Party Change after Electoral Defeat. Between Profound Makeovers and Retouching

The way political party deals with electoral defeat affects its further existence and sometimes is even a matter of survival. The collection of studies by Lawson and Poguntke (2004) discloses that challenges parties face, which translate into a decline in support, induce party transformation. A desire to improve electoral performance is one of the primary motivators for a party to change. An electoral failure may be the reason for many - different in character or extent - structural changes in political parties. Such a change may lead to either the formation of the new bodies within the party, which may not have a visible impact on the party, or that will lead to emergence of the new structures, which will actually take up the programme, communication or strategic changes. There may also be changes in power balance in the party, like there may occur the separation of one fraction or group of activists from the party, or the party may eventually break up completely. In the analysis we include 73 parties from most of EU countries plus United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland which in the period between 2011 and 2017: 1) gave up power after election and moved to opposition (ruling or co-ruling prior to election), or 2) had already been in opposition and in result of election experienced further decline in vote share or parliamentary representation. To fully analyze the correlation between defeat and changes in the organizational structure, to explain why some bodies appears and what kind of structures are most common to change, in our research, apart from those parties which experienced defeats, we also consider the control cases of non-defeated parties. For this purpose, data collected for the public Political Party Database (PPDB) will be used.