Critically examine the role of political parties in sustaining and stabilising democracies in the developing societies. (2024, 15 Marks)
Edmund Burke defined a party as a body of people united on a shared principle to promote the national interest. In post-colonial societies the party carries a heavier load than in the West: it links citizen and state, and it also has to build the nation. That role is indispensable, but parties have both sustained and eroded democracy in these societies.
The setting: a strong state over a weak society
Hamza Alavi described the post-colonial “overdeveloped state”, a bureaucratic-military apparatus inherited from colonial rule that is stronger than any domestic class. Gunnar Myrdal‘s “soft state” (Asian Drama, 1968) captured the other side: weak enforcement and pervasive discretion. Parties are the main civilian counterweight to both.
How parties sustain democracy
- Mobilisation and political education: under universal adult franchise, the Congress turned a national movement into a party that taught a largely unlettered electorate to vote from 1951–52.
- Integration: Rajni Kothari‘s “Congress system” absorbed regional, caste and ideological demands through internal factions instead of suppressing them.
- Institutionalising participation: Samuel P. Huntington (Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968) warned that political decay follows when participation outruns institutions. The strong party is the remedy.
- A safety valve and alternation: opposition parties channel discontent into elections, as India’s alternations of 1977, 1989 and 2014, and the BJP’s rise as an alternative to the Congress, show.
- Civilian supremacy: where parties are weak, the barracks fills the vacuum. Pakistan’s leader-centred parties could not prevent repeated coups. Its 27th Amendment (November 2025) created the post of Chief of Defence Forces for Field Marshal Asim Munir, formalising military primacy.
The critique
- Personalism and dynasty: many parties are vehicles of a leader or family, and they rarely outlive the founder.
- Dominance without opposition: in Bangladesh, the Awami League’s hegemony emptied electoral competition and ended in the August 2024 uprising. The February 2026 election gave the BNP a landslide and Tarique Rahman the premiership, but with the Awami League barred, the alternation was incomplete. In Tanzania, with the main opposition disqualified, the ruling CCM’s candidate took about 98% of the presidential vote in October 2025 amid deadly protests.
- Ethnic outbidding: Donald L. Horowitz showed that ethnic parties turn elections into censuses and harden cleavages.
- Clientelism: Kanchan Chandra‘s “patronage democracy” shows parties trading targeted benefits for votes, so accountability runs through brokers rather than policy.
- Backsliding from within: Nancy Bermeo‘s executive aggrandisement, and the account by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of elected leaders capturing referees, show ruling parties as the main agents of erosion.
- Oligarchy: Robert Michels‘s iron law operates unchecked where internal elections are absent.
Conclusion
The decisive variable is institutionalisation. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully link stable, rooted, autonomous party systems to democratic survival. India shows what such parties achieve. So does Botswana, where the BDP handed over power peacefully in November 2024 after 58 years. Pakistan shows what their absence costs. Nepal’s March 2026 vote, which gave the anti-establishment Rastriya Swatantra Party a commanding majority, poses the test afresh: a party must become an institution before democracy can rest on it.