a ‘requisite for democratic government’, but the more experience a country
has of democracy the higher the level of party system institutionalization
(Kuenzi and Lambright, 2001, p. 463).
Another debate about party systems and democratization has focused on
the number of parties in the system, comparing the stability of two-party
competition with a multi-party system. A multi-party system is thought to
be less stable. Huntington, for example, predicted that in the long-term
two-party and dominant-party systems were more likely than single or
multi-party systems to produce political stability because they provide a
form of party competition that is more effective is assimilating new groups
into the political system. Single parties find it difficult to incorporate the
new social and economic interests created by modernization without coer-
cion and therefore instability. In the multi-party system, the assimilation of
new social forces into politics can only be done by increasing the number of
parties: ‘The two-party system ... most effectively institutionalises and
moderates the polarisation which gives rise to the development of party
politics in the first place’ (Huntington, 1968, p. 432).
However, another view is that a preference for a two-party system reflects
Eurocentric and Anglo-American biases, a confusion of governmental with
regime instability, and an assumption that party politics is dominated by a sin-
gle Left–Right dimension, when in Third World countries other dimensions of
conflict, such as ethnicity and religion, are superimposed. A multiplicity of
parties provides for the representation of all interests, encouraging lawful
political participation and reducing incentives to engage in political violence.
This controversy remains unresolved, though one comparative study of Third
World democratization found only ‘weak and fragmentary’ support for the
hypothesis that democratic consolidation was more likely under a multi-than
a two-party system (Power and Gasiorowski, 1997; see also Lijphart, 1984).
This is significant in view of the propensity for countries emerging from
authoritarianism to spawn a multiplicity of political parties. For example,
since becoming free from Indonesian occupation the small state of East
Timor, with a population of 850,000, has splintered into no fewer than
16 parties which contested the first elections to the 88-seat assembly.
The survival of parties as organizations
We have seen that one element in the institutionalization of party systems of
government is the strength of parties as organizations. Strong parties are
adaptable (e.g. in shifting from opposition to government), complex,
150 Understanding Third World Politics