Location,Measurement and Patterns: The Relationship between Parties and Society

 

Ye Qilin  （Huaqiao University）

 

Abstract:This article is an academic commentary.Under the appeal of political stability,this paper tries to clarify the relationship between political parties and society,to eliminate some existing misunderstandings and provide a scientific and reasonable perspective for the comparative study on party politics.

Among existing literatures,there are two different understanding approaches on the relationship between political parties and society.One is sociology,the other is institutionalism.The institutionalism approach dominates nowadays.With the domination of institutionalism approach,most of literatures discuss the legitimacy of political parties based on institutions,measure the legitimacy of political parties by the percentage of election vote,and classify the relation patterns between parties and society by the structural criterions.Against the above misunderstandings,this paper starts from parties’ key function of social integration and political consolidation,and then discovers the social standard logic of parties to locate scientifically and reasonably the relationship between parties and society.Based on the social standard logic of parties,this paper discusses the sources of social foundation named as legitimacy of parties,and argues that the mixture of ideology,institutions and effective representative of interest are the source of legitimacy of parties.And by this,the measurement index of the legitimacy of parties should be the party identification by questionnaire and interview.Furthermore,the classification of relation patterns of parties and society by the legitimacy of parties,could better follow the social standard of parties,and be closer to the truth of party politics.

The conclusions of this paper are as follow.Firstly,social standard is the location of the relationship between parties and society.Secondly,the legitimacy of parties is the key observation dimension on the relations of parties and society.Thirdly,the measurement of the legitimacy of parties should be party identification by questionnaire and interview.Lastly,two basic relation patterns are one with strong legitimacy of parties and one with weak.

The innovations of this paper are as follow.Firstly,the relationship of parties and society has been located scientifically and reasonably.Secondly,the more scientific and reasonable measurement has been proposed.Thirdly,a new classification of the relation patterns of parties and society has been made.Lastly,the article has been provided a unified,scientific and reasonable dimension for the comparison between Chinese party politics and Western.

 

Key words:social standard; legitimacy; political stability