Systems of Government
One-Party State
Also Known As Single-Party State
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A one-party state is a country in which a single political party controls the government, either by law or in practice.
Facts
Origin Year1918 marks the Bolsheviks' dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly in January of that year, after which the Bolsheviks and their Left Socialist-Revolutionary allies governed through the Bolshevik-dominated Congress of Soviets with rival parties barred from power, establishing the first state organised under single-party rule. The October 1917 revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power but initially alongside a coalition and an elected, multi-party Constituent Assembly; competing socialist parties were not shut out of government until the following year, and the Communist Party's own ban on internal factions did not come until 1921. Founding ContextTook shape in the twentieth century as revolutionary and nationalist movements, including the Soviet Communist Party after 1917 and the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party in China, established constitutional or de facto bans on rival parties to concentrate political power in a single organization. 1 Learn More
The One-Party State: Rule Without Competition
A one-party state is a country where a single political party controls the government, either because the law forbids other parties to compete for power or because the ruling party has made competition practically impossible. The form covers a wide range of governments, from openly totalitarian systems built around a single ideology to nominally multiparty states where one party has never lost an election.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 produced the model that gave the twentieth century its clearest template: the Bolsheviks dissolved Russia's brief experiment with a multiparty constituent assembly within months of taking power and built the Soviet Union around the Communist Party's permanent monopoly on political organization. Later one-party states, including the People's Republic of China after 1949, adapted that template to their own circumstances rather than copying it wholesale.
Not every one-party state claims to be democratic in form; some, like Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party after 1964, moved from competitive politics into single party rule during a single leader's tenure and later moved back out of it. The form is therefore better understood as a description of where power sits than as a single fixed ideology.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Britannica names the Chinese Communist Party as a classic example of a hegemonic single-party ruler.
Britannica describes North Korea under the Kim dynasty as a totalitarian one-party state.
Influenced By
The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the later banning of rival parties established the Soviet one-party state.
Practiced By
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