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Political party organizations play large roles in democracies, yet their organizations differ widely, and their statutes change much more frequently than constitutions or electoral laws. How do these differences, and these frequent changes, affect the operation of democracy?
This book seeks to answer these questions by presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of party organization in nineteen contemporary democracies. Using a unique new data collection, the book's chapters test propositions about the reasons for variation and similarities across party organizations. They find more evidence of within-country similarity than of cross-national patterns based on party ideology. After exploring parties' organizational differences, the remaining chapters
investigate the impact of these differences. The volume considers a wide range of theories about how party organization may affect political life, including the impact of party rules on the selection of female candidates, the links between party decision processes and the stability of party programmes, the
connection between party finance sources and public trust in political parties, and whether the strength of parties' extra-parliamentary organization affects the behaviour of their elected legislators. Collectively these chapters help to advance comparative studies of elections and representation by inserting party institutions and party agency more firmly into the centre of such studies.
Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu.
The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.
List of contents
- 1: Susan E. Scarrow and Paul D. Webb: Investigating Party Organization: Structures, Resources and Representative Strategies
- Part 1: How Parties Organize
- 2: Paul D. Webb and Dan Keith: Assessing the Strength of Party Organizational Resources: A Survey of the Evidence from the Political Party Database
- 3: Luciano Bardi, Enrico Calossi, and Eugenio Pizzimenti: Which Face Comes First? The Ascendancy of the Party in Public Office
- 4: Ingrid van Biezen and Petr Kopecký: The Paradox of Party Funding: The Limited Impact of State Subsidies on Party Membership
- 5: Elin Haugsgjerd Allern and Tània Verge: Still Connecting with Society? Political Parties' Formal Links with Social Groups in the 21st Century
- 6: Benjamin von dem Berge and Thomas Poguntke: Varieties of Intra-Party Democracy: Conceptualisation and Index Construction
- 7: Niklas Bolin, Nicholas Aylott, Benjamin von dem Berge, and Thomas Poguntke: Patterns of Intra-Party Democracy across the World
- Part 2: The Impact of Party Organization
- 8: Marina Costa Lobo and Isabella Razzuoli: The Impact of Parties' Financial Dependence on Citizens' Perceptions of Party Responsiveness
- 9: Scott Pruysers, William P. Cross, Anika Gauja, and Gideon Rahat: Candidate Selection Rules and Democratic Outcomes: The Impact of Parties on Women's Representation
- 10: Karina Kosiara-Pedersen, Susan E. Scarrow, and Emilie van Haute: Rules of Engagement? Party Membership Costs, New Forms of Party Affiliation, and Partisan Participation
- 11: Annika Hennl and Simon Tobias Franzmann: The Effects of Manifesto Politics on Programmatic Change
- 12: Conor Little and David M. Farrell: Party Organization and Party Unity
- 13: Paul D. Webb, Thomas Poguntke, and Susan E. Scarrow: Conclusion: Assessing the Impact of Party Organization
- Afterword
About the author
Susan E. Scarrow is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on representation and electoral institutions, including political party development, direct democracy, and political finance. Her prior publications include Beyond Party Members (Oxford University Press) and Democracy Transformed? (Oxford University Press, edited with Russell J. Dalton and Bruce Cain).
Paul D. Webb is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on party and electoral politics, including the OUP books Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (with David Farrell and Ian Holliday) and The Presidentialization of Politics (with Thomas Poguntke), and is co-editor of the journal Party Politics. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK.
Thomas Poguntke is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf and Director of the Düsseldorf Party Research Institute (PRuF). He has published widely on political parties and comparative politics including The Presidentialization of Politics (OUP, edited with Paul Webb) and The Europeanization of National Political Parties: Power and Organizational Adaptation (Routledge, edited with Nicholas Aylott, Elisabeth Carter, Robert Ladrech and Kurt Richard Luther).
Summary
This volume presents the first findings of a novel cross-national effort to assess the current state of political parties' internal rules and organizational resources.
