Political party
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in elections and participate in governance. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or policy goals.
Political parties have become a major part of the politics of almost every country, as modern party organizations developed and spread around the world over the last few centuries. Although some countries have no political parties, it is extremely rare. Most countries have several parties while others only have one. Parties are important in the politics of autocracies as well as democracies, though usually democracies have more political parties than autocracies. Autocracies often have a single party that governs the country, and some political scientists consider competition between two or more parties to be an essential part of democracy.
Parties can develop from existing divisions in society, like the divisions between lower and upper classes, and they streamline the process of making political decisions by encouraging their members to cooperate. Political parties usually include a party leader, who has primary responsibility for the activities of the party; party executives, who may select the leader and who perform administrative and organizational tasks; and party members, who may volunteer to help the party, donate money to it, and vote for its candidates. There are many different ways in which political parties can be structured and interact with the electorate. The contributions that citizens give to political parties are often regulated by law, and parties will sometimes govern in a way that favours the people who donate time and money to them. In some cases, a political party tightly cooperates with affiliated or subordinate organizations of a different type, such as a trade union, a youth organization, or a party militia.
Many political parties are motivated by ideological goals. It is common for democratic elections to feature liberal, conservative, and socialist parties; other common ideologies of very large political parties include communism, populism, nationalism, and Islamism. Political parties in different countries will often adopt similar colours and symbols to identify themselves with a particular ideology. However, many political parties have no ideological affiliation and may instead be primarily engaged in patronage, clientelism, the advancement of a specific political entrepreneur, or be a "big tent", in that they wish to attract voters who have a variety of positions on issues.
Definition
Political parties are collective entities and activities that organize competitions for political offices. The members of a political party contest elections under a shared label. In a narrow definition, a political party can be thought of as just the group of candidates who run for office under a party label. In a broader definition, political parties are the entire apparatus that supports the election of a group of candidates, including voters and volunteers who identify with a particular political party, the official party organizations that support the election of that party's candidates, and legislators in the government who are affiliated with the party. In many countries, the notion of a political party is defined in law, and governments may specify requirements for an organization to legally qualify as a political party.Political parties are distinguished from other political groups or clubs, such as parliamentary groups, because only presidents have control over the political foundations of the party and also they include political factions, or advocacy groups, mostly by the fact that a party is focused on electing candidates, whereas a parliamentary group is a group of political parties, a political faction is a subgroup within a political party, and an advocacy group is focused on advancing a policy agenda. This is related to other features that sometimes distinguish parties from other political organizations, including a larger membership, greater stability over time, and a deeper connection to the electorate.
In addition to contesting elections, political parties serve key functions such as articulating a shared set of beliefs and a policy platform to address public issues, recruiting and training potential political leaders, and acting as a vital link between the government and the populace.
History
The idea of people forming large groups or factions to advocate for their shared interests is ancient. Plato mentions the political factions of Classical Athens in the Republic, and Aristotle discusses the tendency of different types of government to produce factions in the Politics. Certain ancient disputes were also factional, like the Nika riots between two chariot racing factions at the Hippodrome of Constantinople. A few instances of recorded political groups or factions in history included the late Roman Republic's Populares and Optimates factions as well as the Dutch Republic's Orangists and the Staatsgezinde. However, modern political parties are considered to have emerged around the end of the 18th century; they are usually considered to have first appeared in Europe and the United States of America, with the United Kingdom's Conservative Party and the Democratic Party of the United States both frequently called the world's "oldest continuous political party".Before the development of mass political parties, elections typically featured a much lower level of competition, had small enough polities that direct decision-making was feasible, and held elections that were dominated by individual networks or cliques that could independently propel a candidate to victory in an election.
18th century
Some scholars argue that the first modern political parties developed in early modern Britain in the 17th century, after the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution. The Whig faction originally organized itself around support for Protestant constitutional monarchy as opposed to absolute rule, whereas the conservative Tory faction supported a strong monarchy, and these two groups structured disputes in the politics of the United Kingdom throughout the 18th century The Rockingham Whigs have been identified as the first modern political party, because they retained a coherent party label and motivating principles even while out of power.At the end of the century, the United States also developed a party system, called the First Party System. Although the framers of the 1787 United States Constitution did not all anticipate that American political disputes would be primarily organized around political parties, political controversies in the early 1790s over the extent of federal government powers saw the emergence of two proto-political parties: the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party.
19th century
By the early 19th century, a number of countries had developed stable modern party systems. The party system that developed in Sweden has been called the world's first party system, on the basis that previous party systems were not fully stable or institutionalized. In many European countries, including Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and France, political parties organized around a liberal-conservative divide, or around religious disputes. The spread of the party model of politics was accelerated by the 1848 Revolutions around Europe.The strength of political parties in the United States waned during the Era of Good Feelings, but shifted and strengthened again by the second half of the 19th century. This was not the only country in which the strength of political parties had substantially increased by the end of the century; for example, around this time the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell implemented several methods and structures like party discipline that would come to be associated with strong grassroots political parties.
20th century
At the beginning of the 20th century in Europe, the liberal–conservative divide that characterized most party systems was disrupted by the emergence of socialist parties, which attracted the support of organized trade unions.During the wave of decolonization in the mid-20th century, many newly sovereign countries outside of Europe and North America developed party systems that often emerged from their movements for independence. For example, a system of political parties arose out of factions in the Indian independence movement, and was strengthened and stabilized by the policies of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. The formation of the Indian National Congress, which developed in the late 19th century as a pro-independence faction in British India and immediately became a major political party after Indian independence, foreshadowed the dynamic in many newly independent countries; for example, the Uganda National Congress was a pro-independence party and the first political party in Uganda, and its name was chosen as an homage to the Indian National Congress.
As broader suffrage rights and eventually universal suffrage slowly spread throughout democracies, political parties expanded dramatically, and only then did a vision develop of political parties as intermediaries between the full public and the government.