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

Recently, students of European parties have come to agree that organizational power has been concentrating in the party in public office (PPO), whose particular interests and objectives shape those of the party at large. This process of growing autonomy of the PPO—hypothesized by Katz and Mair—goes hand in hand with that of party penetration of the state and with a corresponding decline of party presence within civil society. This chapter aims to verify, empirically, if the PPO is indeed moving in the direction of becoming the strongest party organizational ‘face’. It also investigates whether the degree of ascendancy of the PPO varies 1) across parties and 2) across countries. To this end, it analyses persistence and change in party organizations across ten European countries, from the 1970s to 2010, using data from the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) and comparable data from the Party Organizations Data Handbook.

The aim of this article is to place the recent debate on the concept of disintermediationintended as the process of change in political representation towards more direct forms of political mediation -within the broader literature on party change, to assess its actual usefulness in the field. We maintain that the potential of this concept applied to party organization is mainly heuristic, as it describes a number of intertwined changes observable in parties' resources, representative strategies and structures. Our expectation is that contemporary parties have progressively adopted disintermediated organizational profiles, by weakening the intermediate organs while favouring both the parliamentarization of the leadership and the opening of their membership. These assumptions are empirically verified through a diachronic analysis of the party changes registered in nine European democracies, from the beginning of the 1970s to 2010. All in all, we argue that parties' internal disintermediation has increased in most countries, in the passing from the 1990s to the New Millennium.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the Italian public funding regime, in the light of the assumptions of the cartel party thesis. In the mid-1990s, the debate on party and party system change was revitalised by R. Katz and P. Mair (1995), who introduced the concept of the ‘cartel party’ as a means to study the increasing influence of the state on party politics. Among the main analytical dimensions of the cartel party argument, the system-level variables have received little attention with respect to the Italian case. In what follows I try to find out empirical evidence for the hypothesised changes in the relationship between parties and the state and in the patterns of inter-party competition. I will analyse the trends of the law-making process in the domain of party funding (1948–2014), by combining these observations with data on parties’ reliance on state funds and party collusive behaviour

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