section_path: Party positions and ideologies
section_name: Party positions and ideologies
paragraph_text: Party positions and ideologies
  
  Political ideologies are one of the major organizing features of political parties, and parties often officially align themselves with specific ideologies. Parties adopt ideologies for a number of reasons. Ideological affiliations for political parties send signals about the types of policies they might pursue if they were in power. Ideologies also differentiate parties from one another, so that voters can select the party that advances the policies that they most prefer. A party may also seek to advance an ideology by convincing voters to adopt its belief system.
  
  Common ideologies that can form a central part of the identity of a political party include liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, feminism, environmentalism, nationalism, fundamentalism, Islamism, and multiculturalism. Liberalism is the ideology that is most closely connected to the history of democracies and is often considered to be the dominant or default ideology of governing parties in much of the contemporary world. Many of the traditional competitors to liberal parties are conservative parties. Socialist, communist, feminist, anarchist, fascist, and nationalist parties are more recent developments, largely entering political competitions only in the 19th and 20th centuries. Environmentalism, multiculturalism, and certain types of fundamentalism became prominent towards the end of the 20th century.
  
  Parties can sometimes be organized according to their ideology using an economic left–right political spectrum. However, a simple left-right economic axis does not fully capture the variation in party ideologies. Other common axes that are used to compare the ideologies of political parties include ranges from liberal to authoritarian, from pro-establishment to anti-establishment, and from tolerant and pluralistic (in their behavior while participating in the political arena) to anti-system.
  
  Party positions for individual political parties are assessed by different published indices, such as the V-Party Dataset.