Political party
thumb|upright=1.4|The members of political parties coordinate to collectively achieve and use political power.

In politics, a political party is an organized group of people who have the same ideology, or who otherwise have the same political positions, and who field candidates for elections, in an attempt to get them elected and thereby implement their agenda. Political parties are a defining element of representative democracy.

While there is some international commonality in the way political parties are recognized and in how they operate, there are often many differences, some of which are significant. Most of political parties have an ideological core, but some do not, and many represent ideologies very different from their ideology at the time the party was founded. Many countries, such as Germany and India, have several significant political parties, and some nations have one-party systems, such as China and Cuba. The United States is in practice a two-party system but with many smaller parties also participating.

Historical development

In antiquity
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, and Aristotle discusses the tendency of different types of government to produce factions in the Politics. Certain ancient disputes were also factional, like the Nika riots between two chariot racing factions at the Hippodrome of Constantinople. A few instances of recorded political groups or factions in history included the late Roman Republic's Populares and Optimates faction as well as the Dutch Republic's Orangists and the Staatsgezinde. 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. 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. The transformation from loose factions into organized 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 "oldest continuous political party".

Emergence in Britain

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. The Whig faction originally organized 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. 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, whereas the Tories eventually came to be identified with conservative philosophers like Edmund Burke.

The period between the advent of factionalism, around the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of George III in 1760 was characterized 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. 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 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". 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.

thumb|upright=1.2|In A Block for the Wigs (1783), James Gillray caricatured Fox's return to power in a coalition with North. George III is the blockhead in the centre.

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.Parliamentary History, xxiv, 213, 222, cited in Foord, His Majesty's Opposition, 1714–1830, p. 441 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,Ellen Wilson and Peter Reill, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (2004), p. 298 joined together with the free trade Tory followers of Robert Peel and the independent Radicals to form the Liberal Party.

Emergence in the United States

Although the framers of the 1787 United States Constitution did not anticipate that American political disputes would be primarily organized 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. 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.

The splintering of the Democratic-Republican Party in the aftermath of the contentious 1824 presidential election led to the re-emergence of political parties. Two major parties would dominate the political landscape for the next quarter-century: the Democratic Party, led by Andrew Jackson, and the Whig Party, established by Henry Clay from the National Republicans and from other Anti-Jackson groups. When the Whig Party fell apart in the mid-1850s, its position as a major U.S. political party was filled by the Republican Party.

Worldwide spread
thumb|upright|Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party
Another candidate for the first modern party system to emerge is that of Sweden. 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.

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, preceded only by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (1875), even though the latter was persecuted by Otto von Bismarck from 1878 to 1890. These parties' 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 organizations, which constituted a "model" in the 20th-century.

Origin 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. There are many explanations for how and why political parties are such a crucial part of modern states.

Social cleavages

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. This abstract model shows that parties can arise from variations within an electorate, and can adjust themselves to the patterns in the electorate (although how well the median voter idea describes the varieties of party systems that exists has been a topic of continued study). 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. 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. Subsequent authors have expanded on or modified these cleavages, particularly when examining parties in other parts of the world.

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. 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. A further objection is 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.

Individual and group incentives
thumb|upright=0.75|It is easier for voters to evaluate one simple list of policies for each party, like this platform for the United Australia Party, than to individually judge every single candidate.
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.

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. This suggests that political parties might be mechanisms for preventing candidates with similar ideologies from acting to each other's detriment. 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, which is in general not possible. 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.

Parties as heuristics

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. Without political parties, electors would have to evaluate every individual candidate in every single election they are eligible to vote in. Instead, parties enable electors to make judgments about a few groups instead of a much larger number of individuals. Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald E. Stokes argued in The American Voter that identification with a political party is a crucial determinant of whether and how an individual will vote. 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.

Structure of political parties
Political parties are often structured in similar ways across countries. They typically feature a single party leader, a group of party executives, and a community of party members. Parties in democracies usually select their party leadership in ways that are more open and competitive than parties in autocracies, where the selection of a new party leader is likely to be tightly controlled. In countries with large sub-national regions, particularly federalist countries, there may be regional party leaders and regional party members in addition to the national membership and leadership.

