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

Governance, Europarties and the challenge of democratic representation in the EU: A case study of the Party of European Socialists

Europarties are at the centre of the potential democratisation of European governance and their development is key to supranational representation. The authors will address the more general question of why Europarties have not so far shaped significantly European governance and policy by focusing on one of the main Europarties-the Party of European Socialists (PES). This article tests a number of claims about the factors accounting for weak Europarty influence over European Union (EU) governance. In this article, the authors discuss these claims by considering successively three complementary interrelated dimensions: the constraints placed upon the social democratic family by the EU institutional environment, the PES socio-economic policy offer and the collective action problem in relation to fighting European elections as a unified party on a unified platform. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe