Political Parties
17.02.2021
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Modern political analisys is any persistent pattern of human relationships that involve to a
significant extent control, power, influence or authority. (Robert Dahl)
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Legitimacy principle is the most important component of political parties. A political regime
is not related to individual names.
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The structure of the institutions: the separation of power principle if you talk abt democracy.
If u talk abt soviet regimes: hegemonic party, unique party.
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The relationships btwn political parties and regimes: new political parties can create a new
regime. Political parties cand be the product of political systems, but also, the political
parties can preceed the pol syst
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Pol parties can have decesive role in different contexts.
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From a democratic point of view, if one party rules everything, there is no balance of power.
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Political party:
1. an organised assembly of men, united for working together for the national interest,
according to the particular principle they agreed upon (Edmund Burke, “Thoughts on the
Cause of the Present Discontent”, 1770)
2. a reunion of men professing the same political doctrine (Benjamin Constant 1816)
3. a political party is the organisation of the most conscious elements of a social class
(Marxist definitions)
4. political parties are voluntary groups, more or less organised, pretending, in name of a
certain concept of commonninterest and society, to assume alone or in a coalition the
functions of the government (Raymond Aron)
5. a party is an associative relation, an affiliation based on free recruitment. Its goal is to
ensure the power for its leaders within an institutionalised group, having as aim the
realization of an ideal or obtaining material advantages for its militants (Max Webber)
6. a political party is first of all an organised attempt to get power… Burke obscured the
issue… but it is equally just to say that parties are held together by the <<cohesive power
of public plunder>>” (E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government; Holt, Reinhart and
Winston, 1942)
7. A party is not a group of men who intend to promote public welfare <<upon principle on
which they all agreed…>> A party is a group whose members propose to act in concert in
the competitive struggle for political power (Joseph Scumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy, 1942)
8. A party is not a community, bu a collection of communities, a union of small groups
dispersed throughout the country (sections, committees, local associations etc), and
linked by co-ordinating institutions (Maurice Duverger)
9. A party is any group seeking votes under a recognizable label (L. Epstein, Political Parties
in Western Democracies)
10. Parties are political groups intent upon gaining and maintaining control of the
instrumentalities of government (Giovanni Sartori, Parties and party systems. A
framework for analysis, 1976)
11. A party is any political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through
election, candidates for public offices (Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party systems. A
framework for analysis, 1976)
12. “… the cliques, clubs and groups of notables sought to capture and control the exercise
of political power and in this sense manifested one of the salient characteristics of
political parties.. when we speak of political parties… we do not mean a loosely knit
group of notables with limited and intermittent relationships to local counterparts. Our
definition requires intead:
a) Continuity in organisation – that is, an organisation whose expected life span is not
dependent on the life span of current leaders;
b) Manifest and presumably permanent organisation at the local level, with regularized
communications and other relationships between local and national units;
c) Self-conscious determination of leaders at both national and local levels to capture
and to hold decision-making power alone or in coalition with others, not simply to
influence the exercise of power;
d)