I am grateful to Cristina Lafont for her thoughtful and generous review of Rethinking Party Reform. Lafont rightly observes that the book focuses primarily on the reform of intraparty decision-making procedures. And she is also right to question whether democratizing these procedures can actually mitigate the crisis that political parties currently face.

If I understand correctly, Lafont worries that my proposals for democratizing parties internally cannot solve the biggest problem plaguing contemporary parties––that their programs and agendas are increasingly ideologically empty and alike––because that problem is caused by factors that are purely exogenous to parties. Accordingly, parties struggle to present citizens with real political alternatives, because international institutions, such as the European Central Bank, the European Court of Justice, or the International Monetary Fund, and the imperatives of the global economy, more generally, severely limit their room for maneuver. Reforming and democratizing parties cannot make these external constraints vanish, so that will not help parties depart from the ideologically vacuous status quo.

Now, there is much truth in this observation. It would be absurd to deny that national governments and parties are constrained by a range of institutions and forces that operate beyond the state. But neither is the power these institutions and forces exercise over parties absolute, nor is reducing their power a task that party reform alone could fulfill. Let me take these points in turn.

First, although one must not underestimate the impact of international institutions and global capitalism on national parties’ policy agendas, it is equally misleading to think that parties have lost all or nearly all control over their agendas. There still exist parties that self-confidently implement agendas that go decidedly against the demands of international agencies (a recent example is the Portuguese Partido Socialista, which rejected the austerity policies mandated by the EU and IMF); there also exist long-standing parties that manage to renounce the exchangeable centrism that typically results from blindly accepting the primacy of global markets and interdependencies over politics (think of the British Labour Party under Corbyn; that the wider public did not approve of the party’s ideological transformation is a moot point). So, there is arguably still some room for ideological innovation, and in my book, I try to show how such innovation could be achieved in a participatory and inclusive fashion.

Second, the deliberative democratization of intraparty decision procedures that I propose in my book cannot of course, by itself, solve the more general problem that institutions and forces beyond the state place constraints on national parties. Certainly, it is imaginable that more internally democratic parties will more robustly resist demands from external principals if this is what their members and voters demand. But limiting the remit and authority of those principals would ultimately require a more fully fledged democratization of global politics. It would require that the many unelected international agencies that ask us to blindly defer to their decisions, as Lafont might put it, give way to more democratic ones. This is no doubt an important project, but it would require a different book.