The internal democracy of the new European parties. A quantitative analysis.

In the last decade, a wave of new political parties rose in Europe out of dissatisfaction with the traditional parties and the democratic weaknesses and failures of the representative system. Generally, they claim to enhance internal democracy as a structural dimension that differentiates them from established parties. This paper aims to study the intra-party model of democracy of these new parties using Von dem Berge and Ponguntke’s (2017) Intra-Party Democracy model. In this paper, we first analyze the IPD indices (assembly-based IPD index and plebiscitary IPD index) of these parties obtained from the second round of the Political Party Database Project (these parties were not included in the first round). With the first round dataset, Von dem Berge and Ponguntke showed that parties with high PIPD scores tend to have high AIPD scores, and parties with low AIPD scores and high PIPD scores are extremely unusual. However, the literature on these new parties argues that new parties born in the last decade end up being highly plebiscitary and aggregative to the detriment of their original aims for deliberation and members decision-making through assemblies and congresses (Gerbaudo, 2018, 2019; Guglielmo, 2021; Barberà et al -eds-, 2021; Meloni, Marco and Lupato, 2023;). In this sense, PIPD does not complement high AIPD. First, we want to ascertain if this is true following Von dem Berge and Ponguntke’s IPD indexes. Second, taking into account that more than 50 parties rose in the last decade in Europe, we can study quantitatively how their IPD scores relate to some key factors (ideological families, institutional power, size, political systems or western/central/eastern zone) and the digitalization component in order to explain differences in the intra-party models. Lastly, we would like to debate the limitations (and benefits) of Von dem Berge and Ponguntke’s IPD model (is it time to overcome the dichotomous distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary intra-party democracy?) and come up with some suggestions for improvement, such as taking into account some PPDB inclusiveness variables to add the IPD quality ingredient. We consider PPDB an excellent data collection collaborative initiative in which we can advance with new contributions.