One school of thought has traditionally insisted on a formal separation between the rulers and the ruled, the ordinary members of society and the leaders and representatives they elect through democratic voting systems, as a basis for the study of liberal, democratic, political systems. An analytical study of the relations between these two entities can be more rewarding in terms of understanding the processes by which the representatives are chosen, and an understanding of the social and organisational bases of their influence.

Leiserson in Parties and Politics examines how the distribution of power in a society is reflected in the organisation of political parties. Political organisation serves as a third structure, a kind of bridge linking the two other main structures: the constitutio

nal-legal system and the social stratification system. Thus the origins of parties and the ways in which they organise themselves across the political spectrum are rooted in social structure.

The problem with adversarial party politics is that parties tend to govern in a sectional interest rather than the national interest. Parties alternate in power in a cyclical fashion, each party undoing what its predecessor has done, but no party actually acting in the interest of the group as a whole, but rather in that of its supporters.

The example of Switzerland has shown that it is possible to represent the interests of most groups - in an approximate fashion - in spite of recent strains caused by rising support for the extremist People's Party.

Furthermore the lack of information, and the difficulty of collecting and collating it, leads voters to search for 'short cuts' to making a rational decision on which party to vote for. As well as producing detailed policies, parties present general 'ideologies' as vague as possible so as to maximize their electorate. David Robertson in A Theory of Party Competition shows that "parties will change their policies in the pursuit of maximising electoral success." In a two-party system like the UK's, parties have been criticised for becoming increasingly less distinct from one another as their policies seem more and more similar. Today's typical voter has less time to spend on collecting information and in view of the absence of any real, clearly-defined political agenda on offer, he becomes increasingly disillusioned and consequentially disinterested with and alienated from the democratic voting process. This is a flaw of the democratic political party system, one which could be addressed with a new kind of political organisation.

A further ability of the political party system is its structural approach to organising and adjusting political controversies. It permits productive and democratically useful debate, by canalising, even polarising, the multitude of different interests at stake by grouping them under one broad ideological banner, thus allowing, theoretically, even the smallest of minorities to express itself by adding its voice to a larger group with similar ideological roots, whilst avoiding a fragmentation of public

Some common words found in the essay are:
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