Why does political parties exist

This refers to the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee, and all of their sub-organizations and local affiliates.

This refers to the party coalitions organized within a legislative body, such as Congress. Learn more about how American democracy works. One of the most fundamental institutions to any democracy is the political parties. Yet, they are often maligned in contemporary American politics. Part of the reason they are so unpopular is that this is currently an age with heightened partisan polarization. However, understanding how and why political parties came into existence helps with understanding US polity and their roles in it better.

Many of them thought political parties were dangerous and anathema to democracy. By Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Ph. When individuals become ardent supporters of a party, it is called partisanship. To begin with, the party must have a written constitution. It must also aim to achieve the election of members to the House of Representatives or Senate. And, it must have either members whose names appear on the electoral roll, or have at least one member who is a current member of the Federal Parliament.

The consequences for misleading the Australian Electoral Commission, even inadvertently, when registering a political party can be severe — as Pauline Hanson learned when she was sentenced to three years in jail but later acquitted in for an electoral offence. Neither interest groups nor political parties are directly mentioned in the U. Where interest groups often work indirectly to influence our leaders, political parties are organizations that try to directly influence public policy through nominating and officially sponsoring members who seek to win and hold public office.

This is a key difference. Interest groups do not officially nominate or nominate candidates for public office, although they may support them politically and even contribute dollars to their campaign. Parties accomplish this by identifying and aligning sets of issues that are important to voters in the hopes of gaining support during elections.

In this respect, parties provide choices to the electorate, something they are doing that is in sharp contrast to their opposition. These positions on these critical issues are often presented in campaign documents or political advertising. If successful, a party can create a large enough electoral coalition to gain control of the government.

Once in power, the party is much more likely to be able to deliver, to its voters, the policy preferences they choose by electing its partisans to the government. Political parties organize political campaigns to win public office for those they nominate.

You can read the full platform of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party at their respective websites. Political parties exist for the purpose of winning elections in order to influence public policy. This requires them to build coalitions across a wide range of voters who share similar preferences.

As identified in a prior discussion of political ideology, the ideologies of liberalism and conservatism, while not representing the entire spectrum of U.

In considering libertarianism and populism, these ideologies historically add many libertarians to the Republican ranks and many populists to the Democrat ranks. The election offered a partial variation to this general pattern with a not insignificant number of those adhering to populist viewpoints voting for the Republican Party standard bearer, Donald Trump. This chart illustrates the general distribution of party and ideological adherence.

Since most U. Using the chart above, it might be assumed that the two parties would try to appeal to voters toward the center where ideological lines intersect.

However, there is evidence that the political party adherents symbolized in the chart above by party shape are moving farther apart, making appeals to moderates more difficult. To track this polarization, Pew Research conducted a study of Republican and Democratic respondents over a twenty-five-year span.

Every few years, Pew would poll respondents, asking them whether they agreed or disagreed with statements. This is especially true for questions about the government and politics.

In , 58 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that the government controlled too much of our daily lives. In , 47 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement.

This is an example of polarization, in which members of one party see government from a very different perspective than the members of the other party.

Over the years, Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart in their beliefs about the role of government. In , Republican and Democratic answers to forty-eight values questions differed by an average of only 10 percent, but that difference has grown to 18 percent over the last twenty-five years. According to some scholars, shifts led partisanship to become more polarized than in previous decades, as more citizens began thinking of themselves as conservative or liberal rather than moderate.

They serve to organize faction , to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party , often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties , to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, 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, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion […].

Election outcomes would probably be based on the way voters compared the parties on the most important events of the day rather than on electoral strategy. There are many reasons we would be wrong in these expectations, however. First, the electorate is not entirely stable. Each generation of voters has been a bit different from the last. It sometimes happens that over a series of elections, parties may be unable or unwilling to adapt their positions to broader socio-demographic or economic forces.

Parties need to be aware when society changes. If leaders refuse to recognize that public opinion has changed, the party is unlikely to win in the next election. Groups that have felt that the party has served their causes in the past may decide to look elsewhere if they feel their needs are no longer being met. Either way, the party system will be upended as a result of a party realignment, or a shifting of party allegiances within the electorate. The election is considered an example of a critical election , one that represents a sudden, clear, and long-term shift in voter allegiances.

