Political Parties: The Bridge Between State and Civil Society

This chapter continues the analysis of those mechanisms in liberal democracy that appear to connect the two main components of political relations, the state and civil society. Here the focus is on political parties, and to a lesser degree on lobbies, referenda, and the ombudsoffice. There is, moreover, a set of informal processes that has always existed but now much expanded and so they cannot be ignored. “Shadow links” is the label these processes have been given, and they include state creditors, credit rating agencies, corporate consultancies, mass media, global regulators such as the IMF and the World Bank, corporatized state agencies, and ‘revolving doors,’ among other forms of quasi-legal influencing.