Challenges to Political Parties


 
 
Concept Explanation
 

Challenges to Political Parties

Challenges to political parties: All over the world, people are dissatisfied with the performance of the political parties. This is the case in our country too. Popular dissatisfaction and criticism has focused on four problem areas in the working of political parties. Political parties need to face and overcome these challenge. 

First Challenge: Lack of Internal Democracy within Parties: In the most of the political parties, the power is concentrated in the hands of one or few leaders at the top. Ordinary members of the party do not get sufficient information about the happenings inside the party. Parties do not conduct internal elections regularly. More than loyalty to party principles and polices, personal loyalty to the leader becomes more important. As a result, the leaders assume greater power to make decisions in the name of the party. Due to all these reason, political parties face this challenge.

 

Second Challenge: Dynastic Succession: The top positions in many political parties are generally controlled by members of one family. Leaders on the top have unfair chance of favouring their families and friends. This is also bad for democracy, since people who do not have adequate experience or popular support, come to occupy positions of power. This tendency is present in some measure all over the world, including in some of the older democracies.

Third Challenge: Money and Muscle Power: This is a prominent challenge to political parties during elections. Since parties are focused only on winning elections, they tend to use shortcuts to winning elections. Such shortcuts include:      

  •  They tend to nominate those candidates who have or can raise lots of money. Rich people and companies who give funds to the parties tend to have influence on the policies and decisions of the party.
  • In some cases, parties support criminals who can win elections.
  • Fourth Challenge: Meaningful Choice to the Voters: It states that very often parties do not seem to offer a meaningful choice to the voters. In order to offer meaningful choice, parties must be significantly different. For example, in our country too, the differences among all the major parties on the economic policies have reduced. Those who want really different policies have no option available to them. Sometimes, people cannot even elect very different leaders as the same set of leaders keep changing from one party to another.

     
     


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