Abstract
Politics for many people today means purely and simply ‘party politics’, a specialist and rather unsavoury activity undertaken by party politicians. This very narrow interpretation of politics is odd when one considers that organised political parties competing for power are a relatively recent phenomenon, the product of the last two or three centuries in western political systems, and more recent still elsewhere. Yet although the confusion of ‘politics’ with ‘party politics’ is misguided and misleading, it does underline how important parties have become in modern politics.
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Further reading
Useful and reasonably up-to-date books on British political parties include Garner and Kelly (1998) and Ingle (2000). The chapter by Baston in Seldon (2001) provides a review of the British party system in the light of Blair’s first term, and several chapters in Dunleavy et al. (2002) touch on developments since 1997 and the second Labour landslide in 2001.
More specialist books include a dissection of Conservative Party members True Blues (1994) by Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson, Lewis Minkin’s monumental study of the Contentious Alliance between the Unions and Labour (1992), and Eric Shaw’s analysis of The Labour Party since 1945 (1996). An extensive literature on Thatcherism and post-Thatcherism on the one hand and New Labour on the other has already been referred to in Chapter 4. Useful sources for updating include journals such as the Political Quarterly, Politics Review and Talking Politics. Party websites can also be consulted, including <www.conservative-party.org.uk>, <www.labour.org.uk> and <www.libdems.org.uk>.
For comparative analysis on parties see relevant chapters in books such as Hague and Harrop (2001). Lane and Ersson (1999) provide a sophisticated classification and analysis of European parties. This chapter has also included some reference to older literature that has influenced thinking on parties including Michels (1911, but with numerous editions since), Duverger (1954), McKenzie (1955 and subsequent editions), Downs (1957) and Beer (1982a and subsequent editions).
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© 2003 Bill Coxall, Lynton Robins and Robert Leach
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Coxall, B., Robins, L., Leach, R. (2003). Political parties. In: Contemporary British Politics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14821-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14821-9_8
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