Intra-party policy formulation in flux. Effects of organizational crises on party members' effective rights to impact policies in Western European parties (1980-2012)

近几十年来，许多欧洲政党进行了组织改革，改变了党员参与党内决策的程度。这些改革对代议制民主的可行性至关重要，因为它们直接影响到政党提供的参与性和代表性联系。此外，这些事态发展引发了关于什么是“内部民主”政党以及从规范的角度来看它们是否可取的激烈辩论。因此，明确这些变化的程度和方向并了解其原因是非常重要的。对相关研究状况的评估显示出明显的差距。虽然候选人和领导人选拔程序的改革受到了广泛关注，但我们缺乏对党内政策制定制度的概念性和系统性的实证方法。为了弥补这一差距，本项目追求四个目标：1）建立一个解释框架，将党内改革模型化为组织危机。创新的论点是，这种改革的方向系统地取决于各自危机的感知起源点。如果危机源于政党间竞争竞技场的消极变化，成员影响政策的有效手段将受到限制。相比之下，如果党内竞技场出现组织危机，例如党员大量流失，党员将拥有更有效的手段来影响政策;（2）一方面，将党内政策制定机构概念化，使其与党际竞技场中领导层的自主权密切相关;另一方面，他们在党内竞技场上对党员的激励; 3）生成一个数据集，从经验上详细说明选定的一些欧洲民主国家的党内政策制定改革和组织危机的情况（英国、挪威、奥地利和德国）两个主要政党（保守党和社会党）之间以及随着时间的推移（1980-2012年）;以及4）通过比较案例研究结合联合收割机跨案例和初步案例内推理来测试理论模型的实证有效性。总而言之，该项目产生创新的理论和经验的见解，对党员的有效权利的影响，在西欧政党的组织危机的影响。

In recent decades, many European political parties have adopted organizational reforms that alter the degree to which they involve members in processes of intra-party decision-making. These reforms are of critical importance for the viability of representative democracy as they directly impact the participatory and representative linkages that parties provide. Also, these developments have nurtured heated debates about what "internally democratic" parties are and whether they are desirable from a normative perspective. It is thus highly relevant to specify the degree and direction of these changes and to understand their causes. An assessment of the related state of the research reveals a distinct gap. While extensive attention is devoted to reforms of candidate and leadership selection processes, we lack conceptual and systematic empirical approaches to institutions of intra-party policy formulation.To address this gap, this project pursues four objectives:1) to develop an explanatory framework which models intra-party reforms as resulting from organizational crises. The innovative argument is that the direction of such reforms systematically depends on the perceived point of origin of the respective crisis. Where a crisis emanates from a negative change in the arena of inter-party competition, members' effective means to impact policy will be curtailed. In contrast, where an organizational crisis arises out of the intra-party arena, e.g. in the course of significant membership losses, members will be equipped with more effective means to impact policy;2) to conceptualize institutions of intra-party policy formulation in a way that captures their relevance for the leadership's autonomy in the inter-party arena, on the one hand, and for the incentives they offer to party members in the intra-party arena, on the other hand;3) to generate a data set that empirically specifies reforms of intra-party policy formulation and instances of organizational crises in a selected number of European Democracies (Great Britain, Norway, Austria and Germany) both across the two main parties (conservative and socialist) and over time (1980-2012); and4) to test for the empirical validity of the theoretical model by means of comparative case studies which combine cross-case and preliminary within-case inference. Taking together, the project generates innovative theoretical and empirical insights on the effects of organizational crises on party members' effective rights to impact policies in Western European parties.