The Relationship Between Political Parties and Governments

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Political systems are very complex to comprehend if one doesn’t know the role of most agencies, branches, and parties. Government functions are not as independent in ruling as one might think; for they are composed of multiple branches and most branches consist of politicians coming from multiple parties. Political Parties are accordingly the essence of politics, they define a country’s political system; one party, bi-partisan, or multiparty system. The inter-relation between parties and governments is an important phenomenon in political science, because parties are basically the connecting link between the people and their governments. (Panebianco p7) However, parties can also be a source of chaos in some cases, especially when they don’t agree on certain issues; they could cause a deadlock in the system as was visible recently with the American budget policy. Or they can take the disagreement into violence as was the case with the Lebanese civil war. Thus one cannot underestimate the important role of political parties, most if not all executives and legislatives come from a political party, one might have independent politicians in power but it’s usually rare. (Jankowski 22) Political parties also play a great role in spreading their ideologies to the citizens of their nations; in the US for example you have two similar yet different parties each spreading their ideologies to their followers. Therefore the role of political parties is a complex one and it shall be examined by understanding their role, how they aggregate support, what are their roles in governments, concluding with short case studies on Lebanon, Syria, and the UK.
The methodology used for writing this paper is based on literary review of articles related to t...

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Lawson, Kay, and Thomas Poguntke. How political parties respond: interest aggregation revisited. Routledge, 2004.
Hermeren, Henrik. "Government Formation In Multiparty Systems." Scandinavian Political Studies 11.A11 (1976): 131-146.
Jankowski , Richard . "Preference Aggregation in Political Parties and Interest Groups: A Synthesis of Corporatist and Encompassing Organization Theory." American Journal of Political Science 32.1 (1988): 105 - 125. Midwest Political Science Association. Web. 3 Jan. 2014.
Pappalardo, A.. "Electoral Systems, Party Systems: Lijphart And Beyond." Party Politics 13.6 (2007): 721-740.
Panebianco, Angelo. Political parties: organization and power. CUP Archive, 1988.
Lijphart, Arend. "Consociational democracy." World politics 21.2 (1969): 207-225.
Ware, Alan. Political parties and party systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

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