Cross-National Measures of Party Organizations and Organizational Theory

Abstract

Party organizations are the leprechauns of the political forest, legendary creatures with special powers who avoid being seen. Because no one has ever photographed a party organization, descriptions vary widely and many scholars do not take them seriously enough to investigate their being. Very few scholars study party organization in comparison to the study of concrete things like voters and nations, and you could put into a briefcase all the studies that systematically and empirically compare party organizations across nations. Why don’t more people study party organization? It is not for lack of interest, for scholars often discuss party organization. It is that party organizations are so intractable for research. Unlike voters who politely answer questions and unlike nations which dutifully generate statistics, party organizations rarely tell about themselves. Because one must imagine what these invisible creatures look like, it is a very uncertain business to measure and compare party organizations.