Parties

The word party refers to one of the oldest concepts used in political science. Depending on the era chosen to determine the beginning of scientific analysis of political facts in the modern sense—for example, if one goes back to Arthur Bentley, James Bryce, Robert Lowell, or André Siegfried, that is, to the beginning of the 20th century—the concept of party can be older than that of political science. Its use in historical, philosophical, or polemical vocabulary appeared in the 17th century with the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz in France, Viscount Bolingbroke in England, and, above all, David Hume, who in the early 18th century initiated what was to become the analysis of parties. Nonetheless, the word has been used since the Middle Ages to refer to the opposite sides in a civil war, for example, York and Lancaster during the War of the Roses, and consequently has a strong connotation of conflict. Even the etymology of the word party is telling: parti in French, Partei in German, partido in Spanish, and even partia in Russian and Polish and in many other languages—derived from the verb partir, which in medieval French meant to split into parts or divide. All European languages, including Slavic ones that use other terms, such as strana in Czech or stanka in Croat or Serbian, use words meaning “side.” The idea is the same: to take sides or to choose one's side, or one's camp, in a political conflict. The definitions of the concept of party are, therefore, older and more numerous than for the concept of social class: There are more than 100 of them, provided by authors from Edmund Burke to Alan Ware, including Leon Epstein, Joseph LaPalombara, and Myron Weiner. All definitions can be grouped into three broad categories, which are sometimes combined. First of all, following Burke, parties can be defined according to the ideas that they convey. Then, following Max Weber, Robert Michels, and Maurice Duverger, one can define parties as organizations. Finally, the trend since the end of the 20th century has been to use the criterion of elections and the existence of a representative, or at least democratic, regime. A remark attributed to Max Weber—“parties are the children of democracy and universal suffrage”—is put forward to support this thesis. One should not, nevertheless, forget the classic definition given during the reign of George III by Edmund Burke: “A party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” This definition remains the best, even if the subsequent evolution of political systems has made it imprecise, as it is now incomplete. Here, we propose to use the term in the following way: