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Organizational and Ideological Strategies for Nationalization: Evidence from European Parties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2017

Gabriela Borz  and
Carolina de Miguel
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Abstract

How does a party’s organizational structure affect its chances of becoming a national party? While existing explanations of party nationalization focus on country-level institutional and societal variables, we argue that aspects of party organization such as the degree of centralization of authority, ideological unity and leadership factionalism also matter. By bringing the analysis to the party level, this article provides a multilevel analysis of institutional and party organization variables and disentangles the effect of each set of influences. We use original data on party organization and party nationalization for 142 parties across twenty European countries. This research contributes to the literature on nationalization and party development by advancing organizational strategies which parties could adopt in different social and institutional environments.

Keywords

party organizationnationalizationfactionalismideological unitycentralization
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 1499 - 1526
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde ([email protected]); Department of Political Science, University of Toronto ([email protected]). We would like to add special thanks to Lauren Birch, Anton Rizor, Brianna Guertin and Kenneth Watt for excellent research help in collecting electoral and party organization data. We would also like to thank Daniel Bochsler for his guidance in calculating the standardized party nationalization scores and the discussant and audience members at the ECPR General Conference, Glasgow 2014, and the MPSA annual conference, Chicago 2015. Finally thanks to the editor Sona Golder and to the anonymous reviewers for excellent comments and guidance. Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/S3BX7A (Borz and de Miguel (2017)) and online appendicies at https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712341700028X

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Supplementary material: Link

Borz and De Miguel Dataset

Dataset

https://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/S3BX7A
Link