The lingering danger of voter apathy is not that public offices will go unfilled but that office holders will be elected by smaller and smaller percentages of eligible voters. Party organizations and procedures vary enormously. On one end of the spectrum, in multiparty parliamentary systems in Europe, political parties can be tightly disciplined organizations run almost exclusively by full-time professionals. At the other extreme is the United States, where rival Republican and Democratic parties are decentralized organizations functioning largely in Congress and at the state level. This situation changes every four years when national Republican and Democratic party organizations, relying heavily on volunteers, coalesce to mount presidential election campaigns.
Political parties are as varied as the societies in which they function.
The election campaigns they conduct are often elaborate, usually time-consuming, sometimes silly. In a democratic society, citizens have a right to gather peacefully and protest the policies of their government or the actions of other groups with demonstrations, marches, petitions, boycotts, strikes, and other forms of direct citizen action. Direct action is open to everyone in a democracy, but it traditionally has been used by oppressed, disadvantaged, or minority groups who feel excluded from other means of influencing government policies. Such protests have always been part of democratic society. Today, nonviolent protest, often designed to attract the attention of the news media, encompasses a wide array of issues, from environmental pollution to nuclear weapons, foreign policy issues, and racial and ethnic discrimination.