particracy

Particracy, also known as partitocracy or partocracy, is a form of government in which the political parties are the primary basis of rule rather than citizens 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 appear partly successful.