Particracy

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Particracy, also known as partitocracy or partocracy, is a form of government in which the political parties are the primary basis of rule^[1] rather than citizens or individual politicians.

As argued by Italian political scientist Mauro Calise in 1994, the term is often derogatory, implying that parties have too much power—in a similar vein, in premodern times it was often argued that democracy was merely rule by the demos, or a poorly educated and easily misled mob. Efforts to turn particracy into a more precise scholarly concept so far appear partly successful.^[2]