Political Party Database Project: How Parties Shape Democracy

在经济危机和交流机会迅速变化的时期，传统政治行为者的合法性面临越来越多的挑战。然而，尽管有这些变化，政党仍然是议会民主政体中的关键参与者。它们引导政治招募，构建政治选择，并提供有意义的政治参与机会。正因为如此，了解政党的结构和资源如何塑造民主生活是至关重要的。不幸的是，由于缺乏系统收集的跨国数据，以及缺乏概念化和测试政党资源和结构影响的标准词汇，对政党作为组织行为者的比较研究一直受到阻碍。政党数据库项目旨在填补这两个空白。我们的多国研究团队目前正在收集19个国家138个政党的数据，以便对关于政党组织差异影响的相互竞争的学术主张进行理论驱动的测试。我们的问题包括政党资源和政党与社会的联系之间的关系，政党规则和社会代表之间的关系，以及特定候选人选择程序对描述性代表和选举成功的影响。这项提案要求资金帮助我们完成分析以供出版，并使我们能够将我们的初始数据作为关于党组织的新的公共数据库的第一期。这一定期更新的数据库将是政治学学生以及寻求改善代表性和增加政治参与的改革者的持续资源。这项建议的三个私人助理将共同协调团队的工作，以收集和更新政党数据，准备出版手稿，并向学术受众和政治从业者宣传我们的发现和新的数据资源。

In a period of economic crises and rapidly changing communication opportunities traditional political actors have faced increasing challenges to their legitimacy. Yet despite these changes, political parties remain key actors in parliamentary democracies. They channel political recruitment, structure political choices, and offer opportunities for meaningful political participation. Because of this, it is vital to understand how structures and resources of poltical parties shape democratic life. Unfortunately, the comparative study of political parties as organizational actors has been held back by the lack of systematically-collected cross-national data, and by the lack of standard vocabulary for conceptualizing and testing the impact of party resources and structures. The Political Party Database Project aims to fill both gaps. Our multi-national research team is currently collecting data on 138 parties in 19 countries in order to conduct theory-driven tests of competing scholarly claims about the impact of party organizational variation. Our questions include the relation between party resources and links of parties to society, the relation between party rules and social representation, and the impact of specific candidate selection procedures on both descriptive representation and electoral success. This proposal requests funds to help us complete our analyses for publication, and to enable us to use our initial data as the first installment in a new public database on party organization. This regularly-updated database will be an ongoing resource for students of politics as well as for reformers seeking to improve representation and increase political participation. The three PIs for this proposal will jointly coordinate team efforts to collect and update party data, to prepare manuscripts for publication, and to publicize our findings and the new data resources to academic audiences and political practitioners.