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Historical developmentEdit

The idea of people forming large groups or factions to advocate for their shared interests is ancient. Plato mentions the political factions of Classical Athens in the Republic,[1] and Aristotle discusses the tendency of different types of government to produce factions in the Politics.[2] Certain ancient disputes were also factional, like the Nika riots between two chariot racing factions at the Hippodrome of Constantinople. However, modern political parties are considered to have emerged around the end of the 18th or early 19th centuries, appearing first in Europe and the United States.[3][4] What distinguishes political parties from factions and interest groups is that political parties use an explicit label to identify their members as having shared electoral and legislative goals.[4][5] The transformation from loose factions into organised modern political parties is considered to have first occurred in either the United Kingdom or the United States, with the United Kingdom's Conservative Party and the Democratic Party of the United States both frequently called the world's first modern political party.[6]

Emergence in BritainEdit

The party system that emerged in early modern Britain is considered to be one of the world's first, with origins in the factions that emerged from the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution of the late 17th century.[7]:4 The Whig faction originally organised itself around support for protestant constitutional monarchy as opposed to absolute rule, whereas the conservative Tory faction (originally the Royalist or Cavalier faction of the English Civil War) supported a strong monarchy.[7]:4 These two groups structured disputes in the politics of the United Kingdom throughout the 18th century. Throughout the next several centuries, these loose factions began to adopt more coherent political tendencies and ideologies: the liberal political ideas of John Locke and the notion of universal rights espoused by theorists like Algernon Sidney and later John Stuart Mill were major influences on the Whigs,[8][9] whereas the Tories eventually came to be identified with conservative philosophers like Edmund Burke.[10]

The period between the advent of factionalism around the Glorious Revolution and the accession of George III in 1760 was characterised by Whig supremacy, during which the Whigs remained the most powerful bloc and consistently championed constitutional monarchy with strict limits on the monarch's power, opposed the accession of a Catholic king, and believed in extending toleration to nonconformist Protestants and dissenters.[11] Although the Tories were out of office for half a century, they largely remained a united opposition to the Whigs.

When they lost power, the old Whig leadership dissolved into a decade of factional chaos with distinct Grenvillite, Bedfordite, Rockinghamite, and Chathamite factions successively in power, and all referring to themselves as "Whigs". The first distinctive political parties emerged from this chaos. The first such party was the Rockingham Whigs[12] under the leadership of Charles Watson-Wentworth and the intellectual guidance of the political philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke laid out a philosophy that described the basic framework of the political party as "a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed".[13] As opposed to the instability of the earlier factions, which were often tied to a particular leader and could disintegrate if removed from power, the party was centred around a set of core principles and remained out of power as a united opposition to government.[14]


A coalition including the Rockingham Whigs, led by the Earl of Shelburne, took power in 1782, only to collapse after Rockingham's death. The new government, led by the radical politician Charles James Fox in coalition with Lord North, was soon brought down and replaced by William Pitt the Younger in 1783. It was now that a genuine two-party system began to emerge, with Pitt leading the new Tories against a reconstituted "Whig" party led by Fox.[15][16] The modern Conservative Party was created out of these Pittite Tories. In 1859 under Lord Palmerston, the Whigs, heavily influenced by the classical liberal ideas of Adam Smith,[17] joined together with the free trade Tory followers of Robert Peel and the independent Radicals to form the Liberal Party.[18]

Emergence in the United StatesEdit

Although the framers of the 1787 United States Constitution did not anticipate that American political disputes would be primarily organised around political parties, political controversies in the early 1790s over the extent of federal government powers saw the emergence of two proto-political parties: the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party, which were championed by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, respectively.[19][20] However, a consensus reached on these issues ended party politics in 1816 for nearly a decade, a period commonly known as the Era of Good Feelings.[21]


Worldwide spreadEdit

Another candidate for the first modern party system to emerge is that of Sweden.[3] Throughout the second half of the 19th century, the party model of politics was adopted across Europe. In Germany, France, Austria and elsewhere, the 1848 Revolutions sparked a wave of liberal sentiment and the formation of representative bodies and political parties. The end of the century saw the formation of large socialist parties in Europe, some conforming to the philosophy of Karl Marx, others adapting social democracy through the use of reformist and gradualist methods.[23]

