Party Change and Party Adaptation in Democracies under Pressure

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Building on E. E. Schattschneider’s (1942) famous verdict that the “condition of the parties is the best possible evidence of the nature of any regime”, this panel investigates the extent to which, why, and how political parties have changed and adapted in the face of heightened pressure and what this means for the resilience and renovation of democracy. It does so by addressing three inter-related themes.

(1) Scrutinizing frameworks of party change: Scarrow scrutinizes the "party decline" thesis, asking to what extent that decline has taken place as predicted and how parties have managed to adapt. Ahmed proposes institutional theory as an alternative to the backsliding framework for understanding why parties depart from established democratic norms and practices. She provides an in-depth case study of party development in the U.S. that highlights party behavior not just as an expression of ideology or autocratic aspirations but as a reaction to the broader competitive environment.

(2) Drivers of party adaptation below the national level: Extending the focus on the competitive environment to the subnational level, Dilling and Krawatzek combine a dictionary-based quantitative text analysis with topic modelling to investigate to what extent and how distinct experiences with authoritarian rule are reflected in parties’ use of populist, nativist, and revisionist language in German state parliaments. In turn, Borges Martins da Silva moves beyond the focus on programmatic politics and examines well-selected local chapters of Brazil's Workers' Party. She demonstrates how and why shifting to clientelism helped the party expand its support base by aligning with broader expectations about how politicians ought to look and campaign.

(3) Citizens’ perception of party reforms: Legein's paper echoes the importance of public perception in processes of party reform. Moving from the supply- to the demand-side of party reform, he presents new findings from a choice-based gamified vignette survey on the individual-level determinants of citizens' perceptions and preferences toward party reform in Belgium and the UK.

Overall, this panel brings together a diverse group of scholars who apply a variety of methods, ranging from ethnographic and in-depth historical research to survey experiments and quantitative text analysis, to study party change and adaptation in cases from Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

Sub Unit

• Division 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Individual Presentations

• Party Decline Revisited: Reconsidering the Predictions - Susan Scarrow, University of Houston

• Party Development, Democratic Backsliding, and Theories of Institutional Change - Amel F. Ahmed, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Discursive Rules and Populist Radical Right Language in Subnational Parliaments - Matthias Dilling, Trinity College Dublin; Félix Krawatzek, Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS)

• From Pitú to Whisky: The Changes of a Programmatic Party under Clientelism - Mariana Borges Martins da Silva, University of Southampton

• Psyched Up for Party Reform: Towards a Psychological Approach to Party Politics - Thomas Legein, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Chair

• Georgia Kernell UCLA

Discussant

• Matthias Dilling Trinity College Dublin