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The study of party membership is a traditional sub-field of the literature on political parties, especially studies based on internal party organization. Among other things, research on party members has focused on why people join parties and how to increase members' opportunities for participation. The decline in party membership has contributed enormously to the growth of these studies. This article will investigate the relationship between the party and its members by focusing on two organizational innovations introduced by the Italian Democratic Party: a) the selection of candidates through open primaries; b) the organization of spaces for discussion open to party members and sympathizers (the so-called Agorà). What opinions do the party members have of these participation tools? What factors determine the different views of the party members? Is it possible to build a typology of party members based on their attitudes to these tools? This article answers these questions by employing an original dataset from a survey administered to Italian Democratic Party members between January and February 2022 (about 4,500 respondents). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cartel party theory has put the study of party-state relations high on the research agenda, deliberately shifting the focus of researchers away from an understanding of political parties on the basis of their relationship with civil society or, indeed, as part of civil society itself. As fruitful as this reorientation has been, this essay argues that the resulting emphasis on 'parties as governors' has produced downsides of its own. Cartel party theory reinforced a separation of the study of parties from the study of other membership organizations considered the very fabric of civil societies. While their governing role makes parties distinct from the latter, I argue that what parties do and how they function should be also assessed against other organizations such as interest groups or associations through which citizens engage in joint activities including but not restricted to political interest representation. The contention is that bringing the study of party back to civil society will generate a broader understanding of the possible roles political parties can (or cannot) play in contemporary democracy than an exclusive study of party as a separate genus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What brings competing parties to coalesce into new entities? I present a model of electoral competition in which parties can form alliances and decide how binding these should be. Parties face a dynamic trade-off between insuring themselves against significant shifts in public opinion and allowing flexibility to respond to future electoral changes. The model shows that more binding alliances such as mergers emerge in equilibrium when electoral volatility is high; instead, when voters are predictable (e.g., highly partisan), parties either run alone or form more flexible preelectoral coalitions. When the electorate is sufficiently volatile, a risk-averse centrist party might prefer to merge with an ideologically extreme party than with a moderate one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines and specific drugs are seen as indispensable solutions to ending or responding to the pandemic, and pharmaceutical enterprises are in the spotlight. The Chinese government has made active efforts to guide pharmaceutical enterprises to make appropriate social contribution during the public health emergency. This study explores how government-enterprise relationship promotes this process.MethodsUsing the financial and textual data of China's listed pharmaceutical companies and policy data from the official website of the Chinese health-related government departments, this study drew the social contribution through text analysis, and established the response index of pharmaceutical companies to the government—the government-enterprise alignment index (GE_Ali) based on the formula of elasticity for reference. Then a series of regressions are used to do the empirical tests.ResultsThis study found the more responsive pharmaceutical companies were to government, the greater their contribution to society during the pandemic, mainly through increasing the intensity of drug R&D, production and promotion, and the good communication mechanism between the two formed a mediating effect.DiscussionThe nature of state ownership, the presence of embedded party organizations, and the location in the provincial capital city had significant effects on the realization of a high level of government-enterprise alignment positively affecting the social contribution. This study confirms that the Chinese government has made enterprises a part of social governance, which is a global hotspot, through the embedding of party organizations. It also indicates that the government needs to re-recognize its key role in shaping social contribution, especially in distinguishing its responsibilities between normal and emergency situations.

