Does Culture Matter? The Cultural Determinants of Parties' Organizational Change

The aim of this contribution is to shed some light on the weight of cultural factors in shaping the patterns of parties’ organizational change. While mainstream literature has generally overestimated cross-national tendencies in party organizational development, a renewed interest for the study of variance has recently gained ground. To date, however, little attention has been paid to domestic cultural variables. By combining data from the European Values Survey (EVS), the Party Organization Data Handbook and the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) on seven European countries, from 1981 to 2017, we are interested in verifying how much of the variance in party organizational profiles can be explained by resorting to country-specific cultural characteristics. By contesting on empirical bases the organizational convergence hypothesis, we argue that national culture plays a significant role in orienting parties' propensity to change.