LAUSR

technological progress are not able to overcome the classical shortcomings of IPD (low participation, deficient representation, social exclusion). The book ends on more positive note with a reprint of the speech held by the former president of the German Bundestag at the symposium. Lammert focuses on the achievements of parties rather than their deficiencies. He points to the multitude of contradicting expectations put at the parties’ doorstep, the preference of citizens to become engaged for personal rather than general interests, and the ascendancy of the entertainment principle in the media. The volume exhibits the distinctive strength of the PRuF. In the finest tradition of this venerable institution, it combines perspectives from Law and Political Science with the evaluation of practitioners. Such interdisciplinary work is particularly fruitful because it helps us to reflect the assumptions and orientations that have become secondnature in the process of disciplinary socialisation. Taken together, the chapters in this volume present a sharp analysis of the party state and chart an intriguing path to transforming party democracy. Though explicitly addressed or echoed in some of the chapters (e.g., Detterbeck, Niedermayer), the position that remains somewhat underemphasised overall is that of authors such as Schumpeter, Sartori, and Katz who argue that more democracy is not the simple cure to the ills of democracy that it can appear to be.