POLI 222 Chapter reading: Reading Political Parties and the Practice of Brokerage Politics
19 Oct 2018
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Reading: political parties and the practice of brokerage. The major parties, liberals and conservatives are the only two parties to have ever formed a national government. For most of the 20th century, the liberals have dominated the centerpiece in a system of polarized pluralism. Other parties are referred to as minor parties, third parties or protest parties and they unsuccessfully sought to break up the duopoly that has long governed the electoral competition. Heavily influenced by the lipset and rokkan paradigm, most accounts of democratic party systems begin with the analysis of social cleavages and underlie partisan divisions and define the social bases of individual parties. Canadian parties have been the exception to the paradigm. The two national parties are not identical or disconnected for the country"s social structure. For decades liberals depended on support from the. Canada"s brokerage parties operate by denying that they should be representative of particular social groups in a national community.
