Patterns of Party Persistence, Decline and Disintegration

This workshop aims at comparatively analysing patterns of party persistence, decline and disintegration. It explores how these phenomena have been treated in the literatures on old, new, semi- and non-democracies and - by linking these subfields more closely - attempts to engage in new empirical research. It is particularly interested in the organisational dimension of these phenomena following Pedersen’s (1982) plea that we need to study parties as ‘mortal organisations’ focusing equally on party decline and death as on those parties forming part of the supposedly ‘established party system’. The reason is simple: if we do not know what makes parties decline and fail, we do not know what makes them persist. Core questions to be addressed are the following: What are concepts and measures of party persistence, decline and disintegration suitable for cross-national research and able to travel a variety of contexts? Is it possible to develop concepts of party persistence, decline and disintegration equally applicable to parties in long-lived, new, semi- and non-democracies? How do different forms of decline (e.g. electoral or organizational) relate to each other? How do parties assess their own performance and based on which indicators do they decide to dissolve? How relevant are contextual factors like electoral systems or party finance laws as compared to party characteristics to explain empirical patterns? These issues shall be explored through both theoretical and empirical (especially comparative) papers.