Party leaders
thumb|upright=1|A National Congress of the Communist Party of China, where policies may be set and changes can be made to party leadership.
Parties are typically led by a party leader, who is the main representative of the party and often has primary responsibility for overseeing the party's policies and strategies. The leader of the party that controls the government usually becomes the head of government, such as the president or prime minister, and the leaders of other parties explicitly compete to become the head of government. In both presidential democracies and parliamentary democracies, the members of a party frequently have substantial input into the selection of party leaders, for example by voting on party leadership at a party conference. Because the leader of a major party is a powerful and visible person, many party leaders are well-known career politicians. Party leaders can be sufficiently prominent that they affect how voters perceive the entire political party, and some voters decide how to vote in elections partly based on how much they like the leaders of the different parties.

The number of people involved in choosing party leaders varies widely across parties and countries. On one extreme, party leaders might be selected from the entire electorate; on the opposite extreme, they might be selected by just one individual. Selection by a smaller group can be a feature of party leadership transitions in more autocratic countries, where the existence of political parties may be severely constrained to only one legal political party, or only one competitive party. Some of these parties, like the Chinese Communist Party, have rigid methods for selecting the next party leader, which involve selection by other party members. A small number of single-party states have hereditary succession, where party leadership is inherited by the child of an outgoing party leader. Autocratic parties use more restrictive selection methods to avoid having major shifts in the regime as a result of successions.

Party executives
In both democratic and non-democratic countries, the party leader is often the foremost member of a larger party leadership. A party executive will commonly include administrative positions, like a party secretary and a party chair, who may be different people from the party leader. These executive organizations may serve to constrain the party leader, especially if that leader is an autocrat. It is common for political parties to conduct major leadership decisions, like selecting a party executive and setting their policy goals, during regular party conferences.

thumb|upright=1|Members of the National Woman's Party in 1918.
Much as party leaders who are not in power are usually at least nominally competing to become the head of government, the entire party executive may be competing for various positions in the government. For example, in Westminster systems, the largest party that is out of power will form the Official Opposition in parliament, and select a shadow cabinet which (among other functions) provides a signal about which members of the party would hold which positions in the government if the party were to win an election.

Party membership
Citizens in a democracy will often affiliate with a political party. Party membership may include paying dues, an agreement not to affiliate with multiple parties at the same time, and sometimes a statement of agreement with the party's policies and platform. In democratic countries, members of political parties often are allowed to participate in elections to choose the party leadership. Party members may form the base of the volunteer activists and donors who support political parties during campaigns. The extent of participation in party organizations can be affected by a country's political institutions, with certain electoral systems and party systems encouraging higher party membership. Since at least the 1980s, membership in large traditional party organizations has been steadily declining across a number of countries.

Types of party organizations
Political scientists have distinguished between different types of political parties that have evolved throughout history. These include cadre parties, mass parties, catch-all parties and cartel parties.Schumacher, Gijs (2017). ‘The Transformation of Political Parties’, in van Praag, Philip (ed.), Political Science and Changing Politics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp.163-178 Cadre parties were political elites that were concerned with contesting elections and restricted the influence of outsiders, who were only required to assist in election campaigns. Mass parties tried to recruit new members who were a source of party income and were often expected to spread party ideology as well as assist in elections. In the United States, where both major parties were cadre parties, the introduction of primaries and other reforms has transformed them so that power is held by activists who compete over influence and nomination of candidates.Ware, Political parties, pp. 65–67

Cadre parties

A cadre party, or elite party, is a type of political party that was dominant in the nineteenth century before the introduction of universal suffrage and that was made up of a collection of individuals or political elites. The French political scientist Maurice Duverger first distinguished between "cadre" and "mass" parties, founding his distinction on the differences within the organisational structures of these two types. Cadre parties are characterized by minimal and loose organisation, and are financed by fewer larger monetary contributions typically originating from outside the party. Cadre parties give little priority to expanding the party's membership base, and its leaders are its only members.Schumacher, Gijs (2017). ‘The Transformation of Political Parties’, in van Praag, Philip (ed.), Political Science and Changing Politics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp.163-178 (p.165) The earliest parties, such as the early American political parties, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists, are classified as cadre parties.

