Doomed to be Dominated? Causes and Consequences of Party Organization Change

The classics on party organization have a pessimistic outlook on the function of party organization in democracy. Leaders will dominate any party and party competition will no longer be about political alternatives. Current trends to counter leadership-domination, such as widening party’s selectorate or seeking to increase the membership are argued to be ineffective. These trends are likely to have severe consequences for policy representation as party may no longer represent the interests of their voters or the people as such. Party organizational changes thus affect the capacity of parties to fulfill their role as interest mediators.

Using a novel dataset, which allows for a longitudinal perspective on party organizational changes over 40 years in 18 countries we find that leadership domination indeed has increased, but still there is a lot of variation between parties. We also find that widening the selectorate or increasing the membership does not decrease leadership domination. We analyze the consequences of party platform change using two waves from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. Combining this information with survey material and information on party organization we indeed find that more leadership domination leads to a different model of representation. To be specific, leader-dominated parties perform better when it comes to represent the general public and changes in the public mood but put less emphasis in representing their party voters. The paper closes with a discussion of how structural party organization helps or impedes political parties in times of crisis.