1. Competitive Party Systems Interest Aggregation

2. Political Parties “Groups or organizations that seek to place candidates in office under their label.” May be single or multi-party systems. Competitive party system – try to build electoral support for your party Authoritarian party system – non-competitive, seek to direct society. Examples?

3. Elections Important to the survival of parties. In democracies most live or die by performance in elections. Once they are in office, parties are torn between what the activists want to do and what the voters want. Activists tend to be radical, voters more centrist. Examples?

4. Electoral System Rules by which elections are conducted. Single-member district plurality election rule. Only need to finish ahead of everyone else. Majority - run off system – voting happens in two stages – must get a majority of all votes in 1 st round to win – top vote getters face off in a run-off with most votes winning.

5. Proportional representation – used by most democracies in Europe and South America – country is divided into large districts with each getting a number of representatives. Number of reps that a party gets depends on the proportion of the vote that it gets in the election.

6. Primary elections In the U.S. the parties use primaries to nominate candidates for the general election. Single-member district – party officials select the candidates. Proportional party systems – a list of candidates is drawn up – closed-list system – candidates taken from top of list – open-list system – voters can give preference to candidates.