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| What constitutes a people's party? The brief summary on this page attempts to provide a definition of the expression "people's party". The text passage at the bottom of the page presents the main arguments and disputes surrounding the subject of people's parties.
Contemporary people's parties are parties that encompass a wide social spectrum (voters, members), who may well have contrasting priorities, (...), that have a pluralistic organizational structure, expressed particularly well by the existence of party groupings with different ideals, and that can draw on a large number of full-time party workers. While sometimes different and often rather vague, people's parties do have ideological ideals. People's parties develop comprehensive political programs and follow their main strategic goal of attracting enough votes to form the government - preferably with an absolute parliamentary majority. (...) People's parties regard themselves as representing a real electoral choice for all citizens satisfied with the prevailing system. The political policy followed by people's parties is aimed at improving the common good and finding compromise between different sections of society People's parties are an expression of pluralistic democracy, of an 'open' society, a society in which assimilation and differentiation of working and living conditions has taken place to such a degree as to make efforts to attract votes from across all sections of society feasible in the first place, because unbridgeable ideological barriers and interests no longer stand in the way. [Taken and translated from: Peter Haungs, Parteiendemokratie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin 1980; zit. nach: Informationen zur politischen Bildung 207, Bonn BpB 1997]
Critics of people's parties (...) are keen to point out that they encourage the balance of power to be disguised: According to critics, the fundamental conflicts in a political system based on the ownership of industrial production remain. The expression "people's party" is a contradiction of terms, since no party can ever represent all the people. The ideology followed by a "people's party" is less interested in mobilizing class-based interests within society than it is in promoting its polices in an uncritical way. According to critics, pragmatism without a theoretical base leads to a situation in which principles are lost and empty phrases are used. Those pushing people's parties are happy to go along with the status quo and have no intention of fundamentally changing society. Those advocating people's parties (...) welcome them as a necessary consequence of a society that is no longer polarized: Relationships between parties in a democratic system (...) should not be characterized by their hostility to one another. If a political party is to attract the widest possible support, its political program must extend out to encompass and attract (previous) supporters of other parties, as well as reassuring them that their interests are also being addressed. Admittedly, there is a problem when elections are reduced to a battle of personalities over policy (...). However, those who would like to have the choice between 'clear' alternatives overlook the fact that the electorate would reject concepts of this nature. The huge and long-lasting failure of alternative "non-people's" parties provides clear evidence of this. [Taken and translated from: Uwe Backes/Eckhard Jesse, aus: Informationen zur politischen Bildung 207, Parteiendemokratie, Bonn BpB 1997]
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Subjects: Human
Rights I Democracy I Parties
I Examples I
Europe
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Globalisation
I United Nations
I Sustainability
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