Political parties remain an essential component of a democratic political system in a 21st century state.
There has been an unfortunate tendency to ignore the contribution that political parties can make to voter education and should make to a more general civic education. Voter apathy is directly related to the efficacy of political parties in developing and communicating policy positions which invigorate citizen interest in public affairs and government, and which, because of their responsiveness to individual and societal needs, place choices before people which they consider sufficiently compelling to get out and vote.
This tendency has been driven by a belief that those with a particular party interest are not to be trusted to inform voters of their rights or to assist them in making choices, and are generally going to attempt to seduce and dupe them by providing one-sided information or even misinformation. Strange that one can trust such parties to govern but not to have the public interest in mind at other times.
However, even if individual parties do behave in this way, the free flow of information and the standards under which modern elections can and should be conducted allow competing messages and information to reach voters. There are thus some systems in which it is assumed that the combined effort of campaigning parties and an efficient decentralized election management body provide sufficient voter information and education for any particular election.
Hence the apparent paucity of voter education in democracies of long standing, and the emphasis on voter education only at transitional moments. This is obviously an increasingly short sighted approach, and overlooks the numerous institutions in such long-standing democracies that conduct educational programmes at election times without referring to them as voter education.
Educators responsible for voter or civic education programmes should therefore consider carefully how best to involve political parties in contributing to their programmes, whether through a direct provision of the jointly determined curriculum, through encouraging their supporters to participate in programmes, through establishing and conducting their own educational programmes as is done by many party foundations or merely by taking seriously, between and at elections, the need to communicate ably and vigorously with the public about their own programmes and about the constitutional context that both binds them to particular forms of organisation and behaviour and gives them the freedom to exist and compete.
In countries where political parties are very poor, educators may even consider non-partisan ways in which these campaigns can be strengthened. Amongst possible options are:
- Joint candidate and party training in campaign management and conduct
- Independent publishing and distribution of collections of party manifestos
- Lobbying for free access to state-run media
- Providing parties with nonpartisan voter information pamphlets to which they can add limited information of their own, reducing their own printing costs
- Holding public education events at which candidates and parties can introduce themselves to the public
An assessment of the role that could be played by political parties' educators will want to consider the extent to which the parties presently represented in various legislatures represent the citizens at large, and whether, through anomalies in the electoral system or as a result of socio-economic cleavages and exclusions, there are formally constituted parties, whether registered or not, or informal political groupings and alliances, which should also be drawn into their educational venture. Interacting with such parties will depend on the institutional place of the educator. If part of a statutory body they may not be allowed to interact with any but registered parties: but if this is the case, they should consider other ways to make sure that the educational programme is not systematically excluding people who because of their political allegiances may not be accessible even by some more non-partisan but official educational programmes.
