From Faction Not to Party

Abstract

Theorists of party systems and historians have made convincing cases that out of factions in the early stages of the formation of party systems come political parties. In nineteenth-century British politics, for example, in the cases of Whigs and Tories, factions did indeed precede parties. No such theorising, however, about the inevitability of parties emerging from factions has been applied to the present-day Russian Federation. Given that system’s volatility, with parties prone to splits, regroupings, further divisions, disappearances and new formations, organisations which call themselves ‘parties’ are not stable. Even though a minority of parties have now survived the two elections of 1993 and 1995, such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, this has not been the general pattern.