Bringing People Back In: From an Organisational to an Evolutionary Paradigm in Party Studies

Party studies are undergoing a refocusing towards personalisation and human agency. At the same time, the persistent party system volatility in younger democracies and the increasing instability of older ones call for new approaches in party research. The proliferation of new parties and the accelerating pace of change in existing ones challenge our preconceived notions of party novelty and continuity. Likewise, change in established parties, which has always simmered beneath the surface of organisational veneers, is becoming increasingly visible in long-standing European democracies. We argue for a shift from an ‘organisational’ to an ‘evolutionary’ paradigm in party studies – moving the emphasis from analysing parties as organisational entities to examining the role of the people within them. An evolutionary, people-centred perspective allows us to better track and understand increasingly volatile party politics, and to develop a common framework for a comparative analysis of cases where differences in the nature and status of party organisations have hitherto hindered comparisons. In our book Party People: Candidates and Party Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2023), we have initially proposed a focus on electoral snapshots: analysing the movement and change of candidates on and between electoral slates at the time of elections. While such an electoral lens has limitations, these can be overcome by examining party system dynamics in other arenas between elections, such as parliamentary party instability (i.e. parliamentary group switching). The paper discusses the origins and limitations of the organisational paradigm, which has achieved almost the status of 'normal science' in party research, and outlines the ways in which an ‘evolutionary paradigm’ could be better suited to analysing contemporary dynamics in parties and party systems. We do so by examining examples of party change where a people-centred perspective on political parties has advantages over one that primarily considers parties as more or less monolithic institutions. Empirically, we draw on an extensive dataset of over 250,000 electoral candidates spanning more than three decades in eleven countries: comparatively unstable nine Central and Eastern European countries and Italy, plus Norway as a benchmark of a relatively stable Western European party system. Specifically, we analyse cases of: (a) genuinely and partially new parties, (b) party rebranding, (b) splits, mergers and changing electoral coalition dynamics. We contrast perspectives based on the organisational and people-based evolutionary paradigms by combining quantitative analysis of party evolution with several case studies of well-known and insightful cases. We demonstrate that a people-based perspective provides additional insights and reveals some important developments not easily captured by an organisational paradigm, such as: (a) significant collective defections, (b) ‘partially new parties’ that are difficult to classify dichotomously as ‘new’ or ‘old’, (c) ‘seemingly’ new parties, (d) splinters that are more significant than the successors of their parent parties, and (e) very unequal mergers. Because of the proliferation of such phenomena, a shift from an ‘organisational’ to an ‘evolutionary’ paradigm—focusing on the people who make up the organisations—may be overdue.