Party Organizational Strength Research Articles

A jelenlét nélküli jelen(lét) – a hazai pártszervezetek fejlettségének területi különbségei

Numerous studies draw a direct link between party institutionalization and democratic (re) consolidation. The level of organization of a given political movement can easily determine their subsequent electoral performance. Not just in Hungary, but within the wider Central-Eastern-European region, accessing data on party membership, branch offices, etc., is extremely challenging, therefore concluding or discovering party organizational strength is a critical research area. In this study I am making a bold attempt to unveil the social embeddedness of the most important political parties from the 2014 general elections to the latest EP elections (2019), by using the polling station table-seater delegates` presence as an indicator of local party presence itself. I assume that, if a given party is not able to delegate a single person to a certain polling station, they have no operating organizations at the grassroots level, therefore it indicates their lack of localization and extensive network. With simple quantitative methodologies, I was also seeking the relationship between electoral performance and party organizational presence locally.

Islamist parties, intraparty organizational dynamics, and moderation as strategic behaviour

ABSTRACT This paper highlights the intraparty institutional dynamics at play that influence Islamist party moderation and its manifest behaviour and ideology. We conceive of moderation as a strategically contingent act that is best explained by intraparty realities operating within particular political dynamics. This shifts the focus from the inclusion/moderation process debate and towards the discussion of party organizational capacity and social movement ties. We provide several propositions about party organizational strength, social movement linkages, and ideological legacy as determinants of Islamist party behaviour. Observations across a variety of cases support these propositions and the salience of a strategic behavioural approach to Islamist party moderation.

The Geography of Citizenship Practice: How the Poor Engage the State in Rural and Urban India

When and why do poor citizens expect the state to respond to their claims, and how do those expectations shape citizenship practice? Drawing on survey and qualitative research in northern India, our study reveals an expectations gap that complicates widely held views of the urban core versus the rural periphery. The urban poor residing in slums are dramatically less likely to believe that they will get a direct response from an official compared to similarly poor rural residents. Slum residents are also significantly more likely than villagers to report the presence of political brokers, who create mediated channels for claim-making. Reflecting on these patterns, we develop a place-based theory to explain sub-national variation in citizen-state engagement. We focus in the northern Indian context on three interrelated factors that shape the local terrain for citizenship practice: the greater visibility of social welfare provision in villages compared to slums; the greater depth of rural decentralization; and the greater strength of urban party organizations. Extending beyond northern India, we propose an analytical framework for the study of citizenship that examines how citizens’ local experiences of state institutions influence sub-national patterns of participation.

El PT de Brasil: un partido de trabajadores sin trabajadores

La fragmentación del sistema partidista brasileño ha sido señalada como un gran problema para el funcionamiento del sistema político y para la gobernabilidad. Sin embargo, poco se dice sobre cómo la interacción competitiva entre los partidos políticos diferentes entre si mismos afecta la composición social de los mismos y el cambio de perfil dentro de las agremiaciones políticas. Así, intentamos establecer la relación entre la fuerza organizacional de los partidos, la intereción entre ellos y la capacidad de los mismos en ofrecer espacio para candidaturas menos competitivas socialmente. La hipótesis es que cuanto mayor es la fuerza organizacional, mayor es la capacidad del partido en elegir un grupo poco inserto en la esfera representativa, los trabajadores. Los datos apuntan que el Partido de los Trabajadores (pt) es el principal responsable de la inserción de este grupo representativo en la Cámara de Diputados brasileña. Pero a lo largo de las elecciones, éste pierde capacidad de insertar la categoría que carga en su nombre. A partir del análisis de cinco elecciones nacionales con datos proporcionados por el Tribunal Superior Electoral, mostramos que parte de esta pérdida se refiere a la fragmentación del sistema partidista en el período 1998 a 2014.

Time after time: party organizational strength in new and old democracies

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.

