Does regulation matter? Trajectories of party organizational change in Western Europe (1970-2010)

The aim of this article is to verify whether a relationship exists between partly laws and party organizational change. While the prevailing contextualist perspective enhances the weight of social, economic and technological factors in shaping party change, we maintain that the intensity of party regulation plays a major role in this respect. Based on some basic assumption of Organizational Institutionalism, the article adopts the rationale of the Political Parties Database (PPDB): we thus conduct an in-depth empirical analysis of three core party organisational dimensions (Resources, Representative Strategies, Structures), over a total of nineteen parties in four Western European democracies (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK), from 1970s to 2010s. Our empirical findings show that, while a growing number of party laws have been introduced in the countries under consideration, their impact on party organizational convergence is far from univocal: we thus provide different possible explanations of these results.