The United States Of America

The Constitution And Democracy

Political parties
Political parties are groups of people who come together out of a desire to obtain political power. The obvious way to obtain such power is to gain control of the government, but political parties also exercise power by influencing the policies of governments not under their control. Actual control, however, is the primary aim, and political parties are oriented toward that goal and attempt to realize it by legal means (elections), extralegal means (picketing and demonstrations), or illegal means (revolution). The purposes behind the desire for power are as varied as the individuals belonging to parties. Parties exist, however, for several basic discernible--and often overlapping--purposes: to promote an ideology, such as fascism and communism; to promote an individual or a family, such as Peronism; and to promote a special interest or section of a nation, such as the Parti Quebecois or the Prohibition party. Some parties are also job oriented and serve as mechanisms by which individuals may enjoy the perquisites of power, such as the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States.

Competitive political parties are widely regarded as indispensable to the proper functioning of a democratic society. The functions assigned political parties in democratic societies such as the United States and Great Britain include the nomination of candidates for the offices of government; the presentation of alternative sets of policies to cope with the major problems of the nation; the political education of the electorate by means of the ventilation of these alternatives through public debates; and the mobilization of the electorate behind one or the other of the parties, thereby securing broad popular participation in determining who shall rule. The party that wins the Election is usually responsible for running the government for a specific period of time until the next election; and the parties that lose the election are responsible for organizing a loyal opposition.

History of Political Parties
The political party has its roots in the omnipresent struggle for power within and among human communities. As far back as history records, chiefs, tyrants, and kings and queens have ruled over tribes, cities, and nations. The rationalization for the existence of governments has usually been the necessity to provide for the common defense of the community and to ensure its domestic tranquillity. History also shows, however, that the tranquillity has often been disturbed as chieftains and tyrants have had to fight against individuals and groups plotting to seize their positions and their power under one pretext or another. The palace struggles between the "ins" and the "outs" were political party battles in a primitive form.
The modern party systems have their origins in the constitutional and religious struggles of 17th-century England. A central issue in contention was whether affairs of state were exclusively the province of the crown. The supporters of the Stuart monarchs claimed that sovereignty resided solely in the crown; they were called Tories and their opponents were called Whigs. The philosophical underpinnings of party differences also date from that division.
The Stuarts placed their claim to power on the principle of the divine right of kings. In defending the absolute power of the monarch, the Tories also drew upon Thomas Hobbes, who contended in The Leviathan that the life of humankind had been "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" until people agreed in a social contract to surrender their natural rights to the sovereign, to whom they thereafter owed unquestioning obedience.

John Locke, on the other hand, was the intellectual inspiration of the Whigs. In the first of his Two Treatises on Government he set out to demolish the arguments of proponents of the divine right of the king to rule. Locke contended that the sovereignty of a nation resides in the will of its people and that the social contract is a triumph of reason whereby the people agree to be bound by the will of the majority for certain definite ends. The agreement may be between the people, on the one hand, and the king and a parliament, on the other. This power, however, must be exercised for the good of the subjects, and the subjects retain the final right of abolishing any government that violates the social contract.

In the 17th century the English political parties represented narrowly defined interests and groups of the population. The Tories had the support of the landed gentry and Anglican clergy (an important political force at that time). The Whigs had the support of the great landholders, the mercantile and financial interests, and the rising class of factory and mill owners. The lower classes, completely disenfranchised, had no support for (or from) either party. Since the 17th century the Tories have evolved into the Conservative party. The Whigs gave way to the Liberal party in the 19th century. It, in turn, was replaced by the Labour party as one of today's two major British parties.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution had hoped to avoid the factionalism of political parties and wrote no role for them into the Constitution. Nevertheless, party divisions began during the administration of the first president, George Washington. The Federalists coalesced around John Adams and the Democratic-Republicans around Thomas Jefferson. The Jeffersonians became the Democratic party, and the Federalists were succeeded by the National Republicans in the 1820s and then by the Whig in the 1830s. The Whigs, in turn, were replaced by the Republican Party in the 1850s. Since then, the Democratic and the Republican party have been the two major parties.

Party Structure
Political parties can be categorized in terms of two broad--and not entirely clear-cut of party structure: cadre parties, such as the political parties in Canada and the United States; and mass-membership parties, such as the Communist party in China and the Labour party in Great Britain.

Cadre Parties
In the United States and Canada only a small fraction (between 2 and 5 percent) of the population formally belong to one of the political parties in the sense of actually being members of one of the local clubs or organizations. Most of the remainder of the population do, in fact, identify with one of the parties and call themselves (in the United States) Democrats or Republicans; they may even be formally registered as Democrat or Republican and vote in party Primary elections. The work and the financing of the party, however, is left to a small elite group of political activists.

