Analysing Political Parties and Democracy

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents the major aspects relevant for the analysis of political parties and their role in democratic governance. In particular, we suggest that parties should be analysed as products of their (changing) environment, as professionalized organizations, as actors that create and maintain organized linkages to other collective actors, as recipients of public funding, as legislators who may act more or less cohesively and, last but not least, as communicators. In doing so, this chapter also provides an overview of the major theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of political parties and makes a case for the contextual richness offered by parallel case studies covering parties on four continents.