ABSTRACT
Political parties are widely considered to be an indispensable part of any modern political system, no matter if it is a Western-style liberal democracy, an authoritarian dictatorship or one of the various types of electoral regimes that have sprung up in the aftermath of what Huntington (1991) called the ‘third wave’ of democratization. However, ‘political parties are not what they used to be’ (Gunther and Diamond 2001: 3), as it has become increasingly clear that the types and functions of parties are changing. Especially in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, political parties rarely fulfil the ideal-type functions political scientists attribute to them. As Randall (2006) has pointed out, widespread poverty and the resultant lack of material and human resources, coupled with the manifold legacies of colonialism and subsequent authoritarianism have significantly impeded the development and, ultimately, the institutionalization of political parties.1