Reconciling Legal-Institutional and Behavioral Perspectives on Voter Turnout: Theory and Evidence from Pennsylvania, 1876–1948

AbstractFoundational studies in political science endeavored to explain the dynamics of voter turnout in America over time. Two theories, one focused on legal-institutional factors and the other on behavioral elements such as party mobilization strategies, were born from the need to account for temporal fluctuations in aggregate voter turnout. A comprehensive test of these competing theories has been hindered by the fact that reliable measures of the behavioral factors driving turnout have proven elusive. In this article, I develop and test an interactive theory of voter turnout that focuses on the impact of legal-institutional barriers to the franchise conditional on party organizational strength and mobilization efforts. To this end, I use data on the circulation of party-sponsored newspapers, coupled with information on the spread of voter registration requirements, to capture the effects of both behavioral and legal-institutional factors in Pennsylvania between 1876 and 1948. My results offer modest empirical support for an interactive theory of aggregate voter turnout. In isolation, however, the effects of behavioral factors are quite limited. On the contrary, legal-institutional variables exert a sizable impact on voter turnout in the state. Contrary to other recent work on the subject, careful analysis of the Pennsylvania case therefore provides a great deal of evidence in favor of legal-institutional accounts of the changes in aggregate voter turnout that were witnessed at the beginning of the twentieth century while demonstrating that behavioral factors, such as the decline of the partisan press, served to enhance the deleterious effects of legal reforms on turnout.

Party organizational strength and technological capacity

In their study of the state-level party organizations in the US, Cotter et al. (1984) introduce a theory of party organizational strength, arguing that the strongest parties exhibit both organizational complexity and programmatic capacity. In the present era, organizational complexity and programmatic capacity still emerge as the primary dimensions of party organizational strength, but this research demonstrates the importance of new indicators of party technological capacity to our understanding of party effectiveness in the early 21st century. In particular, parties that hire technologically-oriented staff are best equipped to carry out party programmatic activities, as they have the capacity to conduct voter mobilization programs and sophisticated data analytics in an online environment. Using data from a 2011 survey of the state party organizations in the US, this research shows that party organizational strength and party technological capacity are interrelated and overlapping concepts and are essential to understanding the parties’ programmatic and voter outreach capabilities.

Tavits, Margit. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization (review)

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 580 people believed, others colluded, and still others resisted, but this is true, he argues, of ‘any power regime’. In order to understand the specificities of state socialism, it is necessary to explore ‘people’s various interactions, and their unexpected, surprising, and often contradictory outcomes, unfolding within the various social contexts organized, accepted, or even encouraged by the regime itself’ (p. 248). The strongest chapters in this collection take up Poenaru’s challenge to resist dichotomy. Socialist Escapes is a very welcome addition to a growing literature on tourism, leisure and the pleasures and challenges of daily life under Communism. Department of History Anne E. Gorsuch University of British Columbia Tavits, Margit. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2013. viii + 289 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £19.99: $32.99 (paperback). Scholars of party politics in Central and Eastern Europe have tended to downplay the importance of party organization. Members and an extensive network of party branches seemed so passé, so twentieth-century. Not only did notable authorities such as Attila Ágh, Petr Kopecký, Paul Lewis, Peter Mair and Ingrid van Biezen argue that new parties in the region were unlikely to build organizational structures, but they tapped into the conventional wisdom that parties in the new democracies did not need them. In her pioneering and path-breaking study Margit Tavits argues cogently against this view, showing that strong party organization really does matter for party success, longevity and durability. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization focuses on three components of party organization: organizational extensiveness (i.e. the number of local branches), membership size and activism and the professionalization of the central organization (i.e. the size of the central-office paid staff). Tavits employs a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods to great effect: there is hard core number-crunching using some sophisticated statistical approaches, but this is combined with detailed studies of parties in the four countries at the heart of her study: Estonia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. By looking in detail at the contrasting fortunes of parties through paired comparisons and narratives, she shows that organizational strength enhances parties’ chances of electoral success and survival. She not only highlights the relationship, but seeks to tease out the mechanisms which make this happen. Tavits points out that if a member of parliament belongs to a party with a strong organization not only can he/she rely on the party’s REVIEWS 581 reputation and resources to get reelected, but also the stronger the party the more ‘credible and effective is its threat to withdraw the electoral benefits (i.e. expel or demote the legislator) if a legislator undermines party unity’ (p. 10). Tavits takes the study of party organization one step further by then asking, given the positive effects of party organizational strength, why do only some parties build strong organizations? She notes that ‘[p]arty leaders face a nontrivial dilemma: by strengthening their party organization on the ground in different electoral districts, they potentially improve its electability, and possible survival chances. However, they simultaneously risk losing intraparty power to the organizationally strong subunits’ (p. 151). Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization is an outstanding book, but two criticisms deserve to be levelled. Tavits is making a case for the importance of party organization across Central and Eastern Europe, but are her four cases the best to explore the hypotheses and illustrate the arguments? A case could be made that Bulgaria might have been worth looking at because of the striking variation between one side of the spectrum dominated by one party since 1989 and the other side which has shown significant churn. Equally, the case of Slovakia illustrates that even with well-developed party organizations some parties like the Communist-successor Party of the Democratic Left and Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia have perished. In neither case does Tavits’s distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ leadership style help explain the life-cycles of these parties, although to be fair, her overall stress on the role of agency does seem to hold the key to the fate of these...

