Political Parties System
The parties system is the whole of parties in a certain State and the elements which characterize its structure: the number of parties; the relations among them, considering their magnitude as well as their relational forces, and, in third place, their ideological and strategic locations, as elements to determine the ways of interaction and the relations with the context in every scope.
In attention to the number of political parties existing in a given political system, it is spoken of multipartidisanship, bipartisanship, or unique party. As it has been said before, regarding dictatorial or totalitarian forms of government, it can be spoken of a unique party system (as it happened in the fascist regimes, of Communist China or the Soviet Union) which is not about institutions derived from a democratic process, but structures for power preservation.
The bipartisanship (as in the United States and England, for example) is identified as derived from an electoral system based on a majority principle, while the multipartisanship system (such as in Germany, Belgium, Finland, The Netherlands and Switzerland) is identified as an effect from the proportional representation system. This reductionist way of analysis establishes a line of connection between fragmentation (multipartisanship-proportional representation) and polarization (bipartisanship-majority), which has made to consider that either one system or the other contributes to the crisis and lack of stability of the democratic system.
Other criteria disregard quantitative typology in order to favor competition or not within the party system.
