How do parties organize, and do parties' organizational differences matter? Different organization patterns are empirically associated with varying electoral performance, voters' participation, policy-making, and party systems' shape and stability.Despite the empirical relevance of party organization, theoretical scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on other functions of parties — namely the electoral one, simplifying the political world for voters, and the policy-making one in the legislative arena. The papers in this dissertation advance a new theoretical agenda on the organization of political parties, generating insights that I test with novel data. The main contribution of the dissertation is to treat party organization as an endogenous rather than exogenous variable. This approach allows to generate novel insights on how the electoral environment influences the way parties organize, and outcomes such as parties' electoral performance and the process of party system stabilization. The first paper conceives the internal organization of a party as being driven by factional competition. What brings opposing factions to engage in sabotage rather than enhance the party image, and what strategies can parties adopt to contain it? The paper introduces a model of elections in which intra-party factions can devote resources to campaign for the party or to undermine each other and obtain more power. The party redistributes electoral spoils among factions to motivate their investment in campaigning activities. The model shows that sabotage increases when the stakes of the election are low — e.g., in consensus democracies that grant power to the losing party — because the incentives to focus on the fight for internal power increase. It also suggests that the optimal party strategy for winning the election in the face of intra-party competition is to reward factions with high powered incentives when campaigning effort can be easily monitored, but treat factions equally otherwise. Finally, the model shows that, when a party weakens electorally, factions’ incentives move from campaigning for the party to sabotaging each other to obtain electoral spoils. A testable implication of this result is the emergence of political scandals triggered internally as a product of factional sabotage. The second paper tests this empirical implication using original data on judicial investigations of Italian MPs involved in various misbehaviors. Judicial investigations of politicians are a fundamental component of politics, often leading to scandals. Yet, empirical evidence of the strategic determinants of judicial investigations is intrinsically hard to gather, a problem that has significantly limited the study of this important phenomenon. The paper studies the politics behind judicial investigations leveraging new data on prosecutors' informants in 1125 episodes of misbehavior of Italian MPs involved in different crimes (1983-2019). Results provide evidence in favor of a political use of denunciations for corruption crimes: when a party weakens, the likelihood that political enemies denounce past misbehavior of members of the weakened party increases, suggesting that the political use of denunciation is elastic to changes in the electoral performance. The timing of past misbehavior is crucial: members of weakened parties are more likely to be accused of misbehavior that happened a long time before the accusation, which further supports the conjecture that accusations are politically motivated. The third paper moves to the topic of party organization in the presence of multi-party competition. It conceives of the choice over party organization as parties' decision to form different types of alliances. Despite being pervasive, little is known about the conditions facilitating different forms of pre-electoral alliances. The paper presents a model of electoral competition in which parties can form alliances before elections, and decide how binding these should be. Parties face a dynamic trade-off between insuring themselves against large shifts in public opinion and allowing flexibility to respond to future changes in voters' preferences. The model shows that more binding alliances such as mergers emerge in equilibrium when electoral volatility is high; otherwise, parties form more flexible pre-electoral coalitions. It also suggests that some power concentration is needed for alliances to emerge in equilibrium, whereas parties run alone under consensual democracies that share power among all parties.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in 25% fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management( in the field of Public and Development Management) / Political parties are prominent in the development of democracy in South Africa. Therefore, it is critical to expand knowledge about the governance of the major parties in the country in order to reflect on the future of democracy. The framework based on key functions - membership recruitment, policy formulation and organisational complexity performed by political parties facilitate an incisive assessment of adherence to governance principles - participation, accountability and transparency. Various sources, which include constitutions, interviews and focus group discussions of political parties, were central in the assessment of the governance principles of parties. The study revealed that the visions, missions, regularity of meetings, quorums requirements for meetings, diverse representation and structures are instructive in assessing and understanding the prevalence of governance principles within the operations of political parties. These areas are revealed in the study and they also provide insights in a future perspective of South African democracy. / GR2018

