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Hans Kelsen and Political Parties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Yigal Mersel
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Abstract

In 1929, Hans Kelsen published a relatively slim book named On the Essence and Value of Democracy. Surprisingly, only a few segments of it were translated into English. One of the underlying theories elaborated by Kelsen is the need for political parties. Kelsen outlines the main justifications for the existence of political parties as derived from the concepts of liberty, equality, and representation. He concludes that political parties are essential for a modern democracy, and thus the modern state should be a party-state (parteienstaat). The goal of this Article is to outline Kelsen's theory on political parties and understand its historical and theoretical background. Furthermore, it strives to evaluate the relevance of Kelsen's theory on political parties nowadays. Kelsen's work is confronted thus with different parties malfunctioning such as non democratic and self interested parties. Reviewing Kelsen's work, there are also doubts about the proper constitutional status of political parties. Furthermore, there are some interesting possible observations regarding Kelsen's suggestion to recall a representative who shows disloyalty to the party line. This Article will demonstrate that Kelsen's work on political parties was not only innovative, but that it is also relevant to any modern debate about the constitutional status of political parties.

Type
Research Article
Information
Israel Law Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 158 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2006

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Footnotes

*

Registrar-Judge, The Supreme Court, Israel; Adjunct Lecturer of Constitutional Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prof. Klein was my thesis instructor in my doctoral studies and many of the ideas in this paper were first analyzed in that thesis. I wish to thank Prof. Klein for his enormous contribution to my scholarship. This paper is also based on a lecture in a symposium held in Jerusalem on March 2005, following the publishing of the Hebrew edition of Hans Kelsen, on the Essence and Value of Democracy (Izhak Englard trans., 2005) (1929). I wish to thank Prof. Izhak Englard, Dr. Barak Medina, and the anonymous referee for their comments to this paper.

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64 Id. at 401-405.

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66 Kelsen, supra note 6, at 96-97.

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71 Mersel, supra note 68.

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74 It seems that the German jurisprudence had followed this idea as it focuses on the internal structure of political parties as evidence for its external democracy. See, e.g., Kommers, supra note 55, at 222. Obviously, this German practice is strongly connected to the constitutional provision imposing explicitly internal democratic structure as one of the duties of political parties. See the German Basic Law, Article 21(1).

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81 Following 1901's law on corporations (Loi du ler Juillet 1901 relative au contrat d'association). See generally Bourrel, S., La Constitution du 4 Octobre 1958 et les Partis Politiques 45–49 (Thèse, Université de Pau et des pays de l'Adour, 1997)Google Scholar; Mestre, C., Le statut des partis politiques en France, Revue d'Aleemaone 181 (1994)Google Scholar.

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