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AbstractResearch on negative partisanship and affective polarization shows that wholesale rejections of individual parties are a common and growing phenomenon. This article offers a novel perspective on assessments of parties by considering citizens' legitimacy perceptions of political parties as institutional players. Combining research on political parties and public opinion, I develop a theoretical framework that explains how parties' characteristics shape their perception as legitimate institutional players. I argue that governing experience, age, ideology, and democratic behaviour provide informational cues to citizens about how democratically dangerous a party is. To test my argument, I fielded a cross-sectional survey in seven West European countries and a large-scale survey experiment. The results consistently show that citizens use party-level cues such as ideological moderation and democratic behaviour to form party legitimacy perceptions. The findings have important public opinion implications for political parties and their institutional role in democracies.

AbstractOn election day, voters' commitment is crucial for political parties, but between elections members are an important resource for party organisations. However, membership figures have been dropping across parties and countries in the last decades. How does this trend affect parties' organisation? Following classics in party politics research as well as contemporary organisational theory literature, this study tests some of the most longstanding hypotheses in political science regarding the effects of membership size change. According to organisational learning theory, membership decline should induce an expansion of the party organisation. However, threat‐rigidity theory and the work of Robert Michels suggest that parties are downsizing their organisation to match the decline in membership size. To test the hypotheses, 47 parties in six European countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom) are followed annually between 1960 and 2010 on key organisational characteristics such as finances, professionalism and complexity. A total of 1,922 party‐year observations are analysed. The results of multilevel modelling show that party membership decline triggers mixed effects. Declining membership size induces the employment of more staff, higher spending and a higher reliance on state subsidies. At the same time, it also triggers lower staff salaries and a reduction in the party's local presence. The findings indicate that today's parties are targeting an organisational structure that is custom‐made for the electoral moment every four years. Faced with lasting membership decline, the party organisation retracts its organisational resources and focuses more on election day. Members matter to parties, but votes matter more.

Political parties play a major role in democratic processes around the world. Recent empirical research suggests that parties are increasingly less important to citizens. Simultaneously, classic and contemporary theories of representative democracy specifically still minimally incorporate accounts of party benefit. This article attempts to reconcile normative political theory on democratic representation with party politics literature. It evaluates party democracy's value in comparison with its next best theoretical alternative – pluralist democracy with individual representatives – along two different paths. It argues that parties are not flawless, but party democracy is preferable over pluralist democracy. Parties increase predictability and the transparency of policy outcomes. This, in turn, facilitates better accountability between voters and their representatives. In addition, parties save politics from becoming a dispersed and even possibly a contradictory set of actions.

Research on party membership development commonly reports figures aggregated to the country level and/or using only a few time-points. While these choices may be appropriate for certain research questions, they nevertheless hide major differences between parties and conceal short-term fluctuations. Additionally, they are inappropriate for studying individual party trajectories. This is necessary, however, to better describe and ultimately explain the phenomenon of membership decline. The article analyses in total 1653 observations across 47 parties in six western European countries between 1960 and 2010 to test hypotheses pertaining to individual party membership development. Using multilevel modelling and time-series analyses, the results show what aggregated data with few time-points cannot: membership decline is by far not a universal phenomenon. Additionally, membership decline appears to be part of a party's life-cycle. The more consolidated parties are, the fewer members they have. Few differences between party families are observable.

How do parties respond to party decline? Political parties have been facing increasing citizen apathy in the last decades. It is exemplified in declining citizen trust in parties and fewer citizens that identify with or enrol in a party. This study investigates how party organisations in Western Europe change in response to the most widespread trends of these: party membership decline. In total, 47 parties in six Western European countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and United Kingdom) are followed between 1960 and 2010 on key organisational characteristics such as finances, professionalism, and complexity. The resulting Party Organisation Dataset 1960-2010 includes 1,970 party-year observations. The study argues that party membership decline can be a trigger of party organisational change. It induces the employment of more staff, higher spending, and a higher reliance on state subsidies. At the same time, party organisations also respond to membership decline by lowering the average staff salary and reducing their local presence.

Scholars acknowledge the existence of intra-party divisions and the potentially negative electoral effects of disunity. Some assume that intra-party divides are between professional politicians and grassroots members, others highlight the importance of ideological blocs. Yet, precisely mapping factional structures, especially ideological factions, is difficult because of the "black box of intra-party politics." Based on theories of party change and spatial competition, we argue for the existence of two distinct ideological factional dimensions that may differ from hierarchical factions. We test our expectations by triangulating evidence from three unique datasets from Sweden: a survey of party members, a media content analysis, and interviews with politicians. Our mixed-methods approach allows identifying the number, structure, content, sizes, and ideological positions of factions. The results show substantial variation in all aspects and that hierarchical and ideological factions rarely coincide. These findings have important theoretical, conceptual, and methodological implications for comparative politics.