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CHALLENGES TO POLITICAL PARTIES
- Popular dissatisfaction and criticism have focused on four problem areas in the working of political parties.
- Political parties need to face and overcome these challenges to remain effective instruments of democracy.
- These are:
-
The first challenge is the
lack of internal democracy
within parties.
Parties
do not keep membership registers, do not hold organizational meetings,
and do not conduct internal elections regularly.
-
The
second challenge of
dynastic succession
is related to the first one.
Most political parties
do not practice open and transparent procedures f
or their functioning, there are very few ways for an ordinary worker to rise to the top of a party.
In many parties, t he top positions are always controlled by members of one family. This is unfair to other members of that party. This is bad for democracy.
-
The
third challenge is about the growing role of
money and muscle power
in parties, especially during elections.
Since parties are focused only on winning elections, they tend to use shortcuts to win elections.
They tend to nominate those candidates who have or can raise a lot of money . In some cases, parties support criminals who can win elections.
-
The fourth challenge is that very often parties do not seem to offer a meaningful
choice to the voters.
Sometimes people cannot even elect very different leaders either, because the same set of leaders keeps shifting from one party to another.
