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| Basic course 3: What function do parties perform?In many ways political parties act as go-betweens between citizens and state institutions. Indeed, modern democracy without parties would be unthinkable. But just how do they perform this role? What function do parties perform as part of the intermediate system in the political system? This is the question we address here in basic course 3.The illustration and the text below list the main functions of political parties:
Political program function: Parties integrate differing interests into a political concept, a political program, for which they try to attract support and a majority. Participatory function: Parties create a link between citizens and the political system; they enable political participation for individuals and groups with the hope of success. Legitimating function: By creating a link between citizens, groups within society and the political system, they make a contribution towards securing the political system in the consciousness of citizens and within the power-holding institutions. [Taken and translated from: Bernhard Sutor; aus: Politik. Ein Studienbuch zur politischen Bildung, Paderborn 1994]
These functions form a central part of all democracies. Parties perform these functions in cooperation with other players in the intermediate system: Associations and the media. Just how this works is addressed by the short text that follows and other texts that are a part of basic course 3:
Parties are not the only players in the intermediate system. The task of communicating interests and forming public opinion is shared with associations, civil-action groups, social-movements and the media. The latter no longer performs a purely passive role of communication but has become (...) "medium and factor" in the communications process. Nevertheless, parties are the only institutions with a "peculiar double role", a role that is legitimized at elections. "Rather than 'approaching' the state like the other go-betweens bearing opinions and interests gathered from people, parties actually carry them 'into' the state by forming the overall opinion in the constitutional state bodies. (...) To this end, political parties solve a common communication problem in all pluralistic-representative democracies between the variety that exists in society and the ideal of state unity." This special kind of mixed constitutional status made up of freedom and commitment, which grants the parties - set apart from other instruments of state - the rank of a constitutional body, is intended to create a situation in which parties "do not become so entangled in the institution of state that they lose their roots in society, and in which party leadership does not become so isolated from its membership that the constant stream of feedback about current opinion and interests dissolves. According to this, then, it is the parties that are supposed to keep going the "political communication cycle" between instruments of state and the public, between the "forming of public opinion" and "the forming of state opinion". Indeed, the debate is not about whether parties belong to society or the state, but rather to what degree they should be integrated into either". Therefore none of the other players in the political process of a democratic system have quite the same special hinged communicative function. [Taken and translated from: Ulrich Sarcinelli: Parteien und Politikvermittlung: Von der Parteien- zur Mediendemokratie?; in: ders. (Hg.), Politikvermittlung und Demokratie in der Mediengesellschaft, Bonn BpB 1998]
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Subjects: Human
Rights I Democracy I Parties
I Examples I
Europe
I
Globalisation
I United Nations
I Sustainability
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