Mass parties
thumb|upright=1|Parties can arise from existing cleavages in society, like the Social Democratic Party of Germany which was formed to represent German workers.

A mass party is a type of political party that developed around cleavages in society and mobilized the ordinary citizens or 'masses' in the political process.  In Europe, the introduction of universal suffrage resulted in the creation of worker's parties that later evolved into mass parties; an example is the German Social Democratic Party. These parties represented large groups of citizens who had previously not been represented in political processes, articulating the interests of different groups in society. In contrast to cadre parties, mass parties are funded by their members, and rely on and maintain a large membership base. Further, mass parties prioritize the mobilization of voters and are more centralized than cadre parties.

Catch-all parties

The term "Catch-all party" was developed by German-American political scientist Otto Kirchheimer to describe the parties that developed in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of changes within the mass parties. The term "big tent party" may be used interchangeably. Kirchheimer characterized the shift from the traditional mass parties to catch-all parties as a set of developments including the "drastic reduction of the party's ideological baggage" and the "downgrading of the role of the individual party member".Kirchheimer, Otto (1966). 'The Transformation of Western European Party Systems', in J. LaPalombara and M. Weiner (eds.), Political Parties and Political Development. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp.177–200 (p.190) By broadening their central ideologies into more open-ended ones, catch-all parties seek to secure the support of a wider section of the population. Further, the role of members is reduced as catch-all parties are financed in part by the state or by donations.Schumacher, Gijs (2017). 'The Transformation of Political Parties', in van Praag, Philip (ed.), Political Science and Changing Politics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp.163-178 (p.167) In Europe, the shift of Christian Democratic parties that were organized around religion into broader centre-right parties epitomizes this type.

Cartel parties

Cartel parties are a type of political party that emerged post-1970s and are characterized by heavy state financing and the diminished role of ideology as an organizing principle. The cartel party thesis was developed by Richard Katz and Peter Mair who wrote that political parties have turned into "semi-state agencies", acting on behalf of the state rather than groups in society. The term 'cartel' refers to the way in which prominent parties in government make it difficult for new parties to enter, as such forming a cartel of established parties. As with catch-all parties, the role of members in cartel parties is largely insignificant as parties use the resources of the state to maintain their position within the political system.Schumacher, Gijs (2017). 'The Transformation of Political Parties', in van Praag, Philip (ed.), Political Science and Changing Politics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp.163-178 (p.168)

Niche parties
thumb|upright=0.7|A political party may focus on one niche issue, like the environment.

Niche parties are a type of political party that developed on the basis of the emergence of new cleavages and issues in politics, such as immigration and the environment. In contrast to mainstream or catch-all parties, niche parties articulate an often limited set of interests in a way that does not conform to the dominant economic left-right divide in politics, emphasising issues that do not attain prominence within the other parties. Further, niche parties do not respond to changes in public opinion to the extent that mainstream parties do. Examples of niche parties include Green parties and extreme nationalist parties, such as the Front National in France. However, over time these parties may lose some of their niche qualities, instead adopting those of mainstream parties, for example after entering government.

Entrepreneurial parties

Entrepreneurial parties are a type of political party that is centered on a charismatic political entrepreneur.

Party positions and ideologies

thumb|Ideology of ruling party in legislative body at the regional or national level worldwide, or ideology of ruling body, as of May 2020.  Colour-coded from left- (red) to right- (blue) wing scale. Based on identification from international recognition or self-proclaimed party ideology.
Klaus von Beyme categorized European parties into nine families, which described most parties. He was able to arrange seven of them from left to right:  Communist, Socialist, Green, Liberal, Christian democratic, Conservative and Libertarian. The position of two other types, Agrarian and Regional/Ethnic parties varied.Ware, Political parties, p. 22
center|frameless|500x500px|Traditional political spectrum used to describe European political parties

