Political Parties and the Party System

Abstract

The growth of political parties was integrally tied to the development of the pillars. For the Protestants, organisation was due in no small part to the efforts of the nineteenth-century leader, Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper was a master organiser and founded (or helped to found) many of the most important institutions within the pillar. He was in fact responsible for the organisation of those orthodox groups that had broken away, in part with his help, from the Dutch Reformed Church into the Gereformeerde Churches. He was responsible for setting up a newspaper to be the mouthpiece of the movement, and a university — the Free University of Amsterdam — to train an intellectual elite. In 1879 he founded the first mass political party of the Netherlands: the ARP.