Most studies of parties’ electoral success adopt an individual-level perspective. They usually focus on the motives of voters, or country-level institutions in explaining an aspect of an election result. Surprisingly, however, while there several theories at the party level that portend to explain when parties succeed, they usually do not provide any evidence for their arguments. This paper begins to fill this gap by examining the relevance of party organizations and leadership charisma in attracting voters in 24 European democracies.
We focus on two arguments that are often treated separately but, we argue, jointly influence party success. First, we examine the extent to which the organizations of a party to this day affect the success of political parties. Historically, prior research pointed to the relevance of mass organizations in helping large parties to become large in Western Europe. And what little evidence exists about parties in Central-Eastern Europe suggests that party organizations in that region also matter for them to succeed at the ballot box. In contrast, a separate set of studies focuses on the role of leadership charisma—parties succeed mainly because a populist leader attracts voters—which is often interpreted to mean that one exists to the detriment of the other. However, it appears to us that leaders and party organizations can reinforce each other in producing electoral success. To integrate these two streams of research into an overall account of party success is the goal of this study.
For our evidence, we use an expert survey conducted in the fall of 2007, covering 94 parties in 13 Central-East European countries. We also conducted an expert survey in 14 West European countries in the spring of 2008 in all EU countries minus Luxembourg.
