Political party
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in elections and participate in governance. Some countries have no political parties at all, but that is extremely rare. Most countries run on several parties, others on just one, and almost every modern country runs on parties of some kind. Researchers have noticed this pattern is so persistent that the existence of political parties is almost a law of politics. That observation raises a series of questions. Where do parties actually come from? Why do candidates who could simply run alone keep banding together under a shared label? How does an organization built to win elections also end up shaping the very divisions in society it claims to represent? And why do some democracies settle on two competitors while others juggle dozens? These are the questions that follow.
Political parties are collective entities and activities that organize competitions for political offices, with members contesting elections under a shared label. The definition can be narrow or broad. In the narrow view, a party is just the group of candidates who run for office under a party label. In the broader view, it is the entire apparatus that supports their election, including identifying voters, volunteers, the official party organizations, and the legislators affiliated with the party in government.
In many countries, the notion of a political party is defined in law, and governments may specify requirements an organization must meet to legally qualify. What separates a party from neighboring political groups is its focus on electing candidates. A parliamentary group is a group of political parties. A political faction is a subgroup within a single party. An advocacy group is focused on advancing a policy agenda rather than winning seats. Parties also tend to have larger membership, greater stability over time, and a deeper connection to the electorate than these other organizations.
Membership itself carries obligations. Joining a party may mean paying dues, agreeing not to affiliate with multiple parties at once, and sometimes stating agreement with the party's platform. Those members form the base of volunteer activists and donors who carry a party through its campaigns, a base that will matter greatly when the question turns to who pays for politics.
Plato mentions the political factions of Classical Athens in the Republic, and Aristotle discusses how different types of government tend to produce factions in the Politics. The idea of people forming large groups to advocate for shared interests is ancient. Some ancient disputes were openly factional, like the Nika riots between two chariot racing factions at the Hippodrome of Constantinople. The late Roman Republic had its Populares and Optimates, and the Dutch Republic its Orangists and the Staatsgezinde.
Modern political parties, by contrast, are considered to have emerged around the end of the 18th century, first appearing in Europe and the United States. Both the United Kingdom's Conservative Party and the Democratic Party of the United States are frequently called the world's oldest continuous political party. Before mass parties, elections featured far less competition. Polities were often small enough for direct decision-making, and contests were dominated by individual networks or cliques that could propel a candidate to victory on their own.
Some scholars trace the first modern parties to early modern Britain in the 17th century, after the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution. The Whig faction organized around support for Protestant constitutional monarchy as opposed to absolute rule. The Tory faction, originally the Royalist or Cavalier side of the English Civil War, backed a strong monarchy. The Rockingham Whigs have been identified as the first modern political party, because they kept a coherent label and motivating principles even while out of power. Across the Atlantic, controversies in the early 1790s over the extent of federal power produced two proto-parties, the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party, in what became known as the First Party System.
By the early 19th century, several countries had developed stable modern party systems. The system that developed in Sweden has been called the world's first party system, on the grounds that earlier ones were not fully stable or institutionalized. In Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and France, parties organized around a liberal-conservative divide or around religious disputes. The 1848 Revolutions across Europe accelerated the spread of the party model.
The Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell implemented methods like party discipline that would come to be associated with strong grassroots parties in the second half of the 19th century. In the United States, party strength waned during the Era of Good Feelings before shifting and strengthening again. At the start of the 20th century in Europe, the liberal-conservative divide was disrupted by socialist parties, which drew the support of organized trade unions.
During the wave of decolonization in the mid-20th century, many newly sovereign countries built party systems out of their independence movements. The Indian National Congress developed in the late 19th century as a pro-independence faction in British India and immediately became a major party after independence, later strengthened by the policies of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. Its influence reached beyond India. The Uganda National Congress, the first political party in Uganda, took its name as an homage to the Indian National Congress. Only as broader and eventually universal suffrage spread did a vision develop of parties as intermediaries between the full public and the government.
Nearly all democratic countries have strong political parties, and many political scientists consider countries with fewer than two parties to necessarily be autocratic. The politics of many autocratic countries are organized around one dominant party, while a country with multiple competitive parties is not automatically democratic. The sheer ubiquity of parties has driven scholars to ask why they appear so essential, and they have produced several competing explanations.
One core explanation is that parties arise from pre-existing divisions among people, organizing an existing cleavage into electoral competition. By the 1950s, economists and political scientists had shown that party organizations could adjust to the distribution of voters' preferences to become more competitive. Beginning in the 1960s, academics tried to identify the social cleavages that gave rise to specific parties, such as religious cleavages producing religious parties. Critics challenged the theory, finding no evidence for it in some cases, or arguing it is not empirically testable. Others noted that parties also cause changes in the underlying cleavages, and that the theory cannot explain where those cleavages came from in the first place.