Organizing for Success: Party Organizational Strength and Electoral Performance in Postcommunist Europe

This article explores the effects of party organizational strength on party success and survival in the new postcommunist democracies. Organizational strength is defined as extensive network of branch offices, large membership, and professional staff. Using quantitative information on parties in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland, the study shows that strong organization helps parties increase their vote share significantly and steadily. Focused comparisons of “most similar” parties with different electoral performance from Estonia and the Czech Republic further exemplify the significant independent role that organizational strength plays in helping parties succeed electorally.

Party organizational strength and party unity in post-communist Europe

The existing comparative literature focuses on political institutions to explain party unity in parliament, and largely ignores the role of party characteristics in this process. This study argues that the strength of political party organization directly and independently influences the level of party unity. Organizational strength makes the party a valuable asset to individual legislators, thus increasing their willingness to be disciplined. Therefore, parties with strong organizations are likely to be more unified in parliament than those with weak organizations. I find support for this argument with data from four post-communist democracies: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland. Narratives suggest that the proposed causal mechanism is plausible.

The Dynamic Relationship between State Party Organizational Strength and Electoral Outcomes

The empirical relationship between party organizational strength and electoral outcomes has important implications for our understanding of democratic political systems, as well as practical implications for party officials. I explore this relationship using fundraising from private sources as a measure of state party organizational strength, and electoral outcomes for state legislature in 43 states during the 2002-2008 election cycles. I find that contributions to state party committees both affect seats won in elections for state legislature and are affected by the share of seats currently held. Simulations show that various exogenous events that might improve the fortunes of a state party have different short and longer term consequences for both contributions and seat shares. The most cost-effective tactic for improving the fortunes of a minority party is likely to be recruiting a single, attractive candidate for statewide office.

Divisive Primaries: Party Organizations, Ideological Groups, and the Battle over Party Purity

Of the many vital functions that political parties serve in American democracy, selecting candidates for public office is near the top of the list. Giovanni Sartori (1976) cites this purpose as their chief defining element—claiming that, at a minimum, a party is a “political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office” (64). Moreover, understanding how parties vet, groom, select, and promote candidates is central to empirically evaluating the strength of political party organizations, the quality of elected policymakers, and ultimately the effectiveness of government. For scholars of American politics, this has led to fruitful lines of research on the processes that the Democratic and Republican Parties use to select their candidates—namely the conventions, primaries, and caucuses that nominate individuals for various federal, state, and local offices. For example, many have investigated the effects of reforms to the presidential nomination process in the early 1970s (Aldrich 1993; Hagen and Mayer 2000; Reiter 1985; Wayne 2000), some arguing that it took power of choosing candidates away from the party organizations and towards other institutions like the press, interest groups, and small ideological factions (Polsby 1983) with potentially negative consequences for governance.

Delegating Direct Democracy: Interparty Legislative Competition and the Adoption of the Initiative in the American States

Between 1898 and 1918, voters in 20 American states adopted constitutional amendments granting citizens the power of the initiative. The embrace of direct democracy by voters invites inquiry into why some state legislatures opted to delegate to citizens the power of the initiative, while others did not. Drawing on an original data set, this article uses Event History Analysis hazard models to explain the puzzle of why legislatures might devolve institutional power to citizens. Our longitudinal, macrolevel analysis of socioeconomic and political forces reveals that political considerations—interparty legislative competition, party organizational strength, and third parties—are the most powerful predictors of a legislature's decision to refer the initiative to the ballot. Although several of our findings comport with the conventional wisdom explaining the adoption of the initiative during the Progressive Era, others are surprising, offering us new theoretical insights into why and when legislative bodies might be willing to divest themselves of their institutional power.

