But surnames aren't reliable either, given the number of inter-marriages that occurred under Ba'ath Party rule.
With the passing of the Gandhis, India in the 1990s shifted from single-party rule to coalition politics.
That has largely gone since Mr Erdogan's mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) Party shot to single-party rule in 2002.
Both parties have been pushed towards their respective extremes, but one party must rule and so the effects on the Republicans, as the minority party, have been worse.
Staff unions are vehemently opposed to any such move, and are pushing the Labour party to rule out privatisation in its next general election manifesto.
In the case of Ecuador, a constitutional reform could have made sense in the framework of political reform aimed at increasing relations between constituencies and elected officials, changing the current system of party-rule (partidocracia) and ensuring that all sectors are properly represented within the system.
Most of the oil-bearing countries are at best fragile democracies emerging from long periods of autocratic postcolonial single-party or military rule.
Accepting that the comparisons are not exact, as of now, Fianna Fail seems set for the biggest loss of parliamentary seats since the Irish Home Rule party in the 1918 election.
Still, for years afterwards the Republicans were able to wield great influence as a minority party thanks to a rule that required a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers to pass a budget.
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Public frustration, festering for years, boiled over in the elections a year ago when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) overthrew more than 50 years of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.
He is now competing against his cousin Ghazan Khan, a political newcomer whose affiliation with a hard-line religious party, Jamaat-i-Islami, could be the exception to the rule when it comes to party ideology trumping family ties.
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But he needs the support of the conservative People's Party (PP) to rule, and they are unnatural allies.
He has said he wants to continue serving the Labour party, and did not rule out a return at some point.
The Securities and Exchange Commission voted along party lines to adopt a rule requiring companies to trace and audit certain minerals as to their origination.
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Soon each side was questioning whether America could survive rule by the opposing party.
Alex Salmond, who led the party until 2000, appeared to rule himself out of the contest by saying he would decline if nominated.
None of the Bihari leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies, which rule in the capital, Delhi, but are in opposition in Bihar, went to Aurangabad.
This week its leader, Khaleda Zia, appointed her son, Tarique Rahman, for many the symbol of all that was wrong with the BNP's last period of kleptocratic, vindictive rule, as the party's deputy chairman.
Italy of Values, a rule-of-law party, drew 6% in the poll, as did the Left Ecology Liberty party.
He said he believes President Pervez Musharraf plans to delay next week's vote because his party will not garner enough seats to rule.
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But since Vicente Fox won a presidential election in 2000, ending seven decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexican governments have attempted to put a long history of corruption behind them.
Something similar was at play when, in 2009, voters ended almost 55 years of uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and subsequently fell out of love with the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) that replaced it.
Mr Cannonier, a relative newcomer to Bermudan politics, was propelled into power in December 2012 when his One Bermuda Alliance ousted the government of Premier Paula Cox and ended 14 years of rule by the Progressive Labour Party (PLP).
But she held together a crumbling party, and almost got enough seats to rule.
The main political component of the People's Alliance is the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP), which has alternated rule over the years with the UNP.
Johnson Asiedu Nketia, the NDC's secretary general, said the governing party did not believe the Supreme Court would rule against them as the elections had been the country's most transparent ever.
''If the new government could achieve significant progress both in domestic and diplomatic fronts, the Liberal Democratic Party would secure a solid base for its rule and may smash the circle of frequently-changed governments.
We have come 180 degrees from 1968, when Kevin Phillips in his landmark political study of that election, "The Emerging Republican Majority, " noted that by virtue of capturing the loyalty of the anti-civil rights whites of the South along with a majority of voters from the nation's heartland, Republicans put themselves in a position to be the dominant party in the country after decades of Democratic rule.
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