(i) the growing number and influence of Islamic fundamentalist formations in the Muslim world, most of them seized by hostility to what they perceive to be decadent Western social mores and culture;.
(ii) the continuing importance of racial and/or religious identity as a determinant of party political affiliation;.
(iii) the often related rise of regional political movements demanding greater autonomy from central government, and in some cased outright separation;.
(iv) the dominance in the 1990s of the philosophy of the free-market economy right across the traditional political spectrum (at least in the developed world), with once anti-market left-wing parties having to find other reasons for their existence; and.
(v) a parallel and somewhat contradictory recent tendency on the part of voters in Eastern Europe, disenchanted by their early experience of the market economy, to opt for parties that are "successors" to the former ruling Communist parties, albeit now espousing democratic socialism rather than Marxism-Leninism.
All these five features together are pointers to the trends in the partisan politics of Democracies all over the world.
In India, especially during Jayprakash Narayan's movement in 1974, the concept of party less democracy was propounded. But, in reality the talk of democracy without parties sounds impractical, making it almost a utopian concept. And if parties are to be looked at as vehicles of ideologies, they almost become an indispensable component of democratic polity. To wish them away would not only be fallacious but also detrimental to the health of democracy itself. Underscoring his concern for the decline of parties in USA, John H. Coleman says, "Declining relevance and impact of political parties presents a hole of sorts in the mediation between citizens and the state. This hole in the representative system raises direct questions about the nature of American democracy.