Rise of Political Parties

10 Key excerpts on "Rise of Political Parties"

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  Elections and Democracy after Communism?

  • E. Herron(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 C h a p t e r 6 Political Party Evolution Functional political parties are essential participants in democratic politics. 1 Ideally, a party is a robust and responsive organization promoting a clearly defined ideology or set of views on pertinent policy matters that regularly contests elections, wins seats, and participates in policy making as a mem- ber of a governing coalition or the loyal opposition. While some groups in post-Soviet space purporting to be parties have developed consistent policy platforms and stable organizations, many more are ideologically ambiguous, organizationally hollow, personalistic, and incapable of formal participation in governance. Previous chapters defined political parties in simple terms—a party was any group that contested an election—and deferred a deeper discussion of the issue to this chapter. While the definition used in earlier chapters simpli- fies coding and analytical procedures, it avoids addressing important features that qualitatively differentiate groups labeled as political parties from one another. This chapter investigates the forms and functions of political parties, fol- lowing other scholars who have characterized party system development in terms of party “supply” and “demand.” In one conceptualization of market- driven party competition, Richard Rose (2000) argues that citizen demand for parties and elite supply interact. Citizens demand particular outcomes, and parties compete to provide what voters want. Alternatively, Henry Hale (2005; 2006) proposes that the main market relationship exists between party organizations as suppliers of valuable services and candidates as con- sumers who demand those services. He notes that many small parties supply few, if any, resources for candidates, in contrast to larger parties, patron- age networks, and business organizations that offer valuable electoral goods and services. The chapter refers to concepts of both supply and demand but

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  Handbook of Party Politics

  • Richard S Katz, William J Crotty, Richard S Katz, William J Crotty(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Party-based politics was one of the transforming inventions of the 19th century. Of course, par-ties were not unknown before this time, but it was not until the 19th century that they emerged as central organizing features in many coun-tries’ politics. Before this, parties were loose groupings at best, linked by support for a par-ticular leader or political idea. Often they were equated with ‘factions’, unwanted divisions that endangered the national order. Yet despite these widespread and deep-rooted anti-party biases, during the 19th century parties took on a well-defined shape both inside and outside of the legislatures in many countries. These changes in political parties coincided with, and stimulated, a much wider transfor-mation of politics. Across Europe and North America the 19th century witnessed a broad movement towards mass electoral politics. As the electorate grew, so too did the seeming inevitability of party-organized electoral com-petition. Because of this, the presence of multi-ple, competing, political parties gradually came to be considered one of the hallmarks of a democratic regime: as E. E. Schattschneider (1942: 1) would put it in the middle of the 20th century, ‘political parties created democracy, and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties’. Along with this shift came new definitions that highlighted electoral aspi-rations as the most important feature which distinguished political parties from other groups seeking to influence public policy. In the succinct words of Anthony Downs (1957: 25), a party is ‘a team seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election’. Though electoral compe-tition came to be seen as a core activity for parties, in more elaborate functionalist descrip-tions parties did much more than this.

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  Elections, Parties and Representation in Post-Communist Europe

  • F. Millard(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  47 3 Political Parties and their Evolution The previous regime cast a long shadow on the development of competitive party politics after the fall of communism. ‘Party’ evoked all the negative connotations of communist control and manipulation, especially in Central Europe. Politics was seldom equated with the art of compromise and negoti- ation. Yet the new institution-builders recognised the ubiquity of political parties in modern democracies and what is more, the absence of any obvious alternative. When elections became the key to political power, groups of aspiring politicians set out to mobilise the population. In the absence of a developed space between the public and private spheres, these groups bridged the gap. Politics was of necessity élite-driven. The élites both reflected and shaped the political opportunity structure. They structured the choices available to voters. This chapter analyses the types of parties that emerged in post-communist states. It examines the bases on which aspiring élites sought electoral support. It centres on the post-communist menu of choice and its evolution. It demonstrates the diversity of ways in which parties adapted to the demands of political competition. Two criteria were traditionally adopted to generate typologies of European political parties: organisation and ideology were seen as the key to differ- entiating parties, understanding their internal dynamics, and explaining their change and adaptation. We referred to several of these approaches in Chapter 2. In Duverger’s argument the two dimensions of ideology and organisation were interlinked. 1 Panebianco focused on the ways in which formative organisational development affected the process of party institu- tionalisation. 2 Lipset and Rokkan were more concerned with how ideology matched the cleavage structures in society, itself shaped by critical pre- democratic conflicts. 3 Recognisable ‘party families’ became a widespread basis for categorising political parties.

