The first modern political party may have proved itself by losing power
Scholars have singled out the Rockingham Whigs of eighteenth-century Britain as the first modern political party for an unglamorous reason: they kept a coherent name and set of principles even while out of office. Holding together in opposition, with a shared label and shared aims, is the test that separates a party from a passing coalition of ambitious men.
Factions themselves are ancient. Plato described those of Classical Athens, Aristotle analysed how different constitutions breed them, and in Constantinople two chariot-racing factions of the Hippodrome turned into the Nika riots. Rome had its Populares and Optimates, and the Dutch Republic its Orangists and Staatsgezinde. Before mass parties, though, elections were usually low-key contests dominated by personal networks and cliques able to carry a candidate on their own.
Some scholars place the birth of modern parties in seventeenth-century Britain after the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution. The Whigs backed a Protestant constitutional monarchy against absolute rule, while the Tories, heirs of the Royalist Cavaliers of the Civil War, favoured a strong crown, and the rivalry organised British politics through the next century. In the United States, the framers of the 1787 Constitution did not all expect parties, yet quarrels in the early 1790s over federal power produced the Federalists and their opponents. Britain's Conservatives and America's Democrats both claim the title of oldest continuous party, and Sweden's early nineteenth-century arrangement has been called the first fully stable party system.
Parties grew with the vote. As suffrage widened toward universal adult voting, they expanded enormously and came to be seen as go-betweens linking the public to government. Charles Stewart Parnell in Ireland pioneered tools such as party discipline, socialist parties backed by trade unions broke the old liberal-conservative pattern in early twentieth-century Europe, and many newly independent countries built party systems out of their independence movements, as India did.
Why parties form is still argued over. One classic explanation says they mirror existing splits in society, such as between rich and poor. Critics reply that the evidence is thin or untestable, and that parties also reshape the very divisions they supposedly reflect. Today almost every country has them; many political scientists regard a state with fewer than two parties as necessarily autocratic, though having several does not guarantee democracy.
Source: Political party
