Political Party Juridification in European Democracies

Democratic states increasingly regulate organizations such as parties, advocacy groups and charities. But we know little about how legal environments shape voluntary organizations’ internal lives, i.e. organizational governance arrangements. We examine this question by conceptualizing and measuring the ‘juridification’ of organizations’ conflict regulation regimes, that is the extent to which organizations replicate external legal standards (e.g. norms of due process) in the procedures they use to regulate intra-organizational conflict. Formulating hypotheses on the influence of ideology and on two types of convergence associated with two distinct conceptions of how the law affects organizational behavior, we examine patterns of party juridification across four European democracies with most different party law provisions. We find that while juridification varies considerably between parties in democracies with few legal regulations reflecting basic ideological differences; where intra-organizational governance is subject to statutory constraints, parties across the ideological spectrum emulate legal norms embedded in state legal systems, transcending what is legally required. This points to broader processes of normative (rather than just coercive) convergence towards rule of law principles making parties less diverse, which has important normative implications.