Florida: Party Activists in a Two-Party System

This article examines the background characteristics of Democratic and Republican party activists, their issue and ideological preferences, patterns of party factionalism, organizational strength and patterns of activity within parties at the county level. The findings demonstrate that underlying Florida’s competitive party system are two sets of ideologically polarized and active party activists. While signs of internal party factionalism have not completely disappeared from Florida’s political parties, at the beginning of the twenty-first century Florida’s party system and party organizations are a far cry from the multifactional chaos that once characterized the old one-party or no party-system in Florida.

Partisan Change in Southern Legislatures, 1946-95

What accounts for partisan change in southern legislatures between 1946 and 1995? I draw my hypotheses from general theories of partisan change and tailor them to the South based on history and previous research to explain the variance in southern Republican legislative strength. I estimate a pooled time series analysis of the eleven former Confederate states to test the path model. The model uses Democratic elite liberalism as an endogenous variable in order to determine the overall effect of several important independent variables including black population, black political influence, urbanization, white northern migration, and wealth. Determinants of state legislative partisan change include the following: secular forces such as wealth, urbanization, and migration; political forces such as presidential midterm losses, party organizational strength, and political scandal; party issue stances on race and general party ideology; changes in national party preferences that precede change at lower levels; and finally, rules governing the structure of political opportunity such as reapportionment and participation.

Presidential Address: Southern Parties in State and Nation

One-half century ago, V. 0. Key, Jr., published his masterpiece, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key's analysis of the failure of democracy in the South must count as one of the great achievements of our discipline. His explanation is rich and complex. Certainly the anti-liberal basis of society in the midtwentieth-century South was crucial-"Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro," he wrote (1984[1949], 5). But it was not only that the South was an illiberal society, what really mattered was that the South was also non-democratic. The failure of democracy can be traced to the absence of party competition and, according to Key, the consequent failure of a coherent and organized party system to emerge. His explanation is that the lack of organized partisan competition to win the support of the great body of the people, as James Madison might have put it, by itself accounts for the failure of democracy. In this account, therefore, if only there was regularized competition, there would be organized parties, and if only there were at least two organized political parties, democracy would inevitably follow. A cottage industry then arose to study, first, the possibility of partisan realignment in the South (e.g., Converse 1966; Phillips 1970), subsequently it sought to assess the inroads Republicans were making in their ability to compete in the South (e.g., Beck 1977; Black and Black 1987), and most recently that industry turned to examine the culmination of the process, ending with a fully competitive (perhaps even dominant) GOP in the South (e.g., Aistrup 1996; Black 1998; Lamis 1990). The attraction of this stream of research is understandable. These are scholars considering whether trends are pointing toward sustained, organized partisan competition. If that were to be so, we would then conclude that the full flowering of democracy would at last be expected to appear in the South.

Latin America's parties

Latin America’s Parties Jonathan Hartlyn (bio) Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America. Edited by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully. Stanford University Press, 1995. 578 pp. This book represents a major step forward in the analysis of parties and party systems in Latin America, enriching the debate enormously. Introductory and concluding chapters by the coeditors make an important general argument, raise issues for further research, and place the country cases in a coherent comparative framework. In between, the 12 country studies provide a wealth of information; written by a mix of senior and junior scholars, the chapters are of uniformly high quality. Mainwaring and Scully argue that “the critical difference among Latin American party systems is whether or not a competitive party system is institutionalized” (p. 1). For them, a strong, institutionalized party system is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for consolidating democracy and for governing effectively. I agree, although I believe that they have not considered all the relevant issues regarding institutionalization here. Their conclusion briefly reviews the impact on parties and party systems of several contemporary changes in the region. These include the region’s wave of democratization, severe economic crisis, the emergence of antistatist economic policies, the questioning of the traditional Left in the wake of the Soviet collapse, and the impact of the mass media and other technological changes on campaigns and party organizational strength. The editors’ focus on party institutionalization leads them to reject categorizing countries by the traditional criterion of the number of parties. To determine party institutionalization, Mainwaring and Scully combine four criteria: regularity of party competition (low electoral volatility); stability of parties’ roots in society; legitimacy accorded parties and elections; and the existence of solid party organizations independent of individual leaders. On the basis of these criteria, the 12 country cases are divided into “institutionalized party systems,” “inchoate party systems,” and an intermediate and somewhat residual category, “hegemonic party systems in transition.” The “institutionalized party systems” include six countries that differ in terms of the longevity of their parties, the types of parties and party systems that they have, the history and nature of their democratic experiences, and their evolution subsequent to the book’s publication. Chile (chapter by Timothy Scully) and Uruguay (Luis González), both with deeply rooted parties of long standing and a long history of [End Page 174] democracy, but also both victims of military takeovers in the 1970s, are naturally located here. Scully focuses principally on elements of continuity, whereas González stresses the challenges of change. Colombia (Ronald Archer), with traditional parties reaching back into the nineteenth century, is often superficially lumped together with Venezuela (Miriam Kornblith and Daniel Levine) because both experienced transitions to democracy in the late 1950s and did not experience military breakdowns in the 1970s. Not in this book. Instead, the chapters here show that the history and nature of the major parties, their organization, and their links to both state and society have varied greatly across the two countries, with profound implications for the kinds of problems of governance and democracy that each has experienced. The chapter on Venezuela was completed prior to the 1993 presidential elections, which saw the emergence of new political forces and a dramatic fall in the vote for the two parties that symbolized the country’s institutionalized party system. Yet the chapter’s discussion of the challenges of economic scarcity; of the perceived “suffocation” of civil society by the two excessively centralized, pragmatic, and corrupt political parties; and of the military’s discontent make this outcome understandable. Also included is the often overlooked case of Costa Rica (Deborah Yashar), the only unequivocally successful democracy in the region since the early 1950s. James McGuire’s chapter on Argentina analyzes the “movementist tendencies” of the major parties, especially the Peronists, and the weakness of the ties between class actors and the parties, two features that call into question the extent to which Argentina falls into the “institutionalized” category. The two hegemonic party systems in transition are Mexico and Paraguay. Ann Craig and Wayne Cornelius place in their proper context societal dynamics and the myriad electoral-rule changes enacted by Mexico’s hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary...

