Editing Political party (section)

===Social cleavages===
{{Main|Cleavage (politics)}}
[[File:IICCR G005 May 1st rally in Bucharest.jpg|thumb|upright=1|Political parties like the [[Romanian Communist Party]] can arise out of, or be closely connected to, existing segments of society, such as organizations of workers.]]
One of the core explanations for the existence of political parties is that they arise from pre-existing divisions among people: society is divided in a certain way, and a party is formed to organize that division into the electoral competition. By the 1950s, economists and political scientists had shown that party organizations could take advantage of the distribution of voters' preferences over political issues, adjusting themselves in response to what voters believe in order to become more competitive.<ref name = "Downs57">{{cite book | last=Downs | first=Anthony | title = An economic theory of democracy | url=https://archive.org/details/economictheoryof0000down |pages=114–142 | url-access=registration | publisher = Harper Collins | year = 1957 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |first=James |last=Adams |title=Review of Voting for Policy, Not Parties: How Voters Compensate for Power Sharing, by [[Orit Kedar]] |journal=Perspectives on Politics |volume=8 |issue=4 |date=December 2010 |pages=1257–1258 |doi=10.1017/S153759271000280X|s2cid=147390789 }}</ref> Beginning in the 1960s, academics began identifying the social cleavages in different countries that might have given rise to specific parties, such as religious cleavages in specific countries that may have produced religious parties there.<ref name = "Lipset67">{{cite book | last1=Lipset | first1=Seymour Martin | last2=Rokkan | first2 =Stein | title = Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments: Cross-national perspectives | publisher = New York Free Press | year = 1967 | page = 50 }}</ref><ref name = "Ware95">{{cite book | last=Ware | first=Alan | title = Political parties and party systems | publisher = Oxford University Press | year = 1995 | page = 22}}</ref>

The theory that parties are produced by social cleavages has drawn several criticisms. Some authors have challenged it on empirical grounds, either finding no evidence for the claim that parties emerge from existing cleavages, or arguing that the claim is not empirically testable.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Lybeck | first1 = Johan A. | title = Is the Lipset-Rokkan Hypothesis Testable? | journal = Scandinavian Political Studies | volume = 8 | issue = 1–2 | pages = 105–113 | year = 2017| doi = 10.1111/j.1467-9477.1985.tb00314.x }}</ref> Others note that while social cleavages might cause political parties to exist, this obscures the opposite effect: that political parties also cause changes in the underlying social cleavages.<ref name = "Chhibber04"/>{{rp|13}} A further objection is that, if the explanation for where parties come from is that they emerge from existing social cleavages, then the theory is an incomplete story of where political parties come from unless it also explains the origins of these social cleavages.<ref name = "Tilly90">{{cite book |page=74 | last=Tilly | first=Charles | title = Coercion, capital, and European states | publisher = Blackwell | year = 1990}}</ref>