Political parties are organizations subscribing to an ideology or formed around a special interest, with the aim of attaining power within government. They participate in elections, select candidates for public office, mobilize voters, raise funds, articulate political positions, coordinate policy making, develop campaign strategies, and generate symbols of party identification and loyalty. Parties are rooted in political, religious, sectional, ethnic, racial, and/or economic class interests. Parties are frequently coalitions of groups espousing disparate interests. Persons who support a party’s candidates, espouse its policies, and work to advance its political objectives are partisans. An opposition party does not challenge the legitimacy of the government, but only its policies.
EARLY POLITICAL PARTIES
European political parties formed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to advise the monarchy. The model of a political party can be traced to Great Britain as the Tory and Whig parties fought for control of Parliament. Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) founded the first U.S. political party, the Federalists, in 1792 to support his fiscal and political policies.
Although a competitive party system is considered to be an essential prerequisite for political freedom today, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American thinkers were wary of political parties, faulting them for serving special interests rather than the public good. Parties often were associated with treason and conspiracy. George Washington (1732-1799), the first president of the United States, in his "Farewell Address" deplored "the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party" (Washington 1796, p. 226). John Adams (1734-1826), the second president, held that "a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution" (Adams 1851, p. 508). Political leaders who serve only the interests of their parties rather than the common good were condemned as corrupt. The Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans did not regard each other as legitimate opposition parties, but as threats to the republic that should be eliminated. When the Federalist Party collapsed in 1814, the political consensus that ensued—the "Era of Good Feeling"—was cited as evidence that the U.S. system had succeeded.
Others wrote more sympathetically and prophetically about the positive role that parties played in political life. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) saw party competition as a necessary good. Famously defining a party as "a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon particular principle in which they are all agreed," Burke declared that "[p]arty divisions whether operating for good or evil are things inseparable from free government" (Burke 1925, p. 229). One of the authors of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison (1751-1836), following the English philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), held in Federalist Paper number 10 that parties, or "factions," could not "be removed" because they are rooted in man’s natural propensity to differ. The "mischief" of factions that cause, though, could be curbed by fostering a multiplicity of "factions and parties" that would render unlikely "that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of citizens." If they do, sufficient impediments, such as bad roads and poor communications, would make it difficult for them "to act in unison" (Madison 1787, pp. 55-61).
Although there is no mention of political parties in the U.S. Constitution, political parties are a logical outcome of the constitutional system. The First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and assembly, both necessary conditions for the emergence of voluntary political organizations. The Constitution’s delegation of legislative power to elected representatives encouraged the formation of political parties. Parties, in turn, transformed and democratized the constitutional system. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) is credited with having created the first popular political party—the Democratic-Republicans later known as the Democratic Party. For his election to the presidency in 1828, Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) transformed this party into the first national, massed-based party.
TYPES OF PARTIES AND PARTY SYSTEMS
Because power is shared between the central government and the individual states, the U.S. federal system of government impedes the development of the type of unified, cohesive parties found in, for example, the European parliamentary systems. A parliamentary system demands greater party discipline because the majority party in Parliament forms the government. Except when the Democrat and Republican parties gather every four years at their national conventions to nominate candidates for the offices of president and vice president and to write their platforms, they are not in any meaningful way national parties. Rather, each is really a coalition of state parties that are themselves confederations of semiautonomous local governmental parties. Even presidents or candidates for the presidency have only feeble control over state and local party members and elected officials. Under the U.S system, a divided government is possible, when one or both houses of Congress and the presidency are held by different parties.
The ideological spectrum of political parties typically runs from left to right. Right-wing political parties espouse conservative or reactionary views, whereas left-wing parties are associated with progressive or radical policies. The Conservative Party of Canada and the United Kingdom and the Republican Party of the United States are right-wing parties, and the Labour Party of the United Kingdom, the Liberal Party of Canada, and the Democratic Party of the United States are generally considered to be left-wing parties. The British National Front Party and the Front National of France are examples of far right-wing parties, and the Green, Communist, and Socialist parties are all on the extreme left.