In a time of extreme political polarization in America, it is necessary to understand how political attitudes are shaped and how and why political perspectives shift. This study explored political polarization and the search for common ground among American voters in order to evaluate 1) political orientation and associations with current and shifting political attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, and learning; 2) political efficacy and associations with political participation; 3) contributions of individual events, experiences, sources and/or social interactions to shifting political perspectives; and 4) the potential role of observational learning and experiential learning as it relates to political attitudinal change. Through a mixed-methods design, this study utilized both quantitative and qualitative methods in two phases in anticipation of the November 2020 U.S. presidential election. First, a survey was administered nationwide on Facebook in July and August of 2020. Second, a small number of participants that indicated that their political views had shifted during the Trump presidency were interviewed in October 2020 to discover more in-depth responses regarding both the formation and shifts of their political ideologies and attitudes. Quantitative statistical analysis from the survey (n = 1,313) revealed that 1) political orientation was significantly associated with a variety of current and shifting political attitudes, political participation, cognitive perceptions and emotions, social media and news media usage, and learning; and 2) personal and collective political efficacy was significantly associated with increased political participation. Qualitative analysis from the semi-structured interviews (n = 16) utilizing the Framework Method indicated that 1) social interactions with role models and media sources informed shifts in political attitudes, especially in regard to family; 2) deeper understandings of shifting political attitudes emerged when viewed through the observational learning subprocesses of attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation; 3) shifting political attitudes were associated with cognitive perceptions and emotions of partisan ingroups and partisan outgroups; 4) deeper understandings of shifting political attitudes emerged when viewed through the experiential learning stages of returning to the experience, attending to emotions, and re-evaluating the experience; and 5) barriers to shifting political attitudes were related to the cognitive perceptions of reason and emotion, whereas rewards for shifting political attitudes were related to increased political participation and learning. The study’s conclusions reaffirmed that there is widespread political polarization in the United States but that there are certain pathways towards common ground through civility and respect, intentional listening, and through the sharing of personal and emotional stories and lived experiences. Those who did shift their views shared an openness to learning through the observation of role models and sources (e.g., family, friends, mentors or teachers, religious leaders, media) and through reflection on past experiences. Aspects of political common ground were obtained not by agreeing on a contentious issue, but by acknowledging that multiple sides of an argument could be valid. It’s about how we approach the problem rather than how we solve the problem. Political orientation is much more complex than the dichotomous portrayal of left versus right.

One of the major debates in Swedish politics today is violence in close relationships and against women and children. The debate has grown stronger since 2017 when Me Too revolutionized the world. This study is analyzed from a structural perspective, where Me Too is a social movement and whether it has influenced or somehow changed the criminal policy of Vänsterpartiet and Moderaterna. The focus will lay on sexual crimes. The study intends to analyze the parties' criminal policy with a focus on sexual crime issues between the years 2013 to 2020 to see if Me Too after 2017 has created change. For this study, selected motions have been taken from the parliament website and presented in an analysis. That material also accounts for the central parts of this study. As a theory for this thesis, the structure and actor model will apply. Here, Me Too stands as structure and the parties as actors. With the help of the model, the outcome of the policy should be studied over time. The structure and actors model is applied in the results in the analysis of the parties' motions. The study will seek answers to two questions. These two are, What are the similarities and differences between the criminal policy of Vänsterpartiet and Moderaterna when it comes to sexual crimes.  As a concluding discussion question, the study tries to develop whether the social movement Me Too has made any impact on the parties' criminal policy regarding sexual crimes. The conclusion of this study is that the parties differ as Vänsterpartiet is based on a feminist ideology and wants to see old norms and social structures in the form of patriarchy broken. Moderates including the debate as an integration problem. They both agree that Me Too has created change for women both in Sweden and worldwide and helped direct the spotlight on this societal problem. / <p>Utveckla de valda partiets ideologier och motivera den valda metoden. </p>

This thesis explores the interplay between digital social movements and political parties on social media. The overarching aim of the thesis is to contribute to the understanding of how the digitalization of the electoral arena has transformed social movements, and how this affects the political parties' perceptions of them. The theoretical framework consists of three analytical lenses to conceptualize this interplay, these are George and Leidner’s (2019) categorization and classification of digital activism, Gunnar Sjöblom’s (1968) theory on partystrategies in a multiparty system, and Anne Kaun’s (2017) concept desynchronization. Acombination of methods is used, including network analysis and interviews, to explore this interplay. The results of the study indicate that there is a desynchronization in the practices of digital social movements and Swedish political parties.

Online behavioural targeted advertising has become a leading method to increase theeffectiveness of advertisement online. The advertisement is based on information aboutusers’ internet activities collected by third party tracking services. However, there is a fineline between whether this should be considered a privacy leakage or an unharmful way toimprove the experience. This thesis presents a methodology for understanding and analyzing how significant personal information leakage to third parties is. To investigate theinformation leakage, a web crawler was implemented with the purpose to imitate fictiveusers browsing the web. The users’ activity online was based on the fictive user’s interestsand personal information. For every webpage visited, data such as text, URLs and screenshots were saved. The data were analyzed and the finding revealed that third parties generated targeted ads based on personal information regardless of the browser, user’s profile,and geographical location. However, we observed that targeted ads are a frequent practiceand noticed that categories valued more by advertisers are more intensely targeted.

