Organizing for Success: The Effect of Intra-Party Democracy on Local Level Party Presence

Levels of intra-party democracy (IPD) have long been seen as important for candidate recruitment, policy development, and party membership. But what impact do they have on the ability of parties to interact with citizens at the local level? In this paper, we leverage new data on the formal rules governing political parties around the world, along with a new measure of local party presence, to show that parties with higher levels of IPD have a greater presence at the local level, and, as a result, are better able to interact with citizens both during and between elections. We argue that this is because such parties are more responsive to the needs and demands of local party members (providing an effective route to share important mobilizing information), and more likely to invest in building local party structures that can subsequently be repurposed to interact directly with citizens. These findings suggest that internal party democracy plays an important role in the outward facing democratic activities of parties, highlighting the importance of bringing together research in these two areas.