ABSTRACT
One important clue to the ways in which people identify themselves politically is to consider the names of political parties. Many of the names refer to the ‘ideologies’ which we have already considered – liberal, socialist, communist, conservative. What is striking, however, is the number of names which refer specifically to sectional groups within a state’s population: national – Scottish National Party, Inkatha (‘Spear of the [Zulu] Nation’); ethnic/racial – Malaysian Chinese Association; religious – Christian Democrat, Jan Sangh
(Hindu); or class/occupation – Labour, Peasant. Indeed, if we look behind the official name of political parties, we find that they frequently are mainly or exclusively supported by one such sectional group. For instance, the Republican Party of India was formerly called the Scheduled Castes Federation (i.e. the ‘untouchables’), whilst the former grandly titled Nigerian National Democratic Party was in fact confined to a faction of the Yoruba peoples of western Nigeria. Conversely, some parties like the Congress Party of India and the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico seek to unite virtually everyone in the state in the cause of nationalism.