UNIVERZITA KARLOVA Fakulta sociálních věd Institut politologických studií Bc. Anna Hlaváčková ZELENÁNÍ POLITICKÝCH STRAN - ADOPCE ENVIRONMENTÁLNÍ POLITIKY PARLAMENTNÍMI STRANAMI V ČESKÉ REPUBLICE Diplomová práce Praha 2011 Autor práce: Bc. Anna Hlaváčková Vedoucí práce: PhDr. Petr Just, Ph. D. Rok obhajoby: 2011 Bibliografický záznam: HLAVÁČKOVÁ, A., Zelenání politických stran - Adopce environmentální politiky parlamentními stranami v ČR, Diplomová práce, Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta sociálních věd, Institut politologických studií, Vedoucí diplomové práce PhDr., Petr Just, Ph. D., Praha 2011, 177 s. Anotace: Diplomová práce "Zelenání politických stran - Adopce environmentální politiky parlamentními stranami v České republice" se zabývá fenoménem zelenání univerzalistických poltických stran ve smyslu jejich postupné adopce environmentální politiky do volebních programů. Objektem zkoumání jsou programy českých parlamentních stran podle výsledků voleb do Poslanecké sněmovny Parlamentu České republiky v červnu 2010. Problematika je zkoumána z kvantitativního i kvalitativního komparativního hlediska, snaží se odhalit trendy v přijímání environmentální politiky do programových dokumentů a popsat jednotlivé postoje českých parlamentních stran k zelenému programu. Práce dále zkoumá vztah této programové změny k...

The thesis inquires into the stances of italian political parties towards the issue of immigration in the years 2005 - 2009 with a particular concern for the role of the EU in this policy area. Using a theoretical clasification of Zincone the thesis analyses parties' documents, electoral programmes and newspaper articles in order to identify the main issues and approaches adopted by the italian parties during the selected time period. The thesis proves to some measure the hypothesis that right- wing parties adopt mainly functionalist, legalitarian and identitarian approaches to immigration, whilst left-wing parties adopt solidarist, human-rights based and multiculturalist approach. In the run of the selected time period there was an increasement in the security rhetorics even by left-wing parties, so a political competition for ownership of the security issue was observed. Also a hypothesis was partially proved that left-wing parties want the EU migration and asylum policy to have a wide impact, whilst the right-wing parties want mainly the EU to help the member-state with the fight against illegal immigration and with negotiating readmission agreements.

This thesis deals with the phenomenon of immigration and integration, which started to play a crucial role in the sphere of Dutch politics and media in the mid-nineties of the twentieth century. The start of a public debate about this topic and the gradual withdrawal from the multicultural integration model have caused immigration, integration and - since 2001 - also Islam to become among the key topics that the Dutch media have refered about and that political parties have taken stances to. Political entities that could be described as "anti-immigrant" perceive the topic of immigration as the cornerstone of their political identity, but "mainstream" political parties have eventually also had to re-evaluate their stance to this topic. Regarding immigration and integration, the media are exposed to conflicting pressures of political correctness on the one side and the appeal to their audience on the other. One of the ways how to increase the appeal is through the allure of controversy, which is something that the can be achieved by stigmatisation of Islam, especially since 2001.

The thesis aims to analyze and explain the origin, development and manifestations of the process of Europeanization of two players of the Czech party system - the ODS and the KSČM. The thesis starts with a theoretical part, which summarizes the current debate in political science and Europeanization in the context of political parties. The main aim was to trace the changes that were seen among those due to the involvement of political parties in the debate over the meaning of European integration for Czech politics and the practical integration into EU institutions. The basic hypothesis, which is verified, aims to examine the correlation and negativistic relation ODS and KSČM on issues of European integration after twenty years of exposure in the Czech party system. At the same time an analysis of election results mentioned parties to the European Parliament, as well as the method of election campaigns of parties in the same institution. The analytical part of the work analyzes the ODS and KSČM in the line of the general impact of European policies, program outcomes of affected parties, as well as electoral competition in elections to the EP and Czech national assembly. Key words: Europeanization, political parties, ODS, KSČM, European Union