America has developed a two-party political system, and the parties serve a number of important roles in the political and social structure of the nation. The Republicans and the Democrats have constituted the two parties for more than a century, though these were not the first political parties in the nation. They have also not had the national stage entirely to themselves, for third parties have come into being at times of dissatisfaction with the tenets or performance of the two primary parties. These third parties have either fallen by the wayside or continue as minor parties. There is much discussion today of the potential for a third party to develop, and one of the reasons for this is the perception that the Republicans and the Democrats are not that different and do not represent the interests of a large portion of the electorate. While it seems likely that the two-party system will persist, it also seems likely that third-party challenges to the system will also continue.
The Founding Fathers did not want political parties and so excluded them from the Constitution, but at the same time they knew that factions would develop. Madison wrote about the near-inevitability of factions in The Federalist Papers, and he said that the causes of faction are part of the nature of the human being. Political parties did indeed develop in the new country, and it appears that this was easily predicted given the tendency of the individual to seek others of like mind and to attempt concerted action where possible. The nature of parties changed over time--in the beginning they were loose alliances among compatible members of congress in support of or in opposition to the president (Reiter 52-53). Later, they would become stronger and more institutionalized.
Though the Founding Fathers feared factions, the discussion of the Constitution involved the interplay of factions in the form of two groups, the Federalists and the Anti-Fed...