The cadre parties in the United States and Canada traditionally have tended to be nonideological and decentralized. Cadre parties comprised mostly office seekers and office holders, resulting in election battles between the "ins" and the "outs." The ins were those who had the political jobs and contracts and wanted to keep them. The outs were the "lean and hungry" individuals who wanted the jobs and contracts. In recent decades, however, the power of the "regular" party organizations has decreased. Most government jobs today (at all levels) are filled by persons who take competitive civil-service examinations, rather than through patronage. Likewise, government contracts tend to be awarded on the basis of competitive bidding instead of through political influence. Reform groups, often far more ideological than the old-time party regulars, have tended to move into the power vacuum left by the weakened party professionals. In addition, special-interest groups, concerned with issues ranging over the whole political spectrum, tend now to work their influence through the political parties instead of operating outside them, as has traditionally been the practice.

The organization of the cadre parties in Canada and the United States is heavily influenced by the federal form of government that prevails in both countries. In the United States, separate Democratic and Republican parties exist in each of the 50 states, and they are largely organized around the state governments. These 50 state parties convene every 4 years to nominate a presidential and vice-presidential candidate and to endorse a platform (the Democratic party also has a "mini convention" at midterm). Otherwise, they interact little with each other, although there is a permanent national committee that coordinates the activities of the state parties. A similar situation prevails in Canada.

Another important influence on party organization is the relation between the executive and legislative branches of government. In the United States a separation of power has been established between the President and the Congress. The national party nominates only the president and Vice President and has little influence in the choice of nominees for the legislative branch of government. As a consequence each state party plays a role in nominating and electing members of the Congress with little or no reference to the national party. In Canada, however, a parliamentary system of government prevails wherein the chief executive (the prime minister) is the leader of the majority party in Parliament. The constituency parties in each province are therefore organized around obtaining a parliamentary majority.

Mass Parties
Typically, mass-membership parties are more issue oriented than cadre parties. An issue-oriented party system consists of competing groups of people whose participation in politics derives in the main from their desire to translate certain policy preferences into public policy. One of the motives, however, for joining a mass-membership party is a desire for job preferment and other advantages that may accompany membership. This is particularly true of mass-membership parties in one-party nations. In such countries party membership often carries other benefits. Party members, for example, sometimes get preference in government housing, school acceptance for their children, and access to special vacation resorts.

In states with more than one political party, however, the party activists typically are not primarily oriented toward political jobs or privileges, although they may also seek these ends. Frequently, but not invariably, they are representative of interest groups. The Labour party in Great Britain is a coalition of trade unions and a variety of socialist and cooperative organizations. The Conservative party primarily represents the interests of the land-owning, financial, and commercial sectors. Both, however, are mass-membership parties and include in their ranks many members from almost every class of the society, who enlist in the party out of agreement with its principles, and who pay party dues, providing a mass base for financing.

Organization and Discipline
The structure and discipline of a particular party depends on whether it is a cadre or a mass-membership party; whether the nation has a federal or unitary system of government; and whether the national government has a presidential or parliamentary system. In turn, the clout of the party when in power depends on all of these factors.

The U.S. political parties are cadre parties, with a highly decentralized structure and little internal discipline, due partially to the federal and presidential form of government. When in power, therefore, these parties are less likely to enact broad coherent legislative packages than are centralized parties in parliamentary systems. In competitive systems such as Great Britain, where the parties are both mass-membership and highly organized and disciplined largely because of the unitary structure and parliamentary form of government, the ruling party may be able to translate into public policy much of what it advocates in the general elections. Members of Parliament, for example, are expected to vote with the party on virtually every issue. U.S. senators and representatives are under no such compulsion.

In one-party systems the single party in power has virtually complete control over who is to occupy the offices of government, over the policies they propose, and frequently over the press and other news media as well. Upon seizing power, such a party makes enormous changes in the personnel and policies of government.

Thereafter, however, it becomes almost out of necessity an extremely conservative party that resists changes in personnel and policies. The political and governmental leaders in one-party states, such as China, therefore have tended to be the party's elder statesmen.

Party Systems
Party systems are typically categorized according to the number of parties that participate meaningfully in the struggle for power. Communist states have one-party systems; fascist states, such as pre-World War II Italy, have one-party systems; many developing countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, also have one-party systems. English-speaking states typically have two-party systems, for example, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. France, Italy, and other Western European nations tend toward multiparty systems.

These categories of party systems are fluid and tend to overlap. In some one-party systems the factionalism within the single party is so intense as to produce a politics that may be described as bifactional one-party politics and is virtually indistinguishable from two-party politics. An example would be the longtime competition between the liberal and conservative factions within the Democratic party in Texas.