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  American Government

  Political Development and Institutional Change

  • Cal Jillson(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In 2013, the first election after the strict Texas voter ID law came into effect, both candidates for governor, the Republican Greg Abbott and the Democrat Wendy Davis, were required to cast provisional ballots because the names on their driver’s licenses and on the voter rolls were slightly different. Moreover, this battle has broadened considerably; in the wake of President Trump’s 2020 re-election loss, nineteen states, most under Republican leadership, passed new election laws. Republicans called these voter integrity bills while Democrats called them voter suppression bills.

  Political Parties in the United States

  The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what James Madison called “factions” and what today we call interest groups and political parties. The Founders believed that there was a public interest and a common good and that statesmen might discover and act upon them. Factions, groups, and parties reflected divisions and disagreements within the governing class and perhaps the public about the nature, even the existence, of the common good. Not until the 1830s did Americans begin to consider that the clash of political parties might actually be healthy, even necessary, for democracy.

  Over the course of the nineteenth century, Americans came to believe that parties could organize, structure, and facilitate democratic politics in ways that made it easier for citizens to participate. Absent parties, voters must study every issue and every candidate independently. But parties have histories, they have reputations as standing for corporate interests or for the common man, and citizens can choose the party that usually represents them best. Choosing a party is easier than studying every issue and every candidate in every election.1

  The distinguishing characteristic of a

  political party

  is that its candidates compete in elections in the hope of winning executive branch offices and majority control of legislatures. Parties recruit and screen candidates, offer platforms, contest elections, and, if they win, attempt to implement their campaign promises. One final and very grave responsibility that parties and party leaders have is managing or protecting their brand.2 The losing party acts as a watchdog, criticizes the governing party, exposes corruption and abuse of power, and prepares for the next election. Contemporary students of political parties have generally agreed with E.E. Schattschneider that modern democratic politics are unthinkable except in terms of parties. Table 7.1

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  Political Parties and Political Development. (SPD-6)

  • Joseph La Palombara, Myron Weiner(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Political development may be understood as a move- 12 V. 0. Key, Jr., Politicsy Parties, and Pressure Groufsi 5th ed., New York, 1958, p. 222. 13 See, e.g., John H. Kautsky, Political Change in Underdevelofed Countries: Nationalism and Communism, New York, 19625 Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., The Politics of Develofing Areasy Princeton, 19605 Immanuel Waller- stein, Africa: the Politics of Indefendencey New York, 1961, pp. 63-795 Thomas Hodgkin, African Political Parties1 London, 1961, pp. 38-48. PARTIES & NATION-BUILDING ment toward a political system which is capable of handling the loads it confronts, characterized by significant differentiation of structures and specificity of functions, increasingly centralized and able to maintain itself. It may not be as easy to measure political de- velopment as it would be to measure economic development, for ex- ample, yet one might argue that a highly developed political system is characterized by some measure of rationalized political efficiency, defined as a substantial degree of coherence in policy output and a capacity for innovation in the face of new problems. 14 Parties and party systems may have an important impact on the course of such development. In the American case the emergence of parties marked a significant elaboration of structures and a movement toward relative political efficiency. Before the advent of parties politics was a pluralistic, kaleidoscopic flux of personal cliques like those that gathered around the great magnate families in New York, caucuses of the sort that came and went in many New England towns, select and often half- invisible juntas in the capitals or courthouse villages in the Southern states, or other more or less popular but usually evanescent factions. All of these political formations in their pluralistic variety may be brought under the general heading of faction politics.

