Political parties mediate between state coercion and voluntary moral conduct

Evidence

The function of hegemony or political leadership exercised by parties can be estimated from the evolution of the internal life of the parties themselves. If the State represents the coercive and punitive force of juridical regulation of a country, the parties- representing the spontaneous adhesion of an elite to such a regulation, considered as a type of collective society to which the entire mass must be educated-must show in their specific internal life that they have assimilated as principles of moral conduct those rules which in the State are legal obligations. In the parties necessity has already become freedom, and thence is born the immense political value (i.e. value for political leadership) of the internal discipline of a party, and hence the value as a criterion of such discipline in estimating the growth potential of the various parties. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 996

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the party’s bridging role between state’s legal coercion and the voluntary moral adhesion of the masses — a key mechanism for understanding how hegemony is transmitted.
• XREF: Connects forward to how Islamophobia research treats state-adjacent movements and organizations as channels that convert legal frameworks into cultural common sense.