Searching for Political Parties in the Past

Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

Slavic Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venelin I. Ganev

Infamously, the 1991 Bulgarian Constitution contains a provision banning political parties “formed on an ethnic basis.” In the early 1990s, the neo-communist Bulgarian Socialist Party invoked this provision when it asked the country's Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional the political party of the beleaguered Turkish minority. In this article, Venelin I. Ganev analyzes the conflicting arguments presented in the course of the constitutional trial that ensued and shows how the justices’ anxieties about the possible effects of politicized ethnicity were interwoven into broader debates about the scope of the constitutional normative shift that marked the end of the communist era, about the relevance of historical memory to constitutional reasoning, and about the nature of democratic politics in a multiethnic society. Ganev also argues that the constitutional interpretation articulated by the Court has become an essential component of Bulgaria's emerging political order. More broadly, he illuminates the complexity of some of the major issues that frame the study of ethnopolitics in postcommunist eastern Europe: the varied dimensions of the “politics of remembrance“; the ambiguities of transitional justice; the dilemmas inherent in the construction of a rights-centered legality; and the challenges involved in establishing a forward-looking, pluralist system of governance.


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 7 portrays the present challenges to political parties, and their response. The chapter surveys organizational innovations, such as primaries and internal referendums, recently introduced by political parties to counteract their decline in membership and loss of confidence amongst the electorate, and it questions their efficacy and validity. These pro-membership innovations seem in fact to favour a plebiscitary modality rather than effective democratic activity. The chapter suggests that an intra-democracy would need four ‘knights’ that should comprise: inclusion, deliberation, diffusion and pluralism. The alternatives to the party that have been advanced in recent times are considered, but their effective import is challenged. The chapter concludes by arguing for the unavoidability of partisanship for effective democracy. Even if the political party suffers agonizingly over its limited legitimacy, it still remains at the core of democratic politics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Jaseb Nikfar

The political parties were formed in Iran following western countries, after the constitutional revolution and second parliament in 1909, and since then they have witnessed rise and falls. The analytical study and an accurate knowledge of the main movements forming the political parties of the last century that is essential for the development of a democratic society in Iranian society. Based on an analytical and accurate study, from the very beginning of political party formation to the present, three forces are distinguishable in Iranian Society and the partial activities during the past 100 years can be framed in three movements:<br /> The Religious Movement, the National Movement, and the Left Movement to be the major causes for political party formation in Iran in the last century. In this article, the author has tried to explain these major movements and political parties that emerged from these movements using the library sources.


1996 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 351-370
Author(s):  
Daniel H. Lowenstein

When Senator Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) announced that he would not run for a fourth term, he said the political system was "broken" and added that Neither political party speaks to people where they live their lives. . . . Both have moved away from my own concept of service and my own idea of what America can be (Levy 1995). Although the source of these strong sentiments may have been surprising, the sentiments themselves cannot have been remarkable to anyone who has lived in the United States for the past couple of decades, which have been a time of collapsing public confidence in political leaders and institutions.


Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 3 investigates the process of party formation in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, and demonstrates the important role of cultural and societal premises for the development of political parties in the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid in this context to the conditions in which the two mass parties, socialists and Christian democrats, were established. A larger set of Western European countries included in this analysis is thoroughly scrutinized. Despite discontent among traditional liberal-conservative elites, full endorsement of the political party was achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of the interwar totalitarian party, especially under the guise of Italian and German fascism, when ‘the party’ attained its most dominant influence as the sole source and locus of power. The chapter concludes by suggesting hidden and unaccounted heritages of that experience in post-war politics.


Author(s):  
Benjamin von dem Berge ◽  
Thomas Poguntke

This chapter introduces a new, two-dimensional way of measuring intra-party democracy (IPD). It is argued that assembly-based IPD and plebiscitary IPD are two theoretically different modes of intra-party decision-making. Assembly-based IPD means that discussion and decision over a certain topic takes place at the same time. Plebiscitary IPD disconnects the act of voting from the discussion over the alternatives that are put to a vote. In addition, some parties have opened up plebiscitary decision-making to non-members which is captured by the concept of open plebiscitary IPD. Based on the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) dataset, indices are developed for the three variants of IPD. The empirical analyses here show that assembly-based and plebiscitary IPD are combined by political parties in different ways while open party plebiscites are currently a rare exception.


