Page 308 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Unit 13: Political Parties

struggle for power: it is a device for catching votes; it is an agency to mobilise people’s support at the Notes
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
intermediary which links social forces and ideologies to official governmental institutions and relates
them to political action within the larger political community.”
Such a view of political party makes it hardly distinguishable from a pressure or an interest group. A
‘specific interest’ may constitute the foundation of a political party. Thus, differences between or
among political parties may be sought on the basis of specific interests. For this reason, Dean and
Schuman observe that political parties have become essentially political institutions to implement
the objectives of interest groups.” A similar vein may be discovered in the interpretation of Crotty
who says: “A political party is a formally organised group that performs the functions of educating
the public.... that recruits and promotes individuals for public office, and that provides a comprehensive
linkage functions between the public and governmental decision-makers.”
But basically different from the English and American views is the Marxist view on the theme of
political party as elaborated by Lenin. Here a political party is taken as a ‘vanguard’ of the social class
whose task is to create class consciousness and then to prepare the proletariat for a bloody and
violent revolution. Every party is a class organisation. The ‘bourgeois’ parties of whatever name
have their vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo, but the party of the workers (communist
party) has its aim at the overthrow of the existing system and its substitution by a new system in
which power would be in the hands of the working class and the society under the rule of this party
would be given a classless character so as to eventuate into a stateless pattern of life in the final stage
of social development. As Lenin says: “The communist party is created by means of selection of the
best, most classconscieres, most self-sacrifing and far— sighted workers.....The communist party is
the lever of political organisation, with the help of which the more progressive part of the working
class directs on the right path the whole of proletariat and the semi-proletariat along the right road.”
It is true that political parties grew as a faction in the early modern age, but now a distinction between
the two is made. Faction is a bad term, because its members take part in disruptive and dangerous
activities so as to paralyse the working of a government. Opposed to this, party is a respectable term.
Its members take part in the struggle for power on the basis of some definite policies and programmes
and they observe the sanctity of constitutional means. So it is said that while “a party acts by counting
heads, a faction acts by breaking heads.” But parties are
‘specialised associations’ and they become more complex, organised and bureaucratic as a society
approaches the modern type.”
13.2 Political Parties in USA, UK, Russia and France

Party System in USA

Like Britain, the emergence of party system in the United States is a matter of extra-constitutional
growth. As already pointed out, it has belied the sincere expectations of those founding fathers who
had deliberately sought to envisage a framework of government which, as Madison said, would be free
from the ‘violence of the faction.’ In spite of the solemn warning issued by the greatest leader of the
nascent American nation (Washington) against the sinister role of political parties, the growth of party
system occurred gradually but incessantly. His successors took note of the same ‘pernicious’ development
and Jefferson in his farewell address had to observe that political parties “are likely, in the course of
time and things, to become potent energies by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be
enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” “The
inevitability could not be undone” and, as Munro says, the calls for a partyless politics “fell on deaf
ears.” So much so that by the middle of the nineteenth century, party system became a recognised fact
of the American political life. It is well observed: “The American party system consists of two major
elements, each of which performs in specified ways or follows customary behaviour pattern in the total
system. To remove or alter the role of one element would destroy the system or create new one.”

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