(1) Background--Agricultural and forestry enterprises are the backbone forces of connecting farmers, promoting agricultural modernization, revitalization of rural industries and common prosperity. It is an institutional arrangement of corporate governance with Chinese characteristics to establish the grass-roots organization of CPC in enterprises and promote them to participate in corporate governance. although some literature has discussed the microeconomic effects of party organizations' participation in corporate governance, few literature has studied the microeconomic effects of party organization embedding and its participation in corporate governance on the agricultural and forestry enterprises, nor have they responded to the actual effects of party organization embedding on the development resilience of enterprises. (2) Methods--Based on China Stock Market & Accounting Research database ( CSMAR), WIND database and the personal characteristics database of the "board of directors, board of supervisors and senior executives", 1442 annual observations values of 167 listed agricultural and forestry companies were sorted out through the data collection and supplement of the listed companies' home pages, annual reports and Sina Finance. The development resilience was selected as the explained variable, party organization embedding as the explanatory variable, and 14 indicators such as subsidy income and operation capability as the control variables. The OLS method was used to evaluate the effects of party organization embedding on the development resilience of the listed agricultural and forestry companies from 2003 to 2022, and the propensity score matching method was introduced for the robustness test. (3) Results--First, from 2003 to 2010, the proportion of the listed agricultural and forestry companies with party organizations in the total sample fluctuated between 76% and 84%, and after reaching a peak of 83. 02% in 2010, it showed a significant trend of decline in fluctuations. Second, the development resilience of the listed agricultural and forestry companies had obvious fluctuation characteristics. Third, the establishment of party organizations in the listed agricultural and forestry companies could significantly improve their development resilience, and it could last for at least 1 years. The robustness was confirmed by three robustness tests of changing the explained variable, controlling the fixed effects of companies and using the propensity score matching method. Fourth, compared with the companies whose party organizations did not participate in the governance of the board of directors/supervisors, the development resilience of the companies whose party organizations participated in the governance of the board of directors/supervisors was stronger. Fifth, the establishment of party organizations had a significant positive effect on the development resilience of the non-state-owned companies, companies in central and western regions and the listed forestry companies, but had no significant effects on the state-owned companies, companies in eastern regions. (4) Conclusions and Discussions--This paper enriches the theoretical results of party organization construction and its participation in corporate governance to enable the agricultural and forestry enterprises to develop their resilience and also provides a practical basis for the policy optimization of party organizations. First, encouraging and supporting qualified agricultural and forestry enterprises to establish party organizations, guiding agricultural and forestry enterprises with party organizations to establish and improving relevant systems for party organizations to participate in corporate governance. So that the qualified members of the party organizations can enter the board of directors, the board of supervisors and the senior executives according to the statutory process. Second, unswervingly promoting the party building work of private enterprises, further expanding the coverage of grass-roots party organizations in private enterprises, and improving relevant regulations and systems for party organizations to participate in corporate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the crucial role political parties play in connecting citizens with political decisions, this article assesses national parties' organizational linkages with the European level. It focuses on explaining variation between parties and the motivations they have to organize the way they do. Building on qualitative comparative case studies of Danish and Flemish parties, this study finds that country‐level factors override party‐level factors. Particularly the domestic political relevance of European affairs, combined with historical ties with European integration and distance from Brussels, determine the nature of parties' multilevel linkages. Contributing to the literature on parties as multilevel organization in the EU, these findings call attention to the great difficulty parties face in reaching beyond the confines of the nation‐state, despite the important role they play in providing the EU with the necessary democratic legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature on autocracies focuses on elite politics to study ruling party stability. I focus on the lowest level of the ruling party structure, party members, to introduce new data on party-based autocracies. Party members are unique connectors between ruling party and society, and ruling parties can recur to them for policy enforcement, political control, co-optation and legitimation to secure power. I present the One-Party Membership Dataset (OPAMED), a comprehensive dataset on party membership in autocracies, covering 42 ruling parties across party-based regimes from 1945 to 2020, and introduce two new variables: party size; and party membership volatility. The first variable measures the membership-to-population ratio, while the second measures the rate of co-optation growth from one year to the other. In conclusion, the OPAMED provides a new, flexible and easy-to-use toolkit on ruling parties in party-based autocracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at defining an analytical framework for the comparative study of party organizations in liberal democracies. By building on a critical assessment of the literature devoted to party organizations, we combine the premises of Comparative Organizational Analysis, Structural Analysis and the rationale of the dimensional approach of the Political Party Database Project. We also provide a parsimonious mathematical representation of our framework to formalize the discursive exposition of our assumptions. The framework is tested on a case study, the Italian political system from 1993 to 2018, which allows for a quasi-experimental analysis of the co-evolutive relationships between the political system and party organizations. Despite the limitations of testing the framework on a single case, the results indicate that the low stability of the laws and regulations of political competition is actually related to a poor level of party organizational institutionalization; at the same time, their intensity seems to be linked to party organizational convergence, in particular concerning party Structures and resources; however, differently from the evidence raised by literature, a high party system fragmentation is not associated to organizational variance.

