Party System Dynamics: New Tools for the Study of Party System Change and Party Transformation

Party systems that once seemed frozen now appear to melt before our eyes. In the two decades since Bartolini and Mair published their foundational work on Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability, measures suggest dramatically increased levels of party and party system change. But it is hard to know how much change because our measures of volatility and other methods of assessing change at the party level have not kept pace with developments. Fortunately, the rate of change within party systems has been matched by improvements in technology that allow scholars to collaborate and calculate. The proposed workshop will bring together specialists from across the globe to gather comprehensive country-level data on in party- and party-system change, develop a common framework and standard for party change data, and use of the new data to develop theory about the causes and consequences of change and potential countervailing forces. In cooperation with the editorial team of the European Journal of Political Research’s Political Data Yearbook—whose current digitization of past PDY issues will provide a standardized framework for party data—the workshop’s papers will become part of an expanded dataset on European party politics and become the basis of proposed edited volumes on party- and party-system change in Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Latin America (with the intention of expanding to Africa and Asia) dedicated in memory of Peter Mair, whose efforts inspired this workshop.