Party Families

Party Families

Party families are essentially groupings of political parties from different nations who band together through set indicators, of which an important one is ideology. Whereas the individual parties may be powerful in their own country on the international stage they would have little influence, therefore by banding together with parties of similar ideologies they increase their strength and voting power. Parties organise on the basis of their ideological profile on the basis that politics being the art of compromise, they realise that they have to make sacrifices for long term gains. If the groupings they are negotiating with have similar ideologies then it would appear logical that the parties of similar ideology join together so that any sacrifice in policy they make would be small, as their ideology would be so similar, and then as a block they could work for the common long term gain.

Three party families of the right whose ideologies are quite similar and so you could say form a group of party families are the Christian democrats, Conservatives and the Agrarian parties. Conservatives believe in the importance of social order. This is reflected in its promotion of the maintenance of traditional values, in other words minimal or no change in society, an emphasis on the importance of religion and a stress on the significance of inequality (such as inequalities of class) as the basis for structured social relationships. The ideology of Christian democrats who seek mainly to apply Christian principles to public policy is thought to be similar in many ways to conservatism as they are in agreement in a number of respects. Both political parties have strong traditional moral values on topics such as abortion and same sex marriage, in which both parties are relatively sceptical of these issues, however some Christian democratic parties are slightly more lenient of it than conservatives as they have accepted the limited legalization of both. Both parties are also in...