This paper bridges literature on political parties and organizational studies by providing a new theoretical lens on political party developments. There has been growing scholarly interest in populist parties and the issues that serve as the raison d'être for their political platform. While the literature has been preoccupied with the journey of the anti‐hero rising to power, less has been written about the organization of the party once it has transcended to political influence. Likewise, whereas organizational birthmarks and imprinting have been integral concepts in the study of organizations, there has been little permeation of the concepts into the study of political parties. The Danish People's Party and Norwegian Progress Party provide two illustrative cases, showing that their original formation and later transformation into the current parties brought with it challenges to their structure and ideology. Our findings show that while an increase in external support to the political party, that is, votes, imprints organizational birthmarks, it is during a decrease in the very same external support that organizational birthmarks are uncovered and challenged. Through process‐tracing and our theoretical model, we identify organizational birthmarks and causal mechanisms in which competing organizational birthmarks create an internal division within the political party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many new parties are electorally succeeding across European party systems, including in post-communist countries. This is especially true in Slovakia, where it is accompanied by another very specific phenomenon, which in our perspective defines recent parliamentary elections - the prevalence of new breakaway parties. These newly formed parties created by splitting from parliamentary parties are now competing alongside them in early parliamentary elections. The 20202023 period, in addition to seeing the fall of governments, and a general political crisis and instability, was also characterized by frequent party factionalism. During this period, turbulent development within SMER-SD, ĽSNS and OĽaNO translated into the formation of three new parties - HLAS-SD, Republika, and the Democrats, which represent our case studies. The aim of our paper is to analyse how these new breakaway parties differ from their original parties organizationally, in the processes associated with intra-party democracy (IPD). We empirically explore their leadership selection, candidate selection and membership policies. The existing data (based on the Populism and Political Parties Database) indicate that their three parent parties are highly personalized with low IPD. The findings of our comparative analysis reveal that the new breakaway parties have incorporated more transparent approaches to intraparty processes compared to their parent parties. However, concerning candidate selection, they have not embraced greater inclusiveness than the parties they originated from. Overall, despite a noticeable trend towards intra-party depersonalization, the opportunity for a broader membership base to participate in the decision-making process remains largely unrealized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normalization of radical right (RR) politics fosters opportunities for RR parties, but can also facilitate intra-party conflicts over the 'true' version of the shared party ideology. Previous research has highlighted two factors that influence ideational change within RR parties: contextual conditions and the formal power of intra-party factions. Yet, surprisingly, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) progressively radicalized to the right and witnessed the increased influence of its extremist grouping Der Flügel, despite contextual normalization pressures and the grouping's lower formal power. Analysing three crucial conflicts within the AfD between 2013 and 2021, we show how intra-party competition additionally plays into nativist party radicalization. Flügel balanced contextual and 'hard' power disadvantages by fostering its 'soft' power as 'the true party within the party'. Simultaneously, this power was cemented by more established AfD actors who used Flügel's ideas against other competitors for office. Our conclusions have important implications for comparative research on competition within and between RR parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that contemporary transnational dynamics have given rise to novel political subjects and territories for political engagement. By looking at how parties as organizational actors operate abroad, this study reworks extant classificatory attempts and proposes an amended typology in which the salient elements of variation are the origin of the party abroad and the degree of formalization. These two dimensions produce a matrix delineating four distinct types of party organization: branch-abroad, organization-abroad in franchising, committee-abroad, and semi-political structures. Conceptually, the