Time after time: party organizational strength in new and old democracies

Abstract

The ‘time factor’ has not been systematically considered in cross-national studies on party organizations. Relying on the largest dataset to date on party organizations, namely the Political Party Database Project (PPDB), the article tests the impact of time as a two-level variable (duration of democracy and age of parties) on parties’ organizational strength in new and established democracies. We add original data from three Latin American countries to the nineteen countries covered by the first PPDB database (132 parties overall). The results suggest that parties in established democracies have less members and more money than those of newer democracies. Among the latter, the greater capacity for mass mobilization produces stronger parties—as in Latin America—compared to the Eastern European countries. The findings challenge the traditional view of the exceptional weakness of Latin American parties and point to the importance of time as a multilevel variable: besides the national context, the “ancestral” party origin in previous regimes have a large impact on organizational strength.