Liana on Political Parties

Political Science 1

Exam 2

Political parties allow people to find strength in numbers, to organize, and to identify with a general approach to the people. Parties provide an identity so that voters have some idea of what they are getting when they support a vote for a candidate. Political parties represent a general view about the relationship between a government and society. Knowing that a candidate is a member of one party provides an introduction to the kinds of positions he or she will support. In any given election there may be hundreds of candidates, and it is very difficult for the voter to judge the individual record and platform of every eligible candidate. Party identification allows a voter to make an informed choice without researching every detail about a campaign.

It basically is a coalition of people organized formally to recruit, nominate, and elect candidates for public office. They are involved in running the government, creating and executing shared political goals through the election of officials to the executive and legislative branches of government, and they bring stability to the political system.

Political parties unite broad groups of individuals under a common set of beliefs and principals about how government should work. Parties recruit members and candidates for public office so their ideas are represented on the local, state and federal government levels. Most major parties tend to embrace general principals and a range of opinions about public affairs. It is not expected for every member to agree across the board about all their political goals. Parties rely on their members to raise funds, spread the word about candidates and policies and persuade others to support the party. Political parties provide a key connection between citizens and government. It is imperative to remember that citizens can belong to a political party without agreeing with every position it supports. Often there is conflict between party loyalty and personal opinion. There can be vast differences between parties at the local state and national level. Depending on sociality and morality it is all geographical. People in the south, generally tend to have different views from people in the north.

The way the public plays a role in political parties if you are or are not a member of a party is through interest groups. There are many different kinds of interest groups, for and against platform topics. Interest groups are one important instrument through which citizens in the United States make their ideas, needs, and views known to elected officials. You can usually find an interest group that focuses on their concerns, no matter how specialized they may be. Interest groups often get started at the state and local levels, later combining into nation wide organizations. Interest groups are not centralized; they are all over the United States, and run closely encouraging a greater variety of interest groups. It would look as if it would weaken the party system, because the social and economic diversity of the 50 states make strict party discipline difficult.

The American tradition of freedom of speech, press, and assembly means that just about any point of view expressed by an interest group, no matter how radical, is permitted a public exposure. Interest groups are categorized in three categories: business, labor, and agriculture. The type of interest group experiencing the most rapid growth since 1970 is the "public interest group." Political scientist Jeffrey Berry defines a public interest group as one that supports goals that are not of direct material benefit to its members but rather express their values pertaining to society as a whole. The first public interest groups were spawned by the civil rights, women's rights, and environmental activities of the 1960s. Supporters of these causes often went through an evolution over time that transferred the expression of their views from street protest to organized action within the political system. Later, public interest groups mobilized on new issues, such as the rights of the disabled, prevention of child abuse or domestic violence, and gay/lesbian rights. These groups have also been major advocates for programs benefiting the poor.

It would seem logical to assume that interest groups with a large base of support in the population would be the most influential. Elected officials champion the policies advocated by significant majorities in opinion polling, because they want to add the large number of potential voters supporting these positions to their winning coalitions. However, several factors obscure this picture. It is true that millions of citizens belong to interest groups and that some, such as the environmentalist Sierra Club and the AFL/CIO, the labor organization, are quite large. However, a closer look shows that most mass-membership groups enroll only a small fraction of their potential supporters. For example, polls show substantial majorities of Americans in favor of strong environmental regulations. These supporters constitute a pool of millions of potential members for environmental interest groups. Though, even the largest environmental groups claim memberships of fewer than one million. This relatively small number of members is in keeping with the overall principle that the number of citizens who join interest groups is a small fraction of the U.S. population.

Another serious problem faced by a mass-membership group is translating citizen support for the group into votes for candidates that support its goals. Voting is a complex act, involving multiple motivations and influences: the candidate's personality, party loyalty, and a range of issues. Voting studies show that many voters are not fully aware of the policy positions taken by candidates they support. As a result, it is often difficult for a group to show that the voting choices of its supporters are primarily motivated by its particular issues. Groups that can convince candidates of their voting power become feared and respected. For example, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which opposes gun control laws, has convinced legislators that its members will vote for or against them solely on this issue. Therefore, the NRA has influence far out of proportion to its numbers, even though most Americans favor stronger gun control laws.

To belong to a interest group you usually become a member and donate some of your money to your cause, information is another resource for interest groups, information is the most powerful resource that an interest group can possess. Information is exchanged in several ways.

As there are many different interest groups, they don’t necessarily have to belong to one party, as mentioned above, just because you are a republican doesn’t mean that you won’t have some democratic, or green opinions as well. The republican party typically wants to lower taxes and rely on private and market driven solutions to social problems, while the democratic party usually supports higher taxes and public, government- based solutions to some issues. John McCain believes in the importance of keeping marginal tax rates low. But, tax cuts work best when accompanied by lower spending. Higher taxes and greater spending discourage entrepreneurship, foster wasteful tax-planning and slow long-term growth. Intelligently-formulated tax cuts and sensible tax reform will deliver much higher growth when they are accompanied by lower spending.

On the contrary, senator, Hillary Clinton introduced a plan that ties increases in the minimum wage to Congressional pay raises, so that if Congress votes a raise for itself, the minimum wage goes up as well. Hillary has consistently supported tax relief for middle-class families. She has supported permanently ending the marriage penalty, extending the lower-income tax rates, providing a deduction for college tuition, and providing a refundable child tax credit and adoption tax credit. In New York, Hillary championed tax incentives like wage credits for businesses and job creation in upstate New York and elsewhere. She also helped launch economic development initiatives to provide critical resources to small and micro businesses and helped launch a private sector venture called New Jobs for New York that makes venture capital available to New York's innovators.

Republicans are known to be the conservatives and Democrats to be the liberals. Conservatives are known on the right and Liberals on the left. Another topic of controversy is Abortion. John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench. Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.
In 1993, John McCain and his wife, Cindy, adopted a little girl with a cleft palate from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now in high school, has been a blessing to the McCain family and helped make adoption advocacy a personal issue for the Senator. The McCain family experience is not unique; millions of families have had their lives transformed by the adoption of a child. As president, motivated by his personal experience, John McCain will seek ways to promote adoption as a first option for women struggling with a crisis pregnancy.

Opposite of that is Mike Gravel supports a woman’s right to decide if and when to have children, and to make the difficult decision about abortion without interference by government. Comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education, including accurate information about contraception, can help to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions. Parity in health insurance and access to family health care services, including family planning education, would also benefit the health and welfare of infants and children, who need and deserve to be wanted and loved.

Some other key issues on the platform are, gun control, budget and economy, drugs, education, corporations, immigration, welfare and poverty, foreign policy, health care, and each sides stance on same sex marriage. Each side has its own unique stance, usually opposing the other party. There are more than just the republican and democratic parties, there are thousands of parties. We just primarily run on a two party system and it seems to be working fine. One thing the two candidates have in common in the 2008 election is, they are both Leo’s, both born in the fifth astrological month of the zodiac calendar, and the eighth month of our traditional calendar. McCain is a dinosaur, and Obama is just a sapling, but according to the stars they both share the same characteristics such as arrogant, intolerant, self serving, interfering, risk-taking, strong and independent. If you can’t find comfort in that similarity, they are both married, maybe there is some comfort in that for the American people. They may have different opinions, but how different would they really be at approaching the problems of the people?