typology elucidates the multifaceted nature of the structural approaches employed by home parties in their endeavors to establish connections with communities abroad. Empirically, this contribution enhances the comparability between organizational configurations abroad and extant research on party structures at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of work on the transformation of formerly rebel groups into political parties. However, there is little work that examines the organizational types of parties that formerly armed groups become. Are these parties more likely to exhibit certain organizational characteristics when compared to other parties? This is an important question especially as scholars consider the role these former rebel parties play in the development of peace and democracy in post-civil war politics. Using data from Daly (2020) and Tuncel and Manning (2022) , as well as recently released data from V-Dem on political parties (Coppedge et al 2020) we find that former rebel parties are more clientelistic and personalistic than other parties, even compared to parties in countries where they compete. We suggest that these parties are unlikely to play a constructive role in post-conflict democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factionalism is an important element in parties' internal life, affecting their policies, strategies, electoral performance and even survival. Yet little is known about how parties manage factionalism. This study examines how radical left parties (RLPs) manage factionalism, drawing on a comparative case study of four RLPs – the Spanish Podemos and United Left (IU), and the Portuguese Left Bloc (BE) and Communist Party (PCP) – from 2010 to 2019. Drawing on original data collection, we find that parties adopt both formal and informal mechanisms to address factionalism. However, their approaches differ significantly. We identify two main approaches towards factionalism: a permissive approach, which allows internal pluralism, in the BE and IU; and a prohibitionist approach, which actively fights factionalism, in Podemos and the PCP, with competitive prohibitionism in the former and pre-emptive prohibitionism in the latter. These approaches strongly correlate with parties' origins and political orientation, but neither fully prevents intra-party conflict or splintering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, the Social Liberal Party (psl), of little relevance until then, secured Jair Bolsonaro’s election as President of Brazil and achieved success in state and national legislative elections. Building upon these results, the question arises: which party aspects contributed to success in the legislative contests? In this article, we analyze the party’s organizational factors and candidacies, pointing out that the Bolsonaro-led coordination conferred a centralizing profile to the party. Thus, despite having low institutionalization, the psl capitalized on the benefits of the Bolsonaro phenomenon for other contests beyond the presidential one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explain why the Chilean Frente Amplio has not managed to consolidate stable links with the main social movements in the country despite having emerged in a context of social mobilization. Secondly, it aims to contextualize the case of the Frente Amplio in the Latin American scenario through paradigmatic cases of parties that have managed to develop and maintain links with social organizations. The article addresses four possible explanations: the autonomous and non-partisan nature of social mobilization, the rapid and costly access of the coalition to the institutional apparatus, the consolidation of an organizational structure less open to the influence of social organizations and, transversally, the disposition adopted by the coalition at key moments of its trajectory towards organized civil society. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of both contextual factors and explanations associated with party agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article contends that contemporary transnational dynamics have given rise to novel political subjects and territories for political engagement. By looking at how parties as organizational actors operate abroad, this study reworks extant classificatory attempts and proposes an amended typology in which the salient elements of variation are the origin of the party abroad and the degree of formalization. These two dimensions produce a matrix delineating four distinct types of party organization: branch-abroad, organization-abroad in franchising, committee-abroad, and semi-political structures. Conceptually, the typology elucidates the multifaceted nature of the structural approaches employed by home parties in their endeavors to establish connections with communities abroad. Empirically, this contribution enhances the comparability between organizational configurations abroad and extant research on party structures at the national level.

