The subject of this study has been organizational change within two Scandinavian green parties – the Swedish Green Party and the Norwegian Green Party. Looking at the organizational changes within these two parties using Robert Michel’s famous concept the “iron law of oligarchy”, I have studied whether these two parties have become more oligarchic after having been elected to the national parliaments of Sweden and Norway respectively. What I have found is that although these two parties still retain much of the original organizational structure that they have had, in particular the Swedish Green Party, change has occurred and seems to be occurring, at least in the Norwegian Green Party, which would indicate that the two parties have become more oligarchic. What I have found is in other words that parties which are elected into their national parliament tend to become more oligarchic during the period following the election – the fact that a party is elected into parliament seems to play a key role in the development towards a more oligarchic party structure in the two cases which I have studied.

Embora a filiação partidária seja um tema clássico da agenda de ciência política, segue essa sendo relativamente pouco estudada. Igualmente, as ferramentas teórico-analíticas presentes na literatura estão muito centradas no contexto europeu, associadas geralmente ao contexto histórico da chamada crise de representação política. Propomos uma forma alternativa de se compreender a filiação: o ciclo da filiação partidária. Definimos a filiação como sendo composta de três elementos interdependentes: o recrutamento partidário, a ação partidária e o desligamento partidário. Em um primeiro momento, voltamo-nos à literatura internacional, buscando entender seus avanços a partir da óptica de nosso conceito de ciclo da filiação. Em seguida, analisamos cada etapa do ciclo a partir do contexto brasileiro. Utilizamos para tal a base pública de dados de filiação do TSE. Em linhas gerais, podemos concluir que cada etapa do ciclo de filiação possui forte relação com o ciclo eleitoral brasileiro. Além disso, temos indícios de que políticos profissionais e membros-base comportam-se de maneira distinta dentro dos partidos. Por fim, que as mudanças institucionais realizadas ao longo do período democrático têm impacto profundo na organização partidária de maneira geral. / Although party membership is a classic theme in political science, it still is a relatively understudied subject. Moreover, theoretical-analytical tools present in the literature are too much focused on the European context, while at the same time being associated with the historical context of the so-called crisis of political representation. We propose an alternative way of understanding party membership: the cycle of party membership. We define party membership as being composed of three interdependent elements: party recruitment, party participation, and party departure. At first, we turn to the international literature, trying to understand its advances from the perspective of our concept of membership cycle. Next, we analyze each stage of the cycle from the Brazilian context, using the public database of party membership provided by the TSE. In general terms, we can conclude that each stage of the party membership cycle in Brazil has a strong relationship with the electoral cycle. Furthermore, we have indications that professional politicians and base members behave differently within parties. Finally, institutional changes throughout the Brazilian democratic period seems to have a profound impact on party organization in general.

The organizations of national and provincial parties in Canada are understood to be separated from one another. However, it is not known whether this separation extends to the constituency-level organizations of those parties. In order to provide a better understanding of how national and provincial parties are linked at the local level (if at all), this thesis describes and accounts for the local organizations of the national Liberal Party and the provincial Liberal parties in sixteen national constituencies selected from the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and New Brunswick. Information from interviews with local party activists and participant observation in the ridings is used to develop a continuum of constituency-level party organizations. Descriptions of the activist bases, constituency associations, and local campaigns in each riding allow for each local organization to be placed along this continuum between integrated local organizations, which share important linkages between the national and provincial levels, and differentiated local organizations, where no such linkages exist. The placement of local organizations along this continuum is accounted for by (1) similarities or differences between the national and provincial party systems in the three provinces studied; (2) the actions of incumbent members of the national Parliament and provincial legislatures; and (3) characteristics of the constituencies. The patterns identified lead to a classification of four types of local organizations – One Political World, Interconnected Political Worlds, Distinctive Political Worlds, and Two Political Worlds – that illuminate the different forms of linkages between national and provincial parties that exist at the constituency level. This examination of the local organizations of the Liberal Party calls into question the academic consensus on the separation of national and provincial parties in Canada. Instead, the Liberal Party is characterized as an unevenly integrated party, where the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary parties are separated from provincial counterparts, but where the national and provincial parties on the ground are oftentimes integrated.

Political parties are the basic building blocks of representative democracy. They reduce information costs for voters, enhance executive accountability, and contribute to democratic governability by facilitating legislative organization and aggregating the interests of powerful societal groups. Yet we continue to know relatively little about the conditions under which strong parties form. The dominant theories of party-building are mostly based on historical studies of the United States and Western European countries, almost all of which developed stable party systems. Drawing on this literature, a segment of the early scholarship on party-building in third-wave democracies optimistically took "party development" for granted, assuming that parties would follow from democracy, cleavages, or certain electoral rules. Yet party-building outcomes in third-wave democracies fell short of scholars' initial, optimistic expectations. In many third-wave polities, social cleavages, attempts at electoral engineering, and decades of democratic competition did not produce durable parties. On the other hand, in numerous third-wave democracies, new political parties did take root. What accounts for the variation in party-building outcomes observed across the developing world? More generally, under what conditions does party-building succeed? / Government

The organizations of national and provincial parties in Canada are understood to be separated from one another. However, it is not known whether this separation extends to the constituency-level organizations of those parties. In order to provide a better understanding of how national and provincial parties are linked at the local level (if at all), this thesis describes and accounts for the local organizations of the national Liberal Party and the provincial Liberal parties in sixteen national constituencies selected from the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and New Brunswick. Information from interviews with local party activists and participant observation in the ridings is used to develop a continuum of constituency-level party organizations. Descriptions of the activist bases, constituency associations, and local campaigns in each riding allow for each local organization to be placed along this continuum between integrated local organizations, which share important linkages between the national and provincial levels, and differentiated local organizations, where no such linkages exist. The placement of local organizations along this continuum is accounted for by (1) similarities or differences between the national and provincial party systems in the three provinces studied; (2) the actions of incumbent members of the national Parliament and provincial legislatures; and (3) characteristics of the constituencies. The patterns identified lead to a classification of four types of local organizations – One Political World, Interconnected Political Worlds, Distinctive Political Worlds, and Two Political Worlds – that illuminate the different forms of linkages between national and provincial parties that exist at the constituency level. This examination of the local organizations of the Liberal Party calls into question the academic consensus on the separation of national and provincial parties in Canada. Instead, the Liberal Party is characterized as an unevenly integrated party, where the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary parties are separated from provincial counterparts, but where the national and provincial parties on the ground are oftentimes integrated.

