Mirzadzhanov Tamerlan Eldarovich

This article provides an overview of various aspects of the relationships between political parties and social movements that form incentives, strategies and results of alliances between them. The electoral aspect describes how movements mobilize the electorate for parties. The state and political-parliamentary aspect is the provision by parties of opportunities for movements to infl uence adopted laws. The agenda and lobbying aspect is the ability of movements to pursue their interests through parties and for parties and movements to use each other to draw public attention to specifi c issues. The identity aspect is the cultivation and dissemination of social identities as a result of the union of parties and movements. The aspect of adversarial politics is the assistance of parties to movements when the latter act in the interests of the parties, but using non-parliamentary methods. The aspect of protests and “street politics” is the representation of movements by parties in parliament in exchange for representation by movements of parties on the street. The aspect of external context and crises is the assistance of movements to parties to consolidate society or completely transfer this prerogative to the movements. The aspect of the autocratic context and democratic transformations is the transformation of relations between movements and parties in autocracies, transitional regimes, and new and established democracies. These interactions are characterized by a regular exchange and “barter” of memberships, support, resources, ideas, and, of course, power between actors of varying degrees of institutionalization. The author demonstrates that such unions are sooner or later characterized by attempts of the allies to subordinate, co-opt and instrumentalize each other, to impose their own ideological and programmatic basis and structural model on one another.

Liberal democracy theory allows for the existence of the dominant party in the system recognized as a competitive democracy. Being an integral part of actual liberal democracies, dominant parties make a considerable impact on the theoretical underpinnings of such systems and their functioning, which is a justifi cation for studying their features and behaviour patterns with the aim of uncovering their emergence, development and decline mechanisms. The article looks into the phenomenon of the dominant party drawing on the seven widely acknowledged and signifi cant cases (Italy, Germany, India, Japan, South Africa, Ishuv-Israel, Sweden) and puts forward a new defi nition of the dominant party grounded in empirical data. The article also provides an analysis of the internal structure and the essential features of the functioning of dominant parties and presents conclusions about the causes of the emergence and development of dominant parties and the reasons for them retaining this status.