The Italian populist party, the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five-star Movement, M5s), has experienced significant organizational changes, each of which has marked a different phase of its development. We can identify four phases: the gestation phase (2009–2012); its entry into Parliament (2012–2017); the first experience of government (2017–2019); the transformation into a 'state-centred' party struggling with endless organizational restyling (2019-ongoing). The academic literature linking populism to party organization is still scarce, as scholars have mainly focused on other questions (e.g. the different approaches to defining populism, its socio-political roots, its regional paths, its communication style), or have studied ideology and party organization separately. This contribution aims at bridging the gap by investigating the organizational evolution of the M5s. Using the theoretical framework of the 'three faces' of party organization, and drawing on a qualitative analysis of the party's official documents, it identifies the actors representing each of the three faces during the different phases of evolution of the M5s and examines the power relations between them. The findings highlight that the M5s is distinct from other contemporary parties, as it has continued to be dominated by the party in central office despite its institutionalization and 'occupation' of the State. This organizational distinctiveness can be related to its populist ideological underpinnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the existing literature, the study tests the relevance of electoral and intra-party alliance concerns on party organization change for the AKP in its 2017 District Congress. We believe that both the electoral and intra-party alliance concerns the party faced in 2017, make it a suitable case to test the basic hypothesis of the study. The dataset used in the analysis consists of secondary data on 971 districts present in Turkey. District presidency change is employed as the key independent variable to estimate organization change. The result of the logistic regression indicates that the effect of increasing percentage of swing voters and members of the former alliance, despite being valid, have moderate positive effects on the AKP’s decision to change its organization. The insignificancy of the electoral safety of the party in the district reveals that in 2017 the AKP changed its organization regardless of the nature of the electoral competition it faces. Interestingly, results indicate that socioeconomic development and ethnic presence in districts are also significant factors that constrain organization change in the AKP. Based on these results we suggest that change in party organization becomes a more difficult issue in parties with strong clientelistic networks where political parties built electoral support through the conditional distribution of resources to voters. Similarly, ethnicity also acts as a constraint due to the peculiarity of the relations political parties develop with these groups. As such clientelism and ethnicity seem to have constraining effects on the abilities of parties to change their organizations. The results highlight the necessity of further research to generalize the validity of the effectiveness of clientelism and ethnic groups on political parties’ organization change on different settings.

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Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a variety of deliberative practices in the organization and activities of political parties. What remains unclear, however, is how parties can promote deliberative democracy in an environment that remains predominantly representative. To investigate this tension, we study the Agora party in Brussels. Agora competed for the first time in the 2019 regional elections in Brussels with the aim of institutionalizing a permanent, randomly selected Citizen's Assembly with legislative power in the Brussels Capital Region and immediately gained a seat in the Brussels Regional Parliament. Based on an in-depth qualitative study including 20 semi-structured interviews with a broad range of party members and document analysis, we study whether and how Agora's organizational structure, i.e. its leadership and centralization, its intra-party democracy, and its organizational resources, allow it to promote deliberative democracy in a representative context. We argue that Agora experiences tensions between its deliberative ideals and its representative means and that there is a looming danger of becoming "just another part" of the system. However, it succeeds in simultaneously rejecting and competing in the representative system by adopting a stratarchical party organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is taxing the rich so difficult despite rising inequality and public support for progressive taxation? Recent research has mostly focused on the 'demand side' of electoral tax politics, showing that economic crises can increase public demands for progressive taxation in contemporary societies. Complementing this research, we focus on the political 'supply side', investigating the conditions under which social democratic parties take up these calls and translate them into policy. Studying wealth taxation in the course of the global financial crisis, we argue that whether parties pushed for taxing wealth crucially depended on intra-party struggles between the (office-seeking) leadership and the (policy-seeking) left wing. Only if the leadership became convinced that redistributive tax policy was electorally promising, did the social democratic parties fight for implementing wealth taxes. We evaluate this theoretical proposition in a comparative analysis of wealth tax policies in Austria, Germany and Spain in 2008–2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of party- and party-system stability have often explored the connection between the party-level property of Party Institutionalization (PI) and parties' electoral performance and organizational longevity, yet scholars