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  Democratic and Authoritarian Political Systems in 21st Century World Society

  Vol. 1 – Differentiation, Inclusion, Responsiveness

  • Anna L. Ahlers, Damien Krichewsky, Evelyn Moser, Rudolf Stichweh(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  2. The Rise of Complexity: Internal Differentiation of Political Systems 87 ty over diversity, and conservation instead of innovation; aspirations that run counter to the ideas of a polity and of politics that emerged and were fairly domi -nant in the later 20th century. Another trend that is connected to the aforementioned observation, one could argue, is that over the course of roughly 200 years of parties as crucial organi -zations in the political system, political issues have become ever more complex. There is no longer just one big question about whether the state should provide social security to citizens, how much taxes should be raised, or whether to go to war with another country, as was the case in the early era of parties. Alongside the general dif ferentiation of party systems, the number of issues that need to be processed and decided upon, ad-hoc and long-term, in myriad party sub-groups, small parliamentary committees, ministries and general assemblies, grows steadily. This makes the bridging and mediating function of parties much more difficult. While a voter might be aware of a party’s general position on the scope of public welfare services, the principles of taxation, or the preference for eco -nomic growth versus resource protection, and other specific areas of individual importance to him or her, it will not necessarily be clear or known what position the same party represents when dealing with highway fees, same-sex marriage, or research funding. At the same time, parties constantly screen society for new topics on which decisions seem to be imminent, and adapt these for programs and policies tailored to their electorates – old and new ones – even before voters may have ever heard about these issues or have ref lected on ways to approach it (see also Chapter 4 on responsiveness). In both cases, a lot of trust and ex ante support is necessary.

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  The Economic Origin of Political Parties

  • Christopher Kam, Adlai Newson(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In the space of twenty years, the two main parties transformed from coteries of local notables who employed clientelism to win elections to electoral-professional parties that fought elections on the basis of volunteers and policies. All of these later developments, however, followed a surge in contested elections and party slates that began in earnest in 1865. Party slates ensured that elections ran along clear two-party lines, imparting a coherence and consistency to party labels across constituencies. This, in turn, made it easier for parties to execute programmatic campaign strategies – although it is more accurate to state the matter in the contrapositive: absent competitive elections run along stable partisan lines, programmatic electoral politics would not have emerged. We titled this Element The Economic Origins of Political Parties, and there are two reasons for this. First, our analyses show that candidates’ behavior was often motivated by economic concerns. Money was both the problem and, in some ways, the solution, in that its declining capacity to alter election outcomes spurred changes that were not forthcoming in response to legislative efforts. Second, it provides a way to think about the behavior of candidates and parties that is motivated by and consistent with what we know from a variety of contexts. For example, drawing an economic analogy between candidates and firms competing in an industry, we might say that in the face of increased 80 Elements in Political Economy competition and higher costs, candidates preferred to eke out efficiencies by consolidating with copartisans rather than by changing technology. It took an additional shock to market conditions (in the form of an even more extensive expansion of the franchise and a wholesale redistribution of parliamentary seats and constituency boundaries) to convince candidates and parties to adopt an altogether different business model.

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  Political Parties in Post-Communist Societies

