THEY REALLY AREN’T BRINGING MUCH TO THE TABLE: Michael Barone: Parties need to up their game.

Two weeks ago in this space, I asked what was to blame for the weakness of the heads of government here and in Western Europe. Institutional failure, voter fecklessness, leaders’ personal weaknesses, or some combination of all three?

This week, let’s look at one of those institutions — political parties. How have they contributed to current woes? How can they perform better?

There are those who would ask, what would you expect from parties? They’re nasty, grubby institutions, selfish, and inward-looking, in which intellectual dishonesty is the norm. Why not be done with them, and have a virtuous nonpartisan democracy?

One quick reply: When and where has anyone had an electoral democracy like that? The framers of the Constitution loathed parties and were wholly unpersuaded by the case Edmund Burke was making for them on the other side of the Atlantic.

But in the 1790s, they quickly formed parties because of disagreements over serious issues like how to finance the federal government and whether to back Britain or France in their world war.

Political parties do provide a certain stability to politics, and they have also have incentives to respond to evolving events and emerging issues. But they have been doing a rotten job of both recently in many prominent democracies.

For parties to work, they have to be run by people with self-discipline and a sense of the national interest. Those people are harder to find than they used to be, and they were never easy to find.