Political party

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,^[84] Islamism, and multiculturalism.^[85] 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.^[86] Many of the traditional competitors to liberal parties are conservative parties.^[86] Socialist, communist, feminist, anarchist, fascist, and nationalist parties are more recent developments, largely entering political competitions only in the 19th and 20th centuries.^[86] Environmentalism, multiculturalism, and certain types of fundamentalism became prominent towards the end of the 20th century.^[86]

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.^[87] Other common axes that are used to compare the ideologies of political parties include ranges from liberal to authoritarian,^[88] from pro-establishment to anti-establishment, and from tolerant and pluralistic (in their behavior while participating in the political arena) to anti-system.^[87]

Party positions for individual political parties are assessed by different published indices, such as the V-Party Dataset.^[89]

Non-ideological parties

Though ideologies are central to a large number of political parties around the world, not all political parties have an organizing ideology, or exist to promote ideological policies. For example, some political parties may be

Political parties are ubiquitous across both democratic and autocratic countries, and there is often very little change in which political parties have a chance of holding power in a country from one election to the next. This makes it possible to think about the political parties in a country as collectively forming one of the country's central

An informative way to classify the party systems of the world is by how many parties they include.[94] Because some party systems include a large number of parties that have a very low probability of winning elections, it is often useful to think about the effective number of parties (the number of parties weighted by the strength of those parties) rather than the literal number of registered parties.^[96]

Non-partisan systems

In a non-partisan system, no political parties exist, or political parties are not a major part of the political system. There are very few countries without political parties.^[97]

In some non-partisan countries, the formation of parties is explicitly banned by law.^[98] The existence of political parties may be banned in autocratic countries in order to prevent a turnover in power.^[99] For example, in Saudi Arabia, a ban on political parties has been used as a tool for protecting the monarchy.^[99] However, parties are also banned in some polities that have long democratic histories, usually in local or regional elections of countries that have strong national party systems.^{[100][101][102]}

Political parties may also temporarily cease to exist in countries that have either only been established recently, or that have experienced a major upheaval in their politics and have not yet returned to a stable system of political parties. For example, the United States began as a non-partisan democracy, and it evolved a stable system of political parties over the course of many decades.^[1]: ch.4 A country's party system may also dissolve and take time to re-form, leaving a period of minimal or no party system, such as in Peru following the regime of Alberto Fujimori.^[103] However, it is also possible – albeit rare – for countries with no bans on political parties, and which have not experienced a major disruption, to nevertheless have no political parties: there are a small number of pacific island democracies, such as Palau, where political parties are permitted to exist and yet parties are not an important part of national politics.^[98]

One-party systems

In a one-party system, power is held entirely by one political party. When only one political party exists, it may be the result of a ban on the formation of any competing political parties, which is a common feature in authoritarian states. For example, the Communist Party of Cuba is the only permitted political party in Cuba, and is the only party that can hold seats in the legislature.^[104] When only one powerful party is legally permitted to exist, its membership can grow to contain a very large portion of society and it can play substantial roles in civil society that are not necessarily directly related to political governance; one example of this is the Chinese Communist Party.^[105] Bans on competing parties can also ensure that only one party can ever realistically hold power, even without completely outlawing all other political parties. For example, in North Korea, more than one party is officially permitted to exist and even to seat members in the legislature,^[106] but laws ensure that the Workers' Party of Korea retains control.^[107]

It is also possible for countries with free elections to have only one party that holds power. These cases are sometimes called dominant-party systems or particracies. Scholars have debated whether or not a country that has never experienced a transfer of power from one party to another can nevertheless be considered a democracy.^[27]: 23 There have been periods of government exclusively or entirely by one party in some countries that are often considered to have been democratic, and which had no official legal barriers to the inclusion of other parties in the government; this includes recent periods in Botswana, Japan, Mexico, Senegal, and South Africa.^{[27]: 24–27} It can also occur that one political party dominates a sub-national region of a democratic country that has a competitive national party system; one example is the southern United States during much of the 19th and 20th centuries, where the Democratic Party had almost complete control, with the Southern states being functionally one-party regimes, though opposition parties were never prohibited.^[108]

