Patterns of Intra-Party Democracy across the World
Despite the widespread recognition of the relevance of intra-party democracy (IPD), there has been a lamentable scarcity of empirical data suitable for large-N cross-sectional comparative analysis. This has changed with the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) project. Against this background this chapter sheds some light on questions about whether and how IPD varies systematically by country and party level criteria. The empirical analysis shows that country-level factors are generally more important than party-level factors. Most importantly, the existence of a party law and levels of trust and affluence are associated with higher levels of IPD. However, the authors also find that smaller parties, in terms of membership size, are associated with higher levels of IPD. While the results must be interpreted with some caution, the authors believe they constitute a first step towards reframing the scholarly debate on IPD from what is normatively desirable to a discussion about causes and consequences of variations in IPD.