Building party grassroots: electoral systems, party organizations and social linkages.

This paper explores the connection between the proportional electoral system (PR) and party organizations as key institutional determinants for party-group linkages from cross-party, national, and temporal perspectives. We address two questions: 1) Do candidate-centred electoral systems impact the development of party-society linkages? 2) If the electoral system has any impact, does it occur directly or mediated by party organizations? Using V-Party (2020) and V-Dem (2020) databases, we selected and analysed 600 parties in 48 countries covering third-wave democracies, post-communist countries, and the most extensive proportional democracies in Europe (Western and Eastern Europe) and Americas between 1989 and 2018. Based on panel models, we found that candidate-centred electoral system reforms are negatively related to the development of strong ties between parties and groups, but only in party organizations with high party strength, intraparty cohesion, financial linkages with non-party groups. When the decision-making process concentrates power in the hands of powerful party elites, they can solve coordination problems and mitigate intraparty conflicts and personalization consequences.