Assessing the Strength of Party Organizational Resources

Abstract

This chapter provides a survey of four types of party organizational resources in the PPDB: members, money, staff, and territorial units. Findings include that around 3 per cent of voters now join political parties across the democratic world; that German and Spanish parties seem to be the richest in terms of absolute levels of funding, but parties in countries such as Austria and Norway are even stronger relative to the size of their economies or electorates; that party staffing levels are generally quite modest; and that countries where there is an emphasis on what is local tend to have the highest relative concentrations of party branches. Moreover, country differences consistently seem to outweigh party family differences in explaining variation in party organizational resources. The chapter concludes by proposing a composite index of party strength which enables us to construct a rank-ordering of 112 parties according to their overall organizational strength.

Time after time: party organizational strength in new and old democracies

“…As the z scores are calculated based upon the mean and standard deviation of the whole sample, we re-calculated the z scores for all 132 parties. Thus, the PSI scores presented in this article are slightly different from those found in Webb and Keith (2017) (see all the party scores on the Appendix, Table B).…”

“…With an exploratory approach, we also test if left-wing parties in Latin America are organizationally stronger than conservative/right-wing parties, reproducing the pattern found in other regions, particularly in the Western European democracies (Webb and Keith, 2017).…”

“…Besides the relations hypothesized above at the national (H1), regional (H2), and party levels (H3), we cannot ignore that some contextual variables can also have an impact on the two dimensions that form the PSI (members and money). In the next sections, these dimensions are always controlled for the polity size (electorate), following the procedures of the PPDB (Webb and Keith, 2017). Additionally, it is reasonable to expect that wealthier countries have richer parties, and that party organizations can be more dependent on labor-intensive activities in the less developed countries (Norris, 2002;Tavits, 2013).…”

“…Finally, we evaluate the relative organizational strength using the Party Strength Index (PSI), which aggregates the z scores of M/E and party income/electorate ratios TIME AFTER TIME: PARTY ORGANIZATIONAL STRENGTH IN NEW AND OLD DEMOCRACIES (Webb and Keith, 2017). Among the twenty parties in Latin America, eight have a PSI score higher than the median (-0.51), and only two parties are located in the last quartile of distribution (Figure 2 below).…”

“…Therefore, the data on party membership and finance, for the period 2011-2014, are summarized in a simple additive index: the Party Strength Index (PSI) (Webb and Keith, 2017). Overall, we rely on a database with 132 parties in 22 countries, covering third-wave democracies, post-communist countries and advanced democracies.…”