Party Research and Party Support Aid: Conflicting Visions of How Parties Function?

The 1990s brought both the advent of Party Politics, a journal that contributed to an upsurge of research on the conditions and impact of political party development, and an upsurge of international aid work that focused on transplanting the Western-centric “party paradigm” to new and new-ish (“Third Wave”) democracies. This support took many forms, including training leaders and grassroots organizers in specific parties, and promoting the adoption of legislative and regulatory frameworks that aid-givers considered to be conducive to democratic parties and democratic party competition. Characteristic of many of these aid community endeavors was the relatively slim role played by academic research on political parties, and even the repudiation by development agency leaders of academic research as being largely irrelevant for the countries to which party aid was being offered (Biezen and Saward, 2008). At the same time, many party support initiatives seemed to work from ideal type models of party organization that researchers were finding to be increasingly out of step with the practice of parties in established democracies, such as the idea that new parties should strive to build up non-patronage based grassroot membership organizations which could then be the basis for intra-party democracy. Conversely, and as the pages of Party Politics attest, political science research in the past three decades has paid relatively little attention to the problems that such party-support initiatives were attempting to solve, or to evaluating (or even acknowledging) the outcome of these efforts. This paper investigates the conundrum of these largely parallel universes of party-development support and party-development analysis, looking in particular at party aid initiatives that have advocated for regulation intended to promote and safeguard democratic party politics. It considers differences between academic and applied understandings of party operations as revealed in regulations covering areas such as party finance, party membership, and intra-party democracy. As these portraits reveal, academic research raises questions about some of the assumptions underlying initiatives promoted by aid agencies; on the other hand, academic research has not systematically taken account of the impact of the rule changes promoted by these regulatory initiatives. We conclude by outlining several research agendas that could lead to the closer integration of academic and applied party work, and thereby possibly help to rebuild the importance of parties as building blocks of democratic politics.