How to Measure Party Institutionalization: Expanding the PPDB to Asia

Abstract

In this paper, we try to develop the indexes to measure the institutionalization of party organization beyond the scope of Western countries. Political parties in advanced industrial democracies have experienced big transformations since the end of WWII. In sum, one type of party has declined, and another has prospered. Some researchers try to capture the ebb and flow from the perspective of party institutionalization. According to this line of research, the distinction between internal and external institutionalization of political parties is usually made. Although the endeavor to quantify the degree of internal institutionalization is scarce, some research operationalizes it as ‘routinization’ of party internal life, which can be judged by the existence of formal rules. The Political Party Database (PPDB) contains over 300 variables which codify many aspects of party organizations based on party statutes. By exploiting the comprehensiveness of PPDB, we compose the Structures Index and the Party Decisions Index to measure the internal institutionalization, by mainly counting the number of formal rules. After that, we test their validity by both quantitative and qualitative ways. We use the Japanese case to examine whether the outcomes drawn from the regression analyses of PPDB countries are supported. Our indexes pass the tests by satisfactory results. This attempt will show how far our indexes can travel, and indicate the extent to which the PPDB variables and coding are useful for comparing important organizational similarities and differences.