Particracy

Particracy (also 'partitocracy', 'partocracy', or 'partitocrazia') is a de facto form of government where one or more political parties dominate the political process, rather than citizens and/or individual politicians. As argued by Italian political scientist Mauro Calise in 1994, the term is often derogatory, implying that parties have too much power—in a similar vein, in premodern times it was often argued that democracy was merely rule by the demos, or a poorly educated and easily misled mob. Efforts to turn "particracy" into a more precise scholarly concept so far merely appear partly successful,