The Party as a Promise: Political Parties’ Organizational Strength in New Democracies

The literature on new democracies frequently highlights parties’ fleeting existence and organizational weakness. Indeed, political parties in young democracies frequently collapse from one electoral period to the next, seriously dilute their brands after a single term in office, and suffer significant defections to newer and more promising projects. They also rarely invest in organization building, even though robust organizations are crucial in allowing parties to weather storms and remain viable in the long run. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, relying on a novel dataset of hundreds of parties in 20 countries between 1990 and 2020, it sheds light on the organizational robustness of political parties in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Second, it compares these data to existing indices of organizational strength based on expert or politician codings. Third, it uses regression analysis to identify the conditions that facilitate the building of strong organizations. My analysis systematizes the existing knowledge on the causes of partisan organizations in new democracies around the world, which is largely based on case studies, and demonstrates that few factors hold up in large-n comparative analyses.