Political finance research has been investigating parties’ incomes and expenditure by predominantly relying on descriptive statistics. Parties’ finances have also mostly been studied detached from the overarching organization literature, even though party theory may provide useful frameworks for analysis. This paper brings the existing literature on organization and finance into dialogue and states that parties’ incomes and expenses mirror the structure of the overarching party body. Two spatial methods are presented to comparatively study parties both in terms of incomes and expenses, namely hierarchical clustering and singular spectrum analysis. These methods enable us to structure the detailed information encountered in account statements. The two approaches are applied to German parties’ finances from 1995-2017 based on public accounting reports. I show that parties finances can be differentiated into a membership/staff-oriented and donation/election-oriented structure. From a longitudinal perspective, German parties have obtained increasingly more donations from individuals, where corporate donations have been decreasing at the same time. I argue that finances reflect parties’ ties to the political environment and provide a promising indicator for studying party systems over time.
