Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Political Party Organizations and Representation

关于政党立场的文献主要集中在政党间的竞争。这种方法倾向于将政党视为单一行为体，这样做忽视了政党内部发生的过程。现有的研究集中在党内政治是由以行动者为中心的理论，未能解释跨党派的差异占主导地位。本论文的研究既不把政党看作是一个“黑箱”，也不把党内动态看作是一群具有不同偏好的行为者争夺政党控制权。本论文研究了政党内部的机构，这些机构将行为者的偏好塑造成最终决定代表质量的政党政策。该项目的一个主要贡献是创建了一个数据集，其中包含长期议会民主制中60多个竞争性政党目前管理候选人选择和宣言设计的党内机构。这些数据来自研究人员收集的党内法规和章程，以及对党内官员的初步采访和对党内记录的实地考察。研究完成后，数据将存档，并提供给该领域的其他学者。这项研究是第一批研究当事人如何形成其宣言的研究之一。虽然这些宣言越来越多地被研究，并被用作政党政策立场的指标，但产生这些宣言的政治机构和进程仍然没有得到充分研究。此外，该项目提供了一个明确和新颖的方式来定义因变量，政党代表性。代表性通常被认为是政府政策如何反映社会中间成员的利益。然而，关于政党的代表性，研究人员可能更关心的是政党政策的一致性和以某种方式为政党成功做出贡献的人的中间偏好-特别是党员或积极分子以及投票给政党的人。该项目审查了三个群体中每一个群体的政党代表性：政党附属机构（成员和活动分子）、政党选民和更广泛的选民。政党代表性被定义为一个维度，任何给定的团体和政党的组合都沿着这个维度沿着位于一个点上。更广泛的影响：该项目提供了数据和研究战略，可用于研究政党以外的代表性;政府政策将最好地代表执政党中政党代表性高的选区团体。除了政府代表性之外，关于政党机构的数据将促进对政党各个方面的比较研究，包括问责制、责任的明确性、经济或官僚效率、竞选支出、筹款、选举竞争力和政党认同。了解政党如何以及如何将公民与政府联系起来是评估民主质量的一个基本问题。虽然这项研究集中在发达的议会民主国家，这里的研究结果将提供基础的假设，在总统制和欠发达的民主国家，以及有关小或短命的政党不包括在本分析。

The literature on political party positions focuses primarily on interparty competition. This approach tends to treat parties as unitary actors, and in doing so neglects the processes that occur within parties. The existing research that does concentrate on intraparty politics is dominated by actor-centered theories that fail to explain variation across parties. This dissertation research departs both from regarding parties as a "black box" and from treating intraparty dynamics as simply a group of actors with divergent preferences vying for party control. The dissertation investigates the institutions within parties that shape actors' preferences into party policies that ultimately determine the quality of representation. A major contribution of this project is the creation of a dataset of current intraparty institutions that govern candidate selection and manifesto design in over 60 competitive parties in longstanding parliamentary democracies. The data come from party statutes and constitutions that the researcher collected, and through primary interviews with party officials and fieldwork examining party records. Upon completion of research, the data will be archived and made available to other scholars in the field. This research is among the first to examine how parties form their manifestos. Although these manifestos are increasingly studied and used as indicators of parties' policy positions, the political institutions and processes that produce them remains understudied. Further, this project provides a clear and novel way of defining the dependent variable, party representation. Representation is often conceived of as how well the interests of the median member of society are reflected by government policy. With respect to political parties' representation, however, researchers may be more concerned with the alignment of party policy and the median preferences of those who contribute to the party's success in some fashion - specifically, party members or activists and those who vote for the party. This project examines party representation for each of three groups: party affiliates (members and activists), party voters and the broader electorate. Party representation is defined as a dimension along which any given combination of a group and party are located at a single point. A group is well represented by a party if its interests are closely aligned with those of that party.Broader impact: The project provides data and a research strategy that can be used to study representation beyond the party; constituency groups with high party representation from those parties holding office will be best represented by government policy. In addition to governmental representation, the data on party institutions will promote comparative research on various aspects of parties including accountability, clarity of responsibility, economic or bureaucratic efficiency, campaign spending, fundraising, electoral competitiveness and party identification. Understanding how and how well parties connect citizens with their governments is a fundamental issue for assessing the quality of democracy. Although this research concentrates on developed parliamentary democracies, the findings here will give bases to hypotheses about party operations in presidential systems and less developed democracies, and about small or short-lived parties not included in this analysis.