Testing Charter–Manifesto Congruence For Democratic Innovations within Political Parties: Evidence from Hungary

The paper scrutinize whether democratic innovations present in party charters also appear in manifestos of respective parties, scrutinizing opposition parties in Hungary. It seeks to understand what factors enable congruence between parties' organizational build-up and their policies promoted to voters. Utilizing the theoretical framework of saliency approach, we argue that institutionalizing the same democratic innovations at the intra-party level and advocating for their adoption at the national level suggests higher importance, and signals `genuine commitment' for these policies. The study seeks understand what drives (possible) incongruence, analyzing links between electoral co-operation and organizational learning, as well as intra-party tensions and splits between 2010 and 2018. This longitudinal research design, analyzing democratic innovations in green, liberal, leftist and far-right parties, reveal a recent breakthrough of e-democracy in party manifestos, rather explained by fears of ballot secrecy violations than (slowly) changing internet penetration figures. Findings help us better understand the popularity of institutionalized democratic innovations, exploring distinct arenas where these are embraced by political parties. At the normative level, the analysis suggests that some forms of institutional solutions are better suited for intra-party organizations and more easily adopted by parties than national institutions. These implications might be relevant for those committed to promote deliberation, gender equality and (re-)engagement of the youth in politics.