Parties, Politicians and the Political System

Abstract

The political party in the modern world comes in many shapes and forms, but there are extraordinarily few political systems which lack parties entirely. One recent study suggests that, even in those cases when an attempt is made to outlaw them, they soon reappear ‘rather like bindweed in a suburban garden’.¹ Some may argue that the pervasiveness of political parties merely reflects the fact that a term which originally had a rather narrow connotation has been extended to embrace political phenomena as diverse as the British Conservative Party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Irish Sinn Fein, the Colorado Party of Paraguay and the Democratic Party of the United States. It is true that what are now called parties include some that shade into what would better be called pressure groups at the one extreme and government bureaucracies at the other. Some perhaps better deserve the appellation ‘faction’, while yet others might more reasonably be seen as bands of terrorists or guerrilla fighters.