Party Organizational Strength and Public Support for Parties

Theory: Theories of party organizational resurgence suggest that the strength of party organizations counteracts weakness and decline in other portions of the party system. Hypotheses: Higher levels of total party organizational strength in an area lead to more supportive attitudes toward political parties as institutions. Consistent with Progressive fears of concentrated power, an imbalance in the organizational strength of the two parties in an area fosters more critical attitudes toward parties. Methods: NES survey data and county party organizational strength data from the Party Transformation Study are used in ordinary least squares and logit analysis to test three models of the relationship between party strength and public support toward parties. Results: Strong party organizations contribute to public support for parties, particularly when strength is not exercised by one party alone. Total party strength is significantly related to public support only in a limited pooled analysis, but the organizational strength gap between the two parties is significantly related to public support as expected and is robust across several alternative measures of perceived party performance.

Measuring Party Organization in the United States

Debate about the decline and revival of American political parties proceeds unabated in political science. Related to this debate is the attempt to link electoral outcomes with party organizational activity. A continuing impediment to resolving this conflict is the asymmetry in our ability to measure the two central concepts. While standard measures of electoral success and partisan competition abound, measures of party organization are less abundant. Although the methods introduced by the authors of the Party Transformation Study (PTS) for measuring party organizational strength have been influential, their survey-based technique has greater utility for some purposes than for others. We argue for the use of state party archives as a means for gathering the data necessary for building appropriate measures of party organization. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by linking data gathered in a pilot study of three such archives to the PTS framework.

The Continuing Search for Party Influence in Congress: A View from the Committees

The search for party influence in the U.S. Congress has focused on floor voting patterns. By shifting the focus of attention to the committee setting, this paper shows that previous measures of party influence have generally underestimated the strength of parties in Congress and have invariably presented a simplified version of their activity. Measures of party conflict, unity, and success in four House committees show that, in the differentiated committee system, parties structure voting differently across decision-making environments and are stronger than on the floor. In the legislative environment of the 1980s, voting patterns in all committees and on the floor converged toward partisanship, even as electoral and organizational indicators of party remained relatively weak. For nearly two decades the debate over whether parties are in decline or in resurgence has raged in political science. It focuses primarily on the increase in partisan independence in the electorate, weakened ties among partisans, and the relative strength and weakness of party organizations and nonparty political associations, such as political action committees and candidate-centered campaigns. At the periphery of this debate, but central to the issue, stands the question of party in government. In this paper, I apply common measures of party strength in Congress, previously used to examine floor roll-call voting, to the committee setting. Shifting attention from floor activity to committees highlights the complexity of legislative parties, showing that party structures behavior differently across institutional settings. Ultimately, the internal structure of the