structural:scholar_edition
18th century

Some scholars argue that the first modern political parties developed in early modern Britain in the 18th century, after the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution. The Whig faction originally organized itself around support for Protestant constitutional monarchy as opposed to absolute rule, whereas the conservative Tory faction (originally the Royalist or Cavalier faction of the English Civil War) supported a strong monarchy, and these two groups structured disputes in the politics of the United Kingdom throughout the 18th century The Rockingham Whigs have been identified as the first modern political party, because they retained a coherent party label and motivating principles even while out of power.

At the end of the century, the United States also developed a party system, called the First Party System. Although the framers of the 1787 United States Constitution did not all anticipate that American political disputes would be primarily organized around political parties, political controversies in the early 1790s over the extent of federal government powers saw the emergence of two proto-political parties: the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party.