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
While the collapse of party membership in the last half‐century has consumed much of the focus of party scholarship, the notion of membership itself is surprisingly under‐theorised. This article presents a tripartite framework for understanding party membership as a constructed concept: from the perspective of the state, the individual and the political party. As organisational mediators and strategic electoral actors, political parties construct varying notions of membership in order to mobilise resources and gain legitimacy, while balancing the participatory demands of citizens with the legal and normative expectations imposed by the state. Using a number of illustrative examples from Europe and beyond, the article analyses the development of supporters' networks and the extension of participatory opportunities to non‐members. Designed in part to address this membership decline and to offer individuals a different way of engaging with political parties, these initiatives are seen as a crucial step in the evolution of modern parties towards looser, more individualised and amorphous networks of affiliation.
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