Political party systems vary across the world. Nonparty states, such as Saudia Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have no political parties at all. Single-party states, such as the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and Cuba, allow only one-party rule. The constitution of the former Soviet Union officially established the primacy of the Communist Party. The prohibition against the formation of opposition parties is evidence of the absence of liberty. In contrast, dominant-party states do allow other parties, but one party, such as the People’s Action Party of Singapore and African National Congress Party of South Africa, typically wins most if not all elections. In the U.S. South until the 1970s, the Democratic Party won nearly all the general elections.
Two-party states, such as the United States, have two dominant national parties that vie for power. The system for electing the president in the United States entails an indirect election in which the electorate votes for a slate of electors who cast their votes for the president and vice president in an electoral college. This system impedes the formation of third parties: Because the slate of electors for the electoral college are elected in winner-take-all state elections, minor party candidates rarely win sufficient electoral college votes to have an impact on a national election. The election of legislative representatives in winner-take-all district elections further discourages the development of third parties. The principle that the single-member district plurality voting system results in a two-party system has been called Durverger’s law, after the French sociologist, Maurice Duverger (b. 1917), who formulated it. The two parties tend to resemble each other because each party gravitates toward the middle in an effort to capture the independent vote.
Multiparty states, such as the United Kingdom, Israel, and Canada, have a number of parties that compete for power. A multiparty system commonly exists in states with a parliamentary form of government. If no party wins a majority of seats in a parliamentary election, a coalition government is formed between two or more parties. The majority of the members of Parliament vote for a leader who serves as the head of the government. Proportional Representation, a scheme of voting used in several European states, encourages further proliferation of parties. Under this system, legislative seats are allocated according to the percentage of popular votes that the party received in the most recent election.
POLITICAL PARTIES AND DEMOCRACY
Modern political scientists regard political parties as beneficial avenues through which political interests and opinions can be channeled. "Democracy," political scientist E. E. Schattschneider (1892-1971) concluded, "is unthinkable save in terms of parties" (Schattschneider 1942, p. 124).
Other thinkers, though, were more cautious in their assessment of the democratic influence of political parties on government. Most significantly, the Italian anarcho-syndicalist sociologist Robert Michels (1876-1936) proposed the iron law of oligarchy which stipulated that no matter how democratic an organization may be initially, it will eventually develop into an oligarchy. All large organizations, to attain greater efficiency and decision-making coordination, tend to concentrate power into the hands of a few. As parties grow in size and complexity, they become more hierarchically organized. True democracy, given the premises of Michels’s argument, is practically and theoretically impossible.
The noted American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) observed that the top of the American political system was becoming more unified and powerful. He described in his most famous book, The Power Elite (1956), the interconnecting relationship between corporate, military, and government leaders. His controversial argument was that there was a growing power gap between a class of people Mills called "the power elite" and the increasingly manipulated and controlled masses.
Not all theorists agreed with the pessimistic implications of these arguments. The popular definition of democracy as "government by the people," Schatt-schneider contended, exaggerates the power of the public. Rather, a more realistic definition that emphasizes organization and leadership rather than spontaneous grass-roots politics is needed. "Democracy is a competitive political system," he observed, "in which competing leaders and organizations define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process" (Schattschneider 1960, p. 141).
WEAKENING OF PARTY LOYALTY
Some of the factors that weaken the power and influence of political parties include declining patronage, the direct primary, the role of the media, the proliferation of non-partisan political action committees, and the growing importance of the Internet as a tool for raising campaign funds and disseminating information about candidates and issues. The direct primary diminishes the ability of party leaders to select preferred candidates to run for political office. Patronage induces voters to support the party’s candidates by handing out jobs, contracts, or promotions for political reasons rather than merit. As easily accessible information about candidates and issues becomes available to voters through the mass media and the Internet, voters become less dependent on parties. Better informed voters tend to be less deferential to parties and more likely to split their votes among candidates from two or more parties.
Many analysts of the U.S. political party system detect a continuing trend toward party dealignment. A growing number of voters are declining to affiliate with any political party, preferring instead to identify themselves as independents. Since 1988 the plurality of independent voters has steadily increased. In 2004 39 percent of the American voters identified themselves as independents. Polls suggest that a large portion of the American public is allergic to partisan politics. They want candidates who promise to rise above partisan bickering and party loyalty to work on enacting legislation that will effectively solve the nation’s most pressing social and economic problems.
The most important function of the national political parties today is to raise funds for candidates and wage "get-out-the vote" campaigns.
