The Dimensionality and Causality of Party Organizational Change: a European Investigation

How much do parties respond organizationally to their social and institutional environments? This paper investigates the level of contemporary party organizational change and its causes. Firstly, the paper deals with the type of organizational transformation and how much of it is perceived or actual change. In doing so it uses data gathered from official documents (the new PPDB database and the Party Law in modern Europe data base) and also original data based on evaluations from two rounds of expert surveys conducted in Europe in 2007 and 2015. The analysis ascertains whether changes are more common to certain social and institutional settings across Europe and also at newer as well as more-established democracies. Secondly, the paper looks into the causes of organizational change. The paper thus contributes theoretically and empirically to the debate between competing theories about life-cycle, system level trends and discreet change approaches which all tackle the issue of party organizational change from different perspectives in regards to both the nature and determinants of change.