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Competitive Party Systems . Interest Aggregation. Political Parties. “Groups or organizations that seek to place candidates in office under their label.” May be single or multi-party systems. Competitive party system – try to build electoral support for your party
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Competitive Party Systems Interest Aggregation
Political Parties • “Groups or organizations that seek to place candidates in office under their label.” • May be single or multi-party systems. • Competitive party system – try to build electoral support for your party • Authoritarian party system – non-competitive, seek to direct society. • Examples?
Elections • Important to the survival of parties. • In democracies most live or die by performance in elections. • Once they are in office, parties are torn between what the activists want to do and what the voters want. • Activists tend to be radical, voters more centrist. Examples?
Electoral System • Rules by which elections are conducted. • Single-member district plurality election rule. Only need to finish ahead of everyone else. • Majority - run off system – voting happens in two stages – must get a majority of all votes in 1st round to win – top vote getters face off in a run-off with most votes winning.
Proportional representation – used by most democracies in Europe and South America – country is divided into large districts with each getting a number of representatives. • Number of reps that a party gets depends on the proportion of the vote that it gets in the election.
Primary elections • In the U.S. the parties use primaries to nominate candidates for the general election. • Single-member district – party officials select the candidates. • Proportional party systems – a list of candidates is drawn up – closed-list system – candidates taken from top of list – open-list system – voters can give preference to candidates.