Those who favor stability of the current political and economic system tended to vote Republican, whereas those who would most benefit from changing the system usually favored Democrat candidates. Based on this alignment, the Democratic Party won the nixt 5 consecutive presidential elections and was able to build a political coalition that dominated Congress into the s, including holding an uninterrupted majority in the House of Representatives from to A look at the presidential election shows how the opinions of different demographic groups vary.

For instance, 55 percent of women voted for Barack Obama and 52 percent of men voted for Mitt Romney. Age mattered as well—60 percent of voters under thirty voted for Obama, whereas 56 percent of those over sixty-five voted for Romney. Racial groups also varied in their support of the candidates. Ninety-three percent of African Americans and 71 percent of Hispanics voted for Obama instead of Romney. Breaking down voters by demographic groups may reveal very different levels of support for particular candidates or policies among the groups.

The election results show clear advantages for Democratic candidates among women, indicating a gender gap between the parties. In , those with the least education and those with the most education post-graduate study tended to vote democratic. This pattern also existed among the least educated and those with the least yearly income. Over time, the United States has become more socially liberal, especially on topics related to race and gender, and millennials—those aged 18—34—are more liberal than members of older generations and have shown a pattern of voting democratic.

Also, as young Latinos reach voting age, they seem more inclined to vote than do their parents, which may raise the traditionally low voting rates among this ethnic group. Based upon data from the National Exit Poll, the election showed both continuity and change in voting among socio-economic groups. It is obviously way too early to determine whether the changes are permanent leading to a new voting coalition for the Republican Party or rather an exception to normal voting patterns.

If anything, the losing gap among males has widened for Democrats. One of the most significant changes occurred when comparing voting by educational background. Democrats continued, in fact increased, their positive margins with those having post-graduate study; but, they also increased among the college educated. When the data is differentiated by both race and education, the Trump support among those without a college degree was shocking to most analysts.

Also, Democrats maintained their majority among union households, but by a significantly reduced margin. Winning elections and implementing policy would be hard enough in simple political systems, but in a country as complex as the United States, political parties must take on great responsibilities to win elections across the many local, state, and national governing bodies. Indeed, political differences between states and local areas can contribute much complexity.

If a party stakes out issue positions on which few people agree and therefore builds too narrow a coalition of voter support, that party may find itself marginalized.

But if the party takes too broad a position on issues, it might find itself in a situation where the members of the party disagree with one another, making it difficult to pass legislation, even if the party can secure victory.

Throughout the history of the United States, the political arena has been dominated by a series of two main parties with a periphery of third parties also involved in the process. In order for that influence to be meaningful, citizens must send clear signals to their leaders about what they wish the government to do. It only makes sense, then, that voters have several clearly differentiated options available to them at the polls on Election Day.

Having these options means voters can select a candidate who more closely represents their own preferences on the important issues of the day. It also gives individuals who are considering voting a reason to participate. After all, you are more likely to vote if you care about who wins and who loses. The existence of two major parties, especially in our present era of strong parties, leads to sharp distinctions between the candidates and between the party organizations.

The two-party system came into being because the structure of U. Even when there are other options on the ballot, most voters understand that minor parties have no real chance of winning even a single office. Hence, they vote for one candidate of the two major parties in order to support a potential winner.

Of the members of the House and Senate, only a handful identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. As an external standard, there is a "two-turnover" criterion Huntington By this criterion, a democracy may be considered to be consolidated if a party that takes power in an election at the time of transition to a democracy loses a subsequent election not necessarily immediately following the first election , and if the subsequent ruling party then loses a later election.

On the other hand, even under authoritarian regimes, in many countries political parties exist and elections are held. In many cases, such countries established parliamentary governments directly after gaining independence from colonial powers or after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Subsequently, although the civilian government was replaced by dictatorships or by military rule after a coup-d'etat, the political institutions including electoral and parliamentary systems, in most cases, were not removed, because elimination of such institutions would significantly damage the legitimacy of the current political administration.

Those in power utilize the political party as a vehicle to propagate the regime's ideology among the citizenry and to create a base of political support Binder In addition, it is not unusual for the ruling powers to "produce" elections to "demonstrate" that they were chosen by the people, allowing the participation of other political parties under limitations.