Parties in opposition invariably criticize the party in power. Is it a good democratic practice?

Question

Organising bandhs/dharnas/agitations despite the party in power doing good has become the order of the day! Party in opposition today may be in power tomorrow; and the practice continues! "I will pull down what you build" rules the roost! Is this a healthy democratic practice? If not, what is the remedy?

Answer 1

The remedy is to stop attacking the opposition party just because you don't like what they are doing.

The very fact that they are the opposition party means you are not going to like what they are doing. So, attacking them based solely on that is pointless -- all the way around.

The remedy is to address the issues -- point out why a particular plan won't solve a problem, or point out other ways to solve the problem. Focus on the issues and WHAT can be done-- not on WHO is doing it.

Answer 2

To some degree, it is a healthy practice. Without criticism, no one would ever know what aspects of government people liked or disliked. However, it seems that in politics people criticize a plan because a Republican or a Democrat authored it and not on the merits/flaws of the plan itself. Personally, I think that the best criticism comes from within the party. It's one thing for a Republican to not like a Democrat's ideas. It's another for a Democrat to not like them (and actually say so - politicians often squelch their opinions for the sake of the party line). The same goes for Republican plans.

The remedy for partisanship, according to the writers of the Federalist papers, is to have many, many parties (factions) so that they all have to compete for the popular vote. When there are many different parties, no one party can attain very much power. Thus broad party coalitions may be formed so that seats in government can be won. How to achieve this in the current two-party system is subject to debate. Do we want the government to tell us how many parties we have to have? The reality is, we have many parties in this country, however, our effective number of parties is two (there's a fancy political science method for calculating how many parties in a multi-party system actually get power, but I don't remember what it's called.) Also, if we had a large number of parties, what if somebody got to be a member of Congress with 5% of the popular vote? (This has happened in countries with massive numbers of parties.) Is this the will of the people? Are they actually represented by this candidate?

Ultimately, extreme partisanship is not a healthy political practice. However, it is also characteristic of the democratic process. There are no easy solutions. Even if someone tried to fix the problem, someone of a different party would likely sabotage the efforts.

Answer 3

I think it's healthy for the opposition to criticize the party in power but provided that it can come up with some type of deal. Compromise is a good thing and both the administration and opposition need to try to reach common ground. What I find disgusting is personal smear ad attacks, which I think doesn't encoruage more voters to get to the voting boothes. Thanks!