Why the rise of ‘cartel parties’ in Australia threatens our democracy

Australians are rightly happy their democracy has avoided the radical, anti-democratic movements sweeping through the United States and Europe.

But Australian democracy is not safe from threats. One of the most dangerous is the rise of “cartel parties” here in Australia. First identified in Europe, these types of parties seek to monopolise power and keep out new voices from politics.

They represent a fundamental shift in party politics from a system where parties give voice to citizens to one where parties focus on managing and monopolising power. Over time, this managerial system of cartel parties is likely to foster the very kind of anti-system and anti-democratic political movements and parties that Australia has so far avoided.

The cartel party idea

Richard Katz and Peter Mair, two European political scientists, developed the idea of the “cartel party” in the 1990s. They noticed that European parliamentary politics was changing, as parties shifted from representing citizens (“voice”) to focusing on controlling and managing power (“management”).

As management institutions, Katz and Mair describe how cartel parties undermine traditional understandings of representative democracy. They do this by creating a top-down form of politics where “the rulers control the ruled, rather than the other way around”. This managerial mode ultimately weakens democratic accountability, scrutiny and transparency.

The cartel party in Australia

Cartel parties are a reality in Australia. Ten years ago, now-Lord Mayor of Melbourne Nicholas Reece described how Australia’s “cartel-like” political parties mean “Australia is a democracy without the people”.

He’s right. Although our major parties make it very difficult to determine the actual party membership numbers, it is clear these numbers have plunged in recent decades.

Our major parties are now top-down management organisations. And they are not hiding it, justifying themselves in managerial language. For instance, Daniel Andrews, one of Victoria’s longest serving premiers, constantly referred to his role as simply “to get things done”.

These appeals to competence and implementation could simply be a statement that politicians are working on delivering on behalf of the people. But cartel parties are not interested in “getting things done” in a way that is responsive and accountable to the people. Instead, they actively seek to minimise bottom-up forms of popular accountability.

Katz and Mair point to two key strategies. First, cartel parties make frequent use of state resources to entrench themselves in power and avoid electoral accountability.

We see this party behaviour everywhere in Australia. To take just one example, in 2019, the Coalition used its grants power to give cash grants to sports clubs in marginal constituencies in an attempt to sway votes. Known as the “sports rorts” affair, it was a clear example of the exploitation of public money for party interests.

Second, Katz and Mair describe how cartel parties collude with one another to maintain their collective monopoly on power. This kind of collusion is grounded in a silent agreement – we will mutually agree to weaken accountability and keep out new voices because eventually we will benefit from it when we win an election.

In Australia, this was recently on show with the electoral reform legislation. This act – the most significant change to Australian electoral law in decades – was agreed on by Labor and the Coalition, then rushed through parliament with little debate and no serious discussion. A key goal of this rushed legislation was clear: to make it more difficult for smaller parties and independents to win seats in parliament.

We are potentially seeing another worrying example of our cartel party system at the moment. This time it is a proposed law that will undermine the functioning of the freedom of information laws and therefore worsen Australia’s public transparency problem.

Labor introduced these proposed changes without any serious justification. If the Coalition supports this legislation in the Senate, it is yet another example of our cartel party system in action.

Impact of cartel parties

As cartel parties avoid accountability, exclude new entrants, and monopolise power, the people lose their fundamental ability to hold their representative accountable. This accountability failure inevitably fosters distrust in representative democracy and helps to encourage radical, anti-democratic political movements.

As Katz and Mair wrote in 1995: cartel parties foster “new extreme-right parties  […] [that] appear to espouse a profoundly undemocratic and often xenophobic opposition”.

Australia is beginning to see this. Trust in public governance is eroding. This includes growing support, particularly amongst those aged 18-34, for “hostile activism”.

We can also see this in the growing power of the sovereign citizen movement.

How can we fix it?

Overcoming our system of cartel parties is not easy. Cartel parties cannot, for instance, be legislated or regulated out of existence because they themselves control the levers of power.

The High Court can mitigate the impacts of some of its worst impulses, for instance by striking down the Electoral Reform Act 2025 for undermining our constitutional freedom to participate in our politics.

But fundamentally, Australians themselves need to demand that their parties do better.

There is encouraging evidence they already doing so. Increasing numbers of community independent candidates are running for office, with a “commitment to return everyday people to the centre of Australian politics”.

Meanwhile, the major parties are steadily losing electoral support.

These trends should send a message to our major parties: stop trying to manage and monopolise power and instead once again give voice to the Australian people. The question then is whether the major parties are listening.