• convergence
• disintermediation
• party models
• party organization

The study of party organizations is not an issue of the past. The ever-lasting discussion on the decline of parties as intermediary bodies has apparently intensified in recent years, especially in the media. Some attribute this to the emergence of populist parties, which allegedly leverage on this aspect to attract voters, while others admit that the complexity of today’s world is too hard to manage without parties losing popular trust, and many other possible explanations are often given by pundits in almost every debate, each with a different recipe for "solving" the problem of political parties’ legitimacy. In this scenario, a discussion and a test of the nature of parties and party organizations today seems crucial for several reasons: first, to understand the "linkage failure" between citizens and political institutions; second, to identify the aspects that lead scholars and pundits to talk about a "party decline"; third, to further understand and improve the complex ties between citizens, parties, institutions, and society.
With all of this in mind, the aim of this work is threefold. First, we want to summarize the scattered literature on party organizations. We are interested not so much in a definition (of which there is plenty in the literature), but rather in a framework which can keep together different aspects of party organization and the environments in which all they are found. We do so by using the recent dimensional approach put forward by the Political Party Database Project, from which we derive our data together with Katz and Mair’s Data Handbook (1992). In line with this, we build two indexes measuring party organizations both at the country and at the single-party levels, to grasp the state of art of party organizations in Europe. Each index is made up of three dimensional sub-indexes, enabling an in-depth picture of party resources, structures and representative strategies.
Second, since every organization, including political parties, is not static and is constantly changing, this study is necessarily also an analysis of party organizational change. For this reason, we set three observation points approximately 20 years apart from each other, dating as back as 1969.
Lastly, we are also interested in further understanding these patterns of organizational change by asking a crucial question: why do they occur? The question is as old as the discipline, and the proposed answers often lack either empirical testing or theoretical grounding. Our goal is to link these different visions and test them against real world data, analyzing the possible shortcomings of each of them. In the end, we find that both visions of party change are plausible and empirically verifiable, yet not for all cases and at all times.