Chapter 2 - Political Parties Flashcards
Functions of parties
Making policy Representation Selecting candidates Identifying leaders Organising elections Political education Reinforcing consent
Doctrine of the Mandate
When a party wins an election and forms a government, it has a mandate to carry out all of the policy commitments contained in its election manifesto.
Left wing politics
Believe in:
- Nationalisation of industries.
- Regulation of large industries.
- Relaxed approach to gov’t borrowing.
- Redistribution of income.
- Protected rights for workers.
- Anti EU.
- Strong support for welfare state.
- Equal rights + tolerance for ‘alternative lifestyles’.
- Liberal attitude to crime
Centre politics
- Free market economy w/ some state regulation
- Pragmatic with borrowing
- Pro free trade
- Mild redistribution of income
- Pro EU + soft brexit
- Welfare for most needy
- multiculturalist
- mixed attitudes to crime
- promotion of individualism
Right wing politics
- total free market
- no economic intervention
- low taxation
- avoid gov’t borrowing
- weak worker protection
- Anti EU, hard brexit
- limited welfare state
- anti immigration
- patriotic
State funding - arguments in favour
- end corrupt donations
- end hidden forms of influence
- reduce huge financial advantages of large parties
- ensure wire participation from groups with less funds
State funding - arguments against
- Taxpayers may object to funding
- difficult to know how to distribute funding
- parties may lose some of their independence
- excessive state regulation of parties
New Right
The conservative movement of the 1980s which combined an authoritarian form of neo-conservatism with an economically liberal form of neo-liberalism
Neo-liberalism
A movement from the 1970s + 80s; the state shouldn’t interfere excessively with the economy, which promotes free markets, and opposes trade union power, high taxes, and excessive welfare for those who are able to work.
Democratic socialism
Moderate socialism that proposes to achieve its aims democratically.
Third way
Policies which lay somewhere between leftist socialism and rightist neo-liberalism
New labour
Labour under tony Blair (more centrist) after mid-1990s
Liberal democracy
A democracy in which rights and equality are guaranteed and promoted.
Libertarianism
Extreme form of neo-liberalism. Gov’t should interfere as little as possible in economic and social activity.
