Revision summary
Parties can sustain developing democracies by aggregating conflict, training elites and making peaceful turnover possible. Huntington’s institutionalisation and India’s early Congress incorporation illustrate the positive case. Failures include family vehicles, ethnic census parties, clientelism and polarising attacks on referees. Existence of parties is not the same as a party system that can lose. Critical verdict: necessary organisations whose quality decides whether democracy thickens or hollows.
Model answer
Introduction
In developing societies, political parties are often the main machine that turns a constitution into a living democracy. They recruit leaders, aggregate demands, fight elections and, in the best case, accept defeat. The question asks for a critical examination of that role in sustaining and stabilising democracy. The verdict is mixed: parties are necessary, and they are frequently the source of the instability they are asked to cure.
Body
How parties can stabilise
E. E. Schattschneider said democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties. Samuel Huntington treated institutionalised parties as the difference between participation that strengthens order and participation that wrecks it. In a poor or post-colonial society, parties can: (1) aggregate language, caste, class and region into a bargain instead of a militia; (2) train a political class that knows how to run ministries; (3) offer peaceful turnover so that losers still have a future; (4) link the village to the capital through patronage that, at its least bad, is a form of incorporation. India’s Congress system in the early decades, whatever its later decay, did this incorporation. Later coalition years and a competitive national party system showed that democracy can survive without a single dominant party if parties still treat the Election Commission and the Constitution as binding.
Elsewhere, South Africa’s ANC after apartheid, Chile’s concertación years, and parts of Ghana and Senegal show parties as roofs over social conflict. Internationally, party internationals and election observation try to socialise that role.
Critical failures
Many developing democracies have parties that are not organisations. They are vehicles for a family, a business house or an ethnic census. Mainwaring and Scully’s work on institutionalisation is the standard warning: where labels change every election, voters cannot reward or punish a programme, and presidents rule through deals. Ethnic parties can mobilise turnout and also lock minorities out, turning democracy into a rotating capture of the state. Clientelism buys the poor at the cost of public goods. One-party dominance can freeze opposition until the street explodes. Military-tutelary systems keep parties as decoration.
Parties also polarise. When they treat opponents as enemies of the nation, they eat the referees — courts, election bodies, the press — which is the backsliding path known from Levitsky and Ziblatt. Developing societies with young institutions are more exposed to that path because alternative organisations (unions, professional bodies) are thinner.
Verdict
Parties sustain democracy when they are programmatic enough to be accountable and restrained enough to lose. They destabilise democracy when they are militias in party clothing or when they become the private property of a leader. The critical examination therefore refuses two cartoons: that parties are a Western luxury poor countries cannot afford, and that any party system is automatically a democratic good. Stabilisation is a quality of party institutionalisation, not of the mere existence of party names on a ballot.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD P[Parties] --> S[Aggregation turnover institutions] P --> F[Ethnic personal clientelist capture] S --> D[Stabilised democracy] F --> U[Unstable or hollow democracy]
Conclusion
Political parties remain the ordinary instrument of democratic stability in developing societies: they aggregate, incorporate and allow defeat. They also organise ethnic capture, clientelism and executive assault on referees. The role is indispensable and double-edged. Institutionalised, bounded parties sustain democracy. Personal and ethnic machines consume it.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Discuss the role of social movements in strengthening the democratic processes in developing societies
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Do independent candidates make parties unnecessary?
Not at national scale. Legislatures and ministries need durable labels. Independents are a local supplement, not a system.
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Are ethnic parties always anti-democratic?
They can represent excluded groups. They become a threat when they deny the opposition a permanent place in the state.
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