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Party rules, party resources and the politics of parliamentary democracies: How parties organize in the 21st century
Title / Series / Name
Party Politics
Publication Volume
22
Publication Issue
6
Pages
Authors
Enyedi, Zsolt
Poguntke, Thomas
Scarrow, Susan E.
Webb, Paul D.
Allern, Ellin H.
Aylott, Nicholas
van Biezen, Ingrid
Calossi, Enrico
Lobo, Marina Costa
Cross, William P.
Deschouwer, Kris
Fabre, Elodie
Farrell, David M.
Gauja, Anika
Pizzimenti, Eugenio
Kopecky, Petr
Koole, Ruud
Müller, Wolfgang C.
Kosiara-Pedersen, Karina
Rahat, Gideon
Szczerbiak, Aleks
van Haute, Emilie
Verge, Tania
Poguntke, Thomas
Scarrow, Susan E.
Webb, Paul D.
Allern, Ellin H.
Aylott, Nicholas
van Biezen, Ingrid
Calossi, Enrico
Lobo, Marina Costa
Cross, William P.
Deschouwer, Kris
Fabre, Elodie
Farrell, David M.
Gauja, Anika
Pizzimenti, Eugenio
Kopecky, Petr
Koole, Ruud
Müller, Wolfgang C.
Kosiara-Pedersen, Karina
Rahat, Gideon
Szczerbiak, Aleks
van Haute, Emilie
Verge, Tania
Editors
Keywords
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/13346
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.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2016
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2F1354068816662493