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For decades now, West European politics has witnessed radical changes. Mainstream parties, once oligarchs in remarkably stable political systems, are experiencing a profound challenge to their legitimacy so that the question of their decline, or even their death, has often been raised hand in hand with the question of the crisis of representative democracy. Political commentators and scholars generally assume that party changes such as those made by many mainstream parties are simply to be seen within the context of structural changes in political demand. However, the literature overlooks an essential part of the story by taking the profound structural changes in the environment in which political parties operate as the main argument to explain their evolution over time. This dissertation argues that it is possible to better understand the when, why and how mainstream parties evolved over time through the use of the concept of (bundle of) party reform(s) and by bringing together lessons drawn from the literatures on party change, institutional reform and political marketing.This dissertation proposes a research strategy based on a mix of innovative methods. Three empirical steps were followed in order to provide ground for the new theoretical approach I propose to party reform as well as to help explain party engineering in mainstream parties. The structure of this dissertation builds in particular on the opposition between the rational-institutionalist approach to party change and its constructivist variant. I decided to focus this study on the six mainstream Belgian parties because of the distinctive context Belgium offers for comparatively examining the resilience of political parties that are particularly rooted at the core of a political system but which consistently face strong challenges. The first empirical part of the dissertation consist in building a descriptive inventory of all the reforms implemented by the Belgian mainstream parties on their political, Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The sub-field of political party research is an interesting case study of the broader development of the discipline of political science over the past 20 years as it demonstrates the reflexive and evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organizations that they study. Party research has moved on from crises of existence, to studying the resilience and adaptation of these organizations with new and evolving methodologies that have taken party research into the twenty-first century and fostered more collaborative, specialist and increasingly internationalized relationships within the research community. In the last two decades, expectations around research engagement and impact have heightened in response to changes in the research funding environment and the political pressure to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the discipline has intensified. The increasingly heterogeneous, specialized and quantified nature of the subfield has enabled party scholarship to find impact and relevance through the provision of technical advice to parties and policymakers, thereby affecting how parties organize. However, while political party researchers have been able to engage audiences outside academia with this specialized and technical advice, the sub-discipline has shifted away from some of the “bigger picture”, normative questions surrounding the role of parties in modern representative democracies.

Political parties have been studied as organizations for more than a century. Over time the focus of party research has shifted, from normative concerns with organizational democracy to the comparative analysis of organizational evolution and party functions. In this article we document the trajectory of party organization research, analyzing the value of the comparative method and evaluating the predictive power of research in our field to consider how it may add value to the study of other types of organizations. We focus on four established fields: party leadership, candidate selection, party membership and party regulation, but also present some of the newest and most promising research themes in the field, including personalization, evolving forms of participation and affiliation, and the relationship between political parties as organizations and social movements.

Although democratic states increasingly regulate political parties, we know little about how legal environments shape parties’ internal lives. This article conceptualizes and measures the “juridification” of party organizations’ conflict regulation regimes: that is, the extent to which parties replicate external legal standards (e.g. norms of due process) within their own procedures. Formulating hypotheses on juridification within different parties and legal environments, we examine intra-party juridification across four democracies with most different party law provisions. While party juridification varies—reflecting parties’ ideological differences—in contexts where organizational governance remains unregulated, once intra-organizational governance is subject to statutory constraints, parties emulate legal norms embedded in the state legal system, transcending what is legally required, which has important repercussions for how the law shapes civil society organizations generally.

Formålet med artiklen er at vise, hvordan partiorganisationer studeres inden for disciplinen statskundskab, og specifikt subdisciplinen ‘komparativ politik’. Vi lægger kort ud med traditionen og efterkrigstidens værker med mere teoretiske refleksioner over partiernes udvikling. Dernæst adresseres tesen om partiernes forfald, der specielt herskede i 1980’erne og 1990’erne, og den efterfølgende fokus på partiernes forandring. Denne forskning præsenterer vi i de tre sidste afsnit om komparative organisationsstudier, specialiseringen i subfelter (partilederskab, kandidatopstilling, partimedlemskab og partifinansiering), og afslutningsvist de nyeste tendenser. Konklusionen om studier af partiorganisationer indenfor feltet ’komparativ politik’ er karakteriseret ved, at forskningsfeltet er blevet mere heterogent og specialiseret. Som på andre af statskundskabs forskningsfelter, skrives færre monografier og flere artikler med specifikke problemformuleringerne, og selvom de kvalitative metoder ikke er forduftet, anvendes de kvantitative i større grad. Fokus er i mindre grad på partiernes som hele organisationer og mere på specifikke aspekter af organisationerne, f.eks. ledelse, kandidatopstilling, og medlemskab. For det andet er der en (naturlig) sammenhæng mellem partiernes forandring, adgang til data og udviklingen af specifikke forskningsfelter. Samlet er konklusionen, at studiet af de politiske partiers organisering er i forandring, ligesom partiernes organisering er. Men det er i begge tilfælde stille forandringer.

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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., 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.

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, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This book engages with the debate over the significance and future of political parties as membership organisations and presents the first broad comparative analysis of party membership and activism. It is based on membership surveys which have been administered, gathered and collated by a group of prominent party scholars from across Europe, Canada and Israel. Utilizing this rich data source together with the insights of party scholars, the book investigates what party membership means in advanced industrial democracies. In doing so, it provides a clearer picture of who joins political parties, why they do it, the character of their political activism, how they engage with their parties, and what opinions they hold.This text will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, particularly to those interested in representation, participation, political parties and elections., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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SCOPUS: ch.b, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

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The Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act 2016 was passed this year, and introduced a range of measures including the empowerment of the Charities Commission to ‘crack down’ on potential abuses of the sector from financial abuses. Here, Nicole Bolleyer and Anika Gauja look at the practical impact of the legislation, and ask what the bill means for the voluntary sector.

The Australian Labor Party has approved proposals from the party’s new leader Kevin Rudd, that the party’s leadership selection rules be changed so that parliamentarians and party members are able to elect party leaders. Anika Gauja writes that the UK’s political parties could consider another aspect of the reforms that ensure party leaders cannot be removed if they have won an election, unless it is demanded by 60% of the party. This would increase the public legitimacy of elected leaders and help to create greater party stability.