At the same time, the Home Rule League Party, campaigning for Home Rule for Ireland in the British Parliament, was fundamentally changed by the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell in the 1880s. In 1882, he changed his party's name to the Irish Parliamentary Party and created a well-organized grassroots structure, introducing membership to replace ad hoc informal groupings. He created a new selection procedure to ensure the professional selection of party candidates committed to taking their seats, and in 1884 he imposed a firm 'party pledge' which obliged MPs to vote as a bloc in parliament on all occasions. The creation of a strict party whip and a formal party structure was unique at the time. His party's efficient structure and control contrasted with the loose rules and flexible informality found in the main British parties, and represented the development of new forms of party organisation.[24]

Origin of political partiesEdit

Political parties are a nearly ubiquitous feature of modern countries. Nearly all democratic countries have strong political parties, and many political scientists consider countries with fewer than two parties to necessarily be autocratic.[25][26][27] However, these sources allow that a country with multiple competitive parties is not necessarily democratic, and the politics of many autocratic countries are organised around one dominant political party.[27][28] There are many explanations for how and why political parties are such a crucial part of modern states.[4]:11

Social cleavagesEdit

One of the core explanations for why political parties exist is that they arise from existing divisions among people. Building on Harold Hotelling's work on the aggregation of preferences and Duncan Black's development of social choice theory, Anthony Downs showed how an underlying distribution of preferences in an electorate can produce regular results in the aggregate, such as the median voter theorem.[29] This abstract model shows that parties can arise from variations within an electorate, and can adjust themselves to the patterns in the electorate. However, Downs assumed that some distribution of preferences exists, rather than attributing any meaning to that distribution.

Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan made the idea of differences within an electorate more concrete by arguing that several major party systems of the 1960s were the result of social cleavages that had already existed in the 1920s.[30] They identify four lasting cleavages in the countries they examine: a Center-Periphery cleavage regarding religion and language, a State-Church cleavage centered on control of mass education, a Land-Industry cleavage regarding freedom of industry and agricultural policies, and an Owner-Worker cleavage which includes a conflict between nationalism and internationalism.[30] Subsequent authors have expanded on or modified these cleavages, particularly when examining parties in other parts of the world.[31]

The argument that parties are produced by social cleavages has drawn several criticisms. Some authors have challenged the theory on empirical grounds, either finding no evidence for the claim that parties emerge from existing cleavages or arguing that this claim is not empirically testable.[32] Others note that while social cleavages might cause political parties to exist, this obscures the opposite effect: that political parties also cause changes in the underlying social cleavages.[4]:13 Others note that, if the explanation for where parties come from is that they emerge from existing social cleavages, then the theory has not identified what causes parties unless it also explains where social cleavages come from; one response to this objection, along the lines of Charles Tilly's bellicist theory of state-building, is that social cleavages are formed by historical conflicts.[33]

Individual and group incentivesEdit

An alternative explanation for why parties are ubiquitous across the world is that the formation of parties provides compatible incentives for candidates and legislators. One explanation for the existence of parties, advanced by John Aldrich, is that the existence of political parties means that a candidate in one electoral district has an incentive to assist a candidate in a different district, when those two candidates have a similar ideology.[34]

One reason that this incentive exists is that parties can solve certain legislative challenges that a legislature of unaffiliated members might face. Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins argue that the development of many institutions can be explained by their power to constrain the incentives of individuals; a powerful institution can prohibit individuals from acting in ways that harm the community.[35] This suggests that political parties might be mechanisms for preventing candidates with similar ideologies from acting to each others' detriment.[36] One specific advantage that candidates might obtain from helping similar candidates in other districts is that the existence of a party apparatus can help coalitions of electors to agree on ideal policy choices,[37] which is in general not possible.[38][39] This could be true even in contexts where it is only slightly beneficial to be part of a party; models of how individuals coordinate on joining a group or participating in an event show how even a weak preference to be part of a group can provoke mass participation.[40]

Parties as heuristicsEdit

Parties may be necessary for many individuals to participate in politics, because they provide a massively simplifying heuristic which allows people to make informed choices with a much lower cognitive cost. In the absence of parties, electors might have to form ideas about every option, but parties enable them to make judgments about a few groups instead of many individuals. Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes argued in The American Voter that identification with a political party is a crucial determinant of whether and how an individual will vote.[41] Because it is much easier to become informed about a few parties' platforms than about many candidates' personal positions, parties reduce the cognitive burden for people to cast informed votes. However, evidence suggests that over the last several decades the strength of party identification has been weakening, so this may be a less important function for parties to provide than it was in the past.[42]









