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A single-party state or one-party system is a form of government where only a single political party dominates the government and no opposition parties are allowed. This is generally as creating a dictatorship, and many (though not all) actual dictatorships represent themselves as one-party states. Examples of dictatorships which are not one-party states include military dictatorships which often attempt to ban all party politics during their rule. A one-party system can be contrasted to one party dominant system in which an opposition is not official prohibited, but it is largely ineffective. Where the one-party subscribes to Marxism-Leninism, the one party system is known as a communist state.

Single-party states often pay lip service to democracy, but without a choice of ruling party, elections in single party states are usually largely symbolic. Although other political parties are sometimes allowed by the government, these other parties must subordinate themselves to the dominant party and cannot function as an opposition. The existence of other parties is sometimes justified by appeals to a united front. Also some one party states may allow non-party members the ability to run for legislative seats, as was the case with Taiwan's Tang wai movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

In most cases single-party states have arisen from fascist, communist or nationalist ideologies, particularly in the wake of independence from colonial rule. One party systems often arise from decolonization, in which one party has had an overwhelming dominant role in liberation or independence struggles.

The justification for one party states is that multi-party systems introduce too much division and are unsuitable for economic and political development. This argument was particular popular during the mid 20th century, as many developing nations sought to emulate the Soviet Union which appeared to have transformed itself from a backward agarian nation into a superpower. The counter-argument is that one party systems do no better have a tendency to produce economic and political disasters. This counter-argument became more widely held as the 20th century drew to a close and the Soviet Union collapsed and as the tremendous human cost of Stalinism and Maoism became more widely noticed. The following countries are single-party states as of 2003:

Examples of former single-party states include:

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A single-party state or one-party system is a form of government where only a single political party dominates the government and no opposition parties are allowed. This is generally as creating a dictatorship, and many (though not all) actual dictatorships represent themselves as one-party states.

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See the latest Pew Research Center data on U.S. political party affiliation, including trends in voting and elections.

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Bernie Sanders supporters line up in California. Reuters/Mike Blake
Young Americans don't care much for political parties. According to the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of millennials (ages 18-33) identify as independents. That's almost as many as identify as Democrats (28 percent) and Republicans (18 percent) put together.

Political scientists are often skeptical about the independent option in surveys. Most individuals who choose to call themselves "independents" still vote consistently with one party or the other. They are partisans except in name.

Even if that's true, the lack of loyalty or concern for parties still has consequences. For instance, presidential primary campaigns were established to allow a party's members to choose its candidate. But the research team at Tufts University's Tisch College, where I study civic engagement, estimates that young Americans (18-30) have so far cast more votes for Senator Bernie Sanders than for Secretary Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined.

Sanders is a party outsider. He ran all his previous campaigns as a socialist, defeating Democrats on the way to statewide office. His career outside the Democratic Party doesn't faze young Democratic primary voters -- and I suspect it even increases his appeal with youth.

Does the fact that young people ignore or dislike parties tell us something about youth and their culture, or is this more about the parties and how they have changed?

Rejecting the hierarchy

Today's young voters have grown up in an age of social media. Millennials both expect and prefer loose networks that allow individuals to personalize their views and form and shift relationships freely. That's bad news for political parties -- hierarchical organizations with officers, rules, official platforms and membership criteria.

Religion offers a parallel case. The pollster Anna Greenberg finds that young Americans are still spiritual -- indeed, they continue to believe in many traditional tenets of religion -- but they are not drawn to traditional religious institutions. She argues that young people expect to be able to choose exactly the religious content they prefer and to express their individual preferences in much the same way as they choose music and consumer goods.

It is hard for a political party to offer such personalization, because it must promote a platform. In contrast, loosely organized social movements like Black Lives Matter or Spain's Los Indignados (anti-austerity protesters) allow participants to express their personal views and to connect to the peers they most like within the movement.

I acknowledge that this cultural shift is part of the story, but I don't think it alone explains the decline of parties. For one thing, social media is just as important in Europe as it is in North America, but according to the European Social Survey (ESS), young Europeans' trust in parties has risen and surpasses that of older Europeans.

Los Indignados began as a decentralized online social movement but has morphed into a political party, Podemos, that holds the third-largest number of seats in the Spanish parliament. I wouldn't say that European youth love parties, but they support the parties that reflect their views.

Parties are changing, too

The theory that young Americans are deserting parties because of shifts in culture and values overlooks the fact that American political parties are changing, and mostly for the worse.

Parties used to raise a lot of money and spend it to employ grassroots workers, recruit volunteers, choose and constrain candidates, generate consistent messages, drive policy agendas, and control patronage jobs. That system involved corruption, which was a good reason to reform it. But after the campaign finance reforms of the 1970s had restricted the parties' ability to raise and spend money, the Supreme Court allowed candidates and outside entities to spend as much as they want.

As a result, the parties now do very little. They are best described as brand names for loosely connected networks of entrepreneurial candidates, donors, and advocacy organizations. Ironically, they have become more like social networks, albeit lubricated by money. The Koch brothers' political network, for instance, employs 3.5 times as many people as the Republican National Committee does.

This means that parties don't hire, contact, or educate many young people or offer them paths to leadership. Candidates and campaigns affiliated with parties may do those things, but young people still lack any contact with the party itself.

