One-party state

A one-party state, single-party state, one-party system, or single-party system is a type of state in which one political party has the right to form the government, usually based on the existing constitution. All other parties are either outlawed or allowed to take only a limited and controlled participation in elections. Sometimes the term de facto one-party state is used to describe a dominant-party system that, unlike the one-party state, allows (at least nominally) democratic multiparty elections, but the existing practices or balance of political power effectively prevent the opposition from winning the elections.

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• The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats.
  • Noam Chomsky, Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance. Penguin Books Limited. 2012. p. 83. ISBN 978-0-14-196787-5. 

• In Portugal in April 1974, before the liberals in the army turned on the oldest Fascist dictatorship in Europe and broke open all the literal and metaphorical prison gates, there had been only one legal party. On May Day of that year, the Socialist and Communist Parties were able to fill the streets of the capital city. Within days, a conservative and a liberal party had been announced, and within a very short time Portugal was, so to say, a “normal” European country. Those parties, with their very seasoned leaders, had been there all along. All that was required was for the brittle carapace of the ancien régime to be shattered.
  • Christopher Hitchens, "What I Don't See at the Revolution", Vanity Fair (April 2011)

• Yes, we have one party here. But so does America. Except, with typical extravagance, they have two of them!
  • Attributed to Julius Nyerere in Green, Mark J. (1982). Winning back America. Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-22630-0. 
    • Variant: The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
    • Quoted by Radhika Desai, Social Scientist. v 29, no. 336-337 (May-June 2001) p. 33. University of Chicago and by Jeff Sharlet, The Family: Power, Politics and Fundamentalism's Shadow Elite. University of Queensland Press. 2008. p. 384. ISBN 978-0-7022-3694-5. 

• Only an unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems permits an understanding of their differences. Both ideologies opposed liberalism and democracy. In both political systems, the significance of the word party was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accepted rules, it became the group that determined the rules. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both one-party states. In both the Nazi and Soviet polities the party played a leading role in matters of ideology and social discipline. Its political logic demanded exclusion of outsiders, and its economic elite believed that certain groups were superfluous or harmful. In both administrations, economic planners assumed that more people existed in the countryside than was really necessary. Stalinist collectivization would remove superfluous peasants from the countryside and send them to the cities or the Gulag to work. If they starved, that was of little consequence. Hitlerian colonization projected the starvation and deportation of tens of millions of people.
  • Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

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One-party state