New parties, new movements: but how much say do party members get?

The Political Party Database Project has analysed the workings of 122 political parties in 19 parliamentary democracies. Remarkably, the vast majority share a common model of subscriber democracy: members join at a local level and enjoy a certain amount of say in the party's direction. But in recent years a wave of new political movements, such as République en Marche ..

It's no longer the economy, stupid! Issue yield at the 2017 German federal election

This article demonstrates that the issue-yield concept is able to predict the electoral strategies of mainstream and challenger parties at the 2017 German federal election. While the electorate of mainstream parties favour valence issues, the Greens and the AfD can gain more by concentrating on socio-cultural positional issues. Relying on a unique survey covering 17 positional issues and 10 valence issues as well as an analysis of Twitter accounts, the article shows that contemporary Germany is characterised by a centrifugal competition on the socio-cultural dimension. At the same time, an asymmetric ideological confrontation persists on the socio-economic dimension, because the Left and the SPD still refer to their traditional welfare issues while the bourgeois parties no longer counter this with a contrasting free-market ideology. Thus, the economy is currently not the decisive issue in German politics. Migration, integration, and other socio-cultural issues are rather driving electoral competition

Digital Campaigning on the Rise? A Long-term Perspective on German Federal Elections

In den letzten zehn Jahren sind digitale Werkzeuge zu zentralen Elementen von Wahlkampagnen geworden. Dieser Trend könnte sich im Jahr 2021 noch verstärkt haben, da die Möglichkeiten für persönliche Interaktionen aufgrund der starken Einschränkungen durch die COVID-19-Pandemie begrenzt waren. Es ist jedoch wenig darüber bekannt, ob sich der Einsatz digitaler Instrumente am Wahltag auszahlt. Der Beitrag geht daher der Frage nach, inwieweit die Bundestagskandidaten bei den vergangenen Bundestagswahlen digitale Instrumente genutzt haben und ob diese Aktivitäten mit besseren Wahlergebnissen im Jahr 2021 verbunden sind. Analysen der Kandidatenbefragungen der German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) deuten darauf hin, dass Wahlkreiskandidaten zunehmend digitale Kampagnen nutzen. Dieser Trend hat sich durch die Wahl 2021 nicht verstärkt. Vielmehr ist ein "natürlicher" Anstieg zu beobachten. Zudem ist die Nutzung einer eigenen Website oder eines Blogs mit leicht besseren Wahlergebnissen verbunden.In the last decade, digital tools have become central elements of electoral campaigns. This trend might have been amplified in 2021, as the possibilities for personal interactions were limited due to the severe restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about whether the use of digital tools pays off on election day. Thus, this research note asks to what extent Bundestag candidates used digital tools in the past federal elections and whether the activities are associated with better election results in 2021. Analyses of the candidate surveys of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) indicate that constituency candidates increasingly use digital campaigning. This trend was not boosted by the 2021 election. Instead, a 'natural' increase is observable. Moreover, using a personal website or blog is associated with slightly better election results

Conceptualizing and measuring party-interest group relationships

Relationships between political parties and interest groups form structures that enable and constrain political action. Yet there is a lack of consensus on what ‘party-group relationships’ means. We propose a conceptualization focusing on ties as means for structured interaction, which is different from sharing or transfer of resources and ideological kinship. Our conceptual discussion suggests that organizational ties form a single yet hierarchical scale of strength: groups that have many formal ties with particular parties would also have weaker ties with these parties, but not vice versa. To validate our conceptual map, we furthermore check whether the distinction between organizational ties, resource sharing/provision and ideological kinship holds empirically. We explore our expectations by means of novel interest group survey data from seven mature democracies. The results of our scaling analysis provide support for our predictions and have multiple implications for future research on the causes and effects of party-group relationships

Party organization and satisfaction with democracy: inside the blackbox of linkage

This article investigates the way in which party organizational resources and processes may affect perceptions of democracy, looking at the impact of parties’ top-down communication mechanisms and bottom-up internal processes. Our examination breaks new ground by pairing party organizational data from the Political Party Database (PPDB) with individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), and shows clear evidence of the link between parties’ organizational resource capacity and their ability to inspire satisfaction with democracy (the 'top-down' path from party organization to democratic evaluations). However, it does not appear that the degree of intra-party democracy practised (the 'bottom-up' path) has a similar impact. Overall, these results provide substantial evidence for the importance of party organization and agency in fostering the popular legitimacy of democratic political systems