Political parties are strange animals. When integrating diverse actors with often divergent ideas and preferences within a single platform, party elites are required to make organizational choices that place them in a dilemma. On the one hand, the party organization has to allow for the aggregation of actors’ preferences. On the other hand, centrifugal forces must be contained. I argue that political parties need to get these organizational decisions right because they initiate multiple path-dependent processes within the same party that ultimately affect their survivability when facing external pressure. I give evidence for my argument through a structured focused comparison of four Christian Democratic parties in Western Europe. My research finds that the extent to which party elites choose a centralized party organization at the moment of party formation shapes the interplay between preference aggregation and centrifugal forces. This influences the party’s resilience toward external pressure even many years later.
