“The age of party democracy has passed,” Irish political scientist Peter Mair declared in a book posthumously published in 2013. He had spent his academic career peering at a specific organism in the life of humans as political animals—the party, with its leaders, members, functionaries, and voters, operating both in parliament and on the street. To Mair, who died in 2011, modern politics was hard to imagine without it; at times, he wondered whether democracy might survive its demise. Yet by