Party Rules, Party Resources, and the Politics of Parliamentary Democracies
- Author(s)
- Thomas Poguntke, Susan E. Scarrow, Paul D. Webb, Ellin H. Allein, Nicholas Aylott, Ingrid van Biezen, Enrico Calossi, Marina Costa Lobo, William P. Cross, Kris Deschouwer, Zsolt Enyedi, Elodie Fabre, David M. Farrell, Anika Gauja, Eugenio Pizzimenti, Petr Kopecký, Ruud Koole, Wolfgang Claudius Müller, Karina Kosiara-Pedersen, Gideon Rahat, Aleks Szczerbiak, Emilie van Haute, Tània Verge
- Abstract
This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find
substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, University of Sussex, University of Houston, Unknown External Organisation Unbekannt/undefiniert
- Journal
- Party Politics
- Volume
- 22
- Pages
- 661-678
- No. of pages
- 18
- ISSN
- 1354-0688
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068816662493
- Publication date
- 11-2016
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/party-rules-party-resources-and-the-politics-of-parliamentary-democracies(dbf506b5-8982-4b1f-af9b-2cc25e026569).html