ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to shed more light on how parties work in practice. Parties perform the vital role in a democracy of organising and articulating the multifarious interests within society, many of which are in sharp conflict. Parties not only involve people directly through their activists and candidates, but they also encourage and educate society to become aware of and engaged in a system ultimately dependent on public involvement. Parties organise coalitions of interests to provide all voters with broad but usually fairly clear choices at election time. Conservatives, governed for two-thirds of the twentieth century, with Labour and the Liberal Party having to make do with the remaining third. On the political fringe in Britain, parties can command reasonable voting support but the ‘first past the post’ voting system means they are not able to focus support in any one constituency and they end up failing to win the seats their vote might be seen to justify.
