Political Parties and Democracy: Resilience or Decay?

Political parties govern in all democracies. To be sure, there is variation between regimes but a common denominator is that parties occupy a central role in personnel selection and policy formulation. At the same time, parties have been losing their formally strong connection to society as is indicated by the rise of new parties and seemingly ever-growing volatility. Arguably, one building bloc of a stable connection between parties and society is their organizational capacity. In other words, linkage is (also) based on parties as organizations which facilitate stable connections between rules and ruled (Sartori). This paper takes a broadly comparative view on how strong parties are as organizations. To this end, it will present data from the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) on party membership and party resources. Based on this analysis of the ‘hard’ infrastructure of linkage, the paper will analyse different modes of intra-party democracy which lead to different modes of representational linkage. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the role political parties can play for the future of democratic representation.