Party Organizational Development and Change: A Theoretical Framework

Abstract

This article aims at defining an analytical framework for the comparative study of party organizations in liberal democracies. By building on a critical assessment of the literature devoted to party organizations, we combine the premises of Comparative Organizational Analysis, Structural Analysis and the rationale of the dimensional approach of the Political Party Database Project. We also provide a parsimonious mathematical representation of our framework to formalize the discursive exposition of our assumptions. The framework is tested on a case study, the Italian political system from 1993 to 2018, which allows for a quasi-experimental analysis of the co-evolutive relationships between the political system and party organizations. Despite the limitations of testing the framework on a single case, the results indicate that the low stability of the laws and regulations of political competition is actually related to a poor level of party organizational institutionalization; at the same time, their intensity seems to be linked to party organizational convergence, in particular concerning party Structures and resources; however, differently from the evidence raised by literature, a high party system fragmentation is not associated to organizational variance.