Two-party systems

In several countries, there are only two parties that have a realistic chance of competing to form government.^[109] One canonical two-party democracy is the United States, where the national government has for much of the country's history exclusively been controlled by either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.^[110] Other examples of countries which have had long periods of two-party dominance include Colombia, Uruguay,^[111] Malta,^[112] and Ghana.^[113] Two-party systems are not limited to democracies; they may be present in authoritarian regimes as well. Competition between two parties has occurred in historical autocratic regimes in countries including Brazil^[114] and Venezuela.^[115]

A democracy's political institutions can shape the number of parties that it has. In the 1950s Maurice Duverger observed that single-member district single-vote plurality-rule elections tend to produce two-party systems,

Multi-party systems are systems in which more than two parties have a realistic chance of holding power and influencing policy.

The presence of many competing political parties is usually associated with a greater level of democracy, and a country transitioning from having a one-party system to having a many-party system is often considered to be democratizing.^[127] Authoritarian countries can include multi-party competition, but typically this occurs when the elections are not fair.^[128] For this reason, in two-party democracies like the United States, proponents of forming new competitive political parties often argue that developing a multi-party system would make the country more democratic.^[129] However, the question of whether multi-party systems are more democratic than two-party systems, or if they enjoy better policy outcomes, is a subject of substantial disagreement among scholars^[130][131] as well as among the public.^[132][133] In the opposite extreme, a country with a very large number of parties can experience governing coalitions that include highly ideologically diverse parties that are unable to make much policy progress, which may cause the country to be unstable and experience a very large number of elections; examples of systems that have been described as having these problems include periods in the recent history of Israel,^[134] Italy, and Finland.^[135] Multi-party systems are often viewed as fairer or more representative than one- or two-party systems,^[136] but they also have downsides, like the likelihood that in a system with plurality voting the winner of a race with many options will only have minority support.^[92]

Some multi-party systems may have two parties that are noticeably more competitive than the other parties.^[137] Such party systems have been called "two-party-plus" systems, which refers to the two dominant parties, plus other parties that exist but rarely or never hold power in the government.^[138] Such parties may serve a crucial factor in election outcomes.^[139] It is also possible for very large multi-party systems, like India's, to nevertheless be characterized largely by a series of regional contests that realistically have only two competitive parties, but in the aggregate can produce many more than two parties that have major roles in the country's national politics.^[122]

Funding

Many of the activities of political parties involve the acquisition and allocation of funds in order to achieve political goals. The funding involved can be very substantial, with contemporary elections in the largest democracies typically costing billions or even tens of billions of dollars.^[140][141] Much of this expense is paid by candidates and political parties, which often develop sophisticated fundraising organizations.^[142] Because paying for participation in electoral contests is such a central democratic activity, the funding of political parties is an important feature of a country's politics.^[142]

Sources of party funds

Common sources of party funding across countries include dues-paying party members, advocacy groups and lobbying organizations, corporations, trade unions, and candidates who may self-fund activities.^[143] In most countries, the government also provides some level of funding for political parties.^[142][144] Nearly all of the 180 countries examined by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance have some form of public funding for political parties, and about a third have regular payments of government funds that goes beyond campaign reimbursements.^[145] In some countries, public funding for parties depends on the size of that party: for example, a country may only provide funding to parties which have more than a certain number of candidates or supporters.^[145] A common argument for public funding of political parties is that it creates fairer and more democratic elections by enabling more groups to compete, whereas many advocates for private funding of parties argue that donations to parties are a form of political expression that should be protected in a democracy.^[146] Public financing of political parties may decrease parties' pursuit of funds through corrupt methods, by decreasing their incentive to find alternate sources of funding.^[147]

