Political parties are the most effective institutions for training leaders and followers

Evidence

The principle once posed that there are leaders and led, rulers and ruled, it is true that parties have up till now been the most effective way of developing leaders and leadership. (Parties may present themselves under the most diverse names, even calling themselves the anti-party or the “negation of the parties”; in reality, even the so-called “individualists” are party men, only they would like to be “party chiefs” by the grace of God or the idiocy of those who follow them.) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 656

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the party as the modern mechanism that manufactures both leadership and governed consent.
• XREF: Toolkit link: the party as mass-training apparatus is what later work on political Islam and populism draws on.