Conservative Parties

Parties are organizations that seek to mobilize public support in order to compete for political power. In principle, attempts at support mobilization can be, and not infrequently are, based on appeals other than those rooted in political views (e.g., the promise of patronage benefits). However, where the publics to be mobilized are very large (as in most liberal-democratic regimes), parties cannot avoid having to compete by espousing alternative sets of public policies—in their turn linked to, and informed by, contrasting political principles or ideologies. At their simplest, then, conservative parties can be defined as organizations bringing together people committed to the quest for power in order to advance an agenda of conservatism—which may in turn be defined as a set of political principles arising from and expressing a commitment to the status quo or the status quo ante. Yet on this definition alone, even parties that most political scientists would not see as belonging to the category—for example, the Soviet Communist Party after 1917—would qualify. So there is also a historical criterion that must be fulfilled, since the parties that have tended to attract the label are ones that first emerged in some parts of the world about 200 years ago to counter the demands of liberals—here meaning 18th- and 19th-century Europeans committed to four essential tenets: (1) a belief in the ontological priority of individuals as against society and (2) an unlimited potential for human improvement through the application of reason, therefore (3) a normative commitment to individual freedom and the view that (4) government is legitimate only insofar as it rests on the consent of the governed. Conservatives especially opposed, among the political positions stemming from these tenets, those according to which there was neither inherent value in tradition nor any role for hereditary or religious criteria in political institutions or decision making. This entry reviews conservative political principles in more detail, looking at how they have evolved over time. It also considers how the parties espousing them have been organized, who has supported them and how they have performed electorally, and the role they have played in the party systems that they have been part of.