A second explanation is about incentives. Parties can coordinate candidates across geographic districts, so a candidate in one district has reason to assist a similar candidate elsewhere, preventing allies from harming one another. Politicians with party affiliations may therefore out-compete those without. A third explanation is psychological. Parties provide a simplifying heuristic, letting voters judge a few groups instead of evaluating every candidate individually, which sharply reduces the cognitive burden of casting an informed vote. Some evidence suggests party identification has been weakening over recent decades, which may make this function less important than it once was.
Parties typically feature a single party leader, a group of party executives, and a community of party members, a structure repeated across countries. The leader serves as the main representative and often oversees the party's policies and strategies. The leader of the party that controls the government usually becomes head of government, as president or prime minister, while rival leaders explicitly compete for that role. Because a major party's leader is powerful and visible, many are well-known career politicians whose appeal can sway voters' view of the entire party.
The number of people who choose a leader varies enormously. At one extreme a leader might be selected from the entire electorate, at the other by just one individual. Democracies usually select leadership more openly than autocracies, where the choice is tightly controlled. The Chinese Communist Party has rigid methods for selecting its next leader through other party members. A small number of single-party states use hereditary succession, where leadership passes to the child of an outgoing leader, a restrictive method meant to avoid major shifts in the regime during transitions.
The leader is often the foremost member of a larger leadership. A party executive commonly includes a party secretary and a party chair, who may differ from the leader and can serve to constrain an autocratic one. Major decisions, like selecting an executive and setting policy goals, often happen at regular party conferences. In Westminster systems, the largest party out of power forms the Official Opposition and selects a shadow cabinet, signaling who would hold which government posts if the party won.
Maurice Duverger, the French political scientist, first distinguished between elite and mass parties on the basis of differences in their organizational structures. Elite parties dominated the nineteenth century before universal suffrage. They had minimal, loose organization, were financed by fewer large contributions from outside the party, gave little priority to expanding membership, and counted their leaders as their only members. The earliest parties, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists, are classified this way.
Mass parties developed around cleavages in society and mobilized ordinary citizens into the political process. In Europe, universal suffrage produced worker's parties that evolved into mass parties, with the German Social Democratic Party as an example. Funded by their members and reliant on a large membership base, they were more centralized than elite parties and prioritized mobilizing voters. From these, new forms emerged. The German-American scholar Otto Kirchheimer coined the term catch-all party for organizations that developed in the 1950s and 1960s through a drastic reduction of ideological baggage and a downgrading of the individual member's role. The shift of Christian Democratic parties into broader centre-right parties epitomizes this type, sometimes called the big tent party.
Richard Katz and Peter Mair developed the cartel party thesis, describing parties that emerged after the 1970s as semi-state agencies sustained by heavy state financing, where established parties make it difficult for newcomers to enter. Niche parties grew from new cleavages like immigration and the environment, articulating a limited set of interests outside the dominant left-right divide; examples include Green parties and the National Rally in France. Other forms abandon ideology entirely. A business-firm party is a personalist party centered on a political entrepreneur, while a proxy party is legally registered like any other but covertly controlled by another political actor, sometimes to fake an impression of political plurality.
Democracies that use a single-member district electoral system tend to have very few parties, while countries that use proportional representation tend to have more. The collection of parties that realistically contend for power forms a country's party system, one of its central political institutions. The number of parties can even be estimated from the magnitude of electoral districts and the number of legislative seats. Because some systems include many parties with little chance of winning, analysts often use the effective number of parties, weighting each by its strength, rather than the literal count of registered ones.
Non-partisan systems, where parties do not exist or do not matter, are very few. In Saudi Arabia, a ban on parties has protected the monarchy, while some long-standing democracies ban parties in local or regional elections despite strong national systems. Parties can also vanish temporarily after upheaval, as in Peru following the regime of Alberto Fujimori, or simply never take hold, as in the pacific island democracy of Palau. One-party systems concentrate power in a single party. The Communist Party of Cuba is the only permitted party there. In North Korea, more than one party is officially permitted, but laws ensure the Workers' Party of Korea retains control. Free elections can still yield a single ruling party, producing dominant-party systems seen in recent periods in Botswana, Japan, Mexico, Senegal, and South Africa.
In the 1950s Duverger observed that single-member district, single-vote, plurality-rule elections tend to produce two-party systems, a pattern known as Duverger's law. The United States, with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, is a current example, alongside long periods in Colombia, Uruguay, Malta, and Ghana. Critics fault two-party systems for limiting choice and encouraging the spoiler effect. Multi-party systems give more than two parties a real chance and often produce coalition governments, as in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Brazil. Yet very large systems can produce ideologically diverse, unstable coalitions, as described in recent periods in Israel, Italy, and Finland. Some are called two-party-plus, where two dominant parties are flanked by smaller ones that can still decide elections.
