A key question in comparative politics and political science concerns how established political parties can best cope with economic, social and environmental problems while engaging citizens in the political process. Many countries with parliamentary democracies are currently facing multiple crises of representation. In response, citizens sometimes turn to radical new party alternatives, or become disaffected and pull out of the political process altogether. Such developments raise critical questions about how parties respond to citizens' disaffection and discontent, and about how these changes affect their links with citizens, and the political balances within and between parties. These are not new questions, but the lack of readily available and standardized cross-national data has hindered comparative research in this area. This project aims to advance the understanding of representation in parliamentary democracies by promoting the systematic cross-national study of key political institutions and processes. In terms of intellectual merit, the project will bring together scholars from twenty countries to analyze previously collected data on over 160 political parties in those twenty countries. The scope of the data will allow the researchers to analyze the impact of party structures and resources on democratic representation. In terms of broader impacts, a key outcome of the project is a free on-line Political Party Database. The project members will promote awareness and use of the Database by holding workshops in the United States and Europe which will be specifically designed to introduce the data to potential beneficiaries, including democracy-promoting non-governmental organizations, scholars in related fields, and graduate students. The data and analyses produced for this project will contribute to ongoing debates about how best to strengthen party-based representative democracies in areas such as political party finance, intra-party democracy, and female participation in politics.
This project not only brings together scholars from a large number of countries, but also with diverse and complementary expertise, including expertise on electoral systems, political finance, intra-party democracy, women's participation in politics, and interest-group representation. This diversity is integral to the project; it will allow the data to be structured and analyzed in ways so that multiple research and practitioner communities will be able to make meaningful inferences from the data. The undertaking will strengthen cross-generational as well as cross-national research networks, with doctoral and post-doctoral students playing key roles in the project. The project also consciously promotes participation of female scholars in what was once a predominantly male subfield, with women constituting over one third of the leaders of the project team.
