Causes and Consequences of Party Reform: New Evidence from Party Surveys in Six European Democracies

Did parties in European democracies reform their organization in recent years, and if so, which reforms did they implement and why? If parties did engage in reforms, do they feel less threatened by societal or institutional challenges as a consequence or, more fundamentally, do they feel less threatened in their existence? In many parties in Europe parties have experienced membership decline, with some scholars declaring the traditional mass party an outdated model. Consequently, how parties as organizations cope with challenges related to societal change and whether party reform (and if so which type) provides – from a party perspective – an answer to these challenges is a highly salient theme. We study party reform as dependent variable and as independent variable. The first perspective allows us to assess the different types of party reforms that political parties implemented and why they chose these reforms over others considering ideology, past electoral performance, membership decline and funding structure as central explanatory variables. The second perspective allows us to explore the effects of different types of reforms on whether parties see their ability to cope with different types of challenges and their survival prospects enhanced or not. To address these issues, we can draw on a new original dataset based on six surveys run in 2016 covering over 110 parties participating in national elections in the six European democracies Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, which have different party and electoral systems, include unitary, devolved and federal regimes, impose different degrees of legal constraints on political parties and provide different levels of public funding. Thus, using a most different system design, we can examine whether parties engage in different types of reforms and whether such reforms have similar or different implications across distinct institutional settings.