‘Athenian democracy’ or ‘American caucus’?

After Gladstone's retirement, the last bastion of the alliance between the Nationalists and the Liberals was the National Liberal Federation (NLF). The Irish perceived the NLF as embodying the solidarity between ‘the peoples’ of Britain and Ireland, allegedly united in their support for ‘the cause of democratic reform’. Yet, as both contemporaries and modern historians have always pointed out, the democratic legitimacy and the popularity of the ‘caucus’ were questionable. While in popular circles ‘suspicion of party ran deep’, politicians earnestly debated whether the ‘machines’ were at all compatible with either liberalism or parliamentary government.

By contrast with the intellectual debate generated by the NLF from the 1880s, there was little theoretical preparation for its establishment in 1877: no blueprint had been drawn up by ‘the lights of liberalism’.