List of conservative parties by country

Conservative parties form one of the oldest party families in democratic politics: organizations defending property, national institutions, religion, and gradual reform against programmes of radical change. The family runs from the British Conservative Party, the model case, through Christian democratic, liberal-conservative, and national-conservative variants on every continent.¹

This entry surveys the family’s origins, its principal members by country, and the debate over what, beyond opposition to the left, holds it together.

Key Takeaways

• The British Conservative Party took its name in the era of Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto (1834) and remains the family’s oldest continuous member.¹
• Anglosphere counterparts include Canada’s Conservative Party (refounded 2003), Australia’s Liberal Party (1944), New Zealand’s National Party (1936), and the United States Republican Party (1854), a conservative party in function though not in name.
• Continental Europe’s right is anchored by Christian democracy, Germany’s CDU/CSU (1945) and its cousins, alongside France’s Gaullist successor parties, Spain’s People’s Party (1989), and national conservatives such as Poland’s Law and Justice (2001).
• Beyond Europe, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (1955) and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (1980) are the largest parties commonly classed as conservative.
• The International Democracy Union (1983) links some eighty centre-right parties worldwide.

History And Context

Parties of order predate the label. British Tories defended crown and church through the eighteenth century, but the modern party dates from the wreck of the old Tory interest over the Reform Act of 1832. Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto (1834) accepted the Act and promised the correction of proven abuses while conserving what worked, the founding charter of conservative electoral politics, with the Westminster parliament its first home.¹ Disraeli’s Reform Act of 1867 then married the party to a mass franchise. The pattern repeated across the democratic world: in Canada, John A. Macdonald’s Liberal-Conservative coalition governed the new Dominion from 1867; Scandinavia organized conservative parties, Norway’s Høyre (1884), Sweden’s Moderates (1904), against liberal and agrarian blocs. Catholic Europe took a different route: after 1945, Christian democracy under Adenauer, De Gasperi, and Schuman rebuilt the continental right on confessional foundations broader than class. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (1955) fused rival conservative factions into a near-permanent governing machine. Latin America contributes its own line, from Chile’s traditional right to Colombia’s Conservative Party, founded in 1849 and among the oldest parties still contesting elections anywhere. The end of the Cold War added post-communist conservative parties in Central Europe, and the 2010s brought a national-conservative wave, Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary, Brothers of Italy, contesting the older liberal-conservative mainstream.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives read the family’s breadth as evidence that theirs is not an ideology but a disposition applied to different national inheritances. Burke’s principles, reform in order to conserve, loyalty to the “little platoons,” suspicion of abstract schemes, translate into an established-church party in Britain, a Catholic social party in the Rhineland, a business-and-tradition party in Japan, and a frontier republican party in America, because in each case the thing to be conserved differs.² What unites the members is a set of commitments visible across the family: private property as the basis of independence, the family as the primary social institution, national sovereignty as the frame of self-government, and change by amendment rather than demolition. Robert Blake’s history of the British party stressed a further shared trait: conservative parties are governing parties, valuing office because administration rather than doctrine is their vocation.¹ The family’s persistence in power across most post-war democracies stands, for conservatives, as the strongest empirical argument that these commitments track durable human needs.

Differing Positions

Political scientists dispute the family’s coherence. Klaus von Beyme’s standard taxonomy separates conservative, Christian democratic, and liberal party families, noting that German Christian Democrats built a welfare state Anglosphere conservatives spent decades trimming.³ Scholars of party systems add that the label is partly residual: parties get classed as conservative for opposing the left rather than for shared doctrine, and the family now spans free-trading Atlanticists and protectionist national populists who agree on little beyond the flag.⁴ Critics on the left press a sharper claim: the family’s continuity reflects the continuity of the interests it defends, property and hierarchy, with principles adjusted as electoral need requires. Conservatives answer that adaptability in defence of permanent goods is the tradition working as designed, though the classification debate remains unresolved in the comparative literature. Serious surveys of the family therefore proceed country by country, treating each party within its own constitutional history, as this encyclopedia’s national entries do.

References

1. Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970).
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790).
3. Klaus von Beyme, Political Parties in Western Democracies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985).
4. Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).