Patrick Emanuel defines party "...an association of people under a specific name whose primary purposes are the achievement and exercise of governmental power.aE? To ensure governmental power there is regularly held elections and the successful party will receive this ultimate power. The success of a political party is characterised by: the leadership; the structure and organization combined with features of charisma or rational-legality; ideology and plans espoused from time to time through their manifesto.

Also, another characteristic of political parties is the sustainability of the political party. For example, about 20 parties have established themselves as durable, which may be due to their association with trade unions. The Jamaica Labour Party initially was hardly a political party, its founder Alexander Bustamante was more focused on his Trade Union. It was really the union that converted itself into a party to contest the first Universal Adult Suffrage election in 1944.

These political leaders also use the economic conditions and education level of the majority to make false promises of benefits. Which result in people turning on each other in the name of party politics and the struggle over scarce benefits, they later form political gangs and turning to crime and violence. In the 1970's and 1980's, the Michael Manley and Edward Seaga era, the struggle for absolute power was on, and they were accused of disregarding the policies and ideologies necessary of development. Changes took place in the form of total abandonment or renaming of the policies that the rule party would choose to keep. The level of crime has also affected democracy, criminal activities has risen from tribal wars to hard drug sales and the crimes associated with the deportees from the United States, United Kingdom and Canada2.

being accountable to the electorate. The parties need to show the public that they can work together and their actions will motivate the masses to also work together for the common good.

The sixth is the conversion of their manifesto into governmental policies. The party programmes tie the ministers to the expectations of the party supporters, since these policies were some of the reasons why they won their seats. It is usually disappointing when the ministers forget their role and seek out personal interests but return to the people when the next election is upon them.

A fifth role of a political party is that of aggregating interest, people of different ethnic and social background unite around common interests. This function serves the diverse societies and help to forge a national consensus especially in societies deeply stratified by class and race. For example, the cousins Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante of Jamaica dominated politics in the years shortly before and also after independence. Although both were on different sides of the fence, Bustamante regarded as capitalist and Manley as socialist, they both agreed on the issues associated with improving the economy in Jamaica also, both parties had multi-class alliances rather than unified class parties.

The solution to the problems of political parties, party systems and party competition cannot come from a radical change in policies and programmes because the same individual and the same cultural values will still be present. Instead, the political parties need to move back to participatory politics, where the input of the grass-root people is important and move away from the self serving practices. On way to help is through continuous training of the ministers and other members of parliament in handling public affairs. There need to be a code of ethics requiring parliamentarians to disclose their finances and their assets. These suggestions were made by other persons and need to be followed through in order to bring back the level of trust, transparency and peaceful living that are experienced by other countries. Also the mass media need to play a more significant role in ensuring that the code of ethics and public management issues are not just for ratings but to have an !

Political parties were also accused of corruption, which is harmful to small developing societies that can ill afford the waste of resources. This corrupt use of resources, further makes resources scar

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2230
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)