Constitution nor do they have any real, legal authority to influence policy. But whereas interest groups often work indirectly to influence our leaders, political parties are organizations that try to directly influence public policy through its members who seek to win and hold public office.
If successful, a party can create a large enough electoral coalition to gain control of the government. Once in power, the party is then able to deliver, to its voters and elites, the policy preferences they choose by electing its partisans to the government. In this respect, parties provide choices to the electorate, something they are doing that is in such sharp contrast to their opposition. You can read the full platform of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party at their respective websites.
Winning elections and implementing policy would be hard enough in simple political systems, but in a country as complex as the United States, political parties must take on great responsibilities to win elections and coordinate behavior across the many local, state, and national governing bodies.
Indeed, political differences between states and local areas can contribute much complexity. If a party stakes out issue positions on which few people agree and therefore builds too narrow a coalition of voter support, that party may find itself marginalized. But if the party takes too broad a position on issues, it might find itself in a situation where the members of the party disagree with one another, making it difficult to pass legislation, even if the party can secure victory.
It should come as no surprise that the story of U. The United States has seen sweeping changes to its size, its relative power, and its social and demographic composition. These changes have been mirrored by the political parties as they have sought to shift their coalitions to establish and maintain power across the nation and as party leadership has changed.
As you will learn later, this also means that the structure and behavior of modern parties largely parallel the social, demographic, and geographic divisions within the United States today. To understand how this has happened, we look at the origins of the U. National political parties as we understand them today did not really exist in the United States during the early years of the republic.
To the extent that national issues did exist, they were largely limited to collective security efforts to deal with external rivals, such as the British or the French, and with perceived internal threats, such as conflicts with Native Americans.
Soon after the United States emerged from the Revolutionary War, however, a rift began to emerge between two groups that had very different views about the future direction of U. Thus, from the very beginning of its history, the United States has had a system of government dominated by two different philosophies.
Federalists , who were largely responsible for drafting and ratifying the U. Constitution, generally favored the idea of a stronger, more centralized republic that had greater control over regulating the economy.
The Federalist faction, led by Alexander Hamilton , largely dominated the government in the years immediately after the Constitution was ratified. Included in the Federalists was President George Washington , who was initially against the existence of parties in the United States. When Washington decided to exit politics and leave office, he warned of the potential negative effects of parties in his farewell address to the nation, including their potentially divisive nature and the fact that they might not always focus on the common good but rather on partisan ends.
However, members of each faction quickly realized that they had a vested interest not only in nominating and electing a president who shared their views, but also in winning other elections.
Two loosely affiliated party coalitions, known as the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans , soon emerged. The Federalists succeeded in electing their first leader, John Adams , to the presidency in , only to see the Democratic-Republicans gain victory under Thomas Jefferson four years later in When the U. Constitution was drafted, its authors were certainly aware that political parties existed in other countries like Great Britain , but they hoped to avoid them in the United States.
They felt the importance of states in the U. They also hoped that having a college of electors vote for the executive branch, with the top two vote-getters becoming president and vice president, would discourage the formation of parties. Their system worked for the first two presidential elections, when essentially all the electors voted for George Washington to serve as president. But by , the Federalist and Anti-Federalist camps had organized into electoral coalitions.
The Anti-Federalists joined with many others active in the process to become known as the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalist John Adams won the Electoral College vote, but his authority was undermined when the vice presidency went to Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, who finished second.
Four years later, the Democratic-Republicans managed to avoid this outcome by coordinating the electors to vote for their top two candidates. But when the vote ended in a tie, it was ultimately left to Congress to decide who would be the third president of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson almost lost the presidential election of to his own running mate when a flaw in the design of the Electoral College led to a tie that had to be resolved by Congress. In an effort to prevent a similar outcome in the future, Congress and the states voted to ratify the Twelfth Amendment, which went into effect in This amendment changed the rules so that the president and vice president would be selected through separate elections within the Electoral College, and it altered the method that Congress used to fill the offices in the event that no candidate won a majority.
The amendment essentially endorsed the new party system and helped prevent future controversies. It also served as an early effort by the two parties to collude to make it harder for an outsider to win the presidency. Does the process of selecting the executive branch need to be reformed so that the people elect the president and vice president directly, rather than through the Electoral College?
Should the people vote separately on each office rather than voting for both at the same time? Explain your reasoning. In the election of , numerous candidates contended for the presidency, all members of the Democratic-Republican Party.
Andrew Jackson won more popular votes and more votes in the Electoral College than any other candidate. However, because he did not win the majority more than half of the available electoral votes, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, as required by the Twelfth Amendment. Thus, Andrew Jackson, with 99 electoral votes, found himself in competition with only John Quincy Adams, the second place finisher with 84 electoral votes, and William H.
Crawford, who had come in third with The fourth-place finisher, Henry Clay, who was no longer in contention, had won 37 electoral votes. Clay strongly disliked Jackson, and his ideas on government support for tariffs and internal improvements were similar to those of Adams.
Clay thus gave his support to Adams, who was chosen on the first ballot. It could be said that strong party discipline prevents a more vibrant democracy where a diverse range of views and positions are advocated.
It also creates a system where individuals are routinely required to vote in a way which compromises their own views. Forming any kind of government in such conditions would be hard and efforts to pass new laws would be fraught with difficulty. By submitting this form, you agree to receive emails from Oxfam and can unsubscribe at any time. Photo: OxfamAUS. How political parties work and why we have them Australian law prescribes a number of conditions which must be met in order to form a political party.
At the same time they try to hold as many posts as possible in the government , or in the municipal or provincial executive. Political parties have various functions.
One is promoting the interests of their voters. They also draw up party programmes. Citizens can join political parties, enabling them to help shape the party programme. Under the terms of the Elections Act, anyone in the Netherlands can found a political party, even minors and foreign nationals.
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