One way of categorizing the sources of party funding is between public funding and private funding. Another dichotomy is between plutocratic and grassroots sources; parties which get much of their funding from large corporations may tend to pursue different policies and use different strategies than parties which are mostly funded through small donations by individual supporters.^[148] Private funding for political parties can also be thought of as coming from internal or external sources: this distinguishes between dues from party members or contributions by candidates, and donations from entities outside of the party like non-members, corporations, or trade unions.^[148] Internal funding may be preferred because external sources might make the party beholden to an outside entity.^[148]

Uses for party funds

There are many ways in which political parties may deploy money in order to secure better electoral outcomes. Parties often spend money to train activists, recruit volunteers, create and deploy advertisements, conduct research and support for their leadership in between elections, and promote their policy agenda.^[142] Many political parties and candidates engage in a practice called clientelism, in which they distribute material rewards to people in exchange for political support; in many countries this is illegal, though even where it is illegal it may nevertheless be widespread in practice.^[149] Some parties engage directly in vote buying, in which a party gives money to a person in exchange for their vote.^[150]

Though it may be crucial for a party to spend more than some threshold to win a given election, there are typically diminishing returns for expenses during a campaign.^[151] Once a party has crossed a particular spending threshold, additional expenditures might not increase their chance of success.^[152]

Restrictions

Fundraising and expenditures by political parties are typically regulated by governments, with many countries' regulations focusing on who can contribute money to parties, how parties' money can be spent, and how much of it can pass through the hands of a political party.^[153] Two main ways in which regulations affect parties are by intervening in their sources of income and by mandating that they maintain some level of transparency about their funding.^[154] One common type of restriction on how parties acquire money is to limit who can donate money to political parties; for example, people who are not citizens of a country may not be allowed to make contributions to that country's political parties, in order to prevent foreign interference.^[153] It is also common to limit how much money an individual can give to a political party each election.^[155] Similarly, many governments cap the total amount of money that can be spent by each party in an election.^[144] Transparency regulations may require parties to disclose detailed financial information to the government, and in many countries transparency laws require those disclosures to be available to the public, as a safeguard against potential corruption.^[142] Creating, implementing, and amending laws regarding party expenses can be extremely difficult, since governments may be controlled by the very parties that these regulations restrict.^[142]

Party colours and symbols

Nearly all political parties associate themselves with specific colours and symbols, primarily to aid voters in

However, associations between colour and ideology can also be inconsistent: parties of the same ideology in different countries often use different colours, and sometimes competing parties in a country may even adopt the same colours.^[161] These associations also have major exceptions. For example, in the United States, red is associated with the more conservative Republican Party while blue is associated with the more left-leaning Democratic Party.^[157][162]

Ideology	Colours	Symbols	Examples	References
Agrarianism	Green	Grain Four-leaf clover		[158]: 58 [163][164][165]
Anarchism	Black   Red	Black flag, or black and red flag Letter A surrounded by a circle Black cat		[166][167][168][169]
Centrism	Purple			[170][171]
Christian Democracy	Orange   White	Christian cross		[172]
Communism	Red	Hammer and sickle Handshake		[173][174][175]
Conservatism	Blue			[176][177]
Democratic socialism	Red	Handshake Red rose Fist		[178][179]
Fascism	Black   Brown	Fasces Swastika Runes		[158]: 56 [180][181]
Feminism	White   Purple   Gold   Pink	Venus symbol Clenched fist Letter F		[182][183]
Green politics	Green	Sun Sunflower		[184][185]
Islamism	Black   Green	Star and crescent		[157][186]
Liberalism	Yellow	Bird in flight		[159][187][188]
Libertarianism	Yellow   Gold	Porcupine Torch		[157][189][190][191]
Monarchism	White   Gold   Purple	Crown		[158][192]
Pacifism	White	The white flag Dove Peace symbol White poppy V sign		[158][193]
Social democracy	Red   Pink   Purple	Handshake Red rose Fist		[194][195][196][178]
Socialism	Red	Red rose		[173][197][198][199][178]

See also

• List of largest political parties
• List of ruling political parties by country
• Lists of political parties by country

References