Page 243 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes Given that parties are so important in the modern state, the next question to ask is—what precisely
are they? In answering this we immediately come up against a problem. As many observers have
noted, attempting a definition of ‘party’ is rather like attempting to define an elephant—anyone who
has seen one knows what one looks like, but providing a definition for a person who happens never
to have come across one is rather difficult. The problem is that of identifying precisely the boundaries
between parties and other kinds of social and political institutions. For virtually every definition of a
party produced by political scientists it is possible to find some institutions that are recognizably
parties that do not conform with the definition in some significant way.
In most cases the long-term purpose of this interaction is for the party to take over control of the state,
either on its own or in conjunction with other parties, but there are some exceptions that prevent us
from thinking of this as a defining characteristic of a party.
• The goal of some parties is to bring about the ultimate dissolution of an existing state rather
than to exercise power within it. For example, orthodox Marxists in the late nineteenth century
saw the role of the Communist Party as helping to bring about the demise of the capitalist state;
later, under Communism, there would be no role for the party. Again, Gandhi saw the Indian
National Congress as a body that should dissolve once it had gained its objective of Indian
independence from Britain. Today there are parties, such as the Bloc Quebecois, many of whose
members have the ultimate objective of taking the province out of the Canadian federation,
rather than exercising power within it.
• As a tactic to achieve its ultimate objective of bringing down a regime, a party may choose not
to engage in one activity usually associated with ‘exercising power’, namely helping to form a
government. In the French Fourth Republic, for example, the Communist Party usually obtained
about a quarter of the vote. But, after 1947, even if other parties had been willing to have it in
the government, it would probably not have chosen to do so. It believed it could effect better
leverage for bringing down the regime by acting explicitly as an anti-regime party.
• There are some political groupings that call themselves parties, and which engage in some
political activities associated with parties such as contesting elections, but whose purpose is
either to entertain or to ridicule politics as an activity. Parties like the Rhinoceros Party in Canada
or the Monster Raving Loony Part in Britain fall into this category.

10.1 Meaning, Definition and Classification of Political Parties

Meaning of Political Parties

According to Michael Curtis, it is notoriously difficult to define accurately a political party. The
reason is that the views of the liberal and Marxist writers differ sharply on this point. Not only this,
even the views of the English liberals differ form their American counterparts. The most celebrated
view among the English leaders and writers is that of Burke who holds that a political party is “a
body of men united for promoting the national interest on some particular principles in which they
are all agreed.” Reiterating the same view, Disraeli defined political party as “a group of men banded
together to pursue certain principles.”
So, according to Benjamin Constant, a party is “a group of men professing the same political doctrine.”
The key point in all these definitions relates to the issue of ‘principles’ of public importance on which
the members of a party are agreed.
But the American view is different in the sense that here a political party is taken as an instrument of
catching power. No significance is attached to the key point of ‘principles’ of national or public
importance in which ‘all are agreed.’ A party is just a platform or a machinery for taking part in the
struggle for power: it is a device for catching votes; it is an agency to mobilise people’s support at the
time of elections; it is an instrument for the aggregation of interests that demand their vociferous
articulation. “We define a political party generally as the articulate organisation of society’s active
political agents, those who are concerned with the control of governmental powers and who compete
for popular support with another group or group holding divergent views. As such, it is the great

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