Political Party Database Project: How Parties Shape Democracy

In a period of economic crises and rapidly changing communication opportunities traditional political actors have faced increasing challenges to their legitimacy. Yet despite these changes, political parties remain key actors in parliamentary democracies. They channel political recruitment, structure political choices, and offer opportunities for meaningful political participation. Because of this, it is vital to understand how parties' structures and resources shape democratic life. Unfortunately, the comparative study of political parties as organizational actors has been held back by the lack of systematically-collected cross-national data, and by the lack of standard vocabulary for conceptualizing and testing the impact of party resources and structures.

The Political Party Database Project aims to fill both gaps. Our multi-national research team is collecting data on 138 parties in 19 countries in order to conduct theory-driven tests of competing scholarly claims about the impact of party organizational variation. Our investigations include examination of the relationships between party resources and their links to society and between party rules and social representation. We are also assessing the impact of specific candidate-selection procedures on both descriptive representation and electoral success. This proposal requests funds to help us complete our analyses for publication, and to enable us to use our initial data as the first installment in a new public database on party organization. This regularly-updated database will be an on-going resource for students of politics as well as for reformers seeking to improve representation and increase political participation. The three Principal Investigators (respectively based in UK, USA and Germany) for this proposal will jointly coordinate team efforts to collect and update party data, to prepare manuscripts for publication, and to publicize findings and the new data resources to academic audiences, political practitioners and the media.

Who will benefit from this research?

Given the project's objectives of understanding changing party structures, resources and links to state and society, the scope for external impact on non-academic practitioners and users is considerable. For instance, policy-makers and others will be able to use the database to identify and profit from the experiences of parties which have implemented changes such as internal primaries or quotas for ethnic minority candidates. Potential beneficiaries include the parties themselves and the democracy-promoting organizations which have been working to strengthen political parties in developing democracies, including USAID, IFES (International Foundation for Electoral Systems), GRECO (Group of States Against Corruption), International IDEA (International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance), the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Hansard Society (UK), the German Parteienstiftungen, and the Netherlands Institute of Multiparty Politics. These organizations often look to established democracies to understand how certain mechanisms have operated within stable polities. The democracy-promoting value of the database should grow as we add more (and mostly newer) democracies to our data collection effort (note that since the ORA application was submitted earlier this year we have been approached by specialists on parties in South East Asia and Latin America who wish to join the project). In short, we expect that our own analyses and the Party Organization Database itself will be highly useful for party officials, public interest groups and think-tanks, and for citizens seeking to address emerging gulfs between political parties and those they claim to represent.

How will they benefit?

This project will enhance public understanding of the impact of political parties' resources and structures, which is an increasingly important project in an era of growing popular distaste for parties (Dalton and Weldon 2005). In response to this public disaffection, policy-makers have made varied attempts to re-engage citizens and bolster support for political processes. Many of these responses limit the role of political parties, whether by introducing non-partisan decision structures (e.g., citizen juries, referendums), by restricting parties' access to some types of resources (e.g., imposing party finance restrictions), or by regulating party decision-mechanisms (e.g., changing candidate selection rules). In addition, parties have responded by altering their own internal structures. Yet as promising as some of these solutions may seem to their advocates, so far there is little systematic study of which mechanisms really reduce gaps between parties and their constituents. The analyses that we are producing for this project will contribute to these debates about how best to strengthen party-based representative democracies. For instance, we will investigate whether high levels of state finance inevitably erode party links to social groups, under what circumstances the expansion of women's participation within parties leads to expanded female participation in legislatures, and how organizational resources affect and reflect shifting power balances between professionalized legislatures, professionalized extra-parliamentary parties, and 'presidentialized' party leaders.