Nature of political parties

What Is a Political Party?

You may often hear the media talk about the state of our country's
political system and, specifically, our political parties. However, the
term 'political party' isn't something where senators, representatives,
and other political officials have fun all day. Instead, a political party
is a group of dedicated people who come together to win elections,
operate the government, and determine public policy.
So, you can
see that this is anything but the fun type of 'party' that we usually
think of when we hear the word.
What Do Political Parties Do?
Political parties in the United States do a variety of things. There are
five main functions that political parties have. Recruiting candidates
for public office is one of the most important functions that political
parties have. An important goal of political parties is to gain control
of the government, and to do this, parties must work to recruit
candidates for all elected offices. For example, if a state had an
opening for governor, each political party would try and find a person
they could support to run for that position.
Political parties also actively try to gather volunteers to help register
voters as well as organize and run the election day voting. The hope
is that the more people that are involved in helping with the election,
the more interest there will be in the outcome, which should increase
voter turnout. The ultimate goal is to get the person the party
supports to win an election.
While political parties do end up endorsing or supporting individual
candidates, they do so because those people share very similar
ideals and political positions of the entire party. Thus, another
function of political parties is to present alternative policies to the
electorate, called their political platform. A political platform is the
ideals and positions a political party has. Thus, we often learn of the
ideals a political party has from the members that support it.