Parliamentary partiesEdit






Partisan styleEdit


Nonpartisan systemsEdit


Uni-party systemsEdit



Bi-party systemsEdit




Multi-party systemsEdit







Political parties are funded by contributions from








In fledgling democracies funding can also be provided by foreign aid. International donors provide financing to political parties in developing countries as a means to promote democracy and good governance. Support can be purely financial or otherwise. Frequently it is provided as capacity development activities including the development of party manifestos, party constitutions and campaigning skills.[50] Developing links between ideologically linked parties is another common feature of international support for a party.[50] Sometimes this can be perceived as directly supporting the political aims of a political party, such as the support of the US government to the Georgian party behind the Rose Revolution. Other donors work on a more neutral basis, where multiple donors provide grants in countries accessible by all parties for various aims defined by the recipients.[50] There have been calls by leading development think-tanks, such as the Overseas Development Institute, to increase support to political parties as part of developing the capacity to deal with the demands of interest-driven donors to improve governance.[50]

Colors and emblemsEdit


• Blue generally denotes conservatism.[55]

• Yellow is often used for liberalism or libertarianism.

• Red often signifies social democratic, socialist or communist parties.[citation needed]


• Orange is the traditional color of Christian democracy.







International organizationEdit





See alsoEdit


  1. ^ Plato (1935). The Republic. Macmillan and Co, Ltd.
  2. ^ Aristotle (1984). The Politics. The University of Chicago Press. p. 135.
  3. ^ a b Metcalf, Michael F. (1977). "The first "modern" party system? Political parties, Sweden's Age of liberty and the historians". Scandinavian Journal of History. 2 (1–4): 265–287. doi:10.1080/03468757708578923.
  4. ^ a b c d Chhibber, Pradeep K.; Kollman, Ken (2004). The formation of national party systems: Federalism and party competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States. Princeton University Press.
  5. ^ Belloni, Frank P.; Beller, Dennis C. (1976). "The Study of Party Factions as Competitive Political Organizations". The Western Political Quarterly. 29 (4): 531–549. doi:10.1177/106591297602900405.
  6. ^ Dirr, Alison (24 October 2016). "Is the Democratic Party the oldest continuous political party in the world?". Politifact Wisconsin. Retrieved 30 September 2019.
  7. ^ a b Jones, J. R. (1961). The First Whigs. The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis. 1678–1683. Oxford University Press.
  8. ^ Ashcraft, Richard; Goldsmith, M. M. (1983). "Locke, Revolution Principles, and the Formation of Whig Ideology". Historical Journal. 26 (4): 773–800. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00012693.
  9. ^ Zook, Melinda S. (2002). "The Restoration Remembered: The First Whigs and the Making of their History". Seventeenth Century. 17 (2): 213–234. doi:10.1080/0268117X.2002.10555509.
  10. ^ Frank O'Gorman (2003). Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy. Routledge. p. 171. ISBN 978-0-415-32684-1.
  11. ^ Hamowy, Ronald (2008). "Whiggism". The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 542–43. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n328. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.
  13. ^ Burke, Edmund (1770). Thoughts on the cause of the present discontents.
  17. ^ Ellen Wilson and Peter Reill, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (2004), p. 298
  18. ^ Goodman, Gordon L. (1959). "Liberal unionism: The revolt of the Whigs". Victorian Studies. 3 (2): 173–189.
  19. ^ Hofstadter, Richard (1970). The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840. University of California Press.
  20. ^ William Nisbet Chambers, ed. (1972). The first party system.
  21. ^ Minicucci, Stephen (2004). "Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790–1860". Studies in American Political Development. Cambridge University Press. 18 (2): 160–185. doi:10.1017/S0898588X04000094.
  22. ^ Kollman, Ken (2012). The American political system. W. W. Norton and Company.
  24. ^ Jordan, Donald (1986). "John O'Connor Power, Charles Stewart Parnell and the Centralisation of Popular Politics in Ireland". Irish Historical Studies. 25 (97): 46–66. doi:10.1017/S0021121400025335.