During the 19th and 20th century, many national political parties organized themselves into international organizations along similar policy lines. Notable examples are The Universal Party, International Workingmen's Association (also called the First International), the Socialist International (also called the Second International), the Communist International (also called the Third International), and the Fourth International, as organizations of working class parties, or the Liberal International (yellow), Hizb ut-Tahrir, Christian Democratic International and the International Democrat Union (blue). Organized in Italy in 1945, the International Communist Party, since 1974 headquartered in Florence has sections in six countries. Worldwide green parties have recently established the Global Greens. The Universal Party, The Socialist International, the Liberal International, and the International Democrat Union are all based in London. Some administrations (e.g. Hong Kong) outlaw formal linkages between local and foreign political organizations, effectively outlawing international political parties.

Party systems

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 political institutions, called a party system. Some basic features of a party system are how many parties there are and what sorts of parties are the most successful. These properties are closely connected to other major features of the country's politics, like how democratic it is, what sorts of restrictions its laws impose on political parties, and what type of electoral systems it uses. An informative way to classify the party systems of the world is by how many parties they include.

Non-partisan systems

thumb|upright=1|right|In a non-partisan legislature, like the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories, every member runs and legislates as a political independent with no party affiliation.
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. A permanent absence of parties is usually, but not always, the result of an official ban on partisan activity. A temporary lack of partisan activity can also occur during an upheaval in a country's politics.

In some non-partisan countries, the formation of parties is explicitly banned by law. The existence of political parties may be banned in autocratic countries in order to prevent a turnover in power. For example, in Saudi Arabia, a ban on political parties has been used as a tool for protecting the monarchy. 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.

Political parties may also temporarily cease to exist in countries that have either only been established recently, or 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. 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. However, it is also possible (though 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.

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. 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. 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, but laws ensure that the Workers' Party of Korea retains control.

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. 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. 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.

Two-party systems

thumb|upright=1|right|The United States has one of the main examples of a two-party system.
In several countries, there are only two parties that have a realistic chance of competing to form government. One canonical two-party democracy is the United States, where the national government is exclusively controlled by either the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Other examples of countries which have had long periods of two-party dominance include Colombia, Uruguay, Malta, and Ghana.

It is also possible for authoritarian countries, and not just democracies, to have two-party systems. Competition between two parties has occurred in historical autocratic regimes in countries including Brazil and Venezuela.

In the 1960s Maurice Duverger observed that single-member district single-vote plurality-rule elections tend to produce two-party systems, a phenomenon that became known as Duverger's law. Whether or not this pattern is true has been heavily debated over the last several decades.

Multi-party systems

Multi-party systems are systems in which more than two parties have a realistic chance of holding power and influencing policy. A very large number of systems around the world have had periods of multi-party competition, and two-party democracies may be considered unusual or uncommon compared to multi-party systems. Many of the largest democracies in the world have had long periods of multi-party competition, including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, and Nigeria. Multiparty systems encourage characteristically different types of governance than smaller party systems, for example by often encouraging the formation of coalition governments.

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. Authoritarian countries can include multi-party competition, but typically this occurs when the elections are not fair. 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. However, the question of whether multiparty systems are more democratic than two-party systems, or if they enjoy better policy outcomes, is a subject of substantial disagreement among scholars as well as among the public. 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, Italy, and Finland.

Some multi-party systems may have two parties that are noticeably more competitive than the other parties. 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. 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 2 parties that have major roles in the country's national politics.

Funding

Many of the activities of political parties involve acquiring funds and allocating them 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. Much of this expense is paid by candidates and political parties, which often develop sophisticated fundraising organizations. 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.

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. In most countries, the government also provides some level of funding for political parties. 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 of them have regular payments of government funds that goes beyond campaign reimbursements. 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. 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. Public financing of political parties may decrease parties' pursuit of funds through corrupt methods, by decreasing their incentive to find alternate sources of funding.

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. 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. Internal funding may be preferred because external sources might make the party beholden to an outside entity.

Uses for party funds
There are many ways for political parties to 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. 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. Some parties engage directly in vote-buying, in which a party gives money to a person in exchange for their vote.

