Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- Political Sociology in the New Millenium
- PART I THEORIES OF POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
- PART II CIVIL SOCIETY: THE ROOTS AND PROCESSES OF POLITICAL ACTION
- 10 Money, Participation, and Votes
- 11 Public Opinion, Political Attitudes, and Ideology
- 12 Nationalism in Comparative Perspective
- 13 Political Parties
- 14 Organized Interest Groups and Policy Networks
- 15 Corporate Control, Interfirm Relations, and Corporate Power
- 16 Social Movements and Social Change
- 17 Toward a Political Sociology of the News Media
- PART III THE STATE AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS
- PART IV STATE POLICY AND INNOVATIONS
- PART V GLOBALIZATION AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
- References
- Name Index
- Subject Index
13 - Political Parties
Social Bases, Organization, and Environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- Political Sociology in the New Millenium
- PART I THEORIES OF POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
- PART II CIVIL SOCIETY: THE ROOTS AND PROCESSES OF POLITICAL ACTION
- 10 Money, Participation, and Votes
- 11 Public Opinion, Political Attitudes, and Ideology
- 12 Nationalism in Comparative Perspective
- 13 Political Parties
- 14 Organized Interest Groups and Policy Networks
- 15 Corporate Control, Interfirm Relations, and Corporate Power
- 16 Social Movements and Social Change
- 17 Toward a Political Sociology of the News Media
- PART III THE STATE AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS
- PART IV STATE POLICY AND INNOVATIONS
- PART V GLOBALIZATION AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY
- References
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
Political parties have long been the subject of opposing assessments. From a negative perspective, parties are criticized because they promote conflict and dissension. Lord Bolingbroke (1965), writing in the 1730s, saw parties as deserving suppression, to be replaced by a leader who could supply the moral authority to promote national unity. On the eve of World War I, perhaps viewing himself as such a leader, Kaiser Wilhem II announced that he no longer recognized parties, only Germans. In much less extreme fashion, James Madison's distaste for parties went along with a recognition that they were inevitable and hence needed to be controlled.
All the U.S. Founding Fathers, who, perhaps understandably, were uncomfortable with the kinds of rudimentary parties with which they were familiar, shared Madison's concerns in some form. It took another eighteenth-century Englishman, Edmond Burke, to recognize the value of parties when, removed from a milieu of paralyzing conflict, they could operate as civil competitors (Mansfield, 1965). At the birth of the United States, despite the ill-feeling toward political parties, the Founding Fathers soon found parties necessary to govern and, later, to peacefully transfer power (Hofstadter, 1972:viii).
It was not until the early twentieth century that political theorists began to give parties a central role in guaranteeing democratic government. In one such assessment, James Bryce (1921:119) wrote that, “parties are inevitable. No free large country has been without them. No one has shown how representative government could be worked without them.”
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- Information
- The Handbook of Political SociologyStates, Civil Societies, and Globalization, pp. 266 - 286Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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