Written by Hilaire Beloc and G.K. Chesterton's younger brother, Cecil, The Party System, is a great little read laying the failure of democracy at the feet of the party system. Although directly relevant to parliamentary democracies, it has much to offer to other systems of government as well.
Although written 100 years ago, this book is strangely prophetic of what's goes on in politics today.
Some samples:
"Votes, elections, and representative assemblies are not democracy: they are at best machinery for carrying out democracy."
"This viewpoint [that a mere spread of the structures - such as elections and parliamentary representation - will bring about democracy] forgets, however, that each people must travel its own road, whether gradually or rapidly, according to its own peculiarities and its own traditions and identity; and that democracy is an historical process, not an ideological one. One cannot invent it, nor export it ready made."
"...a dim suspicion has begun to arise in the minds of at least a section of the people that this historic optimism [of self-government] is not quite as true as it looks, that the electors do not as a fact control the representatives, and that the representatives do not as a fact control the Government, that something alien has intervened between electors and elected, between legislature and Executive, something that deflects the working of representative institutions.
"That thing is the Party System."
"It may, however, be worthwhile to define exactly what democracy is. Votes and elections and representative assemblies are not democracy. Democracy is government by the general will. Wherever, under whatever forms, such laws as the mass of the people desire are passed, and such laws as they dislike are rejected, there is democracy. Wherever, under whatever forms, the laws passed and rejected have no relation to the desires of the mass, there is no democracy."