While political parties in Europe are incredibly adaptable organizations, they have varied in the extent to which they are able to adapt to social and political transformations. I explain parties' adaptability in two steps. 1) Adaptability depends on factionalism in a nonlinear way. Giving too much room and no room at all to factions undermines a party's ability to adapt. 2) Factionalism depends on early organizational characteristics. The more centralized the initially introduced leadership selection process is, the more party elites will be incentivized to form factions. This argument applies to political parties that allow for internal competition and elect their leaders according to formal rules. I use statistical tools, a medium- and small-N analysis and systematic process tracing to test my framework against competing explanations. I focus on Christian democracy to use a most-similar system design. The main empirical part of the thesis relies on a structured focused comparison of the Italian DC, Austrian ÖVP and German CDU. It is guided by a nested analysis and builds on a large amount of primary data which has not been analyzed before. I test my theory on the additional cases of the Portuguese, Dutch and Luxembourgian Christian Democrats and the French MRP. My main finding is that early organizational choices matter. The initial form the leadership selection process takes has a decisive impact on the incentives of intra-party actors to form factions. The initial level of factionalism becomes deeply entrenched in the party's organization and internal code of practice. This explains why party elites are unlikely to change it when they realize that their party's level of factionalism undermines its adaptability. Moving beyond the focus of path dependence on a single level has thus important implications for the literature on party politics, factionalism, party organizations and institutional development.

The organizations of national and provincial parties in Canada are understood to be separated from one another. However, it is not known whether this separation extends to the constituency-level organizations of those parties. In order to provide a better understanding of how national and provincial parties are linked at the local level (if at all), this thesis describes and accounts for the local organizations of the national Liberal Party and the provincial Liberal parties in sixteen national constituencies selected from the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and New Brunswick. Information from interviews with local party activists and participant observation in the ridings is used to develop a continuum of constituency-level party organizations. Descriptions of the activist bases, constituency associations, and local campaigns in each riding allow for each local organization to be placed along this continuum between integrated local organizations, which share important linkages between the national and provincial levels, and differentiated local organizations, where no such linkages exist. The placement of local organizations along this continuum is accounted for by (1) similarities or differences between the national and provincial party systems in the three provinces studied; (2) the actions of incumbent members of the national Parliament and provincial legislatures; and (3) characteristics of the constituencies. The patterns identified lead to a classification of four types of local organizations – One Political World, Interconnected Political Worlds, Distinctive Political Worlds, and Two Political Worlds – that illuminate the different forms of linkages between national and provincial parties that exist at the constituency level. This examination of the local organizations of the Liberal Party calls into question the academic consensus on the separation of national and provincial parties in Canada. Instead, the Liberal Party is characterized as an unevenly integrated party, where the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary parties are separated from provincial counterparts, but where the national and provincial parties on the ground are oftentimes integrated. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The thesis presents a comparative analysis of the Scottish and Welsh Labour Party's position. The work is focuses on the change of regional party's branches after devolution, which the Labour Party introduced in 1999. At the decentralized level was created a new devolved institution, a new party system and a new electoral system, which has brought the possibility of coalition government. These changes were meant a big challenge for the party. The party must adapt to new conditions and change access to regional affiliates. The changes are analyzed according to the theoretical framework created by J. Hopkin and supplemented by the theory of Laffin, Shaw and Taylor. Areas of party activities are being explored, such as election of candidates, electoral and governmental strategies, election leaders, organization and party financing, and party status in a party system based on elections to the Westminster and Regional Parliament or National Assembly. The thesis briefly describes history of the Labour Party and its organization, which is necessary for analysis after devolutional position of the party. There is briefly described the devolution itself in the British environment and the emergence and system of newly established legislative institutions, including the electoral system.

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.

This dissertation studies political party organization in the United States, Germany and Poland during national election campaigns and regular party operations. According to conventional wisdom, changes in party organization, such as professionalized campaigns and communications technology, have detrimental effects on political parties. Katz and Mair argue (1995) that political parties have become agents of the state and fail to provide linkage between the state and the electorate due to these changes in party organization. As cartel parties, political parties are then financially dependent on the state and do not need the support of the electorate. Katz and Mair further suggest that developing a closer relationship with the state has weakened political parties, especially the party on the ground. This dissertation tests whether Katz and Mair's cartel theory applies to political parties in the United States, Germany and Poland examining the parties' organizations during and in between election campaigns and finds that the political parties do not confirm the cartel theory. American and German political parties do not primarily rely on government financing and possess too strong of an electoral linkage to their voters to be considered cartel parties. Political parties in Poland better fit with the cartel theory due to strong financial ties with the state and insufficient linkage with their electorate, both inside and outside of election campaigns. This dissertation argues that the cartel thesis should not be considered a theory since it cannot explain observations regarding political parties and their organizations in the United States, Germany and Poland. Instead, the cartel thesis should be considered a heuristic tool to characterize political parties, continuing the tradition of prior descriptive party models such as those of the mass and the catch-all parties. / Political Science