Roles Of Political Parties

A political party is a group of people with similar ideologies, who nominate candidates, to try and win political power through elections. They bring forward their beliefs on public policy through their candidates in government. There are many types of political parties out there, mass parties, cadre parties, revolutionary, integrative, constitutional parties and catch all parties. Catch all parties have weaker objectives and ideological beliefs as they aim to represent all kinds of social backgrounds and ethnic groups, while cadre political parties require high political commitment, they are commonly recognised as communist and socialist parties. Constitutional parties are parties who work within the framework of the constitution while revolutionary

(Compton.edu, 2015) One of the primary functions of political parties is to select suitable candidates and help them win office. Partaking in an election costs a lot of money and campaigns are becoming more expensive. Money is needed to form a campaign office, to hire staff that will take care of social media, polling and majorly to get the message of the campaign out to the public and for the person to actually meet his/her voters and to tell them why they are best suited to the role of representing them in government. Political parties in Ireland select and help prepare candidates for election. The political parties will select a local candidate whom has similar ideological beliefs to the party and

I find that you see that political parties in Ireland are performing their specific functions much clearer when I describe it in this manner. In Ireland at the moment it is not difficult to explain the reason for the rise of independents, but it is less clear what the consequences would be. It is possible that at local level the councillors would be able to function just as well without political parties as their role is to represent their area not as much their party. Although at a national level, Irish political parties have many very important functions in the Dáil. For example general elections are a way in which the public can shape the kind of government that will be formed. If political parties continue to decline the public will be left with many independents with different objectives put together. While some independents have performed an important role in the Dáil, it would be extremely hard to finalise decisions as you have many TDs all with different ideologies and plans. It is arduous to visually perceive how policy making would be possible in a Dáil consisting mainly of independents. While with political parties in Ireland, parties will coalesce with other parties for more votes and could push the public policy bills a