Why do we need political parties - Concepts - Chapter 4 Class 10 Political Science - Political Parties - Political Science

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:

1. Parties contest elections.
2. Parties put forward different policies and programs and the voters choose from them.
3. Parties play a decisive role in making laws for a country.
4. 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.
5.  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.
6. Parties shape public opinion.
7. 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.