  25. ^ Przeworski, Adam; Alvarez, Michael E.; Cheibub, Jose Antonio; Limongi, Fernando (2000). Democracy and development: Political institutions and well-being in the world, 1950–1990. Cambridge University Press. p. 20.
  26. ^ Boix, Carles; Miller, Michael; Rosato, Sebastian (2013). "A complete data set of political regimes, 1800–2007". Comparative Political Studies. 46 (12): 1523–1554. doi:10.1177/0010414012463905.
  27. ^ a b Svolik, Milan (2008). "Authoritarian reversals and democratic consolidation". American Political Science Review. 102 (2): 153–168. doi:10.1017/S0003055408080143.
  28. ^ Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Nygård, Håvard Mokleiv; Wig, Tore (2017). "Autocratic elections: Stabilizing tool or force for change?". World Politics. 69 (1): 98–143. doi:10.1017/S0043887116000149.
  29. ^ Downs, Anthony (1957). An economic theory of democracy. Harper Collins.
  30. ^ a b Lipset, Seymour Martin; Rokkan, Stein (1967). Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments: Cross-national perspectives. New York Free Press. p. 50.
  31. ^ Ware, Alan (1995). Political parties and party systems. Oxford University Press. p. 22.
  32. ^ Lybeck, Johan A. (2017). "Is the Lipset-Rokkan Hypothesis Testable?". Scandinavian Political Studies. 8 (1–2): 105–113. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9477.1985.tb00314.x.
  33. ^ Tilly, Charles (1990). Coercion, capital, and European states. Blackwell.
  34. ^ Aldrich, John (1995). Why Parties?: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. University of Chicago Press.
  35. ^ Cox, Gary; McCubbins, Mathew (1999). Legislative leviathan. University of California Press.
  36. ^ Hicken, Allen (2009). Building party systems in new democracies. Cambridge University Press.
  37. ^ Tsebelis, George (2000). "Veto players and institutional analysis". Governance. 13 (4): 441–474. doi:10.1111/0952-1895.00141.
  38. ^ McKelvey, Richard D. (1976). "Intransitivities in multidimensional voting bodies". Journal of Economic Theory. 12: 472–482. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(76)90040-5.
  39. ^ Schofield, Norman (1983). "Generic instability of majority rule". Review of Economic Studies. 50 (4): 695–705. doi:10.2307/2297770. JSTOR 2297770.
  40. ^ Granovetter, Mark (1978). "Threshold models of collective behavior". American Journal of Sociology. 83 (6): 1420–1443. doi:10.1086/226707.
  41. ^ Campbell, Angus; Converse, Philip; Miller, Warren; Stokes, Donald (1960). The American Voter. University of Chicago Press.
  42. ^ Dalton, Russell J.; Wattenberg, Martin P. (2002). Parties without partisans: Political change in advanced industrial democracies. Oxford University Press.
  43. ^ Cf. Brettschneider, Nutzen der ökonomischen Theorie der Politik für eine Konkretisierung des Gebotes innerparteilicher Demokratie
  44. ^ McDonnell, Duncan and Newell, James (2011) 'Outsider Parties'.
  45. ^ Redding 2004
  46. ^ Abizadeh 2005.
  47. ^ "General Election results through time, 1945–2001". BBC News. Retrieved 19 May 2006.
  48. ^ Duverger 1954
  49. ^ See Heard, Alexander, 'Political financing'. In: Sills, David I. (ed.) International Emcyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 12. New York: Free Press – Macmillan, 1968, pp. 235–41; Paltiel, Khayyam Z., 'Campaign finance – contrasting practices and reforms'. In: Butler, David et al. (eds.), Democracy at the polls – a comparative study of competitive national elections. Washington, D.C.: AEI, 1981, pp. 138–72; Paltiel, Khayyam Z., 'Political finance'. In: Bogdanor, Vernon (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institutions. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987, pp. 454–56; 'Party finance', in: Kurian, George T. et al. (eds.) The encyclopedia of political science. vol 4, Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011, pp. 1187–89.
  52. ^ ACE Electoral Knowledge Network: Comparative Data: Political Parties and Candidates
  53. ^ ACE Electoral Knowledge Network: Comparative Data: Political Parties and Candidates
  54. ^ ACE Encyclopaedia: Public funding of political parties
  55. ^ Why is the Conservative Party Blue, BBC, 20 April 2006
  56. ^ Farhi, Paul (2 November 2004), "Elephants Are Red, Donkeys Are Blue", Washington Post
  57. ^ Ware, Political parties, pp. 65–67
  58. ^ Ware, Political parties, p. 22

External linksEdit

  1. ^ Döring, Holger; Regel, Sven (2019). "Party Facts: A database of political parties worldwide". Party Politics. 25 (2): 97–109. doi:10.1177/1354068818820671.