Contemporary elections in the largest democracies typically cost billions or even tens of billions of dollars, and much of that expense is paid by candidates and parties that build sophisticated fundraising operations. Common sources of funds include dues-paying members, advocacy groups and lobbying organizations, corporations, trade unions, and self-funding candidates. In most countries the government also provides some funding. Of the 180 countries examined by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, nearly all have some form of public funding, and about a third make regular government payments beyond campaign reimbursements.
The sources can be sorted in several ways. One divides public funding from private. Another splits plutocratic sources, like large corporations, from grassroots ones, like small donations by individual supporters, since each tends to push parties toward different policies and strategies. Private funding can be internal, from members' dues or candidates' contributions, or external, from non-members, corporations, or trade unions. Internal funding may be preferred because external sources can make a party beholden to an outside entity. Public financing is defended as a way to decrease parties' pursuit of funds through corrupt methods.
Money buys training for activists, recruitment of volunteers, advertising, research, and the promotion of a policy agenda. Some parties practice clientelism, distributing material rewards in exchange for political support, and some engage in outright vote buying, paying a person directly for their vote, which is illegal in many countries yet widespread in practice. There are diminishing returns, however. Once a party crosses a particular spending threshold, additional expenditures may not improve its chances. Governments regulate this terrain by limiting who can donate, capping individual contributions and total spending, and mandating transparency. Such laws are hard to write and amend, since the governments creating them may be controlled by the very parties the rules restrict.
In polities where much of the population may be illiterate, a voter who cannot read a party's name on a ballot can instead identify it by colour or logo. Nearly all parties associate themselves with specific colours and symbols, primarily to help voters identify, recognize, and remember them. Parties of similar ideologies often use the same colours across different countries, and those colours serve as shorthand in graphical media. They also name coalitions, as in purple alliances, red-green alliances, traffic light coalitions, pan-green coalitions, and pan-blue coalitions.
The link between colour and ideology can be inconsistent. Parties of the same ideology in different countries sometimes use different colours, and rival parties in one country may even adopt the same colour. The United States offers a striking exception, where red is associated with the more conservative Republican Party and blue with the more left-leaning Democratic Party. Specific symbols recur with particular ideologies as well, such as the Christian cross for Christian democracy, the star and crescent for Islamism, the crown for monarchism, the bird in flight for liberalism, and the red rose for socialism, the visual vocabulary by which an organization built to win elections asks to be recognized at a glance.
Common questions
What is a political party?
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in elections and participate in governance. Its members commonly hold similar ideas about politics, and the party may promote specific ideological or policy goals while contesting elections under a shared label.
When did modern political parties first emerge?
Modern political parties are considered to have emerged around the end of the 18th century, first appearing in Europe and the United States. Some scholars trace the first modern parties to early modern Britain in the 17th century after the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution, and the Rockingham Whigs have been identified as the first modern political party.
What are the different types of political party organizations?
Political scientists distinguish elite parties, mass parties, catch-all parties, cartel parties, and niche parties. Maurice Duverger first separated elite from mass parties, Otto Kirchheimer coined the catch-all party, and Richard Katz and Peter Mair developed the cartel party thesis describing parties as semi-state agencies.
Why do political parties exist in almost every country?
Scholars give several explanations, including that parties arise from pre-existing social cleavages, that they align incentives for candidates and legislators across districts, and that they serve as a simplifying heuristic that lets voters make informed choices with less mental effort. Their ubiquity has led researchers to remark that the existence of political parties is almost a law of politics.
What is the difference between a one-party, two-party, and multi-party system?
In a one-party system power is held entirely by one party, as with the Communist Party of Cuba. A two-party system has two parties with a realistic chance of governing, such as the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States. A multi-party system gives more than two parties a real chance of power and often produces coalition governments, as in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Brazil.
How are political parties funded?
Political parties draw funds from dues-paying members, advocacy groups, corporations, trade unions, self-funding candidates, and government support. Of the 180 countries examined by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, nearly all have some form of public funding, and contemporary elections in the largest democracies typically cost billions or even tens of billions of dollars.
What do political party colours and symbols mean?
Parties adopt colours and symbols mainly to help voters identify, recognize, and remember them, which is especially important where much of the population may be illiterate. Associations can be inconsistent, and the United States is a notable exception where red represents the conservative Republican Party and blue the left-leaning Democratic Party.
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