Political Parties

Political parties largely exist in order to compete for political power by participating in elections, and they provide a coordinating mechanism among voters, candidates, legislators, ministers, and other key actors in a political system. The role of political parties in a coalition government represents a specific application of power studies in political science.

Modern parties of the kind we see today emerged only in the 19th century following the expansion of suffrage in Western democracies such as Britain, France, and the United States. In his classic work, V. O. Key Jr. points out that parties play three core roles in a political system: party-in-the-electorate, providing informational shortcuts to the electorate and acting as the party of campaign; party-in-government, organizing and coordinating legislative mechanisms; and party-as-organization, aggregating and representing public opinion and negotiating between the public and the government. Parties tend to play a more dominant role in democracies, especially the ones that follow a parliamentary as against a presidential constitutional system.

Parties cater to the self-interested behaviors of voters, candidates, and legislators. For example, legislators engage in opportunistic politics by defecting from a party, splitting it or joining another party when these options serve their objectives. Collective dilemmas such as collective action are inherent in democratic politics, and therefore, to be useful and be sustainable, parties need to offer equilibrium solutions to these collective dilemmas.

Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan proposed that parties emerge due to the presence of social cleavages and the need to cater to the interests of different sections of the society. Party formation and survival are also closely linked to electoral rules and the way in which seats in the legislature are distributed and decided. Maurice Duverger formulated propositions now known as Duverger's Law, according to which a single-member plurality system is likely to lead to a two-party system, while multimember proportional representation system favors a multiparty system.

Political parties vary in terms of size, ideologies, and the way they appeal to the electorate. Left-wing parties believe in more state intervention, while right-wing parties favor a limited role of the state in the provision of goods and services. Parties that are more centrist in their ideology tend to [Page 492]follow more liberal policies. Parties can be elitist, mass-based catering to a wider section of the electorate, or “catch-all,” which try to appeal to voters across various social cleavages. Some parties are more democratic, holding regular internal elections and members' conferences, while others are more hierarchical and centralized.

Spatial models of issue voting have been proposed to study how the positions of parties and voters shape the patterns of electoral competition and voter choice in a polity. In these models, both voters and parties are located at their ideal point in a multidimensional space, where each dimension represents a substantive electoral issue. The proximity model postulates that parties will converge toward the position of a median voter and adopt moderate positions on issues. The directional model, on the other hand, assumes that parties holding intense views have an advantage over other parties. Scholars have also developed unified models, which contain both proximity and directional components, to study patterns of party competition.

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