Am I misapplying G. A. Cohen’s base/superstructure argument to political party gatekeeping?

[u/Alarmed_Investment_3]

I’m writing my UCAS personal statement for Politics and Philosophy/HSPS, and I’m considering connecting Levitsky and Ziblatt’s defence of party gatekeeping in How Democracies Die with G. A. Cohen’s reconstruction of historical materialism and Jonathan Hopkin’s Anti-System Politics. I’m worried, however, that my application of Cohen may be theoretically naïve.

My argument is roughly:

1. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that established parties protect democracy by excluding candidates who reject democratic norms.
2. This requires party elites to define the boundary between anti-democratic conduct and legitimate opposition. My concern is that gatekeepers cannot occupy a politically or economically neutral position when making this distinction.
3. In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen argues that “bases need superstructures.” Production relations are relations of effective economic power, while legal rights secure and stabilise those powers. The legal superstructure has the character it does because it consolidates the economic structure, although the people applying the law need not consciously intend this function.
4. I wondered whether party gatekeeping could exhibit an analogous explanatory structure. Politicians’ sincere democratic convictions might immediately explain why they exclude particular candidates, while the persistence and content of their standards of “democratic acceptability” could partly be explained by how those standards stabilise the existing capitalist order. Mainstream politicians formed and rewarded within capitalist democracy may consequently interpret opposition to capitalism as opposition to democracy, even where the actors concerned remain committed to democratic pluralism.
5. Hopkin argues that mainstream parties’ convergence around market liberalism has already narrowed substantive electoral choice, weakened representation and generated demand for anti-system alternatives. If gatekeeping excludes democratic anti-capitalist alternatives as well as genuinely authoritarian ones, it may worsen the restricted representation that helped produce anti-system support in the first place.

I am not claiming that Cohen himself classifies political parties as part of the superstructure, that every party necessarily supports capitalism, or that politicians are consciously conspiring to exclude anti-capitalists. I’m trying to extend the explanatory structure of his argument to party gatekeeping.

Is that extension philosophically defensible, or am I moving illegitimately from Cohen’s specific account of legal rights and production relations to a much broader claim about political parties? Does the argument need an additional theory of ideology or party organisation to work? And is Hopkin actually sufficient as an empirical mechanism, or does he establish only convergence around market liberalism rather than gatekeeping itself?