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

The familiar language to describe and analyse the behaviour of political parties is -often only implicitly -a single-level language. That is not too surprising. Indeed, parties and party systems came into being as the result of a process of boundary closure, of the formation of national states and of a more or less simultaneous territorialization and democratization of politics. Major boundarycrossing societal conflicts were domesticated and consequently 'frozen' in national systems of partypolitical competition (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Bartolini, 1998;Flora et al., 1999).The institutional environment in which political parties have to function today, however, is becoming to an increasing extent, and in varying ways, multilayered. One of the reasons for this is the politicization of the European level of policy making. This has resulted in increased attention to public attitudes and thus voting behaviour in elections to the European Parliament. The increasing importance of the European Union has led to the labelling of the European system as 'multi-level' and to the rapid development of a wide body of research attempting to understand political activities and behaviour occurring in a system in which levels interact in complex ways. The literature on multi-level governance is, however, very much a party-free zone. The focus is on decision making and on implementation, and generally on non-party actors. One of the reasons for this is obviously the lack of real party politics at the European level. Even if the EU might be treated theoretically as one single -though multi-layeredpolitical system (Hix, 1999), the role of political parties in the EU remains rather limited. Probably the strongest argument against the idea that the EU can be seen as a political system that can be compared with other (national) systems is the absence of party politics and especially of party government.Analysis of European elections has nevertheless generated a number of interesting concepts and ideas that can be very useful in the search for a more general conceptual language for dealing with party activities in multi-layered systems. The notion of 'second-order elections', that was coined in direct reference to the first European elections, has found its way into more general and comparative approaches (Heath et al., 1999).A second reason for increasing attention to party Abstract ★ European Urban and Regional Studies 10(3): 213-226

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During the past two decades, various attempts have been made to implement changes in the Belgian electoral system. While most of these attempts met with failure, some minor changes were successful. In this article, we consider three cases in depth: demands for the abolishment of compulsory voting, the ongoing discussion about splitting the Brussels electoral district according to linguistic lines, and the introduction of an electoral threshold. We demonstrate that legal barriers and veto players are instrumental in explaining the odds that attempts at electoral reform will be successful. Belgium"s consociational system does indeed impose the use of super majorities for some reforms and the in-built obligation of power sharing grants veto power to major but also to smaller political parties in every language group. The case studies also demonstrate that political parties often fail to estimate in a reliable manner the consequences of reform.