ABSTRACT
It would appear that representative democracy and political parties are two sides of the same political coin: almost everywhere that there are democratically elected representatives there are political parties to which they belong. It is not dicult to understand why this should be the case. e members of a democratically elected assembly (or legislature) who want to pass laws that are opposed by other members of that body will inevitably unite, that is, form a caucus, whose purpose is to maximize the number of votes on which they can rely and thus enhance their chances of passing those laws. e members who are opposed to those laws, in turn, will inevitably form counter-organizations that are designed to maximize their voting strength. Since the members of these opposing organizations also generally wish to be re-elected, it is equally certain that they will eventually attempt to employ their embryonic party organizations on behalf of the goal of mobilizing as much support as possible among the voting population. When organized competition within the legislature expands in this way into organized competition for the votes of the electorate, we can speak of the full-blown emergence of political parties. In short, parties attempt to win elections and thus gain for their members and supporters at least a share in governing the society. us E. E. Schattschneider, in his 1942 classic, Party Government, denes a political party as “an organized attempt to get . . . control of the government.”1
