WHY DO WE NEED POLITICAL PARTIES?
- Political parties are easily one of the most visible institutions in a democracy.
- For most ordinary citizens, democracy is equal to political parties.
- A political party is a group of people who come together to contest elections and hold power in the government.
- They agree on some policies and programs for society to promote the collective good.
- Parties try to persuade people why their policies are better than others.
- Parties reflect fundamental political divisions in society.
- Parties are about a part of society and thus involve partisanship.
- A party is known by which part it stands for, which policies it supports and whose interests it upholds.
- A political party has three components:
- The leaders
- The active members and
- The followers
Functions of Political Party
- Political parties fill political offices and exercise political power.
- Parties do so by performing a series of functions:
- Parties contest elections.
- Parties put forward different policies and programs and the voters choose from them.
- Parties play a decisive role in making laws for a country.
- Parties form and run governments . The big policy decisions are taken by a political executive that comes from the political parties. Parties recruit leaders, train them and then make them ministers t o run the government in the way they want.
- Those parties that lose in the elections play the role of opposition t o the parties in power, by voicing different views and criticizing the government for its failures or wrong policies.
- Parties shape public opinion.
- Parties provide people access to government machinery and welfare schemes implemented by governments.
Necessity of political parties
- We need political parties because they perform all the functions mentioned above.
- The rise of political parties is directly linked to the emergence of representative democracies.
- As societies became large and complex, they also needed some agency to gather different views on various issues and present these to the government.
- They needed some ways to bring various representatives together so that a r esponsible government could be formed.
- They needed a mechanism to support or restrain the government, make policies, justify or oppose them,
Political parties fulfill these needs that every representative has.