How Well Do Parties Promote Democracy?

I think that parties promote democracy well because without the party system a democracy would not really work because the people would only be able to vote for a single person or single party, giving them limited options on who to vote for. Also in all of their campaigns they say ‘vote for…’ which is a strong reminder of our representative democratic government.
One advantage of a representative government is that the parties allow people to take part in the development of a new policy after all the new policy will end up affecting some or all of the them, this is called channelling public opinion. By doing so they can insure that a majority of the people who vote are happy with the decisions made.
Britain has a very diverse population of different religions, classes, ages and groups. This has encouraged a large amount of parties to arise, in order for all different people’s opinions to be represented. This promotes democracy well because it means that people can to choose to vote for a very particular party as which best suits their political preference. However a problem with this is that not all parties have representatives in each county which means that in some counties like Kent their isn’t much choice because not my parties bother to campaign there of it’s Conservative majority. This means that not all people can vote for their preferred party which leads to people not voting, the less people vote the more invalid the result becomes, as it represents less people and not the whole county/country. The problem with a representative government is that is has led to ‘Catch-All’ parties, like the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic parties. These parties try to appeal to the largest group of people possible without completely defying their fundamental principles. This is often to gain the majority vote however it leads to most minority parties never actually representing in parliament. This means that the democratic function of the parties has been...