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The recent success of new movement parties in Europe brought the attention of party politics scholars to this hybrid party type. There are still many under-analysed theoretical and empirical aspects related to their organization and this article aims to show that despite sharing older movement parties' traits, these 'new' movement parties introduce for the first time a unique combination of plebiscitarian intra-party democracy and party leadership empowerment. The implications of these findings are twofold: first, despite promoting intra-party democracy mainly through new digital tools, the main function of party membership is that of cheerleading; second, the leadership exercises strict control over the organization, thus restricting bottom-up 'voice' from the rank-and-file. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a party's organizational structure affect its chances of becoming a national party? While existing explanations of party nationalization focus on country-level institutional and societal variables, we argue that aspects of party organization such as the degree of centralization of authority, ideological unity and leadership factionalism also matter. By bringing the analysis to the party level, this article provides a multilevel analysis of institutional and party organization variables and disentangles the effect of each set of influences. We use original data on party organization and party nationalization for 142 parties across twenty European countries. This research contributes to the literature on nationalization and party development by advancing organizational strategies which parties could adopt in different social and institutional environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the postcommunist period, political parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had to convincingly demonstrate that they are a vital part of a functioning democratic society. Well-developed intraparty democracy (IPD) is one way of accomplishing this. By asking what factors are relevant to an explanation of IPD formation, we present an analytical framework in which the formation of IPD can be investigated and explore the patterns of IPD and their determinants. We draw on a newly constructed data set based on standardized content analysis, including 129 party statutes from 14 major political parties from Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia between 1989 and 2011. Relying on unit fixed-effects regression approaches, our analyses suggest that especially imperatives related to party origin and Europeanization have important implications for the formation of IPD within CEE parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last three decades a great deal of research has been carried out in an attempt to explain the electoral performance of radical right parties in Europe. Most approaches concentrate on demand-side determinants and have some limitations. We compensate for these shortcomings and focus on the context of party competition and supply-side determinants (consistency of ideological discourse, functioning party propaganda, the continuity of the leader in office and strong party organization) to explain the electoral success of radical right parties in post-communist Europe. We conducted our analysis at party level in nine radical right parties in four countries from Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania) between 1990 and 2014. The bivariate and multivariate (ordinal logistic regression) analyses draw on unique data collected from primary and secondary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party cohesion is a crucial aspect of parliamentary systems, and it varies across time, parties and systems. To explain these variations, scholars have set forth the influence of macro-level and individual-level factors. Although party-level factors have also been considered, the role of party family has been overlooked. This research seeks to fill this gap. To this end, I focus on one dimension of cohesion: the extent to which legislators have internalized the norm of party loyalty. The concept of party family permits to investigate the effect of party origin and party ideology beyond a policy-based approach and left-right dimension. Using attitudinal data of 829 parliamentarians elected in 14 European national assemblies, the analysis uncovers a party family effect, particularly in the green and radical right parties. The results suggest that a greater attention should be directed towards party family as a determinant factor of legislative cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central Eastern European party politics offers a good example of the trend towards centralizing internal party decision making, as well as encouraging strong personalities in the role of party leader. This trend is visible in all three major spheres of party activity: election campaigning, the internal organization of parties, and governmental politics. This paper focusses on the party systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia to demonstrate that there are actually two processes of presidentialization that occur in party politics. On the one hand, the role of the leader is gaining importance in more traditional, well-established parties such as the Civic and Social Democrats in the Czech Republic and Fidesz in Hungary. On the other hand, perhaps an even clearer presidentialization process is evident in the emergence of new protest parties focussed around strong personalities that often make no attempt to establish and maintain a more complex internal party organization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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A recurring problem in comparative politics is determining the extent to which models derived in one setting can be transferred directly to other settings. The original cartel party thesis was meant to account for developments that were beginning to be observed in the established democracies of western Europe in the 1990s. Many of the contemporary conditions that appeared to be driving those developments are to be found in other places, but of course preceded by quite different historical trajectories. The articles on