What can political parties do to involve more women in party politics?

In most political parties the majority of members are men, which has implications for achieving equal representation at all levels of politics. Aldo F. Ponce, Susan E. Scarrow and Susan Achury find that this gender gap varies considerably between parties, and that having more women MPs helps to increase women’s participation at the grassroots level

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 ..

Intra-party decision-making in contemporary Europe: improving representation or ruling with empty shells?

Political observers agree that parties in European parliamentary democracies are more likely than previously to give party members opportunities to vote in decisions about party policies or personnel. Observers are less agreed about the implications of these apparent procedural trends. Some, including Peter Mair, saw them as evidence of the hollowing-out of party democracies; others have seen them as enhancing citizens’ opportunities for meaningful political participation. Because this is ultimately an empirical question as well as a normative one, these radically conflicting interpretations make it crucial to examine which interpretation is best supported by usage to date This is the task we undertake in this article. We use data from the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) to investigate the extent to which parties in 26 European countries have adopted and employed intra-party ballots. We also ask whether there is evidence that such procedures are changing intra-party relationships. We find that balloting of party members is indeed widely used, but it is by no means universal. We find much less support for the implication that such ballots are associated with less competitive contests, or that the new devices are generally used in ways that devalue party-member bonds

Liberal market economies, business, and political finance: Britain under New Labour

The extent and nature of business financing of parties is an important feature of political finance. Britain’s transparent and permissive regulatory system provides an excellent opportunity to study business financing of parties. Business donations have been very important to the Conservative party over the last decade, and of only marginal importance to Labour. Unlike other Conservative contributors, business donors are more likely to contribute when the party is popular. In contrast to the previous period of Conservative government, the biggest British businesses tended to abstain from political finance under New Labour. However, their bias towards the Conservatives is affected by the party’s popularity and the closeness of an election. Britain shares the political importance of business financing of parties and its mixture of ideological and pragmatic motivations with other liberal market economies. However, in Britain the bias towards the right is much stronger and the role of big business more marginal

Party rules, party resources, and the politics of parliamentary democracies: how parties organize in the 21st Century

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) 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 paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focussing 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 datasets. 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: i.e., 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 in the forms that this democratization takes

Explaining Institutional Change: Why Elected Politicians Implement Direct Democracy

In existing models of direct democratic institutions, the median voter benefits, but representative politicians are harmed since their policy choices can be overridden. This is a puzzle, since representative politicians were instrumental in creating these institutions. I build a model of direct democracy that explains why a representative might benefit from tying his or her own hands in this way. The key features are (1) that voters are uncertain about their representative's preferences; (2) that direct and representative elections are complementary ways for voters to control outcomes. The model shows that some politicians benefit from the introduction of direct democracy, since they are more likely to survive representative elections: direct democracy credibly prevents politicians from realising extreme outcomes. Historical evidence from the introduction of the initiative, referendum and recall in America broadly supports the theory, which also explains two empirical results that have puzzled scholars: legislators are trusted less, but reelected more, in US states with direct democracy. I conclude by discussing the potential for incomplete information and signaling models to improve our understanding of institutional change more generally

The Politics of Retrospective Justice in Germany & the Czech Republic. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 05.4, 1994

Ongoing German and Czech efforts to confront legacies of injustice in their recent pasts provides opportunity to examine policies of retrospective justice adopted from where there is no threat of old elites with residual power. Instead of evoking existing explanations of these measures that concentrate on normative issues, the role of former dissidents, or mode of transition, this account focuses on the importance of the character and structure of the political representation in post-Communist regimes in general, and in the German and Czech successor regimes in particular