Page 255 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes • The general poverty and backwardness of Russia and the relative numerical and cultural
weakness of the proletariat made the long-term exercise of power by the proletariat impossible
if the Russian revolution remained isolated; that was the consensus not only among the
Bolsheviks in 1917-18, but among all tendencies claiming to be Marxist.
• All parties develop a political programme that defines their ideology and sets out the agenda
they would pursue should they win elective office or gain power through extra parliamentary
means. Most countries have single-party, two-party, or multiparty systems. In the U.S., party
candidates are usually selected through primary elections at the state level.
• The Democratic Party is the largest and oldest party in America. It is a liberal party, which
denotes its tendency to favor farmers, workers, underrepresented minorities, and unions.
• The first socialist candidate in a US presidential election ran in 1892, (and got 0.19 per cent of
the vote); no socialist party has ever established itself there.
• The Leninist concept of a communist party encompasses a larger political “system and includes
not only an ideological orientation but also a wide set of organisational policies. There currently
exist hundreds, if not thousands, of communist parties, large and small, throughout the world.
Their success rates vary widely: some are growing; others are in decline.
• The parties unite, simplify and stabilise the political process. They bring together sectional
interests, overcome geographical disturbances, and provide coherence to sometimes divisive
government structures.
• In federal systems all political parties emphasise the uniting of different governmental structures,
the extreme case being of South Africa.
• Political parties provide a link between the government and the people. They seek to educate,
instruct and activate the electorate. That is, they perform the job of political mobilisation,
secularisation and recruitment.
• In political systems having weak and ill-organised political parties, power remains in the hands
of the elites that are recruited from the traditional groups like hereditary ruling families or
military organisations. In totalitarian countries where only one party is in power, political
recruitment is made from the ranks of the same party. It is only in countries having a liberal-
democratic order that competitive party system prevails and political recruitment is made from
different political parties.
• In a democratic system revolutionary parties (or those hostile to the established order as such)
act not as conciliatory elements in aggregating the largest number of common interest but as
focal points of discontent and organised opposition.
• Political parties also perform social welfare functions that may be termed their ‘non-political’
activities. The parties work for the alleviation of the sufferings of the people during the days of
famine, drought, epidemics, wars etc.
• In Australia citizens may lead their life from cradle to grave within the frame of organisations
linked to a party which include not only trade union and welfare groups but also stamp collecting
societies, pigeon clubs, and weight-lifting associations.
• With the emergence of a communist state in Russia in 1917 under the leadership of Lenin, one-
party system came into being. The Bolsheviks became the Communist Party that established a
new kind of political order called ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
• “The development of the single party coincides with the rebirth of the state religions in the new
forms they have assumed in the contemporary world; we have a religious state rather than a
State religion.”
• “The one-party state is founded on the assumption that the sovereign will of the state reposes
in the leader and his political elite.
• Britain is its leading instance where power alternates between the Conservative and the Labour

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