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. Once a party has spent more than a certain amount, additional expenditures might not increase their chance of success.

Restrictions
thumb|upright=1|"The Bosses of the Senate by Joseph Keppler" (1889)|Campaign finance restrictions may be motivated by the perception that excessive or secretive contributions to political parties will make them beholden to people other than the voters.
Fundraising and expenditures by political parties are regulated by governments, with regulations largely 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. Two main ways that regulations affect parties is by intervening in their sources of income and by mandating that they maintain some level of transparency about their funding. 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. It is also common to limit how much money an individual can give to a political party each election. Similarly, many governments cap the total amount of money that can be spent by each party in an election. 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.

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.

Party colours and symbols

Nearly all political parties associate themselves with colours and symbols, primarily to aid voters in identifying, recognizing, and remembering the party. This branding is particularly important in polities where much of the population may be illiterate, so that someone who cannot read a party's name on a ballot can instead identify that party by colour or logo. Parties of similar ideologies will often use the same colours across different countries. Colour associations are useful as a short-hand for referring to and representing parties in graphical media. They can also be used to refer to coalitions and alliances between political parties and other organizations; examples include purple alliances, red-green alliances, traffic light coalitions, pan-green coalitions, and pan-blue coalitions.

However, associations between colour and ideology are extremely 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. 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 liberal Democratic Party, which is different from the typical mapping.

+ Ideology Colours Symbols Examples References Agrarianism Green  link=Democratic Farmers' Party of Germany|60x60px link=Agrarian Party of Russia|60x60px link=Centre Party (Sweden)|60x60px  Anarchism   link=Syndicalist Party|60x60px link=Confederación Nacional del Trabajo|60x60px link=Mexican Liberal Party|60x60px  Centrism   Purple Party|60x60px People First Party (Taiwan)|60x60px The Centre (political party)|60x60px  Communism Red  link=Communist Party of Vietnam|60x60px link=Marxist–Leninist Communist Party (Turkey)|60x60px link=Socialist Unity Party of Germany|60x60px  Conservatism   link=Kuomintang|60x60px link=Colombian Conservative Party|60x60px link=Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)|60x60px  Democratic socialism Red  link=Democratic Action Party|60x60px link=Inuit Ataqatigiit|60x60px link=Revolutionary Febrerista Party|80x60px  Fascism   link=National Fascist Party|60x60px link=Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists|60x60px link=National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands|60x60px  Feminism   link=National Woman's Party|60x60px link=Feminist Party (Finland)|60x60px link=Pakistan Women Muslim League|60x60px  Green politics Green  link=Global Greens|60x60px link=Democratic Alternative (Malta)|60x60px link=Mongolian Green Party|60x60px  Islamism Green link=United Development Party|60x60px link=Jamiat-e Islami|60x60px link=Prosperous Justice Party|60x60px  Liberalism Yellow link=United Party for National Development|60x60px link=Liberal Democrats (UK)|60x60px link=Constitutional Union (Morocco)|60x60px Cassel-Picot, Muriel "The Liberal Democrats and the Green Cause: From Yellow to Green" in Leydier, Gilles and Martin, Alexia (2013) Environmental Issues in Political Discourse in Britain and Ireland. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p.105.  Libertarianism Yellow Porcupine link=Libertarian Party (United States)|60x60px link=Libertarian Party (Brazil)|120x60px  Monarchism  Crown link=Italian Democratic Party of Monarchist Unity|60x60px link=Rexist Party|60x60px link=FUNCINPEC|60x60px  Pacifism   link=ECOPEACE Party|60x60px link=Pacifist Socialist Party|60x60px link=United Democratic Left|60x60px  Social democracy Red  link=Social Democrats (Denmark)|60x60px link=Socialist Movement for Integration|60x60px link=Czech Social Democratic Party|60x60px   Socialism Red Red rose link=Socialist Party of Chile|60x60px link=Socialist Party of Albania|60x60px link=Japanese Communist Party|60x60px 

See also

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

References

Category:Elections
 