Gender and Party Change

This conclusion highlights the importance of PACs in twentieth-century American political development. The emergence of partisan PACs, initially formed by major interest groups, played an important and neglected role in fostering the polarization of American politics—a phenomenon that has raised concern in recent decades. Seeking to reconfigure party politics around specific policy issues—more broadly, to realign the party system along an ideological dimension of conflict—these PACs helped make the parties more distinct and more deeply divided over time. They did so via electoral tools and tactics that are now ubiquitous in political life but are rarely probed in scholarship. A focus on PACs thus illuminates the very mechanisms through which party change was brought about, as much as its wider meaning. The book concludes with a consideration of contemporary US politics, in which PACs continue to play a prominent role.

Download Full-text

Party (de)institutionalization in times of political uncertainty: The case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey

Party Politics ◽

10.1177/1354068820960010 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 135406882096001

Author(s):

Şebnem Yardımcı-Geyikçi ◽

Hakan Yavuzyilmaz

Keyword(s):

Party Politics ◽

Causal Theory ◽

Political Uncertainty ◽

Party Change ◽

Justice And Development Party ◽

The World ◽

Party Transformation ◽

Incumbent Party ◽

Political Uncertainties ◽

The Relationship

Recently many polities around the world as different as Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, Thailand suffer from autocratization. This has led to a growing scholarly interest in the process of autocratization. Yet, despite this emerging generation of studies on democratic setbacks, we still do not know much about the changing nature of party politics in the process of autocratization. We argue, in this article, that during autocratization, the incumbent party follows the path of internal and external party deinstitutionalization in response to the changing nature and intensity of political uncertainties. Using the case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, we address three questions: (1) How can the concept of party de-institutionalization be revised and used to understand party transformation during autocratization? (2) What explains party deinstitutionalization in transitional contexts? (3) What is the relationship between party de-institutionalization and autocratization? In doing so, this article increases our understanding of party transformation in transitional contexts and more specifically incumbent party change in the process of autocratization by providing a causal theory of party deinstitutionalization.

Download Full-text

Transformational party events and legislative turnover in West European democracies, 1945–2015

Party Politics ◽

10.1177/1354068820944703 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 135406882094470

Author(s):

Athanassios Gouglas ◽

Gabriel Katz ◽

Bart Maddens ◽

Marleen Brans

Keyword(s):

Turnover Rates ◽

Empirical Methods ◽

Strategic Decisions ◽

Leadership Change ◽

Party Change ◽

Level Data ◽

Multi Level ◽

West European

This paper examines the influence of party change on party-level legislative turnover. Analyzing a novel dataset tracking 251 parties in eight West European democracies between 1945 and 2015, we assess how transformational party events affect the renewal of parties’ parliamentary delegations. Transformational party events refer to party changes resulting from deliberate strategic decisions that redistribute power within parties, change their identity, and/or shift alliances within and between them. We focus in particular on changes in parties’ leadership and name, the formation of electoral cartels, mergers and divisions, applying empirical methods suitable for dealing with fractional outcomes and multi-level data to test their impact on turnover rates. Our estimates indicate that leadership change is a key determinant of MP renewal, leading to systematically higher rates of legislative turnover. Party relabeling and divisions affect turnover as well, although their influence is contingent on other characteristics of the parties and their environment.

Download Full-text

Digital revolution and party innovations: An analysis of the Spanish case

Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica ◽

10.1017/ipo.2019.27 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 50 (2) ◽

pp. 235-253

Author(s):

Francesco Raniolo ◽

Valeria Tarditi

Keyword(s):

Political Parties ◽

Information And Communication Technologies ◽

Communication Technologies ◽

Three Dimensions ◽

Organizational Models ◽

Party Change ◽

Digital Revolution ◽

Political Transformations ◽

New Information ◽

Information And Communication

AbstractThe literature on party change has shown how the advent of the digital revolution and the diffusion of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the democracies of the 21st century have influenced the way political parties communicate and perform their functions. Less investigated, however, is the organizational reaction of political parties to the challenges posed by the transformation of the communications environment. The aim of this paper is to scrutinize whether parties evince a transformative tendency towards virtual models in which new digital ICTs are used as ‘functional equivalents’ of the old organizational infrastructures. To this end, the paper focuses on the Spanish democracy – a paradigmatic case of the political transformations that European democracies have undergone since the 2008 economic crisis – comparing the organizational models of the main political parties: the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Partido Popular, Podemos and Ciudadanos. Particularly the analysis – through the use of parties' documents – focuses on whether and how digital tools are used by the Spanish parties in three dimensions: the participants in the organization, the organizational configuration and the decision-making process. The main conclusions are: new challenger parties make a more intense and radical use of new ICTs introducing ‘disrupting innovations’ in their organization, while old and mainstream parties gradually adapt their organization to the new digital environment introducing ‘sustaining innovations’; parties on the left make greater use of ICTs in order to foster greater internal democracy when compared to their corresponding parties on the centre-right.

Download Full-text