Poltical Parties Flashcards
Who said that a political party is a group that seeks to elect governmental office holders under a given label?
Leon D Epstein
Who said that a political party is a class, a doctrine
Maurice Duverger
Roles and functions of political parties
• Political Parties aggregate and articulate societal interests, public opinion, and policy demands.
• They offer choice to people in choosing political ideologies, policy options, and governing vision.
• They form Government and help implement policies for socio-economic development.
• Political Parties recruit, train, and nominate political leaders as representatives of people.
• Political Parties are essential channel for representation in democratic politics.
• Governments in modern era, democratic, authoritarian, or totalitarian, cannot be imagined without political parties.
Who gave the theory of ideological attachment in political parties
Hitchner and Levine
What is a party system?
What is system denotes number nature, ideological, make up interactions and inter-relationships among political parties in a political system at a given time
Who classified party system on the basis of numbers of political parties in a political system
Duverger
Who further classified political parties on many criteria
Sartori
Types of political parties
Types of Parties:
•On the basis of ideology or position on ideological spectrum
• Left parties
• Communist, Socialist, Social Democrats (center-left), Green, Liberals (center-left on Social issues)
• Right Parties
• Conservatives, Liberals(economy),Fascist, Christian Democrats (centre-
Right), Nationalist
• On the basis of organization and target voters
• Cadre, Mass, Catch-all, Party
• Cadre party: elite parties in the beginning of democracy in UK and USA.
Small size of membership limited to few, those having property, social status, personality, etc.. For example, the Whigs and the Tories in UK and the Federalists and the anti-federalists in USA.
• Mass party: Parties offering membership to masses, raises national issues, and have wide electoral base; for example, Socialist Parties in 20th century Europe; German Social Democratic Party (SPD and the UK Labour Party
• Catch-all party: Parties which aim to get votes from all class/sections/ interests; for example, the Congress and the BJP in India
• Ideological attachment ( by Hitchner & Levine)
• Pragmatic parties, Doctrinal parties and Interest parties.
• Pragmatic parties: don’t have any fixed ideology; quite flexible in making alliances to gain power. For example, SP, BSP, & RJD in India
•Doctrinal parties: Have fixed party ideology; for example, CPI in India
• Interest parties: Representing specific interests of a section/segment of population; for example, Farmers’ League in Sweden;
• Constitutional vs. Revolutionary parties
• Constitutional parties: who believe in constitution and work within its framework:
Congress, BJP, and all mainstream parties in the world
• Revolutionary party: Hindustan Socialist Republican Army by C.S.Azad;
Revolutionary Socialist Party; currently many political parties uses the tag
‘revolutionary’, world over, but they don’t reject the constitution completely.
• Representative and Integrative parties (by Sigmund Neumann (1956))
• Representative: reflect, represent, and channelize public opinion- Catch all parties
• Integrative: shape public opinion by political mobilization- Socialist Parties
• Party of Government vs Party of Opposition
• Liberals, Conservatives, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats- habitually governing parties
• Communist, Regionalists, Environmentalists and Nationalists - habitually opposing parties
Party System:
• Party System denotes
Types of party system
• Single party system
• Pseudo(false) party system- as at least two parties required to form a party system.
• Hegemonic- hegemony of single party
Single party dominance
•Two Party system
•Distinct vs Indistinct Bi-partisan system
•Two plus half party ( 3rd party) system
•prolonged Dominance of one party
•Multi- party system
• Moderate Pluralism
• Polarized Pluralism
Fragmented party system
• Two broad coalition System
