Political Party and Party system

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Political Party

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-Political parties are great tools of democracy. In fact, political parties create democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable without political parties.

-Political party can be defined as ‘an organized group of people sharing common policy preferences and usually a general ideological position.

-‘Having political ideology alone is not sufficient; the party is established to seek for political power.

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Characteristics of political parties

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-Group of people with labels such as Liberal, Conservatives, BN, UMNO, PH, and so on.

-They are organised - deliberately act together to achieve common goal.

-In order to promote their goal, they work through the mechanisms of representative government, such as election and legislature.

-They are mass organization with membership easily available to all citizen.

-A key activity of parties is to select candidates for elective public office.

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Functions of political party

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1.Representation

2.Elite formation and Recruitment

3. 3. Interest Aggregation and Articulation

4.Political Socialization and Mobilization

5. 5. Goal Formulation

6. 6. Organization of Government

7. 7. Advice and Correcting Mistakes

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Representation

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Provides the avenue for people to express their demands to the government in the form of collective voices of political party. Individual voice is not strong enough to demand something from the government. Individual needs platform to demand something from the political system (government).

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Elite Formation and Recruitment

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Parties are functioning to recruit new talent and leaders into their ranks. They form the elite who will run the country if they win the election.

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Interest Aggregation and Articulation

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People have different kind of interests, which is sometimes conflict with one another. It is the task of political party to ‘collect’ and ‘process’ (i.e. aggregate) these demands and form a reasonable demands to the government. These demands will then be ‘articulated’ or ‘expressed’ publicly to its supporters and government (for their attention).

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Political Socialization and Mobilization.

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Political party serves as ‘training ground’ for the people to join politics. In the party, future leaders are trained in various forms of political strategies, skills, and ideas to prepare them for future. During election especially, political party mobilize its supporters to go out and campaign, voting, and showing their support to their candidates.

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Goal Formulation

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Parties also set up their goals that they wanted to attain in the long run. It becomes the basis of the party struggle.

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Organization of government

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If they (political party) win in election. They will form a government. They will contest in the election (i.e. through democratic process, not military coup and extrajudicial way).

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Advice and Correcting Mistake

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In Islam, political party is not merely opposing. They must play the role of advisor (Da’i) to the government to improve the situation in the country. If government is doing good things, we need to support it. If they are doing bad things, we need to exercise the principle of advice.