Democratic Politics

(ii) We need political parties for what ?
We can understand the necessity of political parties by imagining a situation without parties. Every candidate in the elections will be independent. So no one will be able to make any promises to the people about any major policy changes. The government may be formed, but its life will remain ever uncertain. Elected representative will be accountable to their constituency for what they did to the locality. But no one will be responsible for how the country was run.
We can also think about it by looking at the non-party based election to panchayat in many states. Although the parties do not contest election formally, it is generally noticed that the village gets split into more than one faction, each of which puts up a ‘panel’ of its candidates. This is exactly what the party does. That is the reason we find political parties in almost all countries of the world, whether these countries are big or small, old or new, and developed or developing. The rise of political parties is directly linked to the emergence of representative democracies. As we have seen, large scale societies need representative democracy. As societies became large and complex, they also needed some agency to gather different views on various issues and to present these to the government. They needed some way to bring various representatives together so that a responsible government could be formed. They needed a mechanism to support or restrain the government, make policies, justify or oppose them. Political parties fulfill these needs that every representative government has. We can say that parties are necessary condition for democracy.