Similarly, some two-party systems may be more legitimately classified as multiparty systems. For example, in the United States the Democratic party has been so seriously split between Northern and Southern elements that in Congress many conservative Southern Democrats have voted as often with the Republicans as with the Democrats. Therefore, in fact, there have often been effectively three political parties in Congress, that is, Southern Democrats, Northern Democrats, and Republicans. Most, if not all, two-party systems have more than two formally constituted parties. Third parties (such as the Social and Liberal Democrats in Britain) may become politically important in a parliamentary system when the two dominant parties are so closely matched in strength that the ruling party must rely on third-party support (sometimes in a coalition government) in order to maintain a parliamentary majority.

One-Party Systems
In general, a one-party system is the vehicle by which a dominant group excludes or attempts to exclude political competition from participating in the struggle for power; for example, during the first half of the 20th century in the American South, one-party politics was a means of excluding blacks. In other areas it may be the means of excluding competing economic classes or minority ethnic or religious groups from the power struggle.

Communist or fascist one-party states usually emerge out of a revolution in which the party is triumphant. Thereafter, the party proceeds to eliminate competition. Emerging or developing countries also tend to have one-party systems. The basic reason for this development may be a combination of revolutionary and economic factors. Many of these countries acquire the basic outline of their party system during a successful struggle for independence. The unity of purpose and nationalism that is mobilized for the struggle leads in many cases to the initial establishment of a single dominant party. Faced with severe economic problems (that also threaten political predominance), the government of a newly independent nation usually finds that it must move quickly to stimulate and direct economic development. This intention may require efforts aimed at limiting consumption, encouraging capital development, and various types of economic redistribution. Because many of these decisions are unpopular politically, at least in the short run, the governments usually claim that they cannot permit the luxury of competing political parties.

An example of a successful one-party system in a Third World country is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico, which eventually emerged out of the chaos following the Revolution of 1910. It is a group-based organization composed of labor, peasantry, and middle-class organizations. Each of these groups is represented on the national executive committee of the PRI. The formal structure of the PRI is centralized, hierarchical, and pervasive, reaching into unions, agrarian leagues, professional associations, and local political committees.
The PRI is authoritarian, and communication is largely one-way--traveling from the top down to the rank-and-file members. The national executive committee and the president of the nation devise policies and programs that are accepted by and imposed on the party faithful in a predominantly one-way decision-making process. In fact, the president has become more and more independent of the national executive committee in terms of policymaking.

In the 1980s, however, the PRI's autocratic rule began to encounter widespread opposition. In 1988, PRI presidential candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari ran a competitive race, and, after winning a narrow victory, sponsored (1990) reforms designed to combat electoral fraud, decentralize the structure of the PRI, and make the selection of party delegates more democratic.

Two-Party Systems
The two-party form exists in nations such as Germany, where competition between the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties is continual. This party system, however, had its roots in the British political system and remains one of the distinctive features of the political culture in Great Britain (Labour versus Conservative parties), the United States (Democrat versus Republican parties), Canada (Liberal versus Progressive Conservative parties), New Zealand (Labour versus National parties), and Australia (Australian Labor versus a semipermanent coalition of the Liberal and Country parties).

Two features of British politics were especially important: a two-party (roughly) system and the custom of settling political disputes between the landed gentry and the financial, mercantile, and manufacturing interests through elections. In the United States and in the British Commonwealth nations cited, elections were also incorporated into the constitutions and laws as the principal means of settling disputes among interests, as well as the procedure by which rulers and representatives were cloaked with legitimacy.

The endurance of the two-party form in all these nations is notable. The force of inertia in any society may have had something to do with it. It is also possible, however, that the undoubted success of the two-party system in serving the political needs of the settlers and their descendants in the various territories was also influential. In the United States, for example, third parties have never achieved any lasting success and rarely even temporary acceptance with the voters.

Many theorists have indicated what they believe to be the virtues of a two-party system. One of the more important is that there is almost always a majority party, and when there is, the majority party rules. According to democratic theory, this mathematical majority legitimizes all the constitutional actions of the majority party. More practically, in a parliamentary system it means that one party has a majority of the seats and, therefore, can direct political and governmental activity, because leaders and laws are adopted by majority vote.

A second strength of a two-party system is that cyclical electoral regularities tend to promote stability. The cyclical changes tend to run as follows: (1) A party becomes the dominant majority party, usually because of an event and the failure of the opposition party to address the event successfully. The beginnings of the Depression of the 1930s in the United States, for example, and the failures of the Republican party under Herbert Hoover to cope with the problem resulted in the victory of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic party's attainment of majority status. (2) Because the minority party has a virtual monopoly on opposition, almost all those who are dissatisfied with the record of the majority party move to the minority party, thus swelling its ranks until the numbers approximate those of the current majority party. This situation prevails until a new event and new party reactions to the event produce a new majority.