still have not agreed on a standard measure for this concept. This article argues that the length of party statutes could provide part of such a measure, specifically for the extent to which parties have become routinized (a key dimension of PI) through the formalization of their rules and practices. We validate the plausibility of this measure using data on 303 parties from 49 countries, demonstrating that party statute length varies systematically and in ways predicted by our knowledge of how party organizations reflect their institutional environments and the complexity of internal coalitions. We also show that statute length varies in expected ways with attributes often associated with higher or lower levels of party institutionalization. We conclude that statute length offers a conceptually congruent and objective indicator of formalization, one that could be used either alone or combined with measures of parties' informal practices to advance our understanding of the relationship between PI and democratic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinizes national political parties' organizational linkages with the European level. Such linkages not only provide parties with information from the European level, but also provide the EU with a source of democratic legitimacy. By applying an inductive research design and qualitatively reconstructing the organizational linkages of 15 parties in Flanders, the Netherlands and Denmark, this article shows that not only national parties' concrete organizational practices, but also their underlying strategies for engaging the European level differ notably. Importantly, parties' multilevel organizational strategies differentiate between an 'internal' dimension (linkages with their 'own' EU‐level agents) and an 'external' dimension (linkages with their Europarty). Building on these case studies, the article presents an original typology of multilevel party organization in an EU context, providing researchers with an empirically grounded and ideal‐typical benchmark for understanding the organization and behaviour of national parties in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of this contribution is twofold: first, to verify empirically how and to what extent party organizations vary within countries, in time; second, to enhance the role of political factors in explaining organizational variance. While mainstream literature has generally overestimated cross-national party convergence, a renewed interest in the study of variance has recently gained ground. We thus focus on seven European countries, from 1990 to 2010, by combining party organizational data from the Party Organization Data Handbook and the Political Party Database Project, with domestic cultural, socioeconomic, technological data from the European Values Survey and the World Bank, as well as supranational economic data provided by the OECD. We are interested in verifying how much of the variance in party organizations can be explained by resorting to the parameters of the party systems vis-à-vis domestic and supranational extra-political factors. Our results show that the explanatory power of party systems' parameters is stronger than the predictive ability of contextual variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do political parties react organizationally when the competitive context changes? Are all parties equally accustomed to adapting? In recent decades, the emergence of an electorally volatile and publicity-oriented style of politics has pushed Western parties to replace member-centred mass organizations with centralized 'media agencies'. However, as has long been speculated, parties' 'genetic' heritage may condition their adaptive capacity and threaten their competitiveness. This study presents the first comprehensive quantitative test of the impact of party 'genetics' on the ease of parties' organizational professionalization in the cartel party era (1983–2018). It utilizes uniquely fine-grained time-series data on the financial and staff resources of central party offices to compare the adaptive processes of two 'genetically' distinct major Finnish parties – a social democratic mass party and a conservative cadre party. The study finds that although both parties have professionalized under strong external pressure, the 'genetically' election-driven cadre party case adapted much faster, and the member-oriented mass party case continues to invest much more in its membership organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the grassroots-party organizations of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are increasingly involved in the governance of private-owned enterprises (POEs), whether this new pattern promotes corporate innovation is still a research gap. Therefore, based on the data of 1357 POEs' party-organization involvements and their patent applications from 2003 to 2017, this paper analyzes the impact of the party-organization involvements on corporate innovation by using the multiple regression model. The results include: (1) party-organization involvements including party organization activities and senior executives' participation can significantly promote innovation, especially after 2012; (2) party-organization activities improve innovation by increasing research and development (R&D) investment and reducing operating risk, while the senior executives' participation only influences on R&D investment; (3) the party-organization involvements have a stronger promotion on non-invention patent applications, especially for the utility-model-patent applications, than invention-patent applications; (4) the promotion is more pronounced for family businesses, technology-intensive and capital-intensive enterprises, as well as those located in the northern, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and Yangtze River delta. After applying PSM sampling and difference-in-differences (DID) analyses, and substituting the dependent variables, the results remain robust. This paper provides Chinese evidence for party construction and corporate innovation, and also provides