Parties are central to the practice of Australian democracy; however, their patterns of competitive behaviour are more closely aligned with some theories of democracy than others (see Chapter 1). Understanding the development and behaviour of political parties within the Australian electoral system is aided by the behaviouralist approach outlined in Chapter 3, which focuses on the creation of general models of political behaviour backed up by empirical evidence. As suggested by the theories in Chapter 2, the institutional rules of elections provide the political context that enables and constrains the ways parties ‘play the game’. The habitual depiction of the Australian party system as essentially a two-party contest would interest discourse theorists (Chapter 5), not least for the idea that the two-party discourse excludes alternative discourses about how Australian politics might be done. Critical theorists would question whether attention to the party contest really obscures the commitment of all political parties to an underlying pattern of inequality (Chapter 4).