Primary elections for choosing party leaders and candidates are now becoming commonplace in Europe, Asia and America but questions as to how much they hinder a party’s organizational strength and cohesion or affect electoral performance have largely been ignored outside of the USA. Party Primaries in Comparative Perspective gives a much-needed conceptualization to this topic, describing the function and nature of primary elections and providing a comparative analytical framework to the imp...

The effectiveness and capacity of survival of democratic regimes has been recently and widely questioned in the public and political debate. Both democratic institutions and political actors are increasingly confronted with rapid economic and societal transformations that, at least according to some observers and commentators, they not seem to be ready or equipped to manage effectively.This book evaluates and challenges recent scholarly literature on the quality of democracy. It pr...

This book provides a cross-country study of the consequences of the expansion of intra-party democracy, the trend towards more inclusive methods of selection for party candidates and leaders, and the impact of these on political elites in terms of sociopolitical profile and patterns of careers.It explores the link between political organizations and political elites, by studying the role of parties in parliamentary and political selection and its impact on the political leadership ...

This book analyzes how mainstream and new parties are building their digital platforms and transitioning from traditional (offline) organizations into the digital world.The authors present an innovative empirical exploration of the democratic consequences and technical challenges of the digitalization of party organizations from a comparative perspective. They provide an original account of how party digital platforms are regulated and used, and a crucial discussion of the main tec...