A single-party system is usually one where there is an actual constitutional ban, or an effectively enforced unofficial ban, on the number of parties allowed to stand in elections. Alternatively, there may not even be elections at all, and the party is deemed permanently to be in power. However, single-party systems often in fact hide considerable degrees of internal conflict, with power struggles capable of resulting in major changes of policy within the party. In other cases legal alternative parties may be tolerated by the ruling party, but have no chance of election, or several theoretically separate parties be welded into one tightly-controlled organization.
The latter was the case in communist East Germany, for example, while in Mexico the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, in office from 1929–2000, took care to arrange the election of a token handful of members from opposition parties to give a safety valve to public feelings, until elections began to become more genuinely democratic in the 1980s. Finally, effective single-party systems can come about by the sheer preponderance of public opinion in some areas. Until recently many of the southern states in the USA were effectively single-party systems because there was absolutely no chance of a representative of the Republican Party winning office. In such a situation the primary of the Democratic Party, where the choice of who should be the Democratic candidate was at issue, was the only effective election. (Many of the states concerned are now more balanced, even tending towards support for the Republicans, partly as a result of the strong links between that party and influential Christian groups.) The counting of how many parties there are, in any meaningful sense, in a party system is in fact more complicated than it seems (see multi-party systems).
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