Political Parties

Political parties are organized groups that seek to win and exercise power by contesting elections, recruiting candidates, aggregating interests, and shaping policy and public debate. Max Weber described parties as associations oriented toward the acquisition of social power and distinguished them from class and status groups. Moisei Ostrogorski and Robert Michels analyzed the oligarchic tendencies of party organization, with Michels's iron law of oligarchy arguing that leaders come to dominate. Maurice Duverger classified mass and cadre parties and proposed his law linking plurality voting to two-party competition, and Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan explained European party systems through historical cleavages of class, religion, and region. Anthony Downs modeled parties as vote maximizers converging on the median voter, while Otto Kirchheimer described the catch-all party and Richard Katz and Peter Mair identified the cartel party. Peter Mair argued that parties have grown detached from civil society, and Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart linked value change to new party families, including green and populist parties. Antonio Gramsci called the party a collective intellectual. Political parties remain central to research on democracy, representation, polarization, elections, and political change.