of political parties arose out of factions in the Indian independence movement, and was strengthened and stabilized by the policies of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. The formation of the Indian National Congress, which developed in the early 20th century as a pro-independence faction in British India and immediately became a major political party after Indian independence, foreshadowed the dynamic in many newly independent countries; for example, the Uganda National Congress was a pro-independence party and the first political party in Uganda, and its name was chosen as an homage to the Indian National Congress. As broader suffrage rights and eventually universal suffrage slowly spread throughout democracies, political parties expanded dramatically, and only then did a vision develop of political parties as intermediaries between the full public and the government. Causes of political parties 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. However, these sources allow that a country with multiple competitive parties is not necessarily democratic, and the politics of many autocratic countries are organized around one dominant political party. The ubiquity and strength of political parties in nearly every modern country has led researchers to remark that the existence of political parties is almost a law of politics, and to ask why parties appear to be such an essential part of modern states. Political scientists have therefore come up with several explanations for why political parties are a nearly universal political phenomenon. Social cleavages One of the core explanations for the existence of political parties is that they arise from pre-existing divisions among people: society is divided in a certain way, and a party is formed to organize that division into the electoral competition. By the 1950s, economists and political scientists had shown that party organizations could take advantage of the distribution of voters' preferences over political issues, adjusting themselves in response to what voters believe in order to become more competitive. Beginning in the 1960s, academics began identifying the social cleavages in different countries that might have given rise to specific parties, such as religious cleavages in specific countries that may have produced religious parties there. The theory that parties are produced by social cleavages has drawn several criticisms. Some authors have challenged it on empirical grounds, either finding no evidence for