Abstract
The ‘time factor’ has not been systematically considered in cross-national studies on party organizations. Relying on the largest dataset to date on party organizations, namely the Political Party Database Project (PPDB), the article tests the impact of time as a two-level variable (duration of democracy and age of parties) on parties’ organizational strength in new and established democracies. We add original data from three Latin American countries to the nineteen countries covered by the first PPDB database (132 parties overall). The results suggest that parties in established democracies have less members and more money than those of newer democracies. Among the latter, the greater capacity for mass mobilization produces stronger parties—as in Latin America—compared to the Eastern European countries. The findings challenge the traditional view of the exceptional weakness of Latin American parties and point to the importance of time as a multilevel variable: besides the national context, the “ancestral” party origin in previous regimes have a large impact on organizational strength.
Highlights
The ‘time factor’ has not been systematically considered in cross-national studies on party organizations
Assuming that it takes time to build strong organizations (Panebianco, 1988; Tavits, 2013), we ask: are the parties in newer democracies weaker than the parties in established democracies? Are there substantial differences between the parties in Latin America and in other regions? After controlling for the national level, would the time variable have a substantial impact on organizational strength at the party level— “time after time”? These research questions are answered by using strategies and indicators that can 'travel' in cross-national and cross-regional comparisons, developed by the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) (Scarrow, Webb, and Poguntke, 2017)
We gathered official data on national party membership and the finance of national parties’ head offices provided by the parties themselves or by the electoral control bodies. Both party membership and party income data are from the period 2011-2014, and we calculate the averages for each party and country14
Summary
Why should we care about party organizational strength? Strong parties are especially important for new democracies (Van Biezen, 2003; Tavits, 2012) and for the institutionalization of party systems (Mainwaring and Torcal, 2006). For the purpose of this analysis, we argue that the “time factor” is a multilevel variable and must be conceptualized and measured systematically, in both contextual (national) and party levels In theoretical terms, this approach is based on Panebianco‘s (1988) concept that variations in party organizations usually respond to two major (and non-excluding) factors: (1) party elites make important organizational choices based on a “bounded rationality,” limited by the perceptions about the environment; (2) to a biological organism, party organizations usually assume several conformations in each stage of their development (or lifetime), in face of different life-cycle dilemmas The empirical connections between time and party strength have remained virtually unexplored until now (Harmel and Janda, 1994; Dix, 1992; Harmel, Svasand, and Mjelde, 2016)
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