Another strength of the two-party system is that the political parties, of necessity, are umbrella parties embracing virtually every element of the society. The parties are forced, therefore, to aggregate and synthesize the demands of all these elements in developing and proposing a program for election. Accordingly, both parties can legitimately claim to speak for the general welfare, and few interests in the society are entirely left out no matter what the outcome of an election. A possible price of this synthesizing process, however, is that compromise may lead to a dilution of policy and a lack of innovation and dynamism in government.

Multiparty Systems
Three broad categories of multiparty systems may be distinguished. The first is the classical variety, where many small parties exist that are highly competitive and represent very particular points of view, such as communist, fascist, Catholic, Protestant; and where no one of the parties is large enough to command a majority of the vote or a majority in the legislature. The classic example is France's Fourth Republic (1946-58). In the various elections no party ever came close to obtaining a majority in the National Assembly. Therefore, governments were always the result of coalitions of many parties. These governments would last only so long as they avoided important and contentious issues. When such issues arose (as eventually they must), they would tear the coalition apart and force the resignation of the government. The net result was a government that was incapable of addressing itself to the most pressing problems facing the society. In 1958 the French, under Charles de Gaulle, ratified the Fifth Republic, which provided for a cross between a presidential and a parliamentary system and gave the president a specified term of office and extensive powers.

A second broad category of multiparty system exists where one party constitutes a sizable proportion of the voters and the remainder of the electorate is divided among several small parties. This type of multiparty system may resemble the one-party system. Examples include India, where the Congress party--in power for most of the period since 1948--has ruled with about half the vote and the remaining vote was divided among radical parties on the left and religious parties on the right.

A third category of multiparty system prevails where coalitions of parties are successfully formed after or before elections, enabling one coalition to rule. Examples include the French Fifth Republic and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands there are about ten parties represented in the Dutch States-General, ranging from communist to farmer to Catholic to Calvinist. Coalition cabinets, however, representing primarily the center and moderate left parties are able to rule reasonably firmly and successfully. In France the creation of a strong president and reformed or revised election laws in 1958 have resulted in the formation of workable coalitions that provide reasonably stable and effective governments. Although the French have not developed a classic two-party system, they have in fact achieved a workable approximation: parties form--often tenuously--leftist and rightist alliances for electoral and legislative purposes.

Election Laws
The importance of election laws in shaping the form of party system that exists has been debated. Some theorists maintain that the election laws themselves are simply a reflection of the underlying realities of the political culture. According to this view, in a cohesive nation where a consensus exists as to goals, the voters will readily agree to rules whereby candidates are elected by a plurality of the vote in single-member districts, a method of election that effectively excludes weak parties from representation (thereby discouraging a multiparty system). According to this view, societies that are badly divided will find it necessary to represent divergent points of view through election by proportional representation, which allows for and encourages minority parties. Other theorists maintain that election rules have primary influence, that election laws, for example, which encourage a two-party system will tend to maintain an inherently more stable system, regardless of the society. These theorists might assert for example that if the United States elected representatives by proportional representation and if the United States had a parliamentary form of government, U.S. governments would perhaps topple as rapidly as did French governments during the Third and Fourth Republics. The stability of the French Fifth Republic under a more presidential form of government and with revised election laws that provide for runoffs between the two top candidates--and thereby encourage coalitions of parties--is seen by some as a concrete example of the importance of election laws.

John H. Fenton
For Further Reading
Almond, Gabriel, ed., Comparative Politics Today: A World View (1974)
Almond, Gabriel, and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (1963)
Budge, Ian, Ideology, Strategy, and Party Change (1987)
Chambers, William N., and Burnham, Walter D., American Party Systems, 2d ed. (1967)
Coxall, W.N., Parties and Pressure Groups (1986)
Crotty, William, American Parties in Decline, 2d ed. (1984)
Dahl, Robert A., ed., Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (1966)
Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans. by Barbara and Robert North, 3d ed. (1969)
Fairlie, Henry, The Parties: Republicans and Democrats in This Century (1978)
Goldbach, John, and Ross, Michael, Politics, Parties, and Power (1980)
Henderson, Gordon G., An Introduction to Political Parties (1976)
Katz, Richard, A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems (1981)
Key, V. O., Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups (1942)
La Palombara, Joseph, and Weiner, Myron, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (1966)
Lipset, Seymour, and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (1967)
McCormick, Richard, ed., Political Parties and the Modern State (1984)
Ostrogorski, Moisei, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, ed. by Seymour Lipset, 2 vols. (1964)
Panebianco, Angelo, Political Parties: Organization and Power, trans. by Marc Silver (1988)
Porter, Kirk H., and Johnson, Donald B., National Party Platforms, 2 vols., 6th ed. (1978)
Pye, Lucian W., and Verba, Sidney, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (1965)
Sartori, Giovanni, Parties and Party Systems (1976)
Verba, Sidney, et al., Participation and Political Equality (1978)
Von Beyme, Klaus, Political Parties in Western Democracies (1985)