parties and interest groups that are published in this special issue of Party Politics provide an important window on the question of how much historical processes can be compressed, or indeed of whether institutions and practices like the cartel party can be adopted (or to what extent they can be adapted) to new settings, irrespective of historical differences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using internal party documents and semi-structured interviews with over 200 activists of the Freedom Party of Austria, this article examines (anticipatory) adaptation in the intra-party and governmental arenas when this right-wing populist party switched its primary goal from populist vote maximization to office. It suggests such parties’ success will owe much to their leaderships’ capacity to identify and implement strategies and behaviours consonant with their new primary goal and to deal effectively with the inescapable tensions caused by the transition to incumbency. The article demonstrates how the FPÖ’s failures in these respects resulted in an own goal. Yet right-wing populists’ experience of incumbency is not necessarily doomed to failure. Agency remains an important determinant of success. Indeed, it appears supply-side factors may well be far better at explaining rapid shifts in the fortunes of such parties than the still predominantly demand-side approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Otto Kirchheimer's well-known diagnosis of 'catch-all' partism in Western Europe rests on an implicit causal argument about the consequences of social change for political parties. This article takes up the causal story underlying Kirchheimer's account and traces its implications for a specific, though central, party activity: campaigning. As Kirchheimer discerned, the transformation of advanced industrial societies radically altered the context of parties' strategic decision-making. In the area of election campaigning, parties confronted heightened incentives to approach the electorate with 'persuasive' rather than more traditional 'mobilizing' appeals and developed a greatly increased demand for reliable information about voter preferences. These shifts, in turn, had consequences for party organization, promoting the centralization and marginalization of individual members Kirchheimer associates with the catch-all party type. Through the lens of campaign change, then, we can observe the causal processes that unite the diverse features Kirchheimer links to his catch-all party -- although our attention is also drawn to ways in which party development has not conformed to Kirchheimer's expectations. This article illustrates these intersecting processes with a discussion of Labour and Conservative campaigns in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The response of national, state-level political parties to the challenges of competing for power at the devolved, regional levels is a neglected research topic. This article seeks to remedy this by analysing how the British Labour Party has responded to these challenges at the sub- national level following UK devolution. British Labour remains formally a unitary party despite devolution. Nonetheless, the national party leadership has allowed the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties considerable freedom, in practice, to select candidates, conduct regional-level elections and implement some distinctive policies. Meanwhile, the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties have shifted significantly from being traditional, centralized parties with a single hierarchical organization towards being more pluralist, less hierarchical organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I discuss the empirical validity of the cartel thesis, and review three analytical dimensions of the concept: organizational change, functional change and change of party competition in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. I use the empirical findings to elaborate the cartel party model, with three main results. First, in Denmark and Germany party cartels have developed in different ways; second, while the cartel thesis points to important developments, some assumptions are far-fetched and we therefore have to look for the core defining elements of cartel parties; third, the favourable and unfavourable conditions facilitating or hindering the development of party cartels have to be clarified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents part of an ongoing attempt to understand the nature of party formation and change in electoral democracies. The original goal was to account for the weakness of East European parties and party systems. This remains an important topic because weak parties are thought to be indicative of weaknesses in the democratic regimes themselves. Finding the theories of area specialists lacking, the author turned to traditional theories of party formation and change, which were created to explain these phenomena in the western setting. These theories, combined with the contextual insights provided by area specialists, provide considerable leverage on the question of party formation and change in Eastern Europe. In this paper, the author attempts to develop and provide evidence in support of a theory of party formation based on political choice in which actors operate not in a vacuum, but in a context that both constrains and provides resources for agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are central to the process of democratization in east-central Europe. In contrast to the many studies that look at the instability of new parties and party systems, this article focuses on party organizational development. First, a hypothesis is put forward contending that parties in the region are likely to develop as formations with loose electoral constituencies, unimportant membership and a dominant role played by party leaders. Second, this hypothesis is tested on a sample of six parties from the Czech Republic. The analysis shows that certain variations in organizational structure exist, deriving from the distinction between old parties and newly established parties, the former deviating from the hypothesis to a greater extent than the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]