Political Parties in a Global Age

Abstract

Political parties emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alongside the nation-state and representative democracy.¹ Parties typically served as interest mediators in political arenas that had become too big for direct democracy to be practicable. The parties thus created served to articulate particular interests — social, economic, cultural and regional — often related to class and religion. These activities were confined to the nation-state; party manifestos and party-political rhetoric typically focused on domestic issues, with little attention paid to international affairs. Indeed, foreign policy has generally been determined by governments according to some often ill-defined ‘national interest’, changing little when the incumbents change.² Thus, it is not self-evident that these essentially domestic political organizations, rooted in the particular assumptions and traditions of different states, have any role to play beyond state boundaries.

A political party is an institution that (a) seeks influence in a state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government, and (b) usually consists of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to ‘aggregate interests’.

Ware 1996: 5