This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database (PPDB) project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project's first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this paper we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focussing on parties' resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine party-family and within country organizational patterns, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older datasets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: i.e., declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and 2 more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and in the forms that this democratization takes.3

Abstract. This article examines party‐based Euroscepticism in the candidate states of Central and Eastern Europe. In an attempt to develop comparative lessons from the different cases, it presents research into the location, electoral strength and type of Euroscepticism in the party systems of these countries. The data is then used to examine six propositions about the relationship between party‐based Euroscepticism and left‐right ideological spectrum, party position in party systems, public Euroscepticism, prospects for accession, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Euroscepticism and state longevity. The article concludes that extending the scope of our study of Euroscepticism to the candidate states extends our understanding of Euroscepticism from its study in Western Europe and brings new insights into party systems in Central and Eastern Europe. It also offers clues as to some future effects of European Union enlargement.

The focus of the article is to use the changed landscape of Euroscepticism to look broadly across a set of cases of government participation by parties holding Eurosceptical positions to examine whether government participation has an effect on their European positions and whether participation by Eurosceptic parties in government has had an effect on their European policy. In general, while there does seem to be a moderating effect of government participation on a party's Euroscepticism, there are notable cases of Eurosceptic party participation in government having some discernible impact on policy, but under somewhat specific conditions. The impact is clearly different for major and minor parties and, in the case of the latter, moderating their Euroscepticism is often a signifier of a wider process of party mainstreaming. In some cases, while parties continue to use Eurosceptic rhetoric when in office, this does not appear to translate into substantial policy change.

This paper examines the link between recent EU crises and the development of party-based Euroscepticism across Europe. It draws on data from expert surveys with qualitative data to outline the way in which we can empirically see the link between the impacts of the crises in European states, and how far, and in what ways, Euroscepticism has been mobilized by political parties in those states. It identifies four main frames through which the EU is contested in European states which focus on: economic factors, immigration, democracy/sovereignty and national factors. It also shows that there has been a clear difference between the impacts of the different crises. While the Eurozone crisis had a particularly powerful effect in the party systems of those countries most affected by the bailout packages and the migration crisis had a particularly strong effect on party politics in the post-communist states of central Europe, Brexit has had a very limited impact on national party politics, although this may change in the longer-term.

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