“Agents of Democracy”? An Intra-party Democratization in the EU Member States

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Policy Preferences and Attitudes toward Democracy & European Politics and Society
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: European Politics and Society

Abstract

Democratization is a prominent topic in political science research, but the political parties are rarely considered as the unit of analysis, even though they represent “the agents of democracy”. Intra-party democratization reinforces democracy, augmenting the influence of the voters on the party positions and subsequent policies. However, the parties have considerable ideological differences on the left-right spectrum that presuppose different internal structures. This article attempts to measure the dependence between the level of intra-party democratization and the party ideologies in the European context. There are two aims of the paper. Firstly, to compare the level of intra-party democratization between 207 parties present in the European Parliament from 2014 until 2019 and 174 parties from 2019 until 2024. Secondly, to assess the dependence between 9 political ideologies of the national parties of the 27 European Union member states: Centre-right, Centre-left, Centrist, Green, Pirate, Right-wing/National conservatives, Left-wing/Socialist, Right-wing populist/ Far-right and Left-wing populist/Radical leftist/communist; and two dimensions of democratization: democratic selection of the party leader and the integration of the democratic elements in the party decision-making process. The research employs the ordinal scale for the qualitative data of democratization so that the quantitative regression analysis will assist in measuring the connection between both dimensions and ideologies. There are two expectations from the research. Formerly, there has been an increase in intra-party democratization over time. Besides, I claim that the parties on the radical flank of the left-right spectrum show a lower level of democratization, whereas more moderate parties are more democratized.

Author

• Yunis Mir