In 2004, political scientist Dan Shea surveyed local party leaders. "Only a handful" ran any "programs that require[d] a significant amount of time or resources." He also asked county leaders an open-ended question: "Are there demographic groups of voters that are currently important to the long term success of your local party?" Just eight percent named young voters.

Parties were already weak then. Youth turnout reached its nadir in 1996-2000. Since then, candidates like Obama in 2008 and Sanders in 2016 have engaged a lot of young people. Youth turnout rose, as did the proportion of young Americans who said they had been contacted by candidates. But the parties weren't doing this outreach. According to the General Social Survey, fewer than one in 10 young adults actively participated in a party in 2004, and that proportion fell to one in 40 by 2014.

We can debate whether it would be desirable, constitutional or even possible to restore the parties' importance, but as long as they don't do much for young people, young people will naturally learn to ignore them.

Peter Levine, Associate Dean for Research and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Tufts University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Waning Influence of American Political Parties

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Bernie Sanders supporters line up in California. Reuters/Mike Blake Young Americans don't care much for political parties. According to the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of millennials (ages 18-33) identify as independents. That's almost as many as identify as Democrats (28 percent) and Republicans (18 percent) put together.

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Complaints that our electoral process is undemocratic abound. Donald Trump wants a simple majority of the Republican Convention delegates to determine the nominee. Bernie Sanders supporters bemoan any primary--like New York's--limited only to long-registered party members. Super delegates, assigned by the "party establishment," act as they see fit, representing the party's needs over the views of voters. The phrase "party establishment" gets tossed around like a curse. The system, especially at the primary level, has been widely declared to be "broken."

The discussion currently focuses on the primary process, since we are in the midst of that contest. The primaries were added to the electoral process in the nineteenth century, when parties became an accepted part of American politics. In the primaries, party voters, acting state by state, choose delegates to attend a convention that will in turn choose a party candidate. None of this was set up at the founding of the United States; all of it was the invention of the parties themselves. States choose according to their own specific rules--whether caucusing or voting, whether allowing non-party members to participate or not. In the end, some delegates are pledged to a candidate, although they can shift their support over the course of a convention; other delegates enter the arena free to choose. The process is anything but democratic. Since parties came to have a lock on our choice of Presidential candidates, the interests of the party--to choose electable candidates who will further its specific party goals but also maintain its power (sometimes sacrificing ideological purity to do so)--are paramount. Those interests are patently not to simply reflect the will of the people, but are instead about harnessing that will to party ends.

Lest you conclude that parties have hijacked the political process, making it less democratic, remember: the founders who advocated for the U.S. Constitution feared democracy. They were not advocates for majority rule, but its opponents. In the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, when the U.S. government was only a loosely-united collection of states, state politics trumped central decision making. The Articles of Confederation gave the central government no coercive power. If states wanted to send money (say, to support the Continental War effort) they did; if not, they did not. Some men, perceiving a need to address the lack of power at the center, felt motivated to alter the basis of government, giving more power to the new federal government and concomitantly less to states. Most who opposed the Constitution did so because they saw it as anti-democratic. Constitution advocates thought the initial system had been too democratic and diffused, and they wanted the emerging national elite to wield more power. So democracy, far from being the goal of the Constitution, was seen as an excess to be curbed. A suspicion of democracy was utterly consistent with the political theory of their day, which posited that excess in any direction lead to dysfunctional government.

If party elites follow the lead of the founders in suppressing democracy, it is also the case that the founders would not have loved this solution to the problem of excess democracy. They utterly opposed political parties. Deriding the idea of party with the word "faction," they asserted that those who entered into party configurations acted for their own self-interest rather than for the common good. When they created the new federal government, they hoped parties would never arise. Their hopes were quickly foiled, as the election of 1800 (just a dozen years after the adoption of the Constitution) witnessed the first party configurations. Parties went in and out of existence, shifting and changing names, from that time until the era of the Civil War.

Since the end of that conflict, the two parties we have now, Republican and Democratic, have been in existence. Whatever their particular ideological stripes of the moment, the parties exist to block competitors (hence the deck is stacked against Independents), and to maintain the power and influence of parties. The primary system, while it accords with the founders anti-democratic impulses, is the creation of the parties. The parties the founders denigrated now defend the anti-democratic impulses those same men endorsed.

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Worried About Undemocratic Electoral Politics? The Founders Weren't, and Party Leaders Aren't Either

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Complaints that our electoral process is undemocratic abound. Donald Trump wants a simple majority of the Republican Convention delegates to determine the nominee. Bernie Sanders supporters bemoan any primary--like New York's--limited only to long-registered party members. Super delegates, assigned by the "party establishment," act as they see fit, representing the party's needs over the views of voters.

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During the 1860s, Thomas Nast - a cartoonist for the magazine Harper's Weekly - developed the idea of using the donkey and the elephant to represent the Democrats and Republicans, respectively. The above cartoon - titled "Stranger Things Have Happened" - dates from 1879. From the beginning, American political parties have had a tarnished reputation.

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Carol Berkin: Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists

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Calling on her two best known books, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the US Constitution and Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence, Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, briefly discusses some aspects of the American Revolution and the creation of the US Constitution.