Patterns of Intra-Party Democracy across the World

Abstract

Despite the widespread recognition of the relevance of intra-party democracy (IPD), there has been a lamentable scarcity of empirical data suitable for large-N cross-sectional comparative analysis. This has changed with the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) project. Against this background this chapter sheds some light on questions about whether and how IPD varies systematically by country and party level criteria. The empirical analysis shows that country-level factors are generally more important than party-level factors. Most importantly, the existence of a party law and levels of trust and affluence are associated with higher levels of IPD. However, the authors also find that smaller parties, in terms of membership size, are associated with higher levels of IPD. While the results must be interpreted with some caution, the authors believe they constitute a first step towards reframing the scholarly debate on IPD from what is normatively desirable to a discussion about causes and consequences of variations in IPD.

Managed intra-party democracy

“…The statutes usually do this through designating members or their agent, such as a party congress, as both the highest decision-making body and as the selectorate in the party’s choice of its leader. In this sense, our bottom-up perspective on intra-party delegation resembles the usual conceptual and operational definitions of intra-party democracy (Bolin et al, 2017; von dem Berge et al, 2013), in which members are equated with the electorate in a democratic state.…”

Right-Wing Populist Party Leadership in Sweden: One of a Kind or one of the Crowd?

“…"[A]ll parties analyzed", declare the editors of a recent collection of case studies, "typically represent the most centralized political formations in their respective political systems" (Heinisch and Mazzoleni 2016:233). Another study fi nds that the far-right party family displays lower levels of intra-party democracy than does any other (Bolin et al 2017).…”

“…In fairness, we should acknowledge that because SD's long-serving leader, Åkesson, had -at the time of writing -been in charge for so long, since 2005, we have no recent observations of leader selection in SD that can be compared with previous ones in the same party or with other, more recent ones in other parties. Recent research suggests that SD is somewhat more centralised and less internally democratic than other Swedish parties (Jungar 2016;Bolin et al 2017;Bolin 2019), so it might well be that the selection of Åkesson's eventual successor will involve less openness than in other parties. But that remains a matter of speculation.…”

Party guests or party crashers? Non-members’ political engagement across party organizations

“…In terms of party family previous literature supports the relationship between party family and intra-party democracy (IPD) (Gibson and Harmel 1998;Bolin et al 2017, Von dem Berge and. Leftist and social-democratic parties are traditionally more open to broadening their base, thanks to their experience with associated membership (trade unions) and the fact that they need to rely more on mass funding rather than a few wealthy donors (Garland 2016).…”