Susan E. Scarrow’s research while affiliated with University of Houston and other places

This article investigates the causes of decreasing gender gaps in grassroots party participation, asking which of multiple explanations for these changes seems best supported by patterns of behavioral change. We answer this question by examining longitudinal changes in survey reports about who is participating in party activities. Two sets of surveys using slightly different measures of activism consistently show that women comprise a growing share of active partisans, but they fail to support many common explanations about why such shifts are occurring, such as the argument that it is driven by generational changes. More surprisingly, they show that some of the closing of the participation gender gap reflects changes in men’s behavior more than women’s growing partisan empowerment, with men disproportionately withdrawing from party activism. These findings suggest that party efforts to (re)activate their grassroots might benefit from pursuing different engagement strategies for women and men supporters.

Democracy is in decline, and the share of world’s population living in freedom under democratic government has decreased considerably as authoritarian practices proliferate. Surprisingly, most of the analyses that study these developments give little attention to the role of political parties in the decline of democracy, although there is a broad consensus about the relevance of political parties for the functioning of democracy. How parties can contribute to democracy is best understood by looking at a very diverse range of cases in different parts of the world. Instead of taking a regional approach, which dominates the literature on political parties, this book takes a global perspective. It brings together experts from four continents, which opens up fresh comparative perspectives on the role of political parties in the democratic process. It asks how parties contribute to the consolidation of democracy, why they fail today, why new parties emerge and displace old parties, and also what parties need to do in order to survive cut-throat competition, above all with new (and sometimes not so new) variants of populist parties. The book takes a unique global focus, covering old and new democracies in different regions of the world. It covers Western and Central Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Africa, Turkey, and Israel. This includes presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary democracies, and also some countries where democracy is seriously threatened or eroding. It offers unique comparative perspectives combined with a detailed analysis of individual countries and their party systems. The book shows that parties are central actors for the consolidation of democracy, but that organisational reforms are necessary to cope with social change such as individualisation, the decline in party membership, and the impact of new media and modern communication, thus counteracting the fragmentation of party systems and the decay of democracy.

Studies of party- and party-system stability have often explored the connection between the party-level property of Party Institutionalization (PI) and parties’ electoral performance and organizational longevity, yet scholars still have not agreed on a standard measure for this concept. This article argues that the length of party statutes could provide part of such a measure, specifically for the extent to which parties have become routinized (a key dimension of PI) through the formalization of their rules and practices. We validate the plausibility of this measure using data on 303 parties from 49 countries, demonstrating that party statute length varies systematically and in ways predicted by our knowledge of how party organizations reflect their institutional environments and the complexity of internal coalitions. We also show that statute length varies in expected ways with attributes often associated with higher or lower levels of party institutionalization. We conclude that statute length offers a conceptually congruent and objective indicator of formalization, one that could be used either alone or combined with measures of parties’ informal practices to advance our understanding of the relationship between PI and democratic development.

Political observers agree that parties in European parliamentary democracies are more likely than previously to give party members opportunities to vote in decisions about party policies or personnel. Observers are less agreed about the implications of these apparent procedural trends. Some, including Peter Mair, saw them as evidence of the hollowing-out of party democracies; others have seen them as enhancing citizens’ opportunities for meaningful political participation. Because this is ultimately an empirical question as well as a normative one, these radically conflicting interpretations make it crucial to examine which interpretation is best supported by usage to date This is the task we undertake in this article. We use data from the Political Party Database Project (PPDB) to investigate the extent to which parties in 26 European countries have adopted and employed intra-party ballots. We also ask whether there is evidence that such procedures are changing intra-party relationships. We find that balloting of party members is indeed widely used, but it is by no means universal. We find much less support for the implication that such ballots are associated with less competitive contests, or that the new devices are generally used in ways that devalue party-member bonds.

This article investigates the relationship between levels of party institutionalization and individual-level partisan mobilization. Levels of party institutionalization have been linked to macro-level outcomes such as party system stability, but little is known about the micro-level underpinnings of such patterns. This article investigates one set of mechanisms through which party institutionalization might affect electoral outcomes. Specifically, we ask how routinization and value infusion – two central dimensions of party institutionalization – shape partisans’ political mobilization. We investigate these relationships by matching data on individual-level behaviour (taken from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) 2014 wave) with data on party attributes commonly associated with levels of institutionalization (taken from the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project – DALP). We find that while value infusion encourages relatively greater participation from non-member supporters, party routinization depresses non-member participation but may mobilize otherwise inactive members. These findings suggest that to understand the effects of party institutionalization on a macro-level phenomenon such as electoral volatility, it may be necessary to study how parties institutionalize, rather than just asking how much they institutionalize.

In the early 2000s, some observers predicted that the US parties’ overseas association would play an increasing role in US politics (Dark 2003). Changes since then, including the growth of the expatriate population, would seem to make such developments more likely. Yet many features of the US political system mitigate against party efforts to mobilise expatriate supporters, including single-member district elections and candidate-centred contests (Van Haute and Kernalegenn, 2020). What, then, has been the 21st century trajectory of US party abroad activity? This article investigates this question, comparing the recent evolution Democrat and Republican party abroad efforts. It shows that the parties have taken different paths, with the Democrats’ organisation focussing more on electoral mobilisation, while the Republicans’ organisation has focussed more on issue advocacy and non-electoral representation. These different operational modes reflect the opportunities for, and constraints on, mobilising US expatriates for partisan purposes.

How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Western political systems. The contributors to this Handbook, made up of the world’s leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation, examine how well the political elites and parties who are charged with the representation of the public interest meet their duties. Clearly, institutions often fail to live up to their own representation goals. With this in mind, the contributors explore several challenges to the way that the system of representation is organized in modern democracies. For example, actors such as parties and established elites face rising distrust among electorates. Also, the rise of international problems such as migration and environmentalism suggests that the focus of democracies on nation states may have to shift to a more international level. All told, this Handbook illuminates the normative and functional challenges faced by representative institutions in liberal democracies.