  Formation, Persistence, and Change

  • M. Spirova(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Studies of new party emergence—one of the elements of system change—have been relatively rare (Hug 2001; Golder 2003). 14 Po l i t i c a l Pa rt i e s i n Po s t- C o m m u n i s t S o c i e t i e s The literature devoted to Eastern European developments has also failed to address these questions. It tends to contain descriptive accounts of either party system developments or individual parties. There have been few attempts to analyze how an individual party’s development is influenced by the development of other parties or by the legal and institutional arrangements of the political system. 1 However, the decisions of parties to form, merge, ally, or dissolve is a crucial question for the analysis of parties and party systems. This chapter will develop a model to describe and explain the decision-making process that results in these outcomes, which we shall consider to be a choice made by politicians. It borrows from insights into this process developed in several fields of the literature: studies on party system change in Western Europe, including the literature on new party emergence in established systems; the literature on party develop- ment in new democracies, specifically those in Eastern Europe; and more general discussions of the role of political parties in democratic systems. Party Formation, Persistence, and Change: An Overview Political Parties as Endogenous Institutions The current understanding of party formation and change is con- sistent with the understanding of party behavior as the result of the actions of rational, goal-oriented individuals, constrained by struc- tural and institutional factors. This approach to the study of party development has been taken by Aldrich (1995), Perkins (1996), Hug (2001), and Hauss and Rayside (1978). If we consider politics to be a “game,” then institutions can be treated as equilibrium outcomes of this game, or put in other words, humanly devised constraints on human behavior (Calvert 1995).

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  Politics in Pacific Asia

  An Introduction

  • Xiaoming Huang, Jason Young(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  174 The rise of modern political parties in Pacific Asia 174 Catch-all parties and corporatist parties 180 Party structures 183 Candidate selection procedures 184 Membership, recruitment and grassroots organization 187 Factionalism and regionalism 188 The model for LDP dominance 194 Electoral rules in non- pluralist states 195 Elections and mass integration 196 Electoral culture 197 Political funding and money politics 198 Party system reforms 200 Electoral system reforms 202 Electoral rules, party politics and political order 203 P olitical parties and elections play a significant role in modern poli-tics. They are the core practices of democratic politics. Without the freedom of assembly and open and fair elections, there is no genuine democracy. Moreover, different parties and electoral systems affect the way that interests are represented and how political power is distributed in a political system. Indeed, the differentiation in the development of modern political systems can partially be explained by the differences in party and electoral systems. The problem of political parties and elections is more acute in Pacific Asia because of the different roles they play in governance and politics, and their close association with the rise and fall of different political regimes in post-war political development. This chapter discusses, in the first part, the role of political parties in Pacific Asian politics, party politics in different political systems and the organization of political parties; and, in the second, the electoral systems in Pacific Asia, how they affect politics and governance, and key issues in recent electoral system reforms. The focus of this chapter is on the institutional arrangements in the party and electoral systems, and how they shape the patterns of political mobilization and participation, as well as the overall political structure.

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  The American Political Pattern

  Stability and Change, 1932-2016

  • Byron E. Shafer(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  3 | The Rise of Participatory Politics

  The Political Structure of an Era of Divided Government, 1969–1992

  Party balance: a narrowing imbalance of partisan attachments that become more ambiguous in their impact; ideological polarization: the growing polarization of party activists, resisted by elected officials; substantive conflict: economic welfare joined by cultural values as dual, dominant, and crosscutting issue concerns; policy-making process: cross-partisan and cross-institutional negotiations to reassemble these otherwise fragmenting pressures.

  No one at the time could have known that the Late New Deal Era had come to an end with the presidential election of 1968 .1 The Democrats once again controlled the House, as they had for all but four years since 1 930 . The Republicans did pick up the presidency, but only over a Democratic Party suffering internal disarray on a cosmic scale within a faltering economy in the midst of an unpopular war. Top it all off with widespread racial rioting, extensive war protest, plus surging public anxieties about crime, and commentators at the time could be excused for seeing the collective outcome of 1968 not as the harbinger of some new and stable patterning to American politics but rather as an amazing combination of anomalous, idiosyncratic, transitory, and in most ways disastrous events.

  In hindsight, however, it is easy to see—it is hard to avoid seeing—the same election as the first in a sequence of contests that was to be distinctive in all of American history.2 Its hallmark would be “divided government,” split partisan control of the elective institutions of American national government, but with further and stable specifics inside it. To wit: this was to be an era of Republican presidencies stapled onto Democratic Congresses. Indeed, again in hindsight, the only real anomaly in this extended period was not the election of Republican Richard Nixon in 1968 but the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1 976

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