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，许多欧洲政党都进行了组织改革，改变了成员参与党内决策过程的程度。这些改革对代议制民主的可行性至关重要，因为它们直接影响各政党提供的参与性和代议制联系。此外，这些事态发展引发了关于什么是“内部民主”政党以及从规范角度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一个明显的差距。虽然人们广泛关注候选人和领导人遴选过程的改革，但我们缺乏对党内政策制定机构的概念性和系统性的经验方法。为了解决这一差距，本项目追求四个目标：1)开发一个解释性框架，将党内改革模拟为组织危机造成的。创新的论点是，此类改革的方向系统性地取决于各自危机的公认起源点。如果危机源于党际竞争领域的负面变化，成员国影响政策的有效手段将受到限制。相反，如果党内出现组织危机，例如在党员大量流失的过程中，成员将拥有更有效的手段来影响政策；2)对党内政策制定机构进行概念化，一方面反映它们与领导层在党际舞台上的自主权的相关性，另一方面反映它们向党内舞台上的党员提供的激励；3)生成一个数据集，经验性地具体说明在选定的几个欧洲民主政体(英国、挪威、奥地利和德国)中两个主要政党(保守党和社会党)以及随时间(1980-2012年)的党内政策制定改革和组织危机的情况；以及4)通过结合跨案例和初步案例内推理的比较案例研究来检验理论模型的经验有效性。综上所述，该项目就组织危机对党员影响西欧政党政策的有效权利的影响产生了创新的理论和经验见解。

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.