Political Party Database Project: How Parties Shape Democracy
Final Report Abstract
The project represents a major step forward in the research on political parties in modern democracies. Building on earlier work by the Party Organization Project directed by Richard Katz and Peter Mair in the 1980s, the project concentrated in the ‘official story’ on how parties organize in democratic polities. This entailed the collection of data from official sources like party documents, party statutes, party reports and official documents. The project covers the entire range of the organizational life of political parties including their resources (staff, party finance), their memberships, intra-party democracy (including candidate and leadership selection), linkage to relevant societal groups, the impact of party organization on their parliamentary behaviour and the capacity to respond to demands of their voters. Round 1a of the data collection covered 122 parties in 19 countries covering one or several years, mainly between 2011 and 2014. This data set was the principal base of the research output on which we report here. As a number of country collaborators joined the project later, a supplementary data set was published in 2018, which comprised of an additional 24 parties in 6 countries. The data has been made available via Harvard Dataverse in December 2016 (Round 1a) and November 2018 (Round 1b) and has been downloaded several thousand times. It is already an important resource for the comparative study of political parties. One of the most interesting and to a degree surprising result was the considerable degree of uniformity of political parties when it comes to the way they organize. With very few exceptions, their organizations resemble that of a political system in that they have rule-making, executive and arbitration bodies – party congress or assembly, party leadership bodies and party courts. Beyond this similarity regarding their core structures, there is much variation. Parties differ considerably in the way they connect to wider society, how they nominate candidates and elect leaders and how open their process of manifesto writing is. Interestingly, we find some contradictions between empowering the grass roots and achieving normatively desirable outcomes: Parties with less internal democracy are capable of responding more flexibly to voters’ demands, and parties which grant their lower echelons more influence over candidate selection tend to present candidate slates to the electorate which are less diverse regarding gender and ethnicity. Despite the widespread attention toward party primaries and other methods of empowering members (or even non-members), the study clearly shows that party decision-making is still largely the prerogative of dues paying members who meet in party bodies in order to discuss and decide. This ‘assembly-based intra-party democracy’ is characterized by procedures which are designed in a way that those who decide upon a certain issue are also part of the discussion process and have the possibility to propose amendments. In contrast, ‘plebiscitary intra-party democracy’ separates decision-making from discussion; it is a complementary mode of intra-party decision-making. A very important result of our analyses was that ‘country’ matters more than ‘ideology’ when we want to account for differences between parties. This shows the importance of institutional factors, e.g. national regulation of parties or party finance laws; it also shows that ideological differences are no longer as important as they used to be in the past. Last but not least: Does party organization matter? We found multiple evidence that it matters for outcomes directly related to party action, like programme writing and elite selection. However, we can also show that it matters for democracy at large. The way parties organize has important repercussion on how citizens view party democracy and how satisfied they are with it.
Publications
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(2016), Party Rules, Party Resources and the Politics of Parliamentary Democracies: How Parties Organize in the 21st Century, in: Party Politics, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 661-678
Poguntke, Thomas, Susan E. Scarrow & Paul D. Webb et al.
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(2017), Conclusion: The Study of Party Organization, in: Susan E Scarrow, Paul D. Webb & Thomas Poguntke (eds.), Organizing Political Parties: Representation, Participation, and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 307-320
Webb, Paul D., Thomas Poguntke & Susan E. Scarrow
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(2017), Organizing Political Parties: Representation, Participation and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Scarrow, Susan E., Paul D. Webb & Thomas Poguntke (eds.)
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(2017), Patterns of Intra-Party Democracy across the World, in: Susan E. Scarrow, Paul D. Webb & Thomas Poguntke (eds.), Organizing Political Parties: Representation, Participation, and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 158-184
Bolin, Niklas, Nicolas Aylott, Benjamin von dem Berge & Thomas Poguntke
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(2017), Political Party Organizations, in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politic
Poguntke, Thomas, Susan E. Scarrow & Paul D. Webb
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(2017), Varieties of Intra-Party Democracy: Conceptualisation and Index Construction, in: Susan E. Scarrow, Paul D. Webb, & Thomas Poguntke (eds.), Organizing Political Parties: Representation, Participation and Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 136-157
von dem Berge, Benjamin & Thomas Poguntke
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(2018), The consequence of membership incentives, in: Party Politics
Achury, Susan, Susan E. Scarrow, Karina Kosiara-Pedersen & Emilie van Haute
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(2019), Innerparteiliche Demokratie: Varianten und Entwicklungen, in: Julian Krüper mit Wolfgang Bock, Hans Michael Heinig & Heike Merten (eds.), Die Organisation des Verfassungsstaats. Festschrift für Martin Morlok zum 70. Geburtstag, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 353-364
Poguntke, Thomas
