Political Parties and Pressure Groups In Advanced Industrial and Developing Societies

• Political parties are the essential components of representative democracy .They are the umbilical cord that links citizens to their govts.
• The study of political parties has been promoted as a result of behavioural movement in poli science and led to development of statistiology
• Pol parties are powerhouses- Max Weber
• Do the work on the interest aggregation- Almond and Powell
• Laski- democracy is unthinkable w/o pol parties.
• Zoya Hassan and Y Yadav- pol parties have done historic function of bringing social and economic transformation
• Theories and models of political parties-
• Lenin’s contribution
• Gave theory of Communist party in his pamphlet- what is to be done
• Called communist party as vanguard of revolution
• communist parties operate through secret cells , pyramidal structure, democratic centralism i.e. policies decided at base and communicated to top leadership)
• Leaders convert this demand into the workable programme of action. What is the program is decided, it has to be implemented at all the levels from top to bottom
  
• Robert Michel's-book-pol parties-( whether liberal or communist, power with leadership of political parties. once they come to power they lose their revolutionary zeal and become new despots
  
• Maurice Duverger 
  

• Party systems- no of parties important to the system- Sartori
• 
  
  
• Types of competitive party system
• single party dominant system- like congress of bjp system or AKP in turkey or KMT in Taiwan for a long time
• two party system
• turn over ideological- UK
• ,turn over pragmatic -USA , not much difference in ideology
• multiparty
• consociational- consensus based found in Germany and other European countries
• adversarial

1. Myron Wiener
   
2. Joseph La Palombara
   

• Conclusion- Law commission- pol parties are the life blood of our entire constitutional system

• Classification of pressure groups:
• Intro- Pressure groups are invisible empires- Finer. They perform the crucial input task of interest articulation as per SF approach of Gabriel Almon and Powell.
• Almond and Powell classified pressure/interest groups-
1. Institutional-
1. Formed by people who are part of the government like interest group of civil servants, bank employees, Army welfare Association
2. These are most powerful because the operate within the system and can influence the policy-making directly with least struggle
2. associational
1. Denotes just interest-based
2. Trade unions, student union, business union, SEWA
3. In comparative terms they are more prominent in western countries. The reason being the domination of rationality. Society is driven by interest
3. non associational
1. Communal/community based
2. Based on birth—> membership is exclusive
3. Gujjar, Jat sabha, etc
4. anomic
1. Denotes lack of standardised approach
2. Example crowd behaviour
3. Least institutionalised, informal, short-term
4. These are most prominent in developing countries because of lack of institutionalisation of democracy
5. Shows people are not aware of the rights, grievance redressal mechanisms

• Working of pressure groups in developing and developed societies -
• Developed countries like US have better interest based pressure groups like corporate lobbies. As per C wright Mills these elitist groups control politics of developed countries.
• In developing countries we see more non associational and anomic groups
• As per post colonial structural Marxist scholar Hamza Alvi, south Asian states like Pakistan are themselves most powerful pressure group due to their overdeveloped nature
• In India we see rise of interest based groups like FICCI but still traditional non anomic groups like Karni Sena present
• 

• conclusion- PG help in making democracies deliberative and participative through communicative action in public sphere.