Party Organisation and Intra-Party Processes: Supranational, National and Regional Perspectives

Abstract

Party organization and intra-party decision-making is changing. New membership formulae and new modes of membership involvement are increasingly challenging the traditional concept of party as an organization with clearly defined organizational and territorial boundaries. This has repercussions on the way internal decisions are reached, who has a right to participate, how parties relate to the wider public and what policies they pursue. Papers on this panel offer cross-national investigations of sources and impacts of party organizational choices. The papers reflect on how parties are responding to citizens’ changing policy and participatory preferences, illuminating parties’ organizational responses and their impacts. They consider how the advent of new parties, new social movements and new democracies have affected prevailing styles of party organization in Europe, Latin America and beyond, and look at the links between party-level and individual-level behaviors.