Intra-party policy formulation in flux. Effects of organizational crises on party members' effective rights to impact policies in Western European parties (1980-2012)

• Applicant: Dr. Annika Hennl
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2013 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 242419404

In recent decades, many European political parties have adopted organizational reforms that alter the degree to which they involve members in processes of intra-party decision-making. These reforms are of critical importance for the viability of representative democracy as they directly impact the participatory and representative linkages that parties provide. Also, these developments have nurtured heated debates about what "internally democratic" parties are and whether they are desirable from a normative perspective. It is thus highly relevant to specify the degree and direction of these changes and to understand their causes. An assessment of the related state of the research reveals a distinct gap. While extensive attention is devoted to reforms of candidate and leadership selection processes, we lack conceptual and systematic empirical approaches to institutions of intra-party policy formulation.To address this gap, this project pursues four objectives:1) to develop an explanatory framework which models intra-party reforms as resulting from organizational crises. The innovative argument is that the direction of such reforms systematically depends on the perceived point of origin of the respective crisis. Where a crisis emanates from a negative change in the arena of inter-party competition, members' effective means to impact policy will be curtailed. In contrast, where an organizational crisis arises out of the intra-party arena, e.g. in the course of significant membership losses, members will be equipped with more effective means to impact policy;2) to conceptualize institutions of intra-party policy formulation in a way that captures their relevance for the leadership's autonomy in the inter-party arena, on the one hand, and for the incentives they offer to party members in the intra-party arena, on the other hand;3) to generate a data set that empirically specifies reforms of intra-party policy formulation and instances of organizational crises in a selected number of European Democracies (Great Britain, Norway, Austria and Germany) both across the two main parties (conservative and socialist) and over time (1980-2012); and4) to test for the empirical validity of the theoretical model by means of comparative case studies which combine cross-case and preliminary within-case inference. Taking together, the project generates innovative theoretical and empirical insights on the effects of organizational crises on party members' effective rights to impact policies in Western European parties.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Host: Professor Paul Webb, Ph.D.