottish parliament. David Emerson, a senior minister in the Paul Martin government in Canada, quit the Liberal party to join the Conservative party, just as newly elected Stephen Harper was putting together his cabinet. Harper immediately appointed Emerson to the External Trade portfolio. Only days earlier, Emerson had been campaigning against Harper and the Conservatives. Harper explained that his invitation to Emerson to join his cabinet was based "solely on merit". For his part, Emerson said that had Martin been re-elected, he would have "absolutely stayed in the Martin cabinet".

We ought not to be surprised that voters today are less inclined to identify themselves as "Labour" or "Conservative" as their parents tended to do. They have little reason to do so given that political parties are increasingly election-day machines. This has important implications for representative democracies. When we move away from political parties to pursue more narrow interests, the connection between citizens and government is further fragmented. It also speaks to the rise of more "personalised realities".

The problem is that the economic and political interests of the political, intellectual and economic elites are heard at the expense of the broader community. The power and influence of political parties and even formal policymaking processes have given way to powerful individuals and actor-centred institutionalism. This, in turn, has made it virtually impossible for many elected representatives, let alone ordinary citizens, to play any meaningful role in shaping public policies or even holding government to account. We ought not to be surprised at voter apathy and the growing cynicism about government in society.

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