references about political connection and corporate innovation for other countries to some extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how populism is linked to party organization and, specifically, intra‐party democracy. Populism can be defined as an ideology (ideational perspective), which is characterized by anti‐elitism, people‐centrism and a discourse emphasizing a moral struggle between 'good people' and 'the elite'. On the other hand, there are leadership‐focused definitions which see populism as a form of organization with personalistic control (a leadership perspective). With respect to party organization, focusing on the ideational perspective leads to the expectation that populist parties will be internally democratic, and the leadership approach will lead to the opposite expectation. Using the recently published Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) that develops party‐specific populism scores, we examine more than 200 parties in 26 countries. The results highlight that populist parties gravitate toward personalized leaders and thus develop less democratic intra‐party structures. This finding contributes to our understanding of populist parties and their organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Over the past decades, the Netherlands has witnessed the rise of several influential populist radical right parties, including the Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn), Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid) and, more recently, the Forum for Democracy (Forum voor Democratie [FvD]). By analyzing the party’s organizational structures, this article seeks to determine whether the FvD may be considered a new “mass party” and to what extent ordinary members can exert influence over the party’s internal procedures. The party’s efforts to establish a large membership base suggest that the FvD set out to build a relatively complex mass organization. Through targeted advertising campaigns, the party made strategic use of social media platforms to rally support. Thus, while the means may have changed with the advent of the internet, the FvD invested in creating some organizational features that are commonly associated with the “mass party” model. At the same time, however, the party did not really seek to foster a community of loyal partisan activists among its membership base but instead treated its members as donors. The party is clearly characterized by centralized leadership in the sense that the party’s spearhead, Thierry Baudet, maintains full control over key decision-making areas such as ideological direction, campaigning, and internal procedures. At first sight, the party appears to have departed from Wilders’s leader-centered party model. However, a closer look at the party apparatus demonstrates that the FvD is, in fact, very hierarchical, suggesting that the party’s internal democracy is much weaker than the party’s name might suggest.

Despite spells outside parliament, with its blend of nationalist and populist appeals the Slovak National Party (SNS) has been a prominent fixture on Slovakia’s political scene for three decades. Unlike some of the newer parties in Slovakia and across the region, partly as a product of the point of its (re-)creation, SNS has a comparable organizational density to most established parties in the country and has invested in party branches and recruiting members. Although ordinary members exercised some power and influence during the fissiparous era of the early 2000s, SNS has been notable for the role played by its leader in decision-making and steering the party. Each leader placed their stamp on the projection, pitch and functioning of the party, both as a decision-making organization and an electoral vehicle. Ordinary members have been largely—but not exclusively—relegated to the role of cheerleaders and campaigners for the party’s tribunes; a situation which has not changed significantly in the era of social media. The pre-eminent position of the leader and the limited options for “voice” has led unsuccessful contenders for top posts and their supporters to opt instead for “exit.” Despite having some of the traits of the mass party and having engaged in some of the activities common for mass parties, especially in the earlier years of its existence, in more recent times in particular, SNS falls short of the mass party model both in aspiration and reality.

The Lega Nord (LN) has undergone a profound process of transformation since 2013, by replacing its historical regionalist populism with a new state-wide populist radical right outlook. However, very little is known about how such transformation impacted its organizational model, particularly the mass-party features that characterized it under its founding leader, Umberto Bossi. This article explores the organizational evolution of the party under Matteo Salvini by means of a qualitative in-depth analysis of 41 semi-structured interviews with representatives of the LN from four regions (Calabria, Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and Veneto) and primary documents. It underlines that the LN was turned into a disempowered and politically inactive “bad company,” charged with the task of paying the debts of the old party, while its structure, resources, and personnel were poured into a new state-wide organization called Lega per Salvini Premier (LSP). The LSP has not simply maintained the key features of the mass-party in the LN’s historical strongholds, but also pioneered a modern form of this organizational model grounded on the continuous interaction between digital and physical activism, i.e., “phygital activism,” which boosts the party’s ability to reach out to the electorate by delivering the image that the League is constantly on the ground. The LSP has sought to export this modern interpretation of the mass-party in the South; however, in that area its organizational development remains at an embryonic stage, and the party’s nationalization strategy has so far produced a “quasi-colonial” structure dominated by, and dependent on, the Northern elite.