Author(s):  
Annika Hennl ◽  
Simon Tobias Franzmann

The formulation of policies constitutes a core business of political parties in modern democracies. Using the novel data of the Political Party Database (PPDB) Project and the data of the Manifesto Project (MARPOR), the authors of this chapter aim at a systematic test of the causal link between the intra-party decision mode on the electoral manifestos and the extent of programmatic change. What are the effects of the politics of manifesto formulation on the degree of policy change? Theoretically, the authors distinguish the drafting process from the final enactment of the manifesto. Empirically, they show that a higher autonomy of the party elite in formulating the manifesto leads to a higher degree of programmatic change. If party members constrain party elite’s autonomy, they tend to veto major changes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Benjamin Moffitt

Abstract How does a political party become ‘mainstream’? And what makes some parties receive arguably the opposite designation – ‘pariah party’? This conceptual article examines the processes by which parties’ mainstream or pariah status must be constructed, negotiated and policed, not only by political scientists in the pursuit of case selection, but by several actors actively involved in the political process, including media actors and political parties themselves. It explains how these actors contribute to these processes of ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pariahing’, considers their motivations and provides illustrative examples of how such processes take place. As such, the article moves beyond the literature on the ways in which mainstream parties seek to deal with or respond to threats from a variety of pariah parties, instead paying attention to how those parties have been constructed as pariahs in the first place, and how these processes simultaneously contribute to the maintenance of mainstream party identities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 63-67
Author(s):  
T. Beydina ◽  
◽  
N. Zimina ◽  
A. Novikova ◽  
◽  
...  

Political parties today are important elements of the regional political process. Parties, along with other political institutions, participate in the implementation of state policy within the region. The practice of recent years shows a negative trend in the creation of political parties, but those parties that are already registered and are actively fighting for political power at all stages of the Russian elections. Political parties participate in the regional political process to embrace the advantages of the political party space. These advantages are due to both objective factors (territorial potential, the economy of the region) and subjective reasons (personal factors associated with the rating of the leader, both the governor and the party coordinator, the nature of his acquaintance with the central financial department, and more). The study of the organization of power in the regions allows us to talk about its various modifications due to these factors. Political parties are a political institution, they represent an ideological, conceptual, personnel and electoral resource of any government. Regional branches of political parties in today’s political situation fully personify the needs of the regions and represent them at elections. They reflect regional interests, as well as the degree of democracy of the regional government


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
Author(s):  
Silverio Tamez Garza ◽  
Adriana Verónica Hinojosa Cruz ◽  
Carlos Augusto Jiménez Zárate

Abstract. In this paper we analyze how much influence the political party with the largest nationwide (Partido Revolucionario Institucional: PRI) in the Congress, specifically the House of Representatives, in the distribution of the Funds of Branch 23: Paving Fund and Sports Spaces for Municipalities, for the year 2010 which is when this fund was created and for the year 2011. The results of our analysis were that there is a positive impact in the influence ofthe political party with the largest presence in the Chamber of Deputies in the allocation of resources to those municipalities that are governed by mayors from the PRI.Keywords: municipalities, paving and spaces fund goods, political parties, populationResumen. En el presente artículo se analiza la influencia que puede presentar laconfiguración de la Cámara de Diputados con una mayoría por partido en la asignación de recursos hacia las entidades federativas y municipios. Se tomó el caso del Fondo de Pavimentación y Espacios Deportivos para Municipios comparando la distribución en el año de su creación (2010) cuando no se emitieron reglas para su acceso con el siguiente año (2011) tomando en cuenta nuevos criterios. El resultado que nos arroja nuestro análisis es que existe una incidencia positiva en cuanto a la influencia política que se ejerce cuando unexiste mayoría en la representación partidista en la Cámara de Diputados.Palabras clave: fondo de pavimentación y espacios deportivos, municipios, partidos políticos, población


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